Inventing Ireland

by Declan Kiberd

  What troubled Hogan and Father Shaw in the 1916 writings was their unapologetic invocation of Wolfe Tone and, by extension, the "godless" anti-Catholic rebels of the French Revolution. Father Shaw, citing clerical law, objected to Pearse's description of the Jacobin Tone as a prophet. There may indeed have been a calculated snub to ecclesiastical authority when Pearse wrote of being "rebaptized in the Fenian faith", an organization which was itself under interdiction by the Catholic church. However, most modern movements rapidly develop what has been called "a secular equivalent of the church", often the primary system of education in decolonizing states, "imbued with revolutionary and republican principles and content, and conducted by the secular equivalent of the priesthood",43 i.e., teachers like Pearse.

  Going even further back in history, a study of the art of the French Revolution would demonstrate a set of effects similar to those achieved by Pearse. David's famous painting of "Marat Murdered in his Bath" explicitly linked the image to that of Christ in a Pietà, with the implication that the new martyr could fittingly replace the old.44 There are two ways of viewing this manoeuvre. It might be seen as an attempt to extend and update a vibrant Christian tradition, to take a somewhat jaded form and animate it with real contemporary feeling; or it could be viewed as a subversive tactic, which converted the preceding Christian cult into an echo or parody of the more urgent and authentic contemporary image. With his synthesizing mind, Pearse saw an unbroken continuity from Cuchulain through Christ to Tone, and he would surely have preferred the first explanation, but there may have been among his comrades some – Connolly and MacDiarmada spring to mind – who favoured the second. The former usage could have been defended as retrieving Christian language from recent debased applications (as when English bishops blessed guns that went off to fight imperial wars); the latter might be seen as discrediting it entirely, once the latent content had emerged. The phase of self-invention followed hard upon the antiquarian phase, as the latent content of the revolution (a welfare state, a native republic) emerged from beneath its manifest symbols (Cuchulain, Jesus Christ).

  The Edmund Burke who regarded revolution as a "dramatic performance" and "stage effect"45 would have had little difficulty in making such a separation. Nor would he have been overly surprised at the difficulty which many students of 1916 have in separating the event from its mesh of defining texts. Many literary works, especially plays, had far greater an influence on the Rising than the event itself had on those like Sean O'Casey who came to write of it afterwards. There is a real sense in which The Plough and the Stars (1926) derives more from On Baile's Strand (1903, 1906) than from the Dublin streets: the notorious scene where Pearse's speechifying is juxtaposed against the prostitute Rosie Redmond plying her trade in a pub seems a deliberate reworking of Yeats's play, in which a posturing Cuchulain, at war with the waves, proves utterly irrelevant to the needs of a hungry fool and a blind beggar. But, no sooner has that been said than one is reminded that On Baile's Strand may have had far more effect on the Rising itself: after all, its scene where the proletarians mimic the antics of a self-defeating royalty seems an anticipatory version of the revolution (as well as a clear borrowing of the by-play of Hal and Falstaff in Shakespeare's Henriad). What is at issue here is a dialectical tension between an action and its representation, a tension most wittily captured in lines from a recent novel of the Northern Ireland conflict:

  "But it is not like 1916".

  "It wasn't like 1916 in 1916".

  There was a long silence.46

  The whole event has been remorselessly textualized: for it – more than any of its individual protagonists – became an instantaneous martyr to literature.

  That process was foretold by Yeats in his poem "Easter 1916", which brought his waverings in the role of national bard to crisis-point. It enacts the quarrel within his own mind between his public, textual duty (to name and praise the warrior dead) and his more personal urge (to question the wisdom of their sacrifice). The poem speaks, correspondingly, with two voices, and sometimes enacts in single phrases ("terrible beauty") their contestation. The sanction for the first voice from bardic tradition was strong: but the force of the second was becoming more apparent to Yeats who increasingly defined freedom in terms of self-expression. He was abandoning the rather programmatic nationalism of his youth for a more personal version of Irish identity.

