Inventing Ireland

by Declan Kiberd

  The Mayoites, on the other hand, never achieve a rudimentary self-awareness, but abjectly defer to a set of laws which they privately despise. Like hopeless provincials, they have no sense of their own presence. Christy's by-play with the mirror in the second act may be narcissistic, but it does serve to frame his face, raising it from a commonplace thing to the realms of self-reflexive art. The very representation of that face bestows on it an interest it would otherwise have lacked, the growth of consciousness in various characters being indicated in the repeated phrase of recognition "Is it me?" This is "the transformation which takes place in the subject when he assumes an image"52 . . . like those Aran Islanders who, contemplating Synge's photographs, saw themselves as if for the first time.

  The perfect mirror in The Playboy points forward to that moment when Christy will form a conception of himself, rather than existing as a conception of others. This is the first act in any revolutionary agenda, a moment reminiscent of that when an insurgent Mexican peasantry broke into the great houses of landowners to be stunned at the sight of their entire bodies in the vast mirrors.

  Until this point, Christy has been repeatedly described as one who is afraid of his own shadow, that shadow which is emblematic of his hidden potential, the dark, repressed aspects of himself: but he proceeds from that fear to active self-reflection in the mirror during the second act. This is, as yet, a somewhat superficial activity, an adolescent contemplation of ego rather than of self, but it nonetheless provides the means from which the self may finally be inferred. It is the psychological version, within the individual, of that rather revivalist form of nationalism which is self-conscious but not self-aware. Knowledge of the self rather than mere ego would be the personal version of liberation: and even as nationalism is a phase which a community must pass through en route to liberation, so the ego is an essential precondition for the revelation of self. If whole peoples can mistake nationalism for liberation, so there are egos which demand to be identified totally with the self, such as the inflated ego of Christy in Act Two. Equally, there are others which identify solely with the shadow side, persistently asserting their unworthiness, the self-loathing Christy of Act One. Integration can finally be achieved only by those who admit both positive and negative sides as authentic elements.53

  Those, like Christy, who start with the shadow-side, are more likely to reach this terminus than those who blissfully bask, without reflection, in the ego-image of the perfect mirror. Worshippers of ego, lacking the critical capacity, become prisoners of their own impulses, whereas those who reflect on ego attain objective insights into their dark side and that of others. They learn, as Christy does, that the shadow of which they are initially afraid, is the mirror of an opposite within, the Yeatsian antiself, a set of elements all the more powerful for having been repressed. The ego is the mirror of the superficial person. Christy as a mirror-self in the first half of the play was like all mirrors lacking any image of himself with the consequence that when an image showed in his mirror, it was the image of another's desire. By degrees, however, he moves from that passive state to one of active self-reflection, and so his behaviour is progressively less impulse-ridden and more deliberated: by the end, indeed, he can proclaim himself master of those forces which have been mastering him.

  In Act One, Christy speaks prose, a prose which befits the frightened boy he is. In the next act, he perfects a factitious lingo, too flowery and exotic to be true: "It's her like is fined to be handling merchandise in the heavens above".54 This is derided as "poetry talk" by the Widow Quin, who sees in it a falsely idealized account of "a girl you'd see itching and scratching, and she with a stale stink of poteen on her from selling in the shop". Such poetry talk is the interesting equivalent of the black-is-beautiful poetry of négritude, cultivated among the writers of Martinique in the 1940s. Fanon and Césaire were later to conclude that such exotic nativism was no final solution: and, in like manner, at the close of Act Three, Christy repudiates his former lyricism for an altogether more terse and telling language. He turns to the woman who had so recently loved him, but who now lights the sod to burn his leg, and on this occasion he offers no flowery speeches: "That's your kind, is it?"55 After early Yeatsian eloquence, late Yeatsian terseness. After revivalist baroque, Joyce's style of scrupulous meanness, his dignified assertion of a people's right to be colourless. After nationalism, liberation.

