Inventing Ireland (17 page)

Away with us he's going
The solemn-eyed.
He'll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside,
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild,
With a faery, hand in hand.
From a world more full of weeping than he can understand.
³¹

The world which the child is leaving is rendered with far greater precision than the zones for which he is heading, and the effect is complex: the reader is left to wonder whether a terrible mistake has not just been made. The sinister change from second to third person ("that
he
can understand") suggests that the fairies have landed their quarry, already a mere object to their eyes, and so they tip a knowing wink to the unnerved reader. The poem may indeed be a critique of the misuse of the child image in certain forms of Celticism and Peter Pannery.

"Easter 1916", a far greater poem, is nonetheless a rewritten version of those themes: for again, the poet is tugged in opposite directions as a result of an event, which leaves him wondering about the costs in human terms of an abstract ideal. The technique is similar as well: the recounting in vivid detail of those quotidian pleasures which must pull even idealists back from their dream of death. The stone, emblematic of extreme idealism, is unchanging but also the object of a deathlike enchantment. Against it, the poet pits the physical sensations of achieved life, the warm domesticity of the family farm and its easy familiarity with animals:

A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim
And a horse plashes within it:
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moorcocks call;
Minute by minute they live;
The stone's in the midst of all.
³²

The world which
the
rebels are leaving is, once again, rendered with more lucidity than the zones into which they are headed: and, as
before, the fear is that an irretrievable error has been committed. The closing refrain, as in "The Stolen Child", uses almost identical words, but the slight shift allows it to mean something quite different from what it did at the beginning. The unanswerable questions cause the poet to suspend any final judgement:

That is heaven's part.
Our part to murmur name upon name
As a mother names her child,
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild . . .
³³

That reference takes us back to the child stolen by fairies from its rightful human mother, a child who departed "solemn-eyed", like Pearse and MacDonagh. It can hardly be a coincidence that both lyrics chronicle the loss of young life and the distress of mourners left to carry on. In the intervening thirty years, Yeats's view of dreaming has not changed. The man who dreamed of fairyland found no comfort in the grave: and here in "Easter 1916" the poet stands appalled at what Ireland has lost, some of its most gifted thinkers. For him, the dead heroes were all stolen children.

However, in dignifying them at the close with that beautiful image, the poet may have unwittingly trivialized their gesture and have done this in a time-honoured colonialist way. The rebels, being children, were not full moral agents, he seems to say, and so, even when they seem to have done wrong, they can be forgiven. "Be nothing said", he wrote elsewhere, "that would be harsh for children that have strayed". Like the black man in the slave-holding American south, they can be adjudged to be beyond the purview of the moral law. The colony can forgive the rebellion of the colonized: the mother can soothe her child with the incantations of a poet. "Easter 1916" is, in truth, the foundational poem of the emerging Irish nation-state, but it is also, in a perhaps inevitable sub-text, an imperialist's elegy for a headstrong but contained foe. In it, the Irishman is still a child.

Ireland after the famines of the mid-nineteenth century was a sort of nowhere, waiting for its appropriate images and symbols to be inscribed in it. Its authors had no clear idea of whom they were writing for. Many of the native Irish were caught between two languages, shame-facedly abandoning Irish and not yet mastering English. "I see, sir, how it is with you", groaned one enlightened judge who offered to try a defendant in Irish and was refused, even though the man in the dock spoke only broken English; "you are more ashamed of knowing your own language than of not knowing any other".
¹
Those Irish who were literate in English were not great buyers of books and so Irish artists wrote with one eye cocked on the English audience. They were, for the most part, painfully imitative of English literary modes, which they practised with the kind of excess possible only to the insecure.

Cultural colonies are much more susceptible to the literature of the parent country than are the inhabitants of that country itself, since plays and novels of manners have always been exemplary instruments in the civilizing of the subject. A colonized people soon comes to believe mat approved fictions are to be imitated in life, and this notion in due time proves vitally useful to the exponents of resistance literature. Merely to describe a colonial society mimicking an approved literature is, however, to repeat in a boringly predictable fashion the previous modes. The most inspiring lesson which the resistance writer learns from the occupier is that the society around him or her may be no more than the institutional inferences drawn from an approved set of texts.

