Minor invasions preceded the 1170 conquest, precipitated by Diarmait’s promise to make a Norman lord his heir. A few hundred Norman-English knights, mounted, armored, and heavily armed, with about a thousand footsoldiers, took Leinster for themselves in 1170, and made Dublin their headquarters. They built Dublin Castle, the great stone hulk that still broods over central Dublin, on whose walls the severed heads of rebels were once displayed, and other strongholds, parcelling out much of the land to Norman nobles. Their hold over the rest of Ireland waxed and waned while Dublin remained essentially an English holding until the 1920s. By the fifteenth century, their grip on the rest of the country had slipped, and they held only the Pale, an expanse spreading about thirty miles around Dublin. Everything else was literally beyond the pale, a boundary that became a permanent fixture of the English language as the line between barbarianism and civilization, though the civility of the Normans was dubious at best.
Besides Dublin Castle and the two cathedrals, little can be seen of Dublin’s past before the eighteenth century, when the present city was envisioned and built. There were recurrent invasions, insurrections, and bloodbaths, from the failed sack of Dublin by the Scots in 1317 to the uprising of the aristocratic and doomed Silken Thomas there in 1534. It was Cromwell’s base for his mid-seventeenth-century anti-Catholic campaign. Order and a measure of peace returned with Charles II’s viceroy in 1662, the Duke of Ormond. The expansive vision of this Anglo-Irish duke ushered in modern Dublin, with the creation of vast Phoenix Park and the first fine buildings whose pale façades give contemporary Dublin its neoclassical complexion. In the following century, the city belonged unequivocally to the Protestant businessmen and aristocratic administrators whose houses, squares, and Palladian civic buildings make it the finest Georgian city in Europe.
Their era came to an end with the century: in 1801, in the aftermath of increasingly viable rebellions, the Act of Union shut down the Irish parliament and merged its government with england’s, so that Dublin was merely the principal city of a poor colony until it became the capital of the Free State in 1922. Almost all of Irish history is about its relationship to the larger island that on maps looks like a dragon looming over a lamb. The relationship is often analogized to that of a brutal man and a sadly oppressed woman. In his magisterial history of the potato, which is in large part also the history of Ireland, the English scholar Redcliffe Salaman describes the relationship between the two countries as an unhappy marriage, with the smaller island as the downtrodden wife. Of the Act of Union in 1801, he declares: “It was at best a mariage de convenance in which absence of affection, disparity of age, and inequality of fortune, were for the time overshadowed by the feat that if England did not secure her as a bride, her coquetry might end in bringing her paramour, France, unpleasantly near . . .” Seamus Heaney describes it as a rape: “Ralegh has backed the maid to a tree / As Ireland is backed to England.” It’s a metaphor that accords well with an occupation that began with a deserting wife and ended among images of Ireland as Dark Rosaleen, Kathleen Ni Houlihan, and other romantic females.
Present-day Dublin lies on the map as though a drunk had tried to draw a grid using the Liffey as its horizontal axis, given up on geometry, and turned the grid into a spiderweb. The streets of the city center wobble along inside the ring of circular roads and canals, parallel streets warping into convergence. Few of them provide the long straight axes of Parisian or American avenues, so the Wicklow Mountains remain largely unseen around the city’s western edges. Modern gridded cities put real estate first, with pedestrians consigned to the margins between repetitive city blocks, and compensate with vistas, but older, unplanned cities seem to have been laid out by walkers wandering off on centuries of private missions, with the buildings fit between their footpaths, a labyrinth of time and stone. Central Dublin itself is such a cobweb of elderly streets, which the statues stud like flies, and perhaps the streets were a flytrap, for most of the statues are of martyrs to their vision of Ireland, visions and martyrdoms often carried out somewhere with in the city itself. To see the great population of statues one could almost believe that the citizens of this city turn to bronze after death, the way bodies tossed into Irish bogs turn to brown leather.
