Thus, Christy Mahon walks off the stage in control of his delighted parent in a situation which has been captured by Fanon: "At no time do we find a really painful clash. The father stood back before the new world and followed in his son's footsteps".16 The old-fashioned respect for the young, which Wilde had jocosely suggested might be dying out at the start of the 1890s, would be evident again for three decades, even in the poetry of Yeats, whose denunciations of old age are a pervasive theme. Common to many great authors of the Irish risorgimento is the notion of self-begetting. Wilde's enactment of this myth has been fully described: but Shaw's career was predicated even more self-consciously on the glories of the man who fathers and authorizes himself. His father was wholly inadequate, in both the breadwinner's and the paternal role. George Carr Shaw took his young bride Lucinda to that unlikeliest of honeymoon spots, Liverpool, and got so drunk on the first night that he was incapable of sexual activity and had to be undressed by his frustrated partner. When she opened his wardrobe and a shower of bottles cascaded out, she knew that she was doomed. In later years, young Bernard would ask "Mother, is papa drunk?", only to receive the bitter reply "Is he ever anything else?"17
Shaw grew so ashamed of his connection to this inadequate father that he suppressed the very names which linked them, recreating himself as "GBS", "the self-invented child of his own writings".18 When the public records office in Dublin was burned years later during the Civil War, the playwright announced a further breach with his ancestry by boasting to journalists: "I am an Irishman without a birth certificate".19 The genteel poverty induced by the father's drunkenness meant that Shaw escaped university and the generally desultory attempts by headmasters to educate him in received ideas. His mother was so busy pursuing her musical career that she neglected him, with the consequence that "all the work of disciplining and educating myself, which should have been done for me as a child, I had to do for myself".20 Indeed, Lucinda Shaw was so distracted by her music-teacher Vandaleur Lee that her son sometimes wondered whether this man, and not George Carr Shaw, might not be his actual father. He was happy, at all events, to appoint Lee as a sort of surrogate father, along with his uncle Walter:
This widened my outlook very considerably. Natural parents should bear in mind that the more supplementaries their children find, the better they will know that it takes all sorts to make a world. Also, that though there is always the risk of being corrupted by bad parents, the natural ones may be – probably ten per cent of them actually are – the worst of the lot.21
Here, as in the cases of Yeats, Joyce and many others, the revolt of the son is not the usual cliché of rebellion against a tyrannical parent, but the subtler instance of a protest against a colourful but self-divided father's inability to offer any clear lead at all.
All children in colonies, writes Salman Rushdie in Midnight's Children, possess this power to reinvent their parents and to multiply their fathers as the need arises. Saleem Sinai, the protagonist of Rushdie's novel, has "the gift of inventing new parents for myself whenever necessary":22 since he was born at the founding moment of the new state, this is appropriate, because India too is trying to father itself. A land which was an imperialist fiction attempts to constitute itself an irrefutable fact, with "a new myth to celebrate, because a nation which had never previously existed was about to win its freedom . . . catapulting us into a country which would never exist, except by the efforts of a phenomenal collective will".23 Androgyny becomes in that book the prerequisite of the person who would become his own father, and mother too.
In Joyce's Ulysses, likewise, Stephen Dedalus becomes "himself his own father", "made not begotten", on the selfsame principle which leads Christy Mahon to liquidate his own father in order to be free to conceive of himself. This repudiation of the biological parent in a colonial situation takes on a revolutionary character, since it involves not just a rejection of authority but of all official versions of the past; and it proclaims a determination to reinvent not only the self but the very conditions which help to shape it. Inventing a better father necessarily demanded that Irish writers invent an alternative version of the past. Fathers, in such a situation, often give children "the impression of being undecided, of avoiding the taking of sides, even of adopting an irresponsible and evasive attitude".24 If the child were to confine his points of reference to the family unit, the ensuing frustrations could prove "traumatic": but, under stress of events, a younger generation which had previously looked to the father to determine its values now discovers that each must seek them for him- or herself.25
Of no spiritual progress are these remarks more true than of the life of W. B. Yeats as traced in Autobiographies, which he had intended to call Father and Son until his discovery that Edmund Gosse had already used the tide.26 Yeats's was the story of a father who had made "being undecided" a vocation, reworking and revising his paintings to such a degree that the man ruined his own career.27 John Butler Yeats praised the myopic sincerity of Polonius – "to thine own self be true" – perhaps because his own personality was so irresolute and indeterminate. Looking back over many years, the son wrote: "it seems to me mat I saw his mind in fragments, which had always hidden connections I only now begin to discover".28 It was left to the son to articulate a holistic vision which was implicit but unexpressed in the father's life. John Butler Yeats had, indeed, held up Edward Dowden as a perpetual warning of what happens to gifted men who refuse to trust their own natures and so cannot become themselves, lapsing into provincialism. In other words, he read his own fate in Dowden's, as surely as William Butler Yeats read his own possible destiny in his father's.
