Inventing Ireland (2 page)

For Lucy, Amy, Rory – and the coming times.

The author and publishers thank the following: the Society of Authors and the Bernard Shaw Estate for permission to quote from
John Bull's Other Island
and
Saint Joan,
A. P. Watt Limited and Michael and Anne Yeats for permission to quote from
Collected Poems, Collected Plays, Autobiographies
and
A Vision
; the Macmillan Publishing Company and the Estate of Eileen O'Casey for permission to quote from
The Plough and the Stars
and
The Silver lassie;
Random House UK, Jonathan Cape and Sean Sweeney, trustee of the Estate of James Joyce for permission to quote from
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
and
Ulysses;
Random House UK, Jonathan Cape and the Estate of Elizabeth Bowen for permission to quote from
The Last September;
the Samuel Beckett Estate and the Calder Educational Trust, London, for permission to quote from
Murphy
by Samuel Beckett (copyright © Samuel Beckett 1938, 1963, 1977 and copyright © the Samuel Beckett Estate 1993) and the Beckett Trilogy –
Molloy, Malone Dies
and
The Unnamable –
(copyright © Samuel Beckett 1959, 1976 and copyright © the Samuel Beckett Estate 1994); Stephen P. Maher, executor and trustee of the late Evelyn O'Nolan and Mercier Press Limited, PO Box 5, French Street, Cork, Ireland for permission to quote from
An Béal Bocht
by Brian O'Nolan (alias Myles na gCopaleen) 1941 and to HarperCollins Publishers and Patrick C. Power for permission to quote from the latter's translation of the aforementioned text
The Poor Mouth;
to the Tessa Sayle Agency and the Estate of Beatrice Behan for permission to quote from
The Quare Fellow
and
The Hostage;
to Faber and Faber Limited, Publishers, and to the respective authors for permission to quote from
Translations
by Brian Friel 1981, from
Death of a Naturalist, North, Station Island
and
Seeing Things
by Seamus
Heaney 1966, 1975, 1984 and 1991, and from
Quoof
by Paul Mul-doon 1983; to Faber and Faber Limited, Publishers and to the Samuel Beckett Estate 1993 for permission to quote from
Waiting for Godot
and
Endgame,
to Thomas Kinesella for permission to quote from
Downstream
1962,
Nightwalker
1968 and "The Divided Mind' 1971, 1972; to John F. Deane of Dedalus Press and the Devlin family for permission to quote from 'Lough Derg' and 'The 'Colours of Love' by Denis Devlin, ed. J.C.C. Mays 1990; to R. Dardis Clarke, 21 Pleasants Street, Dublin 8, Ireland, for permission to quote from
Collected Poems
of Austin Clarke, Mountrath, 1974; to Michael Smith and New Writers' Press for permission to quote from
'De Civitate Hominum'
and '
Gloria de Carlos V'
by Thomas MacGreevy 1971, and from 'Nightfall, Midwinter, Missouri' by Brian Coffey 1973; to Peter Fallon, Publisher, of Gallery Press for permission to quote from 'The Rough Field' and 'The Siege of Mullingar' by John Montague 1972, 1978, from 'Belfast Confetti' by Ciarán Carson 1989, from
Pharaoh's Daughter
by Nuala ní Dhomhnaill 1990 (with English translations by Ciarán Carson, Paul Muldoon and Eiléan ní Chuilleanáin); to Sairséal Ó Marcaigh Teoranta and Máire Mhac an tSaoi for permission to quote lines from
An Cion go dtí Seo
1987,1988 and to the author for her self-translation; to Sairséal Ó Marcaigh Teoranta and the Estate of Seán Ó Ríordáin for permission to quote from
Eireaball Spideoige
and
Brosna
1952, 1964; to Carcanet Press Limited, Publishers, and Eavan Boland for permission to quote from 'The Woman Turns Herself into a Fish' and "The Emigrant Irish' 1987; to Oxford University Press and Derek Mahon for permission to quote from "The Mute Phenomena', "The Spring Vacation', 'Afterlives' and 'A Disused Shed in County Wexford'; to Caomh Kavanagh and Dr Peter Kavanagh for permission to quote from
The Complete Poems of Patrick Kavanagh,
copyright © 1972, 1995, Peter Kavanagh Hand Press, New York 10016, and to the Goldsmith Press, Newbridge, Co. Kildare; to Colin Smythe, Publisher, Gerrards Cross, for permission to quote from
Selected Plays
of Lady Gregory. Every effort has been made to secure all necessary clearances and permissions. Both the author and publishers will be glad to recognize any holders of copyright who have not been acknowledged above.

