Inventing Ireland

by Declan Kiberd

  Rather than accept the nation as it appeared in Irish poetry, with its queens and muses, I felt the time had come to re-work those images by exploring the emblematic relation between my own feminine experience and a national past.

  Hence her renegotiation of the mermaid image, her move "with an almost surreal invisibility, from being within the poem to being its maker".50 The result, in many of Boland's works, is an updating rather than a repudiation of the idea of the nation: a process which has made her the logical laureate of Mary Robinsons presidency. This, however, has not protected Boland from interrogation by northern critics who believe that the age-old equation of woman and nation should be dismantled altogether: "at least unionism does not appropriate the image of woman", proclaims Edna Longley, "or hide its aggressions behind our skirts".51 To characterize Irish nationalism as female is, in her view, to endow it with a mythic pedigree with conveniently "exonerates it from oppressive and aggressive intent".

  Edna Longley goes further, arguing that it is not necessarily always a good thing when passive versions of women are transformed into active ones – especially if they buttress notions of warrior-womanhood which may prove helpful to the IRA. In her denationalized landscape, there would be no need for Boland to apologize for her early imitations of Elizabethan court lyrics or of English Movement poets of the 1960s. "To what icon is she apologizing?" asks Longley and answers "In fact, it is to Mother Ireland herself".52 She accuses Boland of a failure to interrogate the notion of nation, with the result that the poet ends up reinstating some of the very clichés which she set out to question.

  Edna Longley does not manage to define any ground other than the nation from which a poet might conduct such an enquiry. Boland, for her part, adopts the view that myths are best dismantled from within. So in one of her most quoted lyrics "Mise Éire", Pearse's refrain "I am Ireland" is rewritten as "I am woman":

  . . . who neither

  knows nor cares that

  a new language

  is a kind of scar

  and heals after a while

  into a passable imitation

  of what went before.53

  In seeking to free her own voice as a woman, Boland expanded and enriched the definitions of a nation: and she did this by an expressed solidarity with other forgotten communities, including the voteless, voiceless emigrants. In earlier decades leaders such as de Valera had used great festivals to remind those at home of the diaspora overseas. After the 1960s, this went out of fashion and the nation was defined in increasingly shrunken terms as those living on the island or those living in the twenty-six county statelet. When Mary Robinson was inaugurated as president, one of her first actions was to light a lamp in Aras an Uachtaráin as a reminder that the "greater Ireland overseas" also belonged. The inspiration for that gesture she cited as a poem by Boland:

  The Emigrant Irish

  Like oil lamps we put them out the back,

  of our houses, of our minds. We had lights

  better than, newer than and then

  a time came, mis time and now

  we need them. Their dread, makeshift example.

  They would have thrived on our necessities.

  What they survived we could not even live.

  By their lights now it is time to

  imagine how they stood there, what they stood with,

  that their possessions may become our power.

  Cardboard. Iron. Their hardships parcelled in them.

  Patience. Fortitude. Long-suffering

  in the bruise-coloured dusk of the New World.

  And all the old songs. And nothing to lose.54

  The new wave of emigration, especially among the educated young, was a challenge to the older generation to consider whether the national renaissance had been successful: a pervasive sense of failure, too deep for words or open admission, had led many to "solve" that intractable problem simply by refusing to discuss it. Society was characterized by a growing rift between righteous traditionalists and jittery revisionists. It became fashionable to rewrite the key documents of Irish nationalism in bitter acts of dismissive parody. Paul Durcan caught the sourness of the prevailing mood in a short lyric:

  She was America-bound, at summers end.