  Now young men had re-enacted Cuchulain's sacrifice in Dublin's streets and Yeats felt compelled to confront his growing scruples about such heroism. The power of his poem derives from the honesty with which he debates the issue, in the process postponing until the very last moment his dutiful naming of the dead warriors: this had been, of course, the practice of bards after a battle, in which they invariably claimed that the land had been redeemed by the sacrifice. Yeats's entire lyric is a sequence of strategies for delaying such naming: and the expectations deliberately aroused by the tide, which suggests unqualified encomium, are sharply contested, and disappointed, and then finally honoured in the text.

  The "them" of the opening line are not identified, being nameless butts of past Yeatsian jokes who inhabited with this poet a world of casual comedy, where motley was the sign of a hopeless national buffoonery. The constipated repetition of "polite meaningless words" evokes a place seemingly incapable of change, of comic characters who, in Aristotelian terms, must go on repeating the same mechanical errors. However, these unpromising souls do manage to rise to the mythical out of their matter-of-fact beginnings, achieving the tragic transformation of pity and terror:

  All changed, changed utterly:

  A terrible beauty is born.47

  What is evoked is the moment when the fragmented comic world of individuals at cross purposes is replaced by a lyric solidarity of tragic oneness, and individual attributes are subsumed into myth. "The persons on the stage, let us say, greaten", observes Yeats in an essay on the tragic theatre, "till they are humanity itself".48

  Yet still he names no names, perhaps out of tact, more likely because he wants to assume intimacy and to place himself at the centre of an event which happened during one of his absences from Ireland. "That woman" (Constance Markievicz), "this man" (Patrick Pearse), "the other" (Thomas MacDonagh) are all discussed, praised, and their lost beauty, learning and literary skill are pondered. Even the despised John MacBride (who married Maud Gonne and was deemed a drunken lout in the earlier dream) must now be numbered, however reluctantly, in the song. Despite most "bitter wrong" done to the poet's beloved, he also has been transformed.

  The third stanza offers an accounting of the joys of life which might have made these idealists reconsider their "dream" of death. As in "The Stolen Child", the homely realities of farm life and household animals seem concrete and alluring against the stone-enchanted heart. The horse-hoof plashing in the real pool seems somehow preferable to the winged horse ridden by Pearse in the previous stanza. The changes of cloud, birds and riders seem more vital than the unchanging stone: yet they only "seem" so, for without that stone in its fixity no ripples could vibrate at all. So the poet, with scrupulous exactitude, claims only that sacrifice "can" make a stone of the heart. By refusing to change the rebels have, in fact, changed everything, yet even in that recognition the poet is still not convinced that they were right. For "Easter 1916" is a covert love-lyric, written to soften an unrelenting woman, and the poet wishes to ask Maud to forget the stone for the flashing joy of the fully lived life. His own fanatical devotion has left him childless at fifty, a man who in another poem of the period would contrast the passionate coupling of Coole's swans with his own lonely mortality: and here the swans become hens calling out to their moorcocks, while the poet feels himself the victim of a dilemma ("excess of love") no different from that posed by the rebels' reckless self-sacrifice:

  What if excess of love

  Bewildered them till they died?

  The final stanza collapses into a series of terrified questions, none of them properly answered, but each suppr
essed by an even more pressing interrogation. The post-bardic desperation of a prayer to God:

  O when may it suffice?

  is checked at once by a return to traditional duties:

  That is Heaven's part, our part

  To murmur name upon name . . .

  However, other questions will not be denied, though none can be entertained for long:

  What is it but nightfall?

  No, no, not night but death;

  Was it needless death after all?

  For England may keep faith

  For all that is done and said.

  We know their dream: enough

  To know they dreamed and are dead.

  Those questions are charged with personal passion, while the statements are a fulfilment of bardic duties, shot through with tones of increasing resignation. The demetaphorizing imagination which could reduce a Pegasus to a splashing horse now revokes all romantic he-is-not-dead-but-sleeping evasions. This movement is complex, for it countervails the attempt by the rebels to raise their mundane lives to the level of the mythical. The rebels dreamed – as the poet had earlier "dreamed" MacBride a mere lout – and the verb suggests that they may have all been mistaken in various ways: but the poet writes as one waking to a new reality.

