About the Author
Declan Kiberd was born in Dublin in 1951. He took a degree in English and Irish at Trinity College, Dublin, and he holds a doctorate from Oxford University. Among his books are Synge and the Irish Language, Men and Feminism in Modern Literature and Idir Dha Chultur. He writes regularly for Irish newspapers, has prepared literary scripts for the BBC, and is a former director of the Yeats International Summer School. He has lectured on Irish culture in more than twenty countries and has taught at University College, Dublin, for sixteen years. He is married with three children.
BY DECLAN KIBERD
Synge And The Irish Language
Men And Feminism In Modern Literature
Anglo-Irish Attitudes
Omnium Gatherum: Essays For Richard Ellmann
An Crann Faoi Bhláth: The Flowering Tree Contemporary Irish Poetry With Verse Translations
Idir Dha Chultur
Inventing Ireland:
The Literature Of The Modern Nation
‘Inventing Ireland is that completely unusual thing: a highly readable, joyfully contentious book whose enormous learning and superb understanding of the literary text will introduce readers for the first time to a remarkably lively panorama of Irish culture during the last century. Full of novel readings, theoretical investigations and audacious connections, Declan Kiberd’s book lifts Ireland out of ethnic studies and lore and places it in the post-colonial world. In doing so he situates its great cultural traditions where they jostle not only the major texts of English literature, but also those of writers like Salman Rushdie and García Márquez. The result is a dazzling, performance’
Edward W. Said
‘[A] thought-provoking and entertaining critical blockbuster . . .There is no doubt that this book immediately joins a small group of indispensable books on Anglo-Irish literary history. It is also typical of the best of that school in the brio and wit with which its learning and intelligence are carried’
Bernard O’Donoghue,
Times Literary Supplement
‘Inventing Ireland is exactly what its title claims – an act of exuberant creativity. Nimbly, skilfully, and almost with a sense of near-wonderment at his own discoveries, Kiberd explores the continuities between Irish past and Irish present. And by focusing on what he calls “revered masterpieces”, and by examining them in the wider social context out of which they came, he fashions a nation that is hospitable to all its prickly constituents’
Brian Friel
‘A critical study laced with wit, energy and unrelenting adroitness of discourse . . . Mr Kiberd possesses a special gift for patient exploration of works of art in relationship to their surroundings . . .wit, paradox and an almost indecent delight in verbal jugglery place Mr Kiberd himself in a central Irish literary tradition that also includes Swift, Joyce and Beckett . . .impudent, eloquent, full of jokes and irreverence, by turns sardonic and conciliatory, blithely subversive but, without warning, turning to display wide and serious reading, a generosity of spirit, a fierce and authentic concern for social and political justice. Rather like Wilde and Shaw . . .a remarkable achievement’
Thomas Flanagan, New York Times
‘Inventing Ireland . . .deserves to be read, not only by people with a special interest in Irish writing, but also by people with a strong interest in modern writing in English. Kiberd has much that is original and valuable to say . . .I recommend Inventing Ireland to my readers’
Conor Cruise O’Brien,
Sunday Telegraph
‘That somebody so knowledgable of the roots of Irish writing – in Irish – could move through Anglo-Irish literature and engage all the contemporary debates make one stand in awe of the breadth of Kiberd’s scholarship. That the story is presented with wit and vigour is a further pleasure’
Michael D. Higgins T.D.
‘Declan Kiberd’s passionate, opinionated, often witty, celebratory study . . .will engage both specialists and general readers’
Eileen Battersby,
Books of the Year, Irish Times
‘A splendid book . . .A striking quality of this book is the author’s ability to combine perceptive insight into literary matters with a keen awareness of the political forces that shaped this century’
Ulick O’Connor, Sunday Independent
‘A dazzling book, a book to cherish and revisit. As you read and reread the Anglo-Irish texts, you’ll find it altering them, lightening them up. It changes Beckett and Joyce; it especially changes John Millington Synge. It ends by offering to reshape Irish Studies curricula’
Hugh Kenner, Washington Times
‘Often brilliant and always intelligent’
Fintan O’Toole, Observer
‘A fabulous story . . .and an important, partisan and highly readable book for believers and sceptics alike. Someone ought to put it on John Major’s bedside table’
Brenda Maddox, Literary Review
‘Formidable, thoroughly enjoyable, always engaged, often brilliant . . .This is the fullest attempt we have had to date to read both Irish historical experience and the literature that this has involved in the light of post-colonial theory’
Terence Brown, The Tribune Magazine
‘One of the best studies of Irish literature to come along in years’
Michael Stephens, Washington Post
‘A joy to read – endlessly provocative in its arguments and inventive in its comparisons’
Joseph O’Connor, Sunday Tribune
‘Epical in its aims and achievements . . .Kiberd’s most striking characteristic as a critic is his. intellectual daring, a kind of dignified audacity: he is capable of saying things that simply take one’s breath away’
Brendan Kennelly, Sunday Business Post
‘A magisterial book . . .the prose sparkles. Kiberd wears his impressive learning lightly and relishes aphorism and anecdote . . .Inventing Ireland displays numerous themes on a huge canvas, but is remarkably lucid’
Robert Taylor, Boston Globe
‘A life-affirming and positive book . . .Declan Kiberd has a genius for making what has not yet been expressed into the most blindingly clear cop-on . . .Aphorism and quotable quotes spring up at every hand, jokes appear unannounced and every sentence lands on all fours . . .The tone here is one of celebration and success and generosity’
Alan Titley, Books Ireland
‘Kiberd is a gifted linguist, uniquely qualified as a writer and critic in both Irish and English languages . . .One ends the book admiring his intellectual brio and engagement, and applauding his recognition of Irish cultural diversity’
Roy Foster, The Times
‘Since Roy Foster published his Modern Ireland in 1988 the national shrine has been echoing with impious voices . . .But the arrival of the ‘Revisionists’ is already an old story. Now they have been put on their mettle by the ‘Re-Inventers’ . . .Declan Kiberd’s brilliant new book, Inventing Ireland, is an example’
Neal Ascherson, Independent on Sunday
INVENTING
IRELAND
The Literature of the
Modern Nation
Declan Kiberd
VINTAGE BOOKS
London
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Published by Vintage 1996
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Copyright © Declan Kiberd 1995
The right of Declan Kiberd to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988
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First published in Great Britain by
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ISBN 9780099582212
For Lucy, Amy, Rory – and the coming times.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Introduction
One A New England Called Ireland?