The ideal of a national poet, whether a W. B. Yeats or a Walt Whitman, is to displace this constricting environment and its accompanying forms: since freedom cannot be won in them, it must be won from them. This is the overweening ambition of many great writers, to create a new
genre in the act of destroying another, but it is almost
unbearably intensified in a colony. Irish radicals in the nineteenth century had been gravely informed by the political theorist
Mazzini that theirs was an economic problem requiring resolution rather than the
question of an oppressed nation. Mazzini denied that they possessed the unique philosophy, language, literature, dances or games which together were the signs of authentic nationhood. This was a brutal version of the tragic paradox which confronts all subject peoples: political independence is deemed justifiable only by a distinctive national "idea", yet the very forms of colonialist discourse prevent its articulation. So the very
search
for a method must become the decolonizer's justification. As
Patrick O'Farrell has observed:

... in fact, the two searchings, the British for an answer, the Irish for a meaning to their question, intersected on each other to their mutual frustration. No proposed external solution could ever satisfy the Irish, calm their troubles, for they as a people neither knew who they were, nor what they wanted – these were problems they would have to solve for themselves, themselves alone.
²

Yeats's search has long been recognized as a quest for a mode of expression, which would precede any truth which it might express; even in later poems he could write:

A passion-driven exultant man sings out
Sentences mat he has never thought. . .
³

or.

Where got I that truth?
Out of a medium's mouth.
Out of nothing it came . . .
⁴

This was nothing other than the search for a national style and, as such, the purest Celticism. Matthew Arnold had suggested that in Celtic writing, expression seemed usually to precede conceptualization: "Celtic art seems to make up to itself for being unable to master the world and give an adequate interpretation of it, by throwing all its force into style . . ."
⁵

Most nation-states existed, so to speak, before they were defined, and they were thus defined by their existence: but states emerging from occupation, dispossession or denial had a different form of growth. Some (like Israel) were fully defined before they existed and so fulfilled
the criteria set down by Mazzini. These, however, were few, and there was (and is) a lot of strain attending this artificial process by which an abstraction is converted into reality. Most dispossessed peoples fought a different fight. Under occupation, they could never be their distinctive selves, but in answer to Mazzini's challenge they had to
seem
so by an adopted attitude, an assumed
style. This they would later proceed to justify by a recovered or discovered content. Style was the thing to be seized, the zone in which the battle of two civilizations would be fought out; and Yeats hoped that from his style a full man might eventually be inferred and, in due course – such was the enormity of his ambition – a nation.

The attempt, at a purely personal level, is well familiar to students of the
romantic lyric, which is predicted on three selves: a past self, a reporting self which writes, and the self which the author will become by the very act of writing. In such a transaction, the "I" is necessarily precarious or inchoate, disappearing or scarcely born; but it is the identity towards which the lyric moves that is its
raison d'être,
and this by definition cannot be established until expression has ceased. It was such a model which
Gilles Deleuze and
Felix Guattari had in mind when they defined a minor literature, which is to say, a literature written in a major language by a minority group in revolt against its oppressors:

... A major or established (i.e., imperial) literature follows a vector that goes from content to expression. Since content is presented in a given form of content, one must find, or discover, or see the form of expression that goes with it. That which conceptualizes well expresses itself. But a minor, or revolutionary literature begins by expressing itself and doesn't conceptualize until afterward.
⁶

This explains why in Ireland the cultural renaissance preceded by many years the declaration of political independence (unlike the United States, which waited for over sixty years for its literary revival). It would also account for the preponderance of creative over critical texts in every phase of modern Irish literature. "Expression must break forms, encourage ruptures and new sproutings", wrote Deleuze and Guattari: "When a form is broken, one must reconstruct the context that will necessarily be a part of the rupture in the order of things." Those national authors, like Yeats and Whitman, who effect such breakages thereby become the first artists of the decolonizing world, prime exponents of the emergent literatures of modernity, which are formed
around a single question: how to express life which has never yet found full expression in written literature?

The pressures on such an author are immense. A writer in a free state works with the easy assurance that literature is but one of the social institutions to project the values which the nation admires, others being the law, the government, the army, and so on. A writer in a colony knows that these values can be fully embodied only in the written word: hence the daunting seriousness with which literature is taken by subject peoples. This almost prophetic role of the artist is often linked to "underdeveloped" societies, but the notion that a peoples economic state defines their total cultural condition can lead to such absurdities, mocked by the Nigerian novelist
Chinua Achebe, as "show me a peoples plumbing, and I can tell you their art".
⁷
Nonetheless, the need to resort to non-representational art is obvious to those writers who seek to elaborate a landscape of internal consciousness rather than submit to a despised external setting.

The Dublin of
Ulysses,
an occupied city, exists only on the fringes of Stephen Dedalus's gorgeous consciousness, for much the same reason that Yeats found it hard to attend to anything less interesting than his own thoughts. Attention is given less to the concrete world – about which the writer cares too little even to spurn it – than to the fertile minds which repeatedly displace it with their own superior alternatives. Art in this context might be seen as man's constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him: against the ability to imagine things as they arc, it counterpoises the capacity to imagine things as they might be. Fictions, though they treat of the non-existent, by that very virtue help people to make sense of the world around them.

