Authors: Declan Kiberd
It is, nonetheless, one of the recurring paradoxes of a decolonizing culture that Corkery's subtle account of a dispute between a child's intellectual schooling and emotional nature is a reworked version of Eliot's theory of the dissociation of sensibility. It lends a pervasive gloom to Corkery's entire opening chapter in
Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature,
a gloom not to be found in
West Indian commentaries on the same crisis. (Perhaps the lack of a native language left the West Indians less prone to depression than their Irish, African or Indian counterparts, who felt that something good had been taken away.) Whereas Corkery can complain quite bluntly that "Ireland has not learned how to express its own life through the medium of the English language"
20
(and this after the decade of
Ulysses, The Tower
and
The Silver Tassie
!), Lamming can welcome the novel as "a way of investigating and projecting the inner experience of the West Indian community".
21
Lamming, indeed, sees this as the positive result of being caught between two cultures, a turning inward to examine the ground of one's perceptions, to find out how one knows what one knows. To him this is an event as important as the very discovery of the islands.
Corkery is equally negative concerning the sheer number of expatriate Irish writers who function as prisoners of overseas markets. Yet Lamming can find exile a "pleasure" rather than a dreary financial necessity: it affords him a welcome relief from a philistine class at home which reads solely for examinations, and an opportunity to discover overseas, perhaps for the first time, what it means to be West Indian. To write an investigation of the sources of West Indian consciousness virtually demands a strategic withdrawal from the place: to write at all is, in effect, to go into exile. This might have been the answer given to Corkery by the Irish writers.
Corkery's piercing insights into aspects of Irish reality are of the kind possible only to one who has blinded himself to nine-tenths of that reality. His essay ends on a note of near-farce, virtually denying the existence of Anglo-Irish literature, except perhaps as an exotic offshoot of the English parent plant.
22
The hothouse image is, nonetheless, very well chosen. This is, of course, an aspect of Fanon's second phase of decolonization, into which so many of the texts treated in this book have fallen, in whole or in part: that moment when a writer attempts to stamp the forms of the colonizer with "a hallmark which he wishes to
be national, but which is strongly reminiscent of exoticism".
23
Fanon could make such a critique the basis on which he constructed his model of liberation, that phase which would set all Corkeryesque gloom to rights. Corkery's closing regret in his famous diatribe, that the literary revivalists had failed to throw up a body of criticism which might explain their limitations and point the way ahead, might with some justice be ultimately applied to its own author. He deserves great praise also, for, until the advent of Conor Cruise O'Brien in the 1950s, he was the nearest thing Ireland produced to a post-colonial critic.
The years of the "open syllabus" proved happy ones for the more imaginative teachers and students in Ireland who could afford to think little of examinations; and it may be no accident that they also coincided with that period when Ireland came to be regarded with affection and respect by the peoples of the developing world. In such places, tens of thousands of Irish missionaries were made welcome in the 1920s and 1930s, since they came with no hidden political agenda. When Ireland entered the United Nations after World War Two, its position of non-alignment between the superpowers became a model for other emerging states; and when the foremost architect of that policy, Conor Cruise O'Brien, displeased the European imperial establishment by his handling of affairs in
Katanga (formerly part of Belgian Congo) in 1961, that phase in Irish history reached something of a climax. Editors in London were sharpening fangs well bloodied from recent clashes with the Egyptian leader
Gamal Abdul Nasser. "And who", sniffed Prime Minister Macmillan in London, "is Conor Cruise O'Brien?" At Dublin Airport, a suddenly jobless O'Brien gave his answer: an unimportant, expendable civil servant. But then, eyebrows arched, he declared that he had just received the backing of a less expendable man, Prime Minister Nehru of India, leader of a sub-continent.
24
That moment in Irish history was soon lost. For his part, O'Brien soon afterward embarked on a revision of the anti-colonialism of his younger years, although it was some time before he went public with it. As late as 1969, in his masterly study of the French Algerian writer
Albert Camus, he came out in support of Sartre's attack on French colonialism in Algeria and was suitably caustic about Camus's acquiescence. Camus had said that, if forced to choose between revolutionary justice and his mother, he would in the end opt to save his mother. "Not every intellectual has to make the same choice", commented O'Brien, "but each must realize how he is a product of the culture of the advanced world, and how much there is that will pull him, among the 'Algerias' of the future, towards Camus's fall".
