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Pratt's Ireland: Between the "Otherness" and the Myth

Summary/Abstract: This paper presents the results of an original theoretical and visually narrative analysis of Hugo Pratt’s album Les Celtiques (1971), focusing particularly on two episodes: A Concert in O-Minor for Harp and Nitroglycerin and Winter Morning Dream. Grounded on Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism, Roland Barthes’s semiotics of myth, and Scott McCloud’s theory of comics, the study demonstrates that Pratt constructs Ireland and Celtic Britain as an internal European Orient – a mythologized cultural space that allows Europe to displace, aestheticize, and regulate its historical violence, political conflicts, and identity crises. The first major result of the analysis is that the album in general, and the two aforementioned episodes in particular, reproduce the core logic of Orientalism mythologisation and not only through geographic distance. As Said argues, Orientalism operates by transforming complex societies into “a set of signs” and turning history into cultural essence. In the episode A Concert in O-Minor for Harp and Nitroglycerin, Irish nationalism is mediated through figures (the Banshee), symbolic objects (the harp), and martyrdom, and it is not depicted as a political struggle. Moira O’Danann is rendered simultaneously as a political actor and as a supernatural figure, producing what this study identifies as mythic nationalism, a mode of representation that converts contingent acts of violence and betrayal into sacred narrative. This confirms claim that myth functions by stripping events of their contingency and making them appear natural and eternal. The second key finding concerns the manufacture of heroes and traitors. The episode reveals that betrayal itself is strategically fabricated in order to produce a useful martyr. This demonstrates the manner in which nationalist ideology relies on semiotic manipulation rather than factual truth. Pratt thus exposes, rather than simply reproduces, the myth-making machinery of political discourse. Ireland is, hence, not merely represented but theatricalized as a cultural Other whose suffering is made narratively productive. The analysis of the episode Winter Morning Dream further extends this logic by collapsing modern warfare into mythic cosmology. World War I becomes a conflict between Celtic-Arthurian and Germanic symbolic orders, with submarines, sorcerers, and ancient betrayals forming a single narrative continuum. This produces what Said calls an “imaginative geography”, in which space is structured by symbolic oppositions between civilizations. Celtic Europe becomes a liminal, enchanted, and archaic zone functionally equivalent to the traditional Orient in colonial discourse. The third major result concerns the role of the comic’s medium itself. Using McCloud’s concepts of closure, gutter, iconic abstraction, panel transition etc., the study depicts the mode in which Pratt’s visual narration enables history to slide into myth. Gaps between panels allow readers to synthesize submarines and sorcery, politics and prophecy, into a single experiential reality. This formal structure is not neutral, it actively supports the Orientalist transformation of historical conflict into symbolic destiny. Finally, the study concludes that the album in general and the episodes in particular do not simply depict European history Europe toward itself, producing an internal Orient where myth becomes the primary language of political meaning.

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