What Rough Beasts? Irish and Scottish Studies in the New Millennium : Irish and Scottish Studies in the New Millennium [1 ed.] 9781443802215, 9781847185365

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What Rough Beasts? Irish and Scottish Studies in the New Millennium

What Rough Beasts? Irish and Scottish Studies in the New Millennium

Edited by

Shane Alcobia-Murphy

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

What Rough Beasts? Irish and Scottish Studies in the New Millennium, Edited by Shane Alcobia-Murphy This book first published 2008 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing 15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2008 by Shane Alcobia-Murphy and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-84718-536-3, ISBN (13): 9781847185365

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ............................................................................................... vii Shane Alcobia-Murphy The 1981 Hunger Strikes in the Visual Arts................................................ 1 Cassilda Alcobia-Murphy “The Same Seed That Carried Me till It Saw Itself as Fruit”: Medbh McGuckian’s Exemplars ............................................................... 12 Shane Alcobia-Murphy Seamus Heaney and Osip Mandelstam: “Stretched between Politics and Transcendence” .................................................................................. 25 Sukanya Basu Derek Mahon’s Poetry of Community ...................................................... 34 Brian Burton “Keeping That Wound Green”: Irish Studies and Trauma Culture ........... 45 Conor Carville Public Skaith or Well Feigned Sorrow?: The Habbie Elegy in Ireland and Scotland .............................................................................. 72 Stephen Dornan “Among the Many Wonders of the World”: Seamus Heaney’s Burial at Thebes ........................................................................................ 87 Ashley Lange Domesticity and Diaspora: Irishwomen’s Associational Life in the North East, 1880-1914................................................................... 102 D.A.J. MacPherson

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“The Histories of Yeer Blood”: Exclusion, Social Inequality, and Genetic-Fallacy in Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats and Portia Coughlan ............................................................................... 121 Margaret Maxwell Celtic Identity, Irish Immigration and the Scottish Highlands Tensions in Scottish Interwar Year Literature and Society..................................... 137 Margery Palmer McCulloch Keeping It Reel: Hollywood and Authenticity in Two Recent Irish Plays ........................................................................................................ 153 Lisa McGonigle Ghost Writer: Beckett’s Irish Gothic....................................................... 167 Sinead Mooney Joycean Form in James Kelman’s Early Fiction ..................................... 183 Paul F. Shanks “A Day on Which Northing of Importance Happened”: Brian Friel’s The Freedom of the City and Bloody Sunday..................... 196 Daniel Smith Lockhart and the “Horae Germanica” ..................................................... 207 Dan Wall Contributors............................................................................................. 218

INTRODUCTION SHANE ALCOBIA-MURPHY

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?

In the late 1990s several key institutional developments occurred to further the scholarly interest in the discipline of Irish-Scottish Studies: the establishment of an Irish-Scottish Academic Initiative between five universities (Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Strathclyde, The Queen’s University, Belfast, and Trinity College Dublin); the inauguration of the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies in 1999; and the formation of the UK Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB) Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies in 2001. Following the acquisition of a £900,000 award from the then AHRB, the Centre inaugurated a series of interdisciplinary conferences for postgraduate students to develop intellectual synergies within Irish-Scottish Studies. To date, six conferences have been held under the title Cross-currents and the proceedings have been published to ensure the wider dissemination of their findings. In 2005, the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies held an additional conference, entitled What Rough Beasts?, to gauge the success of this new discipline in the new millennium, and the following essays constitute that conference’s selected proceedings. The essays are a mixture of single-discipline and multi-disciplinary works, and are arranged alphabetically by author. This arrangement follows the example set by Cross-currents: rather than strictly separating work done in different areas such as history, literature, and visual arts, a move which would undermine the cross-disciplinary ethos of the conference, the simple, alphabetical arrangement is intended to tempt the reader to move beyond a single-disciplinary approach. As the editors of the Cross-currents series put it: “Ideally, what will arise from this implementation of the alphabet’s arbitrary logic is a play of friction and confluence that is stratified by the constellation of competing factors and alternative groupings, allowing each reader to follow their own connective

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threads or to leap the sometimes precipitous topic gaps that open up between adjacent essays”. Nevertheless, this introduction does wish to suggest a possible thematic path through this collection of papers. [T]he duty to remember consists not only in having a deep concern for the past, but in transmitting the meaning of past events to the next generation. The duty, therefore, is one which concerns the future, it is an imperative directed towards the future, which is exactly the opposite side of the traumatic character of the humiliations and wounds of history. It is a duty, thus, to tell. (Ricoeur 1999: 9-10).

Reflecting on the ethics and praxis of memory, Paul Ricoeur argues that memory has two kinds of relation to the past, the first being of knowledge, the second of action. On an ethico-political level, the historian, in constructing a narrative, must tentatively negotiate between the related imperatives to remember and to forget; that is, to avoid an intransigent, melancholic obsession with the past - what Kevin Whelan terms “the entropy of the traumatic version of memory” (Whelan 2003: 93) - yet equally avoid the destruction or erosion of “traces” (Ricoeur 1999: 10). Attempting to tell national “stories”, the historian, by locating, collating and carefully analysing the primary material - be it statistical data, oral or written testimony, census data or other archival material - becomes “a witness, who provides testimony: his ethical position depends on trust, trust in the word of another. This trust in testimony, in the expressive function of language, in the moral power of narrative, enables an ‘ethics of discourse’” (Whelan 2003: 108). Yet such a position becomes problematic for a number of reasons: firstly, as Derrida has persuasively argued, all testimony, however heart-felt and ‘truthful’, is ghosted by the possibility of fiction (Derrida 2000: 29-30); secondly, one cannot provide a full, objective account of an event given that “the number of details identifiable in any singular event is potentially infinite” (White 1996: 22); and thirdly, any such account will be shaped by a specific ideological framework since, as George Steiner has contended, “[t]he landscape composed by the past tense, the semantic organization of remembrance, is stylized and differently coded by different cultures” (Steiner 1976: 29). Indeed, Irish and Scottish history has been differently constructed according to the political or theoretical purview of its author, its narrative structure changing according to the specific model adopted. Many of the papers in this collection engage with how history and memory are encoded in Irish and Scottish Studies. Conor Carville, for example, argues that Irish historical and literary culture has, in the 1990s,

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fostered a “wound culture”; academics, he contends, have simplistically psychologised the relation between the present and the historical past through a “vulgarized, shorthand use of a psychoanalytical temporality”. Carville’s paper raises the question of how we represent and interpret historical narratives. One of the narratives that he cites represents a case in point: the story of the Great Famine in Ireland. In a short monograph published by Profile Books, Colm Toibin asks a stark question: “How do you write about the Famine?” (1999: 22). Do you take Brendan Bradshaw’s nationalist line and analyse it as a “19th century version of the holocaust”? Do you take Terry Eagleton’s approach and attack revisionist historians (like Roy Foster) for their supposed failure to assign blame and for their acceptance of the early-C19th Irish economic system as “natural”? Or do you adopt a clinical, objective tone, an approach which Toibin takes issue with when reviewing Mary Daly’s The Famine in Ireland?: Yet another strategy was deployed to distance the author and her readers from the stark reality. This was by assuming an austerely clinical tone, as befitting academic discourse, and by resort to sociological euphemism and cliometric excursi, thus cerebralising and, thereby, desensitising the trauma. (1999: 24)

Such an overview of the different possible narratives is repeated in a more recent article by Christine Kenneally where she contrasts various interpretative models used to analyse the event: popular folk-memory and oral history that attributes blame to the colonial regime; the “Dehydrated” revisionist narratives which downplay the importance of Ireland’s colonial attachment to Britain; the “Providentialist interpretation” adopted by colonial administrators, who argued that the Famine justified widespread socio-economic change; and the trans-generational model which seeks to foreground the prolonged psychological damage caused by the Famine (2002: 1-37). The latter became increasingly pervasive during the sesquicentenary, with cultural commentators and artists repeatedly referring to the disabling psychological legacy of the Famine, namely “inhibited experience” (Waters 1997: 27), “malignant shame” (Sean Kenny 1997: 181) and “psychic trauma” (Ní Dhomhnaill 1997: 69). However, historians and cultural theorists from markedly divergent ideological standpoints have taken issue with such a model. Roy Foster in The Irish Story adverts to the manifest flaws and dangers of what he terms “the new deconstructed

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history, with its stress on the personal and the unmediated” due, in part, to its “complacent anti-empiricism and aggressive sentimentalism” (2001: xv). Commenting on the Great Famine Commemoration of 1995-1997 with its reliance on popular psycho-therapy and the emergent discourse of “Faminism”, he argues persuasively that its practitioners seemed to believe “that ‘history’ can be arranged and packaged into presentations, or pantheons, or waxwork shows, or interpretation centres (where interpreting is, of course, done for you in advance)” (2001: 24). The 200acre Famine Theme Park on Knockferna Hill, Limerick, is one example that he cites, where, so the official information leaflet says, “it will be possible to experience first hand in this remote area how 1,000 people struggled for survival at the height of the Famine” (2001: 29). Historical narrative here becomes reduced to a soundbite, a heritage trail, merely tourist kitsch. Carville’s paper offers a timely intervention in this whole debate. D.A.J. MacPherson’s paper also focuses our attention on received historical narratives. In his case, he explodes certain received notions regarding Irish women’s associational life in the North East of England from 1880-1914. Current opinion has it that the Irish women during this period conformed to prescribed notions of “correct female behaviour”, that their identity was conferred on them through their work in the domestic realm and their adherence to a patriarchal culture. However, MacPherson’s research demonstrates that such a story is incorrect; in contrast, he argues, the Irish women often “outdid their male counterparts” with regard to public associational life, and that there was a far more complex pattern of female work in the North-East region than has heretofore been presented. From a literary standpoint, Daniel Smith’s paper focuses on a play which takes as its theme the politics of representation: Brian Friel’s The Freedom of the City. The play is less about the actual events of 30 January 1972, known in Irish culture as “Bloody Sunday”; rather, the play investigates the manner in which events are discursively represented within different institutions and areas of inquiry (academia; the Church; the Army; journalism; art, etc.). The play demonstrates the author’s keen awareness of how different institutions ideologically frame events, how the different approaches and discourses inflect the stories that are told. The companion paper to Smith’s is that of Cassilda Alcobia-Murphy, which also tackles an iconic event in Northern Ireland’s turbulent history, the 1981 republican hunger strikes in the Maze prison. Like Smith, she demonstrates how different discourses can frame a single event.

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Contrasting political “self-legitimizing circular discursive logic” with the more open and exploratory artistic discourse, she investigates how three visual artists - Richard Hamilton, Rita Donagh and Shane Cullen – embrace the transformative potential of art to facilitate commemoration and self-reflection regarding what was arguably the most traumatic period of the Northern Irish Troubles. If one thematic thread running through this collection is that of narrative encoding, then a second has to do with the responsibilities associated with such encoding. Both Sukanya Basu and Ashley Lange explore how the Northern Irish writer Seamus Heaney responds artistically to political events. In Basu’s paper, we witness a writer who turns to an artistic exemplar, Osip Mandelstam, to gain affirmation for his own artistic response to public events. Heaney’s attention, like that of other Irish poets, has been attracted eastwards to the example set by writers such as Osip Mandelstam and Czeslaw Milosz. Following the path set by Joyce’s elision of the differences between Dublin and Lublin, Heaney’s work continually sets up analogies between Northern Ireland and Eastern Europe, but for a different purpose: I keep returning to them because there is something in their situation that makes them attractive to a reader whose formative experience has been largely Irish. There is an unsettled aspect to the different worlds they inhabit, and one of the challenges they face is to survive amphibiously, in the realm of ‘the times’ and the realm of their moral and artistic selfrespect, a challenge immediately recognizable to anyone who has lived with the awful and demeaning facts of Northern Ireland’s history over the last couple of decades. (Heaney, 1988: xx)

Envious of their “amphibiousness”, Heaney dons the mask of an East European writer. One well-known instance is “Exposure” (Heaney, 1975: 72-3), in which the poet’s “weighing and weighing” his “responsible tristia” invokes not only Ovid’s Tristia but, more crucially, the poetry of Osip Mandelstam. Heaney’s self-description in his 1975 collection, North, as an “inner émigré” recalls the Russian poet’s own status as an “internal émigré”. It is undoubtedly true that the allusion allows Heaney not only to draw on “the traditional energies of exile poetry” but to highlight “that inner expatriation which specially belongs to Northern Catholics in an incomplete state” (Kerrigan, 1992: 264); however, the parallel is far from unproblematic since, in spite of the deep-felt sense of affiliation Heaney has with Mandelstam and the obvious warmth with which he has continued to greet the Russian poet’s enduring legacy, his appropriation

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and re-contextualisation of this specific term elides the very real differences between their two lives. It ought to be clear that the acute pressures of living amidst the harsh Russian totalitarianism of the 1930s bears only superficial resemblance to the tribal exigencies and sociopolitical inequalities borne by the Northern Irish writer throughout the 1970s. In light of the extreme contrast between the freedom of a Laureate “zipping through the stratosphere at Mach-2 somewhere over the Atlantic in his space-age scriptorium” (Brandes, 1991: 3) and the curtailment of Mandelstam’s basic human rights due to politically motivated censorship and imprisonment, how seriously can we take John Desmond’s claim that “[e]xile has led Heaney into an imagined community with Eastern European writers, for whom the issue of the artist’s dual commitment to history and to art has often been literally a matter of life and death”? (Desmond, 1996: 369). Nevertheless, as Basu outlines, Mandelstam’s writing has helped Heaney affirm his own poetic credo and acts as a touchstone regarding “the triumph of the ideals of ‘truth’ and ‘beauty’ in both poetry and life”. In Lange’s paper, we also witness Heaney turning to a literary exemplar in order to respond to political events; this time, however, he turns to the Greek dramatist Sophocles. Lange’s paper contextualises Heaney’s translation of Sophocles’ Antigone in light of the post 9/11 invasion of Iraq and the United States’ “war on terror”. Heaney uses the play to embrace the universal theme of human rights and the idea of an individual who is in conflict with society; the translation allows Heaney to comment at an aesthetic distance, and in an oblique manner, on contemporary events. Both Lange’s paper and that of Basu contributes to a third narrative thread in this collection: the role of artistic exemplarity. Is literary allusion used to invoke the authority of literary exemplars, conferring legitimacy upon a writer’s ideas? Does quotation devolve responsibility from the poet to another writer, allowing the former to ventriloquize controversial sentiments through the latter and absolve himself from all consequences? Does this subsume the writer’s originality? Is quotation used simply for ludic purposes, a whimsical piece of allusive pomposity? Or does its inclusion self-reflexively call into question the validity of the source text, asserting an essential difference, rather than similarity, between the original and new contexts? Many of the papers collected here investigate the purpose of literary allusion. Brian Burton’s paper on the Northern Irish poet Derek Mahon explores how such a writer uses his literary

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exemplars to assert his own individuality, especially in light of his own community’s pressing claims on him. In Mahon’s portrait poems and verse letters we witness his “pleas for the wider world to accept the authenticity of humble artists who believe that their actions are conducted in good faith”. Mahon associates himself with outsiders like Camus, MacNeice and Beckett as a way of understanding his own “homelessness”, but also as an intertextual, trans-historical discourse with a community of other writers. In Paul Shanks’ paper we see how a Scottish novelist like James Kelman borrows from, and adapts, the narrative techniques of a literary giant like James Joyce. Shanks explores the contextual and formal basis for the similarities between their works, focusing, in particular, on narrative voice and its representation of subjectivity. Offering a framework for a sustained comparison of the two authors, Shanks demonstrates that “their texts reveal a dialogic friction between autonomous subjectivity and the invasive nature of voices external to the self”. Shane AlcobiaMurphy’s paper explores a rather different, and more direct, form of borrowing, namely Medbh McGuckian’s imbrication of quotations from works about other female artists. Focusing specifically on the female writer’s marginality within patriarchal culture, Alcobia-Murphy shows how a McGuckian poem constitutes a palimpsest - a literary psychohistory – in which the poet incorporates the tropes and ideas of her artistic foremothers in order to read into, and out from, their own psychodramas. Crucially, she does so by using their one of their own strategies whereby “revolutionary messages are concealed behind stylistic facades” (74). The embedded citations, unacknowledged and devoid of quotation marks, replay the concealments and evasions of her predecessors. Indeed, reading about the strategies employed by her precursors affirms her own right to lift the pen/paint-brush. The majority of the papers in this collection endeavour to make the reader look anew at historical narratives and works of art, none more so than the next grouping which has to do with genre. Sinead Mooney’s paper re-interprets Samuel Beckett’s oeuvre, with its familiar cast of alienated wanderers, narrative circular logic and insistence on fragmentation, as a manifestation of the Irish Gothic mode. Such a critical strategy is bold and utterly convincing, forcing the scholar to read anew Beckett’s work in light of his perception of and reaction to the decline of the Anglo-Irish Ascendency and their precarious position within the newly established Irish Free State. While Beckett has generally been considered as a writer who refused to engage with his national context, Mooney’s paper places the writer back in his Irish context and demonstrates his

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writing’s oblique negotiation with post-independence sectarianism and explores his depiction of a moribund Protestantism in the Irish Free State. Stephen Doran also re-draws canonical demarcations by countering the erroneous reading of the vernacular Habbie elegy as simply satirical or mock-elegiac. His paper shows how the Habbie elegy incorporates humour and sociability into texts which mourn the departed, and how it constituted a crucial (and critically neglected) alternative to the standard English elegy. While all of the papers mentioned above indirectly touch on ideas of Irish and Scottish identity, the remaining papers directly examine this theme. Margery Palmer McCulloch focuses on Scottish cultural production in the interwar years, showing how writers like Hugh MacDiarmid attempted to initiate cultural self-reflection in Scotland and foster a distinct Celtic identity. This theme is also taken up by Daniel Wall, though his paper focuses on J.G. Lockhart’s attempt in the early nineteenth-century to promote a distinctive Scottish literary culture through his handling of German translations (the “Horae Germanicae” series) in Blackwoods magazine. Lisa McGonigle contrasts two dramatic takes on Irish authenticity, and shows both the difficulties and the dangers of misrepresenting a national culture. Finally, Margaret Maxwell looks at how contemporary Ireland is represented in two plays by Marina Carr and shows how that dramatist exposes the uncomfortable underbelly of unprecedented economic success. The Irish rough beast, the Celtic Tiger, was born in the mid-1990s, and its avid embrace of globalization and informational capitalism initiated a decided paradigm shift, with a cultural discourse that prioritised “individualism, entrepreneurship, mobility, flexibility, innovation” displacing “earlier discourses prioritising national development, national identity, family, self-sacrifice, self-sufficiency and nationalism” (Kirby et al., 2002: 13). While economic success brought cultural self-confidence in Ireland, it also revealed racial prejudice and discrimination with regards the Travelling community. Maxwell’s paper is timely in its reminder of how “national identity” may not be all-embracing and how it can suppress minorities.

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References Brandes, Rand. 1991. “The Scale of Things”. Irish Literary Supplement. Fall: 31. Heaney, Seamus. 1988. The Government of the Tongue. London: Faber. Kerrigan, John. 1992. “Ulster Ovids”. The Chosen Ground: Essays on the Contemporary Poetry of Northern Ireland. Ed. Neil Corcoran. Dufour: Seren. 237-69 Kirby, Peadar, et al., eds. 2002. “Introduction: The Reinvention of Ireland – A Critical Perspective”. Reinventing Ireland: Culture, Society and the Global Economy. London: Pluto. O’Brien, Darcy. 1995. “Seamus Heaney and Wordsworth: A Correspondent Breeze”. Critical Essays on Seamus Heaney. Ed. Robert F. Garratt. New York: G.K. Hall. 187-96.

THE 1981 HUNGER STRIKES IN THE VISUAL ARTS CASSILDA ALCOBIA-MURPHY

The hungerstrike carried out by Republican prisoners in Northern Ireland in 1981 can be partly rationalised in terms of a disjunction in discourses between the British state and the Republican movement as to the status of the Republican prisoners and, by extension, of the territory itself. The ‘normalization’ policy, whereby prisoners convicted of terrorist offences would no longer benefit from special category status, was intended to inscribe Northern Ireland, in terms of the international reading of the conflict, within the context of a solidly unified, modern British economy – and the description, adopted in those years, of the IRA in terms of ‘godfathers’, ‘thugs’ and ‘racketeering’ were meant to portray the movement as a force that is as much of a social as an economic threat. It is against this framework that the choice of hungerstriking as a form of protest gains added value as a counterpoint to British state rhetoric, since it is not only a re-enactment of past historical instances of resistance to British rule which are very specific to an Irish context – thereby putting into question the ‘normal’ and ‘British’ nature of the six counties – but it also served as a display of self-denial on the part of the prisoners which would fit awkwardly with the label of self-serving, violent criminality. In Ireland, hungerstriking has been used as a weapon of redress since medieval times (Sweeney, 421-22). However, it was not until the beginning of the twentieth century and the Anglo-Irish conflict that hungerstriking was taken up again in Ireland as a political weapon, the most famous example of this being that of Terence MacSwiney, Lord Mayor of Cork, who went on hungerstrike in 1920 after being sentenced to two years’ jail for sedition and who refused to recognise British jurisdiction in Ireland, eventually dying after 74 days, one of the longest hungerstrikes on record. His often quoted words, ‘It is not those who can

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inflict the most, but those that can suffer the most who will conquer’ (cited in Beresford, 19), however, underline not only the political but also the religious dimension of this action, for it is the sacrificial motif of Irish history and mythology that is being invoked here. Therefore, by choosing to align themselves with the Irish tradition of hungerstriking in the pursuit of justice, the Republican prisoners in Long Kesh are not only claiming for themselves the status of martyred heroes, but are also echoing events of the ‘unfinished war’1 against the British state, thus attempting to redefine the conflict on their own terms, terms which involve a level of political legitimacy which has been denied them. The 1981 hungerstrike lasted for 217 days, during which period ten republican prisoners died. The prolonged build-up of tension, as each one of the prisoners approached a critical state in the face of British inflexibility, added to the impact of the figure of Bobby Sands, whose smiling, youthful face became ubiquitous in the media, increased the visibility of the conflict not only in Ireland and Britain, but also at an international level. One event in particular would mark a shift in policy for the republican movement towards political action as opposed to purely military intervention (the ‘armalite and ballot box’ policy): the election of Bobby Sands as MP for Fermanagh-South Tyrone as a Sinn Féin candidate (Jackson, 397; Brown, 338). This was also a severe blow for the British government’s line of criminalization, since it became harder to uphold the argument which equated the republican movement with a criminal organisation benefiting from little or no support from the local community. Although many authors, such as David Beresford, in Ten Men Dead, have founded their analyses of the ideology and driving force of the hungerstrikes and the way in which they were appropriated by the republican movement on an alignment with significant precedents of struggle in Irish history, as well as a religious tradition of endurance and suffering, Padraig O’Malley, in Biting at the Grave: The Irish Hunger Strikes and the Politics of Despair goes further in identifying a selfconsuming, self-destructive element of the Irish psyche, propitious to the appearance of the kind of degenerative republicanism that preys on its own, and of which the deaths of the ten hungerstrikers are the ultimate example, as he describes ‘a victim-bonded society in which memories of 1

O’ Malley, 19. The Irish Civil War period also witnessed a massive hungerstrike staged by anti-treaty prisoners in 1923 at Mountjoy jail, which registered at its peak 8000 participants.

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past injustice and humiliation are so firmly entrenched in both communities and the sense of entrapment so complete that the hungerstrikes are a metaphor for the entrapment of the larger society’ (O’Malley, 8, 9). The most significant academic shift in the analysis of the 1981 hungerstrikes, however, has been that which centres on the body as the privileged locus of expression and re-enactment of the Northern Irish conflict. In The Hunger Artists, Maud Ellmann describes the same gesture identified by Beresford of the retrieval, through the hungerstrikes, of a mythical-political tradition, in terms of a process of quotation: [T]he hunger strikes stage-managed by the IRA unsettle chronological accounts of history because they represent what Seamus Heaney calls the ‘afterlife’ of former protests, former macerations. By hungering, the protestors transform their bodies into the “quotations” of their forbears and reinscribe the cause of Irish nationalism in the spectacle of starving flesh. (Ellmann, 14)

Thus, the body becomes a textual entity, a living catalogue registering ‘in the flesh’ the material conditions to which the prisoners were subjected in Long Kesh, as well as a palimpsest of former and present struggle, in a way which not only authorises their plight but also determines their future mythical aura, as the chronological historical logic is warped into a cyclical movement of appropriation and repetition. This passage is also representative of one other strain in Ellmann’s analysis, namely the dramatic power and theatricality of the hungerstrikes. Hence, for Ellmann, the hungerstrikes were ‘stage-managed’: ‘self-starvation’, she argues, ‘is above all a performance’ (17), and ‘it was not by hungering as such, but by making theater of their own starvation, that the prisoners brought shame on their oppressors and captured the sympathies of their co-religionists’ (72). What Ellmann is alluding to is, first of all, the visibility that the hungerstrikes brought to the prison struggle and, by extension, to the ideological claims of the republican movement, and the way in which images (of the Christ-like figures involved in the dirty protests, the photographs which identified and iconized each of the hungerstrikers) became powerful tools in the propaganda war against the British rhetoric of criminalization (whose power relied, therefore, on words alone). But the notion of the dramatization of the body, in its presupposition of audience and dramatic space, also encapsulates a tension between what is essentially a very private experience, unknowable beyond the boundaries of the individual, and the social and political appropriation

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of that same experience, a point that is also taken up by Allen Feldman in his book Formations of Violence, dealing with the oral history of the Hblock protests: Despite the rhetorical incorporation of the prison struggle into established republican frameworks, the veterans of the H-blocks confess to an unreconcilable sense of being alien, of inhabiting places and situations that cannot be fully comprehended by the non-prisoner, whatever his political identifications. In the wider Republican community, to this day, an unassimilated aspect of the prison struggle remains; this incomprehension is encountered in the painful silences that surround the events of the Hunger strike, the silence of unhealed wounds, unresolved hopes, and fragmentary understanding. (Feldman, 164)

Even though ‘for all the adversary groups implicated in the Hungerstrike … the body’s process of starvation became a renewed source of ideology production’ (Feldman, 250), what Feldman identifies in this passage is an unknown space that ultimately resists symbolisation and therefore discursive appropriation by either the state, the republican movement or for purposes of journalistic or historiographical narration, as the ‘unhealed wounds’ stand as a painful corporeal equivalent of the unfinished story of the Northern Irish conflict. Both Feldman and Ellmann emphasise the process of textualization which the body underwent during the prison struggle. Hence, Feldman describes the method of ‘comms’ (messages written in cigarette paper and smuggled during visits, hidden in different orifices of their bodies) by which the prisoners communicated among themselves as well as with the Army Council outside the prison as ‘a remarkable literary production which seemed to flow directly from the dying body of the hunger striker’ (250). This equivalence between disembodiment and literary production is a concept which is also central to Ellmann’s thesis, which she articulates in a passage that closely parallels Feldman: ‘Like Clarissa [the hungerstrikers’] starvation generated a peculiarly prolix and rapacious literature, where words rushed in to fill the emptiness that food might occupy’ (83). Ellmann, however, is introducing here a comparison between political struggle and fictional enterprise. By equating the struggle of the hungerstrikers with that of the title character in Samuel Richardson’s novel Clarissa, and describing it as ‘a struggle for the sign: for the same violence may be described as a revolution or a crime, and the same act as marriage or a rape, depending on the power and the jurisdiction of the speaker’ (88), Ellmann is suggesting a problematic

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parallel between the creative potential of artistic and political expression. Although the two may be looking for ‘the sign’, the political sphere aims, more often than not, to lock it into a self-legitimizing, circular discursive logic which stands in frozen opposition to any ideological stance outside its boundaries. During the hungerstrikes, this was visible in the inflexible position adopted by both sides as each claimed for itself the legitimate reading of the conflict. The inability or indeed the refusal to enter into the other’s discursive sphere leads to a petrification of positions which is invariably the space of violence. For the rest of the article I will attempt to examine how the entrapment and congealment of the sign in political discourse during the hungerstrikes is countered by the artistic release and exploration of the image, through a survey of several visual artworks, and I will also attempt to uncover the extent to which these contribute to an enabling reformulation of the 1981 prison struggle. In Thinking Long: Contemporary Art in the North of Ireland, Liam Kelly reflects on the importance that the representation of the body came to acquire in Northern Irish visual arts, both as a response to the proliferation of media images of ‘abandoned roadside dead bodies and scenes of carnage and killings, with related descriptions of torture and mutilation’ and as a representation of an ancestral Catholic imagery: ‘the temple of the Holy Spirit, the denial of the flesh/the elevation of the soul. This view recognises that the body is to be respected but is ultimately perishable’ (Kelly 1996a: 121). The prison struggle of the early eighties effectively compounded the two motifs, as the hungerstrikers exerted a measure of violence on their bodies which paradoxically foregrounded the ascetic and religious qualities of their protest, in a struggle deeply dependent not only on Christological imagery as projected to an outside audience but also on a committed religious practice within the confines of the H-blocks as a counter to the depersonalising setting of the prison establishment (Beresford, 361). It is this Christological imagery that is primarily recognizable in Richard Hamilton’s diptych painting The Citizen (1981-3). The work evolved as a response to a television documentary which showed for the first time, to a British audience, the conditions of prison life for those on the blanket protest. The work consists of two canvasses: the left-hand panel is vaguely abstract and represents the excrementpainted walls of the prisoner’s cell, whereas the right-hand panel offers a

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Christ-like representation of one of the blanket men, a full-size portrait of a long-haired, bearded man wrapped in a blanket, wearing a cross and confronting the viewer with a determined gaze. As Hamilton wrote in the catalogue text for the 1983 exhibition A Cellular Maze, An oft declared British view of the IRA as thugs and hooligans did not match the materialization of Christian martyrdom so profoundly contained on film. One became acutely aware of the religious conflict that had resulted in the civil inequalities that gave a platform for IRA activity. The symbols of Christ’s agony were there, not only the crucifix on the neck of the prisoners and the rosary which confirmed the monastic austerity but the self inflicted suffering which has marked Christianity from the earliest times. (Donagh and Hamilton, 7)

Just as the prisoner’s gaze confronts the viewer ‘head on’, so does Hamilton’s approach confront the prison issue directly by reproducing the material conditions in which these men lived. This emphasis on the reproduction of the material conditions of prison life for the nonconforming prisoners is underlined by Hamilton’s creation of an installation, in a subsequent exhibition in 1988 at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh, which includes a ‘cell’ with ‘walls decorated in imitation of those in the protesters’ cells at Long Kesh. The artist put a sponge-rubber mattress and a dirty pillow in a corner to complete the furnishing.’2 The tension in this painting is created, therefore, out of the opposition between a ‘realistic’ representation of the human individual and the mythic character that Hamilton recognises in the Christological imagery supplied by the documentary footage. The prisoners’ claims to political status are alluded to in the title of the painting, a reference to the ‘Cyclops’ episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses, in which Leopold Bloom runs into a Fenian activist referred to in the book as ‘The citizen’. As juxtaposed with a later painting representing a parading loyalist Orangeman, named The Subject, the title of the painting is also alluding to the more encompassing project of the republican movement, namely that which refuses to acknowledge the existing political configuration of Northern Ireland as a dependent territory of the British Crown in favour of a reintegration with the Republic of Ireland. A third artwork, The State, completes a cycle of paintings aiming to represent all political participants in the Northern Irish conflict. The painting represents a soldier – and here the metonymic relationship 2

Source: Tate Gallery’s Collection site, www.tate.org.uk

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between title and image intends perhaps to offer a comment on how the British presence in Northern Ireland is mostly visible through its war apparatus, the war itself. However, remaining unacknowledged, its description relegated to euphemisms such as ‘The Troubles’. If Hamilton seems to be treading a dangerous, because uncritical, path by choosing to replicate a significant component of republican selflegitimising rhetoric, namely its alignment with Christian values of redemption through ascetic practices, it is in his representation, on the lefthand panel, of the prisoners’ abstract drawings using faeces as the only available material that the overall intention of this work may be best understood. As Hamilton notes, ‘Each cell is marked with the graphic personality of its inhabitants; the walls look different because the pigment, of their own creation, is deployed in varying ways. It isn’t difficult to discern the megalithic spirals of New Grange inscribed there, nor are the Gaelic convolutions of the Book of Kells remote from the wall paintings of Long Kesh’ (Donagh and Hamilton, 8). Although Hamilton is striving somewhat forcefully to establish a doubtful parallel between a Celtic (and therefore ‘authentic’ and legitimate) heritage and the republican struggle, the painter’s ultimate purpose is not so much to give a voice to the prisoners’ claims of political legitimacy, but to respond to what he views as the creative potential stemming from a situation of absolute disempowerment which paradoxically allows for the expression of individual and cultural identity in the most adverse of conditions. Rita Donagh’s representational strategy in her painting Long Meadow seems to take the opposite direction from Hamilton’s. Nowhere are the cells or the gaunt bodies of the prisoners to be seen, as the painting portrays a distanced, aerial view of the prison camp. Rather, it is the stylised letter ‘H’, in recognition of the symbolic status it acquired in the vocabulary of discord around the prison issue, which haunts this work, since the construction of the H-blocks signalled the shift in British politics from a tacit recognition of political status as practiced in the organisation of Long Kesh into nissen huts to a denial of this same status as embodied in the cellular structure of the H-blocks. The painting offers a representation of the eight H-blocks which practically eliminates all traces of perspective,3 thus reducing a familiar structure into the graphic symbol of the letter H. The rigid geometric display is counteracted by a superimposition of diffuse, menacing patterns of light and shadow. As 3

The painting contains nonetheless a certain level of texture due to the choice of materials, namely oil on canvas.

