• 1 Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot [1956], London, Faber and Faber, 2010, p. 75.

Let us not waste our time in idle discourse! [Pause. Vehemently.] Let us do something, while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed. Not indeed that we personally are needed. Others would meet the case equally well, if not better.

Vladimir in Waiting for Godot1

• 2 Martin McDonagh, The Banshees of Inisherin, London, Faber and Faber, 2022, p. 25. We will (...)
• 3 Ibid.
• 4 Aristotle, Poetics, XV, 1454a.
• 5 Ibid., VII, 1451a.
• 6 Ibid., VII, 1450b.
• 7 Jacques Rancière, The Edges of Fiction [Les bords de la fiction, 2017], Steven Corc (...)

1Vladimir’s words hint at the poetic implications raised by the mimetic logic of Aristotelian tragedy: those corresponding to a type of speech in its relationship to action and time. In fact, Vladimir’s line does not so much aim at questioning the function of the protagonists in the theatre as performers of action, as exposing the need for speech to act even if the actions to which it gives rise are feigned. Such are the poetic issues at stake in The Banshees of Inisherin (2022) in which Colm tells Padraic that he no longer wishes to converse with him because of the “small talk”2 and “aimless chatting”3 they have; and as long as that kind of speech says and does nothing to alleviate Colm’s excruciating feeling that time is slipping away. Instead, it makes noise without articulating ideas or translating them into action: it is a kind of speech that does not act. Consequently, one may argue that speech questions the need for action in its development over time; in other words, one may argue that speech questions Aristotle’s mimetic logic on which the unfolding of the plot is based, that is to say the paradoxical cause-and-effect chain of events as determined by the principles of necessity and verisimilitude,4 which ultimately seals the hero’s fortune or misfortune.5 Similarly, it tends to show that time, notably dramatic and fictional time as a whole, is the main criterion to assess action: one that must unfold according to a set pattern of events which is characterised by a beginning, middle and end6 or what Jacques Rancière calls Aristotle’s “fictional rationality”.7

• 8 In fact, for Rancière the disruption of Aristotelian “fictional rationality” exposes the Gr (...)

2Martin McDonagh’s film disrupts this rational structure and its action timeline or temporal development mainly because speech does not act, or at least because it does not give way to actions that move the drama towards its closure. Indeed, it seems that speech is used to kill time in the protagonists’ daily lives that oscillate between loneliness and boredom. Moreover, the film’s plot does not allow the elucidation of its motives as they are not made intelligible to the characters. Indeed, Padraic keeps finding other reasons than those Colm gives him to justify the end of their friendship: Colm does not want to waste his time talking aimlessly anymore to devote himself, not to the art of speech, but to the art of music. This regression towards the identification of the causes meant to drive the plot forward, not only strips bare the mimetic logic of action but also that of feelings. For the broken friendship between Padraic and Colm is not explained by the latter’s sudden enmity towards the former, but rather by his sudden indifference. In The Banshees of Inisherin, speech not only jeopardises the mimetic logic of action in its relationship to words and time by suspending their effects, but also jeopardises that of feelings by undermining the correspondence between logos and pathos on the one hand, and poetics and aesthetics on the other hand as evidenced by Colm’s indifference.8

• 9 The relationship between speech – “the sayable” – and the fictional world repre (...)

5The genesis of The Banshees of Inisherin first needs to be addressed so as to understand the relationship between the spoken and the written words with regards to staging; what they show or do not show in the mise-en-scène. To put it plainly, what is the role of speech, whether spoken or written as dialogues, linguistic signs and dramatic instructions, in its organisation of the visible world represented on screen?9

• 10 Martin McDonagh, The Banshees of Inisherin, p. 35.
• 11 Ibid., p. 95.
• 12 Ibid., p. 16.