25
By 1969, however, western intellectuals were repenting of their support for national liberation movements, as the new states of Africa and Asia sank into chaos, censorship and even dictatorship. Those who saw such problems as a predictable legacy of colonialism were drowned out by a new kind of commentator, often from a former colony, who gravely assured his old masters that these troubles were largely due to the inherent incapacity of such peoples to govern their own affairs. Chinua Achebe was scathing about this "bunch of bright ones" who came along in this way to say "We are through with intoning the colonial litany ... We are tough-minded. We absolve Europe of all guilt. Don't you worry, Europe, we were bound to violence long before you came to our shores". Many liberal Europeans were greatly relieved by this exculpation. Achebe called it "this perverse charitableness, which asks a man to cut his own throat for the comfort and good opinion of another": but he did not fail to note how many European thinkers praised the "sophistication" and "objectivity" of these new analysts.
26
Their thesis of the self-inflicted wound proved immensely consoling to readers of the "liberal" western press, especially when penned in the elegant essays of a V. S. Naipaul. "No Indian can take himself to the stage", wrote Naipaul, "where he might perceive that the faults lie within the civilization itself, that the failures and cruelties of India might implicate all Indians".
27
An Indian economist might point to the many effects of colonial undevelopment which this thesis excluded, and might seek to occupy a space somewhere between the secular Naipaul and the militant holy men: but it was the revisionists who held the high ground. Naipaul was feted in western journals, having told their readers that after their rulers withdrew from their holdings, things only went from bad to worse.
In Ireland, Conor Cruise O'Brien began to sing the same song, but in the future tense, by way of justifying a continuing British presence in the six counties of the north. He repented publicly of his anti-partitionist past, becoming a favoured columnist in the London and New York press, "a voice of sanity in the Irish mess". He translated the mess of Ireland into a rational, enlightenment discourse which made good sense to his international readers. Witty, urbane, amusing, he shared with Naipaul a coolly analytical brain and a mind formed by close study of the European classics. After the outbreak of renewed violence in Northern Ireland, he revised his view of the Camus-Sartre debate and concluded that Camus had been right. The man who had once echoed
Lenin's disappointment that the 1916 rebels had risen too soon to launch an international revolution now made it very clear that he no
longer considered the Easter Rising to have been a positive thing. Yet his career, for all its twists, had an inner logic, that same logic which he had detected in the work of Albert Camus. Both men had found themselves caught on the cusp between
Europe and the developing world. Both responded deeply to these twin tugs, because they could feel the pulls so deeply within themselves. What
O'Brien said of Camus was, perhaps, even more applicable to himself: "he belonged to the frontier of Europe, and was aware of a threat. The threat also beckoned to him. He refused, but not without a struggle".
28
The leaders of modern Ireland also "refused", but only after a period of uncertainty and doubt. The roots of this change may be found in the career of O'Brien's own youthful model, the writer and pundit Seán ÓFaoláin. He was a brilliant protege of Corkery, but one who eventually transcended and repudiated his former teacher in a much-publicized critique. That critique, however, remained unsatisfactory, because it invoked only the values of European individualism, values which, however admirable in themselves, had often been invoked in order to justify the colonial enterprise from which the country was but slowly emerging.
29
ÓFaoláin and Cruise O'Brien represented the ideal of a liberal-European Ireland, but free of its problematic past, whose only tense was the present and its needs: but the persistent injustices in Northern Ireland, and the economic undevelopment of the south, meant that the conditions for such transcendence were never propitious.
It may be doubted, anyway, whether such transcendence, even if achievable, would have been desirable: a post-colonial Ireland had many important differences from a mainly post-imperial Europe. Its people could hardly "play at being Europeans",
30
not because of invincible provincialism but because their traditions linked them to a much wider global network. The years of evolution from the nineteenth century to the twentieth had not been some kind of apprenticeship for an understanding of Europe: rather, the culture of Europe might offer an apprenticeship for a fuller understanding of the writings of Yeats, Joyce and Beckett. All three handled many classic themes of European art, but they did not feel tied to that tradition by any special devotion, and so their handling was irreverent, subversive, even insolent. Of nothing was this more true than of their treatment of English literary culture.
