Inventing Ireland

by Declan Kiberd

  That senumentalization had only been made possible by a safe distance. It was never endorsed by those actually living on the land, whose few playwrights saw more brutality than lyricism in rural life. In this, they corroborated the findings of those radical writers like Synge who, at the turn of the century, reversed the more common revivalist trajectory and went from the city to the country, there to discover a bleak and bitter story. As if to vindicate Shaw's diagnosis, Synge also found a landscape riven with growing class tensions and a crass bourgeois moralism. The Shadow of the Glen offered an astringent critique of the new respectability among country people, which could cause a young man to marry for money rather than love (even though he was not poor), and to count out his coins onto a kitchen-table while his wife-to-be talks most plaintively of her lonely mountain-side life. Synge was astonishingly subtle in his delineations of the class configuration of the countryside. He was, in the words of Jack Yeats, who accompanied him on his trip through the congested districts, a keen observer of political conditions; and from his plays and prose there emerges a social spectrum ranging from stout farmers and their expectant sons, through landless labourers and tramps (who were offered casual work in certain seasons), to the outcast tinkers. Even among the tinkers, however, he noted a new drive towards respectability and settlement, as documented in The Tinker's Wedding, in which a young woman seeks to have her marriage-vow solemnized by a money-grabbing priest. The small-town morality was slowly penetrating even the wildest communities of the remote countryside.

  Few of these variations or tensions found representation in the writings of the more conservative nationalists. Their desire was to fudge all painful differences, in the interests of a spurious national unity and to present the rural scene with one self-confident and unambiguous voice. The comments of Michael Collins have provoked more than one socialist critic to scornful commentary in this context. An arch-pragmatist in affairs of a military or political nature, he let his guard against sentiment drop when the subject was cultural identity. Whenever the talk turned to culture, he reached not for his gun, but for the soft-focus lens:

  . . . impoverished as the people are . . . the outward aspect is a pageant. One may see processions of young women riding down on island ponies to collect sand from the seashore, or gathering turf, dressed in their shawls and in their brilliantly-coloured skirts made of material spun, woven and dyed by themselves . . . Their cottages also are little changed. They remain simple and picturesque. It is only in such places that one gets a glimpse of what Ireland may become again [italics mine].7

  It is all too easy by half, Synge without tears, or at any rate, The Aran Islands without the accompanying commentary which led Synge to remind himself that the most seductive features of island life were all bound up with a social condition indistinguishable from "penury".8 Though beguiled, Synge found the costs of such beauty too high. Collins did not even raise the issue, opting for the escape-hatch of a subordinate clause, "impoverished as the people are . . ." Such a clause might have been more predictably found in a blue book report on the congested districts by a British civil servant. That such an elision could be effected by an Irish rebel leader suggests that his movement could offer only a very limited kind of freedom to his people.

  The pastoralism of Collins, like his nationalist politics, was largely an English creation, with its roots in the Romantic movement of Wordsworth and the Lake Poets: yet the paradox, noted by Yeats, was that forms newly-invented by Irish artists ran the risk of being denounced as un-Irish:

  . . . Forms of emotion and thought which the future will recognize as peculiarly Irish, for no other country has had the like, are looked upon as un-Irish because of their novelty in a land that is so nearly conquered that it has all but nothing of its own. English provincialism shouts through the lips of Irish patriots . . .9

  Yeats cannot have intended it so, but the statements of Michael Collins offer graphic illustrations of that final, brilliant aphorism. Again and again, Collins returned to his beloved rural images, but his preference was, typically, to evoke them in a fallen urban setting. So, in a very famous passage, he described how he felt like cheering at a sudden sighting of a donkey and cart in one of the suburbs of London. "I", he proclaimed, "stand for that".10 This was classic pastoral – an imagined setting that was, to all intents and purposes, English, and a setting, moreover, in which the city was the zone for an unexpected surrender to the values of the rural pastoral. Collins in that statement has given the pastoralist's game away without so much as a wink: he was, in more ways than one, an innocent abroad in England.

