Worse still, they have been theatricalized and corrupted by tourism. On Inishmaan, there was no difference between a role and a self, despite the "penury"; on the larger island, the natives know more. One of the things they know is how to play the part expected of them by English tourists: "I noticed in the crowd several men of the ragged, humorous type that was once thought to represent the real peasant of Ireland ... As we looked out through the fog, there was something nearly appalling in the shrieks of laughter kept up by one of these individuals, a man of extraordinary ugliness and wit".7 In that strange moment, Synge identifies the problem of the Irish nationalist mind in its deep, almost erotic, attraction to the English. English typology has encouraged this stage Irishman to mimic a stock type – with no saving sense of irony – and to confuse this type with "personality". The Gaelic Irish of Inishmaan are not sufficiently conscious to be nationalist, while the man from Inishmore is too Irish to be Gaelic. Such an Irishman is, in classic existential terms, overdetermined; to him there is no Irish identity above and beyond the Irish predicament. Irishness is like Jewishness, whatever people say it is. To be Irish, in such a context, is simply to be called Irish, and to know what that means you have to ask the English.
Those Gaelic poets who, in their moment of estrangement from the ancient culture, warned that from now on their people would be like the children of Israel, knew exactly what they were saying; for, as Jean-Paul Sartre would much later observe of Jews locked into a similar process, "the root of Jewish disquietude is the necessity imposed on the Jew of subjecting himself to endless self-examination and finally assuming a phantom personality, at once strange and familiar, that haunts him and is nothing but himself – as others sec him".8 Irish is like English – "familiar and foreign" – but nonetheless Irish for all that. The universal modern disjunction between role and self is true, twice over, of the Irish nationalist who, knowing that at last he is tolerated, must keep on proving himself and his nation. For this is the great burden of post-colonial national élites: that, unlike the islanders of the Great Blasket or Inishmaan, they must have an idea of Ireland.
Nor is the problem solved by a reversion to West British modes, for they are characterized by what Yeats called "their would-be cosmopolitanism and their actual provincialism".9 If the person were to deny with ferocious intensity the Irish element in himself, he would in that very vehemence mark himself off as Irish. There seems no way out of this mirror-chamber created by the colonialists, because the natives' opinions of themselves are greatly influenced by the low esteem which their rulers have for them. The nationalist rebel feeds the English stereotype with his martyrdom, becoming visibly more like what he should be to deserve the fate mapped out for him. Even the would-be liberationist, for whom it is a point of honour to have no poetic phrase or humorous mood, lives in such daily anxiety that he will correspond to the stereotype that his conduct, too, is patently determined from the outside: whoever makes it his destiny to prove that there are no Irish ends up establishing that there are.
The English built their new England called Ireland: the Irish then played at building a not-England, but now they were playing at being not-Irish. That is a measure of the dire difficulty of reaching Fanon's third, liberationist phase. The people of the second, nationalist phase – especially those who have progressed in their thinking – want to know the "Irish" element within them solely in order to deny it. What Sartre remarked of the Jews is again apposite: "with them it is not a question of recognizing certain faults and combating them, but of underlining by their conduct the fact that they do not have those faults".10 Repeatedly estranged from their experiences, they not only act but watch themselves acting; and so Irish wit, when it expresses itself, does so most often at the expense of its own. Dr. Samuel Johnson once joked that the Irish, being a fair people, never spoke well of one another.
Yet among their own kind, in moments of privacy, all this falseness ceases, and there is no oppressive sense of a tradition weighing them down. Moreover, if in such a setting they criticize the Irish, it is understood that they are being critical of a submission to one or other of these stereotypes: nobody is more anti-Irish in this positive sense than the Irish themselves. The inauthentic Irish fled from the pressure of the stereotype and then the English made them Irish in spite of themselves: but the more thoughtful Irish sought to free Ireland in the only meaningful sense by freeing their expressive selves. They did this, like Christy Mahon at the end of The Playboy, by constructing themselves from within and throwing away the mirror. In making themselves Irish, they did what he did and eluded final description; for to be a new species of man or woman is to lack a given identity, to be not nobody but not somebody either.
How exactly does the whole process work? Yeats's observations on national culture are helpful here, for he sees in it a flowering which, of its very nature, must wither. "Is not all history but the coming of that conscious art which first makes articulate and then destroys the old wild energy?" Once a face is framed, once a form is adopted, a self-consciousness insinuates itself into an action with a concomitant sense of loss. The nationalist self destroys itself by the very energies which define its being, and so the mirror must be smashed before being discarded. The process, though it may be humiliating, must be gone through: all thoughts must be embodied in form, however fallen, and the problems of the decolonizing intellectual who works with the tainted terminology of the colonialist are seen by Yeats as no different in kind from those which confront the saviour-poet. As "Christ put on the temporal body, which is Satan . . . that it might be consumed, and the spiritual body revealed", so poetry "puts on nature that nature might be revealed as the great storehouse of symbolism, without which language is dumb".11 The making conscious of the Irish element leads it to create a perfect mirror in which to view itself, a narcissism of self-love followed by self-loathing, like that which causes a parrot in one of Yeats's poems to rage at its own image and then to break it. The past has returned, but in the form of self-hatred. In the estrangement which follows, Yeats becomes an instance of the modern man, bleak and yet free. Only the sinful, broken, tainted medium allows progress: another example of felix culpa, of going wrong in order to go right.