IRELAND – ENGLAND’S UNCONSCIOUS?
Interchapter
Two Oscar Wilde – The Artist as Irishman
Three John Bull’s Other Islander – Bernard Shaw
ANGLO-IRELAND: THE WOMAN’S PART
Interchapter
Four Tragedies of Manners – Somerville and Ross
Five Lady Gregory and the Empire Boys
YEATS: LOOKING INTO THE LION’S FACE
Interchapter
Six Childhood and Ireland
Seven The National Longing for Form
RETURN TO THE SOURCE?
Interchapter
Eight Deanglicization
Nine Nationality or Cosmopolitanism?
Ten J. M. Synge – Remembering the Future
REVOLUTION AND WAR
Interchapter
Eleven Uprising
Twelve The Plebeians Revise the Uprising
Thirteen The Great War and Irish Memory
WORLDS APART?
Fourteen Ireland and the End of Empire
INVENTING IRELANDS
Interchapter
Fifteen Writing Ireland, Reading England
Sixteen Inventing Irelands
Seventeen Revolt Into Style – Yeatsian Poetics
Eighteen The Last Aisling – A Vision
Nineteen James Joyce and Mythic Realism
SEXUAL POLITICS
Interchapter
Twenty Elizabeth Bowen – The Dandy in Revolt
Twenty-One Fathers and Sons
Twenty-Two Mothers and Daughters
PROTESTANT REVIVALS
Interchapter
Twenty-Three Protholics and Cathestants
Twenty-Four Saint Joan – Fabian Feminist, Protestant Mystic
Twenty-Five The Winding Stair
Twenty-Six Religious Writing: Beckett and Others
UNDERDEVELOPMENT
Interchapter
Twenty-Seven The Periphery and the Centre
Twenty-Eight Flann O’Brien, Myles, and The Poor Mouth
Twenty-Nine The Empire Writes Back – Brendan Behan
Thirty Beckett’s Texts of Laughter and Forgetting
Thirty-One Post-Colonial Ireland – “A Quaking Sod”
RECOVERY AND RENEWAL
Interchapter
Thirty-Two Under Pressure – The Writer and Society 1960–90
Thirty-Three Friel Translating
Thirty-Four Translating Tradition
REINVENTING IRELAND
Thirty-Five Imagining Irish Studies
Notes
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author and publishers thank the following: the Society of Authors and the Bernard Shaw Estate for permission to quote from John Bull’s Other Island and Saint Joan; A.P. Watt Limited and Michael and Anne Yeats for permission to quote from Collected Poems, Collected Plays, Autobiographies and A Vision; the Macmillan Publishing Company and the Estate of Eileen O’Casey for permission to quote from The Plough and the Stars and The Silver Tassie; Random House UK, Jonathan Cape and Seán Sweeney, trustee of the Estate of James Joyce for permission to quote from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses; Random House UK, Jonathan Cape and the Estate of Elizabeth Bowen for permission to quote from The Last September; the Samuel Beckett Estate and the Calder Educational Trust, London, for permission to quote from Murphy by Samuel Beckett (copyright © Samuel Beckett 1938, 1963, 1977 and copyright © the Samuel Beckett Estate 1993) and the Beckett Trilogy – Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable – (copyright © Samuel Beckett 1959, 1976 and copyright © the Samuel Beckett Estate 1994); Stephen P. Maher, executor and trustee of the late Evelyn O’Nolan and Mercier Press Limited, PO Box 5, French Street, Cork, Ireland for permission to quote from An Béal Bocht by Brian O’Nolan (alias Myles na gCopaleen) 1941 and to HarperCollins Publishers and Patrick C. Power for permission to quote from the latter’s translation of the aforementioned text The Poor Mouth; to the Tessa Sayle Agency and the Estate of Beatrice Behan for permission to quote from The Quare Fellow and The Hostage; to Faber and Faber Limited, Publishers, and to the respective authors for permission to quote from Translations by Brian Friel 1981, from Death of a Naturalist, North, Station Island and Seeing Things by Seamus Heaney 1966, 1975, 1984 and 1991, and from Quoof by Paul Muldoon 1983; to Faber and Faber Limited, Publishers and to the Samuel Beckett Estate 1993 for permission to quote from Waiting for Godot and Endgame; to Thomas Kinesella for permission to quote from Downstream 1962, Nightwalker 1968 and ‘The Divided Mind’ 1971, 1972; to John F. Deane of Dedalus Press and the Devlin family for permission to quote from ‘Lough Derg’ and ‘The ‘Colours of Love’ by Denis Devlin, ed. J.C.C. Mays 1990; to R. Dardis Clarke, 21 Pleasants Street, Dublin 8, Ireland, for permission to quote from Collected Poems of Austin Clarke, Mountrath, 1974; to Michael Smith and New Writers’ Press