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 risorgimento 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 modem 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 t
o "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 Castle; 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 'Inter-chapter' 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 Ó 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 Cough-Ian, 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 Clut
terbuck, 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.
Inventing Ireland Page 2
