Ireland has most often been defended by those who would emphasize its virtues and apologize for its failings; Swift took another approach entirely, harping on the uglinesses of a denuded, overused landscape, of poverty and powerlessness, and tracing their source to the graceful powers of England. His most famous book, Gulliver’s Travels, universalizes his spleen to become a critique of at least European man, but the less-known majority of his work dealt with the specifics of his own time and place—pamphlets and satires on the current political situation, poems mocking the elevated motifs and ideal landscapes of his peers’ conventional poetry.
English literature itself sometimes seems to me a huge country house, a mansion to which the shanties and new wings of other English-language literatures are attached; perhaps they hold up the ancient hulk at their center. In this mansion, the principal rooms are occupied by the familiar furniture of epic and lyric poetry, of the novel, the side tables and cabinets of the essay. The books I used when I was an English major folded the Irish in as English literature, but the biggest, the most central, the most familiar pieces are almost always truly English, the results of an irreplaceable confidence and centrality. There’s the dark throne of Milton, the banquet tables of Shakespeare, sonnets from Sidney to Shelley scattered everywhere like bouquets of flowers, and, huge and soft and inviting, the fat featherbeds of the English novel. Swift’s work sits in a passageway, a hard chair with a view through the cracks in the walls. Joyce supplied his own furnishing for the house of English literature with Stephen Dedalus’s comment that the “cracked looking glass of a servant” could stand as “the symbol of Irish art,” suggesting not only a subjugation but a fractured, unpredictable reflection. Then he went and built something new, with a monument to Dublin scattered with in it.
Irish writers have punctuated English literature with works that seldom rest so easily on confidence and centrality, with works that reinvent and critique the dominant forms and place the viewer in unfamiliar positions. Irish masterpieces have taken apart the conventions not only of their genres, but of narrative, language, and tradition. Gulliver’s Travels and Ulysses stand at either end of occupied Irish literature, both books of mockery, exile, and wandering, by one Irishman who chose exile in Dublin and another who chose exile out of it. Tristam Shandy, the first and in many respects the greatest experimental English novel, was published between 1759 and 1767 by Laurence Sterne, an Irish-born clergyman, and even the Brontës, so identified with the Yorkshire moors, were raised on their Irish father’s wild Irish stories. They introduced a dark, violent strain to the complacement Victorian novel—a clutch of eels in the featherbed—and other surprises were subsequently delivered by Wilde, Joyce, Synge, Shaw, Beckett. A more intricate, sardonic, restless imagination seems to characterize the Irish works claimed by England, a sensibility more cognizant of the arbitrariness of literary form and all the opportunities of subverting it.
In this century, a kind of literary geography has remapped the house of English literature. Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea imagined the Caribbean drama that preceded Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Edward Said has scrutinized the colonial rapacity that secured the stultifying calm of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, whose idle gentry are living off unseen slave-plantation wealth. Early in the eighteenth century, Swift was already carrying on this cartographic operation, telling us what his gracious society looked like from behind, below, and outside. Humor itself can be a way of seeing double, of noticing the gap between how things are supposed to be and how they are, from the formal elements of logic and language to the hypocrisies of social and political life. Such an engine drives everything from a simple joke to an extended satire, from Swift’s constant shift between lofty and vulgar styles in his poems to his A Modest Proposal, whose humor lies in its entertainment of cannibalism as a reasonable solution to Irish poverty and thereby makes apparent the well-established existence of cannibalism by other means. The most humorless are usually those who have most invested in the existing order, and humor has always been a pleasure, a tool, and a weapon of those who see that gap. The view from Dublin has often been tragic, and heroic, and sentimental, but it has sometimes been mordantly funny.