6The making of McDonagh’s fiction is transmedial as it was first meant for theatre before cinema, thus following in the footsteps of his earlier plays, The Cripple of Inishmaan (1997) and The Lieutenant of Inishmore (2001), which pay tribute to the social realism and dark humour of the kitchen-sink dramas. With McDonagh’s film, these plays form a trilogy due to their intersecting plots and the ordinary lives they depict in the Aran Islands located in the Western part of the Republic of Ireland. Unsuitable for the stage according to its author, The Banshees of Inisherin was adapted to cinema while its screenplay was published by Faber and Faber afterwards. The publishing house makes no mention of a screenplay or script label, neither on its title page nor on its back cover, but does list the film’s credits. Moreover, technical indications of camera movements are few, except for changes of location, either indoors (in a pub, at Colm’s, Padraic’s or his sister’s house, in church, in a confessional or in a shop), or outdoors (on the road, on the coastline around the island, on a beach or in the harbour). Although technical indications are rare, dramatic instructions are much more present and seem to question their status as a textual regime in their own right. For instance, the director’s comments are punctuated in a few places by some “perhaps”10 or “of course”.11 Elsewhere, they seem to account for authorial hesitations, as when Dominic, the young village idiot, is shown stealing poteen, the national hooch, from his drunkard of a father, Paedar, the village policeman, who is dozing, totally in the nude, right in the middle of their living room. About the bottle of alcohol, it reads: “the bottle of poteen that’s either on the table beside him [Dominic’s father] or in his arms”.12 It seems that McDonagh’s indecision as to whether the bottle of poteen should be on the table beside Dominic’s father or in the latter’s arms, illustrates the grotesque aspects of the film as much as it exemplifies a failed attempt at verisimilitude in the psychological construction of the character and the police order he represents. In fact, if ultimately this authorial hesitation draws attention to the status of the screenplay as a mere set of indications and as a source of potential (re)interpretations, it primarily makes sense in terms of the director’s relationship to the visible; in other words, in terms of a specific way of showing in relation to what is to be shown or not shown on screen. As a result, this kind of inconsistency yields to some figurative uncertainty which becomes palpable through the presentation of an entirely naked body whose private parts are eventually not hidden by the bottle of poteen but exposed to view and the spectators’ gaze. The final mise-en-scène and the grotesque that ensues from it, draw attention to the inoperativeness of mimetic logic, psychological as well as representational, by debunking the narrative consistency it paradoxically helps set up: the poteen placed on the side table next to Paedar can easily be stolen by Dominic.

• 13 Ibid., p. 89 (our italics).
• 14 Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen [L’audio-vision, 1990], Claudia Gor (...)
• 15 Ibid., p. 37.
• 16 Ibid., p. 36.

7These hesitations between showing and not showing highlight an interdependence between speech and the visible, mainly the capacity of the first to make the second readable: as when the voice of Siobhan, Padraic’s sister, who just left the island for the Irish mainland, reads out the letter she wrote to her brother. Dramatic instructions appear as follows: “Over all this, and over the following sections of montage, we hear a letter that Siobhan has written or is writing to him”.13 Whether Siobhan has just written the letter to Padraic or whether she is writing it seems to be of lesser importance, especially in terms of actions and timeline, than the relationship between the act of writing and the visible it highlights; in short, between what is said and what is shown on screen. The content of Siobhan’s letter, which she reads aloud by means of a voice-over, sets a “counterpoint”14 to what is represented on screen. Siobhan claims that Padraic can do on the continent what he already does on the island, but without the overwhelming gloom and bitterness in which his daily activities are shrouded, while his brother is shown carrying out his everyday chores which now include the preparation of his revenge on Colm for the death, albeit accidental, of Jenny, the donkey who kept him company. This counterpoint relationship not only creates an “audiovisual dissonance”15 or disruption between speech and what is shown on screen but also foregrounds “formal individuality” between a voice and a visual composition.16

• 17 Jacques Rancière, The Intervals of Cinema, p. 100.

