Inventing Ireland (40 page)

In theory, two kinds of freedom were available to the Irish: the return to a past, pre-colonial Gaelic identity, still yearning for expression if long-denied, or the reconstruction of a national identity, beginning from first principles all over again. The first discounted much that had happened, for good as well as ill, during the centuries of occupation; the second was even more exacting, since it urged people to ignore other aspects of their past too. The first eventually took the form of nationalism, as sponsored by Michael Collins, Éamon de Valera and the political élites; the second offered liberation, and was largely the invention of writers and artists who attempted, in Santayana's phrase, "to make us citizens by anticipation in the world that we crave".
¹
The nationalism of the politicians enjoyed intermittent support from a major artist such as W. B. Yeats, but eventually he grew tired of it; the liberation preached by the artists sometimes won the loyalty of the more imaginative political figures, such as Liam Mellows or Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington. Inevitably, neither model was sufficient unto itself: even its stoutest defenders were compelled by the brute facts of history to "borrow" some elements of the alternative version.

The problem with the "return to the source" model was clear enough: there was very little source left, just a scattered Irish-speaking community in the most westerly regions. Nor were members of that community especially impressed by the lure of nationalism: a group of Blasket islanders, gathered around a cottage hearth in Easter Week 1916, was brought the momentous news of the rebellion in Dublin. "Abair an focal
republic
i nGaoluinn" (Say the word
republic
in Irish), urged the mischievous
Tomás Ó Criomhthainn; but the islanders had no word, only a local king known as
an rí.
"Agus is beag a chuir a soláthar imní ach oiread oraibh" (And it's little its attainment troubled ye, either), added the laconic Ó Criomhthainn.
²
In his autobiography
An tOiléanach
(The Islandman), he described his feelings of dismay
when first he stepped onto the Irish mainland, and felt himself in alien territory. One generation later, when Muiris Ó Súilleabhain stepped off the same boat onto the same quayside, his strange, island gait prompted the derisive question "Murab Éireannach thú, cad é thú?" (If you're not an Irishman, what are you?), to which he replied after some thought "Blascaodach" (A Blasketman).
³
Gaelic
would not easily be made equivalent to
Irish.

These
islanders and Gaeltacht-dwellers truly were the last Europeans, perched precariously on those very fastnesses where a whole civilization ran out of continent; and so they might have been seen to epitomize Europe at that point where it bordered on the emerging post-colonial world. "These strange men with receding foreheads, high cheek-bones and ungovernable eyes seem to represent some old type found on these few acres at the extreme edge of Europe", wrote Synge while among them, "where it is only in wild jests and laughter that they can express their loneliness and desolation".
⁴
Synge's greatest play, even in its tide, can be read as a mockery
of
the presiding myths of the western,
Eurocentric world; and his thwarting of generic expectations, in a comedy which concludes without the predicted marriage, was certainly an attempt to plunge his audience through the same experience of "cognitive dissonance" which he went through after setting foot on the islands.
Weldon Thornton has persuasively argued that each of Synge's plays somehow eludes the generic stereotypes of tragedy or comedy, "representing as they do received western categories of response". He observes very justly that Synge's aim was to give an honest reflection of "the complexity, perhaps even the incongruity and irrationality, of his characters' feelings or their milieu, without regard for whether the result fell into a recognizable genre".
⁵

In
The Aran Islands,
Synge constructed a sort of pastoral, which had many of the classic features of earlier forays in Africanist or
Orientalist mode: the reconstitution of the setting as a landscape of the individual consciousness; the recognition on the part of the visitor that he can understand more of the natives than they will ever know of him; a betrayed friendship with a sensitive local youth; a mandatory but largely wordless romantic infatuation with a native woman; a readiness to being mocked by the natives for being unmarried at such a ripe age; and, finally, a sad withdrawal from a world which increasingly takes on the contours of a dream.
⁶