  She had no choice but to leave her home –

  The girl with the keys to Pearse's Cottage.55

  This bleakness of tone was characteristic of many plays and novels in the 1980s. As young Ireland went into a ferocious reaction against the older pieties, it seemed that no aspects of national tradition would be left unscathed. In The Journey Home Dermot Bolger took the name of a 1916 patriot, Plunkett, for a corrupt gombeen-politician, and filled the narrative with anger against the Christian Brothers, nuns (who beat girls for possessing such pagan names as Sarah), and rural immigrants in Dublin suburbs who, after three decades in the city, persisted in calling Kerry or Cork "home".56 The Woman's Daughter, his next novel, was equally depressed, but it spoke for the disillusion of many young people who had given up on Ireland, or at least thought they had. Bolger's posture of radical dissent came rather oddly, however, from one who throughout the period was fêted by The Irish Times and accorded a seat on the Arts Council. There was in truth something over-determined about his attacks: he represented a movement which fancied itself the voice of a persecuted modernity while in fact already being fully established and empowered.

  Moreover, the writing of Bolger and his colleagues was considerably less subversive than it sometimes took itself to be. In its underlying sentimentality about its youthful subjects as victims of social tyranny, it grossly exaggerated the malevolence and the importance of priests, teachers, politicians. Although it prided itself on its realistic engagement with the sordid aspects of Dublin life, it may have unintentionally ratified the old pastoral notion of rural Ireland as real Ireland. The city, in Dermot Bolger's world, was not a place in which a happy, modern life was possible: it was not depicted as the vibrant zone of creativity which Dublin by then had become. His attacks on the clergy furthered the illusion that they were still a force to be reckoned with: but by 1985 even the most conservative bishops had privately conceded to journalists that the battle for traditional Catholicism was lost. The books of Bolger and his colleagues were much admired in England, where they were read as indicating a new cutting-edge realism in Irish writing: but soon the conservative undertow was all too apparent, as well as the conceptual clichés of a strangely caricatured Dublin landscape of horses in high-rise flats and doomed young things in squalid bed-sits.

  In The Lament for Arthur Cleary, however, Bolger achieved a work of rare command and power. Here he broke free of the prevailing clichés by the simple expedient of translating a famous Irish-language poem into modern terms. It tells of how a young Irishman returns from a sojourn on the Continent only to find the Dublin that he loved now gone forever, and his own doom sealed. When he accepted the Irish past as a basis on which to know the Irish present, Bolger impressed as a writer: but when he went to war against the past, he was left dependent on his own resources, which could never be equal to the challenge. In his texts, he found it difficult to register a variety of voices, and this was symptomatic of a generation which, in its anxiety to redefine the Irish condition, sometimes seemed unwilling to allow any voices other than its own to be heard. In that respect, also, they were all too like the older gang which they were reacting so strongly against.

  For the younger artists the surviving hero of the Irish renaissance was Francis Stuart, the "prophet of dishonour" who had always acted as if the writer's duty was to put himself at odds with all consensus viewpoints. His Black List, Section H was a wonderfully acerbic account of the revival period, but also an apologia for the author's days in Nazi Germany, from which he had broadcast programmes in the 1940s. This was now "forgiven", however, on the grounds of his exemplary dissident authority: in effect, a fool's pardon was extended to the artist by persons who seemed not at all perturbed by the implicit admission that wh
at such an artist thinks or says is of no consequence, since it will have no social effect. Perhaps this was why so many of the younger generation could portray themselves as dissidents while actually functioning as careerists. Though artists were feted in Charles Haughey's Ireland, an had in fact lost much of its former social power. The rising generation did not speak with a single voice: and its members were too mobile to solidify into schools. Some, such as Dermot Bolger, repudiated Irish nationalism and declared themselves positively uninterested in having a united Ireland.57 On the most urgent question facing the people, these took a line even more conservative than that favoured by the Dublin establishment. They did so with the best will in the world, as a warning to the IRA that the killing was not to be construed as done in their name: but this then led them into an obsessive, sometimes paranoid, search for elements in southern culture which might be complicit in the northern carnage.

