Inventing Ireland (42 page)

What faced the politicians was a conundrum no different from that which confronted the writers: hard though it was to grapple with the social order left by the departed British, it was harder still to posit a social order that did not exist. Not only that, but the attempt was made in the 1920s and 1930s, that period during which intellectuals across the world began to despair of the political order as such and to retreat into a world of privacy in which each could make a separate peace. Excessive hopes had been nurtured by thinkers unused to the chastening experience of actual power: manic depression often resulted from
the frustrations of freedom. Just as it had been the
independent
republics of Latin America which in the nineteenth century destroyed many native cultures, so now in the twentieth, it seemed that the Gaeltacht was dying faster than ever in an independent Irish state. Yeats, as so often, captured the new mood of disappointment, even before it had fully taken shape: in "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen", he looks back with some bitterness to a time when "we pieced our thoughts into philosophy / And planned to bring the world under a rule / Who are but weasels fighting in a hole".
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Whether he is referring to the imperial idea or to the nationalist hope is strictly immaterial: the lines remain deliberately vague, because in them the poet repudiates a programme for saving humanity which may have inscribed into it the anxious self-aggrandizement of the original imperial impulse. He is already suspecting that he may indeed be one of those modernists who set out to save the world, and ended defending a sensibility.

In "Ancestral Houses", he can even reread his beloved image of the sea-shell as epitomizing the crisis all around him, the incongruity of new matter ill-housed in an obsolete setting:

. . . though now it seems
As if some marvellous empty sea-shell flung
Out of the obscure dark of the rich streams,
And not a fountain, were the symbol which
Shadows the inherited glory of the rich.
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The sea-shell, though precious and beautiful in its way, is also empty and dead. It has only the shape, the formal outline, of the life which it once contained . . . being now no more than a museum-piece ejected by the stream of life and removed from the source of its vitality.

In these recognitions, however, Yeats was moving away from a facile nationalism and returning to the ideal of unfettered self-expression which had, after all, been the rationale for the Irish revival. Confronted with the censorship of art and information by the new state, he said:

For the past hundred years Irish nationalism has had to fight against England, and that fight has helped fanaticism, for we had to welcome everything that gave Ireland emotional energy, and had little use for intelligence so far as the mass of people were concerned, for we had to hurl them against an alien power. The basis of Irish nationalism has now shifted, and much that once helped is now injurious.
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In truth, this had become clear to him as soon as Synge became the target of nationalist attack: when Synge began to create, Yeats suddenly realized that he must abandon the creation of a Holy City of the imagination and instead express the individual. If colonialism violated the community, then a nationalism which humiliated the individual could never be an adequate response. In his poem
"The Fisherman", Yeats contrasted audiences: one, the face of "a man who does not exist" but who is associated with the passionate dawn and the dead Synge; the other, the actual national audience, craven, philistine, and as yet "un-reproved".
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After
The Playboy,
Yeats noted how those extreme politics which once in Ireland had sought intellectual freedom now seemed to have united themselves to a hatred of ideas. The revolt against all forms of modernity latent in the more regressive types of nationalism had begun. Yet Yeats continued to will the new state into being, if only so that he could function as one of its foremost critics.

The difference between the two versions of Irish Renaissance might best be explained by invoking
Lionel Trilling's brilliant distinction between
sincerity
and
authenticity.
Sincerity, a congruence between avowal and feeling, can be admired by those naive enough to believe that there is no problem of form: it is based, in part, on the Romantic ideal of a definite identity, which it becomes the labour of a lifetime to be true to. Authenticity is a more excruciatingly modern demand, which begins with the admission that there
is
a problem of form and that this makes the congruence between avowal and feeling all the more difficult. It makes the concession that a person, or indeed a nation, has a
plurality
of identities, constantly remaking themselves in perpetual renewals. Those writers who made the struggle with inherited structures their theme fell into this category, unlike most of the political leaders who never directly addressed the question.
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Those nationalist politicians, instead, followed the practices of the Romantic artists of the nineteenth century and said: there is an essential Ireland to be served, and a definitive all-Ireland mind to be described. However, the artists often rejoined: there is no single Ireland, but a field of varied forces, subject to constant negotiations, and there is no unitary Irish mind, but many Irish minds, shaped by a common predicament which sometimes produces the same characteristics in those caught up in it. The sincere nationalist asked writers to hold a mirror up to Cathleen ní Houlihan's face: the artist wistfully observed that the cracked looking-glass, which was all that remained after his anger had led him to smash it, rendered not a single but a multiple self.

