Inventing Ireland

by Declan Kiberd

  For all their blind spots, Eglinton's essays had a capital value: they alerted many to a xenophobic element within the national movement, which often threatened to negate its own better ideals. Synge became aware of certain insular Leaguers who, "with their eyes glued on John Bull's navel, fear to be Europeans for fear the huckster across the street will call them English".22 For all the talk about deanglicization as a fantasy of purification, it was the allegedly French decadence of Synge's plays, when clothed in a rural Irish garb, which stung nationalist critics. These solemn commentators would object to a boulevardier element, while blithely ignoring the far more potent English influence in Irish culture, an influence which went largely unnoticed only because it was pervasive. The more probing Irish Ireland polemicists were somewhat quicker to detect the English sub-text of many plays: D. P. Moran complained, for example, that Yeats and Moore in their version of Diarmuid and Gráinne "have changed Diarmuid from a Fenian chief into a modern degenerate",23 something, incidentally, which Eglinton had said could not be done; and Patrick Pearse even more acutely heard echoes of Hamlet on the lips of the Cuchulain of On Baile's Strand To all of which the authors could say "but that effect was fully intended". In the adaptation of Gaelic elements to English forms, both elements were vastly changed, as Yeats had hoped, and changed also were the adaptors. The literature which he and his colleagues produced arose not among the Irish speakers of the west nor among the drawing-rooms of a self-enclosed gentry, but from the impact of one civilization (Gaelic) upon another (English).

  Davis's description of the Irish as "a composite race" had been borne out yet again. What had been billed as the Battle of Two Civilizations was really, and more subtly, the interpenetration of each by the other: and this led to the generation of a new species of man and woman, who felt exalted by rather than ashamed of such hybridity.

  The essays put out by Yeats in the theoretical journals of his theatre elaborated on this theme with a remarkable cogency and coherence of purpose. In October 1902, for instance, he urged formal recognition of "that English idiom of the Irish-thinking people of the west ... the only good English spoken by any large numbers of Irish people today".24 With his tongue only partly in his cheek, he urged on the Intermediate Board of Education ("a body that seems to benefit by advice") a novel scheme to improve the written English of schoolchildren:

  Let every child in Ireland be set to turn first a leading article, then a piece of what is called excellent English, written perhaps by some distinguished member of the Board, into the idiom of his own countryside.

  The mind of official Ireland was, however, so colonized that it could not recognize that the people themselves had created a new idiom, neither standard Irish nor standard English, but something that "at its best is more vigorous, fresh and simple than either of the two languages between which it stands"25. Had the argument been conceded, the dialect would have become the natural idiom of church sermons, newspaper editorials or university lectures, but these prestigious discourses remained unaffected by what Yeats mischievously called "the idiom of those who have rejected or of those who have never learned the base idiom of the newspapers".26 He found in Hiberno-English that elusive style, that pressure of individual personality and that shared joy in free expression which was not available in official sources. Alert to the fact that writers of English faced more difficult problems than those which awaited artists in the Irish language, he pointed out that "English is the language in which the Irish cause has been debated and we have to struggle against traditional points of view",27 in other words, the rollicking note thought peculiar to the stage Irishman. For that very reason, it was important to challenge these associations.

  Over five decades later, but in an analogous situation, in French Algeria, Frantz Fanon, the revolutionary and psychiatrist, found that he too had to struggle against the "traditional points of view" embedded in French, "a language of occupation": this he did by broadcasting in French the programmes of Radio Fighting Algeria, "liberating the enemy language from its historic meanings".28 It was doubtless a similar complex of feelings which, in more recent years still, led the Indian novelist Salman Rushdie to declare: "Those of us who use English do so in spite of our ambiguity towards it, or perhaps because of that, perhaps because we can find in that linguistic struggle a reflection of other struggles taking place in the real world". Like Yeats, Rushdie clung defiantly to the hope that something was gained rather than lost in the act of translation, one result of which might be "radically new types of human being".29

  The deployment by postcolonial writers of historically-sanctioned English, and their speaking of it in a writerly, erudite fashion, have become much-remarked features of this process. Back in the 1890s, Walter Pater had said that he wished to write English as a learned language. This was precisely how the Irish actors of Yeats's theatre spoke it, as the London critic A. B. Walkley discovered on attending a performance: "The unexpected emphasis on the minor syllables has an air of not ungraceful pedantry, or, better still, of old world courtliness. We are listening to English spoken with a wonderful care and slightly timorous hesitation, as though it were a learned language".30

  The decolonizing programme of the theatre was made very obvious in Yeats's repeated invocations of the writers of the American Renaissance as models for his own. His notions of a national literature were derived from Walt Whitman, but so also was his idea of the reception of such writers: "If one says a National Literature must be in the language of the country, there are many difficulties. Should it be written in the language that one's country does speak or the language it ought to speak?... Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman are national writers of America, although the one had his first acceptance in France and the other in England and Ireland".31 The man or woman of genius moulded the nation, rather than being made upon its mould: and because of their creative unpredictability, they encountered opposition, but they were embraced there "in the end". In the meantime, they might have to turn for protection to the despised police of the colonial power, as Yeats did during the Playboy riots and as Rushdie would decades later: expressing the people's life was far more dangerous than merely exploiting it.