  The hardest question of all is the last: what if the rebels' love was converted by the magic stone to hatred of England? But the thought is insupportable: and so the personal interrogations of the poet, about the cost to human integrity of such drastic self-simplification, are drowned out by the somewhat perfunctory but conclusive intonations of the bard:

  I write it out in a verse –

  MacDonagh and MacBride

  And Connolly and Pearse

  Now and in time to be,

  Wherever green is worn,

  Are changed, changed utterly,

  A terrible beauty is born.

  The very stridency of the triple negation back in "no, no, not night but death" indicates how much forcing is needed to suppress those questions, if the poet is to deliver the encomium promised in the tide. Those questions prove so searing as to throw into doubt the self-assurance of the refrain, a doubt already voiced in terms of the costs to their sexuality of the political convictions of Maud Gonne and Constance Markievicz.

  At the outset of the poem, the refrain was declamatory enough: by the end of the third stanza, however, it is omitted, as if the poet is no longer sure that he has anything to celebrate. When it returns at the close, it comes back shamefacedly, as an admittedly rhetorical device to suppress the terrifying interrogation. It would be voiced hesitantly by a skilled reader, with the terror rather than the beauty now uppermost. The public bard is still trying to complete a poem which will please Maud Gonne, while the private lover is still hoping to cure her of political rigidity, urging her to forget the stone for the call of the moorcock. And, since "Easter 1916" is a love poem, its final refrain must be interrogative more than assertive, ironic rather than literal. The very fact that it is based on Gonne's recorded response to the Rising ("tragic dignity has returned to Ireland") would suggest that the poet can endorse it only with severe qualification. That qualification may be read into the rather clichéd tones of the closing lines, which seem sometimes like fillers ("Now and in time to be") or like jaded formulae ("Wherever green is worn"), indicating Yeats's bitter awareness that this utterance, too, will become part of the inevitable simplification of a complex event. As a national (rather than nationalist) poet, he has tried to articulate the contesting feelings of rival Irish groups at the time – the feelings of the rebels' supporters after the executions; the sentiments of those still convinced of England's goodwill; the pacifists who saw violence in terms of human cost; the ascendancy mockers. However, he foresees that these strands will all be forgotten, as the rebels are converted into classroom clichés and his own poem quoted only for a refrain which will be ripped out of its wider context. The rebels are changed, but into the fixity of heroes in a museum.

  The underlying strategy is a delayed delivery of the audience's expectation, whose compelled attention the poet holds while he lodges all the necessary reservations. This allows Yeats to explore his own deeper affinities with the ascetic revolutionary mentality, so that his questioning of the rebels is not ill-bred, since it is really his interrogation of himself. Phrases from the writings of the dead men haunt his lines: for example, Pearse's "excess of love" which allows his "fool" to die for the Gael, leaving a sorrowful "mother" naming her child. The poem is thus a disguised exercise in inter-textuality, with the words of dead men modified by those of a living poet, who has grown terrified of the coercive power of texts. He goes through the inevitable guilt-ridden feelings of a survivor who has seen others live out more fully the implications of his Cuchulain, his Cathleen, his world. This may hint at a further reason for his prolonged hesitation to name: if to name is to assert power over the rebels, then to refuse that option is to admit their power over him, an influence discernible in his complimentary use of quotations and metaphors from their writings.

  Dining with society personages in England when news broke of the Rising, Yeats must have felt himself marginal to the event: and his poem becomes his subsequent attempt to insert himself back into history, to regain control and to earn the right to perform that final bardic naming. Ironically, by the time the poet has won himself that right, he can no longer enjoy it. History has taken fire as virtue, but it has taken fire in someone else's head.