The attempt to express an authentic set of feelings through a flawed
medium runs like a leitmotif through Irish renaissance texts: it is to be found in the
Wildean adoption of the mask (emulated by Yeats), in the borrowed clothes sported by Christy Mahon
and Stephen Dedalus, in the anxiety of Beckett's characters to regret the cliché even as they submit to it. The attacks on literature as such in many works are made by artists who know the supreme importance of judging by appearances. The heroism of the dandy, who achieves a witty self-mastery in an adverse situation where there is no court for the free play of his talents, takes on in the colonial setting an altogether deeper poignancy: for he, too, is a prisoner of obsolete forms, he also has been instructed to blast his way into modernity with equipment more suited to a previous task. Caught between two worlds, one half-dead and the other still struggling to be born, the Irish writers sometimes had to pour their thoughts and feelings into incongruous containers. Hence the obsession with the encumbrances of costume in so many texts, prompting Yeats, for example, to resolve to abandon the coats of mythology and "walk naked". Inheriting the genres of made men, the Irish were somehow expected to use them to describe men in the making. Hence the recurrent obsession with the pseudo-couple: Jack/Algy, Doyle/Broad-bent, Robartes/Aherne, Stephen/Bloom, Joxer/Boyle, Didi/Gogo; the writers were asking themselves on just what terms could men even begin to combine.

Many of the classic texts take as point of departure the splintering of a family, leading the characters to break out into a wider world: it was as if, in such narratives, writers were rehearsing the break-up of the imperial family. Irish family-life throughout the nineteenth century had been broken by emigration and uprooting, and it could not anyway have functioned as a symbol of conservation or continuity; and so the family structures which persist in works like
The Playboy
or
Ulysses
often do so in a mode of parody. What is enacted in them is the moment when the family breaks up into its constituent parts and the individual recovers autonomy. This is an act of self-begetting, of a kind described by Jean-Paul Sartre when he said that "I always preferred to accuse myself rather than the universe, not out of simple good-heartedness, but in order to derive only from myself".
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What was offered in such works was not a
revival so
much as a rebirth, a
renaissance
which assumed the inadequacy of fathers and which celebrated children who proceeded to act as parents to themselves. If the prospects for a fullblown Gaelic revival had been suffocated by those who wanted merely a Victorian gentility expressed in the Irish language, then there really was no choice but to encourage each individual to conceive, all over again, of his or her self.

The danger of national fanaticism was its tendency to politicize the private dimensions: and the weakness of liberation was its urge to privatize
all
experience. Taken to an extreme, liberation could be so relentlessly modernizing as to cut people off from the ways of their ancestors and to take away their reasons for living. The stand-off between both movements often expressed itself in the developing world in the disjunction between the state and the nation: within the state structures, people voted and behaved conservatively, but in reality they cared little for these structures and remained fundamentally anarchic in their everyday behaviour. Their real codes – tribal, familial or simply personal – seemed to exist beyond these other zones. In consequence, many people had a double consciousness, a sense in each person of living somebody's life other than one's own.

