Inventing Ireland

by Declan Kiberd

  I think it is high time that Mr. Bunbury made up his mind whether he was going to live or to die. This shilly-shallying with the question is absurd. Nor do I in any way approve of the modern sympathy with invalids. I consider it morbid.32

  Erich Stern has written that "in order to escape the fear of death, the person resorts to suicide which, however, he carries out on his double because he loves and esteems his ego so much".33 Virtually all analysts agree that the double is the creation of a pathologically self-absorbed type, usually male, often chauvinistic, sometimes imperialist: only by this device of splitting can such a one live with himself. Rank actually contended that the double arose from a morbid self-love which prevented the development of a balanced personality.34 If this is so, however, men killing or annihilating the double is no final solution, for his life and welfare are as closely linked to that of his author as are the Irish to the English, women to men, and so on. No sooner is the double denied than it becomes man's fate. Like the "Celtic feminine" in a culture of imperial machismo, it comes back to haunt its begetters, enacting what Wilde called the tyranny of the weak over the strong, the only kind of tyranny which lasts. So, in the play, whenever he is most stridently denied, the double always turns out to be closest at hand. When Jack says "My brother is in the drawing room. I don't know what it all means. I think it is perfectly absurd", Algy asks, perhaps on behalf of all uninvited Irish guests:

  Why on earth don't you go up and change? It is perfectly childish to be in deep mourning for a man who is actually staying for a whole week with you in your house as a guest. I call it grotesque.35

  The denied double thus ends up setting the agenda of its creator, who, being unaware of it, becomes its unconscious slave. The women in the play set the agenda for men, Bunbury for Algy, butlers for masters, and so on, even as the Irish Parnellites were setting the agenda for England, repeatedly paralyzing politics at Westminster.

  Writers throughout history have found their version of the double in art, that diabolical enterprise which paradoxically guarantees immortality; and this is the one employment of the double which may not be a form of neurosis, since it is presented "in an acceptable form, justifying the survival of the irrational in our over-rational civilization".36 But other uses are pathological and doomed, since the double is devised to, cope with the fear of death but reappears as its very portent. That fear gives rise to an exaggerated attitude to one's own ego, leading to an inability to love and a wild longing to be loved. These, sure enough, are attributes of Algy and Jack before the women break up their self-enclosed rituals (and, it might be added, attributes of British policy in Ireland before independence).

  There could hardly be a more convincing psychological explanation of the strange oscillation between conciliation and coercion in imperial policy towards Ireland than Rank's report on the tactics employed in the making of the double. The notion of the "innocent" and "spontaneous" Irish may have been an emotional convenience to those Victorians who were increasingly unable to find satisfaction for feelings of guilt in universally-accepted religious forms. The myth of an unspoilt peasantry, in Cumberland or Connemara, was, after all, a convenient means of emotional absolution from guilt in a society for which natural instinct was often tantamount to a vice. The sequence of coercion following upon conciliation could be explained in terms of outrage with the symbol when it failed to live up to these high expectations.

  If this is so, then the play becomes (among other things, of course) a parable of Anglo-Irish relations and a pointer to their resolution. This should not seem surprising. Wilde, in London, offering witty critiques of imperial culture, was one of the first in a long line of native intellectuals who were equipped by an analytic education to pen the most thorough repudiation of their masters. The violent denunciation of Europe produced by Frantz Fanon would be written to a Hegelian method in the elegant style of a Sartre. In a somewhat similar fashion, the English didn't just create their own colonialism in Ireland; they also informed most hostile interpretations of it.