for permission to quote from ‘De Civitate Hominum’ and ‘Gloria de Carlos V’ by Thomas MacGreevy 1971, and from ‘Nightfall, Midwinter, Missouri’ by Brian Coffey 1973; to Peter Fallon, Publisher, of Gallery Press for permission to quote from ‘The Rough Field’ and ‘The Siege of Mullingar’ by John Montague 1972, 1978, from ‘Belfast Confetti’ by Ciarán Carson 1989, from Pharaoh’s Daughter by Nuala ní Dhomhnaill 1990 (with English translations by Ciarán Carson, Paul Muldoon and Eiléan ní Chuilleanáin); to Sairséal Ó Marcaigh Teoranta and Máire Mhac an tSaoi for permission to quote lines from An Cion go dtí Seo 1987, 1988 and to the author for her self-translation; to Sairséal Ó Marcaigh Teoranta and the Estate of Seán Ó Ríordáin for permission to quote from Eireaball Spideoige and Brosna 1952, 1964; to Carcanet Press Limited, Publishers, and Eavan Boland for permission to quote from ‘The Woman Turns Herself into a Fish’ and ‘The Emigrant Irish’ 1987; to Oxford University Press and Derek Mahon for permission to quote from ‘The Mute Phenomena’, ‘The Spring Vacation’, ‘Afterlives’ and ‘A Disused Shed in County Wexford’; to Caomh Kavanagh and Dr Peter Kavanagh for permission to quote from The Complete Poems of Patrick Kavanagh, copyright © 1972, 1995, Peter Kavanagh Hand Press, New York 10016, and to the Goldsmith Press, Newbridge, Co. Kildare; to Colin Smythe, Publisher, Gerrards Cross, for permission to quote from Selected Plays of Lady Gregory. Every effort has been made to secure all necessary clearances and permissions. Both the author and publishers will be glad to recognize any holders of copyright who have not been acknowledged above.
Some sections of this book have been rehearsed as essays, as broadcasts, or as newspaper articles: the author is grateful to many editors and producers for encouragement in exploring certain themes at an earlier stage in their development.
INTRODUCTION
If God invented whiskey to prevent the Irish from ruling the world, then who invented Ireland?
The obvious answer might be the Irish, a truth suggested by those words Sinn Féin (ourselves) which became synonymous with the movement for national independence. That movement imagined the Irish people as an historic community, whose self-image was constructed long before the era of modern nationalism and the nation-state. There are many texts in the Irish language to bear this thesis out (and a few will be surveyed in my opening chapter), but what they also register is the extraordinary capacity of Irish society to assimilate new elements through all its major phases. Far from providing a basis for doctrines of racial purity, they seem to take pleasure in the fact that identity is seldom straightforward and given, more often a matter of negotiation and exchange.
No sooner is that admitted than a second answer to the question suggests itself: that the English helped to invent Ireland, in much the same way as Germans contributed to the naming and identification of France. Through many centuries, Ireland was pressed into service as a foil to set off English virtues, as a laboratory in which to conduct experiments, and as a fantasy-land in which to meet fairies and monsters. The 1916 insurrection was a deliberate challenge to such thinking: though often described by dreamy admirers as well as by sardonic detractors as a poets’ rebellion, it was an assertion by a modernizing elite that the time had come to end such stereotyping. One 1916 veteran recalled, in old age, his youthful conviction that the rebellion would “put an end to the rule of the fairies in Ireland”. In this it was notably unsuccessful: during the 1920s, a young student named Samuel Beckett reported seeing a fairy-man in the New Square of Trinity College Dublin; and two decades later a Galway woman, when asked by an American anthropologist whether she really believed in the “little people”, replied with terse sophistication: “I do not, sir – but they’re there anyway”. The underlying process, however, was reciprocal: to the Irish, England was fairyland, a notion developed by Oscar Wilde to whom the nobility of England seemed as exotic as the caliphs of Baghdad. If England had never existed, the Irish would have been rather lonely. Each nation badly needed the other, for the purpose of defining itself.
