The Judas kiss

Treason and betrayal in six modern Irish novels

Gerry Smyth

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780719098246
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

This book argues that modern Irish history encompasses a deep-seated fear of betrayal, and that this fear has been especially prevalent since the revolutionary period at the outset of the twentieth century. The author goes on to argue that the novel is the literary form most apt for the exploration of betrayal in its social, political and psychological dimensions. The significance of this thesis comes into focus in terms of a number of recent developments – most notably, the economic downturn (and the political and civic betrayals implicated therein) and revelations of the Catholic Church's failure in its pastoral mission. As many observers note, such developments have brought the language of betrayal to the forefront of contemporary Irish life. This book offers a powerful analysis of modern Irish history as regarded from the perspective of some its most incisive minds, including James Joyce, Liam O'Flaherty, Elizabeth Bowen, Francis Stuart, Eugene McCabe and Anne Enright.

Part I

There must have been a first time.

Something was broken, a grace lost,

A man sidestepped himself, a woman lied.

In that moment, persecution and martyrdom

Happened, two hearts learned not to trust,

A remarkable person was betrayed.

Brendan Kennelly, The Little Book of Judas, 22

1

A short history of betrayal

If we swapped questions, o my brother,

Would we know why we betrayed each other?

Brendan Kennelly, The Little Book of Judas, 90

Introduction

Betrayal is everywhere: in the books we read, the films we watch and the music to which we listen. There are, moreover, ‘infinite types of betrayal’; as Gabriella Turnaturi puts it in her book Betrayals: The Unpredictability of Human Relations:

We betray ourselves, our families, our friends, our lovers, our country. We betray out of ambition, for vengeance, through inconstancy, to assert our autonomy, and for a hundred passions and a hundred reasons.

(2007: 1–2)

Images of betrayal accost each of us every day – in newspapers, on television and radio; in advertisements, editorials and news broadcasts; in soaps and reality shows. The Internet provides us with a constant stream of visual and textual information in which ideas and examples of betrayal are readily available. We encounter betrayal at work amongst our colleagues, in public spaces amongst our friends, and at home within our family. It is, moreover, something each of us carries around with himself or herself from the onset of consciousness, something we must learn to live with on a day-to-day basis: the fear of being betrayed, and the suspicion that one may be a betrayer. Because it so much a part of life, betrayal is simply there like life itself. To adapt the old adage: where there’s life, there’s betrayal.

Because it’s so much a part of life, I think it’s probably fair to suggest that as a species we must have been thinking about betrayal since the dawn of civilisation – since, that is, we began to gather together in groupings of various kinds and sizes, and, more importantly, to reflect on the nature of those groupings (Dunbar 2012: 76ff. and passim). By the onset of recorded history, certainly, betrayal already figures as a crucial element influencing the ways in which people interacted, the societies they organised, the politics they practised and the wars they fought. In Homer’s Iliad, we encounter a range of characters – Helen, Paris, Menelaus, Achilles and Hector – caught up in a web of desire and deceit; in the Odyssey, the hero returns home from war to find his wife importuned and his position usurped. In each case, betrayal is both interpersonal and political: people betray themselves and one another, and this leads on to – and is inextricably enmeshed with – larger betrayals involving cultures, beliefs and ideas. Thus, the pattern is set.

My suggestion is that betrayal figures prominently within the species in terms of its evolution, its history, its culture and the psychological make-up of its individual units. When we come to contemplate our own existence, in other words, betrayal is an ineluctable part of the story. Betrayal plays a central role in some of the most potent and most enduring discourses treating of the human condition. Before going on to consider one particular sub-narrative (the modern Irish novel) it’s necessary to familiarise ourselves with some of the ideas, images and issues emerging from more general engagements with this inheritance. Hopefully, this will sensitise us to the ubiquity of betrayal as an element within human experience, while at the same time introducing us to some of the theories and critical approaches to which we shall have recourse in Part II.

Judas and the politics of friendship

The concept of betrayal is deeply embedded within the Christian world view. It is in fact impossible to contemplate Christianity without reference to the idea of treachery; indeed, some of the most resonant and most potent images of betrayal abroad within Western cultural history derive from Christian discourse.

