Inventing Ireland

by Declan Kiberd

  Paradoxical it may be, but the recent debate surrounding the Irish language may shed much unexpected light on the current dilemma of unionists. Some unionist militants, as if vaguely sensing this, have taken to learning the Irish language during protracted spells in jail; others have adopted the figure of Cuchulain who, after all, defended the gap of the north against outside attack, as a model to inspire their followers. There is an Orange Lodge which marches under the banner Oidhreacht Éireann (Irish Heritage). Some of the more liberal unionists, such as Christopher McGimpsey, have argued strongly for the Irish language as an essential part of their heritage too: and it is a fact that many ancestors of today's loyalists would have been Irish-speaking.

  The twin frustrations of twentieth-century Irish life, reflected in the two unachieved aims of the largest political party on the island, are the failure to reintegrate the national territory and to revive Irish as the community language. The second wound is much less discussed in books and newspapers, and nobody has died because of it – but the silence which surrounds it may in large pan be due to the fact that it was self-inflicted. In just over a century a language spoken by millions withered to almost nothing. Had such a thing happened in any other small or medium-sized European country, it is probable that the language in question would have disappeared. At the start of the nineteenth century, there were more speakers of Irish than speakers of Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish or Welsh: yet they coolly abandoned their language in the belief that it was an obstacle to progress. Only later did some of them, led by Douglas Hyde, conclude that with it went a social framework, a hold on a world, a basis for self-belief and, ultimately, economic prosperity.

  Few enough people outside the ranks of cultural nationalism have been able to admit to the traumatizing effect of the loss of Irish on the personality of citizens. Roy Foster's Modern Ireland offers no separate consideration of it in the course of a very long study. For more than half a century after the foundation of the independent state in 1922, there was no official investigation of public attitudes. Most people congratulated themselves on their eloquence in English, while remaining dumb in Irish.11 It is hard to avoid the conclusion that even the brilliance of the Irish literary performance in English may have had about it some element of determined compensation. The astonishing speed and stunning success with which the Irish jettisoned their native language has never been fully explained, nor has the unsuccess with which they strove to reclaim it in the twentieth century. After seventy years of official support and daily classes for every school child in the land, only five per cent could claim "frequent user" ability, and only two per cent "native speaker" fluency.12 Learning a second language is never easy, of course, yet with far fewer institutional supports, the Irish mastered English so comprehensively in the nineteenth century that they produced one of the greatest literary outpourings in that language.

  Most other European minorities who learned English did so only when they had settled in major cities of Britain or the new world: but the Irish changeover occurred at home. Other peoples had to trade with speakers of a foreign language and so to acquire some proficiency in it, but this never led them to give up their own. The Irish experience was in this respect unique: they didn't learn English in order to emigrate – rather they learned English, and then many of them emigrated, finding no pressing reasons to stay. Seán de Fréine has argued most convincingly that the Great Famine did not of itself destroy the language: a people with self-belief will recover from even worse cataclysms, as both the Germans and Jews have done in the twentieth century. Rather, the Famine revealed a new helplessness in people who had previously faced adversity with confidence and good spirit: it exposed the fact that they no longer had traditions which might give them sustenance.13 De Fréine contends that the Penal Laws of the previous century debilitated the Irish, robbing them of an aristocratic leadership. They were willing to adopt English by the 1790s, if that was to be the price of reforms which would permit them to hold onto their religion. So Maynooth was set up in 1795, with classes conducted in English for "young dandies" who were painfully keen to conceal their Irish.14

  Thereafter, more and more parents who spoke only Irish to one another saw to it that English alone was spoken by their children. A process of "denial" soon followed. Convulsed by guilt at the enormity of what they had done, many found it most convenient to forget that there ever had been such a thing as an Irish language distinct from English. The inferiority-complex which impelled so many to give up Irish was not cured, more often exacerbated, by the gesture: and so a people in denial sought to project their own guilt elsewhere. Hence the rampant Anglophobia among many nationalists in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and the consequent writing of Irish history as a Manichaean morality-tale in the first half of the twentieth.15 Hence, too, the over-emphasis on Catholicism as definitive of Irishness in the same period. With the native language all but gone, many found it necessary to locate the sole or central meanings of a culture in what had survived. Yet the evidence would now suggest that the Irish may be about to jettison Catholicism as unsentimentally as once they disposed of their own language.

  By its own admission the Catholic church is already on the retreat in the southern state, unable to find any mainstream daily newspaper to sponsor its values: yet many Protestant unionists remain suspicious of the siren-call of the south. In ancient times, certainly, the seductive powers of Gaelic culture were such that even a group as self-confident as the Normans was assimilated, becoming "more Irish than the Irish themselves": but the evidence from recent centuries all points to the capacity of the Irish themselves to be assimilated. The more Anglophobic the leaders of Irish nationalism became, the more fully did they make their country an integral part of a prevailing British culture. At the start of the century Synge had lamented the lack of sufficient Irish readers to sustain native publishing houses or a national school of letters: yet the nationalist politicians who grumbled about a unionist veto on political progress never seemed to worry about the fact that English publishing houses and English tastes largely determined what books by Irish authors got into print.

  In more recent decades, native publishing houses have flourished, but the newspaper market has been flooded by cheap British tabloids, which sold widely and did much to coarsen public taste, while the better broadsheet papers were forced to imitate English rivals, which constantly undercut them on the basis of their superior economies of scale. There was little enough reason for unionists to fear cultural assimilation: rather the danger was that both unionists and nationalists were being coopted by the global media network in the English language.

  Against that rather bleak backdrop the cultural successes of the past three decades seem positively heartening. There are now thousands of books published in Ireland every year, to a very high standard of writing and design: an indigenous children's literature is but one manifestation of a new-found confidence. Local publishing companies, like local radio stations, have reflected the traditions of their immediate hinterland in ways which help people to resist the globalization of English-language culture. Among the young in particular, ever since the 1960s, the Irish language has been embraced by many as a force for a "counterculture" quite distinct from nationalist attachments. Indeed, anti-English outbursts have been signally absent among those who, speaking Irish on a daily basis, have no reason to worry as to whether what they say or do has the stamp of Irishness or not. Given that only fifty people could write in Irish when the Gaelic League set to work, the current levels of writing in the language are near-miraculous.

  The fact that many who learned Irish as a second language are also the ones who have mastered French and German has had its exemplary value in answering negative criticisms of the amount of time devoted to the study of Irish in schools. One of the less admirable features of British culture (aped by many nationalists) was its insularity, when it came to the speaking of continental languages. Arguably, the Irish-speaking lobby has done more than mos
t others to counter this. Equally, the fact that many of the most successful business "achievers" in society have been enthusiastic Gaeilgeoirí has strengthened arguments for a connection between cultural self-confidence and economic success. Such self-belief might ultimately prove far more attractive to uncertain unionists in search of a viable identity than the more fretful nationalism which preceded it. The polls in the south show a huge majority against coercing unionists into a united Ireland.16 At the same time, Irish speakers, rightly resentful of a Southern state whose officials could not always deal with them in their native language, made a new kind of case on the basis of minority rights: and in making it they repeatedly urged unionists to keep a close eye on this "test case", which might have implications for the treatment of a unionist minority in some future "agreed Ireland".

  Useful lessons from the Irish experience might be learned and applied in other places and settings. The major moral – it is not too strong a word – is this: that, if the native culture of a people is devalued and destroyed for the sake of material progress, what follows may not be material progress of the kind hoped for, but cultural confusion and a diminished sense of enterprise. The Irish prosper mightily abroad, whenever they are pan of a dynamic community with a belief in itself. At home during the earlier decades of the independent state, they often seemed to stagnate through lost self-belief. Given that they had just done the impossible and dislodged a mighty imperial army, this was a remarkable failure – although it seems less astounding now in the light of subsequent failures in Africa and elsewhere. Nevertheless, some significant element in that failure may be traceable to the experience of losing Irish.

  The confusion which followed was, in the words of one of Brian Friel's characters, not an ignoble condition.17 It produced a great experimental literature, which is admired across the world and which has, coded into its texts, many elements which might be helpful in redesigning an Ireland of the future. If other, less original groups in that society were to look to artists for inspiration, and not just for ornament, much could be learned from the scrutiny. Their art shows that the Irish are still, despite all their frustrations, vibrant – a people of immense versatility, sophistication and multiplicity of viewpoint. The past decade has seen a notable emergence of regional theatre companies, of publishing houses devoted to local authors and local history; and the new community radio stations are winning more and more listeners. If "Ireland" is recovering an interest in its constituent parts, that may be all to the good: writers nowadays are more alert to the dangers of overriding real differences of class, region or language. While the peripheries seem ever more vital, the Abbey Theatre – despite the brilliant successes of Friel, Murphy and Frank McGuinness – has found it increasingly difficult to reconcile its "national" duty to perform a largely ruralist canon with its "civic" desire to service its immediate hinterland. Perhaps by redefining the National Theatre as an abstract, federal entity, encompassing vibrant regional companies who might play parts of that canon, the Abbey could be freed to move in that direction. In this way the idea of a national theatre could be defended and updated.

  If the notion of "Ireland" seemed to some to have become problematic, that was only because the seamless garment once wrapped like a green flag around Cathleen ní Houlihan had given way to a quilt of many patches and colours, all beautiful, all distinct, yet all connected too. No one element should subordinate or assimilate the others: Irish or English, rural or urban, Gaelic or Anglo, each has its part in the pattern.

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  1. Benedict Anderson, "Exodus", Critical Inquiry, Vol. 20, No. 2, Winter 1994, 316.

  2. Ibid., 319.

  3. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Postcolonial Literatures, London 1989, 33.

  4. On the Janus-faced nature of nationalism in the "developing" world, see three brilliant recent interventions: Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse, London 1986; Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture, London 1993; and Basil Davidson, The Black Man's Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State, London 1992. The increasing influence of African (and Indian) analyses on recent Irish cultural debates may be measured by reading books as different as Desmond Fennell's Heresy: The Battle of Ideas in Modem Ireland, Belfast 1993 and Liz Curtis, The Cause of Ireland, London 1995.

  ONE: A NEW ENGLAND CALLED IRELAND?

  1. See Declan Kiberd, "The Fall of the Stage Irishman", The Genres of the Irish Literary Revival, ed. R. Schleifer, Norman, Oklahoma 1979, 39–60 where this argument was first elaborated.

  2. Edmund Spenser, "A View of the Present State of Ireland" (1596), The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 1, Derry 1991, 183 ff.

  3. "An Síogaí Rómhánach", Five Seventeenth Century Political Poems, ed. C. O'Rahilly, Dublin 1952, 29.

  4. Spenser, ibid., 191.

  5. See Piaras Béaslaoi, Éigse NuaGhaedhilge 1, Dublin n.d., 64.

  6. Philip Edwards, Threshold of a Nation: A Study in English and Irish Drama, Cambridge 1979, 79.

  7. Act 3, scene 2, lines 120–4. Touchiness on matters of national pride was not confined to the Irish. After the disappointments of the Earl of Essex's campaign in Ireland, this passage may have been censored on the Elizabethan stage: certainly it does not exist in the 1600 Quarto. By July 1599 the open discussion of Irish affairs was itself a serious offence: already Ireland was turning into the official English Unconscious. On this see Janet Clare, Art Made Tongue-Tied by Authority: Elizabeth and Jacobean Dramatic Censorship, Manchester 1990, 71–2.

  8. Quoted by Edwards, 79.

  9. Seathrún Céitinn (Geoffrey Keating), Fonts Feasa or Éirinn 1, ed. David Comyn, London 1902, 76.

  10. Ibid., 30.

  11. See Andrew Carpenter, "Double Vision in Anglo-Irish Literature", Place, Personality and the Irish Writer, ed. Carpenter, Gerrards Cross 1977, 182–3.

  12. See Edmund Burke, Irish Affairs, London 1988 (first published 1881).

  13. Edmund Burke, Works, Boston 1869, Vol. 10, 217.

  14. Burke, Works, Vol. 2, 222.

  15. Burke, Correspondence, ed. T. Copeland, Cambridge Mass. 1958, Vol. 5, 255.

  16. Burke, Works, Vol. 2, 195.

  17. Burke, Works, Vol. 12, 23–4.

  18. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France in Works, Vol. 2, 320.

  19. Burke, Works, Vol. 2, 205.

  20. Burke, Works, Vol. 5, 225.

  21. Burke, Works, Vol. 5, 148.

  22. Conor Cruise O'Brien, introduction to Reflections on the Revolution in France, Harmondsworth 1969, 42–9.

  23. Burke, Correspondence, Vol. 1, 202.

  24. Standish O'Grady, Selected Essays and Passages, Dublin 1918, 180 ff.

  IRELAND: ENGLAND'S UNCONSCIOUS?

  1. John Keats, Letters, selected by Frederick Page, London 1954, 149.

  2. Matthew Arnold, The Study of Celtic Literature, London 1891, 115.

  3. Ibid., 104.

  4. Shaemas O'Sheel, Jealous of the Dead Leaves, New York 1928.

  5. Arnold, ibid., 92.

  TWO: OSCAR WILDE – THE ARTIST AS IRISHMAN

  1. Henry Craik, letter to John Forster, Forster MS 48.E.25, British Library.

  2. W. B. Yeats, Autobiographies, London 1955, 138.

  3. Ibid., 138.

  4. Ibid., 137.

  5. Richard Ellmann. Oscar Wilde, Harmondsworth 1987, 11–12.

  6. Oscar Wilde, Plays, Harmondsworth 1968, 267.

  7. Oscar Wilde, Complete Works, Glasgow 1994, 770.

  8. Wilde, Plays, 51.

  9. Quoted by H. Montgomery Hyde, Oscar Wilde, London 1976, 31.

  10. Oscar Wilde, Selected Letters, ed. R. Hart-Davis. Oxford 1979, 20–1.

  11. Quoted Hyde, 232.

  12. Wilde, Selected Letters, 100.

  13. Quoted by Hyde, 85.

  14. Quoted by Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, Oxford 19
59, 226.

  15. Richard Ellmann, Eminent Domain, Oxford 1967, 12–13.

  16. Wilde, Selected Letters, 197.

  17. See Hyde, 38 ff.

  18. Oscar Wilde, The Artist as Critic, ed. R. Ellmann, London 1970, 389.

  19. Ibid., 136–40.

  20. On this see Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity Oxford 1972, 118– 22.

  21. Wilde, Plays, 288.

  22. Ibid., 290.

  23. James Laver, The Concise History of Costume and Fashions, New York 1969, 182.

  24. Wilde, Plays, 310.

  25. On Wilde's critique of determinism, see Christopher Nassaar, Into the Demon Universe, New Haven 1974, 135–7.

  26. Quoted by Rodney Shewan, Oscar Wilde: Art and Egotism, London 1977, 193.

  27. Wilde, Plays, 263.

  28. Ibid., 277.

  29. See L. P. Curtis Jnr., Anglo-Saxons and Celts: A Study of Anti-Irish Prejudice in Victorian England, Bridgeport 1968.

  30. Wilde, Selected Letters, 50.

  31. Otto Rank, The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study, New York 1971.

  32. Wilde, Plays, 262.

  33. Eric Stern, review of Rank's The Double, Die Literatur XXIX, 1926–7, 555.

  34. Rank, The Double, 48 ff.

  35. Wilde, Plays, 284.

  36. Quoted by Harry Tucker, introduction, Rank, The Double, xvi.

  37. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, London 1966, 229–40.

  38. Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism, Bombay 1983, 7–8.

  39. Ibid., 79–113.

  40. Ibid., 11.

  41. Wilde, The Artist as Critic, 403.

  42. Quoted by R. K. R. Thornton, The Decadent Dilemma, London 1983.