This hints at yet a third answer, pithily summed up by those who say that exile is the nursery of nationality. The massive exodus which followed the famines of the 1840s left hundreds of thousands of Irish men and women in the major cities of Britain, North America and Australia dreaming of a homeland, and committed to carrying a burden which few enough on native grounds still bothered to shoulder: an idea of Ireland. Wilde believed that it would be, in great part, through contact with the art of other countries that a modern Irish culture might be reshaped. The implication was that only when large numbers of Irish people spoke and wrote in English (and, maybe, French and German) would a fully-fledged national culture emerge. That analysis, in its political as well as its cultural implications, was ratified by many other exiles, who provided a major impetus for the Irish Renaissance which followed. Though often berated by recent historians for their fanaticism and simple-mindedness, the Irish exiles of the nineteenth century were keenly aware of the hybrid sources of their own nationalism. They knew, much better than those who remained at home, that “the native is, like colonial and creole, a white-on-black negative” and that “the nativeness of natives is always unmoored”.1
Benedict Anderson has suggested, as a corollary to those aphorisms of his, that a similar type of exile in the latter half of the nineteenth century brought many rural peoples into cities and towns, where their children, in the course of an ever-extending schooling, were made to learn a standardized vernacular. For the Irish who stayed in their own country that language was English, and a life conducted through the medium of English became itself a sort of exile. The revival of the native language, led by the Gaelic League in the final decade of the century, was an inevitable protest against such homogenization, a recognition that to be anglicized was not at all the same thing as to be English. The colonial élites who were the result of this flawed mimesis would become so many white-on-black negatives; and it was from Gaelic Leaguers, who painfully studied and repossessed Irish, while continuing to speak English in public life, that much of the impetus for political independence would come.
For all of these persons, nationalism evoked an idea of homecoming, a return from exile or captivity, or what Anderson elegantly calls a “positive printed from the negative in the dark-room of political struggle”.2 The same might be said of the literary artists. W. B. Yeats followed Wilde and Shaw to London in the 1880s, the approved route for an Irishman on the make in England. Once there, however, he grew rapidly depressed at the ease with which London publishers could convert a professional Celt into a mere entertainer, and so he decided to return to Dublin and shift the centre of gravity of Irish culture back to the native capital. Cynics have suggested that a literary revival happened in Dublin at the turn of the century “because five or six people lived in the same town and hated one another cordially”. The quip captures the vibrancy and occasional malice of the personal exchanges, but it does scant justice to the collaborative nature of the enterprise.
That enterprise achieved nothing less than a renovation of Irish consciousness and a new understanding of politics, economics, philosophy, sport, language and culture in its widest sense. It was the grand destiny of Yeats’s generation to make Ireland once again interesting to the Irish, after centuries of enforced provincialism following the collapse of the Gaelic order in 1601. No generation before or since lived with such conscious national intensity or left such an inspiring (and, in some ways, intimidating) legacy. Though they could be fractious, its members set themselves the highest standards of imaginative integrity and personal generosity. Imbued with republican and democratic ideals, they committed themselves in no spirit of chauvinism, but in the conviction that the Irish risorgimmto might expand the expressive freedoms of all individuals: that is the link between thinkers as disparate as Douglas Hyde and James Connolly, Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington and James Joyce.
My concern has been to trace the links between high art and popular expression in the decades before and after independence, and to situate revered masterpieces in the wider social context out of which they came. Hence, chapters of political and cultural history, analyses of urbanization, of vernacular, of debates about national culture and the programme of the Gaelic League, take their place alongside detailed reexaminations of major texts. Although my book is broadly chronological in structure, it sometimes cuts back and forward in time, recognizing that any age is always “constructed” by another. My aim has been to explore continuities between the Irish past and present, to place the Irish Renaissance in a constellation with the current moment when, it seems, Ireland is about to be reinvented for a new century. Nobody who has lived through the denial or distortion of so much of the Irish past in recent years – as various groupings sought to colonize it for their own short-term purposes – could be unaware of the ways in which an act of criticism may be at the mercy of the present moment. Doubtless, many of my own insights may be conditional on certain blindnesses, which are nonetheless regrettable for all that.
I have tried in what follows to see works of art as products of their age; to view them not in splendid isolation but in relation to one another; and, above all, to celebrate that phase in their existence when they transcend the field of force out of which they came. There will always be a silent reference of human works to human abilities and to the limitations of time and place: but it is wise to recognize – despite current critical fashions – that certain masterpieces do float free of their enabling conditions to make their home in the world. Ireland, precisely because its writers have been fiercely loyal to their own localities, has produced a large number of these masterpieces, and in an extraordinarily concentrated phase of expression.
The imagination of these art-works has always been notable for its engagement with society and for its prophetic reading of the forces at work in their time. Less often remarked has been the extent to which political leaders from Pearse to Connolly, from de Valera to Collins, drew on the ideas of poets and playwrights. What makes the Irish Renaissance such a fascinating case is the knowledge that the cultural revival preceded and in many ways enabled the political revolution that followed. This is quite the opposite of the American experience, in which the attainment of cultural autonomy by Whitman and Emerson followed the political Declaration of Independence by fully seventy-five years. In this respect, the Irish experience seems to anticipate that of the emerging nation-states of the so-called “Third World”. Yeats also insisted that art offered this kind of anticipatory illumination: he said that “the arts lie dreaming of what is to come”. He wrote for the “coming times”, as did his friends and colleagues. They would all have understood the force of Walter Benjamin’s observation that “every age not only dreams the next, but while dreaming impels it towards wakefulness”. These are the responsibilities that begin in dreams.