Living at such an angle to official English canons, Irish artists "read England" as a prelude to "writing Ireland". They incorporated many of their re-readings of English authors into their creative texts, and
revealed to a new generation of English readers a Shakespeare, Milton, Blake and Shelley richer and more various than the versions of these authors which had been promoted by previous critics. The English, to their lasting credit, took the lesson to heart. It was Irish
academics
who continued to ask their students to read Shakespeare and the others as they would have been interpreted by educated English persons in the year 1922. There was no attempt to imagine how the study of republican poets like Blake or Shelley in a university of Dublin or Cork might constitute a challenge to the Eliotic notion of a royalist, Anglo-Catholic canon. In 1922 the images of national possibility froze, with the country's teachers cast as curators of a post-imperial museum, whose English departments were patrolled by zealous custodians anxious to ensure that nothing changed very much. Down the corridor, many curators of the post-colonial Gaelic museum, known as the Irish Department, made equally certain that no radical revisions occurred, no compromising contacts with other cultures.
All of this required a vast degree of self-repression. If nineteenth-century critics in England had a full-time job stripping Shakespeare and other writers of their radical potentials, the academics of twentieth-century Ireland devoted themselves with equal solicitude to the deradicalization of native writing in both languages. In our journey through the Irish Renaissance we have encountered more than one revolutionary text being turned into a revivalist document. Long before Irish nationalist politicians had erased subversive voices from Irish debate, the critics in the academies had performed parallel feats on the great national writers.
The Utopian content of great literature can never be wholly suppressed, however. It can be driven just a little deeper into the unconscious, awaiting, like all despised potentials, for its moment to rise again. At times when an old order of life has lost its meaning, and a new world has not yet been born, Caliban may indeed be tempted to plot the murder of Prospero. Shakespeare's
The Tempest
transcends such negative perspectives, for all that, with its plea for the fulfilment of the entire potential of the person in a world with "no sovereignty", no tyranny of one over another, no sway of humans over nature. What Gonzalo offers is the dream of a liberated world, a vision of anarchist community, to be found in the writings of Caliban, once he puts pen to paper.
The pace of modernization in the 1960s astonished many and no area of Irish life was left untouched.
1
Between 1960 and 1969 over 350 manufacturing enterprises came from overseas to take advantage of the attractive terms offered by the government, not the least of which was an educated and ambitious workforce. At the same time, Ireland became a holiday destination for members of the international jet-set: these tourists brought a touch of glamour and a consumerist philosophy which soon had their hosts in thrall. In 1963 the formal state visit of
John F. Kennedy a Catholic who had become President of the United States, seemed to epitomize the new mood of internationalism and self-confidence: his youth, charisma and urbanity appealed in particular to a generation born after the Rising and Civil War which now felt ready to possess its inheritance. Better still, President Kennedy was a proud Irishman, a glorious illustration that perhaps one could be Irish and modern at the same time.
He appealed to a growing national propensity for having things both ways. His visit – though this only became clear in retrospect – made Ireland safe for western-style consumerism: henceforth, foreign policy would be less independent, less sympathetic to decolonizing peoples and more securely locked within the American sphere of influence. Yet Kennedy praised doe Irish for being a nation of rebels, who had achieved great things by a stubborn refusal to conform. In many ways he embodied, as well as appealing to, a national self-deception: for he played the rebel while secretly being a superstraight. The myth of a rugged frontier-style individualism helped to reconcile many latter-day Americans who supported Kennedy to life as tractable consumers of services and goods. For the Irish, however, the gap between myths of rebellion and the consumerist actuality was going to be more difficult to bridge. For one thing, consumer comforts were still not widely or equally distributed: one person in three in the west of Ireland was described as chronically isolated and whole villages continued to die. For
another, the actual rebellion was not safely over in the north – merely simmering, unresolved, beneath a queasy surface.
The national television service initiated in 1962 had an immediate effect in encouraging the ventilation of problems which had long gone undiscussed So irate did one rural politician become at the new free-ranging debates that he famously complained that "there was no sex in Ireland before television".
2
The winds of change were felt with real force inside the Catholic church: the liberalizing presence and policies of
Pope John XXIII and the
aggiornamento
of his
Second Vatican Council led to vernacular and folk masses and much talk about the priesthood of the laity. The enclosed training of priests and nuns in seminaries, isolated from newspapers, electronic media and the modern world, was widely criticized as an unsound basis for a ministry which seemed more and more likely to bring them into contact with areas of social deprivation, at home or overseas. In the face of these developments, many bishops relaxed their older, autocratic styles of address. The bans on late-night dancing were rescinded Bishops who failed to move with the times were no longer immune to criticism: one was attacked by a student who called him "an immigrant into the twentieth century".