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Kelly points out, ‘the blocks are diagonally set across the canvas like a still from a German expressionist film – light creates the intense mood of this air raid’ (Kelly 1996b: 13). This element of shadow is of vital importance in the creative development of the work as, for Donagh, the letter H becomes associated with the notion of shadow, ‘an alien presence darkening the sky’ (Donagh and Hamilton, 4). By stylising the H-blocks into the letter H, Donagh is thus linking a political, three-dimensional structure (the H-blocks) with the two-dimensional textual sign, in a reenactment of the way in which the political war became a ‘war of words’, while the ominous shadows associated with the H-blocks offer a comment on how these same H-blocks darkened the political landscape of the Northern Irish territory. The danger in taking up such an unambiguous position vis-à-vis the conflict is the renouncement of critical distance, however, and commenting on Donagh’s repeated use of the H-blocks in her work, Jaki Irvine bemoans what she views as ‘the reiteration of a series of simple rhetorical assertions of belief’ to the detriment of ‘a sustained interrogation of the situation, one which does not exclude the different places of artist and viewer in the production of meaning’ (75). If Donagh’s painting foregrounds the textual sign, Shane Cullen’s installation Fragmens sur les Institutions Républicaines IV relies on the textual medium to such an extent that its status as ‘visual’ artwork might conceivably be questioned. For this imposing installation consists of ninety-six eight by four feet panels, featuring around thirty-five thousand words taken from Ten Men Dead, Beresford’s account of the 1981 hungerstrikes, an account which was based, to a great extent, on a compilation of the ‘comms’ smuggled out by the prison protesters in their effort to communicate with the Army Council of the Provisional IRA. The text has been meticulously hand-painted by Cullen on Styrofoam panels in white Bodoni typeface against a green background and is organised in newspaper-column formations. The viewer is thus confronted with a work of monumental proportions which holds an ambiguous relationship to its source text, for while it reproduces the ‘comms’ written by the republican prisoners during the hungerstrikes, it does so through the mediation of Beresford’s text.4 In effect, Cullen’s seemingly non-interventional strategy goes as far as including Beresford’s editorial addenda. This has led to two kinds of negative evaluations of the work. The first, expressed by Fintan O’Toole, is that which dismisses this work as irresponsible in its apparent

4

See Murphy, 1-22.

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refusal to artistically refashion the textual material in view of the seriousness of the historical events from which it stems: Both as art and as politics this is an act of evasion. It evades the responsibility of art to transform what it touches. And it evades the responsibility of anyone reflecting on events whose meaning is still being played out in the games of life and death to consider the continuing consequences of words and images.5

For behind this body of text stand other bodies, those of the ten dead hungerstrikers, ‘negotiating the terms and conditions of their death’ (Wilson, 19). The second adverse reaction is that which equates the faithful and painstaking reproduction of the prisoner’s words as tacit and unquestioning support of the republican cause.6 Both these responses locate the subject-matter of this installation solely in the historical events of the 1981 hungerstrikes and, as Shane Murphy has pointed out in his essay ‘Writing in the Shit’, they stem from an inability to identify the tensions underlying the representational strategies deployed by Cullen in Fragmens. For if the sheer size of the installation points to its celebratory, monumentalising character, the material of which these panels are made is the short-lived Styrofoam, which allied to its organization into columns of text suggests, as pointed out by Michael Wilson, ‘the throwaway of news print and the unreliable biases of editorializing’ (Wilson, 19). Moreover, by explicitly incorporating Beresford’s editorial asides and contextualisations into the reproduction of the discourse of the hungerstrikers, Cullen’s work cannot be said to reproduce slavishly the republican logic of protest. In fact, Fragmens consistently refuses to substantiate the different strata of sources on which it is based, in any ‘reiteration of … rhetorical assertions of belief’. Instead, by evoking the rhetoric of the republican movement, embodied in the conscious choice to hungerstrike to the death as the ultimate weapon of redress, as well as the material conditions surrounding this choice (a prominent component of the hungerstrikers’ reflections) through the mediation of Beresford’s reconstruction, Cullen promotes a self-reflexive, dialogical inquiry into the 5 Fintan O’Toole, “Second Opinions: An Act of Evasion, as Art and Politics,” Irish Times, August 20, 1996. Cited in Michael Wilson, 18. 6 Such a reaction is cited by Wilson: ‘When a set of the panels from Fragmens was exhibited in Belfast in 1995 a viewer was prompted to call the artist a “Nazi and an Irish Nationalist.”’ (17 ).

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nature of political struggle and ideology, and the ways in which these are appropriated and incorporated in subsequent representations and eventually registered and catalogued in the collective memory by way of the commemorative impulse which seeks to bring closure to painful, because unresolved, historical moments. There are multiple challenges and dangers underlying the representation of a phenomenon that is both political and public but also self-absorbed and private, and whose transfigurative impact both on its protagonists and on the socio-political configuration of the Northern Irish territory attests to the tenacity of firmly-held ideological beliefs no less than to its own dramatic power. Indeed, artworks such as Rita Donagh’s Long Meadow and, to a greater extent, Richard Hamilton’s The Citizen seem, at points, to forego critical distance in favour of a ready recognition and acceptance of the mythical imagery of the hungerstrikes. For if the artwork is attuned to one of the elements of the conflict in particular, namely, the prisoners’ need for visibility outside the prison walls and their insistence on being given a voice, it does little to promote dialogue or reflection as to the causes and significance of the prison protest in its insistent reiteration of this same need. That the 1981 hungerstrikes remain an exceptionally delicate issue, even when considered against the backdrop of a conflict whose defining trait is its seemingly inexhaustible capacity to produce situations which, in their uncompromising and extreme nature, defy stable and inclusive interpretation is evinced by the uneasiness or even straightforward disapproval with which projects such as Shane Cullen’s Fragments Sur Les Institutions Républicaines IV, a work completed some sixteen years after these events, was greeted by a Northern Irish audience. By neither monumentalizing nor plainly refusing to pay tribute to the hungerstrikers, Cullen declines the ‘confidence in a single position’ thus fulfilling what Heaney recognises to be the liberating impulse of the creative endeavour.

References Beresford, David. 1994. Ten Men Dead. London: Harper Collins. Brown, Terence. 1987. Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 1922-1985 London: Fontana Press. Donagh, Rita and Richard Hamilton. 1983. A Cellular Maze. Derry: Orchard Gallery.

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Ellmann, Maud. 1993. The Hunger Artists. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Feldman, Allen. 1991. Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Irvine, Jaki. 1995. ‘Rita Donagh’, Third Text. 31: 75 Jackson, Alvin. 1999. Ireland 1798-1998: Politics and War. Oxford: Blackwell. Kelly, Liam. 1996a. Thinking Long: Contemporary Art in the North of Ireland. Kinsale: Gardon Editions. —. 1996b. Language, Mapping and Power. Derry, Orchard Gallery. Murphy, Shane. 1998. ‘Writing in the Shit: The Northern Irish Poet and Authority’, The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies. 24.1:1-22 O’Malley, Padraig. 1990. Biting at the Grave: The Irish Hunger Strikes and the Politics of Despair. Boston: Beacon Press. Sweeney, George. 1993 ‘Irish Hunger Strikes and the Cult of SelfSacrifice’, Journal of Contemporary History. 28.3: 421-22. Wilson, Michael. 1997. ‘Fragments and Responses’. Exhibition catalogue for Fragmens des Institutions Républicaines IV. Ed. Liam Kelly. Derry: Orchard Gallery. 17-19.

“THE SAME SEED THAT CARRIED ME TILL IT SAW ITSELF AS FRUIT”: MEDBH MCGUCKIAN’S EXEMPLARS SHANE ALCOBIA-MURPHY

In Object Lessons, the Irish poet Eavan Boland quotes approvingly from the prologue to Ralph Ellison’s novel, Invisible Man, and seeks to appropriate the narrator’s doctrine of covert action for her own use: his marginality, she suggests, has an inherent subversive potentiality which can be adopted to great advantage by the female Irish poet within the context of their apparent lack of canonical status (Boland, 1995: 146-7). She appears, however, to have put the cart firmly before the horse since her claim is that “[m]arginality within a tradition, however painful, confers certain advantages”, that it “allows the writer clear eyes and a quick critical sense” (1995: 147). While it is right to stress the positive aspects of an alternative perspective with its critical distance, it surely constitutes a serious misreading of Ellison to state that marginality is a subversive condition per se. Enforced peripherality is, on the contrary, especially conducive to subjugation and the complete maintenance of the status quo. The “quick critical sense” to which she refers, far from being a consequence of marginality, is the necessary prerequisite for noncooperation and retaliatory action. The narrator’s self-imposed invisibility is derived in hindsight from his gradual awakening to a prior invisiblity, namely the life-long prejudice meted out to him by white Americans which renders him “unseen”. This primary invisibility is defined concisely as “a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality” (Ellison, 1982: 7). Selfawareness spawns a course of strategic counter-action, the (secondary) form of invisibility praised by Boland. This sequence is almost a constant in other tales of oppression. For instance, the epigraph to Ben Okri’s Songs of Enchantment, “felix, qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas” (Blessed are those who know the causes of things), prefigures the narrative’s emphasis on the necessity for

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revelation to combat exploitation, a theme reiterated by the references to such binary oppositions as sight/blindness, visibility/invisibility. This preoccupation is subsequently taken up and expanded in Astonishing the Gods in a manner reminiscent of Ellison’s novel. The narrator begins by discovering that prejudice has rendered him invisible: “He searched for himself and his people in all the history books he read and discovered to his youthful astonishment that he didn't exist” (Okri, 1995: 3). Completing his quest for a sense of self, or “the secret of visibility”, he comes to cherish “the invisibility of the blessed”, a mixture of creativity and grace which implicitly counters his sense of inadequacy at the novel's outset (Okri, 1995: 4, 159). Such narratives recall the significant intervention made in the debate between centre and margin by the post-colonial theorist bell hooks. Exploring what she terms “the politics of location", hooks seeks to delineate a means by which marginality could be established as a "central location for the production of a counter-hegemonic discourse that is not just found in words but in habits of being and the way one lives”: I am located in the margin. I make a definite distinction between that marginality which is imposed by oppressive structures and that marginality one chooses as site of resistance — as location of radical openness and possibility. This site of resistance is continually formed in that segregated culture of opposition that is our critical response to domination. We come to this space through suffering and pain, through struggle. We know struggle to be that which pleasures, delights, and fulfils desire. We are transformed, individually, collectively, as we make radical creative space which affirms and sustains our subjectivity, which gives us a new location from which to articulate our sense of the world. (hooks, 1991: 153)1

Although this outline of her place within society mirrors the distinction made by Ellison and Okri between categorisations which are externally imposed and those which are embraced by the self, hooks’ own theoretical discourse retains an unhelpful rigidity, restating rather than deconstructing the original binary opposition between centre and margin. More cogent for a critical reappraisal of the act of canon formation are the lectures by Toni Morrison which exploit the doubleness of invisibility and explain how the act of reading can make manifest the prejudices and (racial) assumptions of those who, consciously or unconsciously, sought to erase the Africanist presence from American literature: 1

See also hooks, 1990: 341-4.

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“The Same Seed that Carried Me till it Saw itself as Fruit”: Medbh McGuckian’s Exemplars The act of enforcing racelessness in literary discourse is itself a racial act. Pouring rhetorical acid on the fingers of a black hand may indeed destroy the prints, but not the hand. Besides, what happens in that violent, selfserving act of erasure to the hands, the fingers, the finger-prints of the one who does the pouring? (1993: 46)

The bringing to light of that which is omitted from narratives is close to what Boland actually seeks to achieve in her re-evaluation of the role of the Irish woman poet, but with one significant difference: Morrison’s analysis undermines the very notion of a tradition, actively questioning the sense of “self” upon which it is founded. In effect, she does not fetishize her own apartness since this would presuppose an integral, stable centre; rather, by recognizing how subjectivity is rooted in, among other things, gender, race and class, the writer brings a necessary provisionality to her critique, a self-reflexive dimension, one which is apparent in the work of the Northern Irish poet Medbh McGuckian. In what follows I want to examine how the marginal personae in Medbh McGuckian's poetry are aware of the dangers which enclosure pose and how, as in the novels of Ellison, Okri and Morrison, invisibility subsequently becomes a means of empowerment, a way of undermining established attitudes. The crucial (and as yet underestimated) form which this invisibility adopts is that of metaficitonality, whereby one text is hidden within another. The second stanza of “The ‘Singer’” (McGuckian, 1993: 14) provides a brief pen-picture of the pressures and frustrations experienced by the narrator as an adolescent: Every year at exams, the pressure mounted — The summer light bent across my pages Like a squinting eye. The children's shouts Echoed the weather of the street, A car was thunder, The ticking of a clock was heavy rain […]

External phenomena are experienced as invasive and disembodied — the sun becomes a squinting eye, the noise from a car is thunder — and these accentuate the poem’s atmosphere of enclosure, the “squinting eye” and “ticking of a clock” being especially Kafkaesque in their effect. Awareness of time passing also implicitly poses a threat to the narrator as a young girl, introducing as it does the dual frustration of her sedentary, repetitive activities coupled with an as yet unfulfilled sexual yearning, symbolised by the phallic rain and the children’s shouts. Indeed, the

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drawing of the curtains reinforces the already sharp differentiation between what is either inside or outside. However, the poem itself is anecdotal, re-told in the past tense by the more worldly-wise narrator who has outstripped such disappointments and the inherent ambiguity of the poem’s title hints at just how she has achieved this: a “Singer” is both creative artist and brand name of a sewing machine.2 In the evenings I used to study At my mother's old sewing-machine, Pressing my feet occasionally Up and down on the treadle As though I were going somewhere I had never been.

The poem bears more than a little resemblance with what has been described as Seamus Heaney’s poem of “vocational dedication”, “Digging”:3 not only do both texts contrast manual work with writing through the use of a clever analogy (pen/spade, sewing machine/singer), they also seek to break with family continuity. While Heaney describes how he has substituted the hard, physical work on the land performed by his father and grandfather for the aesthetic musing upon those roots which “awaken in [his] head”, McGuckian transforms her mother’s labour into a romantic vagrancy of the mind. Although it may be argued that the narrator affirms continuity with her mother by taking her place at the old machine, composition and book-learning is favoured over the stereotypical female activity (sewing). The wheel is, significantly, “disconnected” and the empty bobbin rattling in its case is an apt image for her desire to escape from what she conceives to be a restrictive life. The use of sewing, weaving, quilting and embroidery as metaphors for writing is widespread in contemporary Irish women’s poetry: Mary Dorcey and Mary O'Malley employ “word-spinning” and stitching, respectively,4 as symbols for the joining of words together; Carol Rumens’s “The Colouring Age” suggests that (feminist) salvation lies in the unstitching and unravelling of “the contrived plot” (1993: 25-6); Katie Donovan’s image of the spider weaving a silent language is her depiction of the marginalised female poet achieving a voice peculiar to herself 2

The equation had previously been made in a less successful poem by Eavan Boland, “Patchwork” (1994: 35-6). 3 See, for example, Foster (1989: 16-7) and Larrissey (1990: 149). 4 See Dorcey (1995: 10) and O’Malley (1993: 47).

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“The Same Seed that Carried Me till it Saw itself as Fruit”: Medbh McGuckian’s Exemplars

(1993: 25); and both Anne le Marquand Hartigan and Eva Bourke use Penelope as the archetypal weaver in an effort to reverse the stereotype of the marginal, passive woman waiting for the wandering hero to return.5 Although McGuckian seems in one interview6 to criticise her own practice of weaving phrases into texts, a description in another interview of her method of composition demonstrates its relevance and importance: Inspiration works with me. It takes over, if it’s a good one. I'm just a medium for it. I don’t really have to work. If I have to do a lot of thinking and rationalizing, it’s not going to be a great poem. I just take an assortment of words, though not exactly at random, and I fuse them. It’s like embroidery. It’s very feminine, I guess. They are very intricate, my poems, a weaving of patterns of ins and outs and contradictions, one thing playing off another. (McGuckian, 1990: 2)

Unlike the other poets who raid the myth-kitty in an obvious, standard fashion, McGuckian’s use of the images of weaving and sewing is more complex and has affinities with Emily Dickinson’s more famous spiders, unwinding the “Yarn of Pearl” and sewing at night “Upon an Arc of White”. As Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have pointed out, Dickinson’s symbol has multiple levels of meaning, and therein lies its potency: But what garment does the spider sew from this insubstantial substance? A uniform of snow? A spangled gown? Here Dickinson reveals the strategy of her own yarn of pearl. Hers, she suggests, is a fiction of multiplicity which artistically adopts numerous roles and, even more artfully, settles for none. (Gilbert and Gubar, 1978: 636)

“The Seed-Picture” (McGuckian, 1993: 28-9) is a poem in which McGuckian focuses on weaving in a manner reminiscent of her peers; however, while the craft itself highlights the young adolescent's marginality as well as the demands of familial obligation and inheritance, the form of the poem bespeaks a different kind of weaving, emphasising a Dickinsonian multiplicity and multivocality. The narrator’s “portrait of Joanna” emphasises both the materiality of the creation as well as the substitutive function those materials serve: “Her hair / is made of hookshaped marigold, gold / Of pleasure for her lips, like raspberry grain”. The 5

See Anne le Marquand Hartigan, (1993: 22-8) and Eva Burke (1996: 20-1). Medbh McGuckian stated in an interview with Sarah Broom, that “I have an awful fault of weaving in the sounds and images because I like them, but they don't particularly suit, they're just sort of thrown in for the fun of it” (McGuckian, 1995: 126). 6

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similes themselves call attention to the fracturing of the self as each are used to represent different parts of the girl’s body, gradually attempting to complete a full picture. Although the craft under discussion uses seeds rather than thread - but is still a “womanly or domestic” craft according to the poet7 - the image used to convey confinement is notably that of embroidery: Was it such self-indulgence to enclose her In the border of a grandmother's sampler. Bonding all the seeds in one continuous skin, The sky resolved to a cloud the length of a man?

The “sampler” not only connotes a beginner’s exercise, but also the pattern or archetype from which a copy may be taken, suggesting once again the continuation of tradition; yet such an occupation is restrictive to the feminine, enclosing the woman “in one continuous skin”, and is dictated (ominously) by “the length of a man”. The danger is made even more apparent at the poem's close, when the narrator states that The single pearl barley That sleeps around her dullness Till it catches light, makes women Feel their age, and sigh for liberation.

The final two lines contain an ironic awareness of marginality: though symbolising confinement, the portrait, like a latter-day version of Browning’s “My Last Duchess”, disturbs patriarchy since the woman's image, silent and enclosed within a frame, is implicitly given a voice. The analogy between “seed-work” and the writing of poetry, developed in the first half of the poem, appears to reinforce a conception of McGuckian’s method of composition as simply dual in nature. The importance of intuition and her willingness to allow unconscious or submerged elements to take the lead is suggested when the poet states that “The seeds dictate their own vocabulary, / Their dusty colours capture / More than we can plan”. The secondary activity, then, is one of arrangement: “I only guide them not by guesswork / In their necessary numbers”. Although this reads very much like Seamus Heaney’s wellknown distinction between craft and technique (1984: 47), what has not been widely recognised is that her process of writing actually entails three 7

McGuckian in a personal correspondence with the author, 28 February 1996.

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“The Same Seed that Carried Me till it Saw itself as Fruit”: Medbh McGuckian’s Exemplars

stages, the neglected one being the primary activity of gathering seeds (vocabulary) together. The words “capture / More than we can plan” because they are taken from varied contexts and are subsequently arranged by the writer who attaches them “by the spine to a perfect bedding”, i.e. her book of poems: So those words, my inventive methods are just to keep drawing on these, they come to me, obviously they are all over the place particularly in books, so you just collect these and then eventually they will all just somehow have this nuclear fission, that they swim around together and then in your head they can fuse and come out as a pattern that meets the needs of that particular suffering or that particular situation. (McGuckian, 2004)

The words are usually taken from biographies, diaries, novels or critical works. As such, McGuckian’s poems can often be considered as dramatic monologues, with the poet adopting the guise and voice of another author. Performing a masquerade, the dramatic monologue is said to exhibit “an over-determined and objectified selfhood symptomatic of anxieties about claiming any kind of subject position” (Rees-Jones, 1999: 17), and is thus the appropriate genre in which to explore the dislocations of self due to the material and psychic constructs imposed by patriarchy. One key example is “The Rising Out” (McGuckian, 1984: 35): My dream sister has gone into my blood To kill the poet in me before Easter. Such A tender visit, when I move my palaces, The roots of my shadow almost split in two, Like the heartbeat of my own child, a little Blue crocus in the middle of a book, or the hesitant Beginning of a song I knew, a stone-song Too small for me, awaiting a drier music. She gentles me by passing Weatherly remarks, That hover over my skin with an expectant summer Irony, soliloquies that rise out of sleep, And quite enjoy saying, ‘Rather a poor year.’ I continue meanwhile working on my arm-long ‘Venus Tying the Wings of Love’, hoping She will recede with all my heroes, dark Or fair, if my body can hold her bone to term. For any that I loved, it was for their hair That never really belonged to them, its colour

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Like a line of clouds just about to crumble, The breaking of ice in a jar. In my mind, I try and try to separate one Alice From the other, by their manner of moving, The familiar closing of the unseen room, The importunate rhythm of flowers, If she had died suddenly I would have heard Blood stretched on the frame, though her dream Is the same seed that lifted me out of my clothes, And carried me till it saw itself as fruit.

“The Rising Out” is an inherently political poem, one that is often read as rejecting the conventional equation between the female body and national territory. However, there is a clearer gender politics at work in the text due to its intertext, namely Karen Petersen and J.J. Wilson’s Women Artists (1978), a monograph which contextualises and historicises the lives and production of women artists from the Early Middle Ages to the twentiethcentury. One of the early questions that Petersen and Wilson ask is: “Is it mirroring or some deeper psychic process that causes so many double images in women’s art?” (1978: 3). This accounts for the doubles that occur throughout “The Rising Out”. McGuckian alludes to two of the examples cited by the authors when examining this question. The first is Mary Cassatt’s The Loge (1882), a painting in which “the fan seems to separate one Alice from the other Alice in the looking glass”; the second is Frida Kahlo’s The Two Fridas (1939), which “reflects a frequent dream women have of joyous embrace between the dark sister and the fair sister” and which presents Kahlo’s feeling of being “split in two” (1978: 3, emphasis added). What the poem explores, in part, is “the fear that women describe of looking into the mirror one day and seeing nothing”, an “allegory of non-identity” which “also reveals fear of desertion, of dependence upon an insufficiently integrated self” (1978: 4). We have a clear binary opposition between the social/socialised self and the desiring, subversive, artistic self. What is being played out is a psychodrama, a fear that the subject cannot reconcile two seemingly disparate dispositions and that she is condemned to being split in two. McGuckian’s poem, however, using the documented experiences of female artistic exemplars, attempts to resolve the conflict. The speaker declares that she will continue working on her “Venus tying the Wings of Love”, here referring to Elisabeth Vigée Lebrun’s statement that, on the day her daughter was born, she did not quit her atelier and “continued working at [her] Venus Tying the Wings of Love, in the intervals between

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“The Same Seed that Carried Me till it Saw itself as Fruit”: Medbh McGuckian’s Exemplars

the throes” (1978: 52). All of the extracts cited by McGuckian centre on a key dilemma: how can one be both a mother and an artist? For example, in the concluding stanza we have a pairing together of female artists. The first is Frida Kahlo, one of whose paintings “deals with her own miscarriage”. Petersen and Wilson relate how she “wanted so much to have a child by Diego [her husband], but her body could not hold it to term.” Later, “she took up the scene again and again, sometimes painting the blood out over the frame as if to warn us that life and art cannot be kept separate” (1978: 135, emphasis added). The second artist referred to in the concluding stanza is Paula Modersohn-Becker, the subject of Rilke’s “Requiem for a Friend” in which he says: “And finally you saw yourself as fruit, / Lifted yourself out of your clothes and carried / that self before the mirror” (Rilke in Petersen and Wilson, 1978: 110, emphasis added). While Rilke berated Modersohn-Becker for returning to her husband and seemingly betraying her art for a life of domesticity, McGuckian’s poem offers a corrective. The experiences of Kahlo and Modersohn-Becker are conjoined. When the speaker refers to “the same seed”, she is quoting Joanna Griffin’s poem (cited by Petersen and Wilson) affirming the inseparability of life and art. The allusion also, significantly, establishes a connection between the contemporary female artist (McGuckian/Griffin) and those female exemplars who had to resolve their own psychodramas (Vigée-Lebrun, Kahlo, Cassatt, ModersohnBecket): “‘Her dream is my seed / Her vision my task to make the centuries see her / with such clear eyes as hers are’” (Joanna Griffith in Petersen and Wilson, 1978: 62). Thus, McGuckian’s dramatic monologues often work to explode prevailing assumptions about the female subject, particularly those pertaining to “her defining domestic and nurturing function”, “her existence as object rather than creator of art” and “the patent ridiculousness of her attempts to insert herself actively into the realm of history by means of work or engagement in political struggle” (Nochlin, 1988: 2). One further example is “Self-Portrait in the Act of Painting a Self-Portrait” (McGuckian, 1998: 65), a poem which returns to the themes of canonicity and female artistic authority, and whose title adverts to the author’s self-reflexivity regarding the conditions of her own poetic production. The poem makes use of quotations from Germaine Greer’s The Obstacle Race (2001), an in-depth survey of the historical context and socio-sexual ideology of female production in the graphic arts throughout the ages, and works by pairing together the work of different artists to explore a key tension, namely that between an art which is introverted,

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self-absorbed and inherently private, and that which intervenes in the public realm. The poem begins by declaring that “Unreadable day, you must have sat / too often by the dying”. This sentence conjoins two quotations which present opposing artistic credos. The first, from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Malte Laurids Brigge, suggests that the writer, to create, must abjure narcissistic tendencies and act as a witness to public events: “One must have sat by the dying, one must have sat by the dead in a room with open windows” (1990: 20). However, McGuckian alters the quotation by saying that the addressee has “too often sat by the dying”, and the suggestion here of censure perhaps aligns her view with the second disposition, one adopted by the painter Aloïse Corbaz (1886-1964). Corbaz, an artist who was committed to a psychiatric clinic in 1918, is said to have rejected realism in favour of a private symbolism, resulting in an art which is described by Greer as “a timeless re-working of the images of courtship which she never experienced, in which the woman is a preposterously voluptuous concatenation of circular and oval shapes, gazing narcissistically at the beholder out of lake-blue eyes which she is overwhelmed by the male profile” (Greer, 2001: 117). Corbaz’s “unconscious imagery” is said to respond to “the enculturation of women” and, as such, results in “unreadable forms” (Greer, 2001: 117, emphasis added). This aligns her with the next artist mentioned by McGuckian: Gwen John (1876-1939). Her art is said by Greer to be unreadable in the sense that she “she withdrew into a single drop, forever compressing and concentrating her art and her feelings to one inner end, the intense, energetic but utterly cicumscribed life of a mystic” (Greer, 2001: 110). This is alluded to at the end of the first stanza when the speaker states that the addressee’s “Musehood has withdrawn / into a single drop”. Such inviolable privacy is seemingly paralleled at the beginning of the following stanza with an allusion to Lavinia Fontana’s Minerva Disrobing (1613), a painting which features the female goddess of war, Minerva, “assuming her feminine role after a hard day at the battlefield”: “Minerva stands with her left shoulder turned to the beholder and her left leg stretched behind her. The face she turns over her shoulder is sweet but unexpressive. The gown she lifts without looking is painted with the same delicate and loving attention to detail that we see in Fontana’s portraits, and contrasts oddly with the blankness of the treatment of the figure” (Greer, 2001: 213). While the painting presents us with Minerva, her naked flesh displayed for the male scope gaze, as an objectified female figure now confined within a domestic setting, McGuckian subtly alters

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“The Same Seed that Carried Me till it Saw itself as Fruit”: Medbh McGuckian’s Exemplars

the quotation from Greer to suggest a far more active protagonist: “The striped gown she lifts / without the painting looking”. While the painting’s title states that Minerva is “disrobing”, there is nothing else to suggest that she is not, in fact, preparing to depart for war. Rather, she could be lifting the gown to don it and depart, “without the painting looking”. The poem’s conclusion, like its opening, presents two contradictory positions by means of conjoined quotations: “her ears closed and her lifetime’s gaze […] on her own reflection, undigested, / in the fruit with their dismembered trunks of faces”. The first refers to Clara Peeters’ Still Life (1612), a painting in which the artist has “carefully painted her own reflection, six times, in the flare of light from a window” (Greer, 2001: 237, emphasis added). The multiple miniature self portraits are indicative of an artistic subjectivity which has been rendered split and peripheral by the prevailing masculinist ideology. Such a psychodrama bespeaks a frustrated and insufficiently integrated self of a type discussed in “The Rising Out”. Yet McGuckian counters this introversion with a further allusion to Greer: “To the deadening pull towards passivity is added the pressure of politics which would drag the artist in another direction until her soul lies dismembered” (Greer, 2001: 327). The artist’s self is further split by the call to bear witness as an artist to public events, to break free from the so called ‘feminine realm’ of the domestic interior. While McGuckian’s poem does not seek to resolve the tensions between private and public, it does display an awareness of restrictive ideologies arising from specific historical contexts, and how they impact upon the female artist. By stitching together a dramatic monologue from quotations pertaining to her female precursors, McGuckian can, thus, adopt different masks and play out her own literary psychodrama.While artists like Peeters and John may have had, perforce, to inhabit peripheral positions, McGuckian’s personae glide between them, adopting a strategic and selfreflexive marginality.

References Boland, Eavan. 1994. “Patchwork”. Night Feed. 1st ed. 1982. Manchester: Carcanet Press. 35-6. —. 1995. Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time. Manchester: Carcanet Press. Bourke, Eva. 1996. “Penelope”. Spring in Henry Street. Dublin: Dedalus Press. 20-1.

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Broom, Sarah. 1995. “Image and Symbol in the Poetry of Medbh McGuckian”. Unpublished dissertation. University of Wales. Donovan, Katie. 1993. “Spider”. Watermelon Man. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe. 25. Dorcey, Mary. 1995. “The Making of Poetry”. The River that Carries Me. Galway: Salmon. 10. Ellison, Ralph. 1982. Invisible Man. 1st Ed. 1952. London: Penguin. Foster, Thomas C. 1989. Seamus Heaney. Dublin: The O'Brien Press. Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. 1979. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press. Greer, Germaine. 2001. The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work. London: Tauris Parke. Hartigan, Anne le Marquand. 1993. “Penelope”. Immortal Sins. Galway: Salmon. 22-8. Heaney, Seamus. 1984. “Feeling into Words”. Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978 1980. London: Faber. 41-60. hooks, bell. 1991. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. London: Turnaround. —. 1990. “Marginality as a Site of Resistance”, Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures. Eds. R. Ferguson et al. New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 341-4. Larrissey, Edward. 1990. Reading Twentieth-Century Poetry: The Language of Gender and Objects. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. McGuckian, Medbh. 1984. “The Rising Out”. Venus and the Rain. Oxford: OUP. 35. —. 1990. Sleeping with Monsters: Conversations with Scottish and Irish Women Poets. Eds. Gillean Somerville-Arjat and Rebecca Wilson. Dublin: Wolfhound Press. 1-7. —. 1993. “The ‘Singer’”. The Flower Master and OtherPoems. Meath: The Gallery Press. 14. —. 1993. “The Seed Picture”. The Flower Master and Other Poems. 28-9. —. 1998. “Self-Portrait in the Act of Painting a Self-Portrait”. Shelmalier. Meath: The Gallery Press. 65. —. 2004. “In the Country of Comparative Peace”. Interview by Margaret Coffey and Philip Harvey. Accessed online. www.abc.net.au/rn/relig/enc/stories/s1259334.htm. Morrison, Toni. 1993. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. London: Picador

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“The Same Seed that Carried Me till it Saw itself as Fruit”: Medbh McGuckian’s Exemplars

Nochlin, Linda. 1988. Women, Art, Power and Other Essays. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press. O'Malley, Mary. 1993. “The Quilt”. Where the Rocks Float. Galway: Salmon. 47. Okri, Ben. 1994. Songs of Enchantment. London: Vintage. —. 1995. Astonishing the Gods. London: Phoenix House. Petersen, Karen, and J.J. Wilson. 1978. Women Artists: Recognition and Reappraisal from the Early Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century. London: The Women’s Press. Rees-Jones, Deryn. 1999. Carol Ann Duffy. Plymouth: Northcote House. Rilke, Rainer Maria. 1990. The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Trans. Stephen Mitchell. New York: Vintage. Rumens, Carol. 1993. “The Colouring Age”. Thinking of Skins: New and Selected Poems. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe. 25-6.