  The Irish, by way of resistance, could go in either of two ways; and Wilde, being Wilde, went in both. On one side, he duplicated many of the attributes of the colonizer, becoming a sort of urbane, epigrammatic Englishman (just as militant nationalists, going even further, emulated the muscular imperial ethic with their own Gaelic games, Cuchulanoid models and local versions of the public schools). On another more subversive level, he pointed to a subterranean, radical tradition of English culture, which might form a useful alliance with Irish nationalism and thus remain true to its own deepest imperatives. Sensing that England might be the last, most completely occupied, of the British colonies, Wilde offered in saving Ireland to save the masters from themselves. For the Irish, of course, knew more than their island neighbours: their problem was that of a quick-witted people being governed by a dull one. As Hegel had observed, the losers of history, in learning what it is to lose, learn also what it must be like to win: they have no choice but to know their masters even better than the masters know themselves. To them, the masters (though tyrants) remain always human, but to the masters the subjects are not human, not persons, not really there at all. Hope therefore comes from the initiatives launched by the slaves.37

  The psychologist Ashis Nandy observed these tendencies at work in occupied India, whose citizens often sought to become more like the British, either in friendship or in enmity. A martial ethos was cultivated, ostensibly to threaten the occupiers with violent insurrection; but this was really a subtler form of collaboration with the British culture. The new muscular Indians came, nevertheless, to view the feminized Indian male as one whose identity was nullified by these self-cancelling polarities, a victim of a pathology even more dangerous than that of femininity itself.38 Hesitant European well-wishers like E. M. Forster would provide in a character like Or. Aziz a portrayal of the Indians lack of manly fibre, as if secretly willing the nationalists to open revolt. A liberationist reading followed, rejecting the either/or polarities of male and female, England and India, and embracing instead an alternative both/and mode of thought, which opposed male or female to the ideal of androgyny, English or Indian nationalism to the ideal of liberation.39

  This was at once the occupiers' darkest fear and deepest need: that "instead of trying to redeem their masculinity by becoming counter-players of the rulers according to established rules, the colonized will discover an alternative frame of reference within which the oppressed do not seem weak, degraded ..."40 This led Indian subjects to see their rulers as morally inferior and, with their new-found confidence, to feed that information back to the British in devious ways. This was also Wilde's mission in London, a place (he said) of intellectual fog, where only thought was not catching. "Considered as an instrument of thought, the English mind is coarse and undeveloped", he wrote: "The only thing that can cure it is the growth of the critical instinct".41 That instinct was not always welcomed: two weeks before Wilde's first trial, a versifier for Punch magazine called for the extradition of such colonial androgynes:

  If such be "Artists" then may Philistines

  Arise, plain sturdy Britons as of yore,

  And sweep them off and purge away the signs,

  That England e'er such noxious offspring bore.42

  Indians like Nandy came to see Wilde as embarked on the attempt to save England from the deforming effects of industrial pollution. "I would give Manchester back to the shepherds and Leeds to the stock farmers",43 Wilde proclaimed as a young student of Ruskin; but years later, he sensed that a psychological repair-job was called for as well. The colonial adventure had led not only to suffering and injustice overseas, but had corrupted domestic British society to the core. The projection of despised "feminine" qualities onto Celts or Indians had led, inexorably, to a diminishment of womanhood at home. Wilde's first act on taking up the editorship of the Ladies' World was to rename it Woman's World, and in his plays he argued for those feminine qualities deemed irrelevant to a thrusting industria
l society.

  The hierarchical view of humankind, on which imperialism justified itself, led to a purely instrumental view of the English working-class, but that class would never rise in revolt, since the empire also reduced class tensions by opening up careers overseas to talented members of the lower orders. Nandy held that Wilde's effeminacy thus threatened a fundamental postulate of the colonial mentality in Britain itself.44 Certainly, Wilde seemed at all times anxious to feed back his most subversive ideas to the ruling class, as when he published his essay "The Soul of Man Under Socialism" in the upmarket Fortnightly Review (1891). In such feedback may be found the essence of that carnival-esque moment towards which each of his plays moves: when the wit and laughter of the low rejuvenate the jaded culture of the high, and when polyphonic voices override the monotones of perfunctory authority. "Rather more than a socialist", Wilde described himself with real accuracy as "something of an anarchist".45