3
The bishops were confronted by other, even more challenging, voices. From the heart of the rural community came a Clarewoman,
Edna O'Brien, a fine storyteller and gifted stylist, who focused in her work on the sexual passions and betrayed emotions of a whole generation of Irishwomen. Books like
The Country Girls
won their author an early reputation as a scandalous woman, a sort of Irish Françoise Sagan; but the unerring accuracy of her eye and the deft Tightness of her phrase convinced many that here were believable, fallible, flesh-and-blood women, neither paragons nor caricatures. That some of the male characters portrayed in these books were based on noted "pillars of Irish society" added to the cream of the jest. Although a later, openly feminist, generation would become somewhat critical of her fondness for "wounded woman" stereotypes, OBrien was arguably the writer who made many of the subsequent advances in Irishwomen's writing possible: and she continued to craft a prose of surpassing beauty and exactitude.
Traditional Ireland remained ambivalent about the changes: as he opened the national television station in 1962, President de Valera admitted that it could be a force for great good but feared that it might in the end do more harm. Perhaps he sensed that the new media, conducted in prestigious international languages, might seal the doom of minority tongues like Irish. In that he would not have been far wrong, though it is also arguable that the massive revival of traditional music and folk dancing was
as much the creation of television as of the counter-cultural movements of the 1960s. Television became the device by which a long-repressed community learned once again how to talk to itself;
and in the process that society was forced to confront much that had long gone unadmitted.
4
Throughout the 1960s there were major discrepancies in the levels of social welfare enjoyed north and south of the border. Although unionist politicians had embraced the welfare state only with reluctance, they were soon happy to cite these discrepancies as another argument against reunification: for instance, in 1960 Northern Ireland spent more on education than the Republic, which had three times the population.
5
Within the next two decades these discrepancies would largely disappear, not in some disingenuous attempt to woo unionists into the Republic, but simply because its citizens insisted on modern levels of comfort and social security. Accession to the European Economic Community was endorsed by a majority of five to one, despite the warnings of traditional republicans and radical socialists that it might herald further diminutions of national sovereignty. Soon Irish farming would enter into a boom period, brought on by the policy of higher prices for food.
In the cities, however – and after 1971 more than half the people lived in urban rather than rural settings – reactions were more mixed. Many established industries such as shoe-manufacturing, motor-assembly and milling went under in the face of new trade conditions. (These industries had been traditional centres of militant trade unionism.) Political leaders were, nonetheless, able to sell EEC membership to the electorate on the basis of the large subventions accruing to the country as a peripheral region from central European coffers, subventions which helped to build an infrastructure of roads, redesigned seaports and luxury hotels. Though the employment generated was welcome, fears were expressed that a "dole mentality" long endemic in the depressed west was extending across the whole island, whose leaders and civil servants became expert in the small-print of European hand-outs. While much of the money promoted enterprise, some clearly stunted it. Cynics began to suggest that Shaw's dire prophecy in
John Bull's Other Island
was finally coming true: as smaller unviable farms were sucked up by bigger ones whose proprietors seemed more interested in ranching than crop-growing, the future of entire rural areas seemed to lie wholly within the area of tourism. The playwright Brian Friel even wrote a satire,
The Mundy Scheme,
devoted to the idea of Ireland as a gigantic theme-park, retirement commune and cemetery for European industrialists.
In 1969, inspired by the
Civil Rights movement for black emancipation in the United States, a group of activists in the Connemara Gaeltacht launched their own campaign to revitalize the Irish-speaking areas. At that
time, the level of unemployment was even higher in Connemara than in the gerrymandered city of Derry, itself under unionist misrule. The demand was for industrial development in the region, for proper schools and villages, for an autonomous local authority and for a broadcasting service in the native language. It had become sadly clear that, while politicians in Dublin paid
lip-service to Irish, they had allowed the Gaeltacht areas to continue their slow dying. Some sardonic souls believed that by 1969 it was simply too late to turn the policy around: to them the argument was no longer about how to
revive the language so much as about who exactly was responsible for the disposal of the corpse. Yet the Cearta Sibhialta (Civil Rights) movement was in most respects remarkably successful. Appealing to the idealism of the young in the years following student revolts in Europe and North America, it managed to detach Irish from the purgatorial fires of the school classroom and to present it as part of a global countercultural movement constructed upon "small is beautiful" principles. Many gifted graduates did what few Gaelic Leaguers of Hyde's generation managed: they voted with their feet and settled in the west, offering leadership to rural cooperatives. Young people from the Gaeltach no longer regarded emigration as axiomatic: many stayed and helped to build small industries in their communities.