  Synge is arguably the most gifted Irish exponent of the three phases of artistic decolonization later described by Fanon. He effortlessly assimilated the culture of the occupying English and men proceeded to immerse himself in the native culture. Fanon's warning about the pitfalls of national consciousness is worth quoting at this point:

  The native intellectual who comes back to his people by way of cultural achievements behaves in fact like a foreigner. Sometimes, he has no hesitation in using a dialect in order to show his will to be as near as possible to the people . . . The culture that the intellectual leans towards is often no more than a stock of particularisms. He wishes to attach himself to the people; but instead he only catches hold of their outer garments.56

  This, or something very like it, has long been the nationalist description of Synge, to be found most recently in the account of Seamus Deane: but it is, of course, a description of the Christy of the second act. Unlike that Christy, however, Synge does catch hold of a great deal more than the outer garments of a folk culture: and he never behaves like a foreigner. In the history of Irish writing, he more than any other artist exposed the ways in which a torrent of "exotic" talk may be poor compensation for a failure to act. Denounced as a stage-Irish exaggeration, The Playboy actually offers a sharp critique of the verbal exaggeration associated with the stereotype. The play's counterpoising of fine words and failed action makes it a caustic study of the fatal Irish gift of the gab. It was a measure of Synge's own artistic maturity that he could satirize his own great gift even as he exploited it most fully. In The Playboy his art reached such a pitch of sophistication that it could even raise doubts about the medium through which those doubts were expressed.

  The only stage-Irish scenes enacted on the night of the riots were performed by the protesters in the pit. Synge himself claimed in an essay that the Abbey Theatre had "contrived by its care and taste to put an end to the reaction against the careless Irish humour of which everyone has had too much".57 That sentence broke out of the Anglo-Irish antithesis by shrewdly implying a criticism of both the colonialist stereotype and the nationalist reaction to it. In his own art, Synge wonderfully fused what was best in English and Gaelic tradition, often doing this within a single work, as in the short satire against the women who hated The Playboy:

  Lord, confound this surly sister,

  Blight her brow with blotch and blister;

  Cramp her larynx, lung, and liver,

  In her guts a galling give her.

  Let her live to earn her dinners

  In Mountjoy with seedy sinners.

  Lord, this judgement quickly bring,

  And I'm your servant, J. M. Synge.58

  The poem is in octosyllabic couplets, which Swift said were most suited to pungent, alliterative satire: but the notion of raising blisters on the brow of one who has spurned the writer's art is taken from Gaelic bards, who resorted to alliteration in such performances. So blended, the two traditions amount to something more than the sum of their parts, constituting – like the bilingual weave of Hiberno-English – a third term.

  Synge's Playboy, a product of similar blending, was a sort of blueprint for a new species of Irish artist. In his hands, the meaning of Gaelic tradition changed from something museumized to something modifiable, endlessly open. He sensed that the revivalists' worship of the past was based on their questionable desire to colonize and control it: but his deepest desire was to demonstrate the continuing power of the radical Gaelic past to disrupt the revivalist present. In the play, after all, Christy not only fails to kill his father but decides in the end that he
doesn't even want to: it is enough to know that the old man is now happily tractable to the son's future designs. This play is the "seething pot", into which Syngc cast the shards of threatened Irish traditions, out of which the learning of the future might emerge.59 In that context, it is hardly surprising that, decades after its first production, it should have been almost effortlessly translated into a Trinidadian version by Mustafa Matura under the revised tide The Playboy of the West Indies.

  REVOLUTION AND WAR

  REVOLUTION AND WAR

  The Parnell tragedy of 1891 had not spelled the end of the Home Rule movement, nor the collapse of parliamentary agitation. The Irish Party was badly split, but its members limped on: another attempt by Gladstone to introduce a Home Rule Bill in 1893 was defeated After 1895, the conservatives held power and unionists felt safe for the time being. A new leader, John Redmond emerged to rebuild the Irish Party in 1900 and to regain its old following. Things seemed to progress smoothly enough, especially when the Liberals were returned in 1906 with a strong likelihood that they would reopen the Irish question.