The autobiography thus becomes a sustained and strenuous attempt to vindicate the father's insistence that "some actual man" be felt behind a poem, "with a speech so natural and dramatic that the hearer would feel the pressure of a man thinking and feeling".29 In short, it will in its final moments bring into being – rather than simply report – the self which lay in fragments behind all of it until that point; and so Yeats also will be reborn as the self-invented child of his own writings. The Prodigal Father was delighted rather than dismayed by this implementation of his secret desire. The son, rejecting the father's prudent counsel, did not reject the father, recruiting his experience in the creation of a new set of values. Indeed, so "reinvented" did John Butler Yeats feel by his more famous offspring that he chose to end his days in New York, as far as seemed decent from the son's pervasive influence.
The self thus created becomes thereby the ideal reader of the text, of which it is the son and creation. But the process is nothing like as easy as that glib formulation makes it seem. For one thing, there is the problem of inappropriate form; for another, there is the impeding culture of censorship. The opening pages of Joyce's Portrait encapsulate the problem, in the story told about a moocow by Stephens father and in Stephens song:
O, the wild rose blossoms
On the little green place.
"That was his song" – but, of course, it wasn't since it was derived; and, furthermore, it was liable to mistaken, childish recitations:
O, the green wothe botheth . . .30
The language which so enmeshes the child is the language of the father. The hand lifted by Christy Mahon against Father Time Bearing his Scythe, the hand raised against the wielder of the logos, is the same hand which arrogates to itself the right to reshape the given lines into the contours of art, symbolized by a green rose. Synge and Joyce, after all, tell versions of the same story. At the start of The Playboy, Christy Mahon is given a narrative by the villagers, effectively telling him who he is, but he ends by writing his own script: "I'll go romancing . . ." Similarly, at the outset of A Portrait, Stephen hears the father's tale of a moocow, but concludes the book writing a poem and a diary.
Yet Stephens final mastery is of a limited kind, involving many humiliating compromises with a received language. He recognizes, as he performs in the school play, that his script has been written by others: "the tho
ught of the part he had to play humiliated him".31 Even his own poem seems derivative, nineties-ish pastiche. Yet underlying the book is the desire to find an enabling narrative, which would permit a person to represent the self: as Hannah Arendt has written in another context –
The principle of explanation consists in getting the story told – somehow, anyhow – in order to discover how it begins . . . The basic assumption is that the telling of the tale will itself yield good counsel. This second look at his own history can transform a man from a creature trapped in his own past to one who is freed of it.32
The older generation in a colony on the eve of revolution behaves with irresolution: suspicious of occupier values, it finds, nonetheless, that it cannot break through to a newer system. The young write narratives attacking the old in hopes of forcing their parents into a declaration of their "true" underlying feelings. All of this serves merely to erode even further the self-confidence of the elderly, to a point where their influence virtually ceases to exist. The result is a fatherless society, in effect a society on a semi-permanent war footing; and so it is no surprise when the vacuum thus created is filled by the self-created codes of the young.
The Freudian theory of patricide is but an extreme version of this story: for "it is not Oedipus which produces neurosis; it is neurosis – a desire that is already submissive and searching to communicate its own submission – that produces Oedipus".33 What was written, again and again through the Irish revival, was an Anti-Oedipus, which saw the ancient tale not as awful tragedy but as happy comedy. True, the children of Oedipus felt the pangs of fear and guilt which assailed the scattered offspring of Old Mahon – but Christy's comic patricide becomes the basis of a true morality, and it is his insurgency which makes History possible. The ensuing search for a father-surrogate may be rooted in a desire to erase the memory of the necessary patricide. .. but no surrogate and no actual father can suffice for the child who must invent a self. For, as Nietzsche wrote:
With what water could we cleanse ourselves? . . . Shall we ourselves not have to become Gods, merely to seem worthy of it? There never was a greater event and on account of it, all who are born after us belong to a higher history than any history hitherto.34
The fathers in A Portrait and The Playboy are so unvital that they can scarcely see their sons at all. Having told Stephen the moocow story, "his father looked at him through a glass".35 Old Mahon, on reaching the Mayo village, fails utterly to recognize his son in other people's descriptions of him. But it is the fathers who are crucially absent from their own lives: in any but the biological sense, they are scarcely fathers at all. Hence the repeated use of the forename "Stephen" in A Portrait rather than the ridiculed surname of the father ("What kind of a name is that?").36 The progress of Stephen is registered through the book, despite the inevitable humiliations and compromises, in his increasing control over the language which repeatedly threatened to control him. In its phases, it uncannily recapitulates the growth of Christy Mahon through three distinct zones of discourse: from the discourse imposed by others at the outset, through the excessively flowery idiom of the adolescent period, to the terseness of the diary.
