Pós-colonialismo e pós-modernismo no vandalismo estético em The Butcher Boy (1992), de Patrick McCabe

Abstract

The Irish Patrick McCabe is considered by the expert critics, mainly within the contemporary context of the Anglo-Saxon literary universe, one of the most prominent authors. Among his various works, which range from novels, short stories and plays, The Butcher Boy shines, this narrative come out in 1992, corpus of analysis of this thesis. The success of this work was almost immediate when it was published, being considered by some scholars as a “revolutionary” text, the founder of a new moment in Irish literature. In its plot we follow the narration of Francie Brady, a first-person narrator who tells us about his past, when he was still a boy, whose poverty, social exclusion, and existential loneliness have led him from a joyful life of childish mischievousness into the commitment of a criminal act, the climax of such painful events in his life, that the adult Francie does not even remember when they exactly happened. What the narrator does not forget is that his days changed with the arrival of the Nugent family into the small town where he lived with his parents. This event is the catalyst for the changes in Francie's life, especially after being called a “pig” by Mrs Nugent. What can be seen, from this event, is a hard via crucis of the protagonist's that, in the end, will turn him into a murderer, a delinquent, after committing a grotesque crime. In this transition path, several literary genres are mixed in the structuring of the narrative, through bricolage and parody, among which stand out: Bildungsroman and the Gothic. Irony is another important element of the narrative, coupled with parody, demeaning symbols and modular elements of Irish culture and society. In reality, these ingredients are part of the postmodern dimension that McCabe's work allows to be analyzed. Furthermore, The Butcher Boy, by awakening prejudices, through the insult evoked by Mrs Nugent (who parodically typifies the image of the “colonizer”) calling the Bradys pigs and representing values characteristic of the metropolis, makes it so that the novel can be read and studied through the theoretical lens of postcolonialism. After all, as we intend to show, Ireland, for seven centuries, was a colony of the British Empire and its history shows that the violence and traumas of colonization were not erased in the postcolonial period, some of these social and political wounds being dramatically themed in the novel object of our research. Hereupon, our main purpose, in this doctoral thesis, is to analyze The Butcher Boy, in the light of characteristic elements of postmodernism and postcolonialism. For this, our research covered several paths, such as history, economics, and culture, without losing sight of literary aesthetics, their theories and criticisms. Among others, the theoretical basis that underlies this work are, Said (2007 and 2011), Young (2002, 2003 and 2005), Hutcheon (1985, 1991), Jameson (1991), Kiberd (1996, 2007), Gladwin (2016), Foster (1989) Kenny (2016).