This was, of course, initially a problem for the rebels, who solved it by using religious and mystical imagery: but for O'Casey, this was just not good enough. Pearse achieved a partial solution of the crisis of representation by resort to a biblical language: O'Casey, faced with the same difficulty, refused to attempt a solution at all. This is scarcely the radical ploy it has sometimes been made to seem. Rather than admit the powerful disruption of both Christian and Celtic codes by their subversive combination in the rhetoric of Pearse, O'Casey opted for the much safer, traditional repetition of Christian moralism: his Bessie Burgess, the loyalist alcoholic, is centralized. While the rebels are portrayed as prating of blood-sacrifice, she is extolled as the one personality onstage who actually honours that code. The gunmen are depicted by O'Casey, and by later revisionist historians, as Catholic bigots rather than as men who by rising risked damnation by official Catholicism. The Pearse on O'Casey's stage does not die, but is a dealer in the deaths of others: the brute facts of history, however, show that the gunmen died for the people, just as the people also died for gunmen.
O'Casey does, of course, achieve some piercing insights. He is acute on the self-deception of some rebels, as they flee the war-zone. Clitheroe fires a warning-shot over the heads of looters: however, he refuses to fire directly at them because "bad as they are, they're Irish men and women". His companion, Captain Brennan, follows James Connolly in asserting that the looters should be shot: "If these slum lice gather at our heels again, plug one o' them or I'll soon shock them with a shot or two myself".25 While his anger is understandable, the snobbish contempt with which it is stated is not. As a matter of record, looters took mainly food and clothing, risking death to do so.26 The phrase "slum lice" indicates a gulf of misunderstanding between some insurgents and the people in whose name they rose, a misunderstanding which has dogged the efforts of many republican militants in the decades since. The respectability of some Gaelic Leaguers was coming home to roost.
All of this is based on socialist criteria which people may admire or not as they please, but the single-mindedness of the critique may reduce the stature of the play. Great literature always has a place for the essential criticism of the code to which it finally adheres, which means that the play, if it is to be truly artistic should render the full pressure of the nationalist appeal, especially if the superior validity of socialism is to be established. In The Plough and the Stars, however, the nationalist case is never put, merely mocked. This has led Seamus Deane to complain that all of O'Casey's gunmen are shadows:27 not for even twenty minutes of a two-and-a-half hour play are the rebels allowed to state their case. The extracts used from Pearse's speeches are highly selective, focusing on his blood-rhetoric at the grave of O'Donovan Rossa, but giving no indication of his support for Dublin workers during the Lock Out of 1913.
Pearse's recantation in that year of earlier attacks on Synge showed his identification with the playwright in a martyr's role, but also the progressive refinement of his literary sensibility under the influence of MacDonagh. Connolly was also a conditioning force in those years, leading Pearse to move beyond the notion of a single Christlike redeemer to the idea of a people as its own Messiah. This was of a piece with O'Casey's rejection of individualist heroism; and, indeed, as 1916 approached, Pearse often seemed to out-socialize Connolly, as when he wrote of the democratic effect on nationalism of "the more virile labour organizations", or when he declared that "no private right to property is good against the public right of the nation. But the nation is under a moral obligation so to exercise its public right as to secure strictly equal rights and liberties to every man and woman within the nation".28
An urge to self-justification mars the artistic balance of O'Casey's play, an urge which probably had roots in the survivor-guilt of a former Citizen Army man. He recoiled, for honourable reasons, from the carnage of 1916, but the natural aggression that remained unpurged in his personality was finally vented on the rebels in his text. He was rigidly selective in the motives attributed to them. Doubtless, there were vain men in the Rising such as Captain Clitheroe, men as interested in self-advancement as in serving a cause; and doubtless there were weak men, like Lieutenant Langon, whose courage failed them when they were wounded or fell. But there were others too, whom O'Casey does not depict but who evoked heartfelt tributes from their enemies. In shaping his myth of the Rising, O'Casey was capable of inaccuracy, as when he portrayed the rebels using dum-dum bullets: even the official British enquiry found no evidence of that. Disgusted by a violence he had once endorsed, O'Casey felt the need to distort the evidence, exaggerating the mendacity of some rebels and the virtues of their British opponents.
In general, his rebels are shown as vain, strutting fellows in gaudy uniforms at the start of the play, and as frightened cowards all too anxious to doff their green jackets for the safe anonymity of civilian clothing at the end. O'Casey achieves a typically piercing, but partial, insight on this point. One of his reasons for resigning from the Citizen Army was his opposition to the wearing of uniforms, which he felt would simply mark out volunteers more closely as targets for their military enemies.29 This was no better than the costume drama to which Marx had said all previous revolutions had been reduced. All the Cuchulanoid rhetoric all the revivalist archaisms, had been a story of mistaken identity in which the protagonists were never free to become themselves. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Marx had written:
An entire people, which had imagined that by means of a revolution it had imparted to itself an accelerated power of motion suddenly finds itself set back into a defunct epoch and, in order that no doubt as to the relapse may be possible, the old dates rise again, the old chronology, the old names, the old edicts which had long become a subject of antiquarian erudition, and the old minions of the law, who had seemed long decayed.30
O'Casey, like Marx, had no doubt that when a real revolution finally happened, the people would not mistake themselves for historic actors, but would wear their own clothes.