Synge's pastoralism, however, is not of the conventional western kind which is designed to occlude painful class differences: in his world, rather than have aristocrats play at being peasants, he effects a
revolutionary reversal, which allows him to impute to the islanders an aristocratic mien and lightness of foot (just as, in
Deirdre of the Sorrows,
he can portray peasants in the garb of royalty). His island is a Kropot-kinian commune, wherein every man and woman becomes a sort of artist. Their work changes with the seasons, creating a wonderful versatility of body and of mind: and most of them can speak different languages. Inishmaan, the nearest analogy in Europe to the undeveloped world, affords "something of the artistic beauty of medieval life", whose artefacts "seem to exist as a natural link between the people and the world that is about them". When the
meitheal oibre
(voluntary work party) comes to a house to do the shared labour, work ceases to be such, becoming "a sort of festival" and the cottager "a host instead of an employer". On the neighbouring island of Inishmore, however, he notices the creeping class-consciousness of an "advanced" society: "the families here are gradually forming into different ranks".

Worse still, they have been theatricalized and corrupted by tourism. On Inishmaan, there was no difference between a role and a self, despite the "penury"; on the larger island, the natives know more. One of the things they know is how to play the part expected of them by English tourists: "I noticed in the crowd several men of the ragged, humorous type that was once thought to represent the real peasant of Ireland ... As we looked out through the fog, there was something nearly appalling in the shrieks of laughter kept up by one of these individuals, a man of extraordinary ugliness and wit".
⁷
In that strange moment, Synge identifies the problem of the Irish nationalist mind in its deep, almost erotic, attraction to the English. English typology has encouraged this stage Irishman to mimic a stock type – with no saving sense of irony – and to confuse this type with "personality". The Gaelic Irish of Inishmaan are not sufficiently conscious to be nationalist, while the man from Inishmore is too Irish to be Gaelic. Such an Irishman is, in classic existential terms, overdetermined; to him there is no Irish identity above and beyond the Irish predicament. Irishness is like Jewishness, whatever people say it is. To be Irish, in such a context, is simply to be called Irish, and to know what that means you have to ask the English.

Those Gaelic poets who, in their moment of estrangement from the ancient culture, warned that from now on their people would be like the children of Israel, knew exactly what they were saying; for, as
Jean-Paul Sartre would much later observe of Jews locked into a similar process, "the root of Jewish disquietude is the necessity imposed on the Jew of subjecting himself to endless self-examination and finally assuming
a phantom personality, at once strange and familiar, that haunts him and is nothing but himself – as others sec him".
⁸
Irish is like English – "familiar and foreign" – but nonetheless Irish for all that. The universal modern disjunction between role and self is true, twice over, of the Irish nationalist who, knowing that at last he is tolerated, must keep on proving himself and his nation. For this is the great burden of post-colonial national élites: that, unlike the islanders of the Great Blasket or Inishmaan, they must have an
idea
of Ireland.

Nor is the problem solved by a reversion to West British modes, for they are characterized by what Yeats called "their would-be cosmopolitanism and their actual provincialism".
⁹
If the person were to deny with ferocious intensity the Irish element in himself, he would in that very vehemence mark himself off as Irish. There seems no way out of this mirror-chamber created by the colonialists, because the natives' opinions of themselves are greatly influenced by the low esteem which their rulers have for them. The nationalist rebel feeds the English stereotype with his martyrdom, becoming visibly more like what he should be to deserve the fate mapped out for him. Even the would-be liberationist, for whom it is a point of honour to have no poetic phrase or humorous mood, lives in such daily anxiety that he will correspond to the stereotype that his conduct, too, is patently determined from the outside: whoever makes it his destiny to prove that there are no Irish ends up establishing that there are.

