Inventing Ireland (38 page)

The "tundish" incident in
A Portrait
is a reminder that the colony
retained many of the linguistic features of Shakespearian England, words and phrases which had long fallen into disuse in the parent country. This hints at a broader truth: everything in a colony petrifies, laws, fashions, customs too, so that a point is reached at which the planter may come to resent the parent country's failure to remain the model it once was. The colony may, in extreme cases, be all that remains of a once-vibrant Englishness: hence Shaw's joke that
Ireland, like India, was one of the last spots on earth still producing the ideal Englishman of history. And still producing, according to Synge,
Elizabethan English:

... It is probable that when the Elizabethan dramatist took his ink-horn and sat down to his work, he used many phrases that he had just heard, as he sat at dinner, from his mother or his children. In Ireland those of us who know the people have the same privilege ... In Ireland, for a few years more, we have a popular imagination that is fiery, magnificent, and tender; so that those of us who wish to write start with a chance that is not given to writers in places where the springtime of the local life has been forgotten, and the harvest is a memory only, and the straw has been turned into bricks.
²⁰

Seamus Deane has seen in such a moment a last-ditch attempt by the Anglo-Irish to hold the parent country true to that full-blooded culture which was invoked to justify the imperial enterprise.
²¹
However, all independence movements kick-start themselves into being by repeating elements of the colonial culture: but that in no way implies that their sponsors intend to repeat its mistakes.

It is one thing to imitate your Shakespearian father; it is quite another to take the approach of Yeats and turn him into a revised version of yourself. Moreover, both Yeats and Synge were reaching back beyond the imperial mission to a pre-modern, carnivalesque vitality, to those elements which peoples shared before the fall into imperialism and nationalism – elements which survived in Shakespeare's plays, and which seemed to intersect, in suggestive ways, with the folk life of rural Ireland. All that was salt in Shakespeare's mouth seemed to flavour the speech of those parts of Ireland untouched by Anglicization, a riddle certainly, but not insoluble, since these were the parts that the imperial administrator just could not reach. Like the
surrealists who would later explore those rejected images and ideas which had been banished to the sub-conscious, Irish writers seized upon all that was denied in official culture – holy wells, pagan festivals, folk anecdotes, popular lore – and wrought these things into a high art. The threat to such richness came
not so much from industrial England as from the respectability of the emerging Irish middle class. That was why Synge feared that Ireland would have this popular imagination only "for a few years more". Even as he wrote, the repository of that imagination – the Irish language – was being slowly overridden by a grim
Victorian moralism; but still he and
Yeats hoped to blend the best of Gaelic tradition with the vital energies from premodern England that remained.

Central to this agenda was a refusal to play the victim's part. All through the nineteenth century, the Irish had been the champion whiners of the western world, proclaiming their suffering at every hand's turn. What was attractive about the revival generation was its generous admission that the deformities visited by colonialism upon the Irish were as nothing compared with the repression endured by the English, rulers as well as ruled. That generation saw Ireland as a privileged if pressured place, in which a new kind of person could be invented and the problems of the modern world worked out. They also saw Ireland as having more to offer than to gain. To Yeats and Pearse, Ireland might be the saviour of spirituality and art in an increasingly materialistic era (though the more acerbic Synge likened this project to decorating the cabin of a ship that was sinking). For his part, Synge inclined to think that Ireland would gain freedom only after the spread of socialist ideas in Britain.
Ramsay MacDonald led paternalistic English socialists in articulating the belief that Ireland and the other colonies could only be free
after
the English had first freed themselves. Few European socialists considered the possibility that the strongest impulses towards renovation might come from the periphery: but, because Ireland was far nearer to the centre of power than any other colony, they watched it with nervous interest.

Karl Marx, after all, had written that "the English working class will never accomplish anything before it has got rid of Ireland". The dominion of England over Ireland was, he charged, "the great means by which the English aristocracy maintains its domination in England itself", since the steady supply of Irish labourers forced down wages among a divided working-class. However abject he might be, the English labourer was taught to see himself as part of a ruling nation in relation to the Irish, and in this way he became a tool of the aristocrats and capitalists of his country against Ireland, allowing them to strengthen their control over him. For a real transformation to become possible, according to Marx, the aristocracy had to be overthrown by force and
that
was more likely to be done in Ireland by landless labourers than by the relatively quiescent English worker. Ireland
was imperial England's weakest point: "Ireland lost, the British 'Empire' is gone ..."
²²
So it was the duty of the Irish to be as national as need be to secure this devastating international effect. The
cultural
version of this argument was developed by Yeats and Pearse. Whether materialist or spiritual, the notion of Ireland as a lever of transformation in the wider world took a hold on intellectuals between the 1860s and the Great War.

It should not, therefore, seem surprising that they set themselves the task of dismantling the master narratives of the neighbouring island and, in truth, of imperial Europe. In this they had much in common with a West Indian thinker such as C. L. R. James, who reread Shakespeare's works as a demonstration that
outsiders
had always been the decisive agents in history and the holders of the keys to their changing worlds. Being on the edge of things, a Shylock or an
Othello saw far deeper than those caught up in them at the centre, and from this knowledge they learned what man as a creature truly is.
²³
Of no play were more rereadings offered than of
The Tempest,
for it was the one which allowed Caliban, whether he was Irish, Trinidadian, or, for that matter, proletarian, to see as if for the first time his face in a mirror.
²⁴
The very uncertainty among critics as to what sort of a creature Caliban actually is may have been part of Shakespeare's intended point. His conflation of Brazilians, Bermudans and New Worlders, along with references to Tunis, Algiers and Egypt, reinforce the now-widespread assumption that this is one of the first writings of the "Third World".

