Absent Futures: Childhood Spectres and Irish Nationhood in Patrick McCabe’s Winterwood

This article explores the close association between ghostliness and childhood in Patrick McCabe’s 2006 novel, Winterwood. I argue that the haunting presence of ghosts throughout the narrative renders the invisible visible as repressed histories of childhood abuse in Ireland are exposed and mythologies of childhood innocence are unsettled. McCabe therefore explores the ways in which the mythology of the child intersects with the mythology of Ireland as Redmond Hatch’s attachment to his childhood home allegorises Ireland’s fixation on its rural past. Cultural anxieties over the increasing modernisation of Ireland intensifies identification with the child, but McCabe problematises these identifications by exposing them as illusory. By blending the narrative conventions of the ghost story with elements of literary postmodernism, McCabe explores the ways in which commercialised postmodern nostalgia and obsessive retrospection threaten to destroy Ireland’s future. McCabe proposes that Ireland can regain its potential only if the fetishised figure of the child is contested and demythologised, no longer appropriated (emotionally, sexually and commercially) as a symbol of premodern simplicity and used to mask historical trauma.