I will arise and go now, and go to… Inisherin?
There is little evidence to suggest that Martin McDonagh is a man who views Ireland as a quaint idyll of céilí dancing and thatched cottages. His first six plays, divided into the Leenane Trilogy and the Aran Islands Trilogy respectively, are set around the west coast of Ireland and depict with pitiless brutality incidents of murder, matricide, and a vast array of other moral transgressions. It is due to the ferocity of this portrayal, perhaps, that public reception to McDonagh’s particular take on Irishness has been somewhat mixed, among Irish people especially. The interpretation of his works as caustic tragicomedies masking the innermost anxieties and vulnerabilities of the human condition is counterposed with what his detractors might deem crudely concocted caricatures of ‘The Wesht’.
But while it may be true that the animated discourse around The Banshees of Inisherin (2022) has reinforced divisions among its audience – with the attention bestowed on the film during awards season earlier this year merely emboldening McDonagh sceptics – it is also true that the film has given rise to a great deal of commentary and analysis around its literary influences. Mark O’Connell, in a less than complimentary review of the film published in Slate, explored the film’s treatment of the Joycean looking-glass motif, contending that the reductive version of Irishness presented in McDonagh’s cinematic vision is not a reflection James Joyce would have been happy to see returning his gaze in the mirror.[1] Writing in The Irish Times, Diarmuid Ferriter commented on the frequency with which J.M. Synge’s name is invoked in discussions about McDonagh’s film.[2] Significantly less attention, however, has been paid to the influence of W.B. Yeats on The Banshees of Inisherin, and the film’s recycling of uniquely Yeatsian themes and symbols.
For Yeats, loneliness and the process of ageing constituted rich imaginative subjects. “I spit into the face of Time / That has transfigured me” wrote Yeats in “The Lamentation of the Old Pensioner”.[3] Though written when the poet was only in his twenties, its themes would be revisited decades later in poems like “Sailing to Byzantium” and “The Tower”. Disillusioned with the limitations of the body, and indeed of the physical world, Yeats sought to transcend an existence “fastened to a dying animal”, hoping instead to be gathered “Into the artifice of eternity”.[4]
In The Banshees of Inisherin, the disintegration of the friendship between Brendan Gleeson’s Colm Doherty and Colin Farrell’s Pádraic Súilleabháin is triggered by Colm’s desire for a legacy that outlasts his mortal being and lives on into “eternity”. Pádraic has not committed an offence and there is no initial act of wrongdoing preceding their falling out. “I just don’t like ya no more”, says Colm to Pádraic bluntly. Refusing to continue a tradition of frittering away time with Pádraic over a couple of pints down the pub, Colm resolves to cut Pádraic off and focus on furthering his music career, eschewing “niceness” in the process and showing contempt for the one virtue Pádraic values above all else.
Conscious of the ever-ticking clock, Colm sets out to become remembered, doing so at the expense of his friendship with Pádraic. It is no coincidence that John McCormack’s mournful “Christ Went Up Into the Hills Alone” (1927) features on Colm’s gramophone playlist.[5] There is no room for Pádraic, perceived by Colm to be too “dull”, in this new chapter of introspection and creative fruitfulness. Echoing the speaker of Yeats’ “All Things can Tempt me”, Colm makes an effort to shun interruption and commit himself to the task of “accustomed toil”.[6]
Themes of loneliness and desolation in The Banshees of Inisherin are augmented by the film’s soundscape. In a score steeped in minor key melancholy, Carter Burwell infuses the tinkling notes of a xylophone with gently plucked harp arpeggios to evoke a sparseness reminiscent of the weather-beaten Connemara terrain. While the solitude evoked in Yeats’ “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” is associated with peace, contentment, and the meditative qualities of cricket song, here it connotes an eerie form of alienation.[7]
A friendship can mean very different things to those involved, but just as an unbridgeable gulf separates the subjective experience of two individuals, the same can be said of the gulf between one’s exterior and interior self. In dramatising the multiplicity of selfhood, there is no greater symbol than the mask, and Yeats was keenly attuned to its significance, especially in the context of the anti-self’s construction. It was Ezra Pound who first introduced Yeats to Japanese Noh theatre – a form of classical dance-drama that avails of masks in its performance – and the dramatic form’s association with spiritualism and identity subsequently became a source of inspiration for Yeats in his own dramaturgy.[8] Wooden Oni masks line the walls of Colm Doherty’s home in The Banshees of Inisherin. On the one hand, their presence may indicate a preoccupation with a world that lies beyond the parochial community of Inisherin, while on the other, they may be a metaphor for Colm’s masked inner torment. “How’s the despair?” is a question that is asked of Colm repeatedly throughout the film.
A momentary trick of the light during one scene on the beach gives a fleeting impression of copper-coloured waves, invoking the “blood-dimmed tide” of Yeats’ “The Second Coming”, as Colm and Pádraic look towards the mainland where conflict wrought by the Civil War (1922–23) is reported to be unfolding.[9] This is not the only reference to the poem, either, for the drowning of “innocence”, alluded to in the poem’s first stanza, is rendered visually near the film’s conclusion.[10] Nor would it be unreasonable to assume that the island elder, the becloaked Mrs. McCormick who doubles as the eponymous Banshee, shares similarities with the mythical figure of Cathleen Ní Houlihan – a theatrical creation of Yeats and Lady Gregory – as she speaks about blood sacrifice while luring youngsters to their death.
There is something of the Yeatsian idea of the “woman lost” in the unrequited love that Barry Keoghan’s Dominic Kearney feels for Kerry Condon’s Siobhán Súilleabháin.[11] Siobhán’s eventual departure from the island sets her apart from the other central characters, who are in their own ways trapped by their geography and by their solitude, be it in the isolation of Pádraic and Dominic from those around them, or in Colm’s obsessive pursuit of purpose and meaning. When presented with an opportunity to escape the hermetically sealed world of Inisherin, Siobhán chooses to leave the island behind in exchange for a life on the mainland, where the people seem “less bitter and mental”. After all, who wouldn’t? Inisherin is no Innisfree.
*
Nora Doorley is a writer from Dublin who lives and works in Brussels. She has had work
published in the Studies in Arts and Humanities Journal, The Lonely Crowd, The Brussels
Times, The Parliament Magazine and #CriticalThinking.
Notes
[1] Mark O’Connell, ‘Blarney: The Banshees of Inisherin and the put-on Irishness of Martin McDonagh’, Slate, 26 January 2023.
[2] Diarmaid Ferriter, ‘Banshees of Inisherin a Dark Twist on Myths of Western Islands’, The Irish Times, 13 January 2023.
[3] William Butler Yeats, ‘The Lamentation of the Old Pensioner’, in Collected Poems (Pan Macmillan, 2016), 17-18.
[4] William Butler Yeats, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, in Collected Poems, 22-24.
[5] John McCormack, Christ Went up into the Hills Alone (Victor Talking Machine Co., 1927).
[6] William Butler Yeats, ‘All Things can Tempt me’, in Collected Poems, 5.
[7] William Butler Yeats, ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, in Collected Poems, 6.
[8] Thomas Rees, ‘Ezra Pound and the Modernization of W.B. Yeats’, Journal of Modern Literature, 4:3 (1975), 582.
[9] William Butler Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’, in Collected Poems, 5.
[10] Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’, 6.
[11] William Butler Yeats, ‘The Tower’, in Collected Poems, 115.
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