  To project oneself back into the revivalists' world is to come upon a situation which was more open and more complex than many cared to concede. The very texts which were seized upon to purvey in school classrooms the image of a generic ahistorical peasantry – the autobiographies of the Blasket islanders – fairly vibrate with class tensions. It has been jocularly suggested that the English have a class system and talk of little else; that the Americans have a class system, but pretend that it doesn't exist; and that the Irish are the worst offenders of all, since they operate a class system, but won't tell anyone what it is. A close reading of Blasket literature might provide some clues. For both Tomás Ó Criomhthainn and Muiris Ó Súilleabháin, to leave the island and set foot on the Kerry mainland for the first time was to experience all over again the fall of man, from a kind of anarchist commune into a world of snobbish differences. Island life had bred a tribe of communitarians, who shared a subsistence economy and the dangers of storm and sea. This made for a kind of instinctive egalitarianism, but what Ó Criomhthainn actually saw on the Dingle quayside was rather unsettling:

  Chonnac daoine uaisle ina seasamh ann agus slabhraí timpeall a mbuilg, daoine bochta agus gan a leath-cheart d'éadach orthu . . .11

  (I saw noble people standing there, with decorative chains around their waists, and poor people without their sufficiency of clothing.)

  Mainland Ireland had been Anglicized and, in that process, filled with a soul-destroying class feeling. In Cré na Cille, a book set in the Connemara Gaeltacht, Máirtín Ó Cadhain built a dead woman's monologue around her complaint that her relations above the ground should have had the audacity to bury her in a fifteen-shilling grave rather than one of the guinea plots.

  The absence of such divisions on the islands of Aran or the Blaskets was profoundly attractive to radical thinkers from J. M. Synge to George Thomson. The self-confident women of Aran in their flowing red dresses seemed free of Victorian restraint. Similarly, the refusal of a division of labour, Synge judged, had left each island man with a versatile character, as his work changed with the seasons, but demanded a constant vigilance, so that it was impossible for timid or foolhardy persons to survive long on the islands. He also noted how the recent introduction of a police force was slowly corrupting social morals on the islands, but he remarked on the fact that, despite this modernization, the islanders persisted in their age-old belief that imprisonment had no corrective effect on criminals.12

  The mainland had been heavily infected with a mode of thinking which favoured the privatization of property and the provision of punitive sate institutions. Engels's grim prediction was coming true: the Irish were beginning to act like strangers in their own country. The western islands, however, still subscribed to certain codes which might be restored; and they were visited and studied by English, as well as Irish, radicals. The Blasket islands offered George Thomson, a Cambridge don in flight from one of the most class-ridden societies in Europe, the prospect of an alternative community, and, even more than that, liberation from the very idea of the state as such. Devotees of the imagined community that calls itself a nation, the Irish had historically shown a marked aversion to the idea of the state; but, on the islands, that aversion had scarcely been felt, for the people treated the state in the same way that they treated notions of social class, with sublime indifference.

  If the fundamental tensions created on th
e mainland by class feeling and by statist politics were visible to visiting islanders and to visiting writers from Dublin, how much more painfully obvious must they have been to the victims of such policies themselves. Synge referred to the rising rural middle class as "an ungodly ruck of fat-faced, sweaty-headed swine" and he went on:

  ... There are sides to all that western life, the groggy-patriot-publican-general-shop-man who is married to the priest's half-sister and is second cousin once-removed of the dispensary doctor that are horrible and awful... In a way, it is all heart-rending; in one place, the people are starving, but wonderfully attractive and charming, and in another place, where things are going well, one has a rampant double-chinned vulgarity I haven't seen the like of.13

  In the decade-and-a-half after Synge made his observations, these latent tensions came to a head. The Co-Operative Movement made ground among dairy-farmers; and workers in a number of rural creameries had set up Soviets by April 1920.