SEAMUS HEANEY AND OSIP MANDELSTAM: ‘STRETCHED BETWEEN POLITICS AND TRANSCENDENCE’ SUKANYA BASU

Seamus Heaney in his foreword to his first selected prose collection Preoccupations (1980) foregrounds some of the key questions that preoccupy his work: how should a poet properly live and write, and what is his relationship to his own voice, his own place, his literary heritage and his contemporary world? (Heaney, 1980: 13). These questions are extremely useful markers which help point the way towards an understanding of the varied thematic strands of Heaney’s prose essays. He explains further that his prose writings are often instances of “breaking bread with the dead”, which W.H. Auden considered an action essential to the life of poetry (Heaney, 1980: 14). In several essays, Heaney looks back to certain key literary influences that have helped shape his poetic voice. He says “I had a half-clarified desire to come to poetic terms with myself by considering the example of others” (Heaney, 1980: 13). While examining this interaction between Heaney’s own voice and that of his literary ancestors, one finds his observation on Eliot in his essay ‘Envies and Identifications: Dante and the Modern Poet’ vitally revealing: When poets turn to the great masters of the past, they turn to an image of their own creation, one which is likely to be a reflection of their own imaginative needs, their own artistic inclinations and procedures. (Heaney, 1985: 5)

This statement in a way also provides the rationale for this article which looks at how Osip Mandelstam is an iconic figure for Heaney in both his prose and poetry. I will concentrate on Heaney’s critical essays on the Russian writer from the collections Preoccupations and The Government of the Tongue to show how Mandelstam’s life and ideas are crucial to Heaney’s aesthetic system. Heaney pays homage to this exemplary predecessor and, in doing so, creates certain paradigms of

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Seamus Heaney and Osip Mandelstam: ‘Stretched between Politics and Transcendence’

critical judgement within which he wants his own work to operate. Indeed, it is in exalting the aesthetics of his predecessor that he highlights the specific values that are important to his own creativity. Although one can only draw superficial comparisons between the extreme socio-historical conditions under which Mandelstam wrote and those under which Heaney writes, the latter picks up certain key ideas from the former about how to write in times of political duress. Heaney writes that he too lives in “critical times […] when the idea of art is in danger of being overshadowed by a quest for poetry as a diagram of political attitudes” (Heaney, 1980: 219). Heaney celebrates Mandelstam’s life and work as both salutary and exemplary in their resistance to “official” political programs and intent. Eugene O’Brien in Seamus Heaney: Searches for Answers puts forward the idea that Heaney’s work stresses “the duality and necessity for interaction and intersection of notions of selfhood and alterity” (3). He argues that Heaney’s poetry engages with a “pluralistic and complicated construction of what it means to be Irish” (3) and identifies in Heaney a movement outwards from a tribal sense of selfhood to a search for more “broader, symbolic enunciations of individual and cultural identity” (4). I would suggest that it is this impulse that leads Heaney to move beyond Irish exemplars to a figure such as Mandelstam who, in being removed from Heaney’s immediate regional, political or cultural allegiances, is a representative of a kind of “world-culture”.1 Osip Mandelstam was born in Warsaw to Jewish parents but spent his childhood and adolescent years in St. Petersburg before going to study in Paris and travelling around Italy. He returned to Russia in 1910 where, along with Anna Akhmatova, he participated in the poetic movement known as “Acmeism” and published his first collection of poetry entitled Stone (1913). He also worked under the dark shadow of the Stalinist era (1929-1953) and much of his later work was suppressed and unpublished during that time. It was due to his non-compliance with the official mechanisms of the state that he suffered repeated interrogation, imprisonment and exile. He died at the age of forty-seven in a transit camp 1 According to the Acmeist poet Anna Akhmatova Osip Mandelstam defined Acmeism as a “homesickness for world culture”. This is cited in Clarence Brown’s introduction to Osip Mandelstam: Selected Poems (1973:xi). Though the phrase is ambiguous, it is used in this context to refer back to Mandelstam and to point towards the awareness of a more pluralist worldview on the part of Heaney.

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near Vladivostok. In spite of the rigid censorship of his time his poetry survived in “pre-Gutenberg conditions” in the form of three schoolnotebooks and through a miraculous act of memory on the part of Nadezhda Mandelstam who memorised them for fear of their being seized and destroyed. His story became known to the western world only in the 1970s when she published her memoirs of those trying times: Hope against Hope (1971) and Hope Abandoned (1974). Two early essays by Heaney – “Faith Hope and Poetry” and “Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam” – are closely related though they appear in separate volumes of Heaney’s prose and I will refer to them in terms of their continuity of thought throughout this article. In the earlier essay Mandelstam is presented as a figure of hope, someone who has the touch of the magical about him (“the Lazarus of modern Russian poetry”). Mandelstam here represents for Heaney the defiant spirit of artistic integrity that refuses to accept defeat in the face of the strains of the external world. In a poem from the 1930s Mandelstam proclaims confidently that he can “speak for everyone”. This astounding declaration of the authority of the poetic voice is what Heaney finds admirable: I speak for everyone. My strength is such that My palate has become the heavens, my lips Have cracked open like the red clay earth. (Mandelstam in Jane Gary Harris, 1988:103)

Heaney in his essay also upholds the power of art describing it as having something of the singular intensity of religious devotion: “Art has a religious, binding force, for the artist. Language is the poet's faith and the faith of his fathers and in order to go his own way and do his proper work in an agnostic time, he has to bring that faith to the point of arrogance and triumphalism” (Heaney, 1980: 217). This necessary arrogance or authority of the poet is what Heaney locates in Mandelstam’s poetic voice. The tone of the essay is distinctively combative and defiant as the concerns of the polis and those of the individual artist are seen in dramatic opposition. The poet, rebelling against the conforming dictates of the totalitarian regime, is successful in upholding the notions of artistic freedom and truth that become exemplary for later writers. Heaney emphasises Mandelstam’s “heroic” nature: he specifically relates how the Russian poet refused to toe the party line and to write odes in praise of Stalin and hydroelectric dams. In a world grown cynical towards acts of faith, where poetry has become a lost cause, Heaney takes it upon himself to reinstate the fallen position of art and seek out exemplary heroes.

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Seamus Heaney and Osip Mandelstam: ‘Stretched between Politics and Transcendence’

Despite being persecuted till his death and having all his works suppressed, Mandelstam’s literary legacy managed to survive and his revival in modern day Russia is a justification of Mandelstam's faith in the power and efficacy of art and his belief in future generations of readers. Heaney quotes these lines in his essay on Mandelstam to confirm their shared belief in the abiding value of art for its readers. The people need poetry that will be their own secret to keep them awake forever, and bathe them in the bright-haired wave of its breathing. (Mandelstam in Brown, Merwin, 1973:89)

The essay thus champions the tragic yet self-affirmative voice of Mandelstam who was effectively able to use his poetry to uphold the ideals of “truth” and “freedom” in a society that was so deeply resistant to them. Though these terms are somewhat problematic in a modern cynical world, Heaney too is concerned with similar notions in both his prose and poetry. In the poem “Oysters” from Field Work (1979) he expresses his anger at his inability to ‘repose / In the clear light, like poetry or freedom’ (Heaney, 1998: 145). Crucially, Heaney equates poetry and freedom and uses the somewhat sinister metaphor of “eating the day deliberately” to quicken himself into “pure verb”. The need to be transformed into “pure verb” constitutes the desire for a language that is ungoverned, one that is free from any narrow, limiting cultural or political resonance or expectation. Though it is problematic to contemplate a purely inspired aesthetic moment that is free from the political and the social, Heaney yearns for a transcendent space that can obliterate the boundaries between art and life, song and suffering, the political and the aesthetic: “Deep down, of course there is the sure awareness that no such simple solution or dissolution is possible, but the waking mind desires constantly some clarifies allegiance, without complication or ambivalence” (Heaney, 1988: xii). In Mandelstam’s steadfast affirmation of the essential humanism of the act of poetry Heaney glimpses the space of pure concentration that he is looking for in his own art. In “Frontiers of Writing” (1993) from The Redress of Poetry he talks about how “the work of a poet should ideally be a source of truth and a vehicle of harmony and relates it to the problem of how poets from Northern Ireland feel the special need of trying to be true to both the negative nature of the evidence and at the same time showing an affirming flame, which is their longing to be socially responsible and

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creatively free at the same time” (189). This is a constant dialectic within Heaney’s own work and he seeks answers in Mandelstam’s stance as the individual artist who was also able to speak up on behalf of his oppressed people. Heaney perhaps seeks that absolute form of conviction, that “inner grace” (Heaney, 1988: 72) that Mandelstam possessed when he composed his seditious epigram against Stalin: “Along with the poetry came the power to not to obey orders, and almost, it would seem, as a proof to himself that the power was absolute, Mandelstam later wrote his uncharacteristically explicit and ‘political’ poem against Stalin, ‘The Kremlin Mountaineer’” (Heaney, 1988: 72). This text resulted in Mandelstam’s arrest in 1934. Talking about the Russian poet’s breaking out of his poetic silence and rediscovering his lost voice, Heaney says that it was a sign of “inner grace” being restored which was due to a sense of his being right which gave him the inner freedom to summon poetry once more. Up that point, Mandelstam had been unable to write poetry for a period of five years (1925-1930). Nadezhda Mandelstam recalls in her memoir how her husband’s physical and mental ailments were due to his being forced to hear and follow the official line on poetry in the state. Heaney argues that the writing of the uncharacteristically explicit poem was a “self-cleansing act” (1988: 135) for Mandelstam through which his true voice and being could utter itself. It was David facing Goliath “with eight stony couplets in his sling” (1988: 72). Our lives no longer feel ground under them. At ten paces you can’t hear our words. But whenever there’s a snatch of talk it turns to the Kremlin mountaineer, The ten thick worms his fingers, his words like measures of weights, the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip, the glitter of his boot-rims. Ringed with a scum of chicken-necked bosses he toys with the tributes of half-men. One whistles, another meows, a third snivels. He pokes out his finger and he alone goes boom.

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Seamus Heaney and Osip Mandelstam: ‘Stretched between Politics and Transcendence’ He forges decrees in a line like horseshoes, One for the groin, one the forehead, temple, eye. He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries. He wishes he could hug them like big friends from home. (Mandelstam, 1973: 69-70)

In the poem one notes how language is suppressed and distorted by the oppressor and the human voice is reduced to the sounds of servility and fawning: ‘whistle’, ‘meows’, ‘snivels’. The poet’s task is to recover the lost pure language and attempt a response: You took away all the oceans and all the room. You gave me my shoe-size in earth with bars around it. Where did it get you? Nowhere. You left me my lips, and they shape words, even in silence. (Mandelstam, 1973: 73)

While Heaney, too, wants to speak up for “his people” and intervene in the public sphere like Mandelstam, who intervened on the behalf of five elderly clerks who were going to be executed in 1928, he is also conscious that explicit political protest may not necessarily translate into good art. Yet Mandelstam becomes for Heaney the perfect example of the “poet as witness” (Heaney, 1988: xvi). Mandelstam “represents poetry’s solidarity with the doomed, the deprived, the victimized, the under-privileged, in whom the truth telling urge and the compulsion to identify with the oppressed becomes necessarily integral with the act of writing itself” (Heaney, 1988: xvi). Heaney perhaps has Mandelstam in mind when he writes: I yearn […] to know there is one among us who never swerved from all his instincts told him was right action, who stood his ground in the indicative, whose boat will lift when the cloudburst happens. (1990: 237)

What he finds triumphant is Mandelstam’s potential for song amidst the suffering: “the essential thing about lyric poetry, Mandelstam maintained, was its unlooked for joy in being itself, and the essential thing for the lyric poet was therefore a condition in which he was in thrall to no party or programme, but truly and freely and utterly himself” (Heaney, 1988: xix). Thus, Mandelstam’s entire lyric utterance – but not, crucially, the specific Stalin protest poem – becomes representative of the value of art as

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essentially an “unharnessed, non-didactic, non-party-dictated, inspired act” (Heaney, 1988: xix). For Heaney, poetry must be devoid of reductive political claims. Therefore, Mandelstam becomes for Heaney a key literary exemplar, substantiating his own faith in the liberating force of poetry. Composing in secret in a totalitarian state, Mandelstam serves as a worthy instance of the “ungoverned’ tongue”. In a later interview Heaney talks about Auden’s notion that poetry “survives” – in contrast to the seemingly more negative assertion that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’ – arguing that poetry “survives as the uncensored truth of the moment…it survives as a mouth and that gives it its verity, that’s what it makes happen. It makes itself happen” (1999: 131). This is one of the important ideas that he takes from Mandelstam. While Mandelstam’s voice is unfettered, Heaney’s tongue suffers from self-censorship in the face of the Troubles of the 1970s; when caught in the bind of political reality he feels the need to answer responsibly. Indeed, North (1975), Heaney’s most directly politically implicated piece of work, written during a time of crisis, has echoes from Mandelstam. In his essays on Mandelstam Heaney also makes the reader aware of the human frailties of the artist figure. Exiled to Cherdyn, Mandelstam attempted to jump out of the hospital window in a state of madness. The pressures of being reduced to a “non-person” and having his tongue governed, the poet found solace in subterfuge and art. The older Mandelstam came to identify himself with exiles and outcasts as he was pushed to the margins of society by the state he had challenged. Heaney refers to himself as an “inner émigré” in his poem “Exposure” from North as he left Northern Ireland to move to the Republic of Ireland. Heaney perhaps identifies his own liminal position with respect to his being a minority figure in the North with that of Mandelstam’s as both a Jew and an inner exile in Russia. There are echoes of Mandelstam as he reflects on this action, “weighing [his] responsible Tristia”2 in a society divided over “internees” and “informers”. Heaney rejects such binary oppositions and instead recalls the “diamond absolutes of art” (Heaney, 1998:144), echoing Mandelstam who implied that it was the poet’s responsibility to allow poems to form in language within himself, the way crystals formed in chemical solution (c.f. Heaney, 1988: xix). The poet, Heaney argues, should trust his voice and be obedient to the poetic impulse, disregarding the impositions of orthodoxy and self-censorship. 2

There are associations here with the exiled Ovid writing his Black Sea Tristia and with Mandelstam’s poem by the same name.

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Seamus Heaney and Osip Mandelstam: ‘Stretched between Politics and Transcendence’

In a poem dedicated to Mandelstam titled “M”, Heaney recounts the nature of Mandelstam’s influence on him. As the inspired artist spins the globe in search of answers, the vibrating sound and the steadfast Russian of Mandelstam makes the deaf phonetician magically hear. This quality of “steadfastness” offers a release for Heaney. The poet, as the vessel for language, is responsible towards the sound and not the state, to phonetics and not five-year plans. Mandelstam reminds Heaney that “humanity is served by the purely poetic fidelity of the poet to all words in their pristine being, in the steadfastness of their speech articulation”. He is to Heaney a symbol of the poet as “a potent sound wave, like a note, which can put a crack into the officially moulded truth in a totalitarian society” (Heaney, 1988: xx). What Heaney stresses most about Mandelstam is that his courage and integrity as a man translates into those of the poet, until the two are inseparable. In his life and poetry “song and suffering” collide and produce a “new level of consciousness” (Heaney, 1988: xxii). Through Mandelstam’s example Heaney can claim for poetry “an experience of release”, a moment of confident airy sureness that Frost described as the “momentary stay against confusion” (1988:93). What Mandelstam wrote in his essay “On the Addressee” (1913) becomes true of his own art and life: “[A poet’s] lines continue to live on long after they were written, as events, not merely as tokens of an experience which has passed” (Mandelstam, 1979: 73). One locates in the Heaney of Seeing Things (1991) a consideration of things marvellous: “So long for air to brighten / Time to be dazzled and the heart to lighten” (50). Helen Vendler notes that this collection does not have the historicized thickness of the bog poems from North; rather, the poems are about that which one cannot touch. This is similar to what Mandelstam writes in his essay “Word and Culture” where he states: “The poem lives through an inner image that ringing mold of form, which anticipates the written poem. This is the sound of an inner image; this is the poet’s ear touching it - only the instant of recognition is sweet to us!” (Mandelstam, 1979: 116). It is in this imagining of the “diamond absolutes” that Heaney felt an important change in his own poetic development: “Then finally and happily, and not in obedience to the dolorous circumstances of my native place but in spite of them, I straightened up. I began a few years ago to make space in my reckoning and imagining for the marvellous as well as for the murderous” (Heaney,

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1998: 458). One can relate this change to the magical quality of the Lazarus figure that Heaney had earlier identified in Mandelstam. What Mandelstam teaches Heaney is that poetry has the freedom to function beyond the polis and its governing figures of authority. As the poet acts as an antenna, capturing the voices of the world, he becomes a medium expressing his own subconscious and the collective subconscious. The readers of poetry therefore grant it its authority as it makes us see “unexpected and unedited communications between our nature and the nature of the reality we inhabit” (Heaney, 1988: 93). Through Heaney’s essays on Mandelstam one gets invaluable insight into the Northern Irish poet’s own artistic ideals and the development of his creative mind. Mandelstam’s heroism acts as an example for Heaney of the triumph of the ideals of “truth” and “beauty” in both poetry and life.

References Heaney, Seamus. 1980. Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-7. London: Faber —. 1985. “Envies and Identifications: Dante and the Modern Poet”. Irish University Review 15: 5-17. —. 1988. The Government of the Tongue. London: Faber. —. 1990. New Selected Poems 1966-1987. London: Faber. —. 1991. Seeing Things. London: Faber. —. 1995. The Redress of Poetry. London: Faber. —. 1996. The Spirit Level. London: Faber. —. 1998. Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996 London: Faber. —. 1999. Interview with J.J.Wylie and J.C. Kerrigan. Nua: Studies in Contemporary Irish Writing 2 (Autumn-Spring): 125-37. O’Brien, Eugene. 2003. Seamus Heaney: Searches for Answers. London: Pluto Press. Mandelstam, Osip. 1973. Osip Mandelstam: Selected Poems. Trans. Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin. New York: Athenaeum. —. 1979. Mandelstam: The Complete Critical Prose and Letters. Ed. Jane.Gary.Harris. Michigan: Ann Arbor. Harris, Gary, Jane. 1988. Osip Mandelstam. Boston: G. K. Hall &Co.

DEREK MAHON’S POETRY OF COMMUNITY BRIAN BURTON

In 1994 the Irish University Review published a special edition on the work of Derek Mahon. One of the essays contained in the journal, ‘Derek Mahon’s Poetry of Belonging’, is an examination of Mahon’s failure to belong to ‘his people’, and the essay’s author, Kathleen Shields, asks, ‘Who are Mahon’s people and how does he write about them?’ (Shields, 67). Kathleen Shields’s thought-provoking inquiry focuses on Mahon’s strained relationship with the people of Belfast and the limitations of his kinship with them. Mahon’s poetry does, however, provide evidence that there exists another community to which he feels he does belong, and this is the community of other artists who sustain Mahon’s sense of identity as a poet. But before discussing Mahon’s relationship with these artists, I’d like to examine, through one particular poem, Mahon’s estrangement from the people of Belfast. Mahon has never been completely sure of his place. He identifies the authentic artist as an outsider, and subsequently has tended to dissociate himself from his native city and its inhabitants. His Ulster Protestant origins emerge in his poetry through conflicted, ambiguous emotions and a detached irony that conflates obligation, guilt and a desire to be elsewhere. Terence Brown has described Mahon as ‘perhaps most in exile when actually at home’ (Brown in Mahon 1996: 18), and this can be seen most clearly in the early poem ‘In Belfast’ (Mahon 1968: 6). It opens with the lines, ‘Walking among my own this windy morning / In a tide of sunlight between shower and shower’, Mahon immediately situating himself centrally amidst his home community and establishing his position in medias res as a means of conferring an authoritative perspective on the poem. However, his enlightened position as privileged recipient of poetic inspiration instantly singles him out from the city’s populace, and he is quick to dispel any sense of allegiance between himself and his people. The build-up of climatic diction compounds his isolation: while the poet associates himself with ‘a tide of sunlight’, the inhabitants of Belfast are afflicted with the darker aspects of stormy weather. Mahon’s use of the

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word ‘tide’ betokens his cosmopolitan lifestyle, and his restless ebbing and flowing away from and back to Belfast undermines any concrete concept of ‘home’. Expressions such as ‘resume’ and ‘Once more’ help to reinforce this itinerancy by suggesting repeated rueful returns to the dark chaos of unreason that in Mahon’s mind Belfast represents. The final stanza raises the ante on Mahon’s gamble to confront communality directly by introducing a moral imperative: One part of my mind must learn to know its place – The things that happen in the kitchen-houses And echoing back streets of this desperate city Should engage more than my casual interest, Exact more interest than my casual pity.

That ‘must’ speaks volumes for Mahon’s compulsive drive towards authenticity. Ethical necessity and its concomitant fight for selfpreservation denote a mind divided by the disparity between the rational self-consciousness that contrives to dwell within a cocoon of authentic need, and the bad faith of inauthenticity that submits without question to ‘the unwieldy images of the squinting heart’. While the guilt of being divided between loyalty to self and loyalty to home should raise more than casual interest or pity, Mahon holds emotion and sentiment in check for fear of submitting to the demands of cultural, ideological and religious inheritance. The strongly positioned ‘Should’ qualifies both the unstressed moral imperative ‘must’ and the powerful rhyme of ‘city’ and ‘pity’. Mahon acknowledges the responsibility he, as artist and Protestant, should feel towards his community by conflating objective reality and subjective emotion. However, his commitment to such a project falters in the face of two things: a personal need to remain authentic, and the self-reproaching knowledge that pity implies superiority in the way it looks down on those it is intended to aid or save. A strong sense of defiance permeates the lines, ‘There is a perverse pride in being on the side / Of the fallen angels and refusing to get up’, and the juxtaposition of ‘pride’ with ‘side’ presents an affiliation between one of the deadly sins and shared communal activity. Mahon’s intimate knowledge of Belfast should provoke moral outrage and something more than ‘casual interest’, but it fails implacably to do so. The subtle diminution of the moral imperative from ‘must’ to ‘Should’ reflects the choice Mahon has made, and his forthright decision to be loyal to his own consciousness holds sway. The gradual transition from the uncertainty of ‘could’ in the second stanza to the moral directive ‘Should’ addresses Mahon’s uneasy refusal to rise to

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the bait laid down by a Protestant orthodoxy that claims to offer moral certainty and ‘astute salvations’, but confers only intellectual and emotional paralysis. The ethical constituent of the poem’s could-mustshould structure balances precariously on the knife-edge of memory, continually opposing Mahon’s attempt to assert his individuality. Mahon tries to overcome this problem by writing poems which either adopt or impersonate the personae of other writers and artists, or address fellow members of an artistic/intellectual community. The former group can be termed ‘portrait poems’, while the latter comprises Mahon’s verse letters.1 Mahon’s portraits include ‘De Quincey in Later Life’, ‘Van Gogh among the Miners’, ‘Knut Hamsun in Old Age’, ‘Brecht in Svedenborg’, ‘Ovid in Tomis’, and ‘The Joycentenary Ode’. While evoking the presence or imitating the voice of their titular characters, these poems are also, to some extent, comments on Mahon himself. For instance, ‘Brecht in Svedenborg’ contains a distinct echo of ‘In Belfast’ in these lines: This could be home from home If things were otherwise. Twice daily the mails come Up the sound in a ship. I notice that the house Has four doors for escape... (Mahon 1982: 18)

All of these portrait poems are written in the first person, and while they pay homage to Mahon’s precursors they also double up as examples of ironic self-critique. Each poem is moulded as a fictional discourse that merges details from each artist’s life and work with Mahon’s own preoccupations. Mahon sets the authenticity of artistic vision against the societies which originally condemned the subjects of these portraits for their so-called ‘sickness’, their faux pas, and their frailty as humans. Although all of these characters are, in one sense or another, absurd, there is also something heroic about each of them. For example, while Knut Hamsun ‘shook hands with Hitler’, he also cured himself of tuberculosis by spending, as Mahon puts it, ‘four sub-zero nights and days / Perched on the screaming roof of a freight train’ (Mahon 1982: 20). By having the subjects of his portraits admit to their failings, Mahon is advocating tolerance of the foibles of flawed human nature as though begging forgiveness for his own weaknesses. Whereas Auden’s portraits are 1

The phrase ‘portrait poem’ is borrowed from Justin Replogle’s study of Auden (133-36).

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essentially caricatures designed to focus on their subjects’ neuroses and mental sickness, Mahon seeks sympathy for his subjects by relating their fallibility to his own infirmities and affinities. Mahon’s portraits are, unlike those of Auden, pleas for the wider world to accept the authenticity of humble artists who believe that their actions are conducted in good faith, and what these poems have in common is a belief in the artistic spirit to ‘go on’, irrespective of the inevitability of failure. Although the compulsion to write may ultimately prove futile, the guise of an adopted persona liberates the poet from the need to constantly foreground his own identity. These portrait poems possess an unequivocal degree of artifice which, according to Bill Tinley, ‘disguises their personal and political origins’, although this disguise can be recognised as little more than an ironical diversionary tactic once we remember that, at least in the cases of Brecht, Joyce, Hamsun and Ovid, politics was at the root of their estrangement and exile (Tinley, 117). This tactic gives Mahon the means to write indirectly about Belfast as his own place of exile, his detachment providing an ostensibly impersonal comment on the reception of art and the treatment of artists in the province. Mahon has frequently admitted to feelings of guilt regarding his breaking of ties with Belfast, as can be seen in other early poems such as ‘Afterlives’ and ‘Glengormley’. Nevertheless, many of his later poems increasingly follow a trajectory away from direct personal commentary on Northern Ireland in favour of an even more dispassionate approach. What these portraits illustrate is Mahon’s desire to affiliate himself with a new community that bears little resemblance to the general populace of his home city. By celebrating the lives and achievements of his artistic precursors, Mahon is both mimicking and gently satirising Auden whose own corpus includes numerous portraits, most notably those about Voltaire, Yeats and Freud. Auden’s influence is also apparent in Mahon’s verse letters. These epistles – ‘Beyond Howth Head’, ‘The Sea in Winter’, ‘The Yaddo Letter’, and ‘The Hudson Letter’– do not just deal, in the words of John Redmond, with ‘the big themes of society and history, space and time’; they also explore the nature of identity and the workings of the poetic mind as it deliberates over poetry’s worth (Redmond, 96). Redmond is nevertheless right to say that Auden ‘is crucial to these verseletters – in fact, they are unimaginable without his example’ (Redmond, 97). Auden’s ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ and New Year Letter provide the epistolary templates for Mahon’s own experiments with a form Auden considers a variety of light verse, and which, as a response to social conditions, could be used to carry political and sociological levels of

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meaning. As Auden defines it, light verse is characterised by language that is ‘straightforward and close to ordinary speech’, and in this sense it is a vehicle perfectly suited for the personal form of address belonging to verse letters (Auden 1986: 363). This is not to say, however, that Auden sees light verse as being in any way trivial or frivolous: Light verse can be serious. It has only come to mean vers de société, triolets, smoke room limericks, because, under the social conditions which produced the Romantic Revival, and which have persisted, more or less, ever since, it has been only in trivial matters that poets have felt insufficient intimacy with their audience to be able to forget themselves and their singing-robes. (Auden 1986: 364)

The question of audience is a familiar one to readers of Auden. It is probably fair to say that Mahon likewise hankers after a wider audience, but unlike Heaney he is unwilling to take the reins of spokesmanship. He knows, as did Auden, that his true audience will mainly comprise fellow poets, critics, students and other intellectuals interested in his work. Indeed, about twenty percent of Mahon’s poems are addressed or dedicated to specific members of an artistic audience or community, and this figure does not include the portrait poems. But while Mahon might agree with Auden that one of the central problems faced by the modern poet is ‘how to find or form a genuine community, in which each has his valued place and can feel at home’, it is less likely that he would endorse fully Auden’s claim that, ‘[w]ithout a secure place in society, without an intimate relation between himself and his audience, without, in fact, those conditions which make for Light Verse, the poet finds it difficult to grow beyond a certain point’ (Auden 1986: 367-68; 366-67).9 Mahon knows only too well that, for the poet at least, there is no such thing as ‘a secure place in society’, and his work frequently shows society and the poet’s audience to be polar opposites. And herein lies his own dilemma. While the verse letter has at its heart a concern for audience and is fully conscious of its intended reader, there is a danger that by addressing an epistle to an individual reader the poet could alienate any potential larger audience. Private and personal allusions, usually the bedrock on which verse letters are built, can easily restrict the understanding of any reader not privileged enough to be ‘in the know’. Nevertheless, Mahon’s verse letters go some way towards counteracting Beckettian pessimism in the way they justify writing as worthier than silence. As Ben Howard notes, ‘under Mahon’s aegis, the verse letter becomes less a vehicle for social criticism than a mode of lyrical utterance; and the form that for Pope served a didactic purpose becomes an outlander’s communiqué, an exile’s

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cry’ (Howard, 136). In other words, these verse letters express the very alienation that might be experienced by the poet’s audience. In fragmentary (e.g. Ulster) or evolving (e.g. Ireland) societies, the poet usually tries to communicate both a sense of shared traditions and his own revisionary insights. But the epistolary form deliberately limits such an approach by privileging an individual or a selective audience over a larger and more inclusive mode of address. Verse letters, both by convention and by definition, try to bypass normal routes of reception by confiding in an almost guaranteed audience, appealing directly to that audience’s friendship or even its vanity. Dedications become personal addresses that rely on sharing common attitudes and experiences, and ‘render the poems confidential and the addressee complicit in a poetic idea’ (Johnston, 237). Personal knowledge of a specific audience, whether it is comprised of friends or fellow artists, becomes ‘a defence against the wider world’ that protects the poet’s insularity (Redmond, 109). Included within this wider world are the interlinked arenas of society at large and economic necessity, realms of existence that provide constant sources of conflict for the authentic poet. In a revealing interview with Willie Kelly, Mahon claims to abhor the notion of poetry as a ‘business’: I went through a period when the whole business sickened me. Peripheral things impinged too much on the fact of poetry itself. I was increasingly aware of literary politics, jockeying for position, and this undignified stuff seemed to be encroaching on what was essentially a pure activity. (Mahon 1981: 10)

Mahon’s less generous critics may, with some justification perhaps, point towards a degree of envy in the phrase ‘jockeying for position’ as regards the amount of success enjoyed by Seamus Heaney, while those peripheral things might include Mahon’s own excursions into translation, writing plays, adapting for television, and his frequent forays into reviewing and journalism. But Terence Brown, in his introduction to Journalism, a selection of Mahon’s prose writings, discerns a serious intent behind Mahon’s occasional writings, a seriousness that carries over into his poetry: Throughout one senses that the part of himself that Mahon has most fully put into his literary journalism, as well as his urbane yet invincibly curious intelligence, his warm affection for people as well as their poems and novels, his good humour and impatient scorn for the enemies of decency everywhere, is a respect for those who have accepted deracination of one

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In the same essay, Brown also notes that ‘Mahon writes for an audience who he hopes will share, without making too much of a thing about it, his evident relish for words employed with panache, zest and accompanying aesthetic scruples’ (Brown in Mahon 1996: 14). In an interview conducted nine years after the one with Willie Kelly, Mahon confesses that, ‘I’ve been journalising for years now […] and I enjoy it’ (Mahon 1981: 10). But he remains suspicious of the institutional commercialism of writing, and his discomfort with writing for public consumption has resulted in a reductive, or even elitist, desire to narrow his audience to something more manageable on a personal level: ‘I invoke a circle of friends, a reading society’ (Mahon 2000: 175). This quotation comes from a fairly recent interview where Mahon also apologises for his lack of contact with the larger community as well as his solipsistic desire ‘[t]o be essentially solitary (this is all very selfish, I realize that) – not without community, exactly, but a slight distance all round, so that one is dealing with community on one’s own terms. And that’s the way I live today’ (Mahon 2000: 177). What these interviews disclose is a difference in attitudes between writing for a large audience who may be totally unfamiliar with Mahon and his poetry, and writing for a select group with whom he can share his innermost thoughts and feelings. Verse letters, encapsulating both public document and private correspondence in their complicity with their audience, bear a resemblance to diary entries; they are pieces of writing expected to be read by very few, though often it is secretly hoped that they will reach a far larger audience. The verse letters and portrait poems seem to provide evidence that, given half a chance, Mahon would rather abnegate all written contact with the wider world in favour of communicating solely with an inner circle of confederates and confreres. This might suggest either elitism or a lack of confidence or both were it not for a tendency towards ironic selfdeprecation; but what these poems certainly defend is the poet’s freedom to compose as he sees fit. And what Mahon considers an appropriate subject for poetry is poetry itself. Writers in general, and poets in particular, are natural outsiders who rely on sympathy and understanding from other writers, and even if an audience for their work does not exist they will try to create one. Hence Mahon’s gravitation, either through his verse letters or through his ‘portrait poems’, towards ‘a community of imagined readership’ (Mahon 1981: 11). But Mahon’s verse letters are also, in the manner of Auden’s ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ and New Year

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Letter, his most autobiographical poems: they are personal meditations on the tribulations of the poet’s life and art, his isolation, and his concerns about the value of poetry. Mahon realises that with poetry’s increasing marginalisation and decreasing popularity, an audience composed of members of the wider world is not readily available. If the modern poet is to find not only a suitable audience but also a suitable place in the world, then both must be constructed from a community of other artists. Such a community need not merely comprise the dead artists of tradition, of course. Overall, about twenty percent of Mahon’s poems are dedicated to living artists and intellectuals, and these dedications perform a number of functions vital to the creation of a community. Firstly, they are personal addresses that rely on sharing common attitudes and experiences; secondly, they transform the poems into private, almost confidential forms of communication; and thirdly, the addressee is made complicit in a particular poetic idea. Personal knowledge of an audience, whether it is comprised of friends or fellow artists, becomes a defence against the world that goes some way towards protecting the poet’s insularity. But simply addressing his poems to other like-minded souls is not enough; Mahon also feels that he must invoke the presence of precursors who will confer a degree of authority on his endeavours. During the 1970s Mahon adopted this technique on a grand scale with the publication of two verse letters, ‘Beyond Howth Head’ and ‘The Sea in Winter’, and these epistles introduce us to an extended artistic community of his own creation. ‘Beyond Howth Head’ alone name-checks Beckett, Yeats, Dylan Thomas, Chomei, Thoreau, and Spenser, while a variety of quotes and allusions indicate the quiet presence of Shakespeare, Chateaubriand, Voltaire, Pope, Matthew Arnold and, significantly, Auden himself. This is only a selection of the writers who constitute Mahon’s personal pantheon, the artistic community of ‘great masters’, to use Auden’s expression, whose lasting legacy to artistic order is something both Auden and Mahon are keen to share in and maybe even become part of (Auden 1994: 201). ‘The Sea in Winter’ extends this pantheon even further, calling on, amongst others, Pindar, Thomas Mann, Ibsen, Dante, Wallace Stevens, and, once again, Auden. The very selfconsciousness of the process is designed to combat the loneliness of the poet’s activities, but compared with the friendships implied by Mahon’s dedicatory poems, the invocation of predominantly dead precursors is destined to fall on deaf ears. If Mahon is to find a community and a place in the world, then his discourse must be conducted with the living.