So, self is denied, then defined, before being superseded in a moment of breakthrough, when all mirrors are thrown away. Up until this moment, history has been a mere chronicle of facts, but in the fifteenth phase of A Vision, when revolution comes, the artists take history and "do its personages the honour of naming after them their own thoughts",12 which is to say that they find in the forms of past heroism the lineaments of their desires. When the mirror is shattered by the alchemist, what is left is the luminous drop of distilled gold, which provides the illumination.13 When the ego is released from the mirror phase of a mimic nationalism, a deeper self is freed, a self which has no further need of irritable assertion, but is serene enough to allow the forces of creation to flow through it. It can contain the culture so fully as to embody both its "nay" and its "yea", without setting one above the other.
Before this breakthrough comes a period which has been called "a nationalism of mourning".14 At this time, it becomes increasingly clear that the longing for form has not been appeased by any of the models on offer, either literary or political, but is still "a dumb, struggling thought seeking a mouth to utter it".15 Its incarnation in the inappropriate body of the inherited state exemplifies the paradox of a world in which every act is a suffering and every statement a loss of vital energy. If the energy of life is the urge to find a satisfactory expression, then a nation is but a longing for a new form, a sign that all dreams end in a beautiful body:
Birds sigh for the air,
Thought for I know not where,
For the womb the seed sighs.
Sinks the same rest
On intellect, on nest,
On straining thighs.16
Yeats had concluded that, if incarnation and crucifixion were identical, then a god who took a flawed human form
was already suffering the ravages of a tainted medium. Yet every artist must follow suit: by taking on the flawed worlds body, they achieve self-conquest, are born again to a recovered innocence and help others to recover it too.
That recovery comes at the instant when the self resolves to reshape available forms to a personal standard of excellence, and to see in such nationalist icons as Swift, O'Connell or Parnell not models for slavish emulation (as in a mirror) but illuminations of the onlookers' real potential, "precisely that symbol he may require for the expression of himself".17 The moment of liberation is thus achieved when the return to the source is also an opening onto a mysterious future: "this instinct for what is near and yet hidden is in reality a return to the sources of our power, and therefore a claim made upon the future. Thought seems more true, emotion more deep, spoken by someone who touches my pride, who seems to claim me of his kindred, who seems to make me a part of some national mythology".18 This may explain one of the paradoxes of post-colonial culture: that it can seem, at one and the same time, extremely old and extremely young, of ancient lineage and in a sense yet unborn. The world of the self-invented man is "the tradition of myself", by which the founder is also the final consummation of a whole stream of thought: so Yeats, who helped to define Irish literary nationalism in his own writings, became in time the lyricist who, in alternately bitter and melancholic modes, sang the nationalism of mourning. But his account of the collapse of the nationalist project would itself become the master-narrative of its successor and a further proof that "tradition may live in the lament for its passing".19
In this dynamic, the very meaning of the word tradition changes, since it no longer implies a museum of nostalgias but a reopened future. Yet the past must be honoured, albeit subordinated. "We cannot kill the past in going forward", writes Carlos Fuentes, the Mexican novelist, "for the past is our identity and without our identity we are nothing".20 One of the tactics of colonialism was to deprive a people of their past precisely in order to deny them their future. Though it was quite understandable that people, in their anxiety to modernize, should dream of creating themselves ex nihilo, free of degrading past links, this was not to be absolute: the task rather was to show the interdependence of past and future in attempting to restore history's openness.
