Catholic Ritual and the Grotesque Moral of Trouble(d) Bodies: The Role of the Stomach, Digestion, and Bodily Experience in Bernard MacLaverty's Cal (1983)

Abstract

This paper explores the stomach as a central site of moral and historical trauma in Bernard MacLaverty’s Cal. Specifically, this will highlight the organ’s history of hunger within the Irish canon through an analysis of Catholic iconography. In doing so, this paper considers the Great Famine, the 1981 Hunger Strikes at the Maze Prison complex, and religious fasting in repentance for sins. Hunger is considered within the context of Ireland’s colonial past, both as a forced bodily trauma and as a method of colonial resistance against the British administration which once attempted to starve its body politic. Within the novel, the stomach acts as a somatic vessel for sin and salvation; it is a signifier of Cal’s internal guilt and the rigid political and moral absolutism of his environment. Undoubtedly, the stomach plays a vital role within the novel, with this essay considering how the organ is represented both biblically and politically. This paper understands this correlation through Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of grotesque bodily realism, viewing the stomach and other bodily functions – such as digestion and sex – as socially and culturally productive in Irish Troubles fiction. In essence, this paper examines Ireland itself as a body, with Catholicism as its stomach, processing and digesting the violent trauma of its colonial past and present.