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Hence, in his more recent work we witness a shift in Mahon’s idea of community. In the verse epistles, poetry is shown to comprise a plethora of voices from the past filtering into the present as if to say that poetry is little more than a palimpsestic process of re-transmission, every poet adding to all that has gone before through imitation. Moreover, the polyphony of voices contained in ‘Beyond Howth Head’ and ‘The Sea in Winter’ serves to remind us that poetic and personal identities are, to some extent, inherited from others. What these poems exhibit is Mahon’s pressing need to discover his own voice and thereby set himself apart from his people. Indeed, Mahon expresses his concerns for poetry as a communally utilitarian art form, saying, ‘I’m not convinced of the value of poetry…Poetry is a craft, but not one that provides something useful for the community’ (Mahon 1981: 10). Mahon’s inability to reconcile the act of creation with providing a socially useful service boils down to an understandable lack of trust in the poet’s role in a hostile society. If poetry is unimportant as far as the wider world is concerned, then so must be the poet. The litany of voices invoked in these verse letters threatens to submerge Mahon’s own, making the quest for authenticity an even greater struggle. He is therefore faced with the prospect of anonymity as the burden of the past buries him beneath a weight of expectation he feels he may not be able to live up to. The urge to find an individual, authentic voice therefore becomes a struggle against integration into the ‘sullen silence’, as Mahon puts it in ‘In Belfast’, of his native city. The verse letters of both Mahon and Auden explore the validity of art and the role of the artist in society. Recognising his own failings as a recovering alcoholic, Mahon writes in ‘The Sea in Winter’, And all this time I have my doubts About this verse-making. The shouts Of souls in torment round the town At closing time make as much sense And carry as much significance As these lines carefully set down. All farts in a biscuit tin, in truth – Faint cries, sententious or uncouth. (Mahon 1979: 112)

These sentiments seem to anticipate the rumblings of discontent with the solitary life that we hear in 1995’s ‘The Hudson Letter’ where Mahon strives to turn his back on artistic solipsism and makes a plea for inclusion. Although strictly speaking ‘The Hudson Letter’ is yet another verse epistle (or even a sequence of epistles), it reveals an ethics of communality

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unheard in his earlier work. The reference to ‘the homeless’ living in ‘cardboard boxes on a ‘commercial site’’ in Section II provides the poem with its central image, and in Section III, he portrays himself as just another ‘undesirable ‘resident alien’ on this shore’ (Mahon 1995: 39; 42). Detachment and dispossession dictate both his solitude and his allegiance with the homeless denizens of New York who are encountered more forcibly in Section XII, the punningly titled ‘Alien Nation’. Here, Mahon takes the language of the impoverished dispossessed and directs it at the reader in an appeal for sympathy and understanding: ‘Spare a thought, friend; spare a dime, bud; spare the price of a Bud / for the fourth world of Napoleon’s ‘fifth element’, mud’ (Mahon 2000: 62). Asserting that homelessness is as much a question of metaphysical displacement and physical distance from native territory as it is of not having a roof over one’s head, he continues: ‘We are all far from home, be our home still / a Chicago slum, a house under the Cave Hill / or a caravan parked in a field above Cushendun’. The final section of ‘The Hudson Letter’ begins, ‘Once upon a time it was let me out and let me go - / the night flight over deserts, amid cloud, / a dream of discipline and fit solitude’ (Mahon 2000: 75). The youthful desire for escape into solitude exhibited by ‘Spring in Belfast’ has passed and the older and wiser Mahon now demands, ‘take me back and take me back in’. Mahon, however, is not oblivious to the fact that poetry which seeks to rescue desire from despair requires solitude, while salvation relies neither on faith in God nor on appeals to the dead, but on taking part in the lives of others. Yet he still finds such a project problematic, and ‘The Hudson Letter’ ends with a series of images that reinforce the difficulty of this eternal quest: I’d say make all safe and harmonious in the end did I not know the voyage is never done for, even as we speak, somewhere a plane gains altitude in the moon’s exilic glare or a car slips into gear in a silent lane… I think of the homeless, no rm. at the inn... ….When does the thaw begin? We have been too long in the cold. – Take us in; take us in! (Mahon 2000: 77)

Having been frozen out of society for so long, Mahon is now keen to reacquaint himself with it. In ‘The Yaddo Letter’, a rather maudlin address to his children that precedes ‘The Hudson Letter’, he acknowledges that,

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‘life consists in the receipt of life’ (Mahon 2000: 30). Mahon has spent much of his career plagued by self-doubt and guilt, which have been compounded by a firm adherence to existential and aesthetic principles, yet this stance is not one that could be maintained over the course of a lengthy career. ‘Knut Hamsun in Old Age’ asks if it is viable to make a choice between ‘Perfection of the life or of the work’ (Mahon 1982: 21), and in his mature poetry Mahon has finally realised that to have both is impossible. He tried to achieve the latter in his earlier work by distancing himself from the quotidian existences of his people; now perhaps it is time to strive for the former by joining them.

References Auden, W.H. 1986. The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings 1927-1939. Ed. Edward Mendelson. London: Faber. Auden, W.H. 1994. Collected Poems. Ed. Edward Mendelson. London: Faber. Battersby, Eileen. 1990. ‘Made in Belfast’. Sunday Tribune 26 August: 25. Howard, Ben. 1996. The Pressed Melodeon: Essays on Modern Irish Writing. Brownsville: Story Line. Johnston, Dillon. 1997. Irish Poetry After Joyce. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Mahon, Derek. 1968. Night-Crossing. Oxford: Oxford UP. —. 1979. Poems 1962-1978. Oxford: Oxford UP. —. 1981. ‘Each Poem for Me Is a New Beginning’. Interview by Willie Kelly. Cork Review 2.3: 10. —. 1982. The Hunt by Night. Oxford: Oxford UP. —. 1995. The Hudson Letter. Loughcrew: Gallery Press. —. 1996. Journalism: Selected Prose 1970-1995. Ed. Terence Brown. Loughcrew: Gallery Press. —. 2000. ‘Derek Mahon: The Art of Poetry LXXXII’. Interview by Eamonn Grennan. Paris Review 154: 150-78. Redmond, John. 1994. ‘Wilful Inconsistency: Derek Mahon’s VerseLetters’. Irish University Review. 24.1: 96-116. Replogle, Justin. 1969. Auden’s Poetry. London: Methuen, 1969. Shields, Kathleen. 1994. ‘Derek Mahon’s Poetry of Belonging’. Irish University Review. 24.1: 67-79. Tinley, Bill. 1991. ‘International Perspectives in the Poetry of Derek Mahon’. Irish University Review. 21.1: 106-117.

‘KEEPING THAT WOUND GREEN’: IRISH STUDIES AND TRAUMACULTURE CONOR CARVILLE

Society in Ireland is at present in one of the most interesting stages of its whole development. We are peculiarly in a transition state. Our present condition combines the characteristics of many epochs. We know of no other country in which the reciprocal effects of two essentially different states of society can be so closely studied. You can take your stand, as it were, on the line of junction, and lay your hand on one side on barbarism, on the other on the perfection of civilization. In traveling from Dublin to Dingle you travel through two centuries. It is like going backward and forwards through the rooms of a wellarranged historical museum. (Anon., 1836: 658).

Several versions of one theme have long marked commentary on Ireland and Irishness. Ideas of a culture where temporality is disrupted, a society in which past and present are somehow coeval, or where time is understood as being other than simply linear are so prevalent as to be almost invisible.1 Perhaps the most obvious examples are those Victorian evolutionary schemas in which Ireland is seen as primitive, occupying a position that lags behind England on some notional timescale of development. In the same period the Irish body and identity were each seen as arrested: either trapped at a previous evolutionary stage, or permanently arrested in childhood. There were also, of course, indigenous Irish adaptations of such ideas which were used as political strategies in the creation of difference from Britishness or Englishness. One thinks of those idealized nineteenth-century descriptions of the country as an insula sacra, preserving beliefs, traditions and ways of life long since superseded by industrial modernity elsewhere. Other nationalist variations on the idea of temporal disruption read the Irish landscape itself as a kind of theatre of memory which made the past visible in the present, a mode of seeing that has its origins in late eighteenth-century antiquarianism, although it can 1

See Fabian (1983) for an analysis of temporality in the colonial context.

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also be found later. Such descriptions granted the archaeological relics of prehistory, the historical ruins of the more recent past, and contemporary commemorative monuments an equal valency. The events for which each element is taken to stand were distinguished from the others in terms of chronology, and yet seen as equidistant from the present while also being contained within it. More recently, notions of temporal disruption can be commonly encountered in British media coverage of Irish affairs, coming often with a patina of pseudo-psychoanalytical language: Ireland is a place that is ‘trapped in the past’, a country where the ‘burden of history’ is somehow heavier and more onerous than elsewhere, liable to erupt in unpredictable violence. One recent example is Clive Wilmer’s description of Northern Ireland as ‘a province locked in the cycle of retribution’ (2006); another is Tim Luckhurst’s accusation that Ken Loach’s film The Wind that Shakes the Barley ‘reawakens ancient feuds’ (Luckhurst cited in Monbiot, 2006). There is a clear continuity between these ideas and the Victorian notions of temporal dislocation mentioned above. Such a rhetoric also makes clear that these ideas carry with them certain conceptions of self and subjectivity. More specifically, an analogy is implicitly drawn between psychoanalytical notions of the self or the self’s temporality, and broader ideas of culture, society and history, so that collective history is understood as functioning in the same way as personal memory, with the conflicted and uneven temporality of the psyche projected onto the historical stage. This short-circuit between the psyche and the social finds a privileged conduit in the notion of ‘trauma’, with both the Irish ‘character’ and Irish history being defined through notions of a violent, involuntary insistence which fragments the present. For both Victorian travelers and contemporary media pundits then, Irish history and the Irish subject are seen as coterminus, in that both function erratically and unpredictably in thrall to atavism and anachronism. The vulgarized, shorthand use of a psychoanalytic temporality in accounts of Irish politics and history is complicated by another, relatively recent phenomenon. It has been widely noted that in the 1990s western society embarked upon a period of intense concern with the idea of recovered memory.2 This new interest is perhaps most evident in the many 2

Richard Haslam (2005) provides a partial account of the history of this process in the Irish context, although his main focus is on the representation of Ireland as child. The more general issue of recovered memory has generated a huge literature. Key texts include Crews (1997), Scott (1996) and Showalter (1997). For

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memoirs that appeared during the decade, earning the generic title of ‘pathography’, and exploring the significance of childhood ordeal in the formation of adult identity.3 Perhaps the best known Irish examples are Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes and Nuala O’Faolain’s Are You Somebody, although Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark could be considered a particularly sophisticated example. Roddy Doyle’s Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, Hugo Hamilton’s The Speckled People and The Sailor in the Wardrobe, Dermot Healy’s The Bend for Home and Joseph O’Neill’s The Blood-Dark Track might also be mentioned here.4 Many of these memoirs and novels, some more explicitly than others, draw parallels between personal histories bedeviled by the secrets and violence of childhood and the history of the nation as a whole. This familiar strategy is updated, however, through the use of a psychoanalytical understanding of time and memory, so that these texts deploy a conceptual framework that lies somewhere between the nineteenth-century mode of anachronism and the more recent journalistic shorthand of ‘the return of the past’. In Ireland, the ‘pathography’ phenomenon is further complicated by the way in which an interest in memoir and the language of trauma arose alongside the emergence of other narratives of the past. During the nineties the psychic damage occasioned by institutional and clerical child abuse was attested to again and again in the Irish courts and media, in a radical dissection of social shibboleths unparalleled in any other Western state in recent years, pushing issues of memory and trauma (and, again, identity and subjectivity) to the very center of the culture.5 Here was another route whereby the specialized language of psychoanalysis, and attendant notions of the insistence of the past in the present, found their way into the public realm. Academic discourse too found itself entangled in the language of abuse, even as it attempted to analyse it. Hence Terence Brown, in his treatment of the effects of revelations of child abuse on the status of the Catholic church, slips easily into the very language often used by the victims: ‘so devastating were the traumata undergone by the church in the 1990s … that [Mary] Kenny could conclude in 2000: “the very concept of discussion on trauma, see Caruth (1995; 1995a) and Leys (2000). 3 See Luckhurst (2003: 37). The term was first used in 1993 (see Hawkins, 1993). 4 See McCourt (1996), O’Faolain (1997), Deane (1996), Doyle (1993), Hamilton (2003; 2006), and O’Neill (2002). 5 See Brown (2004: 367-71).

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‘Catholic Ireland’ was by the end of the century, gone” (Brown, 2004: 371, emphasis added). Brown’s transferal of the concept of trauma from the victims’ accounts to the history of the institution responsible demonstrates how powerful and insidious this discourse can be. David Wheatley’s descriptions of the 1980s and 1990s as ‘decades of unprecedented and traumatic social change in both the Republic and Northern Ireland’ and Luke Gibbons’ reference to ‘the traumatic fall-out from the divisive abortion and divorce referenda of the 1980s’ are perhaps more typical examples.6 Indeed Luke Gibbons work, as we shall see, is particularly reliant on the concept.7 The most telling formulation of the sense of a collective psychic suffering, however, is John Waters’: The guilt, pain, anger, fear and self-hatred which deeply infect society in the Republic, provided also the motivations of revisionists seeking to explain away their own pained experience and get on with living in the present. Revisionism is a form of forgetting. But our history lives within us. I do not mean metaphorically. Somewhere inside all Irish bodies is the pain of our history. If we could feel that pain, we would know the truth in a manner beyond versions or words. The only facts we really need is [sic] that the pain exists, and that there is a reason for it. We are the products of history, socially, politically, morally, psychologically. So a historiography that denies the validity of our feelings is not wholly trustworthy. (Waters, 1997: 89)

In this passage’s odd movement between a new-age rhetoric of therapy, of getting in touch with our pain, and its evocation of a materialist analysis (‘we are the products of history’) lies a succinct encapsulation of the discursive structures with which I am concerned. Waters’ absolute conflation of singular history with ‘all Irish bodies’ is also highly significant here, as is the metaphysical yearning for a ‘truth … beyond versions or words’. What we arrive at is a notion of Irish culture as uniquely prey to temporal disruption, with the forms and patterns of that disruption modeled in broadly psychoanalytical terms. 6

See Wheatley (2002: 253) and Gibbons (2004: 216). There are references to trauma on pages 6, 144, 162, and 167 of Gibbons’ Transformation in Irish Culture (1996). David Lloyd, too. is increasingly reliant on the concept. See for example, Lloyd (1999: 103), (2003:. 487, 489), and (2002: 216). In Joe Cleary’s ‘Toward a Materialist-Formalist History of TwentiethCentury Irish literature’ the term is frequently applied to Irish society. See Cleary (2004: 209, 220, 235, 236).

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To summarize then, the nineties saw a psychologizing of the relation between the present and the historical past. In Ireland however, this took place within an extraordinarily fraught and over-determined set of contemporary conditions, and in the context of a colonial discourse which, in its ascription of a distinctive temporality to the country, lent itself to psychoanalytical reinvention. Analysis of the Irish situation can nevertheless benefit from a careful and qualified comparison with the situation elsewhere. Reflecting on the North American experience, for example, Mark Seltzer has described the infiltration of civil society by the language of the consulting room as the elaboration of a ‘wound culture’. Seltzer understands this process as an ideological operation where the language of the individual psyche is mapped onto the group to create new forms of community: ‘[t]he notion of the public sphere has become inseparable from the collective gathering around sites of wounding, trauma and pathology: sociality and the wound have become inseparable’ (Seltzer cited in Luckhurst, 2003: 28). While this analysis might account for some aspects of ‘wound culture’ in Ireland, it must also be supplemented by the recognition that such ‘collective gatherings’ take various forms and have radically different consequences. One example might be drawn from Britain, when New Labour successfully co-opted the groundswell of emotion on the Princess of Wales’ death, and managed to distance itself from an institution – the monarchy – which the new collectivity fleetingly decried. Tony Blair thus emerged from the situation with his reputation intact. In Ireland in 1994 by contrast, Albert Reynold’s Fianna Fáil Government fell as a result of the Fr. Brendan Smyth scandal, while the Catholic church as a whole was severely damaged by the revelations of abuse. If Seltzer’s ideological notion of wound-culture is apparent anywhere in Irish culture, it can be found in another arena: the spectacles of remembrance endured in the Nineties, from the commemorations of the Famine and 1798 to Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins.8 A cursory survey of the language of such events quickly attests to Seltzer’s sense of the infiltration of the public sphere by the discourse of analysis. Thus, to take just one example, Luke Gibbons advocates the concept of the Freudian ‘talking cure’ – the narration of the past as a means of overcoming the present – as a justification for Jordan’s cavalier attitude to historical fact, arguing that the director consciously resolved to ‘treat history as fiction in 8

For summaries of the debates around commemoration see Brown (2004: 411-15) and Ian MacBride (2001).

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the making: a fiction that [would] create the future’ (Gibbons cited in Kearney, 2001: 175). Some light might be shed on this rapprochement between psychoanalytical and commemorative discourses through a comparison with France at the end of the 1980s and the celebrations of the bicentenary of the Revolution. Perry Anderson has pointed to the way in which Pierre Nora’s work might be read as intimately connected to French political restructuring in this period, arguing that his Les Lieux de Mémoire project provided a convenient intellectual weight to a transformation in French nationalism necessitated by the difficult choices of the 1990s.9 According to Anderson, Nora’s emphasis on memory and the use of historical sites as evidence of a shared past enabled an inclusive and anodyne form of nationalist history that took memory or ‘remembrance’ as its model. In the light of Anderson’s persuasive arguments, it is worth noting that key advocates of a historiography influenced by Nora’s were heavily involved in the officially sanctioned Irish commemorative projects of the Nineties (Brown 2004: 409-15). In the Irish context however, local political conditions, the legacy of institutional abuse, as well as the continued, belated effects of a colonial discourse of temporal disruption, produced an indigenous spin on Nora’s work that resulted in a statesanctioned version of Selzer’s ‘wound-culture’. It is well documented, for example, that the 1798 observances were appropriated by a Fianna Fáil government eager to draw parallels between the United Irishmen’s antisectarianism and a putative ‘reconciliation’ in the North.10 In the process the ‘trauma’ of Scullabogue (and by implication those of other sectarian atrocities after 1969) was mobilized as a metonymic ‘wound’ to which the ‘healing processes’ of both commemoration and the peace talks in the North would be directed. In this way the historical moment of the late eighteenth-century was mapped directly onto the Good Friday Agreement, with the temporal and political distance between them abolished. Historical ‘trauma’ was cynically appropriated by the State for hegemonizing purposes at precisely the same time as the real traumas of the victims of clerical abuse were undermining the State’s historic partner the Catholic Church. 9 See Anderson (2004): ‘Les Lieux de mémoire was an enormous critical and public success, and in due course became the model for several imitations abroad. But it was always plain that it must count as one of the most patently ideological programmes in postwar historiography, anywhere in the world’. 10 See Dunne (2004).

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The apotheosis of ‘wound-culture’ in Selzer’s sense, however, can be found in the events and publications surrounding the 150th anniversary of the Famine, where the psychoanalytic vocabulary of ‘repression’ and ‘recovery’ reaches a critical mass. For it is principally through consideration of the Famine that notions of ‘historical’ trauma, often elaborated in the context of consideration of the Holocaust, make their way into Irish Studies. Dominick LaCapra has warned of such an application of psychoanalytic discourse to historical events in terms which will inform much of the analysis that follows: ‘the indiscriminate generalization of the category of survivor and the overall conflations of history or culture with trauma […] have the effect of obscuring crucial historical distinctions’ (LaCapra, 2001: xi).11 In Heathcliff and the Great Hunger Terry Eagleton describes the Famine in a manner typical of the general debate. The quotation below is also instructive in the way it explicitly links the familiar theme of Irish temporal disruption to that of ‘trauma’. Thus, the Famine shatters space as well as time, unmaking the nation and scattering Irish history across the globe. That history will of course continue; but […] there is something recalcitrant at its core which defeats articulation, some ‘real’ which stubbornly refuses to be symbolized [….] [T]his ‘real’ is a voracious desire that was beaten back and defeated, which could find no place in the symbolic order of social time and was expunged from it, but which … will return to haunt a history now in the process of regathering its stalled momentum and moving onwards and upwards. Some primordial trauma has taken place, which forsakes your development at one level even as you continue to unfold at another, so that time in Irish history … would seem to move backwards and forwards simultaneously. (Eagleton, 1995: 15)

By the term ‘real’ Eagleton is invoking a specifically Lacanian concept: the limit of the human attempt to symbolically organize the world, revealed in language through the negative indices of the latter’s distortion and disruption. He describes the Real elsewhere in terms which suggest an affinity with ‘wound-culture’, depicting it as ‘the primordial wound we incurred by our fall from the pre-Oedipal Eden, the gash in our being where we were torn lose from Nature’ (2003: 197).12 This account 11 See also LaCapra’s earlier monographs (1995; 1998) Recent critical analyses of the application of pathological psychoanalytic terms to the Holocaust can be found in Finkelstein (2000). 12 Eagleton is here clearly drawing on Fredric Jameson’s adaptation of the Lacanian Real. As Jameson puts it, “it is not terribly difficult to say what is meant

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of the Famine as Real usefully brings together many of the aspects of traumaculture that I have teased out so far. Eagleton’s approach, although recognizably psychoanalytical, seems at first impersonal: the unsymbolized past event comes back again and again to tear apart a society’s self-understanding, ‘scattering’ the possibility of its history so that a unified linear account is impossible. Irish culture as a whole is seen as a damaged consciousness, with its ability to map the world and its own past radically compromised. In the final sentence of the quotation above, however, the introduction of the second person ‘your’ elides personal and historical ‘development’, so that the individual too seems constituted in relation to the return of this event. As in the Irish pathographies mentioned above, then, and as with Water’s account, the nation and the individual are seen as homologous. What is more, Eagleton suggests that it is the very recalcitrance, the unrepresentability, of the event (or ‘wound’) of the Famine that provides Irish culture and the Irish subject with their distinctive and unifying trait, what we saw Water’s call ‘the truth […] beyond versions or words’. Thus, although Eagleton appears to challenge narrative history and national identity these ideas are reinscribed through an appeal to the negative: both Irish history and Irish identity are defined here through the way in which they are marked by the ‘traumatic’ return of the repressed historical event. Trauma, in other words, acts according to Seltzer’s model, as the wound around which a culture and an identity coalesces. Eagleton’s reading of the Real of the Famine ultimately functions to authenticate both the unified individual and a consistent national narrative. Such a conception of the Real is in fact a means of domesticating this slippery idea and recruiting it for a determinate purpose. Eagleton deploys the Real as a negative vantage point that transcends representation, a replacement for a discredited metaphysics of identity: the Real of the Famine thus provides a lynchpin through which Irish culture (and the Irish subject) can be defined, and a stable reference point around which a particular history of Ireland can be assembled. In this sense Eagleton’s by the Real in Lacan. It is simply History itself” (Jameson 1977). As will become clear, I agree with Dominic LaCapra that this is a misreading of the concept however. When the Real is assimilated to the last instance of empirical history in this way: ‘the entire Lacanian thematic becomes compatible with a totalizing understanding of narrative and dialectics holding forth a utopian promise – something Lacan explicitly criticizes, especially in his later work’ (LaCapra, 2001: 251).

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description of the Famine provides another important example of the way in which – across a range of discourses – a contemporary psychoanalytical language is articulated with a notion of temporal disturbance to produce a new form of communal identity based on the notion of the wound. More specifically the Victorian conception of Ireland as a site of dispersed temporalities is repeated in Eagleton’s claim that the return of the unrepresented Famine results in a history which moves ‘backwards and forwards simultaneously’. And just as nineteenth-century Irish nationalists appropriated this sense of temporal disruption and turned it into a distinction, so Eagleton’s use of Lacan implies that the void which he sees insisting within Irish history, and the fragmentation that issues from it, is in fact that history’s unifying, distinguishing feature. To briefly recap, I have argued that the concepts of trauma and the wound have emerged in recent years as a means of providing identity and community. I have also argued that in Ireland this emergence must be understood in relation to both a colonial discourse of temporal disruption and contemporary political exigencies. Finally, I have suggested that we can find privileged examples of what we might call “traumaculture” in both state-sponsored discourses of commemoration and avowedly dissenting areas of Irish intellectual debate, where notions of fragmentation and extremity function to integrate and legitimize notions of identity. It is this movement from disruption to integrity, from atemporality to narrative and from loss to the subject that I want to examine. In order to do so, however, we must now look more closely at the concept of the subject itself. In the light of our analysis of traumaculture, it is worth noting recent claims that a new conception of subjectivity emerged in the nineties, which Roger Luckhurst has dubbed the ‘traumatic subject’. Luckhurst argues convincingly that such a conception of the subject is ‘peculiarly paradoxical’: trauma is, after all held to disaggregate or shatter subjectivity; trauma is that which cannot be processed by the psyche yet lodges within the self as a foreign body, dictating its processes and behaviours in opaque and alarming ways. To organize an identity around trauma, then, is to premise it on exactly that which escapes the subject, on an absence or a gap. (Luckhurst, 2003: 28)

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Such a description is indeed paradoxical, yet this traumatic subject is encountered in many areas of contemporary cultural studies and literary theory and, as suggested above, is increasingly normative in Irish literary and cultural studies. As Hal Foster puts it: ‘today innovative work in the humanities appears reconfigured less as Cultural Studies than as trauma studies’, going on to note the dangers of this ‘point at which popular culture and the academic converge’ by lamenting that ‘sometimes the model of both seems to be Oprah’ (Foster, 1996: 239, n.38). For LaCapra, meanwhile ‘[t]rauma has been a prevalent preoccupation in recent theory and criticism. At times it has even become an obsession or an occasion for rash amalgamations and conflations…’ (LaCapra, 2001: x). The Enlightenment subject was of course one of the main targets of structuralist and poststructuralist critique, although the idea of a unified self that perdured over time, and was in complete control of its speech and intentions, had already been undermined by Freud, Marx and Nietzsche. With poststructuralism, however, the ontological Cartesian subject of selfreflection and the logical Kantian transcendental subject of apperception came under attack from a new generation of thinkers, with the subject being seen as ‘split’ in a number of ways. Thus, for Foucault the self is a fiction produced by power and divided between its institutional position and the language it deploys; for Derrida it is a fictional self-identity upholding the metaphysics of presence, and divided against itself by language and finitude, while for Lacan, re-reading Freud, the ‘ego’ is a compromise formation dispersed between an Imaginary ideological unity and the Real of the death drive. It is possible to argue that in the wake of these formulations a new form of the subject was adopted in some branches of the Humanities, one which ignored the very real differences between such theoretical positions and in doing so managed to dilute some of their more radical insights. This is a subject that is ‘dispersed’ amongst the discourses that form it, that shifts from subject-position to subject-position according to the dictat of context and is at the mercy of systems of language, economics and the unconscious. Yet it is also a subject that, conforming to a humanist imperative demanding the consolations of ‘resistance’, can freely forge collective bonds, can express, exemplify and perpetuate a definite tradition, and can act intentionally and voluntaristically as part of a collective. There is, in other words, a fundamental antinomy between the claims on the one hand of historical rigour and attention to determining context and, on the other, attempts to demonstrate agency and

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emancipatory action. Hermann Rappaport has described this conceptual entity (which I will call the Cultural Studies subject) as an: alternative deconstruction of the subject within (1) a constructivist framework of the subject as a self-fashioning agency and (2) an interpellative framework of the subject as subjected to […] ideology that will eventually become the dominant paradigm for feminism, postcolonialism, and race studies. (Rappaport, 2001: 73)

And, one might add, Irish Studies. As Rappaport points out, this model moves unpredictably and inconsistently between various poststructuralist aspects of the subject, and in particular between a notion of ideological ‘interpellation’ and one of performative ‘self-fashioning’. In a recent essay Joep Leersen inadvertently makes a similar point and in doing so evokes the notion of trauma, when he suggests the invention of a new version of the subject by something he calls ‘social studies activism’: If we look at identity politics in the late twentieth century the over-riding sense is that each fragmented identity which has staked out its position on the map has done so on the basis of past trauma. History writing nowadays is concerned almost exclusively with underdogs; indeed underdoghood is indispensable to obtain political or historical sympathy … In our historical narratives, all must be represented: women, colonial races, workers, homosexuals and other marginal or ‘overlooked’ groups. (Leersen, 2001: 218, my emphasis)

Although I will distance myself from Leerson’s cynicism, his comments can help us to identify the links between the new model of the subject that Luckhurst identifies and the notion of past trauma as catalyst for collective identity that is visible in Eagleton’s work and rife in contemporary Irish Studies. In both cases a certain unrepresentability is stressed. And yet it seems to be this very deficiency, this gap or lack in representation, that provides a form of definable identity. As Rappaport points out, the theoretical roots of this idea lie in the argument that the subject is ‘constructed in contradiction’, and such a formulation lends itself in particular to a politics of identity: Minorities were good candidates for the revolutionary subject, because the less they could be structured in terms of stereotypical ideological constructions, the more they could be said to live a conflict of subjectpositions articulated in terms of social contradictions. Hence …academia began privileging those who lived social contradictions on account of their

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In Irish Studies, with its particular interest in history, such an emphasis on minority subjects misrepresented by ‘stereotypical ideological constructions’ translates easily into a preoccupation with those whose history is inadequately represented by the available discourses of colonialism or nationalism. This position is of course directly influenced, principally through the conduit of David Lloyd’s work, by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and the Subaltern Studies project.14 Thus, for example, Luke Gibbons has read Burke’s aesthetics as ‘gesturing towards recalcitrant or clandestine areas of experience that elude the scripts of official political discourse’ (Gibbons, 2003: 6). As a result the Irish Studies version of the subject is seen not as dispersed primarily across contradictory sexual, ethnic, or class positions, as has been the case in Cultural Studies and literary theory, but as divided principally between past and present. To put this another way, in Irish Studies the new model of the subject is constituted primarily through the contradiction between unrepresentable past experiences and contemporary normative or, as Leersen puts it, ‘official’ modes of representation. Rather than the Cultural Studies subject of contradiction, then, we have what I will call the Irish Studies subject in exclusion, where the subject gains an identity through a conflict between excluded experience and institutional narratives. As we saw with Eagleton, this exclusion then serves to subtend a new form of identity, stabilized around the points of absence in contemporary narratives, moments when the past event insists in contemporary discourse as a transcendental lack or gap. When considered in these terms one can see the utility, indeed the necessity, of supplementing the Subaltern Studies approach with an element of psychoanalysis in the way that critics like Luke Gibbons often do, for psychoanalysis enables the assertion that such exclusions from normative history are internalized by those excluded in the form of a specifically ‘traumatized’ consciousness. Thus, what had seemed initially, in Luckhurst’s description of the ‘traumatic subject’, a morbid cult of sentimentality and victimhood turns 13

See, for example, Belsey, (1997: 597-98): ‘Women as a group in our society are both produced and inhibited by contradictory discourses. Very broadly, we participate both in the liberal-humanist discourse of freedom, self-determination and rationality and at the same time the specifically feminine discourse offered by society of submission, relative inadequacy and irrational intuition’. 14 See Lloyd (1999: 77-88).

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out on closer inspection to be a viable, historically situated technology of the self that integrates an identity around the void of a wound. Trauma becomes the ground on which an identity is constructed: the excluded past event – as absence – is posited and becomes a fixed point. Rappaport refers to this process in an essay on Judith Butler when he censures the ‘metaphysical trait’ of the automatic presumption of ‘a community that empathizes and makes common cause with the supposed authenticity of the experience of […] injury’ (Rappaport, 2001: 113). I will now attempt to describe these assumptions in more detail, paying particular attention to the role of ‘traumatic’ temporal disruption in the work of one of the most influential contemporary Irish cultural critics, Luke Gibbons. As I suggested earlier, the particular form which psychoanalytical discourse assumes within Irish studies has affinities with a notion of temporal disruption that has roots in nineteenth-century colonial discourse. In other words, when critics posit the coexistence of past and present within Irish culture, they repeat a Victorian sense of Ireland and Irish identity as temporally disrupted, somehow errant in its historical development. This sense of a shared paradigm is reinforced when one considers the way in which both Victorian and contemporary critics find evidence of such disruption in the landscape itself. Thus, one recent approach, for example, enacts a spatialization of time, seeing the Irish landscape as composed of a patchwork of differing temporalities determined by ‘uneven development’ or ‘cultural hybridization’, in a way which recalls the nineteenth-century intuitions of both antiquarians and travellers. In this respect, when Luke Gibbons, in his essay ‘Some Hysterical Hatred’, points to the co-existence of older agricultural and social practices with new forms of economic structures in Ireland, he echoes Victorian rhetoric with phrases such as ‘history was not a spent force in Ireland’ and ‘while the past was over and done with in Scotland, in Ireland it was still unresolved’ (begging the question whether ‘history’ can ever be ‘resolved’).15 At the same time, however, conforming to the journalistic use of psychoanalytical discourse, Gibbons goes on to use a panoply of unexamined terms, referring to historical artifacts found in a bog as ‘the return of the repressed for colonial rule’; noting how ‘the traumas visited on the body politic can lead to paralysis’ and ending: ‘the figure of hysteria testified ultimately to the persistence of a troubled past, whether it be secreted in the body or in the petrified violence of the 15

See Gibbons (1997: 9). For a more recent example with a similar rhetoric, see Virginia Crossman’s ‘Introduction’ to the ‘History’ section of Scott Brewster, Virginia Crossman, Fiona Beckett and David Alderson (1999: 10).

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landscape’ (Gibbons, 1997: 15, 19, 23, my emphasis). It is worth noting that this equation between the individual body and the landscape as registers of historical violence is based solely on metaphor – the preservative qualities of the bog as analogous to the insistence of ‘traumatic’ memory. Such purely rhetorical equivalence between ‘body’ and ‘bog’ serves to deflect attention from the unsubstantiated nature of the argument that the psychoanalytical notion of hysteria can unproblematically apply equally to both a personal and a historical ‘troubled past’. As with the work of some of the other critics we will consider, the landscape of Ireland thus performs a mediating role in bringing together consciousness and history, the psyche and the social. In a sense familiar from nationalist ideology the evocation of the landscape serves to suture incompatible ideas, rendering self-evident what is entirely suspect. As with Gibbons, both Terry Eagleton’s chapter on ‘The Archaic Avant-Garde’ in Heathcliff and the Great Hunger, and various statements in Seamus Deane’s Strange Country also deploy ideas of temporal disruption in their analyses of Irish culture.16 For all three critics traditional and modernizing practices are seen as metonyms for past and present, so that differing temporalities are taken to be simultaneously present to the gaze which plays on the Irish landscape. Joep Leersens’s Remembrance and Imagination provides a final example, where the Bakhtinian chronotope is used to describe Ireland as ‘a place with an uneven distribution of time passage’, where certain areas display a different temporality to others (Leersen, 1996: 226-7). Another application of this same idea of the return or persistence of the past is met with in the idea that Ireland somehow entered modernity ahead of the rest of Europe, or experienced its onset with a greater intensity. As David Lloyd has it: ‘the forces that a poet like Wordsworth seeks to counteract […] are accentuated in the Irish case by the colonial encounter that […] accelerates the processes of cultural distintegration’ (Lloyd, 1993: 96). For Gibbons, meanwhile, in Transformations in Irish Culture: ‘In a culture traumatized by a profound sense of catastrophe, such as Ireland experienced as late as the Great Famine, is there really any need to await the importation of modernism to blast open the continuum of the past?’ (1996: 167). And again: ‘Irish society did not have to await the twentieth century to undergo the shock of modernity’ (1996: 6). Eagleton has a variation on this theme when he writes, again in Heathcliff and the 16

See ‘The Archaic Avant-Garde’ in Eagleton (1995), and Deane (1997: 53).

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Great Hunger: ‘Because of the Famine, Irish society undergoes a surreal speed-up of its entry upon modernity’ (1995: 14). Meanwhile Fintan O’Toole refers to contemporary Ireland as ‘a society that became postmodern before it ever quite managed to be modern’ (1995: 5).17 And again there is a popular, ideologically freighted corollary of this in recent journalistic notions of Ireland as a kind of silicon glen. A final instance of the rhetoric of temporal disruption in contemporary Irish criticism is one that is somewhat more occluded, although exemplary in the conception of the subject in exclusion that it enables. This approach considers what it terms ‘radical’ or ‘popular’ memory and moves between a concern the persistence of historical memory across generations and a more far-reaching assertion of the existence of different forms of memory, and indeed temporality, among different groups. A Gibbons essay such as ‘Identity without a Centre: Allegory, History and Irish Nationalism’ might serve as paradigmatic. Here Gibbons argues that allegory, understood as a subjective, coded and unstable mode of meaning-production, is ‘part of consciousness itself under certain conditions of colonial rule’, maintaining that the evidence for such a consciousness lies in the popular ballads and performative rituals of eighteenth-century Irish secret societies such as the Defenders (Gibbons, 1996: 142-3, my emphasis). The extravagance of this position cannot be underestimated: the suggestion is that epistemological structures are distorted through the inability to express experience in the public realm, so that the exclusion of subaltern history from representation produces a deviation from a presumed normative phenomenological grasp of historicity. While I have argued that the contemporary notion of Irish society’s temporal disruption is overdetermined by a range of historical and discursive forces, the manner in which this disruption is modelled by cultural critics is clearly dependent on a broadly psychoanalytical template and, more specifically, on the Freudian notion of Nachträglichkeit. Finding its most notable and sustained recent exposition in Lyotard’s Heidegger and “the jews” (1990), Nachträglichkeit is a psychic temporality whereby past events are ceaselessly reconstructed and 17 See also Bell (1988: 229): ‘Such are the contradictions of Irish modernization that we have prematurely entered the post-modern era …. We are entering the future … walking backwards’. More recently, Declan Kiberd’s The Irish Writer and the World takes up a similar position (2002: 280-1). Cleary also writes of Ireland being ‘catapulted into modernity’ (2004: 225).

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reimagined, where the past appears ‘belatedly’, returning in the present time and again. A survey of its appearance in recent Irish cultural criticism can help us to further locate the emergence of the subject in exclusion as I have been describing it. Once again it is in recent writing on the Famine and its legacy that Irish Studies has come closest to explicitly acknowledging the importance of this concept. Scott Brewster and Virginia Crossman’s ‘Rewriting the Famine’ is one of the more explicit examples, which also evokes the notion of trauma: ‘Nachträglichkeit’, they write, ‘has clear implications beyond the consulting room: it offers an account of “lost” or unspeakable history, the ways in which cultures remember and forget the effects of a traumatic past’ (Brewster and Crossman in Brewster et al., 1999: 44, my emphasis). Distancing themselves from Gibbons’ understanding of the nineteenth-century experience as ‘proto-modernist’, they continue: To present the famine as indicatively modernist […] risks consigning its Singularity to memorial history. The Famine brought the shock of the new, though not in a modernist sense of novelty or excitement: its shock constituted a wound or a trauma, an original moment whose effects register belatedly. Its appalling details lost, this event nevertheless institutes a structure of remembering […] the Famine evades the strategies of modern history as outlined by Lyotard: it demands an approach capable of witnessing to limits. Lyotard identifies such witnessing with the postmodern, a concept not to be understood as the chronological successor to modernity [….] As ‘new’ or avant-garde, the postmodern is lways in advance of itself, its effects registered after the event. This double temporality of shock and retrospection aligns the postmodern as a form of writing or experience with the historicity of trauma. This alignment suggests a mode of thinking historically that would encounter a traumatic history not only as closure and loss, but also as an opening to the future. (Brewster and Crossman in Brewster et al., 1999: 55, my emphasis)

Brewster and Crossman here criticize what they see as an illicit ‘memorializing’ ascription of a proto-modernity to Ireland, whereby Irish society is seen as partaking of a conventionally historicist development from a pre-modernist to a modernist stage, even if doing so in advance of other societies. They proceed to supplant this, however, with an argument based on the concept of Nachträglichkeit, while evoking both ‘trauma’ and the ‘wound’. Brewster and Crossman thus occupy the same paradigm as Gibbons while apparently replacing it. That is to say, both positions assert a psychoanalytically influenced version of counter-temporality that is thought to distinguish the Irish context, psychologizing history by imbuing

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it with the dynamics of personal memory. When Brewster and Crossman write that the Famine institutes ‘a structure of remembering, they are deploying the ‘excluded’ past in the same way that Eagleton does, the ‘lost’ event creating a node around which the structure of a new identity is formed. In all of these instances of a broadly psychoanalytical approach, I would argue, what is missing is the crucial sense of Nachträglichkeit as a speculative structure. It was Freud’s contention after all, in the wake of his abandonment of the seduction theory, that the disturbing memories pieced together by some of his patients were retrospective constructions.18 In this sense the glib association of the disruptive ‘traumatic’ symptom with actual historical events is very problematic indeed. I would like to suggest that the crux of this problem can be understood in terms of the status of the Real. As I pointed out earlier, Eagleton associates the absent event with this Lacanian notion, referring to the Famine as ‘some real’ that ‘stubbornly refuses to be symbolized’. Eagleton thus sees the Real as lying beyond representation, outside the Symbolic structures that order the social. Evacuated of content in this way it is able to function metaphysically, creating a stable structure which guarantees a consistent identity for the subject. However, for Lacan the Real is not outside the Symbolic order of language and representation but rather forms its limit. It is thus still minimally within the Symbolic, although when it appears there it is as distortion, vision, hallucination. In this sense the Real marks the ‘edge’ of representation, the point where it breaks down, ceases to function, rather than a realm divorced from and beyond it. Similarly, for Freud the structure of Nacträglichkeit entails the retrospective construction of a past event using the Symbolic material to hand, rather than the eruption of some ‘authentic’ independent element from ‘outside’ the present. To be more precise, a change in the analysand’s circumstances causes a previously innocuous memory to begin to be charged with affect. That memory itself may be functioning in turn as a coded or distorted representation of an unconscious memory which is itself, being unconscious, inaccessible. Thus, for example, Freud argues that the Wolfman’s recollection of two dogs mating screens the primal scene of his parents having sex. Equally, however, this primal scene could itself be a fantasy projected backwards from the memory of the dogs, a retrospective construction triggered by the event of the onset of puberty, as a result of which the spectacle of the dogs has assumed a new significance 18

See Scott (1996).

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in the boy’s psychic theatre.19 Freud argues that the ‘truth’ or otherwise of the scene is in fact irrelevant: ‘I should myself be glad to know whether the primal scene in my present patient’s case was a phantasy or a real experience; but taking other similar cases into account, I must admit that the answer to this question is not in fact a matter of very great importance’ (Freud, 1955: 97). In Moses and Monotheism, furthermore, Freud translates his argument into a broader sphere by arguing that, in Eric Santner’s terms, ‘the Jewish tradition bears witness to a traumatic past pertaining to the inaugural violence of its origins, violence that did not take place at the level of a verifiable event’.20 Consequently Nachträglichkeit posits a two-way process, with the past affecting the present and the present the past in an ultimately undecidable way. As a result there is no possibility of this logic providing the kind of metaphysical anchorage implied by Eagleton. Quite the reverse. The Real does not return as a structuring absence, but as an excessive, undecidable distortion, and is available only as a composite of existing signs. The Real is overpoweringly real in its presence, but also unreal in its artifice. Turning back to our analysis of Gibbons’ position we can now see that his concept of the traumatic symptom implies a metaphysics similar to Eagleton’s. In his essay “‘Where Wolfe Tone’s Statue Was Not’: Joyce, Monuments and Memory” named historical events are said to manifest themselves as ‘popular memory … lodged in the immediacy of the body’, and are thought to reactivate ‘contact with the vestigial traces of the fallen’ (Gibbons, 2001: 143). In this way the past appears in the form of a symptom which disturbs the body. As Gibbons repeatedly puts it, such affects are registered physically in the present as discernable somatic signs which are translated almost immediately into historical terms. It is such a suturing of traumatic symptom to empirical past event which Gibbons shares with Eagleton. A recent article on Joyce suggests that Gibbons is aware of the problematic relation between history and traumaculture: It is not even a matter of finding in the public sphere the equivalent of trauma, or related notions of ‘involuntary memory’ that are normally allocated to personal experience; rather, the true measure of psychic dislocation under colonial modernity is that both public and private are 19

This is the key case-study on the primal scene and Nachträglichkeit. See Freud (1955: vol. 17, 7-122. The standard edition will be abbreviated to SE henceforth. 20 See Santner (2005: 86, n. 17 and. Freud, ‘Moses and Monotheism’ in SE (23).

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permeable, and that the unrequited past comes across with the lived intensity of personal experience. (Gibbons, 2005: 85)

However, this seems disingenuous. Gibbons appears to distance himself from the idea of collective trauma but at the same time reinscribes it by once again, as in ‘Identity Without a Centre’, abolishing the boundaries between individual and social memory, seeing this boundary as, in effect, an ideological construction. Psychic dislocation thus becomes another name for trauma, as ‘colonial modernity’s’ breakdown between public and private results, for Gibbons, in the insistence of the past ‘with the lived intensity of personal experience’, a process very similar to that of involuntary memory. Indeed, the version of trauma which appears here seems more radical than ever, with Gibbons arguing that the appearance of historical traces in Ulysses ‘may not be an entirely subjective phenomenon’, but somehow stem from what he calls ‘the political time sedimented in the buildings and streetscapes encountered by the various characters’ as they traverse the city (Gibbons, 2005: 85). We also find this spatialization of time in Gibbons’ short essay on Bloody Sunday, with its Gothic references to the ‘sedimented terrors of the past’ that ‘…seem to be lodged in the body, or even the walls of homes’, and its argument that: ‘[i]n the wake of a […] public trauma like Bloody Sunday restless memories drift through the streets like the smell of cordite’ (Gibbons, 1998: 101-2). Such assertions of the relationship between space and history conform absolutely to those Victorian tropes of the landscape as theatre of memory mentioned earlier, tropes which Gibbons himself elsewhere criticizes as a ‘romantic idea of stories in stones, of a naturalistic narrative denying its own construction and posing as an organic creation of history’ (Gibbons, 1996: 120). The consequences of such an approach can be seen if we return to the Tone essay. Here Gibbons argues that in the ‘Wandering Rocks’ chapter of Ulysses, Tom Kernan is ‘unconsciously following in the footsteps of the centenary procession [of Wolfe Tone’s death] six years earlier’, and that this activity confronts him with the ‘shards and fragments’ of time (Gibbons, 2001: 152). These confrontations force Kernan, against his will, to reflect on key moments in Irish (nationalist) history: ‘We can assume, given his unionist sympathies, that Tom Kernan does not consciously call up “the memory of the dead”, but that such thoughts, lodged in his body, are prompted by his participation in such rituals [i.e. Kernan’s unconscious tracing of the procession], his involuntary return, as it were, to the scenes of the crime’ (Gibbons, 2001: 155).

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We might also adduce here Gibbons’ argument that the character of Lenehan in Dubliners’ ‘Two Gallants’ feels the ‘reverberation of the past’ due to his ‘historically charged surroundings’ (Gibbons, 2001: 143). Such claims demonstrate once more that while his approach differs from Eagleton’s evocation of a Real absence as structuring node, Gibbons substitutes for this an equally authenticating sense of the past as a radical, if perplexing, presence. The fictional characters he describes are seen as witnesses, helplessly attesting to the truth of the past through the involuntary responses of their body to a vaguely sketched sense of locale. Thus, while Gibbons argues that the subject’s access to Irish history has little to do ‘with race memory or a mystical spirit of place’, his analysis has no real distance from such discredited concepts, but merely displaces the idea of a collective memory from consciousness to the body, and then reads historical significance from these somatic traces (Gibbons, 2001: 152). What is striking in this displacement is the unanimity of its movement, a smooth glide from past event to present environment, then on to the body and the symptom, and ultimately to thought and historical reflection. This series of transmissions is seen as entirely unproblematic, despite the fact that no individual link stands up to close examination. One looks in vain for an explanation of the efficacy and alacrity with which ‘historically charged surroundings’ imprint themselves on the body. Yet the sense of the past as emerging from another realm to impact on the present is implied throughout the text. Similarly, even if the process of transmission is accepted, the question arises as to why it is only the excesses and tragedies of nationalist history that Gibbons sees ‘lodged’ in Kernan’s body in this way. In his Edmund Burke and Ireland, Protestant ‘celebrations of Cromwell and King William’ are described, in the same terms as Kernan’s supposedly compulsive stroll, as ‘revisiting the scene of the crime, the return of the repressed in the public sphere’ (Gibbons, 2003: 14, 161). If Protestant ‘tradition’ can return according to such a psychoanalytical logic, then surely other historical spectacles could also imprint themselves on Kernan in the course of his walk, with effects that might copperfasten his Unionist identity rather than subverting it. Indeed a look at the relevant passages from Ulysses confirms that Kernan’s walk through the heart of the Hibernian metropolis conjures up popular memories of various stripes, and not just the ‘vestigial traces of the fallen and defeated’. Take the following for example: ‘Mr. Kernan approached Island street. Times of the trouble. Must ask Ned Lambert to lend me those reminiscences of Sir Jonah

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Barrington. When you look back on it now in a kind of retrospective arrangement. Gaming at Daly’s. No cardsharping then’ (Joyce, 1992: 309). The memoirs of Jonah Barrington (1968) were of course a key text in the formation of the image of a rake-hell ascendancy, and Kernan here muses on scenes of dissolution and profligacy associated, in the popular imagination, with the back streets through which he is moving. Such elements, however, while conjured up by the urban spaces around Kernan, are far from being ‘authentic’ traces of the past. Instead they demonstrate that the ‘popular memory’ that Gibbons evokes to ground his version of the subject in exclusion is much less rigid, predictable and authoritative than he suggests. Images of ascendancy such as these are thoroughly ideological constructs that served to hegemonize a social grouping which was in fact rather inchoate. They do not represent, in other words, the unconscious return of repressed, violent events that Kernan helplessly attests to, and which thus interpellate him, despite himself, as a ‘native’ subject. Rather, they are traces of a reified, ideological nature within the disordered stream of Kernan’s reflections, traces which Joyce does not inflect with any less import than the more obviously nationalist impressions which precede and succeed them. Indeed, rather than the sudden ‘traumatic’ intervention of the past, the general tone of Kernan’s reverie is that of the gentle percolation of images normally associated with the Joycean stream of consciousness. Kernan is a bricoleur rather than the idiosyncratic version of the flâneur that Gibbons claims him to be, borne up upon a fluid, sustaining wave of heterogenous percepts and concepts that are formed from the symbolic material to hand. Indeed this sense of the active role of the subject in constructing the past, rather than being at its mercy, is explicitly acknowledged in Joyce’s reference to a ‘retrospective arrangement’. The fact that the Barrington passage is not considered by Gibbons suggests that his notion of popular memory is dependent upon an unexamined sense of a homogeneous cultural inheritance. Questions of nuance of political viewpoint, not to mention religion, class or gender in the personal relation to national narratives are swept aside. This much is clear when Gibbons admits Kernan’s Unionism only to suggest that the affective power of his surroundings interpellates him so vigorously and vividly that he cannot help but bear witness to the violence and injustice of the colonial past. Rather than opening up a sense of agency for the colonial subject in the way that Gibbons asserts, such a schema seems rather coercive. Indeed one can only assume that Gibbon’s sees Kernan’s

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Unionism as a kind of false consciousness, and that his confrontations with the sites of past colonial ‘trauma’ inducts him into a more authentic historical awareness. Thus, once again Gibbons proposes a broadly Freudian model for the interaction of the historical past and the present. And yet the ‘lodging’ of popular memory in the body is simply asserted, through a rather casual reading of some incidents in Joyce, without any explanation as to why this should happen, apart from fleeting reference to some of Walter Benjamin’ more poetic and intuitive speculations. Thus, both Benjamin and Freud seem to lie behind Joseph A. Buttigieg’s description of Joycean temporality, which Gibbons quotes: It is hard to imagine how a careful reader of Joyce could possibly entertain the idea that what is gone is past and fixed. There is no such reassurance in Joyce’s writings. On the contrary he illustrates how the present can alter the past and how the past can burst into the present and shatter it. (Gibbons, 2001: 151)

While this description of Joyce, through its references to ‘bursting’ and ‘shattering’, stays within the general paradigm of temporal disruption we have been examining, it is a much more sophisticated description of Nachträglichkeit than the one implied in Gibbons’ essay. It is precisely the two-way, feedback mechanism described by Buttigieg that is absent in Gibbons’ account, for the latter does not scruple to present ‘what is gone’ as ‘fixed’, never allowing for the sense that the Real which intervenes has a constructed element, composed in the present from the rags and patches of the Symbolic order of which it forms the limit. Gibbons’ theory relies above all on a sense of an objective correlation between the ‘painful stimuli’ which he sees Joyce’s characters experiencing and the historical incidents which, however remotely, somehow provoke them. In this sense the immediate lived intensity of the body acts to corroborate the excessive, traumatizing nature of the event, just as the event unfailingly provides the symptom with its always singular meaning. Indeed, Gibbons seems to see the traumatic pain in the present and the original event in the past as the same thing, bound together in a temporal short-circuit, fused like recto and verso. If Gibbons therefore differs from Eagleton in not proposing an absent unknowable Real, the structure he advances remains the same, in that the Real exists instead as the fixed authentic and authenticating presence of the ‘symptom’. What is more this symptom is seen to refer to a fixed, meaningful event beyond the endless substitutions of the Symbolic. For Gibbons as for Eagleton, then, the trauma of the return of

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the excluded past composes the present even as it ‘shatters’ it, providing all Irish subjects, whether they like it or not, with the pole around which their psyches revolve. The ultimate effect of Gibbons’ position in the Tone essay is to obfuscate even further the actual reason for, or mechanics of, the relations between the past and the individual by appealing to vague notions of trauma, repression and ‘pain’. In doing so he conforms absolutely to a discourse which he himself identifies in Edmund Burke and Modern Ireland, that of the ‘theme of a festering wound, of the body in pain’ which is a ‘recurrent motif in eighteenth-century Irish culture’ (Gibbons, 2003: 10). What is the rhetoric of trauma if not a revival of this nationalist trope, a method, as Paul Muldoon would have it, of ‘keeping that wound green’? (Muldoon, 2002: 3). Unlike Gibbons and Eagleton, when Michel Foucault argues in The Order of Things that psychoanalysis links the unconscious, historicity and the individual, he is not arguing for the conflation of history and memory, or the conversion of historical event into personal trauma and vice versa. Indeed, he would see such an equation as integral to the formation of the humanist subject that he is concerned to critique. What distinguishes psychoanalysis as what Foucault calls a ‘counter-science’ is that it focuses on a single formal point at the limits of Man where, as he puts it ‘representation remains in suspense, on the edge of itself, open, in a sense, to the closed boundary of finitude’ (Foucault, 1994: 374). The project of psychoanalysis is, thus, to: make visible […]the frontier forms of the human sciences […] it would situate its experience in those enlightened and dangerous regions where the knowledge of man acts out, in the form of the unconscious and of historicity, its relation with what renders them possible. In ‘exposing’ it, these […] counter-sciences threaten the very thing that made it possible for man to be known. Thus we see the destiny of man being spun before our very eyes, but being spun backwards; it is being led back, by those strange bobbins, to the forms of its birth, to the homeland that made it possible. And is that not one way of bringing about its end? (Foucault, 1994: 381, my emphasis)

The echo of Yeats’ ‘Byzantium’ here – ‘For Hades’ bobbin bound in mummy-cloth/ May unwind the winding path’ - is coincidental but fortuitous, for I suggest that the work of certain Irish writers – Le Fanu, Beckett and Joyce among them - can be read in tandem with Foucault’s task here. Thus if it seems that, to take one example, Yeats’ adaptation of Swedenborg’s notion of ‘dreaming back’, whereby past acts and events are

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rehearsed again in an afterlife intermediate between the earthly and the otherworldly, is itself a version of Nachträglichkeit, it is also necessary to ask whether Yeats’ work succeeds in ‘unwinding the winding path’ of the subject or whether, like Gibbons, Eagleton and others, he remains within a conventional, humanist or nationalist understanding of the subject. A major task before contemporary Irish cultural criticism is thus to establish a set of tools that can distinguish the ‘unraveling’ that Foucault approves of from the unreflective deployment of critical techniques, such as those I have linked to traumaculture, which simply remain within all-too-familiar nineteenth-century paradigms. .

References Anderson, Perry. 2004. London Review of Books. 26.18. 23 Anon. 1836. ‘Attractions of Ireland – No. III: Society”. Dublin University Magazine. December: 658 Barrington, Sir Jonah. 1968. The Ireland of Sir J. Barrington, Selections from his Personal Sketches. Ed. B. Staples. London: Peter Owen. Bell, Desmond. 1988. ‘Ireland without Frontiers? The Challenge of the Communications Revolution’. Across the Frontiers: Ireland in the 1990s. Ed. Richard Kearney. Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1988. Belsey, Catherine. 1997. ‘Constructing the Subject, Deconstructing the Text’. Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism. Eds. Robyn Warhol and Diane Price Hendl. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. 597-98. Brewster, Scott, Virginia Crossman, Fiona Beckett and David Alderson, eds. 1999. Ireland in Proximity: History, Gender, Space. London: Routledge. Brown, Terence. 2004. Ireland, A Social and Cultural History 1922-2002. London: Harper Perenniel. Caruth, Cathy, ed. 1995. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. Caruth, Cathy. 1995a. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma Narrative, History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. Cleary, Joe. 2004. ‘Toward a Materialist-Formalist History of TwentiethCentury Irish literature’. boundary 2 31.1: 207-41 Crews, Frederick. 1997. The Memory Wars: Freud’s Legacy in Dispute. London: Granta. Deane, Seamus. 1996. Reading in the Dark. London: Jonathan Cape. —. 1997. Strange Country. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Doyle, Roddy. 1993. Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. London: Vintage.

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Dunne, Tom. 2004. Rebellions: Memoir, Memory and 1798. Dublin: Lilliput Press. Eagleton, Terry. 1995. Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture. London: Verso. —. 2003. Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic. Oxford: Blackwell. Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the Other, How Anthropology Makes its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Finkelstein, Norman. 2000. The Holocaust Industry. London: Verso. Foster, Hal. 1996. The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Foucault, Michel. 1994. The Order of Things. London: Routledge. Freud, Sigmund. 1955. ‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis’. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. James Strachey. Vol. 17. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis. 7-122. Gibbons, Luke. 1996. Transformation in Irish Culture. Cork: Cork University Press. —. 1997. ‘“Some Hysterical Hatred”, History, Hysteria and the Literary Revival’. Irish University Review. 27.1: 7–23 —. 2001. “‘Where Wolfe Tone’s Statue Was Not’: Joyce, Monuments And Memory’”. History and Modern Memory in Modern Ireland. Ed. Ian McBride. Cambridge: CUP. 139-159. —. 2003. Edmund Burke and Ireland: Aesthetics, Politics and the Colonial Sublime. Cambridge: CUP. —. 2004. ‘Projecting the Nation: Cinema and Culture’. The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture. Eds. J. Cleary and C. Connolly. Cambridge: CUP. 206-24. —. 2005. ‘Spaces of Time through Times of Space: Joyce, Ireland and Colonial Modernity’. Field Day Review. 1: 71-86. Hamilton, Hugo. 2003. The Speckled People. London: Fourth Estate. —. 2006. The Sailor in the Wardrobe. London: Harper Perenniel. Haslam, Richard. 1999. ‘A Race Bashed in the Face: Imagining Ireland as a Damaged Child’ in Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies. 4.1 http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert. Accessed 21st October 2005 Hawkins, Anne Hunsaker. 1993. Reconstructing Illness: Studies in Pathography. West Lafayette In.: Purdue University Press. Jameson, Fredric. 1977. ‘Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan’. Yale French Studies. 55-56: 338-95. Joyce, James. 1992. Ulysses. London: Penguin. Kearney, Richard. 2001. On Stories. London: Routledge.

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Kiberd, Declan. 2002. The Irish Writer and the World. Cambridge: CUP. LaCapra, Dominik. 1995. Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. —. 1998. History and Memory After Auschwitz. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. —. 2001. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Leersen, Joep. 1996. Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical And Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century. Cork: Cork University Press. —. 2001. ‘Monument and Trauma: Varieties of Remembrance’. History and Modern Memory in Modern Ireland. Ed. Ian MacBride. Cambridge: CUP. 184-203. Leys, Ruth. 2000. Trauma: A Genealogy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lloyd, David. 1999. Ireland After History. Cork: Cork University Press. —. 2002. ‘The Memory of Hunger’. Loss: The Politics of Mourning. Eds. David L. Eng and David Kazanjian. Berkeley: University of California Press. 205-228. —. 2003. ‘Ruination: Partition and the Expectation of Violence (On Allen deSouza’s Irish Photography)’. Social Identities. 9.4: 475-509. Luckhurst, Roger. 2003. ‘Traumaculture’. new formations. 50: 28-47 Lyotard, Jean-François. 1990. Heidegger and “the jews”. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. MacBride, Ian, ed. 2001. History and Modern Memory in Modern Ireland. Cambridge: CUP. McCourt, Frank. 1996. Angela’s Ashes. London: Harper Perenniel. Monbiot, George. 2006. ‘If we knew more about Ireland, we might never have invaded Iraq’. The Guardian. ‘Comment’. June 6. Muldoon, Paul. 2002. ‘Hard Drive’.Moy Sand and Gravel. London: Faber. 3. Nora, Pierre, ed. 1988-1993. Les Lieux de Mémoire. Paris: Gallimard. O’Faolain, Nuala. 1997. Are You Somebody?: The Life and Times of Nuala O’Faolain. Dublin: New Island. O’Neill, Joseph. 2002. The Blood-Dark Track. London: Granta. O’Toole, Fintan. 1995. ‘Introducing Irelantis’. Séan Hillen, Irelantis. Dublin: Irelantis. 1-5. Rappaport, Hermann. 2001. The Theory Mess: Deconstruction in Eclipse. New York: Columbia University Press. Santner, Eric. 2005. ‘Miracles Happen: Benjamin, Rosenzweig and the Matter of the Neighbour’. The Neighbour: Three Enquiries in Political

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Theology. Eds. Slavoj Žižek, Eric L. Santner and Kenneth Reinhard. Chicago: Chicago University Press. 76-133. Scott, Ann. 1996. Real Events Revisited: Fantasy, Memory and Psychoanalysis. London: Granta. Seltzer, Mark. 1997. ‘Wound Culture: Trauma in the Pathological Public Sphere’. October. 80: 3-26. Showalter, Elaine. 1997. Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture. London: Picador. Waters, John. 1997. An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Ireland. London: Duckworth. Wheatley, David. 2002. ‘Irish poetry into the Twenty-First Century’. The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry. Ed. Matthew Campbell. Cambridge: CUP.. 250-67. Wilmer, Clive. 2006. Review of Seamus Heaney’s District and Circle. New Statesman, Monday. 17th April.

PUBLIC SKAITH OR WELL FEIGNED SORROW?: THE HABBIE ELEGY IN IRELAND AND SCOTLAND STEPHEN DORNAN

James Orr’s “The Irish Cottier’s Death and Burial” is one of the most significant pieces in the Ulster Scots literary tradition. The poem, which was intended as an Irish version of Burns’s “The Cottar’s Saturday Night”, first appeared in Orr’s 1804 collection, Poems on Various Subjects. Orr vividly describes a death, wake and funeral in rural County Antrim. He evokes the lively social gathering which congregates at the home of the deceased: Syne wi' anither glass they hail day-light An' crack mair cruse o' bargains, farms an' beasts; Or han' tradition down, an' ither fright, Wi' dreadfu' tales o' witches, elves, an' ghaists. The soger lad, wha on his pension rests, Tells how he fought an' proudly bears the scaur; While unfleg'd gulls, just lookin owre their nests, Brag how they lately did their rivals daur, Before their first sweethearts, an' dashed them i' the glaur.

This extract illustrates the importance of traditional wakes in Irish and Scottish popular culture during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Orr’s poem reveals the sociability that co-existed amidst the solemnity of these occasions as the community took a certain pleasure in the opportunity for interaction that these gatherings afforded. Orr even mentions during this poem that the “wauk” is punctuated by laughter. The speaker is keen to emphasise that this laughter is not out of place and does not constitute disrespect towards the deceased. The youths: hark in neuks wi' lasses whom they prize; Some banter simple nymphs, their parts to shaw; But though a laugh be sometimes like to rise,

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They dinna either death or the dead despise. (Orr, 64-5)

This poem suggests that there was a paradoxical co-mingling of humour and pathos in the cultural practices surrounding wakes and funerals in Ireland and Scotland as the gravitas of the situation was coloured by an underlying convivial aspect. The perfect articulation of this paradoxical mixture of grief and humour is the genre of the Scots vernacular, or Habbie elegy which was invented by Robert Sempill of Beltrees in the seventeenth century when he wrote “The Life and Death of Habbie Simson, Piper of Kilbarchan”. Sempill’s poem was central to the Scots vernacular revival of the eighteenth century. During the first wave of the Scots vernacular revival, instigated largely by Allan Ramsay in the early eighteenth century, a spate of Habbie-style elegies were produced. These poems lamented colourful local characters, typically musicians or publicans, in a distinctive and jaunty six line stanza which was named “standard Habbie” by Allan Ramsay in honour of Sempill’s poem. This stanza consists of six lines with the first, second, third and fifth lines rhyming and consisting of four feet, and the fourth and sixth lines rhyming and consisting of two feet. This stanza became central to the Scots vernacular revival of the eighteenth century and was ubiquitous in the Scots tradition in the eighteenth century. The Habbie elegies of the early eighteenth century were typically printed and circulated as broadsides and tended to be modelled quite closely on Sempill’s original, although Allan Ramsay’s efforts certainly exceed it in terms of versification and artistry. The genre, at least in terms of the volume being composed, probably reached the zenith of its popularity in the early nineteenth century by which time a plethora of Habbie style elegies had been composed with almost every vernacular poet that ventured into print making an attempt at the genre. Robert Fergusson and Robert Burns composed several Habbie elegies apiece, as did many of the minor Scots poets who contributed to the remarkable outpouring of vernacular verse in the wake of Burns. Poets such as Richard Gall, David Sillar, Thomas Donaldson, Ebenezer Picken and Alexander Wilson were a few of those Scottish poets to have been attracted to the genre. It is less well known, however, that Habbie crossed the North Channel and made considerable inroads into Irish poetry. One of the earliest examples of Ulster Scots poetry is a Habbie elegy for the Quarter

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Master, Brice Blare of Strabane, County Tyrone which appeared as a broadside and was authored by a Northern bard, almost certainly William Starrat of Strabane.1 Starrat is known to have composed several Ulster Scots pieces including his epistle to Allan Ramsay. Olivia Elder, from county Londonderry also composed a Habbie elegy in imitation of Ramsay in the 1770s illustrating the popular appeal of the genre in Ulster even prior to the success of Burns’s work. The interest in the genre accelerated during the Ulster Scots literary revival of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when Ulster poets such as Samuel Thomson and Francis Boyle were amongst those to use the genre. But perhaps most surprising of all is Thomas Dermody’s remarkable and neglected cycle of Scots influenced poems written in Killeigh, County Offaly, between 1790 and 1792. This cycle is built around a series of five Habbie elegies and suggests that the Scots influence on Irish poetry was not restricted to its Ulster Presbyterian heartlands. This essay will re-evaluate the Habbie elegy which became one of the most important genres in a resurgent vernacular tradition which culminated in a remarkable flowering in the wake of Burns. Such an analysis would traditionally have been restricted to solely Scottish authors; however, this essay will suggest that to do this would be to discount several very good Irish efforts in the genre because of a misguided geographical specificity. The genre originated in Scotland but the overzealous demarcation of national literary canons has obscured the degree to which the Habbie tradition, and Scots forms in general, became common to both Scotland and Ireland. This essay will also contend that this genre should be understood as an autonomous elegiac mode with its own distinctive conventions. We should not approach these poems from the perspective of the standard English elegiac tradition which, despite some pertinent similarities, functions in a different manner. To categorise Habbie elegies as mock-elegies or satires because of their humorous elements or hyperbole is to fail to understand the mixture of humour and genuine pathos in these poems. This essay will highlight some of the differences between the standard English elegiac tradition and the Habbie tradition with reference to Bakhin’s influential ideas on folk culture. It could be argued that the overbearing presence of the English elegiac tradition has lead to the occasional misleading interpretation of 1

This piece was reproduced in Ulster Journal of Archaeology, vol. xiii, 1907, pp.160-161.