  Twelve

  The Plebeians Revise the Uprising

  Such was the interaction between street and stage in the years after 1916 that the following note appeared on the programme for Sean O'Casey's first successful play: "Any gunshots heard during the performance are part of the script. Members of the audience must at all times remain seated". The Shadow of a Gunman was produced at the Abbey Theatre on 23 April 1923, while the final gunfire of the Civil War erupted sporadically through the ensuing, uneasy week. The events treated in the play had taken place less than three years earlier, in May 1920, but Joseph Holloway could write in his diary, after returning home from the production, of "that stirring period in our history".1 It was as if, saddened by the frustrations of the 1921 Treaty and by the fratricide of the Civil War, he was already investing the War of Independence with the aura of a golden age when all Irish people could agree on what they were fighting for. Such nostalgia overlooked the massive suffering endured by many townlands at the hands of the Black-and-Tans. Not the least of O'Casey's achievements in The Shadow of a Gunman was to remind sentimental nationalists of just how wasteful and unheroic any war – even a war of national liberation – can be.

  O'Casey was a working-class realist who focused his Dublin plays not on the deeds of warriors but on the pangs of the poor. These people found their streets invaded by rival armies who used them as shooting-galleries for weeks on end. O'Casey's deepest indictment of the rebels was that he allowed them to appear so seldom on his stage, as if to suggest the irrelevance of their lofty ideals to the actual needs of the urban poor. As far back as 1914, he had decided that James Connolly had made a terrible mistake in bringing his Irish Citizen Army into a direct alliance with the nationalist forces of the Irish Volunteers. He reminded Connolly of his oft-repeated maxim that you could paint all the pillar-boxes green and hoist the tricolour over Dublin Castle, and yet achieve nothing, for unless there was a change in the distribution of wealth, you would simply be exchanging one set of exploiters for another. He resigned from the Citizen Army on this and a number of related principles.2 Events thereafter in Irish public life unfolded very much as he had feared.

  His fullest artistic expression of the ensuing disappointment is in Juno and the Paycock. There, the stock melodramatic device of a legacy which turns out to be false would be taken as his sarcastic metaphor for what he derided as the fake inheritance of Irish republicanism. Equally, the melodramatic device of the rapacious Englishman who leaves a decent Irish girl pregnant could be read as his ind
ictment of a dishonest and over-hasty British withdrawal, which seemed to create far more problems than it solved. The execution of Johnny Boyle in the play by former comrades was an apt image of a land sundered by civil war: but for O'Casey the most depressing feature of all was the sudden pretensions to respectability among republican families, as yesterdays rebels rapidly became the new managers and exploiters of the infant state. The Boyle family, who had once encouraged their son's republican principles, end up mocking him as a "die-hard", leading to the erosion of his self-confidence which causes him to betray his principles. But, long years before he had written this script, O'Casey had foreseen it all.

  It was, in a sense, inevitable that he would identify his cause as that of the Dublin poor. He was born in 1880, one of thirteen children, eight of whom died in childhood. Dublin in those years was a raw and desperate place: its death-rate (forty-four in every thousand of population) was worse than the slums of Calcutta. Almost one-third of its citizens lived in tenements (many officially listed as unfit for habitation), and over two-thirds of the tenement-dwellers lived in a single room. On average, over fifty people lived in each tenement. Such a setting dictated the controlling mood of the Dublin plays, each of which is a study in claustrophobia, in the helpless availability of persons, denied any right to privacy and doomed to live in one another's pockets. Many of O'Casey's poetic speeches are attempts by characters to create a more spacious world in the imagination than the drab, constricted place in which they are expected to live. In that respect, O'Casey is an heir to Synge, who had found in the rich idiom of the peasantry an implicit critique of a monochromatic world. Moreover, all the nervous joking by characters about money-lending and evictions was rooted in the social realities of the time. Almost one-third of tenement-dwellers were evicted annually for inability to pay rent: hardly surprising when the average wage for an adult male was fourteen shillings for a seventy-hour week. In evidence given to the official enquiry into the cause of the 1913 Lock-Out, the labour leader Jim Larkin told the commission what every worker in Dublin already knew: that the dire accommodation in Mountjoy prison was nonetheless far superior to that on offer in the Dublin slums.3