Inventing Ireland

by Declan Kiberd

  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 Bédrla, 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 dudes 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 h
is 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, agios drong díobhsan óg; do chonnairc mé agus tuigim prímh-leabhair an tseanchusa, agus ní facadarsan iad, agus dá bhfacdís, 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'fháil uaidh, chuireas romham stair na hÉireann do scríobh, ach de bhrí gur mheasas nár bh'oircheas chomh-onóraighe na hÉreann 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

  In the Díonbhrollach or introduction, Céitinn (sounding at times like the Edward Said of his era) laments the fact that "truth" has now become a function of learned judgement rather than the sum of a whole people's wisdom. "Ireland", he complains, is never to be seen in itself, but as a flawed version of England, as a country still entrapped in the conditions from which England liberated itself in 1066.

  With devastating wit, Céitinn proceeds to show how, even on a purely textual level, the English writers have been amazingly selective in what they have culled from one another, and he unsparingly exposes the contradictions which nonetheless mar their testimonies. Accusing them of writing to a formula – blame the Irish – he compares them to the beetle, which disdains to alight on summer flowers but joyfully rolls itself in dung. Marvelling at Spenser's ignorance of the history of the Irish nobility, he jocosely concludes that, on the score of being a poet, the man allowed himself the licence of invention

  ... mar ba ghnáth leisean agus le na samhail eile iomad finnsgéal filíochta a chumadh agus a chóiriú le briathra blasta, do bhréagadh an léitheora.

  (as it was usual with him and with others like him, to frame and arrange many poetic romances with sweet-sounding words to deceive the reader.)10

  This is, of course, a tongue-in-cheek rebuttal of the very terms in which Spenser castigated the native poets as practised liars, embellishing truth for their own self-interest. By rights Céitinn could have enjoyed the traditional status of a "saoi re héigse" (a man of learning): it was the collapse of the Gaelic order in 1601 which had prevented this. But he was acute enough to sense in Spenser his own mirror-image: a court poet deprived of a court, a learned man who had somehow lost his full entitlements. If history is what gets written in books by life's winners and tradition is what gets remembered and told among the common people, then Spenser must finally be rated an historian and Céitinn a traditionalist. Lacking a printing press, Céitinn had no opportunity to publish Boras Feasa on its completion in 1640; but hundreds of copies circulated in manuscript, and the book became much admired for its lucid style and for the feelings of self-worth which it instilled in Irish speakers. Throughout the same period, after its publication in an abbreviated version in 1633, Spenser's View was widely available in Ireland and in England in printed form.

  A major part of Céitinn's project was his demonstration that the Irish were not foils to the English so much as mirrors. Against the view of them as hot-headed, rude and uncivil, Céitinn offered a portrait of the ancient Irish as disciplined, slow to anger but steadfast thereafter in pursuit of their rights, urbane and spare of utterance, and so on ... to all intents, the very model of an English knight or squire. To scant avail. In centuries to come, English colonizers in India or Africa would impute to the "Gunga Dins" and "Fuzzi-Wuzzies" those same traits already attributed to the Irish. The fact that the Irish, like the Indians, can on occasion be extremely cold, polite and calculating was of no great moment, for their official image before the world had been created and consolidated by a far greater power. The occupiers also projected many of their own flaws onto the Irish and then, like parents who are dismayed to find their weaknesses repeated in their own children, felt nonetheless quite at liberty to criticize the Irish for these failings. English understanding of Ireland based itself on a limited number of ideas; as Céitinn feared, such ideas fed off one another far more than they drew sustenance from actual life.

  Eventually, Irish intellectuals deduced that the intent of English policy was straightforward: to create a "Sacsa nua darb anim Éire" (a new England called Ireland). This was undeniably true: but, because it remained an open space in which all kinds of desires and loathings might find their embodiment, Ireland also began to appear to English persons in the guise of their Unconscious. In that covert sense, the effect of official policy was the creation of a secret England called Ireland The notion had obvious dangers, especially if Ireland were to be imagined as a feminine landscape, whose contours needed only to be laid bare: but as the seventeenth century gave way to the eighteenth, it also revealed its positive literary uses. In George Farquhar's and Richard Brinsley Sheridan's plays, Anglo-Irish gentlemen returned in dishevelled desperation to remind the London smart-set of the cultural price being paid for empire by its sponsors on the periphery, a place often repressed from official consciousness. Oliver Goldsmith in The Deserted Village could, in a somewhat ironic manner, bring the consequences of rural clearances to the attention of his more sensitive metropolitan readers; and Jonathan Swift could write of Ireland as a laboratory in which the discrepancies between official pretence and raw underlying realities were
starkly posed. In the Drapier's Letters Swift asked how a free man in England could lose his autonomy simply by crossing the Irish Sea. His Modest Proposal that Irish children under six be roasted as meat for English tables, though seriously discussed by some myopic readers, was for many a sharp reminder of the way in which English policy was viewed in Ireland. For here was a land where the difference between latent and manifest content had to be constantly negotiated by all writers.

  Throughout the eighteenth century, this gap exercised the framers of legislation as well as the authors of literature. On the ascendancy side, the Penal Laws implemented against Catholics who refused to work on their church holidays were somewhat undercut by a rider, to the effect that justices and constables who refused to implement the law would be jailed. The verbal harshness of the statutes was a reflection of their inoperability in a country lacking a comprehensive police force or a system of prisons. The very edict which repressed the Catholics into the official unconscious, supposing such persons not to exist, seemed to concede the impossibility of its own consistent application. It implicitly acknowledged that it afforded only one perspective and that another, contrary view would be taken by many.11

  On the native side, poets writing in Irish showed a penchant for covert statement. They praised the beauty of Cathleen Ní Houlihan when they really meant to celebrate Ireland. In what seemed like harmless love songs, they besought girls to shelter gallants from the storm, gallants who turned out on inspection to be rebels on the run from English guns. They decried the felling of the woods, but in this they were actually bemoaning the fall of the Gaelic aristocracy, whose evicted leaders often took refuge in the woods from which they launched revenge attacks. In both Irish and English writings of the period, the woods appear increasingly often as the unconscious, sheltering kerns, rebels and exponents of those desires punished by the Puritans (many of whom came to Ireland with Cromwell in the 1640s and later). In the settlers' texts, the clearing represented the daylight world of civilization and the conscious: and so the native who stumbled into the settlement and was promptly lulled off became a metaphor for the occupiers need to negate all illicit desires.