  Beneath the calm unruffled surface of Irish political life, however, things were changing. A gifted journalist named Arthur Griffith had become founder-editor of the United Irishman in 1899, a fiercely separatist paper which, though anti-militarist in ethos, called for a withdrawal of all Irish MPs from Westminster. Arguing that the Act of Union in 1800 had been illegal – purchased by bribery and corruption – Griffith suggested that, instead of attending parliament, Irish representatives should join with local councillors in a native government. Power was not something to be given or withheld at the whim of the British: it was a force inherent in the community, a force which Irish leaders could take and use in its name.1 In 1903 Griffith formed his National Council: and, along with groups such as the Gaelic League and Inghinidhe na hÉireann (Daughters of Erin), it provided the nucleus for Griffith's Sinn Féin launched in 1908 (the title means "ourselves", indicative of self reliance). Many members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood cultivated close friendships with Gaelic Leaguers (the Keating branch in Dublin was a hotbed of political revolutionaries)2 and with members of Sinn Féin. But the appeal of the latter was limited for a long time, despite its pacifist programme and its declared allegiance to the British monarch: in a 1908 election in North Leitrim, it was beaten by a two-to-one margin by the parliamentary party. As late as 1912, Patrick Pearse was still capable of supporting the Home Rule movement and its parliamentary party from a public platform. The House of Commons passed a Home Rule bill in that year, which the more conservative House of Lords could not delay for more than two years. It seemed that by 1914 the deposed capital of Dublin would regain its own parliament.

  These tortuous manoeuvrings were soon to be overtaken by a more volatile series of events. In northern Ireland unionist opinion, outraged by the Home Rule bill, pledged itself to raise arms against its imposition. Guns were run into Larne and the Ulster Volunteer Force was founded, to set up a provisional government in Ulster if need be. Almost a quarter of a million people signed the oath. The movement's leader was a Dublin lawyer, Edward Carson, who had prosecuted Oscar Wilde (a fellow-graduate of Trinity College) at his trial He was assured of the support of the Conservative Party in England In these circumstances, the Liberal Prime Minister, Asquith, persuaded Redmond that it would be foolish to coerce the unionists and wiser to retreat from his demand for Home Rule for the whole island Nationalists in the south viewed this development with dismay and, insisting that the northerners began what they would finish, they set up their own army called the Irish Volunteers.

  Meanwhile, urban unrest was growing. The Land Acts had permitted tenants to buy out holdings and food prices were high, so that rural Ireland seemed well content. In the cities, on the other hand things were bad: Dublin's poor were among the worst-fed and worst-housed in Ireland, and the death-rate was actually the worst of any major European city

  To challenge these inequities, two Labour leaders, Jim Larkin and James Connolly, founded the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union in 1908; and by 1913 its power had grown to such a degree that one of the city's foremost employers, William Martin Murphy, resolved to break it. He welded hundreds of employers into a federation which locked out 24,000 members of the union. Over the eight months that followed families starved; other workers went on supportive strikes; there were mass-meetings, riots and deaths. An Irish Citizen Army was established under Connolly to protect the workers, whose insurrection was effectively crushed The Catholic hierarchy, on hearing that the children of some Dublin dockers were to be shipped to sympathetic families in England intervened to condemn the plan; and Larkin was widely denounced as a troublemaker. However, the new mood of agitation survived the Lock Out.3

  The outbreak of war in Europe changed everything. Home Rule was put on hold for its duration: it was to be the post-war reward for Redmond's support for England and for "plucky Catholic Belgium". Tens of thousands of Irishmen volunteered to fight (as they saw it) for the rights of small nations; other members of the Irish Volunteers felt in all conscience that this was not their war. Among the IRB, members agreed that once again England's difficulty could be Ireland's opportunity: slowly but steadily it recruited more and more key members from Sinn Féin and the Gaelic League. It already exercised the decisive influence in the Irish Volunteers.