6
Meanwhile, in the major cities of Dublin, Cork, Galway and Belfast, a strong parents' movement called for all-Irish language schools in areas of social deprivation: recognizing that Irish was still a passport to educational success, some wanted their offspring to benefit from expert instruction in the language, while others simply believed that without a sound knowledge of Irish their children would have only a two-dimensional understanding of the national culture. These schools soon became centres of excellence and the nucleus of other language-based activities of the wider community Many of the activists were persons of high culture and soon a revival in the writing and publishing of Irish was under way. Most of its exponents had learned Irish as a second language, and predictable arguments raged as to whether the quality of their work really measured up to that of the previous generation of masters such as Máirtín Ó Cadhain or
Máirtín Ó Direáin: but one of the surviving geniuses of the earlier group,
Máire Mhac an tSaoi, gave her enthusiastic blessing to
Nuala ní Dhomhnaill, whose poetry won an international following in English translation as well as in the original Irish. Other younger authors such as
Alan Titley,
Michael Davitt and Deny
O'Sullivan seemed to confirm that this revival was of real artistic consequence.
Irish continued to enjoy a privileged but strangely precarious position in national life. A book of poems published in the language was likely to have
as many intelligent readers as a comparable volume in English, yet Irish was by common consent still in danger of disappearing as a community language within a generation. The incursions of the international media, whose television shows and magazines were conducted in English, meant that the Gaeltacht remained under cultural
threat even after some semblance of industrial policy had been formulated for it. Bilingualism became widely practised among the young in such places; and few spoke Irish with the same purity or rigour as did their ancestors. It become clear that if Irish had a long-term future, it was as likely to be in the cities as in the countryside.
The public at large wished the language well but remained unwilling to make concrete sacrifices to protect it. The decision by the Fine Gael/Labour coalition government of the mid-1970s to make a "pass" in Irish no longer compulsory in state examinations was generally applauded. Many language enthusiasts felt betrayed, however – one said that the move ended "the last vestige of state policy on the language"
7
– but others argued that compulsion had served only to bring Irish into discredit with honest minds. Henceforth, those who studied the language would, it has hoped, come to see it as a gift rather than a threat: those who nursed such ideas pointed to the immense popularity of Gaelic music and folk music among those same young people least inclined to learn compulsory Irish at school.
This paradox seemed to indicate a failure of official policy, yet at a deeper level it may simply have revealed a real ambivalence in national attitudes. A 1975 government report showed that about three-quarters of the people still believed the language essential to Irish identity, but that less than one quarter believed that the language would still be thriving in the next century. The problem of being at once Irish and modern had not been fully solved by John F. Kennedy's ritual phrase or two in Irish. The fate of a people still despondent about its capacity to shape its cultural future became manifest in the tortuous clauses of the government report:
The average individual . . . feels rather strongly that the Irish language is necessary to our ethnic and cultural integrity, and supports the efforts to ensure the transmission of the language. At the same time, under present policies and progress, he is not really convinced that we can ensure its transmission. He has rather negative views about the way Irish has been taught in school and has a rather low or "lukewarm" personal commitment to its use, although in this latter case, the average person has not sufficient ability in the language to converse freely in it. On the other hand, he strongly supports nearly all government efforts to help the Gaeltacht, but at the same time feels that the language is not very suitable for modern life.
8
These words were published in 1975. but they still hold true. A government proposal to establish an Irish-language television station won popular support in 1993, though not without opposition from the mass-circulation Independent group of newspapers. Adult classes in Irish remained much in demand: and the Gaelic schools movement, on the basis of superlative results, grew stronger than ever. Yet, for all that, Irish-language programmes on television and Irish-language newspapers were watched and read only by a minority. The "rebels" of John F. Kennedy's imagination were showing a surprising degree of conformism to the world of Dallas and Falcon Crest.
In that, of course, they were no different from other peoples: what disappointed the idealists, however, was that it need not necessarily have been so. Douglas Hyde had hoped to make Ireland again interesting to the Irish: the repossession of a language was to be the prelude to the repossession of a distinctive cuisine, clothing dance tradition, physical culture, and so on. Though Gaelic games and musk grew ever more popular, the language itself remained in an ambiguous position. While some of its partisans could be written off as antiquarians better at home in a Society for Creative Anachronism, many more touched a truly sensitive nerve. By 1989 a best-selling history of the country by J. J. Lee held that at the root of the failure of enterprise lay a lack of self-belief, traceable directly to the loss of the ancestral language.
9
This thesis, which might have been laughed to scorn a decade earlier, was now widely quoted on the airways of a national broadcasting station which many – though not Lee himself – held responsible for bringing Ireland into line with international consumerism.