8Similarly, when Padraic responds to his sister’s letter and reads it aloud, words do not fully correspond to what is shown, especially when he hints that Jenny is still alive, thus silencing her death. Instead, Padraic is seen writing the donkey’s name on a piece of wood that will be placed on a funeral cross where the animal rests, thus turning the burial site into a sanctuary. Here, the written word is a linguistic sign that makes the visible world readable by remaining mute rather than audible through the reading of a letter and notably speech. Elsewhere it is another counterpoint relationship which plays out between the mute written signs and the prolixity of speech, notably when the island’s female grocer desperately enquires about the content of the letter that Siobhan has just received, and who, unable to keep quiet, tries to extract from her the words she refuses to say: those that will confirm her departure for the continent. In reality, it is a whole “imaginary construction”17 that silent written signs prompt, whether during the silent reading of a letter or that of national literary pieces which have precisely stirred up Siobhan’s fancies and desire to leave the island for the mainland.

• 18 Martin McDonagh, The Banshees of Inisherin, p. 14.
• 19 Ibid., p. 47.

9If these hesitations, between showing and not showing, highlight a counterpoint relationship or an interdependence between the spoken word – what is said off screen – and the visible – what is shown on screen –, they also affect the representation of the Irish Civil War the film portrays against the backdrop of its ending in 1923. This war was triggered by the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921, meant to promulgate the Irish Free State and end the Irish War of Independence by yielding dominion over Protestant Northern Ireland to the United Kingdom, which the Irish revolutionary fighters of the Republican Army opposed. In McDonagh’s film, the Civil War is portrayed in a metonymic fashion for one becomes aware of its effects before its causes. For instance, the characters only take notice of it when they hear cannon fire in the distance and see smoke billowing up on the opposite island. In fact, they are ignorant of the whys and wherefores of the war, as Padraic declares while watching the shooting: “Whatever it is, you’re fighting about”.18 Here, words neither clarify the reasons of the conflict nor identify its participants as it turns out to be less a matter of fighting against or for a cause than fighting about something – “whatever”: an a priori purposeless war whose opposing camps are unidentifiable. Even institutional speech is no better than that of a civilian as the island’s policeman neither knows nor pretends to know about the intricacies of the war. He even takes part in some executions without questioning which side the condemned men belong to as long as there is money to make, “The Free State lads are executing a couple of the IRA lads. (pause) Or is it the other way around? […] For six bob and a free lunch I don’t care”.19 Speech is indebted to a money-making logic that blurs the distribution of politics between two opponents whose respective intentions are no longer intelligible, and in the absence of a visible war which cannot present itself as a sensible manifestation despite its metonymic representation; or precisely because war is the sensory measure of some irrepresentability that speech, when reduced to an accounting logic or small talk, cannot make readable in the visible.

• 20 Ibid.
• 21 Ibid.

10The armed conflict is presented as an abstraction that words, whether spoken by civilians or representatives of the establishment, cannot make readable in the visible world represented on screen except from afar on the opposite island where its effects can be observed, without, yet, its reasons being made apparent. The Civil War is thus presented as an anonymous noise drowned in the daily ambient commotion off and on the island of Inisherin where rumours spread and fuel the inhabitants’ shallow talks. As a result, if speech no longer makes the visible intelligible, it also makes itself inaudible and unverifiable. According to Peadar’s own words about the war: “I find it hard to follow these days”.20 As a fratricidal conflict between nationalists, the Irish Civil War of the 1920s blurs the dividing line between enemy within and enemy without, between the island and the Irish mainland and its relationship to Great Britain. Hence Peadar’s rhetorical question to Colm, “Wasn’t it so much easier when we was [sic] all on the same side and it was just the English we was killing? I think it was. I preferred it!”.21 This fratricidal war is also the one played out on an individual level between Padraic and Colm, causing the disruption of the film’s plot and speech to be disappointing.