  The rural community in the previous few years had witnessed an astounding decline in deference to all forms of authority. It has been justly pointed out that "the post-Rising labour movement was radical because, far from begging government or men of property to raise the labourers status in traditional fashion by granting him land, it arrogantly asserted that the landless worker, as chief producer of the nation's wealth, was a superior person in his own right".14 This is an image quite at variance with that of a stoic, unchanging peasantry. No doubt, the Great War and the waves of revolution which passed over Europe in its wake, as now-defiant soldiers returned home impatient with the discredited rhetoric of the upper-classes, had served further to erode all forms of authority.

  If conservative politicians like Michael Collins produced a version of pastoral, so also did radical artists like Synge, for antipastoral is, for all its nay-saying, still a version of the mode.

  Synge's reading of Marx's Kapital – especially of its famous sections on the division of labour and on the working day – is manifest in many pages of The Aran Islands, for example, the following:

  ... it is likely that much of the intelligence and charm of these people is due to the absence of any division of labour, and to the correspondingly wide development of each individual, whose varied knowledge and skill necessitates a considerable activity of mind. Each man can speak two languages. He is a skilled fisherman, and can manage a curragh with extraordinary nerve and dexterity. He can farm simply, burn kelp, cut out pampooties, mend nets, build and thatch a house, and make a candle or a coffin. His work changes with the seasons in a way that keeps him free from the dullness that comes to people who have always the same occupation. The danger of his life on the sea gives him the alertness of a primitive hunter, and the long nights he spends fishing in his curragh bring him some of the emotions that are thought peculiar to men who have lived with the arts.15

  In Synge's eyes, the islanders constituted a sort of anarchist commune, composed of frank women and courageous men. He repeatedly made strategic contrasts between their integrity and the vulgar materialism then overtaking those mainland communities, which Yeats still idealized.

  Two generations later, a working-class Dubliner, Brendan Behan, would find on the Blasket islands a community living a kind of life that was recognizable to someone from another peripheral social grouping, the inner city poor. The story of how, in these decades, the major record of Blasket life An tOileánach was censored by schoolteachers, in the process of being made safe for mainland classrooms, was yet another example of how a revolutionary text might be converted to revivalist purposes. Ó Criomhthainn's innocent accounts of adolescent sexuality on the islands, of how the local boys were delighted when a gust of wind raised the skirts of the girls ("D'fhéachas isteach in áit nár shaighneáil an ghrian ariamh"; I looked into a place where the sun never shone before) were pruriently excised.16 It is even possible that the author anticipated this gelding of his text in the famous, closing statement that he and his sort would not be found again. A commune was dying on its feet, and even those few faithful representations of it in literature would be subject to revision, as personal freedoms came under the scrutiny of the nationalist censors.

  How did so much radical energy get deflected from its original purpose? One answer is that the mainland rural community, after its emancipation in the late 1880s and 1890s, came to dominate the national agenda, marginalizing both the western islanders, the Gaeltacht and the inner-city poor. As Shaw feared, the Land Acts spelled a new lease for landlordism of a more petty variety. For a brief, glorious period, it did indeed seem as though feudalism might be about to fall in Ireland, as Michael Davitt reported in a hopeful book of 1904. Even Yeats could recall being exalted by this new mood:

  . . . after the agrarian passion we began to value truth . . . free discussion appeared among us for the first time, bringing the passion for reality, the satiric genius that informs Ulysses, The Playboy of the Western World, The Informer, The Puritan and other books and plays; the accumulated hatred of the years was suddenly transferred from England to Ireland.17

  It is significant that Yeats locates this freedom of thought not in 1922, but two decades earlier, in the environment that shaped the genius of Synge and Joyce.

  The "hatred of Ireland" recalled by Yeats was actually a repudiation of the backwardness and undevelopment of a neglected colony; but the agrarian question, which opened this self-critical debate, also by its very resolution ensured its premature closure. The ultimate victims of the Land Acts were the gentry and labourers, swept aside by the new proprietors, who made certain that the land agitation did not develop into a return to communal tenure. By 1916 a further group could have been added to the list of their victims, the urban poor, afflicted horribly by rising food prices and contracting job opportunities. The interests of the rural periphery were already coming to dominate those of the urban centre. Yeats, though he continued to fulminate against the philistinism of the Catholic middle class, was never more bourgeois than in his attacks on the bourgeoisie: and he assuaged their guilt about their victims by texts which reduced them to literary material. The new élites, in turn, paid Yeats the ultimate compliment which any post-colonial middle class can bestow, when they asked him to head the committee to redesign a national coinage. In later decades, it would be his proud image which would adorn the Irish twenty-pound note.