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Habbie elegies. The presence of humour is one aspect that has tended to unsettle some commentators on the genre since humour is obviously negligible in the standard English elegiac tradition. The comic descriptions and hyperbolic expostulations contained in Habbie elegies has resulted in them being aligned with the mock-elegiac tradition. Thomas Crawford, for instance, is presumably referring to this tradition when he writes that Burns’s “Elegy on Captain Matthew Henderson” “begins in the manner of the Scottish mock elegy” (Crawford, 212). Furthermore, MacLaine includes his commentary on these poems under the general heading of “satires” (MacLaine: 1995). Perhaps Noble and Scott Hogg’s description of the poems as forming a “Scots comic elegiac tradition” (Noble and Hogg, 198) is a better one than the potentially misleading use of the term mock-elegy. It is potentially misleading because in the standard English mock elegiac tradition comedy is generated in a very different way to Habbie poems. Bakhtin’s conception of coexisting classical and grotesque traditions is perhaps salient at this point. He articulates this in his famous introduction to his study of the novels of Rabelais. He argues for the existence of a folk tradition that parallels, and coexists with the classical one. Habbie elegies certainly display many characteristics of the folk tradition that Bakhtin identifies. His definition of folk humour also highlights a central difference between Habbie elegies and mainstream mock-elegies. He argues that “folk humour denies, but it revives and renews at the same time. Bare negation is completely alien to folk culture” (Bakhtin, 11). In the Habbie tradition the laughter, like the laughter of the mourners at the cottier’s wake in Orr’s poem, is not disrespectful or negative, but is infused with warmth. The aim of most standard English satires and mockelegies, on the other hand, is to negate. A good example of a typical standard English eighteenth century mock-elegy is Jonathan Swift’s “A Satirical Elegy on the Death of a Late Famous General”. The aim of this mock elegy on the duke of Marlborough is to negate the transient achievements of the subject and to expose the superficiality of his elevated social rank. Swift, quite mercilessly and ruthlessly pours scorn on his subject’s very “inglorious” and unsoldierly death of old age. He also suggests that his subject will have plenty to fear at his resurrection and sardonically comments on the lack of mourning family. The final lines of the poem typify Swift’s attempt to negate his subject’s rank and achievements:

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Public Skaith or Well Feigned Sorrow?: The Habbie Elegy in Ireland and Scotland Let pride be taught by this rebuke, How very mean a thing’s a Duke; From all his ill-got honours flung, Turned to that dirt from whence he sprung. (Swift, 528)

Swift’s negation culminates with the literal reduction of the proud nobleman to dirt. The tone of Swift’s elegy is utterly cold as he reservedly condemns his subject. This absolute condemnation of the subject is alien to the vernacular elegy which simultaneously “asserts and denies” (Bakhtin, 12). The foibles and characteristics of the subjects are often commented upon humorously in vernacular elegies; however, this humour tends to be characterised by fondness rather than negativity. The poets’ attempts to capture something of the richness of their subjects’ characters account for the comic elements in these poems which are never seriously directed against their subjects. The comedy can be generated through physical descriptions of, or anecdotes about the subjects, but this reminiscing is almost always used to evoke warmth. In “The Life and Death of Habbie Simson”, for example, the appearance of Habbie is evoked comically as the speaker remembers how “Ay whan he play'd, the lasses leugh, / To see him teethless, auld and teugh” (McCordick, 781). Despite his comic appearance, however, the rest of the poem would suggest that the laughter of the lasses in this social context contains more warmth than ridicule. Certainly the cold mockery of Swift’s elegy is far displaced from the girls’ laughter. These important differences suggest that Habbie elegies should be understood as having their own distinctive conventions that are alien to the standard English tradition. Bakhtin’s complaint that examples of folk culture “were measured not within their own dimensions but according to measurements completely alien to them” (Bakhtin, 18) could be applied to the critical reception of Habbie elegies. The presence of humour in the poems, coupled with the rapid rhythm of the stanza form, both of which are alien to traditional mainstream elegies in English, has, in some cases, led to the assumption that the sentiments are not genuine. However, there is genuine pathos in the laments of many Habbie elegies, and this fusion of humour with pathos is only one of several paradoxes that inhabit these poems. The centrality of paradox would seem to suggest a connection with the standard English elegiac tradition since, as William Watkin has recently argued, paradox is central to the genre. He suggests that in the elegy there is an interplay

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between presence and absence and that “the traditional role of elegy is to set in a structure of presence - poem, monument, epitaph, name - a radical and irreversible absence: the lost beloved” (Watkin, 36-7). This statement applies equally to the Scots vernacular and the mainstream standard English elegiac tradition which Watkin focuses on. However, this should not occlude the obvious differences between the traditions since they use paradox in different ways. Even during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when the tradition was burgeoning to an unprecedented degree, it was still common for poets to evoke this sense of loss, which was often linked to indigenous artistic traditions such as Habbie Simson’s piping. The loss of these characters and their talents represented “public skaith”, or a loss to the entire community, or even sometimes the nation, as in Robert Fergusson’s “Elegy, on the Death of Scots Music”, or Robert Tannahill’s “Will MacNeil’s Elegy”. In both of these poems the death of the individual represents the demise of indigenous traditions and knowledge. In Fergusson’s piece in particular the death of the prominent musician, William MacGibbon, symbolises the decline of the indigenous Scots musical tradition in the face of foreign influences. Paradoxically, therefore, a genre designed to mourn loss became an important vehicle in instigating the Scots literary revival. One aspect of Habbie elegies which is potentially disorientating is the paradoxical mixture of humour and pathos. The presence of humour can lead to the assumption that the sentiments expressed in the poems are not genuine and that the speaker is indulging in that “well feign’d sorrow” that Thomas Dermody mentions in his “Rencantatory Postscript” to “Elegy for Davie, the Killeigh Piper”. This humour is often generated through the hyperbolic expostulations that punctuate these poems. Hyperbole, however, exists in other elegiac modes which would never be considered mock-elegies by literary critics. For instance, the language of many of the elegies composed for public figures and statesmen contain images and utterances which are just as hyperbolic as anything that appears in Habbie elegies. This is illustrated by the abundant use of pathetic fallacy and lamenting personifications of the nation in eighteenth century standard English elegies on public figures. The laments in Burns’s Habbie poems, such as “Poor Mailie’s Elegy” or “Tam Samson’s Elegy”, are undoubtedly hyperbolic and contain humorous undercurrents. For instance, in the

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former he rhetorically curses the man who invented the rope, the cause of Mailie’s death, and in the latter he depicts the creatures of the natural world celebrating the death of Tam, the avid hunter. However, these examples are no more hyperbolic than Burns’s standard English elegies “On the Death of the Late Lord President Dundas”, or “On the Death of Sir J. Hunter Blair”.2 In the former Burns uses abstract personifications and pathetic fallacy whilst in the latter he describes the genius of the nation “that frantic beat her breast” as the distraught speaker walks the cliffs of Holyrood. Such inflated imagery is as hyperbolic an expression of grief as anything in Habbie elegies. In neither case does the hyperbole necessarily detract from the sincerity or poignancy of the elegy. Orr’s poem intimates that the mixture of humour and grief in the Habbie elegies simply represents a more fitting evocation of the way in which the common folk received a death in the community. Their reaction contrasted with the sombre and humourless funerary ceremonies of the ruling classes. There is certainly a strong focus on community and locality in the Habbie elegy genre. Although they are ostensibly mourning an individual, these poems are also, paradoxically, celebrations of the homogenous and organic community from which these individuals departed. The individual is quite often lamented from a communal point of view and the speaker frequently identifies the subject with his profession and emphasises the void which has been left. The lament, therefore, often seems to become a celebration of the individual’s role within the community, and by extension the community as a whole. These elegies involve an interesting interplay between the descriptions of the community and the individual who is usually “an eccentric local character” (MacLaine, 25). Despite the peculiarities and uniqueness of the subject, his or her centrality to the community is constantly reinforced as social gatherings such as wakes, fairs and weddings are regularly described. These poems often display an impulse to celebrate the local community and popular culture whilst simultaneously lamenting the deceased. The speakers in elegies on publicans and musicians often invoke the impending dearth of alcohol and music. In “The Life and Death of Habbie Simson, Piper of Kilbarchan”, for example, the speaker catalogues Habbie’s characteristic traits such as his strength and speed at football and his gossiping conversation. But Habbie’s death will be most keenly felt by the

2

See Burns, pp.295-96 and pp.272-73.

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community due to the loss of his piping which equates in the microcosm of the village to the loss of music itself: Alas for him my heart is sare, For of his springs I got a share, At every play, race, feast and fair, But guile or greed, We need not look for piping mair, Sen Habbie’s dead. (McCordick, I, 782)

The community’s festivals will suffer due to the loss of the “springs”, or tunes, supplied by Habbie on these occasions. A similar sense of communal loss is evoked in Thomas Dermody’s “Elegy on Nicholas the Killeigh Tailor” as Nicholas's niche in the community is rendered vacant. The speaker laments that the subject's death will have a visible effect on the community as “soon shall ill-made garments shew, / Nice Nick is dead” (Dermody, I, 216). Equally in Burns’s “Tam Samson’s Elegy”, the speaker laments the vacancy left in the community by the death of the aged and colourful Tam. Tam is a keen sportsman and his demise has left his place on the curling rink vacant. There is, therefore, a consistent focus on individuals and their roles within their communities in Habbie elegies. It could be argued that the concern with individual’s roles within their communities in these poems frequently belie an anxiety about the locality they describe. They celebrate the richness and colour of local life but these communities are depicted as fragile organisms whose inhabitants enjoy symbiotic relationships which are destroyed by the death of an individual. In a study of early American elegies, Jeffrey A. Hammond states that “the initial impact of death on these small communities was frighteningly disruptive” (Hammond, 15). In seventeenth and eighteenth century Scotland and Ireland a death would have had a similar effect on a small community. The importance of local communities and folk culture in these poems seem to, once again, invite comparison with Mikhail Bakhtin’s analysis of folk culture and particularly the grotesque. For Bakhtin the grotesque was associated with the lower body and was often concerned with what he calls the open body:

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Public Skaith or Well Feigned Sorrow?: The Habbie Elegy in Ireland and Scotland the grotesque body is not sepatated from the rest of the world. It is not a closed, completed unit; it is unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits. The stress is laid on those parts of the body that are open to the outside world, that is, the parts of the body through which the world enters the body or emerges from it, or through which the body itself goes out to meet the world. (Bakhtin, 26)

In Habbie elegies the physicality of the elegised subject is consistently remembered. Eating and drinking, for instance, are central to many of these texts. The speaker in Alexander Wilson’s “Elegy on an Unfortunate Tailor”, for example, graphically remembers his subject, Rabby, and his capacity for consuming food: Wi won’er aft I’ve seen him worry Up cogs o’ kail, in hungry hurry; Grip up the cheeses in gapin’ fury, An’ hew down slices, Syne punds o’t in his entrails bury, In lumps and pieces. (Wilson, 51)

Dermody’s piper, Davie, shares the gluttonous appetite of Wilson’s tailor as at wedding feasts he would ravenously “Grasp at the bacon white and red” and “spill the gravy” (Dermody, I, 219). This focus on the body’s physical need to consume is further illustrated by the abundance of hosts or hostesses elegised in Habbie poems. Along with the piper, who provides music, the host or hostess, who provides food and drink, is the most frequently elegised profession. Robert Sempill’s companion piece to Habbie Simson, was an epitaph in the same style for Habbie’s nephew, Sanny Briggs. Sanny Briggs was the Sempills’ convivial butler whose charge it was to provide alcohol for the company. This desire to elegise those who provide food and drink in a convivial setting was continued by Allan Ramsay in his “Elegy on Maggy Johnson” and “Elegy on Lucky Wood in the Canongate”. Both were hostesses whose role it was to “cram our wames” (MacLachlan, 33). Maggy brewed and sold her own ale from her farm near Edinburgh which was, according to Ramsay’s poem, a popular place for indulging in alcohol, food and conversation. Richard Gall’s later piece entitled “Elegy on Pudding Lizzie” is in a similar vein. The speaker in this poem laments the loss of Lizzie’s “little dwalling” and the rich variety of foods and whisky that it provided. He hyperbolically evokes the hunger that will

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ensue and which will leave “Our wames e’en to our rigging-bane / Like skate fish clapping” (Gall, 64-9). The depiction of the “open” body is also evident in vernacular elegies through the unashamed acceptance of the functions of the human body. The speaker in Ramsay’s “Elegy on Maggy Johnston” fondly reminisces that the hostess’s liberality made her clients “pish and spew, and yesk and maunt” (MacLachlan, 36). William Starrat of Strabane is equally coarse in his evocation of anatomical functions. He elegises a local sociable quartermaster whose prodigious appetite for good ale is referred to throughout the poem. In this case it is the failure of the subject to consume food that proves destructive. Brice Blare’s acquaintances suspect that his death was hastened by his reticence to eat as he apparently confined himself to the consumption of liquids. The speaker laments that his subject “us’d neither teeth nor **** / Lang e’er he deed.” One of the words is replaced by asterisks in the original text; however, it is clear, given the rhyme and context, that the local populace believed that Brice neither chewed food nor excreted in the period preceding his death. The poem ends with a tongue-in-cheek moral that warns the reader to learn by Blare’s example and eat well whilst drinking.3 This seems to represent a literary assertion of the necessity of anatomical functions. This focus on the physicality of the human body, therefore, sets the Habbie elegy apart from its mainstream counterpart. Bakhtin recognises another paradox salient to the Habbie tradition in his study of the grotesque when he writes that “the grotesque image reflects a phenomenon in transformation, an as yet unfinished metamorphosis, of death and birth, growth and becoming” (Bakhtin, 24). Just as his conception of folk laughter is double edged, as it “asserts and denies” (Bakhtin, 12), so does his conception of the grotesque image seem to paradoxically pull in contrary directions as it evokes death and yet suggests rebirth. Again this idea of rebirth is present in Habbie elegies. It is particularly pertinent to several broadside elegies on Hangmen, or executioners in the eighteenth century. These display a black humour and irony since “The man who liv’d by choaking breath, / Ly’s here, at length, o’ercome by Death”.4 In

3

Ulster Journal of Archaeology, xiii, 1907, p.160. This text ‘Elegy, on the Death of Hary Ormiston, late Hangman in Edinburgh’, (circa 1718-1722) is available electronically at www.nls.uk/broadsides/broadside.cfm/id/15665. See also ‘Elegy, on the Death of the Late Executioner’ at www.nls.uk/broadsides/broadside.cfm/id/14658.

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these poems the service that the subject provided was to exterminate life, therefore, his death potentially prolongs the lives of others. This notion of interplay between death and rebirth, framed within a comic context, is particularly pertinent to a specific group of Habbie elegies. In several pieces the speaker concludes by recanting his elegy and revealing that his subject has not actually died. Ramsay, in his poem “The Life and Acts of, or an Elegy on Patie Birnie”, describes and mourns the convivial fiddler of Kinghorn for twenty stanzas before abruptly revealing that he has not, in fact, died. Robert Burns uses the same joke in his poem “Tam Samson’s Elegy”, when in an equally curt final stanza subtitled “per contra”, he invokes the reader to “cease his grieving, / For yet unskaith’d by Death’s gleg gullie, / Tam Samson’s livin!” (Burns, 222). Ramsay, Burns, and also Robert Tannahill in “Will MacNeil’s Elegy”, therefore, present the reader with somewhat incongruous works which are ultimately elegies with happy endings. This peculiar tendency to elegise the living is also evident in the tendency for poets to compose their own elegies or epitaphs. Robert Burns, for example, composed “A Bard’s Epitaph” and “Elegy on the Death of Robert Ruisseaux” both of which could be categorised self elegies, particularly the latter since, ruisseaux is a French translation of the Scots word burns, or streams in English. The Irish poet Thomas Dermody also habitually composed epitaphs and elegies on himself in poems such as “My Own Epitaph”, “My Own Elegy” and “Elegiac Stanzas on Myself”. This tendency to elegise the living carries over into Dermody’s Habbie elegies as he takes up and expands the joke suggested by Ramsay and Burns whereby the speaker is comically resurrected at the conclusion of the poem. Dermody expands the single stanza renunciations of Ramsay and Burns into “recantatory postscripts” of several stanzas in “John Baynham’s Epitaph” and “The Death of Poor Davie, The Killeigh Piper”. In both poems the mourning speaker is shocked by the reappearance of his supposedly deceased friend. In “John Baynham’s Epitaph” the distraught speaker enters the local hostelry to break the news of his friend’s death only to see the subject of his elegy emerge from a drunken slumber beneath a table. Baynham then inclemently demands that the speaker recants his elegy or he will administer “a drubbing” (Dermody, I, 210). Similarly, in the elegy on Davie the piper, the speaker is walking towards the local pub after bewailing the loss of his friend when the drone of

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Davie’s pipes startles him. After the initial shock of the reunion the two sit down together “full spruce and gay”. The poem ends with the speaker affirming that Davie is alive: Though all the town in well-feign’d sorrow, Swore Death had pink’d his body thorough, And laid him flatter than the furrow, There’s no believing: In come, and you shall see to-morrow Poor Davie living. (Dermody, I, 221)

This tendency to resurrect the subject and to create humorous elegies on living characters is one of the most intriguing paradoxes of the vernacular elegy. Certainly they resist Joshua Scodel's notion that epitaphs “provide strong closure. The subject of an epitaph, the ultimate state of the dead, thematically evokes finality” (Scodel, 86). In Bakhtin’s writings folk culture and the grotesque realist aesthetic have a strong political dimension. The political nature of folk humour is emphasised by Bakhtin’s notion of carnival. According to Bakhtin, folk culture resists and inverts the culture and authority of the ruling elite through the carnivalesque. This is pertinent to Habbie elegies which continually celebrate the conviviality and sociability generated by alcohol. This celebration runs counter to the prevailing code of morality which the Kirk of Scotland endeavoured to uphold in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Sections of the Kirk would certainly have frowned upon many of the characters and activities described in Habbie elegies. By describing, and indeed celebrating alcohol, music and sexuality the Habbie elegies subtly assert a different set of values to those championed by official religious authority. Liam McIlvanney has illustrated how Burns uses folk humour to humanise contemporary European leaders and strip them of their epic status in the song “Why Shouldna Poor Folk Mowe”. This is an example of Bakhtinian degradation; a process by which forms of authority are demystified and humanised by folk humour. It is a process by which forms of authority are brought down to earth. (Bakhtin, 20) This certainly occurs in Habbie elegies, particularly in those poems on the local representatives of church and state authority such as Kirk treasurer’s men and hangmen. In these poems the impersonal forces of church and state authority are demystified and endowed with a human face. Ramsay’s John Cowper, Robert in “An Habbiack Elegy” and Dermody’s parish clerk, John

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Baynham, illustrate how the institutions of authority are assimilated into and infiltrated by the folk culture through these individuals who tend to enjoy the activities officially denounced by the institutions they represent. Dermody depicts Killeigh’s church clerk, John Baynham, presiding over a raucous and convivial company of tipplers at Lory’s pub. This infiltration of folk culture into official culture is even more obvious in “A Habbiack Elegy” as the subject is simultaneously the enforcer of local religious authority and a widely recognised “whoremaster”. Furthermore, it is strongly implied that he is a serial father of illegitimate children. Robert thus represents the triumph of the regenerating common folk over the official culture that forbids fornication. It is not only the institutions of civic and religious authority that are humanised and degraded in Habbie elegies. These poems also consistently demystify non-human forms of authority, in particular death and Satan. In Habbie elegies folk humour reduces and humanises death and Satan. Bakhtin argues that folk humour represents “the victory of laughter over fear” and “the defeat of divine and human power, of authoritarian commandments and prohibitions, of death and punishment after death, hell and all that is more terrifying than the earth itself.” (Bakhtin, 90-91) Death and Satan are stripped of their authority and power by the demystifying folk humour of the Habbie elegies. These personifications often occur in the form of rhetorical interjections by the speaker on behalf of the subject. Death is often censured and upbraided for prematurely taking the subject. Thus Ramsay’s speaker in “Elegy on John Cowper” exclaims “shame faw yer chandler chafts, o Death”, whilst in “Elegy on Captain Matthew Henderson” he is more formally addressed as “thou tyrant fell and bloody”. The moment of expiry is also evoked with a degree of humour as a personified death literally and physically causes expiry by striking, choking or hurling his victims into the grave or a metaphorical representation of it. In Dermody’s “A Lamentable Elegy on Nicholas, the Killeigh Taylor”, for example, the speaker comically personifies Death and ponders why the subject, Nicholas Surlock, did not put up more resistance: When the old surly haughre came, Why didst thou not defend thy fame; His dog’s ears with thy scissars maim, Or hurl thy goose? Ah no! poor wight, thou went’st quite tame Into his noose. (Dermody, I, 216)

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Death is reduced to an “old surly haughre” as the speaker suggests that his subject might have physically resisted his assailant. In this poem Dermody also sustains an extended play on the similarity between the name of his subject and the colloquial name for Satan, “Old Nick”. The speaker imagines his subject condemned to Hell for his adulterous relationships. The poem, however, in typical folk humour style, strips the eternal punishment threatened by the religious authorities of all its terror. The speaker imagines Nicholas the tailor continuing his vocation in the realm of Satan. He imagines Nicholas getting well paid by working for great historical figures such as Caesar and Alexander the Great, and even for Satan himself. The speaker anticipates that “Now you may deck the prince of soot / With goodly clothes from head to foot” (Dermody, I, 213). The notion of Hell as a place of torment is inverted as it is depicted as a sexually liberated society, which suits the character of Nicholas, a serial cuckolder. The traditional heat of Hell is transformed into a heat that symbolises sexual passion through the “brimstone-blooded jade” that the speaker hopes his subject will meet. The traditional torment and pain associated with Hell is transformed and is linked to the passion of the sexual act as the speaker says: “May the coquettes of lowland woo thee, / And am’rous scratch thy cheeks so ruddy / With tooth and nail” (Dermody, I, 214). Dermody’s elegy seems to oppose official religious authority by stripping Hell of its terror and depicting it as a place where Nicholas Surlock will thrive rather than suffer. The Habbie elegy, therefore, was an important genre in Scottish and Irish poetry from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth. The genre emerged as an alternative to the standard English elegy which was unable to incorporate the humour and sociability that mingled with the mourning during many traditional Scottish and Irish wakes such as the one described in James Orr’s “The Irish Cottier’s Death and Burial”. The humour in Habbie elegies is not typically designed to be disrespectful or vindictive in the manner of many mock-elegies. Habbie elegies are more profitably read if they are considered as expressions of Bakhtinian folk culture. This is evident in the focus on the anatomical functions of the human body, in the interplay of death and rebirth and in the defiance of official culture. The Habbie elegy, therefore, was a potent vehicle in the articulation of public skaith in many Scottish and Irish communities.

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References Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Rabelais and his World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Burns, Robert. 1969. Complete Poems and Songs. Ed James Kinsley. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Crawford, Thomas. 1994. Burns: A Study of the Poems and Songs. Edinburgh: Canongate Academic Press. Dermody, Thomas. 1807. Harp of Erin. Ed. James Grant Raymond. 2 Vols. London. Gall, Richard. 1819. Poems and Songs by the Late Richard Gall. Edinburgh. Orr, James. 1806. Poems on Various Subjects. Belfast. Hammond, Jeffrey A. 2000. The American Puritan Elegy: A Literary and CulturalStudy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McIlvanney, Liam. “‘Why Shouldna poor folk mowe?’: An Example of Folk Humour in Burns.” Scottish Literary Journal, 23, no.2 (1996), 4353. MacLachlan, Christopher, ed. 2002. Before Burns: Eighteenth Century Scottish Poetry. Edinburgh: Canongate Classics. MacLaine, Allan. 1985. Allan Ramsay. Boston: Twayne Publishers. McCordick, David. 1996. Scottish Literature: An Anthology. Vol I. New York: Peter Lang. Noble, Andrew and Patrick Scott Hogg, eds. 2001. The Canongate Burns: The Complete Poems and Songs of Robert Burns. Edinburgh: Canongate Classics. Scodel, Joshua. 1991. The English Poetic Epitaph: Commemoration and Conflict from Jonson to Wordsworth. New York: Cornell University Press. Swift, Jonathan. 1996. “A Satirical Elegy on the Death of a Late Famous General”. The Norton Anthology of Poetry. Eds. Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter and Jon Stallworthy. 4th Edition. New York: Norton. p.528. Watkin, William. 2001. “Poppypetal.” Last Before America: Irish and American Writing. Eds. Fran Brearton and Eammon Hughes. Belfast: Blackstaff Press. pp.36-37. Wilson, Alexander. 1876. The Poems and Literary Prose of Alexander Wilson. Ed Alexander B. Grosart. Paisley.

“AMONG THE MANY WONDERS OF WORLD”: SEAMUS HEANEY’S THE BURIAL AT THEBES ASHLEY LANGE

The story of Antigone, a young woman who would defy a tyrannical government and surrender her life to bury a beloved brother, is one that has been reinterpreted countless times since its creation. Her grief-stricken figure is not exclusive to the work of Sophocles, as she appears during the Classical period in both Statius’ Thebaid and Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes.1 However, it is Sophocles’ portrayal of the conflict between Antigone’s devotion to family and Creon’s responsibility to maintain the social order that she threatens which has inspired operas, ballets and stage variants, as well as philosophical examinations of the nature of humanity. Some of the enduring power of the tale must then lie in both its universally applicable themes, (human rights and the individual in conflict with society), as well as in the particulars of the Sophoclean text and its treatment of the story as a tragedy. George Steiner explains the appeal of the Sophoclean tragedy (and Greek tragedy in general) as having to do with the fact that it has “at its disposal economies of symbolic deployment, as immediate as those of the Mass” (Steiner, 268). The symbolic nature of the characters provides a way into the text, making it possible for Antigone to assume the role of Everywoman and Creon that of any government. Translators are allowed a certain freedom due to the archetypal nature of the characters and plot. The essential narrative is strong enough to require little outside context to render it intelligible to the audience. This inherent strength allows the play to be transformed, by authorial additions, from the general to the specific without sacrificing structural integrity.

1

In the former, Antigone is spared and Creon killed as an unreasonable tyrant. The latter has Antigone’s burial of her brother occurring after the action of the play, with the opinion of the Chorus divided between Creon and Antigone.

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“Among the Many Wonders of World”: Seamus Heaney’s The Burial at Thebes

Modern versions frequently relocate the play to apply its action to a contemporary dilemma. Jean Anouilh’s translation placed a war-torn Thebes within Occupied France without lessening the power of the play.2 His subversion of the plot, with Antigone losing her resolve and Creon ‘winning’ the right to carry on his rule, becomes a powerful statement about the nature of resistance. The play cannot have the expected end because one of the characters has failed to act her part to the fullest. Bertolt Brecht’s version, set in Germany during the Third Reich, likewise utilizes the familiarity and “iconic” nature of the work as a means to raise questions about political dissent (Brennan 2004).3 Brecht’s play, apart from placing its first scene in a German household, uses Friedrich Hölderlin’s translation of Antigone into the Swabian dialect as its source (Brecht, 197).4 Athol Fugard’s The Island also addresses the linguistic as well as the political by setting the tragedy in both a South African prison and in the local vernacular.5 The classical structure lying beneath Anouilh, Brecht and Fugard’s commentaries on the contemporary assists in lending the prestige and historical importance of the Greek original to the current and local. Likewise, the usage of dialect in creating a translation not only gives a location to the action outside both Thebes and the immediate place of production, but also seeks to raise the status of the variant language itself. Irish translations of Antigone, which have proliferated in the past twenty years, attempt to answer the old questions of power and loyalties as well as perform new interrogations of place and language. Seamus Heaney, in the production of his own translation of Antigone, has created a text that uses the universality of the original to interpret the dynamics of the modern world. This version follows in the spirit of the ‘protest’ Antigones of Brecht and Fugard, in both its political awareness and its usage of the vernacular, but rejects many of the dramatic devices its predecessors used to achieve their effects. Seamus Heaney’s 2004 Burial at Thebes, rather than limiting the play’s application to a single place or to 2

Jean Anouilh, (1967). Brennan says of Greek tragedy that it is not “psychological per se. Rather it [is] iconic, mythological and religious.” 4 The usage of this dialect is significant in that this version was written during the creation of the German state and national identity. 5 These translations also use additional characters and scenes to enhance the play. Anouilh’s adds the character of a nurse and makes Antigone a nervous schoolgirl. Brecht adds both a distancing monologue at the beginning and a scene set in Germany. Fugard’s version presents Antigone as a play within a play. 3

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gender concerns (as previous versions by Tom Paulin and Brendan Kennelly, respectively, had done) seeks to engage with the world in the manner of the original, but also reapplies the play’s lessons to the modern political climate. Burial at Thebes returns to the Hegalian interpretation of the Sophoclean original and treats Antigone as a double tragedy that sees Creon and Antigone as the two conflicting sides of Man, while addressing both recent history and current politics. Hegel had argued that “What makes [Antigone] tragic is that each (Creon and Antigone) did what each had to do, and both sides were in the right [….]” (Pinkard, 144). This clash of the individual against society is further complicated by the introduction of the figure of the individual at war with his or her self. Creon declares war upon his own house, as well as Antigone, in an attempt to discover those who would betray Thebes. Antigone’s struggle lies between her desire to perform the rites that must be observed in deference to the gods and family and her confession that she would not have broken the law for a husband or son. Heaney’s location of these conflicts as neither part of agitation for women’s rights, nor as addressing specifically Northern Irish concerns, allows for the play to act as a generalized statement about power, its abuses and ultimate accountability. Heaney defends his Creon, unlike Paulin and Kennelly, by saying he “[…] of course, has a point, and a responsibility. His tragedy, as the Chorus and others repeatedly point out, has to do with his overbearing rather than his basic position” (Heaney, Programme). For Creon, the polis must be preserved, and it is only when the polis’ wellbeing is threatened by the anger of the gods that he can subvert his own law. Hegel identifies this obedience to the gods of social and political life as being one of two ideas bound together in human experience. The second is what motivates Antigone: “the instinctive powers of feeling, love and kinship - the dei inferi, the gods of the underworld […]” (Paulin, 2003).6 Burial at Thebes increases the extent of the similarity between Creon and Antigone, with the title changed from that of the heroine’s name to the act that the two will have each performed by the close. In production, this duality was downplayed, with the last, lingering spotlight on the hanging body of Antigone that had been raised through a trap door in the stage. Heaney disagreed with this directorial decision, saying that there should have been “preferably no winching up of the hanged heroine at the end [….] it seems 6

Paulin cites Hegel’s division of Human law and Divine law (Hegel, 467).

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to me she should be a living principle rather than a dead weight.”7 The non-presence of Antigone’s body on stage at the end of the play, unlike the visible corpses of Eurydice and Haemon, allows her a ‘life’ beyond that of the physical body. A living idea of Antigone, her existence more important by what is seen to occur in and as a result of her absence, remains to balance the king who must continue to live in spite of his pleas for death. The responsibilities of family have not been visibly ‘killed’, nor do they remain as a separate physical entity, but have rather been assumed into a Creon forced into humanity. By asserting that both Creon and Antigone are correct, Heaney makes the concession that both are equally in the wrong. The opening speech by Creon is a frightening statement of intent to destroy anything that is labelled ‘other’. Creon satisfies the need for comfort by providing a solution to the instability that Thebes has recently endured. Indeed, by superseding individual rights for the ostensible good of the masses, his actions are reminiscent of those of Hitler following Germany’s post-war economic depression. Creon’s language is vague enough to allow “traitors and subversives” (11) to refer both to those who “terrorized us” (34) and to those who perform acts of protest. The Chorus emerges here as representative of a polis that has been terrorized by an invasion led by a traitor. Their patriotism and isolationism comes from a desire for security. The polis has moved away from active and constructive activity, content to play the role of victim with Creon offering protection. The king asserts his rule by ascribing any detrimental events to entities from without the community, thus providing an extra-societal villain who is plotting disorder. Such a villain is necessary to maintain the feeling that he is creating the desired stability. Creon first places the blame for Polyneices’ burial on a citizen who represents the ‘other’, one lured away from the collective by the outside influence of money. The betrayer who would be bought is as much excluded from the self/society as Polyneices has been for attacking Thebes. Antigone appears as a threat by acting against policies designed to comfort a traumatized public that is still in the sway of a siege mentality. She plays the enemy from the political without to Creon’s enemy from within who is supported by a passive populace. Heaney notes in his essay for the Abbey Theatre’s programme the absence of a version of Antigone by Yeats as being a factor which allowed him a “road [that] was open” (Programme). Yeats had completed 7

Heaney, in a letter to the author, 12/8/04.

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translations of the other two Theban plays, Oedipus the King (1928) and Oedipus at Colonus (1934), but had only translated one of Antigone’s choral odes. Heaney acknowledges that there have been many versions of the story produced for the Irish stage, North and South, all of which were considered before undertaking the project. He seems to indicate, however, that in the absence of a version produced by Yeats, there has been no true Irish Antigone. Appearing as “From the ‘Antigone’”, Yeats’s partial version acts as a commentary on the devastating civil war that Ireland had just experienced, drawing connections between a mythical Thebes that has endured fratricidal strife with an Ireland trying to emerge from mythology. The divisions of families along Pro- and Anti-Treaty lines - “Brother and brother, friend and friend, / Family and family, / City and city” (Yeats, 391) - find their echoes in the fatal struggle between Polyneices and Eteocles, the lines of Creon and Oedipus and the cities of Argos and Thebes. The concluding section of “A Woman Young and Old”,8 Yeats’s “From the ‘Antigone’”, is an anti-resolution that is jarring in its displacement. Antigone fits as neither a young woman with a future nor an old woman facing death, but rather is a synthesis of the two as a young woman at the end of her life. Rather than concluding with finality, the end is linked to the beginning to create a cycle. A tragedy has occurred, but in terms of the civil war that has led to the deaths of the brothers and has doomed the sister. The tragic heroes of Yeats are Polyneices and Eteocles, and the action is accomplished before the play begins. The actual plot of the play, the struggle between Creon and Antigone, is almost incidental. This failure to transcend history and the local, as well as the absence of a moment of healing catharsis, enables Heaney’s translation. The image of a North under siege most closely associated with the Unionist community is recognizable in Heaney’s portrait of a Thebes that still sees itself at risk of betrayal. Burial at Thebes reconciles this trope with the idea of a besieged Nationalist population by joining the story of Antigone to that of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill. Heaney cites the structure of Ní Chonaill’s Caoineadh Airt Ui Laoghaire as providing a way into both the Greek and the Victorian English9 texts, saying: “what gave me the poetic go-ahead was the sudden discovery of a note that connected the distressed heroine of Sophocles’ tragedy in the fourth century BC and the author of the great eighteenth century lament we know by its Irish title” (Programme). The lament for a husband son and brother murdered for 8

The date of completion for this section is placed at December of 1927 (Yeats, 614). 9 R.C. Jebb’s version was chosen for the literal translation of the Greek text.

