Inventing Ireland
Page 69
Corkery attributed such self-doubt to the continuing prestige of English culture in Irish scholastic institutions. An English child, reading his or her own literature, finds in it a focus of the minds and instincts of English people; whereas an Irish child, reading English, experiences something very different:
His education, instead of buttressing and refining his emotional nature, teaches him the rather to despise it, inasmuch as it teaches him not to see the surroundings out of which he is sprung, as they are in themselves, but as compared with alien surroundings: his education provides him with an alien medium through which he is henceforth to look at his native land! At the least his education sets up a dispute between his intellect and his emotions ... So does it happen mat the Irishman who would write of his own people has to begin by trying to forget what he has learnt...17
Just as the English turned Ireland into a mock-England, so now the post-colonial student, caught between a reality for which there were no obvious forms and a set of proffered forms which did not cohere with that reality, had to try to convert English locations and characters into Irish versions already known and loved. The outcome was often a student blinded equally to the richness of both inheritances, constantly forgetting what little had been learned. Ngugi's report from Kenya reads in places like a paraphrase of Corkery, a man whose work in all likelihood he did not know.
The apologists for English literature as traditionally understood might argue that such self-estrangement, the production of such a divided consciousness, has been the object of all sophisticated literary study since the eighteenth century. As Gauri Viswanathan has written:
It entails the suppression of the individualistic self, through self-examination and self-evaluation, to make way for the idealized self of culture. Division is the key to canonical power, inducing the reader to absorb another identity and respond in another voice. The tyranny of canons can be overcome only by deliberate estrangement from the texts that constitute them. But if education remains committed to our "getting into" texts rather than viewing them from the outside as strangers, the process of division will continue.18
This, however, seems only half the story. The British Victorian élite were inspired to self-improvement: they began as estranged, but soon separated themselves from the philistine middle class, and thus achieved their ideal selves. The Bombay élite, in contrast, were selected out of their society, and by the study of English literature set into such tension with it that all their efforts at self-elevation were redirected to the reform of that society. Matthew Arnold never dreamed of estrangement from a national culture, merely from a philistine middle class, the better to pursue the ideal. Two generations after him, his American disciple Lionel Trilling did indeed ask his students so to read the texts of modernism that they took a step "beyond culture", in ways which allowed them to view man as if he were an anthropological witness of himself. Trilling was, however, shrewd and sardonic enough to note the scandalous ease with which his students stepped back inside their charmed circle.19 Had they stayed outside just a little longer, their understanding of other cultures – for instance, that of Islam – might have been enriched. The readers of English in colonies were asked a rather different question – to step outside their native cultures on the strict understanding that they would never thereafter step back in. All became victims of this process, but the spiritual disorientation reported by Ngugi, Achebe and Corkery was far more painful than the kind envisaged by Arnold for English schoolchildren.
It is, nonetheless, one of the recurring paradoxes of a decolonizing culture that Corkery's subtle account of a dispute between a child's intellectual schooling and emotional nature is a reworked version of Eliot's theory of the dissociation of sensibility. It lends a pervasive gloom to Corkery's entire opening chapter in Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature, a gloom not to be found in West Indian commentaries on the same crisis. (Perhaps the lack of a native language left the West Indians less prone to depression than their Irish, African or Indian counterparts, who felt that something good had been taken away.) Whereas Corkery can complain quite bluntly that "Ireland has not learned how to express its own life through the medium of the English language"20 (and this after the decade of Ulysses, The Tower and The Silver Tassie!), Lamming can welcome the novel as "a way of investigating and projecting the inner experience of the West Indian community".21 Lamming, indeed, sees this as the positive result of being caught between two cultures, a turning inward to examine the ground of one's perceptions, to find out how one knows what one knows. To him this is an event as important as the very discovery of the islands.