In restoring writers to the wider cultural context, I have been mindful of the ways in which some shapers of modern Africa, India and the emerging world looked at times to the Irish for guidance. Despite this, a recent study of theory and practice in postcolonial literature, The Empire Writes Back, passes over the Irish case very swiftly, perhaps because the authors find these white Europeans too strange an instance to justify their sustained attention.3 I hope that this book might prompt a reassessment. All cases are complex, but it is precisely the “mixed” nature of the experience of Irish people, as both exponents and victims of British imperialism, which makes them so representative of the underlying process. Because the Irish were the first modern people to decolonize in the twentieth century, it has seemed useful to make comparisons with other, subsequent movements, and to draw upon the more recent theories of Frantz Fanon and Ashis Nandy for a retrospective illumination. If Ireland once inspired many leaders of the “developing” world, today the country has much to learn from them. This is in no way to deny the specificity of each particular case; and I have tried, in teasing out some analogies, to render the crucial differences as well as the often-forgotten similarities. In that spirit I have refrained from attempts to “recolonize” Irish cultural studies in the name of any fashionable literary theory, preferring to allow my chosen texts to define their own terms of discussion. My belief is that the introduction of the Irish case to the debate will complicate, extend and in some cases expose the limits of current models of postcoloniality. If nationalism is most often invoked in western Europe nowadays by those who wish to defend the status quo, in eastern Europe and in the wider decolonizing world it may equally be an inspiration to those who wish to change it: the Irish case, as always, exhibits both tendencies at work, often simultaneously.4
A few definitions may be helpful at this point. “Imperialism” in this text is a term used to describe the seizure of land from its owners and their consequent subjugation by military force and cultural programming: the latter involves the description, mapping and ecological transformation of the occupied territory. “Colonialism” more specifically involves the planting of settlers in the land thus seized, for the purpose of expropriating its wealth and for the promotion of the occupiers’ trade and culture. Students of these processes have traditionally devoted most of their attention to the economic and political ramifications, and have tended to underestimate the cultural factors. Recent work by Edward Said, C. L. R. James, Albert Memmi, Aimé Césaire, as well as by Fanon and Nandy, has helped to illuminate the cultural politics of resistance movements, but there is still much to be done on the implications of empire for the life of the “home country”. Because Ireland, unlike most other colonies, was positioned so close to the occupying power, and because the relationship between the two countries was one of prolonged if forced intimacy, the study of Irish writing and thought in the English language may allow for a more truly contrapuntal analysis. In my judgement, postcolonial writing does not begin only when the occupier withdraws: rather it is initiated at that very moment when a native writer formulates a text committed to cultural resistance. By this reckoning, Seathrún Céitinn and W. B. Yeats are postcolonial artists, as surely as Brendan Behan.
As far as the Irish were concerned, colonialism took various forms: political rule from London through the medium of Dublin Casde; economic expropriation by planters who came in various waves of settlement; and an accompanying psychology of self-doubt and dependency among the Irish, linked to the loss of economic and political power but also the decline of the native language and culture. Although imperial rule in twenty-six counties ceased in 1921, many descendants of settler families continued to hold much land and wealth. In the ensuing decades, Ireland became part of a new world system, which saw the collapse of colonialism in most of its outposts. That new system was, of course, dominated by the Americans who, learning from the mistakes of predecessors, concluded that there was no need to rule vassal states and so were content simply to “own” them. Once again Ireland, because of its strategic position in the northern hemisphere as a major supplier of American immigrants, found itself in a complex relationship with a great power, and one which was on this occasion also a republic. The resulting ambivalence is traced in later stages of this book, which shows that the effects of cultural dependency remained palpable long after the formal withdrawal of the British military: it was less easy to decolonize the mind than the territory. Such a programme was made even more difficult by the persistence of British rule over six counties of northern Ireland: even today the unionist élites remain committed to an “England of the mind” which has long ceased to have any meaning for most inhabitants of a multicultural Britain.
Inventing Ireland, though long, is bound together by recurring and developing themes. It begins with an outline of the Anglo-Irish antithesis as a slot-rolling mechanism devised by the English; against its either–or polarities both Wilde and Shaw offered a more inclusive philosophy of interpenetrating opposites. This became the Yeatsian method, defined most fully in A Vision. The androgynous hero and heroine represented natural refinements of such thinking, to be explored in the very different works of Augusta Gregory, Yeats, Joyce, Synge and Elizabeth Bowen. A corollary was the notion of the self-invented man or woman. Nietzsche had said that those who haven’t had a good father are compelled to go out and invent one: taking him at his word, this generation of Irishmen and Irishwomen fathered and mothered themselves, reinventing parents in much the same way as they were reinventing the Irish past. Throughout that process, as Synge saw more clearly than most, there were major reversals in the relations between mothers and daughters, fathers and sons: families split into their constituent parts and the free person was born. The link between such self-invention and a Protestant spirituality was explored in a whole set of texts produced in the 1920s and 1930s, as an implicit critique of the alarming new tendency of Catholic Ireland to equate itself with nationalist Ireland in the early years of the Free State.