• 22 Aristotle, Poetics, XI, 1452b.
• 23 Jacques Rancière, Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art [Aisthesis: scènes d (...)
• 24 Aristotle, Poetics, I, 1447a.

11In Aristotle’s conception of tragedy, the catastrophe or peripeteia represents the climax of the drama caused by the intentions of the hero who, because he is unaware of their imperfect nature, will see his fortune sanctioned in this way.22 The plot thus unfolds according to a “reversal of effects against [the hero’s] intentions”,23 that is to say, according to a paradoxical chain of actions. This causal chain, posited as natural24 by Aristotle, drives the mimetic logic of actions towards a climax and an anti-climax supposed to lead to their resolution, as the hero is simultaneously led to acknowledge the fault initially committed. The Banshees of Inisherin turns Aristotelian mimetic logic topsy-turvy, as it begins with an anti-climax caused by Colm’s sudden indifference towards Padraic who cannot explain it, whereas it ends with a climax when Padraic decides to take revenge about Jenny’s death for which he holds Colm responsible.

• 25 Jacques Rancière, The Lost Thread: The Democracy of Modern Fiction [Le fil perdu: essais (...)
• 26 Jacques Rancière, Aisthesis…, p. 130.

13Indeed, Colm’s sudden indifference leads Padraic, like the rest of the island’s inhabitants, to question its causes: a quarrel, bad news, or a phase of depression? All these speculations, of which none is true, show that “the time of action is eaten up by an infinite regression towards the question of its point of departure”.25 In other words, Colm’s indifference not only makes his intentions cloudy, but also illustrates a certain refusal of mimetic obligation, not only in terms of action but also in terms of feelings, triggering the questioning of their causes instead, precisely those that motivate their chain and effects.26 In fact, Colm soon reveals the reasons for his indifference and silence: he wants to spend time doing an activity which is more meaningful than mere chatter by making music. To practise his art, Padraic must stop bothering him and remain silent. Speech must become mute.

• 27 Martin McDonagh, The Banshees of Inisherin, p. 34.
• 28 Jacques Rancière, Aisthesis…, p. 116.
• 29 As Aristotle prescribes about tragedy in Poetics, XIV, 1453b.
• 30 Martin McDonagh, The Banshees of Inisherin, p. 82.
• 31 Ibid., p. 74.
• 32 Ibid., p. 20, 32, 58, 78, 87.
• 33 Ibid., p. 59.

14As Padraic’s incomprehension grows, Colm is led to perform a radical move on his own person by cutting off his first finger, then all the fingers on his left hand, in order to make his pal “see sense”.27 But can Colm’s self-mutilation become the “legible sign of a thought or an emotion”28 when speech is finally silenced? Nothing could be further from the truth, for although this act causes quite a stir among the island’s inhabitants, it arouses less pity and fear29 than incomprehension, to the extent that Padraic claims that Colm is mad (“Madness”,30 “fecking mental”31); a madness reduced to an implacable mathematical logic: between the two of them, only Padraic still has all his fingers. Colm’s drastic act thus gestures towards its literal reading: the severed fingers shall be the visible and tangible proof of his madness, a madness far more acceptable in terms of reason, far more reasonable than the latter’s initial and manifest indifference to Padraic, and self-mutilation to which he surprisingly appears indifferently sensitive, “blankly”32 and “unperturbed”33 as the screenplay indicates. What is at stake is not so much Colm’s sanity in the face of Padraic’s bewilderment as both men try to master their respective narrative and force it upon the other: the former by establishing narrative discontinuity or mimetic disorder manifested through his indifference and drive to make music; and the latter by restoring narrative continuity through speech in his understanding of Colm’s feelings.

• 34 Jacques Rancière, Aisthesis…, p. 130.
• 35 Ibid., p. 123.
• 36 Martin McDonagh, The Banshees of Inisherin, p. 77.
• 37 Ibid., p. 86.