That said, it should be added that this constant preoccupation with father-figures in revival texts is the tell-tale sign of a society which is unsure of itself and of its ultimate destiny. Its rebellions are conducted not so much against authority figures as against their palpable absence. These gestures rehearse not the erosion of power so much as the search for a true authority, and in them will lurk the danger of re-Oedipalization. The revolutionary slaying-of-the-father most often ends simply by instituting some new father or authority-figure. The very notion of a self-inventing, fatherless being is rooted in the actual experience of a real father; and re-Oedipalization proves difficult to avoid. Freud himself was a case in point. In his Viennese years, he had developed the theory that all politics are reducible to the primal conflict between father and son. As a boy, he had been reprimanded by his father for urinating in his trousers: "The boy will come to nothing!" This was, he suspected, the source of his subsequent ambition: at that moment he decided to show his father that he could amount to something. Years later, as a successful adult, he had what he called, significantly, his "revolutionary dream", in which a strong son reprimanded a guilty father for the same offence.37 Though this was a revenge of sorts, it did not trouble the inherited Oedipal categories: Freud, as is well known, was at pains to proclaim his "fatherhood" of psychoanalysis, and it was precisely in that role that he was rejected by Jung and Rank.
In Irish political and social life, matters did not unfold as in the texts of Wilde, Synge and Joyce, or as in the theories of Fanon and Memmi. Instead, the fathers had their revenge on the sons for daring to dream at all. What was conceived as a journey to an open future became instead a nostalgic regression into a protected past. Such an apostasy was possible once the leaders of the emerging nation-state decided to make adolescence itself into an ideology. In other words, the state was to be frozen in Synge's mirror-gazing second phase, and revivalism was made into an end in itself rather than a means by which to prise open the future. Those who had begun with the claim to have invented new forms of politics almost all ended as conservatives; and it was the military heroism, rather than the creative and critical thought, of the 1916 rebels which they celebrated.
In retrospect, it became clear that in many nationalist treatments of the father-son theme, there had been confusion over who might win the trial of strength, and also over who was realty who. The nationalists seemed young, but their muse was old ... as Yeats had warned in a bitter poem:
ON HEARING THAT THE STUDENTS OF OUR NEW
UNIVERSITY HAVE JOINED THE AGITATION AGAINST
IMMORAL LITERATURE
Where, where but here have Pride and Truth,
That long to give themselves for wage,
To shake their wicked sides at youth
Restraining reckless middle age?38
The tight-lipped young idealists were easy prey for those who asked them to harness their talents to an unmodified colonial administrative machine; and in so doing they betrayed whatever youthfulness they had. Rebels against an authority which failed to be authoritative, they turned out to be in many cases arch-conservatives. The rhetoric of youth was widely used in the new state, but often to occlude the fact that many (including many young dissidents) were being barred from their rightful share in the determination of national policy.
In that context, the passivity of males and the assertiveness of females in many texts of the revival may be judged to have carried with it a conservative undertow. The historian Peter Gay noted a similar conjunction in the art of Weimar Germany; "again and again there are scenes in which the man puts his head, helpless, on the woman's bosom".39 In a culture of chronic male unemployment, such moments seem explicable as male self-hatred. If so, the "truth of maternity" and "myth of paternity" may have indicated an element of self-laceration in the art of some Irish males. Gay's comment on the Weimar scene can be translated, with only a little strain, into terms appropriate to life in the new Irish state: "the revenge of the father and the omnipotence of the mother . . . were both equally destructive to the youth".40
Critics of such an analogy, and of the preceding analysis, might argue that a fiercely patriarchal system, such as colonialism, could hardly have left men feeling useless in their domestic spheres; and there is ample evidence to show that the head of the Irish household was often just as autocratic as his British counterpart. It can, indeed, be argued that the patriarchal society of which he was a part would lead the Irish male to strive all the more for control within his own family, if only because of his political and social impotence outside it. But the evidence of Irish texts and case-histories would confirm the suspicion that the autocratic father is often the weakest male of all, concealing that weakness under the protective coverage of the prevailing system. The fathers in Joyce's Dubliners come home to beat their sons, in part a
s a response to the fact that they are tyrannized in the office. Patriarchal values exist in societies where men, lacking true authority, settle for mere power.
Recent refinements in psychiatric theory may help to explain the psychological process at work. Children with problems have traditionally been described as mother-dominated, but such problems may often be attributed to the father's refusal to assume full responsibility. It is argued that the father's role is central in the second year of a child's life: the toddler needs space in which to achieve the beginnings of independence, but the mother feels a natural sadness at the prospect of a less intimate bond. The father at this point must try to compensate for this loss by reclaiming his place as partner, as well as by fulfilling the duties of father. If he fails to do so, he makes it harder for the mother and child to take the necessary steps back from one another. Many fathers in societies may lack the self-confidence, or hope for the future, that such a deed demands; and by failing to intervene at the right moment they launch another generation into a further hopeless cycle.
On the other hand, those fathers who can demonstrate that they are not under the mother's control help to cure the child of absolute dependency. By asserting his due authority over his children, the father allows them to explore their own anger until they can control it at will and learn to stand up for themselves. Even more importantly, the father teaches the child that other people have needs too, and that everyone functions as a member of wider and wider groups.41 When such fatherly authority is not asserted, the child may become a self-indulgent subversive with no respect for the configurations of the larger community... in other words, a rebel.
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