Some sections of this book have been rehearsed as essays, as broadcasts, or as newspaper articles: the author is grateful to many editors and producers for encouragement in exploring certain themes at an earlier stage in their development.

If God invented whiskey to prevent the Irish from ruling the world, then who invented Ireland?

The obvious answer might be the Irish, a truth suggested by those words
Sinn Féin
(ourselves) which became synonymous with the movement for national independence. That movement imagined the Irish people as an historic community, whose self-image was constructed long before the era of modern nationalism and the nation-state. There are many texts in the Irish language to bear this thesis out (and a few will be surveyed in my opening chapter), but what they also register is the extraordinary capacity of Irish society to assimilate new elements through all its major phases. Far from providing a basis for doctrines of racial purity, they seem to take pleasure in the fact that identity is seldom straightforward and given, more often a matter of negotiation and exchange.

No sooner is that admitted than a second answer to the question suggests itself: that the English helped to invent Ireland, in much the same way as Germans contributed to the naming and identification of France. Through many centuries, Ireland was pressed into service as a foil to set off English virtues, as a laboratory in which to conduct experiments, and as a fantasy-land in which to meet fairies and monsters. The 1916 insurrection was a deliberate challenge to such thinking: though often described by dreamy admirers as well as by sardonic detractors as a poets' rebellion, it was an assertion by a modernizing élite that the time had come to end such stereotyping. One 1916 veteran recalled, in old age, his youthful conviction that the rebellion would "put an end to the rule of the fairies in Ireland". In this it was notably unsuccessful: during the 1920s, a young student named Samuel
Beckett reported seeing a fairy-man in the New Square of
Trinity College Dublin; and two decades later a Galway woman, when asked by an American anthropologist whether she really believed in the "little people", replied with terse sophistication: "I do not, sir – but they're there anyway". The underlying process, however, was reciprocal: to the Irish,
England was
fairyland, a notion developed by Oscar Wilde to whom the nobility of England seemed as exotic as the caliphs of Baghdad. If England had never existed, the Irish would have been rather lonely. Each nation badly needed the other, for the purpose of defining itself.

This hints at yet a third answer, pithily summed up by those who say that exile is the nursery of nationality. The massive exodus which followed the famines of the 1840s left hundreds of thousands of Irish men and women in the major cities of Britain, North America and Australia dreaming of a homeland, and committed to carrying a burden which few enough on native grounds still bothered to shoulder
an idea of Ireland.
Wilde believed that it would be, in great part, through contact with the art of other countries that a modern Irish culture might be reshaped. The implication was that only when large numbers of Irish people spoke and wrote in English (and, maybe, French and German) would a fully-fledged national culture emerge. That analysis, in its political as well as its cultural implications, was ratified by many other exiles, who provided a major impetus for the Irish Renaissance which followed. Though often berated by recent historians for their fanaticism and simple-mindedness, the Irish exiles of the nineteenth century were keenly aware of the hybrid sources of their own nationalism. They knew, much better than those who remained at home, that "the native is, like colonial and creole, a white-on-black negative" and that "the nativeness of natives is always unmoored".
¹

Benedict Anderson has suggested, as a corollary to those aphorisms of his, that a similar type of exile in the latter half of the nineteenth century brought many rural peoples into cities and towns, where their children, in the course of an ever-extending schooling, were made to learn a standardized vernacular. For the Irish who stayed in their own country that language was English, and a life conducted through the medium of English became itself a sort of exile. The revival of the native language, led by the
Gaelic League in the final decade of the century, was an inevitable protest against such homogenization, a recognition that to be anglicized was not at all the same thing as to be English. The colonial élites who were the result of this flawed mimesis would become so many white-on-black negatives; and it was from Gaelic Leaguers, who painfully studied and repossessed Irish, while continuing to speak
English in public life, that much of the impetus for political independence would come.