As Fanon acidly recalled, the
language of the enemy comes freighted with historic meaning, every sentence being either an order or a threat or an insult. Joyce captured, better than most, the sense in which
every
child feels colonized and used by language, by words which mean one thing and then another, by phrases which sometimes provoke laughter and at other times love, and so on. But before Joyce, there was Shakespeare's Caliban:

You taught me language, and my profit on't
Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you
For learning me your language.
²⁵

And after Joyce, there would be Beckett's Gov:

I use the words you taught me. If they don't mean anything any more, teach me others. Or let me be silent.
²⁶

Caliban, of course, had no other language and so, like Clov, he pined for a prelinguistic quiet; but the Irish had. The pastoralist, however, convinced that he is marrying culture to nature, "a gentler scion to the wildest stock", always discounts what culture is already on the island, preferring to see it under the guise of nature. The brave new world is only new to those who can effect this self-deception. Dozens of Gaelic texts attest the fact that savages only emerge when persons fall into the chasm that opens between two cultures which do not interlock. The satire in
Pairlement Chloinne Tomáis
or "Bodaigh na hEorna" is aimed at the churl who speaks in broken English, putting off the restraints of Gaelic culture without achieving self-mastery in another.

Otherwise, to the Irish mind
The Tempest
was what many nineteenth-century patriotic melodramas were: A True Story of the People, driven to Hell or to Connacht:

And here you sty me
In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me
The rest o' the island.
²⁷

This happened in history only after the natives had been found guilty of making the early arrivals "more Irish than the Irish themselves" through intermarriage and thus threatening to people the isle with Calibans. Even the unreality of Caliban and Ariel, the sense of them as projections who appear or disappear at Prospero's will, is in keeping with the fact that the colonial subject is a fiction created by the colonizer. But fictions may, if given a chance, become living fact. Caliban, like the younger Yeats and Joyce, plots a slave's revolt, a seizure of those intellectual tools which gave the imperial imagination mastery of half the globe. In particular, Caliban urges Stephano and Trinculo:

Remember
First to possess his books, for without them
He's but a sot.
²⁸

That crusade against the hated book, symbol of an invading Christianity and later of the invading English, could be continued by many an Irish rebel. Small wonder that Edward Dowden saw Caliban as a serf, incapable of ennobling service; but, many decades afterward, that great exponent of Shakespeare's imperial theme,
G. Wilson Knight, could still insist that Caliban "symbolizes all brainless revolution".
²⁹
As comic
butt, Caliban was fair game for any indignity. In these conservative readings, even the profoundly Christian idea of redemption of the high by the lowly played no part.

So congealed did these interpretations become that Aimé Césaire felt it necessary not just to rewrite but also to remake Shakespeare's plot. In his version, Prospero's masque is interrupted by the manifestation of an African god, over whom the invading ruler has failed to achieve full control. But perhaps Shakespeare needed less to be remade than reread.
The Tempest
may celebrate the imperium of imagination, but it is scarcely the apology for empire assumed by Dowden and Knight: it is, if anything, a critique of its failure even in its own terms to master by intellectual power all that it represses or denies. Instead of an isle of the blest, the invaders find that they have simply jeopardized what little culture they had already sustained; and, rather than an expansion of personality, they endure its drastic simplification for the sake of their survival. The denial of the natives entails the repression within the imperial personality of all those elements with which the natives are identified. Such suffering is hardly to be sustained for long without exhaustion:

Now my dreams are all o'erthrown
And what strength I have's my own
Which is most faint. . .
³⁰

Yet Prospero does achieve the rudimentary grace to acknowledge "this thing of darkness" as "mine", and to recognize that his Other is also his innermost self. He also foretells that moment when his know-ledge will fail in the face of that otherness which it can never fully fathom, that moment when the book will surrender to the fact and the invader find in himself the goodness to go:

But this rough magic
I here abjure, and when I have required
Some heavenly music – which even now I do . . .

I'll break my staff
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I'll drown my book.
³¹

Prospero really has no choice, for he is caught in a paradox: Caliban represents the elements of his own repressed personality, and so if he
kills him, he destroys himself. Since there is only one slave on the island, to do away with him would be to do away with mastery. Yet this, quite irrationally, is what the colonizer can never quite admit: that "England" is an invention too, created in the endless dialectic between rulers and ruled. If the English first learned of the Irish from plays and texts, mostly written at many removes, many Irish equally concocted a nation of
Englishness without direct exposure to the people thus "known". The
idea
of England preceded, for most Irish, the experience of it; and that idea was derived mainly from plays, rumours and letters home, but most of all, as the centuries passed, from books in the classroom. So, even in their fictions of one another, a strange reciprocity bound colonizer to colonized. It might indeed be said that there were four persons involved in every Anglo-Irish relationship: the two actual persons, and the two fictions, each one a concoction of the others imagination. Yet the concoction leaked into the true version, even as the truth modified the concoction. After a while, neither the colonizer nor the colonized stood on their original ground, for both – like Prospero and Caliban – had been
deterritorialized.

"Prospero lives in the absolute certainty that Language, which is his gift to Caliban, is the very prison in which Caliban's achievements will be realized and restricted". So wrote the West Indian novelist,
George Lamming, who went on to say: "Calibans use of language is no more than his way of serving Prospero; and Prospero's instruction in this language is only his way of measuring the distance which separates him from Caliban".
³²
Seamus Heaney has rephrased the same idea in an Irish context with his complaint in "The Ministry of Fear" that "Ulster was British but with no rights / On the English lyric".
³³
Joyce, however, sensed that the Irish, unlike the West Indians, had a native language which could help them to remould standard English along their own lines. So did Yeats and Synge. George Moore went so far as to compare a standard English thus revitalized by the Gaelic
substratum
to a jaded townsman refreshed by a dip into a primal sea.