Authors: Declan Kiberd
Birds sigh for the air,
Thought for I know not where,
For the womb the seed sighs.
Sinks the same rest
On intellect, on nest,
On straining thighs.
16
Yeats had concluded that, if incarnation and crucifixion were identical, then a god who took a flawed human form was already suffering the ravages of a tainted medium. Yet
every
artist must follow suit: by taking on the flawed worlds body, they achieve self-conquest, are born again to a recovered innocence and help others to recover it too.
That recovery comes at the instant when the self resolves to reshape available forms to a personal standard of excellence, and to see in such nationalist icons as Swift, O'Connell or Parnell not models for slavish emulation (as in a mirror) but illuminations of the onlookers' real potential, "precisely that symbol he may require for the expression of himself".
17
The moment of liberation is thus achieved when the return to the source is also an opening onto a mysterious future: "this instinct for what is near and yet hidden is in reality a return to the sources of our power, and therefore a claim made upon the future. Thought seems more true, emotion more deep, spoken by someone who touches my pride, who seems to claim me of his kindred, who seems to make me a part of some national mythology".
18
This may explain one of the
paradoxes of post-colonial culture: that it can seem, at one and the same time, extremely old and extremely young, of ancient lineage and in a sense yet unborn. The world of the self-invented man is "the tradition of myself", by which the founder is also the final consummation of a whole stream of thought: so Yeats, who helped to define Irish literary nationalism in his own writings, became in time the lyricist who, in alternately bitter and melancholic modes, sang the nationalism of mourning. But his account of the collapse of the nationalist project would itself become the master-narrative of its successor and a further proof that "tradition may live in the lament for its passing".
19
In this dynamic, the very meaning of the word
tradition
changes, since it no longer implies a museum of nostalgias but a reopened future. Yet the past must be honoured, albeit subordinated. "We cannot kill the past in going forward", writes Carlos Fuentes, the Mexican novelist, "for the past is our identity and without our identity we are nothing".
20
One of the tactics of colonialism was to deprive a people of their past precisely in order to deny them their future. Though it was quite understandable that people, in their anxiety to modernize, should dream of creating themselves
ex nihilo,
free of degrading past links, this was not to be absolute: the task rather was to show the interdependence of past and future in attempting to restore history's openness.
The colonialist crime was the violation of the traditional community: the nationalist crime was often a denial of the autonomy of the individual. Liberation would come only with forms which stressed the interdependence of community and individual, rather than canvassing the claims of one at the expense of the other. The question which faced the decolonizing world, the question to which it might become the answer, was: how to build a future on the past without returning to it? The danger of nationalist culture was its tendency to petrification and its martyr cult, which created in many adherents an unhealthy obsession with their future demise: the Deirdre of Irish lore constantly foretasting her legendary status is one example, the monks in Joyce's
Dubliners
who sleep in their own coffins another. Joyce, by his satirical treatment of statuary in
Dubliners,
mocks the tendency of nationalists to embalm themselves alive: they fetishize and manipulate the past to the point where they irretrievably lose it. The English occupiers, having lost their own past in this way, tried similarly to dispossess others, which was why a return to some sort of source seemed necessary, if the future was to be more than a vanishing point. "The past is the only certifiable future we have", says Fuentes: "The past is the only proof that the future did, in effect, once exist".
21
Hence his
the future, imagine the past
Imagine
is the operative word for the liberationist who, far more than the nationalist, needs the sanction of previous authority if history is to be blown open. That sanction comes from history not as chronological narrative but as symbolic pattern, in which certain
Utopian moments are extracted from its flow. The 1916 Rising announced itself in this way, not only as the outcome of the previous thirty years, but also as a moment charged with the Utopian energies of 1803, 1848 and 1867. As Walter Benjamin remarked: "to Robespierre ancient Rome was a past charged with the time of the now, which he blasted out of the continuum of history. The French revolution viewed itself as Rome incarnate".
22
This means also that the nationalist present which was 1916 must have construed itself under the aegis of the liberation which would finally replace it. The rebels had instinctively grasped the
constellation
which their era formed with those earlier ones, and with those "millions unborn" of whom Pearse dreamed in his poem. Accused by their critics and by
future conservative historians of being fixated on the past,
they
were anything but: what they sensed was their power to redirect its latent energies into new constellations. They therefore reserved the right to reinterpret the past in the light of their desired future, which they recruited against a despised present. So they implemented Nietzsche's programme for all who have not been given a good father: they went out and invented a better one, a better past.
History thereby became a form of science fiction: in order to get a fair hearing in a conservative society, the exponents of revolution had to present their intentions under the guise of a return to the idealized patterns of the past. Connolly, dreaming of a classless communitarian society, must present it in
Labour in Irish History
as a restoration of a system akin to that of the ancient Celtic laws; and Pearse could present the theories of Montessori as but the fosterage practised by the Gaelic chief. Each man put on the mask of a historical actor to bring something new into being: each dropped into a familiar role in order to learn something new about himself.
The Odyssey
was no more intrinsic to Joyce's
Ulysses
than was the Cuchulain myth to the leaders of 1916: such narratives provided a respectable scaffolding behind which the rebels were free to improvise.
The most spectacular scaffolding of all was provided by nationalism and the nation-state: forms which might at any moment be kicked away to reveal the radical new structure which had been improvised beneath. Claiming to revere the scaffolding of the older forms, the Pearses, Connollys and Joyces were not-so-secret innovators. They understood that one must forget much of the past if anything is to be
created in the present: or, at least, one must constantly re-edit that past in the light of current needs. The hope for progress, Nietzsche had said, was to "wipe away whatever came earlier in the prospect of reaching a true present... a new departure".