All of this put into even sharper focus the meaning of the debate about national identity, which had been initiated by Douglas Hyde and the Gaelic League in 1893 and which registered the choice as one between nationality or cosmopolitanism by the turn of the century. Were the Irish a hybrid people, as the artists generally claimed, exponents of multiple selfhood and modern authenticity? Or were they a pure, unitary race, dedicated to defending a romantic notion of integrity? These discussions anticipated many others which would be heard across the “Third World”: in Ireland, as elsewhere, artists celebrated the hybridity of the national experience, even as they lamented the underdevelopment which seemed to be found alongside such cultural richness. At the level of practical politics, the ‘green’ and ‘orange’ essentialists seized control, and protected their singular versions of identity on either side of a patrolled border, but the pluralist philosophy espoused by the artists may yet contain the shape of the future. The century which is about to end is once again dominated by the debate with which it began: how to distinguish what is good in nationalism from what is bad, and how to use the positive potentials to assist peoples to modernize in a humane fashion. Each section of my narrative opens with an italicized ‘Interchapter’ which briefly sketches political developments, so that readers who wish can map literature against the blunter realities of history.
I owe thanks to many more people than can be mentioned here. Some of the deepest debts go back farthest: to inspiring teachers Brendan Kennelly, the late Dick Ellmann, the late Máirtín O Cadhain, Barbara Wright and Paddy Lyons; to generous colleagues Lyn Innes, Terence McCaughey, Richard and Anne Kearney, Angela Bourke, Liz Butler-Cullingford, Chester Anderson, Porter Abbott and Seamus Deane; and to helpful friends Ulick O’Connor, the late Eilís Dillon, Tony Coughlan, Carol Coulter, Adrian and Rosaleen Moynes, Joan Hyland, Dillon Johnston, Tim Pat Coogan, Rand Brandes, Patrick Sheeran, Richard Murphy, Roy and Aisling Foster, Gabriel and Brenda Fitzmaurice, Desmond Fennell, Nina Witoszek, Nicky and Eleanor Grene, Phil O’Leary, Máirín Ní Dhonnchadha, Séan Ó Mórdha, Liz Curtis, Owen Dudley Edwards, Anthony Roche, Janet Clare, Michael D. Higgins, Jerusha McCormak, Bob Tracy and Rob Garrett. I recall with fondness many inspiring conversations with my dead friend Vivian Mercier: in all the richness of his tragic being, he was a model of the old-fashioned philologist who took for his home the entire world. Edward Said, another such, has been unstinting in his encouragement: his own work is a touchstone in these endeavours. Brian Friel’s kindness and encouragement over the years have been more helpful than he knows. Neil Belton’s editorial work has been a constant illumination, all the more helpful in coming from a publisher who is not in full accord with many of my interpretations. Antony Farrell was also most supportive.
The School of Irish Studies, Ballsbridge, and the Faculty Research Fund and Academic Publications Committee of University College Dublin offered financial support and this is gratefully acknowledged. I am also very thankful to Beverly Sperry, Clodagh Murphy and Ciara Boylan of the Night Owl Bureau in Dublin for their most professional and friendly help in preparing this rather long work. A deep debt is also owed to many gifted students – Debbie Reid. Dermot Kelly, Emer Nolan. Carol Tell, Lance Pettitt, Ronan MacDonald, John Redmond, Caitriona Clutterbuck, Glenn Hooper, Brendan Fleming, Declan Collinge, Jeff Holdridge, Fuyuji Tanigawa, Minako Okamura, Clíona ó Gallchóir, P.J. Mathews, Derek Hand and Taura Napier – who have gone on to teach others what first they imparted to me. Many friends overseas have also been of great assistance: Krista Kaer in Estonia; Muira Mutran in Brazil; Maria Kurdi in Hungary; Chen Shu in China; Carla de Petris and Rosangela Barone in Italy; Shaun Richards in England; Ihab Hassan and David Lloyd in the United States; Mary Massoud in Egypt.
Since this book is finally a personal statement about the Irish imagination, it would have been unthinkable without the support of my beloved wife, who has greatly complicated and enriched my understanding of my country. My gratitude also to Damien Kiberd and Marguerite Lynch for lively and irreverent debate over more than a quarter of a century about “the matter with Ireland”; and to my father and mother for sharing memories of the old days with me.
Declan Kiberd
Clontarf, Dublin, 1995
One
A New England Called Ireland?
If Ireland had never existed, the English would have invented it; and since it never existed in English eyes as anything more than a patchwork-quilt of warring fiefdoms, their leaders occupied the neighbouring island and called it Ireland. With the mission to impose a central administration went the attempt to define a unitary Irish character. Since the first wave of invaders was little more than an uneasy coalition of factions, its members had no very secure identity of their own, in whose name they might justify the incursion. Many Norman settlers gradually became “more Irish than the Irish themselves”: many others became hybrids, who partook fully in Irish cultural life, while giving political allegiance to London. So the makers of Crown policy in Ireland made ever more strenuous attempts to define an English national character, and a countervailing Irish one.