For all of these persons, nationalism evoked an idea of homecoming, a return from exile or captivity, or what Anderson elegantly calls a "positive printed from the negative in the dark-room of political struggle".
²
The same might be said of the literary artists.
W. B. Yeats followed Wilde and Shaw to London in the 1880s, the approved route for an Irishman on the make in England. Once there, however, he grew rapidly depressed at the ease with which London publishers could convert a professional Celt into a mere entertainer, and so he decided to return to Dublin and shift the centre of gravity of Irish culture back to the native capital. Cynics have suggested that a literary revival happened in Dublin at the turn of the century "because five or six people lived in the same town and hated one another cordially". The quip captures the vibrancy and occasional malice of the personal exchanges, but it does scant justice to the collaborative nature of the enterprise.

That enterprise achieved nothing less than a renovation of Irish consciousness and a new understanding of politics, economics, philosophy, sport, language and culture in its widest sense. It was the grand destiny of Yeats's generation to make Ireland once again interesting to the Irish, after centuries of enforced provincialism following the collapse of the Gaelic order in 1601. No generation before or since lived with such conscious national intensity or left such an inspiring (and, in some ways, intimidating) legacy. Though they could be fractious, its members set themselves the highest standards of imaginative integrity and personal generosity. Imbued with republican and democratic ideals, they committed themselves in no spirit of chauvinism, but in the conviction that the Irish
risorgimento
might expand the expressive freedoms of all individuals:
that
is the link between thinkers as disparate as
Douglas Hyde and
James Connolly, Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington and
James Joyce.

My concern has been to trace the links between high art and popular expression in the decades before and after independence, and to situate revered masterpieces in the wider social context out of which they came. Hence, chapters of political and cultural history, analyses of urbanization, of vernacular, of debates about national culture and the programme of the Gaelic League, take their place alongside detailed reexaminations of major texts. Although my book is broadly chronological in structure, it sometimes cuts back and forward in time, recognizing that any age is always "constructed" by another. My aim has been to explore continuities between the Irish past and present, to
place the Irish Renaissance in a constellation with the current moment when, it seems, Ireland is about to be reinvented for a new century. Nobody who has lived through the denial or distortion of so much of the Irish past in recent years – as various groupings sought to colonize it for their own short-term purposes – could be unaware of the ways in which an act of criticism may be at the mercy of the present moment. Doubtless, many of my own insights may be conditional on certain blindnesses, which are nonetheless regrettable for all that.

I have tried in what follows to see works of art as products of their age; to view them not in splendid isolation but in relation to one another; and, above all, to celebrate that phase in their existence when they transcend the field of force out of which they came. There will always be a silent reference of human works to human abilities and to the limitations of time and place: but it is wise to recognize – despite current critical fashions – that certain masterpieces do float free of their enabling conditions to make their home in the world. Ireland, precisely because its writers have been fiercely loyal to their own localities, has produced a large number of these masterpieces, and in an extraordinarily concentrated phase of expression.

The imagination of these art-works has always been notable for its engagement with society and for its prophetic reading of the forces at work in their time. Less often remarked has been the extent to which political leaders from Pearse to Connolly, from de Valera to Collins, drew on the ideas of poets and playwrights. What makes the Irish Renaissance such a fascinating case is the knowledge that the cultural revival preceded and in many ways enabled the political revolution that followed. This is quite the opposite of the American experience, in which the attainment of cultural autonomy by Whitman and Emerson followed the political Declaration of Independence by fully seventy-five years. In this respect, the Irish experience seems to anticipate that of the emerging nation-states of the so-called "Third World". Yeats also insisted that art offered this kind of anticipatory illumination: he said that "the arts lie dreaming of what is to come". He wrote for the "coming times", as did his friends and colleagues. They would all have understood the force of
Walter Benjamin's observation that "every age not only dreams the next, but while dreaming impels it towards wakefulness". These are the responsibilities that begin in dreams.