15Colm’s composition on the violin does best express this indifference to the mimetic order, in other words to “the logic of causal chains, the psychology of characters, the performance of roles and the mimetic expression of feelings”.34 Indeed, “[m]usic makes sensible what words try to make visible in vain: the ineffability of sensation […]”.35 This is illustrated by Colm’s contemplative attitude each time he finds himself sitting behind his window, staring blankly, doing nothing, to use Padraic’s own words, the latter being quite incapable of enjoying the aesthetic experience of music or of expressing any opinion on the matter as he can only find one adjective to repeat to describe his pal’s masterpiece: “That’s great […]! That’s more than great, that’s really great”.36 The film similarly ends with the two men contemplating the sea, gazing out to the horizon, while Padraic makes a promise to Colm after burning down the latter’s house: “[…] we won’t call it quits. We’ll call it the start”.37 Although words may hold promise of further events, they can only foreshadow an endless cycle of violence between the two, which is also a way for Padraic to secure a protracted relationship with Colm. In short, words fail to make intersubjective communication possible.

• 38 Ibid., p. 35.
• 39 Ibid., p. 42.
• 40 Ibid., p. 18.
• 41 Ibid., p. 28, 51.
• 42 Ibid., p. 71.
• 43 Ibid., p. 24.
• 44 Ibid., p. 21.
• 45 Jacques Rancière, Aisthesis…, p. 123.

16Even when Padraic assures Colm that he will keep quiet, the promise thus made is shattered by the preterition it underlies, denying precisely what it is meant to perform: “I will shush…”.38 Of course Padraic won’t hush, much to Colm’s annoyance, who refuses to listen to any more of his friend’s platitudes and nonsense. Again, speech makes a lot of noise, like the rumours that spread across the island for want of being actualised and turned into events, “Nobody has a lick o’ news for us from your side of the island, Padraic”.39 Words do not give rise to any tangible or verifiable information, at best they are adorned with qualifiers that are never more nuanced than “good” or “bad” to characterise the news they are supposed to bring. Indeed, this is how Padraic explains what he first believed to be Colm’s sudden enmity towards him: “Maybe bad news he’s had?”.40 Although speech, mainly the rumours and news it gives rise to, tightly weaves together the island’s social fabric, the inhabitants are at odds with its sensible material as they are either described as “nice”,41 “mean”42 or “dull”43 depending on what they say or do, and similarly to the news circulating on the island, whether good or bad. The lack of adjectives makes speech unsettling especially when it states the obvious, as when Padraic prosaically advises his sister to read another less sad book if the current one puts her in such a state: “Sad? You should read a not sad one, Siobhan, else you might get sad”.44 Here, words say nothing more than what already presents itself as a sensible manifestation; conversely, words seem to be indebted to the visible in seeking to make “the ineffability of sensation”45 readable.

• 46 Martin McDonagh, The Banshees of Inisherin, p. 32.
• 47 Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, Steven Corcoran (ed. and trans.) (...)
• 48 Martin McDonagh, The Banshees of Inisherin, p. 32.
• 49 Jacques Rancière, The Lost Thread…, p. 153.
• 50 This line is from the film dialogues (32:33) and as Colm looks straight in the (...)
• 51 Martin McDonagh, The Banshees of Inisherin, p. 24.