Though the statues mark history, they mark the present version. Earlier versions have been destroyed as part of Dublin’s reinvention as a national capital rather than an invader’s stronghold or a provincial headquarters: a statue of King William III, the Protestant zealot, was blown up in 1929, and one of George II on St. Stephen’s Green was destroyed to coincide with the coronation of George VI in 1937. The massive Nelson’s Column on O’Connell Street was bombed in 1966, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising, then demolished. This broad central street, which was called Sackville Street when O’Connell Bridge was called Carlisle Bridge, is dominated by the surviving statues, scattered like chesspieces in a finished game. The General Post Office itself, a surprisingly unimposing mass on the west side of O’Connell Street where the Easter Rising was based, still sells stamps. A small bronze statue in its central window, of a Christlike Cuchulain dying his mythological Irish death, is the principal tribute to those who were killed there. The great pillar of the Liberator of the Catholics in the 1840s, Daniel O’Connell himself, stands facing the river at the head of his street. Representative Irish figures—bishops and workers—pace around it clockwise, winged victories hover helpfully above, but O’Connell is higher than the victories. The more modest monument at the other end of O’Connell Street, where it crosses Parnell Street, is to Charles Stuart Parnell, who was not only a liberator but an adulterer, compromised at least by Victorian standards.
Between the two heroes, on the island running down the center of the broad street, is a recent addition, a fountain running over an elongated green-bronze reclining woman who is supposed to represent Anna Livia Plurabelle, James Joyce’s personification of the River Liffey in Finnegans Wake. Even O’Connell Bridge has a small bronze plaque on it commemorating a point in Leopold Bloom’s progression around the city in Ulysses, one of fourteen such plaques; and Joyce himself is present as a bust in St. Stephen’s Green, funded by American Express, as well as a lumpy bronze figure resembling a lost tourist outside a cafeteria on O’Connell Street. All around the city stand tall glass cases displaying reproductions of prints by James Malton from his Picturesque Views of Dublin of 1794, so passersby can compare the modern city to its ancestor. Often the main buildings appear almost unchanged, islands of stability in a sea of people and surrounding buildings whose styles have changed radically (though I did see a horse-drawn cart proceed nonchalantly up O’Connell Street amid the cars and buses). The political figures are monuments to Irish nationalism for the Irish, but many of the other monuments seem to be less for the national audience, the audience of Parnell and O’Connell, than for the current wave of invaders, of which I was a small part.
Tourism, which brings three million foreigners to this island of three and a half million people every year, looms ever larger in the Irish economy, as it does in many other small, pretty, poor countries, from Nepal to Costa Rica. O’Connell Street itself has the buildings, monuments, and statuary of a national past, but the stores that line the street—fast-food chains, souvenir and gift shops—are there for foreign visitors. Tourists have as peculiar an effect on a culture as invaders do, if not in so straightforward a manner. They are there, officially, to see the exotic, the different, the ancient, but sooner or later a new economy springs up in their wake. Thus the culture they left behind appears again, or that limbo which is tourist culture springs up, or the place they come to see becomes its own impersonation. Sociologist of tourism Dean McCannell compares the hotel and resort complexes tourism generates in the third world to the beachheads of a quasi-military occupation—a literal invasion.
There are situations in which tourism can encourage the preservation of a place, but far more frequently, tourists inadvertently stimulate an industry at the cost of th
e local culture. Cultures, after all, evolve and change, but tourists most often want an unchanged vision of the past. The ultimate versions are in colonial Williamsburg in Virginia and the Irish-American Folk Village in Omagh, County Tyrone, where the past is reenacted with actors, costumes, props and sets for the audience of travelers. It’s hard to say to what extent a real past has been resurrected in these places, but the present has certainly been vanquished. Such tourist accommodation raises the question of whether a tradition still exists when it’s no longer carried on for traditional purposes. Thus an Aran Isles sweater knitted for an international market is not the same as an Aran Isles sweater knitted for the fishermen in the family. It looks the same, but it’s part of a market economy, not a subsistence economy; subsistence and handicraft have become an aesthetic of authenticity. The vast and ever-expanding industry of tourism threatens to turn the whole world into a series of theaters whose companies perform palatable versions of their culture and history. Tourists thus possess a perverse version of Midas’s touch: the authenticity and exoticism they seek is inauthenticated and homogenized by their presence.