In restoring writers to the wider cultural context, I have been mindful of the ways in which some shapers of modern
Africa, India and the emerging world looked at times to the Irish for guidance. Despite this, a recent study of theory and practice in postcolonial literature,
The
Empire Writes Back,
passes over the Irish case very swiftly, perhaps because the authors find these white Europeans too strange an instance to justify their sustained attention.
³
I hope that this book might prompt a reassessment. All cases are complex, but it is precisely the "mixed" nature of the experience of Irish people, as both exponents and victims of British
imperialism, which makes them so representative of the underlying process. Because the Irish were the first modem people to decolonize in the twentieth century, it has seemed useful to make comparisons with other, subsequent movements, and to draw upon the more recent theories of
Frantz Fanon and
Ashis Nandy for a retrospective illumination. If Ireland once inspired many leaders of the "developing" world, today the country has much to learn from them. This is in no way to deny the specificity of each particular case; and I have tried, in teasing out some analogies, to render the crucial differences as well as the often-forgotten similarities. In that spirit I have refrained from attempts to "recolonize" Irish cultural studies in the name of any fashionable literary theory, preferring to allow my chosen texts to define their own terms of discussion. My belief is that the introduction of the Irish case to the debate will complicate, extend and in some cases expose the limits of current models of
postcoloniality. If nationalism is most often invoked in western Europe nowadays by those who wish to defend the
status quo,
in eastern Europe and in the wider decolonizing world it may equally be an inspiration to those who wish to change it: the Irish case, as always, exhibits both tendencies at work, often simultaneously.
⁴

A few definitions may be helpful at this point. "Imperialism" in this text is a term used to describe the seizure of land from its owners and their consequent subjugation by military force and cultural programming: the latter involves the description, mapping and ecological transformation of the occupied territory. "
Colonialism" more specifically involves the planting of settlers in the land thus seized, for the purpose of expropriating its wealth and for the promotion of the occupiers' trade and culture. Students of these processes have traditionally devoted most of their attention to the economic and political ramifications, and have tended to underestimate the cultural factors. Recent work by
Edward Said,
C. L. R. James,
Albert Memmi,
Aimé Césaire, as well as by Fanon and Nandy, has helped to illuminate the cultural politics of resistance movements, but there is still much to be done on the implications of empire for the life of the "home country". Because Ireland, unlike most other colonies, was positioned so close to the occupying power, and because the relationship between the two
countries was one of prolonged if forced intimacy, the study of Irish writing and thought in the English language may allow for a more truly contrapuntal analysis. In my judgement, postcolonial writing does not begin only when the occupier withdraws: rather it is initiated at that very moment when a native writer formulates a text committed to cultural resistance. By this reckoning,
Seathrún Céitinn and W. B. Yeats are postcolonial artists, as surely as
Brendan Behan.

As far as the Irish were concerned, colonialism took various forms: political rule from London through the medium of Dublin Castle; economic expropriation by planters who came in various waves of settlement; and an accompanying psychology of self-doubt and dependency among the Irish, linked to the loss of economic and political power but also the decline of the native language and culture. Although imperial rule in twenty-six counties ceased in 1921, many descendants of settler families continued to hold much land and wealth. In the ensuing decades, Ireland became part of a new world system, which saw the collapse of colonialism in most of its outposts. That new system was, of course, dominated by the Americans who, learning from the mistakes of predecessors, concluded that there was no need to rule vassal states and so were content simply to "own" them. Once again Ireland, because of its strategic position in the northern hemisphere as a major supplier of American immigrants, found itself in a complex relationship with a great power, and one which was on this occasion also a republic The resulting ambivalence is traced in later stages of this book, which shows that the effects of cultural dependency remained palpable long after the formal withdrawal of the British military: it was less easy to decolonize the mind than the territory. Such a programme was made even more difficult by the persistence of British rule over six counties of northern Ireland: even today the unionist élites remain committed to an "England of the mind" which has long ceased to have any meaning for most inhabitants of a multicultural Britain.