An omnipotent, omniscient, monotheistic God would appear to obviate the discourse of betrayal: there is no ‘Other’ upon whom the Singularity must rely for His sense of Self, and therefore no subject who might in time attempt to practise deceit by pretending to be loyal whilst secretly harbouring malevolent intentions. The possibility of betrayal only becomes active once the ‘Other’ – in the form of the angels – enters the scene.

In Paradise Lost, the English republican poet John Milton refers to Satan as ‘that traitor angel’ (1667: 50, line 689); he is an ‘artificer of fraud; and was the first / That practised falsehood under saintly show / Deep malice to conceal, couched with revenge’ (88, lines 121–3). Note the spatial conceit invoked here: ‘falsehood’ operates ‘under saintly show’, and the malice is ‘deep’, presumably beneath a surface show of loyalty. Satan plotted against God, but maintained an outward show of fidelity and friendship. This represents one crucial aspect of betrayal which we shall come to recognise across many different scenarios and contexts: the subsistence of a malevolent reality beneath the appearance of fidelity and good will.

A number of issues immediately present themselves in this instance, two of the most obvious being: (1) how could Satan have deceived (or believed that he could deceive) an omniscient God? (2) how could he have operated outwith a divinely sanctioned plan? In other words, if God has ordained the way matters will unfold, has He not also ordained Satan’s betrayal, thereby negating the subject-to-subject relationship on which the possibility of betrayal relies?

We’re straying here into the minefield of ‘free will’, something I wish to avoid at this stage. Besides providing a precedent for the manifold betrayals which populate the Christian narrative, however, Satan himself is instrumental in the next one: humanity’s betrayal of God. In Genesis, Satan it is who, in the form of a serpent, entices Eve to eat the fruit of the forbidden tree. After Adam joins her and their offence is discovered, they are cast out of the Garden of Eden and condemned to the life of toil and pain that is the result of their Original Sin. According to Christianity, this is an act and a consequence to which all humans are heir. Thus, to be human is to be implicated in an act of betrayal; our progenitors owed fealty to God but chose to forswear that allegiance, and we are all condemned to suffer as a consequence. To be human, according to Christianity, is to be a traitor.

Thereafter the Bible is peppered with instances of disloyalty, duplicity and infidelity. Cain kills Abel; Delilah hands Samson over to the Philistines; David commits adultery with Bathsheba, after which his son Absalom mounts a rebellion against his father’s rule; and so on. As these examples testify, betrayal may take different forms: fratricide, adultery, interpersonal deceit, political sedition, etc. All these examples are echoes to some degree of the original acts of betrayal perpetrated by Satan, Eve and Adam. In both their personal and their public lives, it appears, humans are fated to act out the failure of loyalty – a failure that became possible only after the One (the Subject) imagined an Other. Throughout the Old Testament, the moment of absolute identification between Subject and Other – embodied in the concept of Love – remains an elusive ideal.

Thus, both the Jewish tradition and the Christian one which emerged from it were well primed for the infamous act of betrayal on which the New Testament narrative turns: Judas Iscariot – the twelfth apostle, Christ’s friend and confidant – delivers his master up to his enemies. In so doing he becomes both ‘a figure of crucial and … abiding ethical and psychological consequence’ (Gubar 2009: 337) as well as a figure to ‘think with’ (Ehrman 2006: 51). To put it figuratively, the career of Judas provides an arena wherein the most fundamental questions attending the human condition may be performed.

Judas is established as an arch traitor in the accounts which began to emerge in the decades following the death of Jesus: the four gospels and the various writings of Paul. The actions of Judas are motivated either by some unknown grievance – possibly jealousy of Christ’s relationship with Mary Magdalene – (Mark), by greed (Matthew) or by Satan (Luke). From this early period also emerges (in John) the idea that Judas’s betrayal was part of a pre-ordained plan, long established in Hebrew scripture, to which Jesus was consciously working.

The representation of Judas as an evil traitor is confirmed and consolidated in the following centuries as Christianity begins to mobilise into an international religion. In various commentaries, and for various reasons, Judas is portrayed as the malevolent agent bringing about the capture and subsequent death of the Saviour. This is the figure – ‘fratricide, patricide, incestuous thief, and Christ-killer’ (Ehrman 2006: 49) – around whom in time the discourse of anti-Semitism will coalesce.