  What is canvassed throughout The Importance of Being Earnest is nothing less than the revolutionary ideal of the self-created man or woman. Even the odious Lady Bracknell finds herself inadvertently proposing a Nietzschean idea: that if nature hasn't equipped you with a good father, you had better go and manufacture one: "I would strongly advise you, Mr. Worthing, to try and acquire some relations as soon as possible".46 Jack, therefore, has to create himself ex nihilo, inventing the tradition of himself. Born and first bred in a railway station, he appears to have defied all notions of paternity (or what Lady Bracknell calls "a recognized position in good society"). In Edward Said's terms he exemplifies affiliation (the radical creation of one's own world and contexts and versions of tradition) rather than conservative filiation. Lady Bracknell has no doubts as to where all this is leading: to the break-up of family life into its individual units and to "the worst excesses of the French Revolution".47 Revolution is a spectre which she raises when the education of the lower classes is mentioned: if successful, it may lead to a home-grown uprising and acts of violence in Grosvenor Square.

  The politics and psychology of the play are quintessentially republican: Bunbury must not be interred in England but in Paris, home of European radicals and Fenian exiles. All this is scarcely surprising from the pen of one whose mother had determined to "rear him a Hero perhaps and President of the future Irish Republic";48 from one whose first play Vera: Or The Nihilists was deemed too republican for the London stage and performed instead in the United States; from one who told an American audience after the Phoenix Park killings in 1882 that England was "reaping the fruit of seven centuries of injustice"49 and who said that England would only be fully saved when it too became a republic. Wilde's republicanism was a declared feature of his agenda in London from the outset. In 1881, he sent a political pamphlet by his mother to the editor of Nineteenth Century, adding "I don't think age has dimmed the fire and enthusiasm of that pen which set Young Irelanders in a blaze".50 Contrary to many aesthetes who yearned for Renaissance-style patrons, he asserted that the republican form of government was the one most favourable to art.51

  The debate about republicanism had been very much in the air during Wilde's teenage years. In 1871 a radical politician named Charles Dilke had called for the abolition of monarchy at a meeting of working men: for this he was ostracized and his subsequent gatherings broken up. The London Times editorialized: "these are evidently improper points, to be handled, and that with little candour or delicacy, before an assembly of working men".52 Prime Minister Gladstone assured the queen on 21 December 1871 that "it could never be satisfactory that there should exist even a fraction of the nation republican in its views";53 and together they both ran a nationwide campaign for royalism. So successful was this that the subject was not widely debated again until 1922–3, the years immediately following Irish independence, when the matter was raised at Labour Party meetings in the north-east of England.54 This gives some sense of Wilde's daring as a thinker, as well as illustrating that the so-called Irish question was truly parabolic, a device by which British radicals could explore contentious topics at a somewhat safe remove. For example, some years after Wilde's fall from grace the question of homosexuality was raised once again in a charged Irish context, by the allegations surreptitiously circulated during the trial of Sir Roger Casement in 1916. The Irish question was merely the sounding-board for unacknowledged English questions.

  Certain questions recur in each of Wilde's plays, and so also do certain observations. Lady Windermere's Fan, for instance suggests that England has no room for the "heart", which it invariably breaks. The most vital character on stage, Mrs. Erlynne, chooses to emigrate, taking with her Lord Augustus Lorton; and he feels set free of his country rather than deprived of it. Imperialism has, apparently, sapped English society of two elements, the creative and the criminal, leaving only dull suburban types. What life there is in it comes from the outside, from the visiting Mr. Hopper of Australia, who takes the one unattached young woman in the play back with him. Wilde's implication is prophetic of the end of empire: for while Britain wins further victories overseas through such innovators, it will be in a state of terminal decay at home. A society which has no place for its dissidents, its creators or its youth is a society in trouble. Wilde knew this only too well, since he came from such a place: Ireland. And he said that the remedy was for England to adopt some Irish qualities while shedding Irish territories.