Corkery is equally negative concerning the sheer number of expatriate Irish writers who function as prisoners of overseas markets. Yet Lamming can find exile a "pleasure" rather than a dreary financial necessity: it affords him a welcome relief from a philistine class at home which reads solely for examinations, and an opportunity to discover overseas, perhaps for the first time, what it means to be West Indian. To write an investigation of the sources of West Indian consciousness virtually demands a strategic withdrawal from the place: to write at all is, in effect, to go into exile. This might have been the answer given to Corkery by the Irish writers.
Corkery's piercing insights into aspects of Irish reality are of the kind possible only to one who has blinded himself to nine-tenths of that reality. His essay ends on a note of near-farce, virtually denying the existence of Anglo-Irish literature, except perhaps as an exotic offshoot of the English parent plant.22 The hothouse image is, nonetheless, very well chosen. This is, of course, an aspect of Fanon's second phase of decolonization, into which so many of the texts treated in this book have fallen, in whole or in part: that moment when a writer attempts to stamp the forms of the colonizer with "a hallmark which he wishes to be national, but which is strongly reminiscent of exoticism".23 Fanon could make such a critique the basis on which he constructed his model of liberation, that phase which would set all Corkeryesque gloom to rights. Corkery's closing regret in his famous diatribe, that the literary revivalists had failed to throw up a body of criticism which might explain their limitations and point the way ahead, might with some justice be ultimately applied to its own author. He deserves great praise also, for, until the advent of Conor Cruise O'Brien in the 1950s, he was the nearest thing Ireland produced to a post-colonial critic.
The years of the "open syllabus" proved happy ones for the more imaginative teachers and students in Ireland who could afford to think little of examinations; and it may be no accident that they also coincided with that period when Ireland came to be regarded with affection and respect by the peoples of the developing world. In such places, tens of thousands of Irish missionaries were made welcome in the 1920s and 1930s, since they came with no hidden political agenda. When Ireland entered the United Nations after World War Two, its position of non-alignment between the superpowers became a model for other emerging states; and when the foremost architect of that policy, Conor Cruise O'Brien, displeased the European imperial establishment by his handling of affairs in Katanga (formerly part of Belgian Congo) in 1961, that phase in Irish history reached something of a climax. Editors in London were sharpening fangs well bloodied from recent clashes with the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdul Nasser. "And who", sniffed Prime Minister Macmillan in London, "is Conor Cruise O'Brien?" At Dublin Airport, a suddenly jobless O'Brien gave his answer: an unimportant, expendable civil servant. But then, eyebrows arched, he declared that he had just received the backing of a less expendable man, Prime Minister Nehru of India, leader of a sub-continent.24 That moment in Irish history was soon lost. For his part, O'Brien soon afterward embarked on a revision of the anti-colonialism of his younger years, although it was some time before he went public with it. As late as 1969, in his masterly study of the French Algerian writer Albert Camus, he came out in support of Sartre's attack on French colonialism in Algeria and was suitably caustic about Camus's acquiescence. Camus had said that, if forced to choose between revolutio
nary justice and his mother, he would in the end opt to save his mother. "Not every intellectual has to make the same choice", commented O'Brien, "but each must realize how he is a product of the culture of the advanced world, and how much there is that will pull him, among the 'Algerias' of the future, towards Camus's fall".25
By 1969, however, western intellectuals were repenting of their support for national liberation movements, as the new states of Africa and Asia sank into chaos, censorship and even dictatorship. Those who saw such problems as a predictable legacy of colonialism were drowned out by a new kind of commentator, often from a former colony, who gravely assured his old masters that these troubles were largely due to the inherent incapacity of such peoples to govern their own affairs. Chinua Achebe was scathing about this "bunch of bright ones" who came along in this way to say "We are through with intoning the colonial litany ... We are tough-minded. We absolve Europe of all guilt. Don't you worry, Europe, we were bound to violence long before you came to our shores". Many liberal Europeans were greatly relieved by this exculpation. Achebe called it "this perverse charitableness, which asks a man to cut his own throat for the comfort and good opinion of another": but he did not fail to note how many European thinkers praised the "sophistication" and "objectivity" of these new analysts.26 Their thesis of the self-inflicted wound proved immensely consoling to readers of the "liberal" western press, especially when penned in the elegant essays of a V. S. Naipaul. "No Indian can take himself to the stage", wrote Naipaul, "where he might perceive that the faults lie within the civilization itself, that the failures and cruelties of India might implicate all Indians".27 An Indian economist might point to the many effects of colonial undevelopment which this thesis excluded, and might seek to occupy a space somewhere between the secular Naipaul and the militant holy men: but it was the revisionists who held the high ground. Naipaul was feted in western journals, having told their readers that after their rulers withdrew from their holdings, things only went from bad to worse.