The colonialist crime was the violation of the traditional community: the nationalist crime was often a denial of the autonomy of the individual. Liberation would come only with forms which stressed the interdependence of community and individual, rather than canvassing the claims of one at the expense of the other. The question which faced the decolonizing world, the question to which it might become the answer, was: how to build a future on the past without returning to it? The danger of nationalist culture was its tendency to petrification and its martyr cult, which created in many adherents an unhealthy obsession with their future demise: the Deirdre of Irish lore constantly foretasting her legendary status is one example, the monks in Joyce's Dubliners who sleep in their own coffins another. Joyce, by his satirical treatment of statuary in Dubliners, mocks the tendency of nationalists to embalm themselves alive: they fetishize and manipulate the past to the point where they irretrievably lose it. The English occupiers, having lost their own past in this way, tried similarly to dispossess others, which was why a return to some sort of source seemed necessary, if the future was to be more than a vanishing point. "The past is the only certifiable future we have", says Fuentes: "The past is the only proof that the future did, in effect, once exist".21 Hence his the future, imagine the past
Imagine is the operative word for the liberationist who, far more than the nationalist, needs the sanction of previous authority if history is to be blown open. That sanction comes from history not as chronological narrative but as symbolic pattern, in which certain Utopian moments are extracted from its flow. The 1916 Rising announced itself in this way, not only as the outcome of the previous thirty years, but also as a moment charged with the Utopian energies of 1803, 1848 and 1867. As Walter Benjamin remarked: "to Robespierre ancient Rome was a past charged with the time of the now, which he blasted out of the continuum of history. The French revolution viewed itself as Rome incarnate".22 This means also that the nationalist present which was 1916 must have construed itself under the aegis of the liberation which would finally replace it. The rebels had instinctively grasped the constellation which their era formed with those earlier ones, and with those "millions unborn" of whom Pearse dreamed in his poem. Accused by their critics and by future conservative historians of being fixated on the past, they were anything but: what they sensed was their power to redirect its latent energies into new constellations. They therefore reserved the right to reinterpret the past in the light of their desired future, which they recruited against a despised present. So they implemented Nietzsche's programme for all who have not been given a good father: they went out and invented a better one, a better past.
History thereby became a form of science fiction: in order to get a fair hearing in a conservative society, the exponents of revolution had to present their intentions under the guise of a return to the idealized patterns of the past. Connolly, dreaming of a classless communitarian society, must present it in Labour in Irish History as a restoration of a system akin to that of the ancient Celtic laws; and Pearse could present the theories of Montessori as but the fosterage practised by the Gaelic chief. Each man put on the mask of a historical actor to bring something new into being: each dropped into a familiar role in order to learn something new about himself. The Odyssey was no more intrinsic to Joyce's Ulysses than was the Cuchulain myth to the leaders of 1916: such narratives provided a respectable scaffolding behind which the rebels were free to improvise.
The most spectacular scaffolding of all was provided by nationalism and the nation-state: forms which might at any moment be kicked away to reveal the radical new structure which had been improvised beneath. Claiming to revere the scaffolding of the older forms, the Pearses, Connollys and Joyces were not-so-secret innovators. They understood that one must forget much of the past if anything is to be created in the present: or, at least, one must constantly re-edit that past in the light of current needs. The hope for progress, Nietzsche had said, was to "wipe away whatever came earlier in the prospect of reaching a true present... a new departure".23 No wonder that Michael Davitt, the author of Ireland's new departure in land-holding, was one of those who gave rise to the radicals' creative misinterpretation of the Irish past. And no wonder that Nietzsche saw history and modernity as opposed ideas: what was modern about the 1916 thinkers was precisely their disruption of chronology, their insistence on the revolutionary idea of tradition.
This is all quite at variance with the common nationalist view of tradition as something which has come to a conclusion. Its exponents fancy that they are the final point of history and the past a foil to their narcissism. Such a past has in effect lost its future, its power to challenge and disrupt: it exists only as a commodity to be admired, consumed, reducing its adherents to the position of tourists in their own country, whose monuments and heritage centres can be visited or re-entered by an act of will. Its people are lulled by their leaders to "become drunk on remembrance",24 to recover the past as fetish rather than to live in the flow of actual history. The fetishizing, once permitted, affects everything – even the landscape is treated like a reified woman's body – so that, after independence, the actual landscape is slowly transformed by the touristic industries until it conforms to the outlines of the original fantasy. In other words, the Cathleen ní Houlihan of real flesh and blood must impersonate for her lovers the sort of woman they want her to be, and she must leave her own desires unimplemented. In such a nationalism, the "lyrical stage"25 completely overrides the historic concreteness of the revolution. It is made possible by an endless harping on an idealized past, which is used as a distraction from the mediocrity of the present. James Connolly foresaw this when he warned that a neglect of vital, living issues might "only
succeed in stereotyping our historical studies with a worship of the past, or crystallizing nationalism into a tradition, glorious and heroic indeed, but still only a tradition".26
The penchant for commemoration is a tell-tale sign of a community which, pained by the process of unequal development, has difficulty in adjusting to modernity. Yet the nationalism to which it appeals is modern in the sense that it rejects a dynamic traditionalism and seeks to abort the historical process. The inappropriate forms left by the occupier lead the nationalist to violate the rights of minority groupings, and also the customs and familial structures of the people. By way of compensation, nationalism men learns how to mythologize the very values which it has been helping to destroy: it was 1930s Ireland, wrecked by emigration and the consequent break-up of families, which insisted on defining the family as the basic unit of society. But the reality did not measure up to the rhetoric. Each year, returning emigrants were invited to visit this petrified society, and to inspect it as once a colonial official might have reviewed a primitive tribe's progress on a special reservation. Of such a phenomenon, Sigmund Freud had written: "the reservation is to maintain the old condition of things which has been regretfully sacrificed to necessity everywhere else . . . The mental realm of fantasy is also such a reservation reclaimed from the encroaches of the reality principle".27
Inventing Ireland Page 36