3
Noah’s Alphabet
Later on, Dublin would become a city of people for me, but on first encounter it was a city of monuments and ideas. From Swift’s tomb I steered past houses, stores, official buildings, offices toward the National Gallery, but the Natural History Museum lured me in on my way. Just after I entered its mortuary hush, a flock of children cascaded through the tall doors in a steady rush, and every fourth or fifth one uttered a high clear O of amazement, their cries falling on each other and echoing like notes of music in the huge hall. Immediately inside the doors loomed the black fossil skeletons of the three Giant Irish Deer, more popularly known as the Irish Elk. Already six feet high at the shoulder, and standing on pedestals facing the doorway, their antlers swept the air for several feet on either side like huge many-fingered hands or like condor’s wings or cartoon balloons of speech, the largest antlers ever borne on earth. They looked like deer becoming birds, like those mythological hybrids of snakes and women, lions and eagles, with their avian antlers. But the children and I, after we recovered from the overwhelming, unlikely, majestic presence of the black bones of two stags and a doe, were fascinated by all the things in the museum, from the downstairs jars of worms and cases of birds to the upstairs realm of all the big mammals of the world, with its overhanging balconies of small specimens.
The kind of modern natural history museum I grew up with tries to rationalize our fascination with animals by placing each stuffed beast in a painted diorama accompanied by helpful plaques of scientific information. These displays belie our real reasons for looking at animals and push us towards a rational version of why we ought to look at them. But Dublin’s Natural History Museum is itself a fossil, with displays that have hardly changed in eighty or ninety years, and the Irish Elk have been standing before the public since the 1830s. The collection doesn’t try to disguise the seductions of collecting, of trophies, accumulations, abundances, and, most of all, of the forms of animals.
The whole downstairs was given over to Irish fauna, a narrowly circumscribed subject thanks to the isolation of islands—and Ireland became one fifty thousand years ago, while Britain was connected to Europe, the Thames a tributary of the Rhine, for forty thousand years more—and thanks to subsequent ice ages. It’s the ice ages and isolation that did away with the reptiles on this island, though St. Patrick is traditionally given credit for driving them all out. Medieval scholars—the Venerable Bede in the eighth, Giraldus Cambrensis in the twelfth century—asserted that converted Ireland was so pure and wholesome a place that nothing poisonous could thrive there and even the scrapings of Irish books could be used as an antidote to serpents’ bites and other poisons. Recent scholars have speculated that St. Patrick’s snake-charming was an idea cooked up by the Vikings, because the saint’s Irish name—Padraig—sounds like Norse Pad-rekr, or toad-expeller. There is only one reptile native to Ireland, Lacerta vivipara, a modest-looking little lizard that gives birth to live young. But the jubilantly irreverent Dr. Oliver St. John Gogarty, the model for Buck Mulligan in Ulysses, long ago loosed some snakes on Featherbed Mountain to make up for the doings of the saint, or the ice age.
The Giant Irish Deer became extinct 10,600 years ago, during another dip in temperatures, and most of the larger carnivores here have become extinct as well, too long ago to leave any taxidermic evidence. Says a sign, “The various claims for the last wolf killed here ranged from 1786 to 1810,” long after bears and boars were gone, and another sign admits, “Most red deer herds have been introduced or at least managed since the thirteenth century.” Which is to say that nature, in the sense in which at least people in western North America are familiar with it, as a realm perhaps influenced but not wholly controlled by human agendas, no longer exists here. People here cannot imagine themselves a
s visitors or guests; they are the principal tenants, having evicted more species than St. Patrick was ever credited with removing.
Without many mammals to celebrate, the downstairs room, with its cakeshop-yellow walls and checkered linoleum floor, made much of its smaller species. There were lavish blue wall-cases of Irish sponges and parasitic worms grouped by their hosts—fish, cats, sheep—and bristleworms and horizontal cases of Irish moths. Most of the bottled specimens had faded to a uniform white, so that all the creatures of Ireland seemed as pale as or paler than its human population. Even an eel that had choked to death on a frog had faded with its victim, so they too seemed one peaceful pallid bottled mythological animal now, a white demon with hind legs waving like long mustachios on either side of its mouth, in contrast to the seraphic black elk. The creatures that had retained their colors were mostly demurely colored to begin with, hares and wild geese and songbirds and hundreds of indistinguishably dust-colored moths. Two nuns, the old-fashioned kind in navy-blue habits skimming the floor, approached a case of seabirds, and one of them said in a high faint voice, apropos of something else, “And it was so perfectly still.”
Upstairs was all the wealth of the world, or so it seemed, a huge long hall with row after row of handsome wood-framed glass cases, replete with perfectly still dingy bone and faded fur. Here was everything from pangolins to polar bears. Trophy heads jutted off three or four sides of every pillar, and from the entrance the antlers and horns thickened the air like the branches of a winter forest. In the center, flanked by glass cases, were open platforms with giraffes, rhinos, hippos, elephants, some stuffed, some skeletons. The animals were only loosely grouped by continents and species, and there were exceptions everywhere, like the Irish wolfhound in the case of bears and wolves. Most of them appeared to be posed for formal portraits, as aristocrats once did: looking natural, their limbs arranged with carefully casual asymmetry, head held up.
Others were arranged with what seemed a peculiar symbolic purpose. A standing lion in one of the first cases had the stuffed head of another lion set on the floor between his legs, its wrathful glass eyes forever staring up at the other lion’s belly and the mane around its face making it look like a dandelion snarling in a lawn somewhere. A lot of the animals were hunting trophies sent back as specimens of the hunter’s prowess. There was an Indian tiger given by King George V, and a popeyed housecat, “felis domestica L shot in Donegal in 1856,” whose hunter modestly remained anonymous, posed with a forepaw held up alertly, like the racehorses in George Stubbs paintings. A badly stuffed snow leopard appeared to have a face crumpled in grief, and the civet cat skeleton’s head bobbed as trotting children shook the floor. “Once upon a time they were real,” a father told his children, as though they had become toys or images rather than eviscerated corpses and boiled-down skeletons, a charnel house of the wilderness. There were brindled gnus, nilgais, musk oxen, and an American bison who looked like an old friend to me, part of my part of the world. One zebra or wildebeest had been caressed on the crest of its flank so often that the hair had worn off and the hide gleamed.
In this jumble was a survey of the whole natural world in terms of faded fur and yellowed bone and glassy eyes. It offered a pleasure unlike the shifty one of zoos. In a zoo one hopes to catch a glimpse of Life and often misses it, or sees prison rather than real animal life, but here one came to see Form, and it was absolutely, utterly available, overwhelmingly so. The animals served as images of themselves, like a book that had come to life, although the chambers were collections of deaths. They weren’t there to be read scientifically; there was nothing about locales or habits beyond a few notes about Irish mammals. They were organized as much by aesthetics and symbolism as by taxonomic and geographic logic. They could have been read historically: like the memorials in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, they constituted a sidelong tribute to imperialism, to the time when servants of the British Empire covered the globe, fighting wars, dominating landscapes, and sending home curiosities. In this way they were imperial souvenirs of imperial expeditions into the larger world. Or they could be read for traces of the history of science, from the museum’s own origins in an eighteenth-century scientific society in the days when science was a gentlemanly concern to the Victorian fetish for collecting and classifying the world—which, come to think of it, seems to have been a reflex of trying to put the Empire in order too.
Yet they didn’t seem to be about those histories at all, but something more general, and more personal. Looking at animals lets us think about the state of being embodied, of our scale, hairlessness, bipedalism, attenuated teeth and muscle, frail bone, binocular vision, and to imagine what it would be like to be otherwise, to possess the oiled power of tigers, the stately bulk of elephants, the weightless grace of gazelles. To look at these creatures was to feel one’s limbs expand and vanish, grow clawed, powerful, become fins or hooves. The great cylinders of rhino and elephant rib cages looked like baskets on stilts in which one could curl up; and there was a whale skeleton suspended in the open air above everything, where only the giraffe’s head reached, as if it floated like a zeppelin or the rest of us were walking lobster-like on a sea floor. The whale had washed up in Bantry Bay on Ireland’s southwestern coast in 1862. Things always look like what we have seen before, and, thanks to the sequence of the museum’s displays, the whale looked like the pollywog preserved downstairs, though Jonah could have opened up a hotel in it. Later on, when I left the museum, the whole world seemed to be assembled out of forms drawn from animals: the curving double docking hooks on the quays of the Liffey looked like musk ox horns, and when I finally arrived at my original destination, the dark wooden lintels of the National Museum’s many doorways looked like the antlers of Irish Elk.