Ireland was soon patented as not-England, a place whose peoples were, in many important ways, the very antitheses of their new rulers from overseas.1 These rulers began to control the developing debate; and it was to be their version of things which would enter universal history. At the outset, they had no justification other than superior force and cohesive organization. Later, an identity was proposed for the natives, which cast them as foils to the occupiers, thereby creating the impression that those who composed it had always been sure of their own national character. What began as a coalition of diverse interests, banded together for purposes of territorial expansion into places like Ireland and the Americas, was later homogenized for reasons of imperial efficiency.
From the later sixteenth century, when Edmund Spenser walked the plantations of Munster, the English have presented themselves to the world as controlled, refined and rooted; and so it suited them to find the Irish hot-headed, rude and nomadic, the perfect foil to set off their own virtues. No sooner had these stereotypes taken their initial shape than they were challenged by poets and intellectuals writing in the Irish language, and they rapidly learned to decode those texts which presumed to decode them. Spenser was astute enough to sense the immense power of the poets, who stood second only to their chieftains in the political pecking-order; and he was also impressed by the “pretty flowers” and beauty of their imagery. This was precisely why he called for the removal of their heads, because “by their ditties they do encourage lords and gentlemen”, which was to say Gaelic lords and Gaelic gentlemen.2 During his sojourn in Munster, many ancient manuscripts of the province were cut up to make covers for the English-language primers then being circulated among schoolchildren. “We must change their course of government, clothing, customs, manner of holding land, language and habit of life”, wrote Sir William Parsons, “it will otherwise be impossible to set up in them obedience . . .”
In his View of the Present State of Ireland (1596), Spenser outlined his programme. The Gaels must be redeemed from their wildness: they must cut their glibs of overhanging hair (which concealed their plotting faces); they must convert their mantles (which often concealed offensive weapons) into conventional cloaks; above all, they must speak the English tongue. “The speech being Irish”, he wrote, “the heart must needs be Irish”. The native poets knew ruin when they saw it staring them in the face. So they replaced the old word gaill for foreigner with a new one Béarla, meaning “English language”, and this they employed as a metonym for the new element in population. One wrote
Is treise Dia ná fian an Bhéarla . . .
(God is stronger than the English-speaking churls . . . )3
The Norman invaders had lost their will to extirpate native traditions and had lived happily among the Irish, among whom they were known as Old English: they became the real villains of Spenser’s Irish writings, which obsessively insist that on this occasion the programme for cultural cleansing must be completely achieved. The fear of hybridity assailed many of the new settlers who worried that, becoming neither Irish nor English, they might fall into the chasm of barbarism which all too easily could open between two discrepant codes. A portrait of Sir Thomas Lee made in 1594 depicted a physically as well as spiritually hyphenated man: conventionally Elizabethan in apparel to his waist, but bare-legged and bare-footed as any Irish kern, the implication being that he might lapse into utter savagery unless the erasure of Irish culture was completed. For their part, the native poets had similar worries. They denounced the exponents of cultural fusion, sarcastically addressing audiences of whose loyalty they could no longer be sure as “a dhream Ghaoidhealta ghallda” (O people Irish-English); or they berated an ambivalent leader “lena leath-bhróig Ghaelach agus a leath-bhróig Ghallda” (with one shoe Gaelic, and the other shoe English). They reserved their most bitter mockery for the broken English spoken by those apers of the new fashions, whose abjection illustrated their theory that to be Anglicized was not at all the same thing as to be English.
The sheer ferocity of Spenser’s writings on the Irish resistance – a ferocity quite at odds with the gentle charm of his poetry – can only be explained as arising from a radical ambivalence. He wished to convert the Irish to civil ways, but in order to do that found that it might be necessary to exterminate many of them. He marvelled at the capacity of Ireland to enforce a gentle man to violence, a violence which “almost changed his very natural disposition”.4 Already, this seductive island was manifesting its fatal tendency to convert even the most rational and cultivated of Englishmen into arrant tyrants. This tyrannizing may have owed much to the remarkable similarity of the two opposed peoples. The Irish, despite their glibs and mantles, actually looked like the English to the point of undetectability; their poets were court poets, whose duties were, like those of Spenser himself, to praise the sovereign, excoriate the kingdom’s enemies, and appeal in complex lyrics to the shared aesthetic standard of a mandarin class. Just as Spenser attributed the woes of England to the irreligious behaviour of its people, so did the Irish poets absolve God of all blame for the calamity now overtaking them. In the words of Seathrún Céitinn (Geoffrey Keating), a poet-turned-priest:
Éigceart na nÉireannach féin
Do threascair iad do aoinbéim.
(The wrongs of the Irish themselves
Are what overturned them in a single moment.)5
It was, perhaps, a subliminal awareness of this resemblance which distressed Spenser, as it would so many of his contemporaries and successors. One English scholar has marvelled at the way in which Sir Walter Ralegh’s sophisticated tolerance, “so notable when he spoke about the native inhabitants of the Orinoco or Virginia, dried up very rapidly at the edge of the Pale”.6
The struggle for self-definition is conducted within language; and the English, coming from the stronger society, knew that they would be the lords of language. Few of their writers considered, even for a passing moment, that the Irish might have a case for their resistance. Henceforth, Ireland would be a sort of absence in English texts, a utopian “no place” into which the deepest fears and fondest ideals might be read. The two major Irish stereotypes on the English national stage embody those polarities of feeling: on the one hand, the threatening, vainglorious soldier, and, on the other, the feckless but cheerily reassuring servant. They have survived into the modern period in such identifiable forms as O’Casey’s Captain Boyle and Joxer, or Samuel Beckett’s Didi and Gogo: but they were cleverly and soothingly conflated by Shakespeare in the sketch of Captain Macmorris in Henry the Fifth.