  The Rising came eventually on Easter Monday 1916 and lasted less than a week. Patrick Pearse, appalled by the slaughter of civilians, surrendered on the Saturday after Easter: over three hundred citizens had been killed in bombardment and fighting, as well as over one hundred and thirty British soldiers and seventy rebels. Though dubbed a "Sinn Féin rebellion" in the British press, it was nothing of the kind. It involved sections of the Irish Volunteers (under Patrick Pearse) and of the Irish Citizen Army (under James Connolly). The Pearse who by 1914 had concluded that the Gaelic League, as the Gaelic League, was a spent force now wanted an Ireland not merely Gaelic, but free.

  The Rising was probably doomed: but for Pearse and Connolly to strike was to win, since their gesture kept the spirit of nationhood alive. All the same, some of the rebels were jeered and spat upon by Dubliners irate at the ensuing wreckage. Many other Dubliners were reported in overseas papers, however, as warmly cheering rebel gallantry4 It was the over-reaction of the British authorities which gave the insurgents the retrospective status of people's heroes. Word leaked out about the murder of Francis Sheehy Skeffington, the pacifist and socialist, who had tried to prevent looting of bombed-out shops and who had been arrested and summarily shot. Even worse was the painfully protracted execution of fifteen rebel leaders between May 3 and 12, despite a strong consensus that they should have been treated as prisoners-of-war. Martial law was imposed and 3,500 people were arrested more than twice the number which had actually taken part in the Rising. Those participants who were not shot were interned, along with other nationalists, in camps which became schools for the coming war.

  By 1918 the war-weary British, whose military ranks had been depleted were threatening conscription on a surly and mutinous Ireland Redmond had badly lost the initiative and misread the public mood about the war. Running on an anti-conscription ticket, Sinn Féin candidates swept all before them in the December elections, capturing 73 seats to the parliamentary party's 6. Their members applied Griffith's policy, set up their own parliament (Dáil Éireann), proclaimed their allegiance to the republic of Pearse and Connolly, and began the programme of passive resistance decreed in the pages of the United Irishman. Alternative courts were set up without the paraphernalia of English wigs and gowns. In backrooms of public houses and in kitchens on outlying farms, an entirely illegal set of judges created a system in opposition to that of the British courts. They helped restore self-esteem to a community anxious to curb the kind of violence which erupts in time of social disorder, and anxious also to project itself as ready for the responsibilities of self-government. Some of the punishments were rather unorthodox: ban
ishment to another county, to an offshore island, even to England where one MP protested against the use of his country "as a sort of convict settlement for men deported by Sinn Féin".5 By 1920 Under-Secretary Cope was admitting that these courts were doing far more to erode British rule than the assassination campaign spearheaded by Michael Collins.

  The war of independence in which Collins played a leading part from 1919 to 1921 was a brutal affair. The rebels shot civil servants and policemen, raided and bombed barracks, ambushed the British forces and ranged across the countryside in "flying columns". Their opponents executed suspects without trial, terrorized republican families and, on several occasions, burned out entire townships or communities by way of reprisal for alleged disloyalty. (The notorious Black-and-Tans were particularly guilty in this regard and are still hated in Irish folk memory.) World opinion, especially that of Americans, was brought to bear on the British and in December 1921, after prolonged negotiations, they signed a Treaty with the Irish. This offered dominion status, but only to twenty-six southern counties: the six northern counties of Ulster would remain in British hands. Michael Collins, in his more optimistic moments, called it "the freedom to achieve freedom". In a darker mood, he privately conceded that in signing it he had signed his own death warrant.6

  One of the other signatories was Arthur Griffith: he persuaded a majority of the Dáil to ratify the Treaty by 14 votes to 57. Éamon de Valera, the sole surviving commander from the Rising, argued that the Dáil had no right to do wrong. He and his followers opposed the oath of loyalty to the British crown. (Though, subsequently, they would claim to have also opposed the Treaty on the basis of its partitioning of Ireland, this featured much more briefly in the Treaty debate.) Instead of dominion status, de Valera proposed that Ireland have an "external association" with the British Empire, thus being free to conduct itself as a republic in external affairs.