  By contrast, novelists such as Roddy Doyle or Joe O'Connor, who took a more relaxed, even humorous, approach to Irish pieties, often seemed to achieve more as artists and as social analysts. Doyle, in particular, explored in his Barrytown trilogy the life of Dublin housing estates. In The Commitments he described the attempt by poor teenagers to succeed as exponents of soul music, on the grounds that "the Irish are the niggers of Europe, and the Dubliners are the niggers of Ireland, and the northside Dubliners are the niggers of Dublin".58 He was one of the first artists to register the ways in which the relationship between "First" and "Third" Worlds was enacted daily in the streets of the capital city. Even more impressive was his exploration of the inner world of childhood in Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (1993), a book which evinced a nostalgia for the 1960s in which it was set and at the same time checked that tendency with a portrait of a disintegrating marriage. Similarly, Joseph O'Connors Desperadoes (1994), a richly comic novel which cut between the Ireland of the 1950s and the Nicaragua of the 1980s, was another successful investigation of the similarities and dissimilarities between Ireland and the "Third World" – a concern evident also in the rock lyrics of U2 and in the campaigns of musician Bob Geldof.

  In drama Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa was a huge box-office success: its depiction of a priest returned from the African missions, no longer able to distinguish between Irish harvest rituals and African tribal practices, was a further elaboration on a theme touched on by President Robinson and by the more radical members of the Christian clergy. In poetry, Paul Muldoon's epic masterpiece Modoc hinted at an equally suggestive set of connections between the experience of the Irish and of the native Indians of America. A puckish, mischievous postmodernism flickered across the sophisticated lines of Muldoon, and it was this element of wry self-mockery which made his writing immensely attractive to many. Traditionally-minded readers found his promiscuous mingling of codes and narratives often exhausting and mind-numbing: but his refusal of what Beckett once termed "the distortions of intelligibility" was quite deliberate, for he hated and still hates the fixed point of view. Even his sternest critics, however, have had to concede the awesome symmetry of his arrangements:

  The Right Arm

  I was three-ish

  when I plunged my arm into the sweet-jar

  for the last bit of clove-rock.

  We kept a shop in Eglish

  that sold bread, milk, butter, cheese,

  bacon and eggs,

  Andrews Liver Salts,

  and, until now, clove-rock.

  I would give my right arm to have known then

  how Eglish was itself wedged between ecclesia and église.

  The Eglish sky was its own stained-glass vault

  and my right arm was sleeved in glass

  that has yet to shatter.59

  Even more noteworthy, however, were the audacious formal experiments in so many texts, indicating a huge and largely justifiable self-confidence in their authors. The content of many works might be bleak enough, but it was often set in dynamic tension with a superb jauntiness of form. The retailing of local gossip in stories of Borgesian economy by "Nina Fitzpatrick", and the swerve from humorous recollection to sombre conclusion in Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha were cases in point. So was the elliptical structure of John Banville's Kepler and its equation of the scientist with an artist whose work deconstructs itself. Perhaps the most spectacular instance of all was Tom Murphy's construction of The Gigli Concert as a form of verbal opera. Murphy's drama has its roots in the disorder of rural Irish life, yet it moves always to a moment when routine is elevated to the pitch of sacred ritual: the desire of a successful house-builder to sing with the sweetness of Beniamino Gigli being a case in point. In Murphy's world the ideal and the real never completely lose touch with one another: and in rare moments of benediction they overlap. He has drawn heavily on the gangster movies of Hollywood for his prototypes of the Irish gombeen man, but there is always an element of affection even in his hardest mockery: and this has meant that he is perhaps the most subtle chronicler of the embourgeoisification of rural Ireland, whether in A Crucial Week in the Life of a Grocer's Assistant or in the magnificent Bailegangaire, which presents the reminiscences of a bedridden old woman. All of these experiments with form, in novels, poems or plays, indicated that what was afoot was something very like a second literary renaissance.