The English built their new England called Ireland: the Irish then played at building a not-England, but now they were playing at being not-Irish. That is a measure of the dire difficulty of reaching Fanon's third, liberationist phase. The people of the second, nationalist phase – especially those who have progressed in their thinking – want to know the "Irish" element within them solely in order to deny it. What Sartre remarked of the Jews is again apposite: "with them it is not a question of recognizing certain faults and combating them, but of underlining by their conduct the fact that they do not have those faults".
¹⁰
Repeatedly estranged from their experiences, they not only act but watch themselves acting; and so Irish wit, when it expresses itself, does so most often at the expense of its own. Dr. Samuel Johnson once joked that the Irish, being a fair people, never spoke well of one another.

Yet among their own kind, in moments of privacy, all this falseness ceases, and there is no oppressive sense of a tradition weighing them down. Moreover, if in such a setting they criticize the Irish, it is understood that they are being critical of a submission to one or other of these stereotypes: nobody is more anti-Irish in this positive sense
than the Irish themselves. The inauthentic Irish fled from the pressure of the stereotype and then the English made them Irish in spite of themselves: but the more thoughtful Irish sought to free Ireland in the only meaningful sense by freeing their expressive selves. They did this, like Christy Mahon at the end of
The Playboy,
by constructing themselves from within and throwing away the mirror. In making themselves Irish, they did what he did and eluded final description; for to be a new species of man or woman is to lack a
given
identity, to be not nobody but not somebody either.

How exactly does the whole process work? Yeats's observations
on national culture are helpful here, for he sees in it a flowering which, of its very nature, must wither. "Is not all history but the coming of that conscious art which first makes articulate and then destroys the old wild energy?" Once a face is framed, once a form is adopted, a self-consciousness insinuates itself into an action with a concomitant sense of loss. The nationalist self destroys itself by the very energies which define its being, and so the mirror must be smashed before being discarded. The process, though it may be humiliating, must be gone through: all thoughts must be embodied in form, however fallen, and the problems of the decolonizing intellectual who works with the tainted terminology of the colonialist are seen by Yeats as no different in kind from those which confront the saviour-poet. As "Christ put on the temporal body, which is Satan . . . that it might be consumed, and the spiritual body revealed", so poetry "puts on nature that nature might be revealed as the great storehouse of symbolism, without which language is dumb".
¹¹
The making conscious of the Irish element leads it to create a perfect mirror in which to view itself, a narcissism of self-love followed by self-loathing, like that which causes a parrot in one of Yeats's poems to rage at its own image and then to break it. The past has returned, but in the form of self-hatred. In the estrangement which follows, Yeats becomes an instance of the modern man, bleak and yet free. Only the sinful, broken, tainted medium allows progress: another example of
felix culpa,
of going wrong in order to go right.

So, self is denied, then defined, before being superseded in a moment of breakthrough, when all mirrors are thrown away. Up until this moment, history has been a mere chronicle of facts, but in the fifteenth phase of
A Vision,
when revolution comes, the artists take history and "do its personages the honour of naming after them their own thoughts",
¹²
which is to say that they find in the forms of past heroism the lineaments of their desires. When the mirror is shattered by the alchemist, what is left is the luminous drop of distilled gold, which
provides the illumination.
¹³
When the ego is released from the mirror phase of a mimic nationalism, a deeper self is freed, a self which has no further need of irritable assertion, but is serene enough to allow the forces of creation to flow through it. It can contain the culture so fully as to embody both its "nay" and its "yea", without setting one above the other.

Before this breakthrough comes a period which has been called "a nationalism of mourning".
¹⁴
At this time, it becomes increasingly clear that the longing for form has not been appeased by any of the models on offer, either literary or political, but is still "a dumb, struggling thought seeking a mouth
to
utter it".
¹⁵
Its incarnation in the inappropriate body of the inherited state exemplifies the paradox of a world in which every act is a suffering and every statement a loss of vital energy. If the energy of life is the urge to find a satisfactory expression, then a nation is but a longing for a new form, a sign that all dreams end in a beautiful body: