Inventing Ireland

by Declan Kiberd

  This is the same strategy by which James Connolly discovered Utopian socialism or Patrick Pearse a child-centred education-system in ancient Ireland. The technical problem posed for artists (as well as apologists) in 1916 was the old one: how to express something unknown in a language dense with precedents? The answer, as has been shown in detail, was also an old one: use the known to express the unknown. This was another useful reminder that all progress depends on translation: even the child learning to speak is learning how to use known words in the attempt to acquire unknown ones. Translation within one's own language is arguably as important as that between languages, and no different in essence. Friel's play on the theme, dealing with the ways in which a child or an adult acquires language, demonstrates that reading and writing are equally versions of this act.

  These activities are necessarily painful, fraught with possibilities of humiliation and even defeat: for the familiar word is invariably more confidently used than the acquired, the spoken word more easily summoned than the written or read one. Language itself may be no more than a pale translation of the ideal voices of silence. The translator is by very definition belated, secondary, dependent on the prior text: yet the prior text itself keeps slipping into unavailability. If spoken words are copies, then writing is a copy of a copy, and reading but a further copying. So where is the point of origin? In the exchange of Máire Chatach and Lieutenant Yolland? But Translations denies that there is any source text.

  This problem is raised even more acutely in Friel's other masterpiece Faith Healer. There the protagonist, attempting to turn human pain to balm, is as often con-man as holy healer. A broker in risk, Francis Hardy knows that to be an artist is to fail, to experience only misery punctuated by rare moments of unexpected splendour and, in the end, to know ignominious rejection. Yet the strictures are implied also of the author, for the play is an occluded version of the Fate of the Sons of Uisneach. its theme of a well-brought-up girl, destined for a noble calling in the north of Ireland, then spirited away to Scotland by an attractive but feckless man to the dismay of an elderly guardian, is reworked by Friel. So also is its central narrative technique, the lilting listing of place names loved and lost; and so also its consummation, a return to predicted disaster. The play turns out to be about itself, since it, like the healer, veers between confidence trickery and brilliant innovation. And the first audience which the artist must con is himself: for if he becomes overly self-analytical, he may kill his very gift and it will even sooner desert him.20

  In Faith Healer an original text is neither reproduced or imitated, but set in vibration with the present – which is to say that it is decanonized in a free translation or "reverberation". By that act it transforms rather than merely reproduces the original legend, in keeping with the latest artist's expressive needs: but this is also a phase in the further development of the original, which depended for its survival over many centuries on just such translations. So also did Joyce remodel The Odyssey of Homer by his translation of it in Ulysses.

  In Faith Healer an ancient myth is creatively misinterpreted so that Brian Friel can redefine heroism for the modern Irish audience. According to the legend Deirdre's name meant "troubler" and she was remembered for the prophecy at her birth that many would die because of her beauty. Grace, the modern Deirdre, is heroic not so much for the suffering which she inflicts (though she has some of the cruelty of the old heroine) as for the pain which she must endure with her partner, the healer. Similarly, the manager Teddy is not allowed the easy "heroic" option of instant death in defence of the man and woman he worships, but is left behind at the end to pick up what pieces remain. The ultimate realism is to deny Deirdre the fake glamour of a romantic death she had in medieval versions, and instead to give her a lonely death as a nervous wreck in a bedsitter. In this respect, Friel returns to the oldest versions of the tale, which had Deirdre dash out her brains on a rock, the hopeless act of a woman crazed with grief, a year and a day after the execution of her lover. Perhaps most significant of all is Friel's decision to give Hardy the central role, just as Naoise was the pivotal figure in the oldest version of the legend in The Book of Leinster.

  Underlying Friel's depiction of Hardy as a modern Naoise, or for that matter Joyce's account of Bloom as a modern Ulysses, is the conviction that primitive myths are not impositions of a culture but innate possessions of every person, who professes to be unique but is in fact a copy, consciously or unconsciously repeating the lives of others. Hence the characteristic modern malaise of inauthenticity, which assails those sophisticated enough to sense the frustrations of a life lived in quotation marks. Hence also the supreme importance of those small differences with which history repeats itself, for they are the sole guarantee of individuality. What applies to persons and characters is also true of authors. Friel retells an old story, borrowing protagonists, situations, even phrases from the tale, and to that extent he is, like Francis Hardy, a con-man. But like Hardy, he also remoulds his tale and his people to some private standard of excellence of his own . . . and to that extent he is indeed an artist. It adds to the poignancy of Hardy's life that he is quite unaware that he has reenacted the story of Deirdre and the Sons of Uisneach.

  Friel's plays are implicit critiques of the value-free approach to history taken by most contemporary Irish historians: and reminders that it is human nature to name as truth what is usually the narrative most flattering to current ruling vanity. Many historians will not admit his implied claim that there is always a crisis of representation, that they (as much as any artist) are at the mercy of their chosen forms and genres. Friel's confrontation with them became most explicit in his 1988 play Making History, which asks whether there is any effective difference between a defective personal memory and a distorted public record.

  In the play Archbishop Peter Lombard is writing the life of Hugh O'Neill, but what he seeks is neither "interpretation" nor "fact" but "the best possible narrative". Being himself caught up in the events he is to record, he is too wary to define either the historian's function or his method: "History has still to be made before it is remade".21 This is, perhaps, a cynical reminder that all historians are revisionists, but it is a reminder which hints at a fundamental similarity between a recorder and maker of events. Both are interpreters. For the strategist O'Neill an action is an interpretation, an option for a single possibility out of a thousand others; and in seeking by imaginative action to shape a nation-state, he too is a maker of supreme fiction. Both men know, of course, that Lombard will have the last word, since history is not written by winners or losers but by historians. Yet Lombard has the wit to concede that there is no History, just histories, each one produced for persons who think they revere facts while secretly wanting a good story. So the story forgets that O'Neill at one point fought for the Tudors against Irish rebels, or that Kinsale was a one-hour rout. Instead, "the telling of it can still be a triumph".22 The problem with that is the problem confronted in Translations: of what value is a linguistic contour which no longer matches the landscape of fact? Histories may get lost in the very act of being recorded and simplified into "narrative". Every interpretation is an imprisonment and an exclusion, an act of aggression against the multiplicity of life. O'Neill's history becomes Lombard's story, and the Irish historian comes to seem to him an enemy as deadly as the English colonizer, since both would imprison him in their fictions.

  Many of Friel's earlier plays had enacted a similar dialogue between a high-minded narrator (perhaps a presiding judge, or a script-director) and the cries of those caught up in the fury of lived histories. For the latter official history became a kind of tragic net, and the more they struggled against it, the more it seemed to entrap its sad and laughable antagonists. In Making History there is, however, a sense that the net itself may be faintly ridiculous: the stubborn complexity of the person is asserted against social prescriptions. So the war between Gael and Gall seems a minor matter when compared to the struggle within O'Neill between nativ
e pietas and Renaissance self-fashioner. At times he can feel exhausted by his own versatility: but he knows that, while his "two pursuits" can scarcely be reconciled, yet the attempt must be made. The test of a first-rate mind is, indeed, its ability to hold opposed codes in the head without losing the capacity to function. The impossible, but nonetheless desirable, fusion of Gaelic and English tradition, which characterized the central love-scene in Translations, is attempted again in Making History in the marriage of O'Neill and Mabel Bagenal.

  Those who seek such a reconciliation may be, it seems, either ennobled or debilitated by it. Ennobled, as when one culture repairs the gaps in another in a mutual exchange of golden songs; or debilitated, as when two discrepant codes cancel one another out, leaving only suspicion and distrust to fill the ensuing vacuum. Yeats had called the two pursuits Reality and Justice, and had hoped to hold them "in a single thought". The gap is not fully closed at the end of Making History, but it has been bridged by an electric irony, which suggests that the choice is not between reality and illusion, but between one dream and another. The historians who reviewed Friel's play were not impressed, and neither were they amused by such a finding.

  John Banville, however, would have understood Friel perfectly, for he had already constructed Doctor Copernicus (1976) on a still more radical critique of academic claims to "truth". This novel shows that even a scientist will in the end choose to save the phenomena rather than admit that they have eluded him. Early in the narrative Copernicus discovers that each of his rival scientists is an unwitting artist: they know that Ptolemy's theory is wrong but have too deep an investment in it to admit this, and so they devise working theories which are grounded in Ptolemy's errors, but which can nevertheless be made to account for the superficially-observed motions of the planets. By the end of the book, Copernicus too has opted for his own "superior" falsification. "The past doesn't exist in terms of fact", said Banville himself in an interview shortly after the publication of his book: "It only exists in terms of the way we look at it".23 What holds a world together is nothing more than a style, but for Banville each style excludes far more than it includes: with every structuralization of chaos, chaos itself increases, because each structure detonates new reactions. Those intrepid souls who seek a better, or at least a more aesthetic, explanation are heroes of the mind.

  Copernicus, like Marx or Freud or Loyola, becomes the inventor of a new discourse. Copernicus's severance of traditional ties robs him not just of old securities but of nationality too: behind the mask of "Ermlander", says the author, "he was that which no name or nation could claim. He was Doctor Copernicus".24 In short, he was a type of the pure artist for whom tradition is not a datum so much as a personal renegotiation with and reinvention of all that has gone before. Seen in this context, anti-nationalist revisionists are in a number of ways rather like the nationalist historians whom they debunk: both take the world as a given and Irish tradition as a stable element in that handover. Both accept the paradigm of the imperialist in that they overlook the actual violence of the colonial "translation" itself – the nationalist by returning to a point of mythic origin, the revisionist by treating the translator's effect that is the "native" as a cause, both literal and metaphorical. Above all, both agree that Ireland marks the outer limits of their enterprise. Banville, however, feels unable or unwilling to write from within that secure culture, and so he takes up a position beyond it, writing of all those forces which have made the very phrases "Irish tradition" or "German culture" problematic.25

  The most chastening discovery of Banville's Copernicus is that the space once occupied by God is now filled with a void: and so, the maker of the ultimate fiction having absconded, all secondary fictions become self-enclosed. If the world is not a translation of a more perfect one elsewhere, then art and science can hardly claim any longer to be renditions of the world, being merely stylistic arrangements of experience. Banville once, in a sly parody of Shelley, said that novelists are the unacknowledged historians of the world:26 the implication, of course, is that the historians will not acknowledge that there is a sense in which they might also be novelists. So he deliberately took for subject a scientist of whose life few facts were known, leaving him free to vivify that life and its setting with an overlaid consciousness which can quote Wallace Stevens or Henry James. In much the same manner, Shaw in Saint Joan had his medieval characters talk as if they had already read Marx and Nietzsche.

  All of these writers are post-nationalist, insofar as they are committed to a project of perpetual translation. The nationalist, being merely the effect of a single act of translation, mistakenly takes himself for the original cause: but Irish artists have long known that such singularity is a delusion. They have known estrangement from all languages as the natural condition of their work: this has meant that they have been able to make a home in many. Far from being ill-fitted to modernity, they have taken it as the one sure given, and so theirs has been a genius for adjustment. While their people have scattered across the face of the earth, moving from neolithic communities to the hyperreality of Hell's Kitchen, the writers have shown similar gifts of adaptation. Beckett wrote his greatest masterpieces in French before translating some of them "back" into English; and then he reverted wholly to creation in English, but only when French had become "trop facile". Liam O'Flaherty began writing in Irish, soon switched to English, and oscillated between them after that. Flann O'Brien and Brendan Behan wrote most of their work in English, but each also wrote major texts of the modern Irish language. Joyce, the greatest of them all, wrote his last text simultaneously in about two dozen languages. Even today Finnegans Wake poses stupendous problems for a translator: how is the job to be done? Out of what language? And into what base-language? How can any version begin to render the plurality of the text?

  All of these artists repeatedly disproved the widespread delusion that one can produce original work only in one's mother tongue. They recognized that every true translation, every text, must retain for the reader some sense of the foreignness of its originals. Beckett offered the most extreme case of this self-estrangement, but many other writers also sought it – "the most extraordinary form of humiliation that a writer, who is not a bad writer, could inflict upon himself'.27

  These observations suggest that modern Irish writing set up shop under the sign of Babel. That biblical myth rehearsed the forces and themes of Irish art, being at once a story of imperialism and of its counter-image in nationalism, and of the punishments attendant upon either. God the Father, who alone was the origin of a universal language, was driven by anger to punish the Semite imperialists who built their tower "as high as heaven" and their affliction was a proliferation of "mother tongues". Instead of filiation, they knew affiliation. That myth is a warning against all who would seek to impose an official language of enlightenment, whether English in the nineteenth century or Irish in the twentieth. The builders of the tower were guilty, after all, of wanting to make a name for themselves, of wishing to construct themselves solely by the act of self-naming.28

  Against such hopeful simplicities, the myth insists that identity is dialogic, porous. Friel's Translations mocks the notion of a cordon sanitaire placed around a self-sufficient Ireland and it accepts that translation, however difficult, is absolutely necessary. The occupants of Babel were punished because of their vain belief that they could do away with evil and create an absolute purity.

  Translation, however, allows a people to reach back longingly to a lost universal language, but only in the knowledge that it can never be repossessed. Banville's Copernicus suspects as much: "If such harmony had ever existed, he feared deep down, deep beyond admitting, that it was not to be regained".29

  REINVENTING IRELAND

  Thirty-Five

  Imagining Irish Studies

  "To restore great things", said Erasmus, "is sometimes a harder and nobler task than to have introduced them".1 The exponents of the Irish Renaissance shaped and reshaped an ancient past, and
duly recalled it, giving rise to an unprecedented surge of creativity and self-confidence among the people. The task facing this generation is at once less heroic and more complex: to translate the recent past, the high splendours and subsequent disappointments of that renaissance, into the terms of a new century. Perhaps the greatest wrong committed by the English in Ireland, after their coming, was their refusal to open themselves fully to all the experiences that followed, to achieve a true translation of that culture towards which they nonetheless moved, as if animated by some undeclared need. It was left to Yeats, Hyde and their generation to point to the lesson and to bring to England a knowledge which the colonists themselves had signally failed to glean. There is nothing especially surprising about that blindness: it is a peculiarity of imperialists everywhere that they fail to identify with human experience, "but also fail to see it as human experience".2

  What was surprising, however, was the willingness of large numbers of nationalists to countenance the notion of Irish exceptionality. Preening themselves on some occasions for being "like no other people on earth", arraigning themselves on others, they often failed to regard Irish experience as representative of human experience, and so they remained woefully innocent of the comparative method, which might have helped them more fully to possess the meaning of their lives. As an exceptional instance, Ireland was always there to be studied by others: the narcissistic fantasy of some nationalists was a little like that of the naïve Aran islander who gravely told J. M. Synge that "there are few rich men now in the world who are not studying the Gaelic".3 The proliferation of courses in Irish Studies in Britain and North America and beyond may have fed such narcissism: but it has not yet prompted any group of native intellectuals to make a reciprocal gesture by studying the ways in which outsiders choose to see them. For instance, an institute of British Studies, based in one or other of the universities, might valuably monitor the ways in which the British constructed their own world (and the Irish as a vital part of it). Instead of this, however, many Irish-born scholars have internalized the external models, producing analyses which owe far more to the narrative methods of Heart of Darkness than their authors might care to admit.