This insight is wonderfully dramatized by O'Casey: moreover, the fact that the tenements were once the splendid town-houses of the Georgian gentry permits him to play off the irony of inappropriate garb against the irony of an inappropriate setting for such everyday squalor and sudden heroics. In such moments, however, he is too strict with others and not half strict enough with himself. After all, that crisis of representation which troubled the rebels also bedevils the artist, because of the inability of inherited forms to contain an unprecedented action: and there is no evidence that O'Casey addresses the problem with any rigour. His play offers no formal innovation of its own, resting content with familiar techniques, and it takes no account of the possibility that the rebels themselves resorted to traditional imagery as a camouflage for their radical innovations. When Cuchulain is used to underwrite a welfare state, or Christ to validate the process of decolonization, then the donning of historical garb may not be quite as conservative as O'Casey thought. Nietzsche had argued that even modern man "needs history because it is the storage closet in which all the costumes are kept": such a one notices that none really fits him, so he keeps trying on more and more, unable to accept the fact that he can never be really well-dressed "because no social role in modem times can ever be a perfect fit".31 All one can do is wriggle about in the old forms and, in doing that, improvise something slightly new: but O'Casey despises even that strategy.
He is unable, therefore, to allow for any complexity of motive. There can be no suggestion that the Rising might have been Clitheroe's way of seeking to advance the fortunes of his family and install a government which would dismantle the tenements in an independent Ireland. O'Casey, instead, has him return to the Citizen Army because he is bored with his recently-married wife and anxious for the social acclaim that accompanies the new rank of captain. There can be no rendition, either onstage or off, of the hope generated by nationalism at the time in the hearts of many socialists. Both Marx and Engels had argue
d that the Irish had a duty to pursue national rights in order to promote international socialism: only if British rule in Ireland were broken could socialists in Europe expect the collapse of imperialism and with it of chauvinist attitudes in Britain itself. Connolly had contended that until the national question was solved, socialism would never blossom in Ireland, a belief vindicated in the decades since his death, when a social revolution was prevented by a fixation upon the politics of partition. O'Casey, however, does not embody those arguments at any phase of his play: nor does he make it apparent that the young rebels of 1916 were but part of a European movement.
Pearse's sanguinary rhetoric is divorced from its cultural context, in order to heighten its ferocity: but it was all too typical of its time. To say, in 1915, as Pearse did, that "the old heart of the earth needed to be warmed with the red wine of the battlefields. Such august homage was never offered to God as this, the homage of millions of lives gladly given for love of country"32 was not so very different from the lines of Charles Péguy:
Happy are those who have died in a just wan
Happy the ripe stalks and the harvested grain.
Nor was it at variance with Sigmund Freud's declaration (also in 1915) that unless it is placed constantly in jeopardy, life becomes "as shallow as an American flirtation" and that only with the prospect of ten thousand deaths a day "has it recovered its full content and become interesting again".33 To the contemporary mind, this is hateful claptrap, but it perfectly reflected the death-wish of many chivalric young men, who truly believed that duke et decorum est pro patria mori. The suicidal assassin at Sarajevo epitomized the fashion; and Pearse was a very representative specimen of what the historian Robert Wohl has called "the generation of 1914". Wohl says that this generation was composed mainly of intellectuals living in large cities, who concerned themselves "with the decline of culture and the waning of vital energies": they were "exalted by the conviction that they represented the future in the present" and dismayed by "their problematic relationship to the masses they would have liked to lead".34 Pearse spoke very deliberately as a member of that generation when he opened a passage in "Peace and the Gael" by saying that "the last sixteen months have been the most glorious in the history of Europe".35 Like others of his generation, he clung to the hope that war would turn out to be a rite of purification, and he considered spiritual values more important than economic facts. He, too, was caught between "a desire to spring forward into the future and a longing to return to the hierarchies and faith of the past".36
If this detracts from Pearse's originality as a thinker, it serves also to defend him against attempts to portray him as a bloodthirsty fanatic The "European" dimension of Easter 1916 is swiftly passed over in The Plough and the Stars, so that the playwright can present nationalism as a pathology. It is never examined or presented in all its mesmeric power rather it is caricatured. The superior validity of socialism is not so much demonstrated as assumed. In consequence, the drama itself is by no means an example of The Playwright as Thinker. The bracing confrontation between nationalism and socialism was well known to O'Casey, if only through Francis Sheehy Skeffington's open letter to Thomas MacDonagh written and printed in the Irish Citizen of May 1915: in it the pacifist radical denied that the war proposed against England could be anything better than "organized militarism".37 Yet, when the Rising came, Skeffington risked and lost his life in the attempt to prevent discreditable looting: though on principle he could not be a fighter, he became in O'Casey's own words "the ripest ear of corn that fell in Easter Week".38 This did not impel the dramatist to include his viewpoint in a play which does not brook such subtle intellectual discriminations. It was hardly surprising that Skeffington's widow should have been among its foremost assailants.
The robust, rolling language of the characters in The Plough may be linked to the strident attitudinizing of the playwright, for his failure of political imagination leads to a dramatic weakness as well. There can be no inner conflict in a play filled with set-piece speeches rather than two-way conversations. And the refusal to present the nationalist case can have only one result: it leads O'Casey to conclude that those Dublin slum-dwellers who were fired by the nobility and pragmatism of the rebel leaders were fools. By denying these factors, O'Casey makes the people seem like dupes, with the paradoxical consequence that Ireland's "worker playwright" finds himself satirizing the common people for their blindness. If men like Clitheroe and Connolly have fallen for an abstraction without substance, then this deprives their death of much dignity.
This satirical treatment of the Dublin poor has further implications. Though it is often said that O'Casey's gift was characterization, there are in truth no characters in O'Casey's slum: rather it is populated with urban leprechauns and sloganeering caricatures, forever jabbering in a sub-language of their own which owes more to the texts of Synge than to the idiom of the Dublin tenements. Those individualizing phrases accorded to figures soon grow wearisome and repetitive. Fluther Good's love of alliteration is entertaining in its way ("It'll take more than that to flutther a feather o' Fluther"), but it is a contrived literary way, the very reverse of the hard-edged realism for which O'Casey is claimed to stand.39 Fluther's repeated "derogatories" invite the literate, theatrical audience to patronize rather than understand this half-articulate workman in a manner which is not all that different from the "superior" British indulgence of blarney in the nineteenth century. The lovable peasant has been thereby introjected into the native Irish psyche, to reappear as a twentieth-century slum-dweller. The rolling cadences of Synge and the forms of the traditional Abbey play are ill-suited to the rhythms of urban life: O'Casey repeated but did not remodel them. Unlike Pearse and the rebels, he failed to make the older forms vibrate with an authentic contemporary feeling.
His Synge-song is admittedly lovely, but well removed from the clipped, cutting edge of inner-city Dublinesque eloquence, which always contains an implied rebuke to the poverty which has given rise to it. Fluther's eloquence, on the other hand, is poetry talk rather than poetry: its patent factitiousness permits the audience to find him charming rather than worrying. It is O'Casey's invitation to his knowing followers not to distress themselves unduly with the plight of a worker whose linguistic reach hilariously outstrips his educational grasp. If pastoral obfuscations of rural poverty were the work of an affluent urban middle class, then this inner-city pastoral was also its invention, proof positive that decades of rising food prices had left the poor citizens as outcasts of the new state, and outcasts who could now safely be sentimentalized by those who had helped to repress them. The old canard that O'Casey's plays attracted the poorer people of Dublin to the Abbey was exploded by C. S. Andrews, who described the actual audience for The Plough as the new Free State élite.40 Though there was much in the play to make such people gasp, there was even more to soothe and to reassure. This was especially the case in the handling of dramatic form: the author was so incurious, so derivative in this that one can only wonder if he ever suspected that his art might be complicit with the counter-revolution.
In The Plough and the Stars the radical tradition of the strong woman and hesitant male, which lent so much excitement to the plays of Wilde, Synge, Shaw and Yeats, is degraded to the level of a dead formula. The critique of the subterranean English elements in Irish nationalism is prosecuted skilfully enough: the rebels and the British soldiers accuse one another of "not playing the game", and a prim Victorianism underlies Ginnie Gogan's protestations of Irish national chastity. As always, however, O'Casey is far more a prisoner of the prevailing English stereotypical forms than are any of his characters: in his use of music-hall routines and in his Arnoldian view of Irish eloquence. This man who had been scathing of the Abbey's charge of a shilling admission-fee nonetheless submitted his play to its directors. O'Casey gave the appearance of challenging a triumphalist nationalism in his audience: but the truth is that he outraged only the radical republicans in it. Covertly, his play exercised a powerf
ul appeal over the new élite, a grouping which had already begun to deny the very processes which had led to its installation. There was, of course, an element of bravado in the prostitute/flag scene on its first staging in 1926, creating a tension between platform and audience which may have served to distract from the lack of inner tension in the text. But with every passing year, as the ruling élites grew less and less radical in thinking, the appeal of O'Casey's Dublin plays actually increased.41 He could be touted as a plebeian genius, given a welcome which was a testimony to the wonderful tolerance of the ruling order: but that order was never likely to be disturbed by his aborted dialectic his failure to carry through the implications of his more promising analyses.
The protests against The Plough and the Stars were led not by narrow-gauge nationalists but by socialist republicans like Liam O'Flaherty and Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington. Somewhere or other along the line, the young O'Casey's project had inverted itself: he who had glimpsed the future at a moment before it could be fully realized in history seemed to fall back, exhausted, upon the available forms. His failure was similar to that of the middle-class nationalists whom he despised: in decades to come they would ban republicans from their airwaves and demonize them in public debates, for much the same reasons that he kept them on the edge of his stage.
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