17Overall, if speech is unsatisfactory, it is because it fails the “sensible” – not only the aesthetic or emotional response speech shall elicit but also the social structure in which it is expressed by contributing to its very disruption. For instance, the rumour according to which Colm and Padraic are no longer friends spreads across the entire island to the intimacy of a confessional where the priest takes the initiative of asking Colm the following question: “And why aren’t you talking to Padraic Suilleabhain no more?”.46 Colm does not reply for there are no sins to confess except those that the sinner willingly admits. Rumours thus shift the dividing line between the individual and the community, the private and the public, the island and the mainland. In other words, it contributes to the disruption of “a distribution of the sensible” – of “a distribution of the invisible and visible, of speech and noise, […] the private and the public”.47 In fact, words are used by proxy for the priest reveals that he has interceded on Padraic’s behalf: “Padraic asked me to put in a word”.48 Speech does not lead the believer to confess his sins but leads the very person who is supposed to absolve them to do so on his behalf. Speech is no longer authoritative, no doubt because it no longer adheres to “the source of thought and of will that it expresses; and to the effect it produces in terms of action”.49 Colm responds to the priest’s confession with “I see”.50 Although this seeing is the token of the priest’s intelligible words, it does not convey Colm’s understanding or compliance, as he precisely starts to cut off every single finger on his left hand right after this scene and until Padraic sees reason and keeps quiet. As a matter of fact, this seeing accounts for a visible that cannot impose itself in its own right, namely the absurd condition of human life, and to which Colm’s mutilated hand is supposed to restore visibility, thus departing from the logic of plausible actions and that of mimetic obligation. Unless, of course, it is a way for Colm to regain control over the course of his life and master his narrative insofar as he feels “time slipping away”51 on him. Mastering the course of one’s life means apprehending time not through the chain of actions that makes it up but through an activity that does away with time, namely contemplation. In this respect, Colm’s explanation to Padraic for his indifference, not so much reflects the protagonist’s desire to be remembered for his landmark musical composition as it hints at the deeper reason on which he based his decision to split from Padraic, that is the arbitrary distinction between the poetics of a noble art and the prosaism of ordinary lives, the one that maintains the distance between fiction and reality, tragedy and comedy.

• 52 Tony Tracy, “Men Behaving Madly: The Banshees of Inisherin”, Estudios I (...)
• 53 Mark O’Connell, “The Banshees of Inisherin…”.
• 54 John Waters, “Existential Slapstick…”.
• 55 Mark O’Connell, “The Banshees of Inisherin…”.

18Although Colm no longer wishes to waste his time in idle discourse so as to compose the music piece that will outlive him, he does not wish to become some demiurge of an artist, or to advocate any kind of autotelic principle in the arts – an attitude, incidentally, mocked by Siobhan when Colm misjudges the century in which Mozart lived while mentioning him as an artistic model to emulate. On the contrary, the aim is to establish a dramatic continuity between art and ordinary lives, fiction and reality. This explains the fictionalisation of the title McDonagh eventually gave to the film, which, when the work was still intended for the stage, conversely referred to the actual island of Inisheer, one of the three Aran Islands including Inishmaan and Inishmore; thus, bringing to a close the dramatic trilogy begun with The Crippleman of Inishmaan and The Lieutenant of Inishmore. The fictionalisation of the island of Inisheer, which McDonagh finally calls Inisherin, is probably induced by the transition from the dramatic to the filmic medium; along with the creative possibilities the cinematic aesthetic offers in the representation of a mythological Ireland. Indeed, the long shots of the island’s fishing port recall the old-fashioned aesthetic of photographer John Hinde’s postcards,52 in which the various markers of Celtic culture, such as the cross, the curragh (a traditional Irish boat), the stone cottages with thatched roofs and painted shutters, the grazing and ploughing animals, and the women’s colourful shawls, are featured. Similarly, the wide shots of the island’s coastline and the expanse of arable plots, each bordered by low stone walls roughly carved out of the surrounding cliffs, are reminiscent of the shots from Robert Flaherty’s documentary Man of Aran (1934) which portrays the daily life of a family of fishermen whom the Irish-born American director had specially trained for the film, thus questioning the relationship between fiction and reality. In fact, McDonagh recycles the stereotypical Irish symbols, or symbols of the Aran islands, and endows them with some indecisiveness about their mythical status and cultural reality. As Mark O’Connell’s words suggest: “[…] it isn’t always clear whether McDonagh is subverting ancient clichés about Ireland and the Irish – misty poeticism, rural backwardness, prodigious boozing, etc. – or merely employing them in his own distinct way”.53 This indecisiveness seemingly accounts for the film director’s uncanny portrayal of Irish symbolic elements as John Waters states that “all [are] simultaneous parts of both reality and myth, all hackneyed and yet breathing, all true and yet false”.54 McDonagh rereads the Irish cultural heritage by both acknowledging and undermining the “predominant modes of Irish representation in literature and art”,55 which, all the more so, heightens their appeal as a source of the tragicomic whether the supposedly Irish taste for tall tales or the parochial nature of his characters is taken aim at.