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refusing to surrender property not allowed to Catholics becomes the voice of a bereaved Antigone that mourns a brother that was robbed of his rightful inheritance. 10 While a version translated by an Irish author, Burial at Thebes is not an Irish vernacular version in the same sense as that produced by Paulin. It is neither completely concerned with the North, nor is non-standard English markedly present. Dialect in Burial is most utilized by Heaney’s extension of the notion of the vernacular to be inclusive of the Irish language. Heaney draws his version from the conflation of what he sees upon visual appraisal of the Greek text and Ní Chonaill’s Caoineadh. This text provided Heaney with the initial rhythms of Burial: [I]t was the drive and pitch of the Irish verse that clinched it: in the threebeat line of Eibhlin Dhubh’s keen I heard a note that the stricken Antigone might sound in the speedy, haunted opening movement of the play [….] Gradually then, this voice of a woman in mourning becomes the voice of a woman outraged [….] it was then easy enough to play variations, making the Chorus, for example, speak a version of the four beat, alliterating, Old English line [….] traditional iambic pentameter […] seemed right for Creon, who needs to hold the line in every sense [….] (Programme)

This again highlights resonances with the “two traditions” of Northern Ireland, with Antigone drawn from the Irish-speaking world, and Creon from the English. Heaney’s “main concern had been to write the verse in such a way that it told the actor how to pace and stress it”.11 By using iambic pentameter, Creon wields his authority in the “Elizabethean English” of the plantations (Heaney, 1972: 31). Heaney’s Creon maintains this rhythm until the death of Haemon where Creon’s voice is integrated with that of Antigone. While not the native tongue, the fact that the language has crystallized to remain closer to the English of the 16th century marks it as distinctively Northern. The rhythm itself evokes the plays of Shakespeare where it was assigned to the generals and kings and its use for Creon’s lines serves to strengthen his power. Indeed, the same expression of power dynamic that exists in Shakespeare exists in Burial, as the guard is assigned a low comic vernacular. Antigone is here 10 The laments of Art’s wife and sister resemble the mourning of Antigone and Polyneices’ wife, Argia in Statius’ Thebaid. (Steiner, 146). A Middle-Irish language manuscript of the Latin Thebaid (Togail na Tebe), c. 1487, was published in 1922. An Irish Antigone was published in 1926. 11 Heaney, letter.

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exempted from this dynamic by being the ‘other’ with regards to speech. She fits in the Irish, but not the English, framework. Heaney contrasts the language of Antigone and Creon by saying, “Creon has a steady, regular form of utterance. Antigone’s pleas are in a shorter, more intense register [….]” (2004, Interview). The former’s long lines express a control, political and verbal, that is lacking in the speech of the latter. It is when Creon can no longer maintain his hold that his full lines break away into the no less valid but restrained and ‘captive’ lines of Antigone. The unambiguous Antigones of Brecht and Anouilh, in which Creon is merely a morally bankrupt fascist and from which most later protest Antigones derive, are not overt influences on Heaney’s play. A pantomime, recalling Anouilh’s prefacing account of a sexual encounter between Haemon and Antigone before the action of the play and Brecht’s distancing device of a brief scene of two women returning from an air raid shelter, began the Abbey production. Heaney says he “would have preferred [the play] to have gone straight to the action” (2004, Letter) and to have bypassed this visual connection with previous ‘protest’ translations. Tom Paulin has likewise said that Heaney’s Burial “does […] not mak[e] Antigone relevant to the very, very delicate situation in the North of Ireland now. It’s much broader and much more universal” and that it is not “politically Irish” (Paulin, 2004). Rather than the text clearly defining a location for the action, as in Anouilh and Brecht’s respective Third Reich France and Germany or Paulin’s Northern Ireland, Heaney utilizes his vernacular version to address a larger audience. Burial at Thebes moves from Yeats’ riven Free State and larger divided Ireland and seeks to treat a fragmented global society in which tragedy is imminent rather than solely historic. The place-specific language of Heaney’s first play, The Cure at Troy (Heaney, 1990), with its references to “a hunger-striker’s father” and a “police widow in veils” (Heaney, 1990: 77), is replaced in Burial at Thebes with word choices that encourage multiple readings. Cure acts as a statement about Northern Ireland, most prominently in its references to the Unionist slogan ‘Ulster says no’, with Philoctetes’ repetitive usage of negative language and Neoptolemus’ query: “Are you going to stay here saying no forever […]?” (Heaney, 1990: 69). Heaney builds upon this idea in production notes for Cure, saying that he “wanted to have verse that would sound natural if spoken in a Northern Ireland accent. But this is not suggesting that actors should try to do Northern Ireland accents: that would be a deplorable distortion” (Heaney, 2002, 174). Written for and produced by the Field

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Day Company, Cure at Troy makes the North its first and primary concern; a production from elsewhere must take the shape of the outside world concerning itself, in its own accents, with the issues of the North. Produced by the Abbey as part of both their centennial celebrations (providing in part the need to reconcile the play with the legacy of it’s founding member, W. B. Yeats) and their “Abbey and Europe Season” (Cox, 2004), Burial takes an altered approach. Burial at Thebes is no more about Northern Ireland than about any other divided country or occupier/occupied relationship.12 The use of references to terrorism and imagery of surveillance are as reminiscent of the North’s watchtowers as they are of the United States’ “War on Terror”. The similarity of conditions and protests in the prison at Guantánamo Bay to those of the North in the late seventies and early eighties,13 including the lack of prisoner of war status and the hunger strikes by internees, also places this version at one with larger global concerns in which patterns of power struggle and protest are repeated almost verbatim. The choice of a Greek drama to portray this struggle serves to strengthen the congruency. Burial at Thebes sees, most prominently, the United States replacing Paulin and Kennelly’s Irish-identified Thebes. Heaney’s Creon derives in greater part from George W. Bush than any Northern Irish politician or church hierarchy. The American populace, like the Thebans, continues to live with an exaggerated siege mentality that has been used to spur patriotic, and necessarily exclusive, feeling. Heaney mentions the invasion of Iraq specifically as providing the language to fill the chosen rhythms, saying in the programme notes that [j]ust as Creon forces the citizens of Thebes into an either/or situation in relation to Antigone, the Bush administration in the White House was using the same tactic to forward its argument for war in Iraq […]either you

12

The poster used by the Abbey to advertise the play, depicting a woman’s head bound in ropes, recalled both the head clad in chain mail of the Norton edition of Heaney’s Beowulf, as well as the ropes binding the bodies of his bog poems. Heaney tried to have this design changed, as he felt “unease” about a “gagged Antigone: she was, after all, the most unsilenceable voice in Thebes” (Heaney, letter). The silent victimhood of Northern women, does not apply to his vision of Antigone. 13 Initially, the right to wear turbans was also denied, resulting in protest through hunger strike (Anonymous, 2002)

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are a patriot, a loyal citizen and regard Antigone as an enemy of the state […] or else you yourselves are traitorous [….] (Programme)

Iraq was not the immediate source of the 11th September attacks, but the event has become the justification for a ‘preventative’ invasion, just as Creon insists upon making an example of Antigone for the polis to lessen the chance of dissent amongst his citizens. Creon’s speech, along with his concentration on vigilance and nationalism, upon taking the throne is drawn from those of Bush. Paulin concurs with this identification, saying that not only is it “Bush as Creon, more I think than Antigone as the protester […]”, but that “the Twin Towers are there right in the very early chorus” (Paulin). The desire to “honour patriots in life and death” (11) echoes the sentiments of Bush’s first State of the Union Address with its promise of “never forget[ting] the debt we owe […] all who gave their lives for freedom” (Bush, 2002). “Freedom” is here embodied by the American nation and government with the opposition characterized as “wrong as they are evil” (Bush). The following invasion of Iraq is justified by paranoia caused by the existence of possible threats. Bush’s declaration that he would “not wait on events, while dangers gather” as it would only lead to a “sense of security [that] would be false and temporary” (Bush) can be seen as the rationale behind Creon’s obsessive hunt for those who would betray Thebes within his own house. Heaney’s focus on Creon and his return to viewing the king as also being a victim of the tragedy serves to highlight the plight of Antigone, as the connections made between the Theban king and Bush extends this tragic potential to those that would be otherwise classified as evil. Unlike the versions of Sophocles produced by Brecht, Anouilh, Paulin and Kennelly, Heaney allows for a subtle delineation between right and wrong. The non-violent protest, in this instance, can be interpreted in light of Conor Cruise O’Brien’s argument with Antigone’s act as never being truly non-violent, as it will predictably lead to bloodshed and death (at least her own,), as well as a threaten the law by which Creon intends to preserve the all-important State. O’Brien states “Creon’s authority, after all, was legitimate, even if he had abused it.” 14 But this can also be read as being the only result possible for the individuals who assert themselves and their 14

Conor Cruise O’Brien, ‘Civil Rights: The Crossroads’, States of Ireland, (London: Hutchinson, 1972), 157. O’Brien, while granting that Creon has legal authority, also terms the civil rights protesters “militant[s]” (O’Brien, 167, in reference to Ivan Cooper) and would have Antigone/Devlin mean only Catholics when referring to ‘the people’ (O’Brien, 184).

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values in the worlds that Creon and his ilk have manufactured. Some reviewers liken Antigone, in this respect, to the trend of suicide bombers and Creon to the Western world. Paulin’s observation that the associations between Bush and Creon are stronger than those of Antigone and war protestors is valid in that Antigone is allowed greater influence than the ordinary, individual protestor. She is an active threat to Theban stability with a lethal potential. It is useful to consider what Neil Corcoran touches upon in his Guardian review of Burial at Thebes, as he wonder[s] if suicide bombers too might perceive themselves as Antigones […] her god, as Creon insists, is Hades, the god of death. How might she behave if she stayed alive and Creon never relented? For Conor Cruise O’Brien, Antigone is ‘an uncompromising element in our being, as dangerous in her way as Creon’. Her other god, Eros, is dangerous too- as Heaney […] knows when his Chorus is drawn admiringly to her but also horrified by her potential for damage [….] (Corcoran, 2004)

The people, increasingly women,15 who have committed these acts, are both reviled as inhuman and celebrated as martyrs. Like Antigone, they are able to reach the polis in the form of those connected to them and only their death can create their power. A controversial art installation in Stockholm, titled “Snow White and the Madness of Truth”, explored this divide in January of 2004 (Stockholm Museum of National Antiquities, 2004). Like the mythological framework of Antigone, the fairy-tale inspired title of the exhibit allows the subject, though seemingly specific, to have an impact beyond the immediate geographical location. The installation consisted of a smiling portrait of the Palestinian suicide bomber Hanadi Jaradat afloat in a pool of blood, set to Bach's Cantata 199, “Mein Herze Schwimmt im Blut”. The pairing of text giving Jaradat’s story of rebellion against powerlessness ( her fiancé, brother and cousin have been killed) with the words of the “cantata [that] begins: ‘My heart swims in blood / because the brood of my sins / in God's holy eyes / makes me into a monster’” (Jones, 2004), is illustrative of the contradiction inherent in discussion of Antigone’s acts. Antigone is at once justified in performing a love-driven act that is not itself violent, but also as culpable as Jaradat and Creon because she is aware of the inevitable results of her actions. One act cannot be removed from the other, as this oppressive rule provides the conditions necessary for Antigone’s protest to become 15

Women are becoming ‘martyrs’ with an increasing frequency motivated, in the case of many Palestinian woman and the so-called ‘Black Widows’ of Chechnya, by the loss of family members.

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deadly. Catastrophe is only inevitable if Creon refuses to change his stance: in the absence of his laws Antigone would never have rebelled. Conversely, had Antigone obeyed the public law and recognized that Creon could not change his decree, he would not have made an example of her. Antigone more than superficially resembles Creon and her actions often find a direct analogue in those of the Theban king. The burial of her brother, which serves to incite her own ‘burial’, is mirrored in Creon’s entombment of Antigone, which leads in turn to his eventual interring of Polyneices. Heaney’s Antigone, professing to uphold the worship of the gods, blasphemes by likening herself directly to Niobe, rather than make the indirect reference of Sophocles’ heroine.16 The Theban king also openly challenges the gods he has professed to worship, saying (as he does in Sophocles) that he will stand defiant in the face of any divine retribution.17 Her first speech offers Ismene the same stark dichotomy as that given by their uncle in his accession speech: to be with or to be against. When Ismene attempts to join the protest, Antigone is unwilling to surrender any of the power gained by martyrdom to her sister. Softened in Paulin’s version, Heaney’s (and Sophocles’) Antigone brutally excludes Ismene from the private sphere as Creon has rejected Antigone from the public. Burial’s restoration of the son that Creon lost in the attack against Thebes, who is absent from the version by Paulin, rationalizes and humanizes his political stand and makes it as comprehensible as Antigone’s rebellion. Creon is not solely driven by power and the need to retain control, but rather has endured a personal loss that augments the national loss. Impartiality in such a situation is impossible. The loss of Megareus allies him with the heartbroken and marginalized Antigone at the same time as it forces him into hostility against the ideology she represents. One tragedy drives the other, with Polyneices responsible for the death of Megareus, who is in turn responsible for Antigone’s execution and the suicides of Haemon and Eurydice. Creon is increasingly put at odds with himself by the futility of trying to fill a personal loss by inflicting pain upon others. Antigone is likewise divided, as she has lost 16

Heaney’s Antigone says: “I am like Niobe,/ Niobe turned to stone” (37). Sophocles’ Antigone refers the goddess indirectly as “the daughter of Tantalus” (Jebb, 151), but is still chided by the chorus for this vanity. 17 “Not if Zeus himself were to send his eagle/ To scavenge the flesh and shit it down,/ Not even that would put me back on my word.” (44)

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her brothers (physically), her sister (ideologically) and any hope of children of her own. Her attempts to unify her family by preparing Polyneices for burial as she had done for Eteocles, comes at the expense of creating the losses of and for her sister, Haemon, Eurydice and Creon. The play turns upon this mutual and self-inflicted fall, and it is in the moments immediately preceding the news that Creon has failed to save both Antigone and his son that the Chorus includes the word katharsios in their chant. Jebb translates this invocation to Bacchus as one in which he is implored to come to Thebes with “healing feet” (Jebb, 203). Here there is a play on the feet seemingly at the source of the curse (Oedipus), the feet of the gods, and the metrical foot of poetry. Thomas Kilroy connects the idea of catharsis to Heaney’s renaming of the play, saying “[a]s in The Cure at Troy, Heaney has changed the original title. By doing so he emphasises the healing, restorative product of tragedy rather than the dark journey itself [….]” (Kilroy, 2004). The joining of Antigone and Creon in this moment (as well as in the altered title) becomes a statement of reconciliation that admits both have done wrong and that this must be recognized before katharsios can occur; both must fall victim to their individual fates. Antigone completes the fall of the house of Oedipus, her sister already having been cast out from the line. Creon’s own household follows the same trajectory and he is left the mirror image of Oedipus, broken and guilty, and finally guided by Antigone to ultimate redemption. Neither Antigone nor Creon alone can provide the inspiration for this healing. Antigone’s lamentation of her “last walk in the light” (37) does not hinder Creon from carrying out her sentence or mocking her funeral song. The king likewise lacks the divine power to spur reconciliation, as Creon admits that besides being “wrong-headed” in matters of politics and family, he has been “wrong-footed by the heavens” (53). Heaney, rather than giving control of reconciliation to either Creon or Antigone, the play’s embittered extremists, empowers the larger community to perform their own healing. He has further altered the Chorus’ line, transforming the “healing feet” into Dionysus “danc[ing] the world to rights” (49). This dance recalls the origins of the Chorus in dance and their side-to-side movements indicated by the strophe and antistrophe. Thus, a Chorus representative of the people, using the movements and words supplied by the dramatist, effects the change, as they are ultimately responsible and uniquely capable of healing the wounds of the past and present.

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Reinterpretation of Antigone has been driven onwards by the continued existence of occupation and the repression of language, bodies and political ideologies, and each version contains new emphases as authors seek to adapt the play to their own times. Unlike the versions produced by Fugard, Anouilh and Brecht, there is no insertion by Heaney of a framing device or extraneous characters. The focus is instead on the manipulation of language to alter the play in such a way that it takes on new applications. Friedrich Hölderlin, whose translation was utilized by Brecht, had adopted Antigone for his own during the early and fragile stages of German unification and applied Sophocles’ themes of individualism and state responsibility to the contemporary political situation with few extra-textual additions. Heaney’s play, while conceived in the spirit of the ‘protest’ translations, owes its structure to Hölderlin’s vernacular play. Heaney’s version, like that of Hölderlin (or indeed any translation), is sometimes more “precisely Sophoclean” than those rendered in Standard English because they retain a truer sense of the text’s essence (Steiner, 86). What may have been ‘untranslatable’, such as Antigone’s use of Greek grammar to either refer to herself and Ismene as a unit or to distance herself from her sister, can be altered to both retain the intended effect and imbue the play with specific meanings. Heaney retains the original Sophoclean concern with language and gender, but also reintroduces the figure of Creon as one who is not totally in the wrong. Sophocles’ Creon, like Heaney’s, is sworn to protect Thebes from any impending threat and acts accordingly to maintain the order of Theban society. Each subsequent version, while paying homage to Sophocles, also bears the indelible mark of the time in which it was produced. Written twenty years later than the 1984 plays of Brendan Kennelly and Tom Paulin, Heaney’s version of Antigone finds evidence in the current affairs of the United States that such governmental omnipotence is being brought into existence. His translation then serves to comment on a world that has fulfilled George Orwell’s predictions of surveillance and the omnipresence of government in society in the forms of such legislation as ‘The Patriot Act’. Not only are the bodies of the citizens controlled, but the usage of vernacular speech patterns also establishes that there is a linguistic control, at the most basic and primal level, from which the individual may deviate at their own risk.

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Heaney’s translation is not only intimately connected to these previous productions, but consciously follows Yeats’s unfinished translation. Heaney takes the desire for a connection to history to an extreme. Not only does Heaney seek to engage with recent history, but also to comment on modern world as well as the ancient past. The North is still a valid location for the action, as Antigone remains “beyond the pale” (22), but it is far from being the focus; Ireland is merely one location that could stand in for Heaney’s Thebes. While Brendan Kennelly reads the conflict between Creon and Antigone as male against female, Heaney maintains a balance in his treatment of gender. The source of the divine in Burial is identified as the female, with the gods themselves born from “the womb of earth”(17), but the ordered and male-identified society is also correct in its own fashion. The structure of Heaney’s play indicates a hope for closure and the integration of the lessons of history. The invocations to Bacchus of the first Choral ode and again at the close of the play join the beginning of the tragedy to the end. This mirrors Heaney’s usage of his translation to connect the texts composed in times of civil unrest (Sophocles, Yeats, Paulin and Kennelly) to each other to create a continuity from past to present. Heaney’s return of the play to a version closer to that of Sophocles joins the immediate present to antiquity and demonstrates the need for a human tragedy to play out in familiar terms and tones, even as it follows a well-travelled historical trajectory.

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Corcoran, Neil. 2004. “The State We’re In”. The Guardian. 1 May Cox, Pat. 2004. “Ireland’s Uniquely European Year”. The Burial at Thebes: Abbey Theatre Programme

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Fagles, Robert. 1984. The Three Theban Plays: Antigone, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus. London: Penguin Heaney, Seamus. 1972. Wintering Out. London: Faber. 1990. —. 1990. The Cure at Troy.. London: Faber. 2002. —. 2003. ‘The Cure at Troy: Production Notes in No Particular Order’. Amid Our Troubles. Eds. Marianne McDonald and J. Michael Walton. London: Methuen. 171-80 —. 2004. The Burial at Thebes. London: Faber —. 2004. ‘A Greek Tragedy for Our Times”. (Interview). Irish Times. 3 April —. 2004. ‘A Note by Seamus Heaney’. The Burial at Thebes: Abbey Theatre Programme —. 2004. Letter to the author. 12 August Hegel, G.W.F. 1910. Phenomenology of the Mind: Volume 2. Ed. J.B. Baillie. London: Swan and Sonnenschein Jebb, R. C. 1888. Sophocles: The Plays and Fragments, Part III: The Antigone. Cambridge Jones, Jonathan. 2004. “It’s Inciting Murder”. The Guardian. 22 January Kennelly, Brendan. 1986. Sophocles’ Antigone. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Kilroy, Tom. 2004. ‘A Young Girl Before the King’. Irish Times. 10 April O’Brien, Conor Cruise. 1972. ‘Civil Rights: The Crossroads’, States of Ireland, (London: Hutchinson Paulin, Tom. 1984. The Riot Act. London: Faber. 2003. ‘Whose side are you on?’. The Independent. 28 September. 2004. ‘BBC Newsnight Review’. 5 April

Pinkard, Terry. 1994. Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Steiner, George. 1984. Antigones. Oxford: Clarendon Stockholm Museum of National Antiquities. 2004. ‘Making Differences: Cultural and artistic program in conjunction with Stockholm International Forum. Preventing Genocide’,

—. 2003. “‘A Marginal Footnote’: O’Faoláin, the subaltern and the Travellers”. Irish Studies Review, 11.2: 155-164. Accessed online 10th April 2005:

Derrida, Jacques. 1995. The Gift of Death. Trans. David Wills. Chicago: University of Chicago. Dyer, Richard. 1993. The Matter of Images: Essays on Representation. London: Routledge. Fouéré, Olwen. 2003. “Journeys in Performance: On Playing in The Mai and By the Bog of Cats ...”. The Theatre of Marina Carr: “Before Rules Was Made”. Eds. Cathy Leeney and Anna McMullan. Dublin: Carysfort. 160-71. Kirby, Peadar. 2002. “Contested Pedigrees of the Celtic Tiger”. Reinventing Ireland: Culture, Society and the Global Economy. Eds. Peadar Kirby et al. London: Pluto Press. 21-37. Leeney, Cathy. 2004. “Ireland’s ‘Exiled’ Women Writers: Teresa Deevey and Marina Carr”. Ed. Shaun Richards. The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth Century Irish Drama. Cambridge: CUP. 150-63. Memmi, Albert. 1982, 1994, 2000. Racism. Trans. Steve Marinot. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Merriman, Victor. 2001. “Settling for More: Excess and Success in Contemporary Irish Drama”. Druids, Dudes and Beauty Queens. Ed. Dermot Bolger. Dublin: New Island. 55-71. —. 2003. “‘Poetry Shite’: A Postcolonial Reading of Portia Coughlan and Hester Swane’. The Theatre of Marina Carr: “Before Rules Was Made”. Eds. Cathy Leeney and Anna McMullan. Dublin: Carysfort. 145-59.

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Mac Gréil, Michael. 1996. Prejudice in Ireland Revisited. Maynooth: Survey and Research Unit, St. Patrick’s College. McAuliffe, Mary and Melissa Thompson. 1999. Interview with Catherine Jones. Accessed online 18th May ’05:

McVeigh, Robbie. 1992. “The Specificity of Irish Racism”. Race and Class. 33.4: 31-45. O’Toole, Fintan. 1994. Black Hole, Green Card: The Disappearance of Ireland. Dublin: New Island Books. —. 2003. After The Ball. Dublin: New Island Books. Shakespeare, William. 1967. The Merchant of Venice. Ed. W. Moelwyn Merchant. London: Penguin. Wallace, Clare. 2001. “Tragic Destiny and Abjection in Marina Carr’s The Mai, Portia Coughlan and By the Bog of Cats …”. Irish University Review. 31.2: 431-49.

CELTIC IDENTITY, IRISH IMMIGRATION AND THE SCOTTISH HIGHLANDS TENSIONS IN SCOTTISH INTERWAR LITERATURE AND SOCIETY MARGERY PALMER MCCULLOCH

My interest in interwar attempts to adopt a Celtic identity for a regenerated Scotland was first aroused over twenty years ago when I studied Hugh MacDiarmid’s To Circumjack Cencrastus (1930), a long poem in which he draws on the aisling tradition in Irish poetry as a possible symbolic route to poetic revitalisation. This early interest was reawakened recently during research for a collection of contemporary source documents for the Scottish interwar literary revival, now published as Modernism and Nationalism: Literature and Society in Scotland 1918-1939 (McCulloch 2004).1 A distinguishing feature of this interwar revival, popularly known as the “Scottish Renaissance”, was the belief by the writers and others involved in the movement that a nation’s artistic culture could not be separated from the social, economic and political health of the nation, and that any regeneration in the arts must also involve regeneration in the life of the nation as a whole. In addition, therefore, to creative writing, this ideological position resulted in an unusually large amount of essays, articles and books about the condition of Scotland. In both literary and political areas, the recent experience of Ireland was seen by many as an exemplar both of achieved self-determination and of literary renaissance and therefore acted as the inspiration for a reclaimed Celtic identity in a regenerated Scotland; a Celtic identity which would be distinct from that of Anglo-Saxon England and from Scotland’s previous role as a North British member of the British State.

1

For ease of access, quotations throughout the essay will, wherever possible, also be referenced from this collection of primary source documents.

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This new interwar Celticism was not, however, a reawakening of the earlier Celtic Renaissance associated with William Sharp (Fiona Macleod), whose collection of Irish and Scottish Gaelic poems Lyra Celtica, first published in 1896, was reprinted in 1924, thus bringing it back into currency alongside the new revival movement. For Sharp, quoting from Ossian and Matthew Arnold, the Celts were a people who “went forth to the war, but they always fell”. Yet, though “the Celt falls, his spirit rises in the heart and the brain of the Anglo-Celtic peoples, with whom are the destinies of the generations to come” (Sharp [1896] 1924, xliii, li; McCulloch 2004, 274, 275). This was not at all the kind of Celticism envisaged by C.M. Grieve/Hugh MacDiarmid and his associates.2 What they saw as the recent political and artistic successes in Ireland had given the lie to such defeatist and Anglocentric views of the Celt. As early as 1923, for example, MacDiarmid was writing in the Dunfermline Press about the need to overturn the “dominance of English” in the education system and “to supply now the sort of literature in Gaelic and Doric that would have existed had the contrary tendencies never developed” (MacDiarmid 1923, 6; McCulloch 2004, 270). Similarly, in his later essay “English Ascendancy in British Literature”, he emphasised the need “to bridge the gulf between Gaelic and Scots”, something which “might well lead the way in the great new movement in poetry which is everywhere being sought for” (MacDiarmid 1931, 606-07; McCulloch 2004, 282). For the reformers, the defeatist Sharp was therefore replaced by the historical writings of William Lecky and especially by Daniel Corkery’s influential The Hidden Ireland, with its awareness of parallels between Scottish Highland and Irish Clearances and its insistence on the need to dethrone the classical Renaissance which had influenced European culture for centuries at the expense of indigenous cultural roots. For Corkery, “the standards of a dead nation killed in other nations those aptitudes through which they themselves had become memorable. Since the Renaissance there have been, strictly speaking, no self-contained national cultures in Europe. The antithesis of Renaissance art in this regard is national art” (Corkery [1924] 1967, 12; McCulloch 2004, 270).

2

The Scottish Renaissance movement was initiated in the early 1920s primarily by C.M. Grieve, editor of periodicals such as the Scottish Chapbook and Scottish Nation and the series of poetry anthologies Northern Numbers. His alter ego Hugh MacDiarmid appeared as Scots-language poet in the October 1922 issue of the Chapbook. For convenience, “Hugh MacDiarmid” will be used for both identities in this essay.

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Published in 1924, Corkery’s book came at a critical time for the new movement and its influence can be seen in the Highland fiction and essays of Neil M. Gunn as well as in the poetry and polemical writing of MacDiarmid, especially in To Circumjack Cencrastus of 1930 and in essays such as “English Ascendancy in British Literature”, published in Eliot’s Criterion in 1931 and “The Caledonian Antisyzygy and the Gaelic Idea” from the Modern Scot of the same year. While the former essay sees Ireland as an essential partner with Scotland and Wales in the establishment of a counterpoise to the dominance of English in British literature, in the latter the “Gaelic Idea” is presented as a necessary counter-idea to the emergence in Europe of the new Russia and Soviet economics. “Only in Gaeldom”, Grieve argues, can there be the necessary counter-idea to the Russian idea - one that does not run wholly counter to it, but supplements, corrects, challenges, and qualifies it. Soviet economics are confronted with the Gaelic system with its repudiation of usury which finds its modern expression in Douglas economics. The dictatorship of the proletariat is confronted by the Gaelic commonwealth with its aristocratic culture – the high place it gave to its poets and scholars.

He is insistent, however, that this new “Gaelic Idea” has “nothing in common with the activities of An Comunn Gaidhealach, no relationship whatever with the Celtic Twilight” (MacDiarmid [1931] 1969, 67; McCulloch 2004, 283). What I find most interesting is his further insistence that “it does not matter a rap whether the whole conception of this Gaelic idea is as farfetched as Dostoevsky’s Russian Idea - in which he pictured Russia as the sick man possessed of devils, but who would yet ‘sit at the feet of Jesus’”. And he continues: “The point is that Dostoevsky’s was a great creative idea - a dynamic myth - and in no way devalued by the difference of the actual happenings in Russia from any Dostoevsky dreamed or desired” (MacDiarmid [1931]1969, 67; McCulloch 2004, 283). This capacity to follow what seems to him to be “a great creative idea”, an inspiring “dynamic myth”, is, I believe, the key to an understanding of MacDiarmid, both as poet and polemicist, and especially the key to some kind of understanding of his contradictoriness and his apparent lack of consistency in his ideological positions. His nationalism and his Marxism, as well as his Celticism, rely to a significant extent on this visionary capacity and the capacity to use polarities and the dynamic of change in

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pursuit of his ideals, whatever perils might lurk in the mundane world. One significant example of just such a divergence between the dynamic myth of Celtic identity endorsed by cultural activists and the actuality of everyday life in interwar Scotland was the hostile response, in central Scotland in particular, to the increasing numbers of immigrants from Celtic Ireland coming in search of work. Concern about economic and social decline in Scotland was a ubiquitous topic in the writing of the interwar period, especially from the late 1920s onwards. Two of the most influential contributors were George Malcolm Thomson, whose Caledonia: or the Future of the Scots was published in 1927, followed by Scotland: That Distressed Area in 1935; and Andrew Dewar Gibb, Professor of Scots Law at the University of Glasgow, whose Scotland in Eclipse was published in 1930. Both Caledonia and Scotland in Eclipse range widely in subject matter, their chapters covering economics, the professions and the arts as well as social conditions. It was, however, their treatment of the question of Irish immigration and the related topic of the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland which caused controversy and brought them a notoriety which has lasted down to the present time, obscuring much perceptive analysis of the wider condition of Scotland in their books as a whole. Perhaps the notoriety may be even stronger in our own politically-correct time than it was in the 1930s, as one might surmise from the heavily underlined pages of the immigration sections of university library copies of the books, in comparison to the clean, unmarked (and perhaps unread) pages of other sections. In their accounts, both Thomson and Dewar Gibb discuss Irish immigration in the context of a converse Scottish emigration and relate it also to the slum conditions in Scottish cities: a growing cause for concern in all sections of the population, including the Church of Scotland where the Glasgow Presbytery had set up a special committee to interact with the Slum Abolition League. For Thomson, the Scots are “a dying people” who “are being replaced in their own country by a people alien in race, temperament, and religion, at a speed which is without parallel in history outside the era of the barbarian invasions” (Thomson [1927], 10; McCulloch 2004, 225). And while these Irish Celts immigrate into Scotland in search of work, the Scots are simultaneously emigrating for lack of that same work and opportunity. In addition, the Irish immigrants, mostly unskilled and without resources, gravitate to already overcrowded

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areas of cities such as Glasgow and Dundee, thus exacerbating existing slum conditions. And it would appear that no records are kept of this movement of populations: It is impossible to do more than guess at the average annual Irish immigration into Scotland as there are no figures which give the information. This extraordinary absence of data characterizes almost every branch of social and economic enquiry in Scotland, in itself an illuminating comment on the national mentality (Thomson [1927], 13; McCulloch 2004, 226).

In some respects, Thomson’s analysis is fair enough. There was both a serious exodus of skilled educated Scots, especially young Scots, and a problem in relation to unskilled immigrants and a lack of suitable housing for them. Glasgow’s slums were notorious and Thomson’s descriptions bring out their full horror: Two million people live more than two in a room. It is ludicrous to pretend, as the vast majority of Scotsmen do, that their country is at the same level of prosperity and civilization as England’s, so long as forty-five per cent of Scotsmen live more than two in a room as compared with 9.6 per cent of Englishmen. The gulf between the countries is not that dividing poor and rich relations but rather that between coolies and their white exploiters. Of the inhabitants of Wishaw and Coatbridge, two towns in the Lanarkshire industrial region, twenty-three per cent live in one-room houses, the corresponding figure for all England and Wales being 1.7 per cent. But figures selected from a vast mass of statistics only draw the outline of this monster: a visit to one of those dwellings is needed to fill in the colours. There, in a backland (a tenement built on what was originally the drying green behind an older tenement), a family of eight people sleep in one bed in a room into which the daylight never penetrates. An unspeakably foul odour permeates everything - the famous slum smell, to the making of which centuries of filth, damp, soot, bad air, and decay have gone. Over the door there may be a small label with a number. This signifies that the house is “ticketed”, i.e. liable to entrance and search at anytime of the day or night by the sanitary officials. […] Half Scotland is slum-poisoned. The taint of the slum is in the nation’s blood; its taint in their minds has given birth to a new race of barbarians. (Thomson [1927], 18-20; McCulloch 2004, 228).