  Yet, though Yeats's Samhain articles and Rushdie's essays in Imaginary Homelands would be separated over time by eighty years, the experiences evoked in them did not markedly alter. Yeats's new species of man is recognizably one of Rushdie's hybrids, "people who root themselves in ideas rather than places, in memories as much as in material things; people who have been obliged to define themselves – because they are so defined by others – by their otherness; people in whose deepest selves strange fusions occur, unprecedented unions between what they were and where they find themselves". The experience recalled in the essays is one of becoming identity being not so much a possession as a way of being in the world. For that reason, the image of the migrant or traveller features much in their work, not only because in his displacement he symbolizes the uprooted intellectual, but more especially because he is adaptive, one who moulds the new places that serve also to mould him. "The migrant is not simply transformed by his art; he also transforms his new world", writes Rushdie, who says that in consequence "migrants become mutants, but it is out of such hybridization that newness can emerge". The search is for a mode of expression, a fuller articulation, and this quest becomes its own point for the writer. It becomes clear that for such, reality is a mere artefact until it has been embodied in a style: what Rushdie calls "the sense of a writer feeling obliged to bring his new world into being by an act of pure will, the sense that if the world is not described into existence in the most minute detail, then it won't be there".32

  Yeats, who had undergone these experiences so many years before Rushdie, was also led to the paradoxical conclusion that a nation could only achieve consciousness through exposure to others. Similarly, a self could only awaken by an act of hybridization: for nothing could create until first it was split in two:

  All literature in every country
is derived from models, and as often as not these are foreign models, and it is the presence of a personal element alone that can give it nationality in a fine sense, the nationality of its maker. It is only before personality has been attained that a race struggling towards self-consciousness is the better for having, as in primitive times, nothing but native models, for before this has been attained, it can neither assimilate nor reject. It was precisely at this passive moment, attainment approaching but not yet come, that the Irish heart and mind surrendered to England, or rather to what is most temporary in England; and Irish patriotism, content that the names and opinions should be Irish, was deceived and satisfied. It is always necessary to affirm and reaffirm that nationality is in the things that escape analysis.33

  This powerful and penetrating paragraph is one of the first Irish articulations of the dialectics of postcolonial liberation. It repeats the warnings of Hyde, Moran and others about a nationalism which would be no more than an imitation of its English begetter: but it transcends their diagnoses by offering a subtle account of how so many who dream of liberation become blocked at that mimic stage.

  Ten

  J. M. Synge – Remembering the Future

  The society depicted in The Playboy of the Western World is a colony in the throes of a land war, as the last phase of the campaign against feudalism in Ireland is enacted. Pegeen Mike refers with excitement as well as fear to the thousand militia then crossing County Mayo, scene of so many evictions which have left so many vagrants in the streets. Synge did not suppress the ugliness of colonialism – "the loosed khaki cut-throats", "the broken harvest", or the rigged juries "selling judgements of the English law" are all mentioned1 – but this is mere backdrop. Synge was less interested in the colonial present than in the future. Assuming the inevitability of Home Rule, he tried instead to see so profoundly into the Mayoites' culture that the shape of their future might become discernible.

  So he took the violence of the colonizers as read: his deeper interest was in how the colonized cope with the violence in themselves, their situation and their daily life. There is no obvious outlet in the world of the play for these instincts. The Mayoites offer no allegiance to the hated English law, which might allow them to channel their violence into socially-sanctioned punishments like the hanging of a murderer. The allegiance to the Catholic church, which by its sacrifice of the Mass helps to appease the human taste for violence, is also very weak. Father Reilly is so peripheral a figure to these fundamentally pagan people that Synge does not allow him to appear on the stage at all: only Shawn Keogh speaks of the priest without irony. Yet the villagers are saturated in violence and its attendant imagery. Sarah Tansey is willing to travel miles to set eyes on the man who bit the yellow lady's nostril by the northern shore. Such a people desperately need a hero who can bring their instincts to violence into a single clear focus: a hero, moreover, whom they can then convert into a scapegoat, onto whom may be visited any troublesomely violent tendencies that are still unfulfilled.