23
No wonder that Michael Davitt, the author of Ireland's new departure in land-holding, was one of those who gave rise to the radicals' creative misinterpretation of the Irish past. And no wonder that Nietzsche saw history and modernity as opposed ideas: what was modern about the 1916 thinkers was precisely their disruption of chronology, their insistence on the revolutionary idea of tradition.
This is all quite at variance with the common nationalist view of tradition as something which has come to a conclusion. Its exponents fancy that they are the final point of history and the past a foil to their narcissism. Such a past has in effect lost its future, its power to challenge and disrupt: it exists only as a commodity to be admired, consumed, reducing its adherents to the position of tourists in their own country, whose monuments and heritage centres can be visited or re-entered by an act of will. Its people are lulled by their leaders to "become drunk on remembrance",
24
to recover the past as fetish rather than to live in the flow of actual history. The fetishizing, once permitted, affects everything – even the landscape is treated like a reified woman's body – so that, after independence, the actual landscape is slowly transformed by the touristic industries until it conforms to the outlines of the original fantasy. In other words, the Cathleen ní Houlihan of real flesh and blood must impersonate for her lovers the sort of woman they want her to be, and she must leave her own desires unimplemented. In such a nationalism, the "lyrical stage"
25
completely overrides the historic concreteness of the revolution. It is made possible by an endless harping on an idealized past, which is used as a distraction from the mediocrity of the present. James Connolly foresaw this when he warned that a neglect of vital, living issues might "only succeed in stereotyping our historical studies with a worship of the past, or crystallizing nationalism into a tradition, glorious and heroic indeed, but still
only a tradition".
26
The penchant for commemoration is a tell-tale sign of a community which, pained by the process of unequal development, has difficulty in adjusting to modernity. Yet the nationalism to which it appeals
is
modern in the sense that it rejects a dynamic traditionalism and seeks to abort the historical process. The inappropriate forms left by the occupier lead the nationalist to violate the rights of minority groupings, and also the customs and familial structures of the people. By way of
compensation, nationalism men learns how to mythologize the very values which it has been helping to destroy: it was 1930s Ireland, wrecked by emigration and the consequent break-up of families, which insisted on defining the family as the basic unit of society. But the reality did not measure up to the rhetoric. Each year, returning emigrants were invited to visit this petrified society, and to inspect it as once a colonial official might have reviewed a primitive tribe's progress on a special reservation. Of such a phenomenon, Sigmund Freud had written: "the reservation is to maintain the old condition of things which has been regretfully sacrificed to necessity everywhere else . . . The mental realm of fantasy is also such a reservation reclaimed from the encroaches of the reality principle".
27
The goal of early national leaders was stasis, not growth – an economy which guaranteed a frugal sufficiency for all. De Valera's pastoral politics owed much to Thomas Jefferson, sharing his hope of having things both ways, of avoiding the savagery of absolute, untamed nature, and also the desiccation of great modern cities. In the ideal Ireland of the nationalists, mere was to be no drab, workerist conform-ism: neither were there to be massive differences of wealth or status. This would be a world in which men could fertilize and farm the land with machines made, most conveniently, elsewhere. By no means ridiculous, this was the state sought by many other leaders, to solve the problem posed by modernity with
the right kind of modernity,
Recognizing the protest against a shallow cosmopolitanism latent in the national movements, its sponsors hoped for a new dispensation, under which the best of
tradition might blend with the benefits of modernity. Such a radicalism was both modern and counter-modern. In that sense, it was a political version of literary modernism, which compensated for all that was lost in the consumer society by emphasizing the complexity, beauty and quality of many traditions. It was in this sense that the cultural values promoted by Yeats and Synge could be both very new and very old, evoking Adam and a perpetual Last Judgement.
The problem was that these ideals could never be expressed or embodied in the form of the inherited nation-state; and politicians who took over those forms, unmodified, effectively asked their people to live like an underground movement in a country under occupation. All the old apparatus was maintained: the ever-burgeoning capital city with its dominance over the rest of the country, even after its institutions were seized by people from the countryside; the planting of the tricolour on a state apparatus explicitly designed to disempower local
communities; the emulation of the social hierarchies of imperial Britain at just that moment when they were falling to challenges in the parent country. The graft of Victorian-Edwardian values onto the emerging Ireland which they ill-fitted can be seen in the idiotic imposition of English lettering where once Gaelic characters had been used to write Irish (rather reminiscent of those educators in independent Algeria who preferred the Latin to the Arabic alphabet). Even more remarkable was the uneasy proliferation of names for the new state: the
Irish Free State; Éire; Ireland; the Irish Republic – each one less satisfactory than the next, and each increasing that yearning for a true republic of the mind.
The people were so exhausted by the expenditure of energy in dislodging the occupier that they seemed to have little left with which to reimagine their condition; and the coarsening effects of all uprisings on those caught up in them took an inevitable toll as well. As George Russell wrote: "there is a
danger in revolution if the revolutionary spirit is much more advanced than the intellectual and moral qualities which alone can secure the success of
a
revolt".
28
So,
for all his lofty ideals, de Valera was compromised by the inherited forms. He was soon to be seen wearing a top hat, and a morning-suit to consultations with the Papal Nuncio. The less the forms fitted current experience, the more necessary it became to retreat for consolation and compensation into the myth of a pristine, innocent Gaelic past. A revolution which began by seeing liberation as choice had rapidly become a quest for
liberation from choice,
a quest for a few pious certainties. Those who had once fought alongside de Valera seeking revolution or death now faced in his period of rule the death of their revolution. Increasingly, he and his colleagues lapsed into nostalgia. The more the legitimacy of their state was challenged, the greater their appeals to the sanction of the past: it was now the "die-hard" republicans who, refusing all compromise, continued to dream of an open future. While de Valera sought legitimation in the backward look, they sought justification in the coming times.