Hence the yearning among peoples for the freedom which a magical consciousness can always create for itself. The realists, complained Wilde, "have sold our birthright for a mess of facts".
⁸
To challenge English ideas is merely to treat symptoms; only by rejecting English forms could the mind be opened to the democratic muse. There are the hints of alternative forms in Gaelic poems and place names, whose recovered literal meanings allow the poet to see his native landscape anew. Whitman's admiration for the word
Mississippi
(which to his ear flowed and unwound like the river) is paralleled by Yeats's ritual invocation of places known and esteemed. The love of catalogue common to both national poets may have its roots in the epic poetry of the Gael and the native American; but the ecstatic lists of native placenames which result are the Adam-like incantations of writers,
rediscovering the exhilaration with which the first persons in Ireland or America named their own place and, in that sense, shaped it.

The attempt is forever frustrated, of course, since so many of the names have been lost or over-ridden by Anglicized versions, it seems to the poet that the "Sacsa nua darb ainm Éire" must be contested by his own private world. In effect, the artist volunteers to fill the cultural vacuum, as promissory note for a yet-to-be-implemented nation. Stephen Daedalus says that Ireland must be important because it belongs to him: the artist immodestly equates self and nation, so that by the end of
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
one youth claims to incarnate the uncreated conscience of the race. Yeats makes the same pact in
"To Ireland in the Coming Times":

Nor may I less be counted one
With Davis, Mangan, Ferguson,
Because to him who ponders well,
My rhymes more than their rhyming tell
Of things discovered in the deep,
Where only body's laid asleep.
⁹

Both men may have learned the basic manoeuvre from Whitman:

One's self I sing, a simple, separate person,
Yet utter the word Democratic, the word
En-Masse.

In such a self-charged context, nation-building can be achieved by the simple expedient of writing one's autobiography: and autobiography in Ireland becomes, in effect, the autobiography of Ireland. To read the autobiographies of Yeats, George Moore or Frank O'Connor is an experience akin to the study of Whitmans "Song of Myself": it is to be constantly impressed and unnerved by the casual ease with which they substitute themselves as a shorthand for their country, writing an implicit and covert constitution for their republics in images of their very creation.

The republican ideal was the achieved individual, the person with the courage to become his or her full self. The imperialists were not to be thought of as different, so much as aborted or incomplete individuals. By a weird paradox, their incompleteness was evidenced by their polished surface, their premature self-closure which left them at once incomplete and
finished.
The glossy, confident surface indicated a person immune to self-doubt and therefore incapable of development.
The Irish self, by contrast, was a
project
and its characteristic text was a process, unfinished, fragmenting. It invited the reader to become a co-creator with the author and it refused to exact a merely passive admiration for the completed work of
art. Similarly, in the African context, Achebe has observed that "when the product is preserved or venerated, the impulse to repeat the process is compromised"
¹⁰
: his own
Igpo people, knowing that no condition can be permanent, devoted themselves to a perpetual flux of forms and styles, to meet each new force which appeared on the scene. Such openness, such freedom is not nobly chosen by an artist who might otherwise have sought the cowardly safety of closure: it is, rather, the inevitable result of the pressure under which the artist places him- or herself. If people create a world which exists only by the grace of their style, then language is placed under severe stress, being asked in effect to do much of those people's living and thinking for them. This explains the tremendous emphasis on style in Irish writing from the time of Yeats onward.

Wilde had said that the only question about a work of art was whether it was well or badly written. Yeats concurred, contending that "books live almost entirely because of their style";
¹¹
he argued that the part in men of action which corresponded to style was the moral element. He found, therefore, in style that middle term which reconciled the seemingly opposed worlds of action and interpretation:

. . . Men are dominated by self-conquest; thought that is a little obvious or platitudinous if merely written, becomes persuasive, immortal even, if held to amid the sway of events. The self-conquest of the writer who is not a man of action is style . . .
¹²

Self-conquest,
as opposed to conquest by others: what was proposed here was not a self-cancellation, but a self
so
possessed that it could withstand the pressure of proffered, inappropriate forms. So
"The Lake Isle of Innisfree" was praised by the artist as the first poem with his own music and rhythm about it.

What Yeats meant by style, therefore, was something much more expansive, muscular and demanding than the usual inferences drawn from the word. "Is not style not born out of the shock of new material?" Synge had asked him, on returning with his destined
dialect from the
Aran Islands.
¹³
The poet simply glossed that brilliant question with the observation that the new material was Ireland, awaiting its shaper like wax upon a table. On the islands, Synge had found in his
objective surroundings a world which, until that moment, had been a subjective puzzle within his own unclear and disordered imagination. But his discovered style had freed Synge from the merely literary, said Yeats, enabling him "to take the first plunge into the world beyond himself, the first plunge away from himself that is always pure technique, the delight in doing not because one would or could, but merely because one
can
do".
¹⁴
Ideas were of strictly limited importance in a process which dictated that style anticipate subject matter, which in truth it helped to bring to birth; and self-conquest was redefined as the plunge away from self into pure technique.