• 56 Fintan O’Toole, “Introduction”, in Martin McDonagh, Plays 1: The Beauty Queen of Leenane, A Skull i (...)
• 57 Mark O’Connell, “The Banshees of Inisherin…”.
• 58 Martin McDonagh, The Banshees of Inisherin, p. 52.
• 59 Ibid.

19Another possible intertextuality is William Butler Yeats’s poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” (1890), characteristic of the Celtic Revival of the late 19^th century, which, by rejecting the cultural and linguistic indebtedness inherited from the English poetic tradition, asserts itself as an insular art56 though promoting an unwanted “idealized image”57 if not stereotyped vision of Ireland. Hence Padraic’s reaction to Colm when the latter tells him that only art can last in time compared to their ephemeral existence, which he contrasts by means of a conjunction his friend takes up to mock him: “‘Yet’ he [Colm] says, like he’s English!”.58 By refuting Colm’s opposition, Padraic not only reasserts his Celtic identity and the linguistic features of the Gaelic language, he also makes arbitrary the distinction between a noble art and the ordinariness of everyday life, which he further blurs by misusing the name of Beethoven, another illustrious Viennese classical music composer who is supposedly admired by Colm: “I don’t give a feck about Mozart, or Borvoven, or any of them funny-name feckers. I’m Padraic Suilleabhain!”.59 Colm’s endeavour to make music and artsy domestic interior tend to question the matter of Irishness or Irish identity by featuring motley elements of art, such as puppets, masks, paintings and musical instruments from supposedly different cultures. On the whole, one may assert that McDonagh’s film acts as a catalyst for an uncanny linguistic reality and cultural imagery which are embedded in the Celtic heritage it takes as its backdrop, starting with its very title.

• 60 Ibid., p. 76.
• 61 Ibid., p. 77.
• 62 Ibid., p. 72.

20The film’s title refers to a mythological female creature, the banshee, whose cry is said to herald imminent death. In fact, this is how Colm eventually calls his musical composition, The Banshees of Inisherin, as he explains to Padraic his poetic choice of creating rhyming consonance by doubling the “sh” sound. To which Padraic prosaically replies that there are no banshees on the island.60 And to which Colm retorts: “I know, I just like the double S.H. sounds. […] And maybe there are banshees too. I just don’t think they scream to portend death any more. I think they just sit back quietly, amused and observe”.61 While the exchange between the two men may sound absurd, it raises deeper questions about the relationship between seeing and knowing, insofar as the banshee participates in the representation of a mythical Ireland which Colm initially undermines by first denying their existence then redefining their role; one that echoes that of Mrs. McCormick in the film, a neighbour whose disturbing strangeness earns her to be called a “ghoul”62 by Siobhan and Dominic. Her representation in the film matches Colm’s description of the banshee: she is a kind of roaming spectre who sees and knows everything. If Mrs. McCormick first stands in the foreground at the beginning of the film, she gradually recedes to the background as the narrative progresses and as her words become ominous with death. She is getting eerier so much so the characters, and spectators included, dread her appearance from any corners of the island or of the screen. In this way, the creepy female figure lives up to her Irish mythological roots for she questions the invisible that is part of seeing due to her ghostly presence as much as she questions a way of seeing; notably, the impossibility of seeing when one thinks one knows what there is to see, and as exemplified by Colm who firmly denies the imaginary nature of the banshee while taking his belief and assertion for granted – “I know” he says. The creature thus suggests the possible thrust of the invisible in the visible through her sudden appearances, or by silently announcing Dominic’s death through the presentation of his floating body that she might bring ashore. Her words are also prophetic, as when she announces two imminent deaths to Padraic, embodying both the banshee of Irish myths and a kind of Virgin Mary, not least because several shots in the film hint at their coming together.