  This figure must come from outside the settled community, for otherwise he might exact a terrible revenge through the intervention of angry relations. So, Christy Mahon comes from "a windy corner of high distant hills".2 This permits the community the luxury of believing that with him the cycle of incremental violence will come to a final halt. Hence the importance of reading into Christy all the ills and frustrations that flesh is heir to. As his father so vaguely yet so magnificendy says: "Isn't it by the like of you the sins of the whole world are committed?"3 This would also account for Christy's radical blankness as a personality on his arrival: he is the seductive male version of those female models into whose gorgeous but empty faces men can read their most vivid fantasies. In this case, however, the role of sex-object is played by the male lead. A person thus sacrificed drains off the evil in a village and, in the very act of being disposed of, becomes endowed with the glamour of a holy healer who has the power to bind the community back together.4

  But the play, on the night of the riots in 1907, was not heard to a conclusion – so we must look to the earlier acts for a cause. The monstrous spectacle of a deformed colonial life may have defeated the very sympathies which it could have aroused among nationalists in the audience. The frustration of knowing that they were more nauseated than sympathetic may have led many spectators to insure themselves against ensuing guilt by converting the play, through vilification and hearsay, into a genuine "monster". The physical assaults on the actors would be of a piece with this, since their effect would be to enhance the deformation and monstrosity of the players. Synge's play, and by extension Synge himself, thus became – like Christy – a scapegoat for the violence visited upon one another by the colonized.

  Not long after Synge had served this function and died an early death, Patrick Pearse, repenting of his earlier attacks on play and playwright, wrote of him as an authentic martyr and contrasted that martyrdom with the facile careerism of an imperial administrator:

  Ireland, in our day as in the past, has excommunicated some of those who have served her best, and has canonized some of those who have served her worst ... When a man like Synge, a man in whose sad heart there glowed a true love of Ireland, one of the two or three men who have in our time made Ireland considerable in the eyes of the world, uses strange symbols which we do not understand, we cry out that he has blasphemed and we proceed to crucify him. When a sleek lawyer, rising step by step through the most ignoble of all professions, attains to a Lord Chancellorship or an Attorney Generalship, we confer upon him the freedom of our cities. This is really a very terrible symptom in contemporary Ireland.5

  By 1913 Pearse had endowed Synge with the saintliness of his own putative sacrifice – to be made three years later-for the work of art called Ireland. This moment had been adumbrated at the end of Synge's play: for not long after the scapegoat Christy serves his function of uniting previously quarrelsome men so that they can enjoy "peace now for our drinks", he is invested with the insignia of a lost redeemer by the very woman who evicted him: "O my grief, I've lost him surely. I've lost the only Playboy of the Western World".6

  The stock explanation of the riots is that nationalists rejected a work which appeared to satirize a drunken, amoral peasantry at a time when all patriotic dramatists of the National Theatre were expected to celebrate a sturdy people ready for the responsibilities of self-government. It is also said that pious Roman Catholics resented the insulting use of sacred phrases in lines like "With the help of God, I killed him surely, and that the Holy Immaculate Mother may intercede for his soul".7 There is some validity in these arguments, but not much, given that other plays by Synge, even more extreme in these respects, were presented without disorder. The situation was, of course, rich in ironies, the most obvious being that the protesters shouted "We Irish are not a violent people" and then sprang at the actors to prove their point – confirming Synge's conviction that some were.

  One says some, for little credence should be given to the cliché of the fighting Irish. The Irish have a refutation for violence (due perhaps to the overcrowded conditions in which their emigrants lived in British and American cities) but also a shrewd distaste for it. Though some have professed to admire "mythic" violence, they have more often than not shied away as individuals from the thing itself; and Yeats was in this respect a representative case. He wrote:

  Even the wisest man grows tense

  With some sort of violence,

  Before he can accomplish fate,

  Do his work, or choose his mate.8

  Violence to some past self, in his system, became the necessary precondition for the remaking of a new one: yet, when that violence ceased to be rhetorical or psychic and became real, Yeats was filled with scruple.

  Synge's extraordinary influence on the middle period of Yeats's poetry was attributable to his insistence that violence and poetry went hand in hand. There was, most strikingly, his declaration in the Preface to his own Collected Poems, which he submitted for
editing and publication to Yeats, that "before verse can be human again it must learn to be brutal".9 That sentence voiced his revolt against the artificial poetic diction which had so emasculated English poetry in the later nineteenth century. He believed that "the strong things of life are needed in poetry, also, to show that what is exalted, or tender, is not made by feeble blood". The weakness of Swinburne and Rossetti lay in their cultivation of a tenderness that was cloying rather than tough, while the problem with realists like Ibsen and Zola could be found in their naturalist depiction of sordid urban conditions unmitigated by any sense of beauty. In the life and language of western Ireland, however, Synge found a world that managed to be both tough and tender. A visit to the Aran Islands liberated the frustrated artist in Synge, who thanked Yeats for sending him with the remark that style is "born out of the shock of new material"10 (Hemingway, another lyricist of violence, once said "what amateurs call a style is usually only the unavoidable awkwardness of first trying to make something that has not before been made").11 Accepting the romantic symbol of the poem as a tender flower, Synge added that there was no flower which had not strong roots among the clay and worms.

  A major investigation is conducted in The Playboy of the relationship between the flower and the crude life at its roots, between style and shock, which is to say between poetry and violence. In a private letter to an admirer, written soon after the riots, Synge remarked that "the wildness and, if you will, vices of the Irish peasantry are due, like their extraordinary good points, to the richness of their nature, a thing that is priceless beyond words".12 So if the violence and the poetry sprang from a common source, it would have been impossible to separate them without a diminution of both.