In Ireland, Conor Cruise O'Brien began to sing the same song, but in the future tense, by way of justifying a continuing British presence in the six counties of the north. He repented publicly of his anti-partitionist past, becoming a favoured columnist in the London and New York press, "a voice of sanity in the Irish mess". He translated the mess of Ireland into a rational, enlightenment discourse which made good sense to his international readers. Witty, urbane, amusing, he shared with Naipaul a coolly analytical brain and a mind formed by close study of the European classics. After the outbreak of renewed violence in Northern Ireland, he revised his view of the Camus-Sartre debate and concluded that Camus had been right. The man who had once echoed Lenin's disappointment that the 1916 rebels had risen too soon to launch an international revolution now made it very clear that he no longer considered the Easter Rising to have been a positive thing. Yet his career, for all its twists, had an inner logic, that same logic which he had detected in the work of Albert Camus. Both men had found themselves caught on the cusp between Europe and the developing world. Both responded deeply to these twin tugs, because they could feel the pulls so deeply within themselves. What O'Brien said of Camus was, perhaps, even more applicable to himself: "he belonged to the frontier of Europe, and was aware of a threat. The threat also beckoned to him. He refused, but not without a struggle".28
The leaders of modern Ireland also "refused", but only after a period of uncertainty and doubt. The roots of this change may be found in the career of O'Brien's own youthful model, the writer and pundit Seán ÓFaoláin. He was a brilliant protege of Corkery, but one who eventually transcended and repudiated his former teacher in a much-publicized critique. That critique, however, remained unsatisfactory, because it invoked only the values of European individualism, values which, however admirable in themselves, had often been invoked in order to justify the colonial enterprise from which the country was but slowly emerging.29 ÓFaoláin and Cruise O'Brien represented the ideal of a liberal-European Ireland, but free of its problematic past, whose only tense was the present and its needs: but the persistent injustices in Northern Ireland, and the economic undevelopment of the south, meant that the conditions for such transcendence were never propitious.
It may be doubted, anyway, whether such transcendence, even if achievable, would have been desirable: a post-colonial Ireland had many important differences from a mainly post-imperial Europe. Its people could hardly "play at being Europeans",30 not because of invincible provincialism but because their traditions linked them to a much wider global network. The years of evolution from the nineteenth century to the twentieth had not been some kind of apprenticeship for an understanding of Europe: rather, the culture of Europe might offer an apprenticeship for a fuller understanding of the writings of Yeats, Joyce and Beckett. All three handled many classic themes of European art, but they did not feel tied to that tradition by any special devotion, and so their handling was irreverent, subversive, even insolent. Of nothing was this more true than of their treatment of English literary culture.
Living at such an angle to official English canons, Irish artists "read England" as a prelude to "writing Ireland". They incorporated many of their re-readings of English authors into their creative texts, and revealed to a new generation of English readers a Shakespeare, Milton, Blake and Shelley richer and more various than the versions of these authors which had been promoted by previous critics. The English, to their lasting credit, took the lesson to heart. It was Irish academics who continued to ask their students to read Shakespeare and the others as they would have been interpreted by educated English persons in the year 1922. There was no attempt to imagine how the study of republican poets like Blake or Shelley in a university of Dublin or Cork might constitute a challenge to the Eliotic notion of a royalist, Anglo-Catholic canon. In 1922 the images of national possibility froze, with the country's teachers cast as curators of a post-imperial museum, whose English departments were patrolled by zealous custodians anxious to ensure that nothing changed very much. Down the corridor, many curators of the post-colonial Gaelic museum, known as the Irish Department, made equally certain that no radical revisions occurred, no compromising contacts with other cultures.