  If the English used Ireland as a laboratory in which to test their society, Wilde was happy to use England as a testing-ground for Irish ideas and debates: for, in his mind, the two could not be separated. Though it was never viewed as such in Ireland, he saw his own art as part of the Irish Renaissance, jokingly telling Shaw that their mission was to dispel English fog so that it could make way for the "Celtic School".55 What he meant by the latter phrase, he explained in "The Critic as Artist": "it is the Celt who leads in art. . . there is no reason why in future years this strange Renaissance should not be almost as mighty in its way as mat new birth of art that woke many centuries ago in the cities of Italy".56

  But this did not mean that Wilde could write directly of the Ireland of his youth. That would have entailed him in the bad faith of reproducing an environment which he knew he should be contesting; and that is something which no radical author could countenance (unless, like Shaw, he wrote of the contrast between how the land was and how it should be). Ireland in the nineteenth century was a confused and devastated place, suspended between two languages; and Wilde was committed to sketching the lineaments of no-place, otherwise known as Utopia, something which Ireland or indeed England might yet become. Where Arnold had hoped to see the object in itself as it really was, Wilde wished to see it as it really was not. At a time when the Irish were often accused by the English of mischievously changing the question, Wilde was thinking farther ahead than either side in the debate. So far from responding to the questions posed by the epoch, art (for him) offered answers even before the questions had been asked.

  There is a further reason why, in order to deal with Ireland, a play such as The Importance of Being Earnest had to be set in England. Wilde had discovered that an Irishman only came to consciousness of himself as such when he left his country. Wearing the mask of the English Oxonian, Wilde was paradoxically freed to become more "Irish" than he could ever have been back in Ireland. "It is only by contact with the art of foreign nations that the art of a country gains that individual and separate life that we call nationality . . ."57 Identity was dialogic; the other was also the truest friend, since it was from that other that a sense of self was derived. A person went out to the other and returned with a self, getting to know others simply to find out what they think of him or herself. This seeing of the entire world through the others eyes was an essential process in the formation of a balanced individual; and so Wilde loved England as genuinely as Goethe loved the French. He quoted Goethe on the point: "how could I, to whom culture and barbarism are alone of importance, hate a nation which is among the most cultivated of th
e earth, and to which I owe so great a part of my own cultivation?"58

  That was a universal theme: the persons who gave its name to France were indeed Germanic Franks, for a culture could only be surveyed and known as such from the outside or, at least, the margins. Identity was predicated on difference, but the colonizers of the 1880s and 1890s were conveniently forgetting that fact in their anxiety to make over the world in their image; and they would have to be reminded. A somewhat similar jolt must also be given to those national chauvinists who were too eager to deny any value to the occupier culture; and Wilde, by announcing the Irish renaissance with works which appeared to be set in England, administered that rebuke. One says "appeared to be set in England", of course, for a reason which must be finally explained.

  English literature had a liberating effect on Wilde: it equipped him with a mask behind which he was able to compose the lineaments of his Irish face. This was to be a strategy followed by many decolonizing writers; and, as so often, it was the Argentinian, Jorge Luis Borges who gave the fullest account of the method. He described the insistence that Argentine artists deal with national traits and local colour as "arbitrary" and as a "European cult" which nationalists ought to reject as foreign. There were no camels in The Koran, he said, because only a falsifier, a tourist or a nationalist would have seen them; but Mohammed, happily unconcerned, knew that he could be an Arab without camels. Borges, indeed, confessed that for years he had tried and failed to capture Buenos Aires in his stories, but that it was only when he called Paseo Colon the rue de Toulon and only when he dubbed the country house of Adrogue Fiste-le-Roy that his readers found the true Argentine flavour. "Precisely because I did not set out to find that flavour, because I had abandoned myself to a dream, I was able to accomplish, after so many years, what I had previously sought in vain".59 Wilde advanced the same argument when he said that the more imitative an is, the less it expresses its time and place: what compels belief in a portrait is not its fidelity to the subject so much as its embodiment of the spirit of the artist. Borges, for his part, found that being Argentine was either a fate or a mere affectation: if the former, then it was futile to try consciously for an Argentine subject or tone, and if the latter, then that was one mask better left unworn, for it could only be donned in the degrading pretense that the mask actually was the face.