The scene is a clear instance of English wish-fulfilment in a play written not long after the defeat of the Queen’s men at the Battle of the Yellow Ford. Anti-Irish feeling was high in Elizabethan London, as the danger of an Irish-Spanish alliance grew weekly; so Shakespeare causes his Irishman to allay all fears of treachery. When a Welsh comrade-at-arms seems to question Irish fidelity to the crown, Macmorris explodes:
| Flauellen: | Captain Macmorris I thinke, looke you, under your correction, there is not many of your Nation – |
| Macmorris: | Of my Nation? What ish my Nation? Ish a Villaine, and a Bastard, and a Knave, and a Rascal. What is my Nation? Who talks of my Nation?7 |
In other words, the captain says that there is no Irish nation. The word is mentioned for the good reason that Hugh O’Neill, the earl of Tyrone, had just called and led the first nationwide army of resistance against the English in the field of battle. He had welded rival princes into a coherent force, by appealing to them with such sentences as “it is lawful to die in the quarrel and defence of the native soil”. “We Irishmen”, he told them, “are exiled and made bond-slaves and servitors to a strange and foreign prince”.8
The captain’s name indicates that he is a descendant of the Norman settlers of the Fitzmaurice clan, some of whom changed their surnames to the Gaelic prefix “Mac”: they remained politically loyal to the crown, despite their identification with Irish culture. Macmorris chides his colleagues for retreating when “there is throats to be cut”, but his very emphasis has its roots in his pained awareness that a figure of such hybrid status will forever be suspect in English eyes. In Shakespeare’s rudimentary portrait are to be found those traits of garrulity, pugnacity and a rather unfocused ethnic pride which would later signalize the stage Irishman – along with a faintly patronizing amusement on the part of the portraitist that the Irish should be so touchy on questions of identity. Even more telling, however, is the fact that some of the Irishman’s first notable words in English literature are spoken as a denial of his own otherness. On Shakespeare’s stage only fresh-faced country colleens are permitted to lisp charmingly in the patois “Cailín ó cois tSiúire me” (I am a girl from the banks of the Suir). Macmorris is the first known exponent on English soil of a now-familiar literary mode: the extracted confession. So he is made to say what his audiences want to hear.
If colonialism is a system, so also is resistance. Postcolonial writing, in a strict sense, began in Ireland when an artist like Seathrún Céitinn took pen in hand to rebut the occupier’s claims. He had been reading those texts which misrepresented him, and he resolved to answer back. He represented the Old English, those Gaelicized Normans who were especially demonized as hybrids in Spenser’s View: but his ambition was to clear the reputation of the native Irish as well. This gives his comments a certain objectivity: and he is honest enough to tell much that is not flattering. His scholarly scruple is clear in the tentative tide which he appended to his text Foras Feasa ar Éirinn (A Basis for the Knowledge of Ireland), which was assembled mainly after the publication of Spenser’s View in 1633. A Tipperary man who was born in 1570 and educated at Bordeaux, Céitinn returned in 1610 to witness Gaelic Ireland dying on its feet after the crushing defeat of O’Neill at Kinsale a decade earlier and the subsequent Flight of the Earls. He might properly be seen as one of the first counter-imperial historians, in that his object was not only to reply to Spenser, Stanyhurst and the English writers, but more particularly to save the lore of ancient Ireland from passing into oblivion. Like the revivalists of three centuries later, Céitinn feared that the national archive had been irretrievably disrupted and that his country, to all intents and purposes, was about to disappear. He mocked the ambitious young English historians who had endlessly recycled the same clichés current since the time of Cambrensis, in a tyranny of texts over human encounters:
. . . óir atáim asoda, agus drong díobh-san óg; do chonnairc mé agus tuigim prímh-leabhair an tseanchusa, agus ní facadarsan iad, agus dá bhfacdis, ní tuigfidhe leo iad. Ní ar fhuath ná ar ghrádh droinge ar bioth seach a chéile, ná ar fhuráileamh aon duine, ná do shúil re sochar d’fliáil uaidh, chuireas romham stair na hÉireann do scríobh, ach de bhrí gur mheasas nár bh’oircheas chomh-onóraighe na hÉireann do chrích, agus comh-uaisle gach fóirne d’ar áitigh í, do dhul i mbáthadh, gan lua ná iomrádh do bheith orthu.
(. . . I am old, and a number of these people are young. I have seen and understood the chief books of history, and they have not seen them, and if they had seen them they would not have understood anything. It was not for hatred or love of any tribe beyond another, nor at the order of anyone, nor in hope to get gain out of it, that I took in hand to write the history of Ireland, but because I thought it was not fitting that a country like Ireland for honour, and races as honourable as every race that inhabited it, should be swallowed up without any word or mention to be left about them.)9