• 63 Ibid., p. 68.
• 64 Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, Gregory Elliott (trans.), London – New Y (...)

21If the banshee’s prophetic words make her a source of the tragic, they never seem to be taken seriously. Hence Padraic’s reluctance and surprise when Mrs. McCormick tells him about the bad omen she had; she replies with a sneer on her lips: “I wasn’t trying to be nice. I was trying to be accurate”.63 This smile, of which it is impossible to know whether it is forced or not, undermines not so much the fulfilment of a prophecy as the truth it is supposed to bring to light. In fact, this smile seems to bring into conflict “two regimes of sense”,64 the tragic and the comic. The role of the tragicomic can be understood in McDonagh’s words:

• 67 Jacques Rancière, Dissensus on Politics and Aesthetics, p. 148.
• 68 Jacques Rancière, The Lost Thread…, p. 47.
• 69 John Waters, “Existential Slapstick…”.

If McDonagh’s statement about the tragicomic once again reflects the function of art as a way of constructing the world, it conversely questions the fictional part inherent to reality.67 For the tragicomic is not only the conflict of several regimes of sensibility, the tragic and the comic, but also the possibility of “sensible coexistences that revokes the narrowness of the old order of causal consequences and narrative and social proprieties”;68 and thus the possibility of establishing a dramatic continuity between, on the one hand, the poetics of an art freed from the correspondence between logos and pathos, and on the other hand, the prosaic reality of ordinary lives. If the tragicomic results from the failure of rational mimetic logic, it still offers a dramatic continuity by making any distinction between high and low art irrelevant – between a high and a low station of life preposterous. It dismisses any transcendental view or idea of a sublimation or redemption of life through art, as the latter seems to be part and parcel of the former and conversely; for if life is sheer tragedy for Padraic and Colm who are presented together and locked in a rather tense relationship at the very end of the film, life as tragedy is also “merely underdeveloped comedy”69 for both characters, and for the better and worse of what is yet to come.

• 70 Jacques Rancière, Film Fables [La fable cinématographique, 2001], Emiliano Batt (...)
• 71 Ibid., p. 7.
• 72 Ibid., p. 10.

22McDonagh’s film is a “thwarted fable”70 to use Jacques Rancière’s expression: it goes against the Aristotelian mimetic logic of actions to make it regress to the very causes supposed to motivate its narrative arc, while contributing to its progression by sparking off a chain of paradoxical actions, the finality of which cannot, however, be achieved. Both progression and regression operate through speech in its relationship to text and staging: between what is read, what is said and what is shown on screen, in relationship to the visible, the invisible, the intelligible and the sensible. In such a way that the Aristotelian logic of actions and feelings is undermined, making words unsatisfactory, though prophetic, but conversely less indebted to the visible and the latter to it. McDonagh’s “thwarted fable” also operates by “extracting one fable from the body of another”71 in this case theatre, music and cinema itself, as part of a composite interpretative network of poetics, aesthetics, history, culture and language. The fictionalisation of its title, induced by its adaptation from the dramatic stage to the filmic device, also reflects the “thwarted” character of McDonagh’s fable; more precisely, a desire to excavate the visible by thwarting the “passivity”72 of a cinematic apparatus that would supposedly evidence what it records, and in such a way as to conjure up a shared imaginary realm that blurs the dividing line between myth, historical reality and ordinary lives to establish dramatic continuity.