The English call their tourist business “the heritage industry,” which makes it clear that it is an industry and its product is the past, as it is in Ireland. The past is an odd product. In fact it’s not a product at all, since it is too unknown, unpleasant, and unimaginable for vacation time consumption; the heritage industries instead supply their audience with versions of selected aspects. The word industry is as peculiar as the word heritage, since nothing is produced but opportunities to consume and some of the necessary artifacts, from historic markers to shamrock-bedecked salt and pepper shakers, and since its purpose is leisure, which was once the opposite of industry. It is the perfect industry for the information age: one of leisure, consumption, displacement, simulation. It seems both to reverse colonialism and to repeat it; it is a means by which some of the wealth of rich nations returns to poor ones, but is also a means by which the former continue to invade and dictate to the latter.
Tourism reconstitutes as play all the endless tides of humanity that constitute war, invasion, and exile, reenacts the tragedies of population shifts as comedies of desire and expenditure. It echoes another form of movement, that of the pilgrimage, though its secular subjects are more varied and whimsical. The tourist may be in search of sun, of certain kinds of terrain and weather, of festivals, of relics and signs of the past. They are an odd species, whose anticipatory wanderings seem more satisfying than their arrivals, and it may be that the real purpose and pleasure of travel is simply not to be at home or to be in motion.
Irish tourism has its own peculiarities. The counterpoint to Ireland’s history of invasions is its more recent history of emigrations, of people streaming out of the impoverished isle to populate all the English-speaking parts of the world. More than half a million of Ireland’s annual visitors are US reverse immigrants, coming to look at where their ancestors came from, and they are well catered to, for tourism generates a hundred thousand Irish jobs. The tourist shops sell tiny coats of arms and other souvenirs bearing family names and crests; the National Library serves a constant flood of genealogical researchers come to put together a pedigree; most of the natives will inquire at some point whether a tourist is part Irish and will civilly listen to foggy details of the ancestral departure. The animosity between American tourists and hosts that exists in other parts of the world seems largely absent here. It may be an understanding that they are not wholly distinct peoples and their histories are interwined; it may be respect for the cash cow; and it sometimes seemed to me that the Irish require American tourists as an audience: if they could convince the tourists to believe their version of Ireland, they might be able to believe it themselves. Tourism may theatricalize its sites, but in Ireland, many of the locals are willing actors.
One of the ineffable byproducts of these touristic transactions is sentimentality. It’s hard to say how much of this sentimentality is an Irish-American view of the motherland from a pleasantly misty distance, but it’s what made going to Ireland such a dubious venture for me. The place is insufferably cute in the popular American imagination, associated with shamrocks, Lucky Charms breakfast cereal, green beer on St. Patrick’s Day, lines of syrupy old songs like “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” and sticky catch-phrases like “the auld sod.” It’s odd that a country whose history often reads as an interminable litany of the varieties of suffering should have conjured up an international image of such cloying charm, or perhaps the latter counterbalances the former—perhaps sentimentality is the pink bouquet on the coffin, as charm can be a survival skill. (And revolution and suffering have their own sentimentality. In counterpoint to the idyllic “Ireland of the Welcomes” of mainstream American fantasy and Irish Tourist Board promotion is “Ireland of the Bombs,” in which simple, heroic versions of Northern Ireland and the Irish Republican Army swell up to fill the whole map of a more radical American imagination.) Sentimentality is the enjoyment of emotion for its own sake, a kind of connoisseurship of feelings without the obligation to act on them, the narcissim of the heart. Irish literature is full of sentimental drunks, and its landscape is full of tourists nostalgic for the sanitized version of the simple country life presented in postcards, on tea towels, and in vacation lodgings. Still, fine qualities go along with sentimentality, including the tenderness that is acted on.