  This domination of the rural over the urban led to some curious paradoxes. Taking their cue from Wordsworth, Coleridge and, most of all, from Matthew Arnold, the revivalists attacked the complacency and philistinism of the middle class, despite the fact that in Ireland a native middle class had not yet fully emerged as a social formation. Concomitant with this went an attack on the belching factory-chimneys and common corner-boys of city culture, despite the fact that no Irish conurbation, other than Belfast, had been significantly industrialized. And over and above those themes was laid an idealization of a peasantry which was itself already convulsed by internal tensions and material acquisitiveness.

  This elevation of the peripheral over the central was an internalization of a model which, in the later nineteenth century, had characterized the politics of Great Britain and Ireland. When Parnell and his parliamentary party had held the balance of power at Westminster, they provided an object-lesson in how the Celtic periphery could paralyze the London centre. As Shaw remarked, in "How to Settle the Irish Question":

  ... the Irish, though representing only one-tenth of the population of the whole and less than a third of the area, has more than a sixth of the membership, holds the balance of power, and occupies so much of the time of the House that its business seems to consist mainly of the discussion of Irish grievances, though Ireland is in every way a happier and freer country to live in than England . . .18

  In an essay called "Brogue-Shock", Shaw phrased the idea even more trenchantly:

  . . . Beyond a doubt, we Irish are the governing race in these islands; and I am not sure that the transfer of the seat of government from We
stminster to Belfast or Dublin would not be the most natural solution of the problem. There never would be a Home Rule movement in England ...19

  This became the model which was internalized in subsequent Irish politics: rural Ireland was real Ireland, the farmer the moral and economic backbone of the country. That myth was given a further lease of life in each generation, by the urbanized descendants of landless labourers or by failed small farmers keen to create a compensatory fable of rare old times. Marooned in an unplanned city of tenements and housing estates, many people experienced real guilt-feelings for the "crime" of being new Oubliners at all.20

  Even Brendan Behan in his autobiography conceded how hard it was for him to admit that the borstal boys from Liverpool and Manchester whom he met in jail seemed to know the same cultural parameters as himself: the weekly visit to the pawnshop, the fish-and-chipper, and so on. In the familiar manner of other post-colonial capitals, Dublin was overrun by unplanned migrations of rural folk, who had no sooner settled than they were consumed by a fake nostalgia for a pastoral Ireland they had "lost".

  Patrick Kavanagh was the test-case here: at first, when he was still close to his Monaghan roots, he denounced the false consciousness of the peasant periphery, but after a decade or more in Dublin, he fell back into line with it, going to extraordinary lengths to recreate Baggot Street as an urban pastoral, "my Pembrokeshire". And that invented Ireland proved far more attractive to poetry-readers among the New Dubliners than had Kavanagh's bitter indictment of rural torpor in The Great Hunger. The conversion of Baggot Street into a rural idyll proved palatable to those politicians and architects intent on effecting somewhat similar transformations themselves, imposing a ruralist grid of community onto an urban setting.

  The city planners were, in the words of a leading architect, "road engineers who are all first generation country people, who have no idea how cities should be developed".21 For years, the police in Dublin were invariably of rural origin, as were most of its schoolteachers and civil servants; it was a rural Minister who designed the infamous tower blocks of Ballymun in 1966 in memory of the signatories of the Easter proclamation, and it was rural Ministers who held the Justice portfolio year after year, showing scant understanding of the problems of urban youth. Most of the political activists in the city had also cut their teeth in the countryside, from which they brought the clientelist traditions of brokerage politics, which prevented the emergence of a left-right ideological debate.22