The contradiction within nationalism is obvious enough: its covert desire to mimic the extirpated power while disowning its overt influences. The rage which follows causes the native to break the mirror in which he cannot see himself. Caliban is indeed the New Man for whom the old way of life is rapidly losing its meaning, but who has not yet broken through to the new: his plotting of the murder of Prospero may be seen as the nationalist phase of the revolt. Yet the dream of
The Tempest
is of an end to coercion of all kinds. The tables of the new law must, however, be written in the language of the outlaw, in the bastard lingo that grows between two competing nationalisms. Since the old, inherited forms cannot be purified, they must be remodelled. "The one duty we owe to history", said Wilde, "is to rewrite it"
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(just as the one duty he felt he owed to nature was to improve on it). If the ages were invariably the fleshed-out symbols of some earlier art-form, that was only because life ("poor human life", as Wilde called it, "terribly deficient in form")
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was forever straggling in the wake of art, seizing upon its forms as soon as it caught up with them in order to express itself. So boys playing girls in Shakespeare's dramas helped to evolve a new, completely modern sense of girlhood and womanhood.

It is in this context that the forms evolved by Irish artists take on extra-literary importance. Such forms can be seen as answering questions which have not yet been fully asked in the more conventional political sphere. Rather than adapt themselves to the inherited genres, the writers tried to adapt the genres to themselves. Their texts thus became the signposts standing on a shattered road to a future, which would be admirable to precisely the extent that it did not as yet exist. It was something like this which
Herder had in mind when he said that "a poet is a creator of a people: he gives it a world to contemplate, he
holds its soul in his hands".
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Again and again in their writings, Irish authors recur to the notion of
art as providing the forms which will become the actual environment of the future.

At first, this form was nationalism. In 1888 Yeats wrote that "one can only reach out to the universe with a gloved hand – that glove is one's nation, the only thing one knows even a little of".
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Then Yeats began to worry the glove, as all do only when it ceases to fit. By the time Synge was writing, Yeats could already hear "the wreck of the Ireland of my youth" in the
Playboy
row, even as Synge himself heard the "death-rattle" of a nation in the very moment of its apparent revival, during the singing of patriotic songs at the Irish Literary Theatre. Such a national culture must always be a nostalgia, visible only in an eternal retrospect as the after-image on a retina. Just as the Anglo-Irish began truly to see the Irish land when they ceased to own it – having for years owned a land they could not really see – so now the Irish nationalist phase of revival was over even as it announced itself, was only studied and known as such when it began to disintegrate.

Yet even in the move onward to the next stage, there would be temptations to regress, moments when Yeats would feel like choosing autocracy as a refuge from his insecurity. Each generation, asked to prise open the future with a technique derived from the past, could find itself slipping back: just as nationalism could take on many of the contours of colonialism, so liberation might sometimes look like a revamped nationalism. As Fred Jameson has written: "it is as though 'genuine' desire needed repression in order for us to come to consciousness of it as such ... yet transgressions, presupposing the laws against which
they
function, thereby end up precisely reconfirming such laws".
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Nonetheless, in a culture where expression often precedes conceptualization, form will determine eventual content, and life imitate art in the manner suggested in Yeats's play
The King's Threshold:

What bad poet did your mothers listen to
That you were born so crooked?
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or again:

I said the poets hung
Images of the life that was in Eden
About the child-bed of the world, that it,
Looking upon those images, might bear
Triumphant children.
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So, the shape taken by an experimental narrative may hint at the solution to the seemingly insoluble contradictions of a civil society, teaching it how to combine the benefits of modernity with the warmth of community. An art which deliberately opposes its own age is reflected in a notion of genius as never like the country's idea of itself: but from the contest with current codes a symbolic projection of the future community emerges. Kenneth Burke's model of language as symbolic action is helpful here, since "it begins by generating and producing its own context in the same moment of emergence in which it steps back from it, taking its measure with a view towards its own project of transformation",
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an instance of art reminding us of the very contradiction of which it is itself the resolution. The sloughed-off earlier environment remains as an archaic scaffolding, once useful, now increasingly open to parody, yet somehow contained within the newer order, if only as a reminder that it needed to be created. Art comes not in that moment between the second and third phase, when the realist approaches the magical, but in that moment when the dreamer, installed in the third phase, reaches back to the cast-off reality. Those who persist in taking that discarded scaffolding for an actual living environment doom themselves to adolescence and eventual erasure – but the scaffolding had its undeniable uses in its day and can be preserved within the new dispensation. Such a Utopia will deliver the self "from the anxieties of reality, but will still contain that reality".
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