All of this required a vast degree of self-repression. If nineteenth-century critics in England had a full-time job stripping Shakespeare and other writers of their radical potentials, the academics of twentieth-century Ireland devoted themselves with equal solicitude to the deradicalization of native writing in both languages. In our journey through the Irish Renaissance we have encountered more than one revolutionary text being turned into a revivalist document. Long before Irish nationalist politicians had erased subversive voices from Irish debate, the critics in the academies had performed parallel feats on the great national writers.
The Utopian content of great literature can never be wholly suppressed, however. It can be driven just a little deeper into the unconscious, awaiting, like all despised potentials, for its moment to rise again. At times when an old order of life has lost its meaning, and a new world has not yet been born, Caliban may indeed be tempted to plot the murder of Prospero. Shakespeare's The Tempest transcends such negative perspectives, for all that, with its plea for the fulfilment of the entire potential of the person in a world with "no sovereignty", no tyranny of one over another, no sway of humans over nature. What Gonzalo offers is the dream of a liberated world, a vision of anarchist community, to be found in the writings of Caliban, once he puts pen to paper.
RECOVERY AND RENEWAL
RECOVERY AND RENEWAL
The pace of modernization in the 1960s astonished many and no area of Irish life was left untouched.1 Between 1960 and 1969 over 350 manufacturing enterprises came from overseas to take advantage of the attractive terms offered by the government, not the least of which was an educated and ambitious workforce. At the same time, Ireland became a holiday destination for members of the international jet-set: these tourists brought a touch of glamour and a consu
merist philosophy which soon had their hosts in thrall. In 1963 the formal state visit of John F. Kennedy a Catholic who had become President of the United States, seemed to epitomize the new mood of internationalism and self-confidence: his youth, charisma and urbanity appealed in particular to a generation born after the Rising and Civil War which now felt ready to possess its inheritance. Better still, President Kennedy was a proud Irishman, a glorious illustration that perhaps one could be Irish and modern at the same time.
He appealed to a growing national propensity for having things both ways. His visit – though this only became clear in retrospect – made Ireland safe for western-style consumerism: henceforth, foreign policy would be less independent, less sympathetic to decolonizing peoples and more securely locked within the American sphere of influence. Yet Kennedy praised doe Irish for being a nation of rebels, who had achieved great things by a stubborn refusal to conform. In many ways he embodied, as well as appealing to, a national self-deception: for he played the rebel while secretly being a superstraight. The myth of a rugged frontier-style individualism helped to reconcile many latter-day Americans who supported Kennedy to life as tractable consumers of services and goods. For the Irish, however, the gap between myths of rebellion and the consumerist actuality was going to be more difficult to bridge. For one thing, consumer comforts were still not widely or equally distributed: one person in three in the west of Ireland was described as chronically isolated and whole villages continued to die. For another, the actual rebellion was not safely over in the north – merely simmering, unresolved, beneath a queasy surface.
The national television service initiated in 1962 had an immediate effect in encouraging the ventilation of problems which had long gone undiscussed So irate did one rural politician become at the new free-ranging debates that he famously complained that "there was no sex in Ireland before television".2 The winds of change were felt with real force inside the Catholic church: the liberalizing presence and policies of Pope John XXIII and the aggiornamento of his Second Vatican Council led to vernacular and folk masses and much talk about the priesthood of the laity. The enclosed training of priests and nuns in seminaries, isolated from newspapers, electronic media and the modern world, was widely criticized as an unsound basis for a ministry which seemed more and more likely to bring them into contact with areas of social deprivation, at home or overseas. In the face of these developments, many bishops relaxed their older, autocratic styles of address. The bans on late-night dancing were rescinded Bishops who failed to move with the times were no longer immune to criticism: one was attacked by a student who called him "an immigrant into the twentieth century".3