Clearly, Judas is a figure of seminal importance to Christianity, and to the generations of historians, philosophers and artists whose own world view has been so thoroughly informed and shaped by the Christian world view. Judas provided Shakespeare with a readily available, universally recognised example of treachery. He is described (in Love’s Labour’s Lost) as ‘a kissing traitor’ (Craig 1965: 167); while in Henry VI Part III Gloucester self-consciously likens himself to the twelfth apostle as he kisses the infant Prince: ‘To say the truth, so Judas kiss’d his master / And cried “all hail!” when as he meant all harm’ (595). Although not invoking the name, Richard II clearly alludes to Judas when he describes allies who have switched allegiance as ‘villains, vipers, damn’d without redemption’ (395), as does Polixenes in The Winter’s Tale when he fears he may be likened to the hated historical figure who ‘did betray the best’ (329).

We should not be surprised, perhaps, that a figure so roundly condemned for so long should, after a period of time, begin to be rehabilitated by those bringing new perspectives to bear upon the orthodox line. The discovery and publication in 2006 of the so-called ‘lost gospel of Judas Iscariot’, for example, has added considerable fuel to the debates surrounding the twelfth apostle. This document, when placed in the context of contemporary history, allows for a very different reading of both the career of Jesus and his ‘betrayal’ by Judas. The religious historian Bart D. Ehrman argues that the incident needs to be approached with reference to two key religious discourses which were vying with contemporary Jewish orthodoxy: Apocalypticism and Gnosticism.

According to Ehrman, Jesus emerged (as did his predecessor John the Baptist) from a radical strand within contemporary Judaism which believed that the Kingdom of God was imminent. The established world order was patently evil: God was coming to destroy it, and He was coming soon. Jesus and his followers were living at the end of an age. The few who would survive the apocalypse would be those chosen by God to establish his Kingdom on earth – that is, Jesus, the ‘Son of Man’, and his followers, including the twelve men (representing the twelve tribes of Israel) who made up the inner circle of his retinue.

If Jesus ‘is best understood as a first-century Jewish apocalypticist’ (Ehrman 2006: 151), The Gospel of Judas portrays the twelfth apostle as an adherent of Gnosticism. The latter connotes an arcane religious philosophy which offers to ‘[reveal] the secrets of how this miserable world of pain and suffering came into existence as a cosmic disaster, and how those of us in the know … can escape the material trappings of this world to return to our heavenly home’ (Ehrman 2006: 10). The seeds of this philosophy were already in place before Jesus commenced his ministry; and the Gnostic interpretation of Jesus’ career came to represent a powerful strain within early Christianity, before it was systematically eradicated by a range of first-millennium ‘authorities’.

In The Gospel of Judas, the relationship between the two principals is revealed as that obtaining between a divinely sponsored agent and the human who most fully understands what is at stake, and who most closely adheres to that agent’s wishes. Jesus needs to be freed from the human form he has temporarily adapted in order to impart his secret information, and in order to return to his place in the highest echelon of the gods – a location above and beyond that occupied by the inferior Jewish deity known as Yahweh, he who was responsible for the disaster of human existence. Judas’s ‘betrayal’ expedites this release; in the gospel fragment named for him, he is, as Ehrman puts it, ‘the “hero” of the account. He alone is said to understand Jesus and his message … The betrayal is characterized as a good deed done by Judas for Jesus … [that which] allows Jesus to escape the trappings of his material body’ (2006: 63).

Regarded from the perspective of Apocalypticism and Gnosticism, the ‘betrayal’ of Jesus by Judas – in some respects the key act of the Christian imagination – begins to look quite different from its orthodox representation. That orthodoxy – commencing with the writings of Paul, and established by a variety of Christian writers over the following centuries – portrays Judas as an unequivocally ‘bad’ man, and it does so with reference to a combination of categorically ‘evil’ conditions: greed, jealousy, demoniacal possession, lust, etc.

Orthodoxy is never received, however, it is always achieved. ‘Heresy’ provides us with the possibility (one in fact broached by ‘heretical’ artists throughout the ages) that Judas ‘betrayed’ Jesus because he was frustrated at the non-arrival of the apocalypse, and – as one of the more committed of the apostles – he wished to push matters to a climax. He may have become confused (as so many have done over the centuries) as to whether the Kingdom of God was a figura...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Afterwards
• Notes
• References
• Index