Every collection is a world in miniature, but animals particularly, describing as they do the possibilities of terrain, bodily form, temperament, and danger, represent the world for us. The museum seemed like a lexicon of form, of all the forms of grace and awkwardness, the frail and the potent. The most beautiful thing there in my eyes, and one of the most beautiful I’ve ever seen, was a pygmy elephant skull. The two things that most distinguish a live elephant, its ears and trunk, were gone with the rest of the flesh, and the tusks stretched out like drawbridges to this massive tabletop castle of bone. Taller than it was wide or deep, it had double windows of sinuses in the otherwise blind front wall of bone, and eye sockets swinging out from the mass like balconies, so big around I could’ve stuck my thigh through them. Tucked deep within the bulk were a surprisingly small smile of sweet joy and a pointed chin like a commedia dell’arte mask. All the strength and intelligence of elephants seemed to be visible in the architecture of its skull, and the massiveness, the featureless frontal plane, the sideways eyes, the hidden jaw suggested how much these qualities were tied up in a corporeal condition so unlike the human. The enchanting skull of a pygmy elephant was not what I had come to Ireland to seek—but one travels for the unexpected.
Natural history museums let us imagine encountering these beasts, for at some level we still remember snakes and lions and still have reflexes that can be awakened by them. And it gives us, in their various qualities of presence, of menace and charm and power and music, characters for our dreams. Wolves survive in the imagination even in places like Ireland, where they’ve been extinct for two centuries, and Africa has given the rest of the world spectacular magafauna as forms for children’s toys and adults’ images, from the lion who lies down with the lamb to the elephant of the US Republican party. They populate our language too, though even there they are endangered.
It’s no coincidence that the books and posters we use to learn the alphabet from are most often animal alphabets, from aardvark to zebra, for animals constitute the primordial alphabet. I grew up with a Dr. Seuss book called On Beyond Zebra, which coined new letters for the alphabet and fabulous beasts to go with them, as though you couldn’t have innovation in one area without the other, a proposition that made per
fect sense to children. Medieval Irish manuscripts are notable for their animal ornamentation around the capital letters, as though the alphabet were turning back into beasts. Like alphabets, animals constitute a finite group that can describe the whole spectrum of possibility; animals are themselves a language for describing both the bodily forms and range of dispositions of human beings. In the Middle Ages, bestiaries were a popular form of literature, occupying a niche somewhere between field guides, fairy tales, and alphabet primers. The bestiaries, and the animals they described, were part of a system in which everything had an allegorical meaning; the whole world was a text waiting to be read by those who knew its language. Elephants, for example, signify Adam and Eve in Eden, because they are supposed to conceive their young innocently, by sharing the fruit of a certain tree; they also signify the Hebrew law, because when they fall they cannot get up again. Wild goats, because they constantly seek higher pastures, signify good preachers. The Bible and the world were two equal forms of the divine text, so that animals were almost literally an alphabet, rather as they were for Aesop, who made them illustrate so many aspects of human character and conduct, with his dogs in the manger, his virtuous ants and sybaritic grasshoppers. In either version, animals make the human world clearer, give tools and emblems with which to describe and understand it. Even as recently as George Orwell’s Animal Farm, animals served as emblems of human tendencies, so that the horses in his allegory were honest workers, the pigs corrupt conspirators.
A Book of Migrations Page 4