  The conditions for that renaissance were not so very different from those which had produced the first one – a highly-educated young population, whose intellectual ambitions often exceeded the available career opportunities. Indeed, the immense reputation of Irish writing in overseas capitals was a great help to aspiring artists. Unlike Kavanagh and his contemporaries of the mid-century, who wrote in the intimidating aftermath of Yeats and Joyce, and who often found it hard to believe that their concerns were of interest to any but themselves, this new generation effortlessly assumed the attention of the world as a natural right. Some reputations were, if anything, too easily won: by the 1990s to be an "Irish writer" in London or New York was for some a passport not only to relative comfort but also to complacency. But the advantages of such a warm welcome more than outweighed the dangers. The rapid international recognition of still-young writers, playwrights and film-makers allowed the more gifted among them to pursue extremely mobile careers, which in turn led to a further internationalization of themes and tones.

  Evidence for a "second renaissance" was also to be found in the major films (often with strong literary associations) made by Neil Jordan (director of The Crying Game) and by Jim Sheridan (director of My Left Foot). Unlike their English contemporaries, who often achieved at the age of thirty a technical competence which left them invulnerable to criticism but incapable of development, the Irish artists took risks, improvised, and often brought off quite breath-taking effects. Some indeed were accused of experimentation for its own sake, of engaging in nothing more than a succession of daredevil feats. Most, however, could justly claim that they were driven to test new forms by the exacting nature of their chosen themes. Of no artist was this more true than of Brian Friel, a man whose entire oeuvre achieved early a representative status, as admired in the south as in the north, as often performed overseas as at home, as praised in the academy as it was loved by live audiences.

  Thirty-Three

  Friel Translating

  Translations is the best known of Brian Friel's plays. Set in the Donegal hedge-school of Baile Beag in August 1833. it describes the attempt by the British soldiers of the Royal Engineers and their Irish collaborators to transliterate the local Gaelic placenames and Anglicize them, in the process of mapping the area for the Ordnance Survey. It is a time of transition in every sense, for it becomes clear that the local hedge-school will soon be replaced by a state-sponsored National School providing free education in English for all.

  This was but one of a number of modernizing experiments conducted in the colonial laboratory that was Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century before being applied in England. Another was the introduction of a streamlined postal service years before such a
thing was enjoyed in England. The postal system was welcome since it vastly improved communications: the National Schools have had a more ambiguous reputation, since they were often cited by nationalist historians as having played a major part in the decline of the Irish language. So rapid was the transition from Irish to English in some rural areas that William Carleton, the novelist and short story writer, reported attending a wedding where the bride spoke no English and the groom no Irish, with the result that "the very language of love cried out for an interpreter".1 This passage may lie behind the central scene of Friel's play, in which the English officer Yolland and the peasant Máire Chatach enact an identical ritual. The Irish language was fatally associated in the popular mind with poverty, backwardness and defeat.

  When Translations was first staged in Deny in 1980, to launch the Field Day Company, Irish theatre critics had no doubt that, like Heaney before him, Friel was another canny northerner who chose a remote historical event to throw an oblique light on the present. The pressure on Máire Chatach to learn English as a prelude to emigration seemed a scenario out of the 1950s as much as the 1830s; and the cultural debates in the play seemed to echo resoundingly of the clash between tradition and modernity, between the pastoral Ireland of de Valera and the technological island envisioned by Seán Lemass. The anti-industrial bias of some pastoralists is epitomized in Friel's play by the hedge-schoolmaster Hugh who remarks derisively that few of the townsfolk speak English, and then only for commercial purposes to which the language seems particularly suited. This is certainly a feasible interpretation, given that Friel's own career as an artist has spanned the decades since the First Programme for Economic Expansion in 1958 paved the way for investment by multinationals. Like many northern nationalists, Friel has looked at this modernization with very mixed feelings, since the emergent southern élites seemed to be abandoning the commitment to nationalist nostra. Some southern critics have gone so far as to accuse Friel of misrepresenting an economic crisis of the 1960s as a merely cultural and linguistic problem of the 1830s. They allege that this is symptomatic of a general retreat by modern Irish writers from the political complexities of modernity into a more private domain of language.2