I set off for the tomb of one of the most publicly unsentimental men in European history, Jonathan Swift, the Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Great currents of pale pedestrians in blues and grays and browns washed down all the major avenues, damming up at the traffic lights and swirling into each other wherever two streets met. I poured with them across O’Connell Bridge, around the bulge of Trinity College’s white, many-pillared Palladian prow, up Dame Street which acquired a few other names as it wavered along, then southward, away from the Liffey, to another street of varying names that delivered me to the front of the cathedral. Empty of worshippers, if not of visitors and tombs, it seemed less like a church than a museum of a church, clean and vacant, and the woman at the door taking admission from every entrant confirmed its transformation. Both the hulking old cathedrals in Dublin belong to the Protestant Church of Ireland, as do many of the oldest and most imposing churches throughout the Republic, though their congregations constitute a tiny fraction of the population: the Republic of Ireland is 95 percent Catholic. Church and state have never been particularly separate here, and the north wall bore monuments to soldiers of the “Burmah” campaign, of South African conflicts, and of the First World War—signs that the old colony of Ireland was a launching ground for the rest of the British Empire.
Swift was a servant of the Church of England, and master of the cathedral. High above the south aisle, below a white bust of his heavy features and before the resting place of his remains, I found his famous epitaph inscribed on black marble, which Yeats translated from Swift’s Latin thus:
Swift has sailed into his rest;
Savage indignation there
Cannot lacerate his breast.
Imitate him if you dare,
World-besotted traveller; he
Served human liberty
—an inscription which anticipates the grave’s status as a tourist landmark.
Another of the reasons to travel is to situate the past in its locale, to put a picture round the facts. The particulars of a battlefield, a poet’s house, a monarch’s throne often illuminate dusty events, making them immediate and imaginable in a way nothing else can, or undoing the imagined version with an unexpected scale or style. It is the texture of a life that is most often missing from accounts of the past: the size of a room, the height of a border-wall, the rockiness of a landscape. For those stuffed full of the lore of a continent not our own, it’s helpful to come and flesh it out once in a while with tangible places. I too was a tourist in Ireland, and I had come to look at relics of the past and literary sites, among other things. In the c
athedral where Swift was dean from 1713 to his death in 1745, it’s possible to picture a real man whose step covered a certain distance on the stony floor, who entered here and mounted there to preach and looked out towards that river. But most of the terrain of Swift’s life has been cleared away.
His St. Patrick’s was situated on the lowest ground in Dublin and was surrounded by the slums that housed the city’s poorest people, in narrow streets with names like Shit Street and Dunghill Court. Without sanitation or any system of waste removal at all, offal accumulated grotesquely, giving the place a stench politer eyes and noses than Swift’s could hardly ignore. This filthy and often flooded little expanse was his kingdom. The dean himself once wrote sardonically of all this shit, “that these Heaps were laid there privately by British Fundaments, to make the world believe, that our Irish Vulgar do daily eat and drink.” A great walker of the city, Swift was well acquainted with his poor neighbors and well loved for his charities and for his championing of their rights.
Literary historian Carole Fabricant points out that Swift’s preoccupation with cruelty and injustice, with dirt and shit, has its literal ground here in the old neighborhood of St. Patrick’s. Swift is usually portrayed as an English writer whose misanthropy, indignation, and preoccupation with the more repulsive aspects of the body were personal idiosyncrasies, or signs of mental disorder. Though he did go mad, his themes had grounds. In Fabricant’s view, Swift’s harsh antiromanticism was as rooted in his residence among the poor of Ireland as his friend Alexander Pope’s mannered poetry was the fruit of servants and English country-house living. Swift had an odd relationship to Ireland, once remarking, “I reckon no man truly miserable unless he be condemned to live in Ireland” and another time rejecting a return to London by saying, “I choose to be a freeman among slaves, rather than a slave among freemen.” His grandparents had come over after Cromwell, and the question of whether he was English or Irish was and is answered according to desire and politics rather than any clearcut fact. It might be most accurate to say he was both. Born and raised in Ireland, he spent his young manhood in the literary and political coteries of England and the second half of his life back in his birthplace. He seems to have been something of an exile wherever he was, not wholly a member of either country, split between comfort and conscience.
A Book of Migrations Page 3