Thomson’s descriptions can be corroborated by other accounts such as that of Edwin Muir in his Scottish Journey of 1935. For Muir, a man not given to extremist outbursts, the Glasgow slumdwellers’ “open publication of their degradation” should be recognised as a “moral

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protest”, an intuition that there is an injustice in their lives which needs to be proclaimed and righted (Muir [1935] 1979, 122; McCulloch 2004, 257). For Thomson, on the other hand, although, like Muir, he deplored the appalling conditions human beings had to live in these slums, the conditions were to some extent the responsibility of the inhabitants themselves, especially the immigrant Irish, whose Roman Catholic religion forbade birth control and so increased the misery and disease brought by too many people living in limited accommodation. Thomson’s statistics provide evidence for increased death-rates as the result of overcrowding and one would not quarrel with his insistence on the need for control of fertility as one of the actions necessary in order to bring about better health and living conditions. But it is the language in which the case against the immigrants is presented which often undermines both his and Dewar Gibb’s arguments. For Gibb, for example, this alien population of “low-grade immigrants” is “breeding [...] not merely unchecked, but actually encouraged by their own medicinemen”. “As a rule quite unprosperous, they have in some places displayed special abilities. Thus in Glasgow they are fast developing a monopoly of the priesthood, the pawnshops and the public-houses.” In addition, he sees them as “responsible for most of the crime committed in Scotland”: Wheresoever knives and razors are used, wheresoever sneak thefts and mean pilfering are easy and safe, wheresoever dirty acts of sexual baseness are committed, there you will find the Irishman in Scotland with all but a monopoly of the business. Glasgow is cursed with gangs of young loafers who prowl about the East End in Bridgeton and Calton, attacking one another and often attacking the police and strangers. Their names, as the newspaper reports show, are Irish to the extent of at least ninety per cent. (Gibb 1930, 55; McCulloch 2004, 235).

For Thomson too the emphasis is on the religion of the immigrants and on crime: To-day every fifth baby born in Scotland is a little Irish Catholic. In Glasgow in 1924, 28 1/2 per cent of the children born saw the world through the windows of an Irish Catholic home. And, most sinister and significant of all, one-third of the crimes committed in Scotland are the work of Irishmen. (Thomson [1927], 10; McCulloch 2004, 226)

Religious and racial prejudice seem at the heart of such talk, together with a deep-seated insecurity, a fear of being overtaken by outsiders which has

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resonances of the future “rivers of blood” speeches by Enoch Powell in the post-World War Two period when England in particular was faced with significant coloured immigration from the Caribbean and India and Pakistan. In our own time also, we have on-going hostility and mythmaking with regard to asylum-seekers and economic migrants from the “new”, former eastern block countries of Europe, as well as continuing uneasiness about the place of non-European immigrant populations in our society: an uneasiness exacerbated by international terrorism after September 11 and by the Iraq war. Yet while, in interwar Scotland, such fearful prejudice may have been understandable among the impoverished, insecure, working-class population, such a simplistic and hostile presentation of a complex situation was hardly excusable among the professionally educated who aspired to be the leaders of a new society. On a more positive note, anti-Catholic prejudice was a fault one could not lay at the door of MacDiarmid and the principal creative writers of the time. Both Edwin Muir and MaDiarmid were attracted to Catholicism, which they saw as having a leavening effect on Calvinism. MacDiarmid welcomed Irish immigration for that reason as well as for his vision of a Celtic identity for Scotland, while his Scottish Chapbook presented a series of Catholic Sonnets “illustrative of neo-Catholic tendencies in contemporary Scottish Literature”, one of them “The Litany of the Blessed Virgin” written by himself (MacDiarmid 1922a, 74-76). Edwin Muir’s description of the Catholic Grotto at Carfin - “the only palpable assertion of humanity that I came across in the midst of that blasted region” - is one of the positive episodes in his often bleak and ironic Scottish Journey (Muir [1935] 1979, 170; McCulloch 2004, 259). It is difficult to think of a creative writer of substance in the period who expressed hostility towards Catholicism at this time, although attacks on Calvinism and on institutionalised religion per se were frequent. Nevertheless, Celtic identity in the literary sphere was also not free from tensions. The outstanding example here is MacDiarmid’s To Circumjack Cencrastus. Perhaps because of his disillusionment with the general lack of support from Scottish society after the peer-group critical success of his early Scots lyrics and A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, the Cencrastus poet turns towards Ireland and the aisling tradition as the source of new inspiration. Corkery’s The Hidden Ireland had probably provided the information sources for this new approach. In the aisling chapter of his book, for example, Corkery discusses the visionary nature of the tradition and emphasises that the spirit seen by the poet in his

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dream-vision is always the spirit of Ireland, appearing as a majestic and radiant maiden. He also contrasts this Irish tradition with Scottish Jacobite aisling poetry, which he sees as homely and affectionate in nature, speaking of a Pretender who, though absent, is alive and well. In the Irish tradition, the tragic presence is “Erin”, the spirit of Ireland, an everpresent sorrow (Corkery [1924]1967, 128-33; McCulloch 2004, 272-73). The theme of loss is taken up in the Celtic sections of MacDiarmid’s Cencrastus, with the Irish as opposed to the Scottish Jacobite tradition providing the model. Here, however, the sorrow is directed not towards Scotland itself, but towards a poet who has lost the capacity to speak for his country. His hope is that a meeting with the visionary maiden, the Celtic “Brightness of Brightness”, may restore the inspiration and strength needed to carry out his role as his country’s poet. From his earliest critical writings in the 1920s, MacDiarmid had insisted on the need to halt the decline in both Gaelic and Scots Vernacular and on the need also to find a way to enable these discrete language traditions to interact positively with each other. In the Cencrastus poem his difficulty is, in part, one that is shared by both Gaelic and Scots-language traditions, that of discontinuity: I am the Mavis of Pabal A pool cut aff frae the sea, A tree withoot roots that stands On the ground unsteadily … (MacDiarmid [1930] 1978, 191)

However, with regard to his new Celtic orientation, there is an additional obstacle, the lack of the relevant language itself: O wad at least my yokel words Some Gaelic strain had kept [. . .] - Fain through Burns’ clay MacMhaigstir’s fire To glint within me ettled. It stirred, alas, but couldna kyth, Prood, elegant and mettled. (MacDiarmid [1930] 1978, 225)

These dispirited lines come from a section of Cencrastus - written in a light Scots - where the poet persona specifically points to his attempt to follow the road laid out by Aodhagán Ó Rathaille, the great Irish aisling poet discussed by Corkery: Aodhagán Ó Rathaille sang this sang That I maun sing again;

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For I’ve met the Brightness o’ Brightness Like him in a lanely glen, And seen the hair that’s plaited Like the generations o’ men. (MacDiarmid [1930] 1978, 224)

Yet, unlike his Irish mentor, this meeting with the visionary maiden is characterised by insecurity and self-denigration on the part of the Scottish supplicant, who can hardly believe that the Brightness of Brightness is genuinely welcoming him, fearing that she may be laughing “ahint her haund/At my uncouth demeanour”. He is not sure, either, that he himself is able to recognise the genuine dream-vision maiden: But tho’ I’m blinded in her licht The hardy doot’s still rife That aiblins I am sair beginked Thro’ sma’ experience o’ life, And favoured here wi’ nae King’s dochter, But juist . . . a minister’s rinawa wife . . . (MacDiarmid [1930] 1978, 226)

This passage makes for an awkward ending, its Scots language and Scottish context joke reinforcing the reader’s impression throughout the poem that this poetic register is alien to the authentic Gaelic-language tradition; and reinforcing also the Scottish poet’s own earlier words that “MacMhaigstir’s fire” could not “glint” through the medium of “Burns’ clay”. What Neil M. Gunn called “getting the Gaelic aristocratic idea into Lallans harness” was proving to be no easy task (MacDiarmid 1973, 361). Yet all is not lost. At the very end of the Cencrastus poem as a whole, there is a lyrical passage which, while not successful in its entirety, does contain several stanzas which, without any special pleading, seem to me to be successful in turning Ó Rathaille’s symbolism into a form which suits MacDiarmid’s belief in the power of thought and his capacity to move from the everyday to the visionary. The following three stanzas, written in a medium which, although the Scots language is still there, is predominantly English, suggest more successfully the non-homely quality of their Gaelic mentor: My love is to the light of lights As a gold fawn to the sun And men, wha love ocht else, to her Their ways ha’ scarce begun [. . .]

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Celtic Identity, Irish Immigration and the Scottish Highlands Tensions in Scottish Interwar Literature and Society My love she is the hardest thocht That ony brain can ha’e, And there is nocht worth ha’en in life That doesna lead her way. My love is to a’ else that is As meaning’s meaning, or the sun Men see ahint the sunlight whiles Like lint-white water run. . . . (MacDiarmid [1930] 1978, 291)

MacDiarmid’s difficulty with Celtic identity and poetic language had parallels in the political sphere. One of the strongest advocates of a Celtic identity for Scotland was the Hon. Ruaraidh Erskine of Marr, whose Changing Scotland, published by the Review Press, Montrose, argued out a case for a new Scotland which would be entirely Gaelic-speaking and founded on Scotland’s Celtic heritage. This attempt to restore Scotland to the position of a Celtic state was fiercely attacked by the anonymous reviewer of Changing Scotland in the Winter 1931 issue of the Modern Scot who pointed out, not unreasonably, that cultural diversity was a strength in nationalism and was pertinent to Scotland’s actual situation. The reviewer’s argument that the case for nationalism did not depend upon Scotland having a language distinct from English was an argument relevant also to Neil M. Gunn’s writing in English about the Highlands of Scotland and their distinctive traditions - which earned him the ironic epithet “brilliant novelist from Scotshire” from Lewis Grassic Gibbon (Gibbon 1934, 200; McCulloch 2004, 35); and it was relevant also to the leaders of Ireland’s own literary renaissance such as W.B. Yeats and, later, James Joyce. C.M. Grieve’s original plans for a literary revival in Scotland in the period before he became converted to the use of Scots under the name of MacDiarmid had also been for a revival based on the use of English, but a Scottish English used very differently from the English of England: “Most of it [Scottish Literature]”, he wrote in the Dunfermline Press in August 1922, “is, of course, and must continue to be, written in English. But it is not English on that acount, although it is denounced on that score by the ardent minority bent upon the revival of the Doric [...] It is no more English in spirit than the literature of the Irish Literary Revival, most of which was written in the English language, was English in spirit” (MacDiarmid 1922b, 6; McCulloch 2004, 23). What is intriguing as we look back from our own time to the language controversies of the interwar period is the rigid “one language, one identity” position taken up by so many of these writers, even when in

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practice they were writing in more than one language. By the 1920s, language diversity was already a fact of Scottish life and in our own time it has become a source of strength in Scottish writing, not something to be deplored. Yet in the interwar period many appeared unable or unwilling to recognise diversity as a strength, or even as a marker of an identity distinct from a monoglot England. Nor was Erskine of Marr’s attempt to impose Gaelic as Scotland’s official language feasible in a situation where more than half of the population did not traditionally speak that language - or had not done so for centuries - and the areas in which it was spoken were largely remote island or rural communities where the language itself had not had opportunities to develop in accordance with a changed industrial and economic world. Such an inflexible proposal also worked against the exploration of other possible ways of halting the decline of Gaelic and reintroducing it more widely as one of the languages of Scotland. Despite such tensions between the symbolic and the practical realities of an acceptable identity for a regenerated Scotland, much that was positive did come out of the focus on Celtic connections in the interwar period. The situation of the Scottish Highlands received more serious attention from economists and social commentators as well as from those intimately connected to the area; and although the picture of decline which resulted from such investigations could be seen as a negative outcome, there was a more active approach towards finding solutions relevant to local needs. Neil M. Gunn is a key figure here, especially in the essays he wrote for the Scots Magazine in the 1930s about the Scottish fishing industry. In these he drew attention to the negative impact of regulations laid down in Westminster which were not suited to conditions in remote coastal communities already suffering losses as a result of large industrial boats clearing their traditional fishing grounds. Gunn presented similar arguments about the negative impact of “the dole”, again a southern and urban measure introduced to deal with unemployment but one which could not readily be applied to communities where work was seasonal and varied and unsystematised. And he argued strongly that tourism could not be seen as the principal economic way forward for the Highlands, resulting as it did in few indigenous families benefiting to any significant extent from seasonal visitors and bringing no long-term, stable employment into the area. “But better a factory [in the Highlands] than starvation; better a self-respecting worker in my own trade union than a half-sycophant depending on the whims of a passing tourist”, he argued (Gunn 1937, 415; McCulloch 2004, 310).

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Gunn was committed to self-determination and to finding local solutions for local problems; but as with so many of the problems of the period, without the political power to put proposals into action it was difficult to see how decline could be halted. And the Highlands suffered not only from Westminster rule, but from a lack of understanding of their needs and their culture on the part of many Lowland Scots. In the Scots Magazine article “The Gael will Come Again”, written under the pseudonym of Dane McNeil, Gunn vigorously refuted a charge of “lethargy and slackness” against the Highlanders levelled by a previous contributor (Gunn 1931, 325; McCulloch 2004, 278). On the other hand, an article such as “The Truth about An Comunn Gaidhealach” by “EarraGhaidheal” [An Argyll man] in the Free Man of September 1933 charged An Comunn, its President and its Art and Industries Committee with a lack of interest and competence in relation to improvement in Highland conditions: Fisheries, Agriculture, Afforestation, not to speak of the land problem, have been burning questions for Highlanders during the last generation, but what has An Comunn done in the matter? Nothing. Some years ago it got a few rugs made. Of these sixteen remain unsold, and according to the 42nd Annual Report (1932-3), “The Art and Industires Committee is continuing to do all that is possible to expedite their disposal. No further rugs are in process meantime.” Meantime, of course, the poor natives can either emigrate to the slums of Glasgow or Edinburgh, or gather solemnly on the slopes of the Coolins and quietly perish to the ghostly wails of Fin MacCool and other defunct heroes. In no case must anything be done to embarrass the Government. For did not Mr Neville Chamberlain make some exceedingly flattering remarks concerning An Comunn at Kinlochleven, and does not the President himself, Dr Ross, remark feelingly in his Annual survey (1932-3), “the Fort-William Mod of 1932 was an outstanding success. It will be notable as the first occasion on which the Mod had the honour of a visit from a British Prime Minister.” Mr Ramsay Macdonald is the Prime Minister in question, and doubtless the Rev. Neil found his chance visit remarkably convenient with a view to future possibilities (Earra-Ghaidheal 1933, 6; McCulloch 2004, 297).

The complacency of An Comunn was attacked by other writers of the time (including Gunn in his Scots Magazine article “The Ferry of the Dead”), with several of them taking up the question of the decline of the Gaelic language. The article by “Earra-Ghaidheal” had ended with its writer declaiming that “the Gaelic is dying, and dying rapidly, and its assassin is An Comunn”. Pointing to the the Mod as “merely a gigantic

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piece of bluff to gull the public into thinking that all is well with the language”, he quoted a Daily Express correspondent who had visited children competing at the Mod: From Portree, from Oban, from Carradale they have come, these brighteyed, excited, soft-spoken Children of the Mist. But it was not the Gaelic they were speaking as they chattered among themselves. They only do that, it seems, when they are performing. (Earra-Ghaidheal 1933, 6; McCulloch 2004, 297).

The novelist Fionn MacColla, himself a Gaelic learner, was another of those who argued for greater support for the language, pointing to the way in which Welsh was accepted as a normal part of the school curriculum in Wales and deriding the excuse that “the schools don’t want it” in relation to Gaelic teaching and broadcasting in Scotland. In the Free Man of March 1933, he argued that the Government, not the schools, chooses the subjects on the curriculum and that “Gaelic will not be accorded a place on the curriculum of Scottish schools, will not become ‘quite a normal school subject’, unless the Education Department - and behind them their masters, the Government of England - consent thereto”. Yet, a generation of Scots for whom their national history had been illuminated by a knowledge of the old national language and of the submerged traditions associated therewith, would be infinitely less docile and tractable, infinitely less hospitable to influences of Anglicisation than the present generation of Scots whose knowledge - if the term can be used in such a connection - of their national history is falsified from the start by the Anglophile assumptions with which they were taught to approach such limited aspects of it as were disclosed for their study. Admit Gaelic into the schools and you commence the destruction of the whole Englishascendancy ideology which our rulers have been at such pains - largely through the agency of those same schools schools - to build up (MacColla 1933, 7; McCulloch 2004, 293).

One of the most wide-ranging and practical discussions of Gaelic in the Free Man was written by a contributor with the by-line Iain Ruadh [Iain Roy], who laid down in a two part-article proposals for the gradual introduction of Gaelic as the teaching medium of all Highland schools, with the ultimate aim of achieving a Highland University with teaching in Gaelic. Civil servants and public service workers in the Highlands would have to be Gaelic-speaking before they were appointed. Gaelic placenames and signs would be introduced so that indigenous inhabitants

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would not feel as if they were living in a foreign country and their own language would become once more an accepted part of their lives. Gaelic would also be introduced as a “normal” second-language choice in Lowland schools so that knowledge of the language at least would spread beyond the Highlands and it would gradually become accepted more widely as one of the living languages of Scotland (Ruadh 1933, 4, 6; McCulloch 2004, 298-301). Had the political power existed in the interwar period to put such a proposal into action, we might not today be facing the possibility of the virtual disappearance of Gaelic as a spoken language. And even after the establishment of devolved government in Edinburgh, there is as yet no sign that the Scottish Executive is considering anything so rash as introducing Gaelic as a normal part of the school curriculum. Although the interwar Scottish Renaissance movement itself did not have the political power base to bring into being many of the ideas it put forward about possible ways to regenerate the nation’s life, and although those associated with it often could not even agree among themselves on the way forward for Scotland, it left a legacy of imaginative literature and wide-ranging arguments which are still pertinent to our concerns today. The adoption of an alternative Celtic identity may no longer be a symbolic necessity for Scotland’s culture; and it was never a practical one for Scotland as a whole, given the diverse nature of the country. Yet, if we are serious about the creation of an integrated, equal, “grown-up” Scotland, then we should use the powers of our devolved government to follow the lead of Wales and southern Ireland and make sure that the language that opens the door to our Celtic heritage is given a chance of survival through making it part of the educational curriculum for the country as a whole and returning it to its proper place in the life of the Highlands. This would be an achievable - even if inevitably partial - reclamation of the Celtic identity which eluded our interwar predecessors and would provide official recognition of the diversity which has become a marker of Scottish identity in our contemporary literature and music and is increasingly becoming part of our sense of self and country. And Celtic Ireland continues to offer inspiration as it points us today towards the importance of involvement with Europe and the recognition of yet another strand in our common identity - something which was also part of the Scottish Renaissance agenda. Connections - Celtic and European - can still be a source of renewal in a new Scotland.

Margery Palmer McCulloch

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References Corkery, Daniel. [1924] 1967. The Hidden Ireland. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan. ‘Earra-Ghaidheal’. 1933. The Truth About An Comunn Gaidhealach. The Free Man 2.35: 6. Gibb, Andrew Dewar. 1930. The Eclipse of Scotland. London: Humphrey Toulmin. Gibbon, Lewis Grassic. 1934. Literary Lights. Scottish Scene or The intelligent man’s guide to Albyn. London: Jarrolds. Gunn, Neil [Dane McNeil]. 1931. “The Gael Will Come Again”. The Scots Magazine 14.5:324 -27. —. 1937. “Gentlemen - The Tourist!”:The New Highland Toast. The Scots Magazine 26.6:410-15. MacColla, Fionn. 1933. Welshing the Scottish race. The Free Man 2.5:7. McCulloch, Margery Palmer. 2004. Modernism and nationalism: Literature and Society in Scotland 1918-1939: Source Documents for the Scottish Renaissance. Glasgow: Association for Scottish Literary Studies. MacDiarmid, Hugh. 1922a. Scots Catholic Choir. The Scottish Chapbook 1.3: 74-6. —. 1922b. Scottish Books and Vookmen. Dunfermline Press 5 August: 6. —. 1923. A Scotsman Looks at His World. Dunfermline Press 14 April: 6. —. 1931. English Ascendancy in British Literature. The Criterion 10.41:593-613. —. [1931] 1969. The Caledonian Antisyzygy and the Gaelic Idea. Selected Essays of Hugh MacDiarmid. Ed. Glen Duncan London: Cape. —. 1973. Neil Gunn and the Scottish Renaissance. Alexander Scott and Douglas Gifford eds. Neil Gunn: The Man and the Writer. Edinburgh: Blackwood. —. 1978. To Circumjack Cencrastus [1930]. Complete Poems 1920-1976. Ed Michael Grieve and W.R. Aitken. London: Martin Brian & O’Keeffe. Muir, Edwin. [1935] 1979. Scottish Journey. Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing. Ruadh, Iain. 1933. A Gaelic Revival in Reality. The Free Man 2.40: 4; 2.41: 6. Sharp, William. [1896] 1924. Lyrica Celtica: An Anthology of Representative Celtic poetry. Edinburgh: John Grant.

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Thomson, George Malcolm. [1927]. Caledonia: or the Future of the Scots. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co.

KEEPING IT REEL: HOLLYWOOD AND AUTHENTICITY IN TWO RECENT IRISH PLAYS LISA MCGONIGLE

When Marie Jones’s Stones in his Pockets moved to London’s New Ambassador Theatre in May 2000 for a critically acclaimed run with Sean Campion and Conleth Hill, a number of reviewers drew comparison with Martin McDonagh’s The Cripple of Inishmaan (1997), the occasion for both plays being the arrival of a Hollywood film crew upon a small West of Ireland community.1 Stones, for example, is set in a contemporary “scenic spot near a small village in County Kerry” (S, 14) during the filming of the fictitious epic The Quiet Valley, whilst locating Cripple in the Aran Islands “circa 1934” (C, 5) allows McDonagh to incorporate into his work Man of Aran, Robert Flaherty’s pseudo-documentary of the same year.2 In addition, both plays centre upon discontented seventeen year-olds who look to the film industry as a means of “getting out…to America” (S, 58), “getting away from Inishmaan” (C, 58), and whose untimely fate lends itself to the text’s title: Sean Harkin places “stones in his pockets” (S, 92) prior to drowning himself, whilst “poor Billy who has not only bad arms but bad legs too” (C, 6) is the eponymous cripple of McDonagh’s work. Yet such surface similarities notwithstanding, Stones and Cripple remain two markedly different texts and, as Margaret Llewellyn-Jones 1

Michael Coveney, “Last night’s first night”, Daily Mail, 25 May 2000; Michael Billington, “Celebrity Fantasy”, Guardian, 25 May 2000, both taken from LexisNexus web resource; the similarity is also observed by Mel Gussow in his introduction to Marie Jones, Stones in his Pockets (New York: Applause Books, 2001), p9 2 Abbreviations and page references: S - Marie Jones, Stones in his Pockets (New York: Applause Books, 2001); C - Martin McDonagh, The Cripple of Inishmaan (New York: Vintage, 1998)

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notes, it is in “the question of authenticity in images of Ireland” (Llewellyn-Jones, 126) that the nature of this difference - which crucially affects the attitude adopted to Hollywood’s appropriation of Irishness can most readily be perceived. In his essay “…maybe that’s just Blarney: Irish culture and the persistence of authenticity” (drawn upon by Llewellyn-Jones in her comparison of the texts) Colin Graham notes that authenticity “has affected the basic discourses of Irish culture and identity politics in its prevalence”, developing into a “standard of worth and a cultural core value” (Graham, 135). Describing the assertion of authenticity as a “desire for validation” (Graham, 150), Graham argues that branding the representations created by a coloniser as “inauthentic”, or invalid, is thus a defiance of their authority and the corresponding assertion of the right to self-definition is a crucial component in a demand for political autonomy. In explaining the choice of title for his study of Irish theatre, The Politics of Irish Drama, Nicholas Grene likewise describes how from its inception the Irish National Theatre was “an integral part of that broader cultural nationalism of the turn of the century which sought to create for a long-colonised Ireland its own national identity” (Grene, 1), as encapsulated in Lady Gregory’s celebrated pronouncement that the movement would “show […] Ireland is not the home of buffoonery and of easy sentiment, as it has been represented, but the home of an ancient idealism” (Gregory, in Harrington, x). The consequence of the Irish theatrical tradition being “so closely bound up with national politics” is, as Grene observes, that “the spaces of Irish drama […] are predicated as being authentic, truly reflecting the speech and behaviour of a reality out there” (Grene, 1, 263). However, Graham also contends that rather than remaining an immutable touchstone of worth, “the nation’s very reason for being, its logic of existence” (Graham, 133), the notion of authenticity can in itself become subject to critical interrogation. “Ironic authenticity”, as identified by Graham, is “a heavily ironised form of the authentic which questions the very idea of authenticity itself”, the example furnished of this being a Smithwicks advertisement which playfully represents Ireland through a “postmodern montage” of shamrocks, Celtic crosses and similar clichés accompanied by the mockingly knowing voiceover, “maybe that’s just blarney”, so that “the whole process of authentication, claims to authenticity and the pathos of those claims is questioned and maybe dismissed in a double-edged use of a stereotype” (Graham, xi, 149-50).

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In suggesting that Marie Jones’s engagement with Hollywood’s depiction of Ireland can be understood in terms of this “ironic authenticity”, however, Llewellyn-Jones misconstrues the concept as synonymous with dramatic irony, and her description of Stones in his Pockets as “deconstructive” (Llewellyn-Jones, 126) fails to adequately distinguish between the deconstruction of inauthentic representations and that of authenticity itself. It may be ironic that Caroline Giovanni, the star of a melodramatic blockbuster calling for panoramic shots of the Blasket Islands, turf-digging extras and a “Big Happy Ending” (S, 57) in which the downtrodden tenantry are peripeteiacally restored to their land, feels that “there is nothing like the real thing” (S, 51), but this does not compromise the concept of authenticity itself. Indeed the urgency with which Jones emphasises that “movies aren’t real life” (S, 90) and seeks to replace the cliché-ridden Quiet Valley with the voice of authentic Ireland corroborates Grene’s argument that “a large part of the anxious obsession with selfrepresentation in the Irish dramatic tradition originates with the colonial and postcolonial tradition of the country” (Grene, 267)3, though to be ousted in Stones is not the traditional adversary of perfidious Albion, but Hollywood’s cultural imperialism which supplants authentic Ireland with marketable commodifications of Irishness. Despite the warning from her voice-coach, “you can’t be too exact, you won’t get away with it in Hollywood” (S, 24), Caroline Giovanni seeks to perfect her Irish accent by fraternising with the locals, or “going ethnic” (S, 49) as her bodyguard provocatively describes it. Yet when it is pointed out that Maeve, the character whom Caroline plays in The Quiet Valley, “is one of the landed gentry, she wouldn’t talk like us anyway […] she’d have been educated in England” (S, 52), the actress – though an enthusiastic exponent of how “simple, uncomplicated, contented” (S, 24) she finds Ireland to be – refuses to listen. The minutiae of socio-historic verisimilitude do not factor into the homogenised Irishness palatable to Hollywood, and the film industry’s distortion of reality is similarly felt when Jake and Charlie, the extras from whose perspective the filming of The Quiet Valley is witnessed, are instructed to “watch in silence” (S, 69) for an eviction scene. Jake objects to not only to the implausibility of their characters bearing passive witness to “a whole family being evicted without opening our mouths” (S, 69) but also to the subordination and 3

See also Joyce McMillan, “Ireland’s Winning Hand”, Irish Theatre Magazine for an analysis of “the intensity of the relationship between the theatrical and the political life of the nation in Ireland”, vol 3, issue 15, Summer 2003, pp15-23

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disempowerment which their voicelessness conveys, “typecast” (S, 70) as they have become as “defeated, broken men” (S, 70). It is not only, Jones implies, the abstracted principle of representation that is at stake. Hollywood’s exploitation of Ireland is both a culturally exhaustive process which has “used up most of the forty shades of green by now” (S, 54) and has deeply undesirable economic effect. The producers of The Quiet Valley wield considerable monetary power in which the locals have little share; though it is revealed by the director that “each day we film it costs at least a quarter of a million dollars” (S, 63), the extras each earn only forty pounds of this substantial sum, and Mickey, the “last surviving extra on The Quiet Man” (S, 19) has “watched his whole way of life fall apart around him…now all it’s worth is a backdrop for an American movie” (S, 71) with the incursion of Hollywood upon the village. Delivering pat lines to a passing television reporter praising how “the people are so strong and resilient […] it is so magical…the country is so romantic” (S, 80-1) obfuscates these destructive effects of filming upon the local community and Jake castigates Caroline for the manner in which the crew, having secured a suitable location for their purpose, “use the place and then clear off and think about nothing you leave behind” (S, 78). No less grave than this economic exploitation is the psychological damage inflicted by Hollywood upon the local community, as evinced in heavy culpability the industry bears in the death of Sean Harkin. A previous film had been produced in the locale and Fin, Sean’s best friend, recalls how, as an impressionable twelve-year old “Sean used to watch them day after day” (S, 59) whilst they filmed, and subsequent to this was dissatisfied with the mundanity of rural life, seeking solace in “virtual reality…drugs and music” (S, 74) and fixated with “getting out” (S, 58). However, the return of Hollywood to his village proved a sharp comedown. Having been refused a role as an extra in The Quiet Valley, Sean bitterly rails that “I was fucking born diggin’ turf and that hurin’ slag is tellin’ me to miss off” (S, 31), his cultural authenticity acting as no guarantor of respect from Hollywood. His indignation is compounded when, later that same day, he is ejected by the film’s security staff from a local pub. It is following this “humiliation” (S, 77) that Sean drowns himself and when Caroline expresses her sympathy that Sean’s death must be “very hard” (S, 77), Jake angrily informs her it is even “more so” (S, 77) because her profession “might be one of the things that drove that kid to do what he did” (S, 78), by “filling Sean’s young head with dreams” (S, 68) and subsequently reneging on these.

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Drawing upon the work of Homi Bhabha in exploring contemporary Irish fiction, Linden Peach argues that “previously marginalised voices confront and contradict the dominant discourses that have been directly or indirectly responsible for their silence and marginalisation” (Peach, 1, xii) and this is a process also undertaken in Stones. In realising “don’t we have the right to tell our story, the way we want it” (S, 87), Jake and Charlie challenge the mute and subservient position to which they have been assigned, and instead envisage a film within which “a film is being made and a young lad commits suicide…in other words the stars become the extras and the extras become the stars…so it becomes Sean’s story, and Mickey and all the people of this town” (S, 86-87), thereby replacing the “terrible bloody accent” (S, 23) and faux-Irishry of the film-industry with their own authentic and previously occluded voices. Llewellyn-Jones’s analysis of Stones is thus inconsistent with her description of the manner in which “postcolonial discourses are closely bound up with the processes through which previously colonised peoples claim – and often re-work – their cultural identity”, as this is precisely the nature of the process undergone by Jake and Charlie (Llewellyn-Jones, 10), who reject their proscribed roles as silenced extras and instead document the detrimental impact, material and otherwise, of Hollywood’s cinematic imperialism upon Ireland However, in its attempt to replace the soft-focus whimsy of The Quiet Valley with the gritty realism of “real fucking ecstasy” (S, 61) and teenage suicide, Stones nonetheless falls back on the narratives and tropes which it seeks to reject as “unreal” (S, 45). Despite the scathing cynicism towards the “nice romantic Irish scene” (S, 45) which The Quiet Valley sought to create, Jones implies that such a scene was in fact in existence before the encroachment upon the village of multinational film crews. The pathos of Sean’s life, for example, is that he “loved the land…the cows” (S, 90), announcing “when I grow up I am going to have the best herd in Kerry” (S, 66), until the “intrusion into his world” (S, 93) of Hollywood, an interruption which Jake and Charlie will represent in their film by a pair of “trendy designer trainers” (S, 93), ludicrously incongruous against a pastoral background. It is also emphasised by three separate figures – Jake, Fin and Mickey – that Sean’s removal from the pub occurred “in his own town in front of his own people” (S, 75, 77,86) and Mickey likewise protests “this ground you are standing on…belonged to my Grandfather, and you are telling me a Riordan to get off my land” (S, 85) when he is threatened with the same. These characters are thus presented as the

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dispossessed victims of a heartless external force, thereby equating their evictions with those of the hapless peasantry in The Quiet Valley. Furthermore, although a baffled Charlie wonders “how can you have a happy ending about a kid who drowns himself?” (S, 57) when he and Jake are advised to furnish their proposed film with such to ensure its commercial viability, the conclusion of Stones parallels the “Big Happy Ending” of The Quiet Valley in which local boy Rory “has married Maeve and…is going to hand back the land to the people” (S, 57). Just as these subjugated peasants regain their land, so too do Jake and Charlie repossess their cultural property. Llewellyn-Jones’s contention that “the whole notion of representation is shown ironically” (Llewellyn-Jones, 128) in Stones thus bespeaks a fundamental failure to recognise that it is precisely through the claim to speak for authentic Ireland that moral and cultural authority are recouped within this text. In contrast to the “ethically loaded” condemnation of “cultural colonialism” (Billington) which is Stones, Martin McDonagh’s The Cripple of Inishmaan does not indict Man of Aran’s interpretation of Irishness with such vehemence, as perhaps befits a playwright who describes himself as having brought a film fan’s perspective to theatre.4 When “a Yank be the name of Robert Flaherty” arrives on the neighbouring island of Inishmore “to go making a moving film…will show life how it’s lived on the islands” (C, 13), local gossipmonger Johnnypateenmike predicts “a little exodus…of any lasses or lads in these parts with the looks of a film star about them, wants to make their mark in America” (C, 13), and, indeed, “limpy” (C, 38) Billy Claven ventures in due course to Hollywood “for a screen test for a film they’re making about a cripple fella” (C, 61), this being a role for which he has the necessary demeanour. Yet this aside, Man of Aran is almost incidental to the text as a whole and, contrary to Maria Kurdi’s claim that “Cripple offers a masterful picture of how idealised island life in Flaherty’s Man of Aran baffles and even irritates the objects of its mythmaking”, the film in fact has a decidedly minor impact on the inhabitants of Inishmaan, as is particularly clear when they gather to watch the finished product (Kurdi, 47-48).

4

See also Colin Graham, “Subalternity and Gender: problems of post-colonial Irishness”, in Theorizing Ireland (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) ed Claire Connolly, pp150-161; McDonagh is quoted on http://www.angloiren.de/west/west_p2.htm

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Though the stage directions indicate that “all are staring up at the film” (C, 77), the islanders’ energy is directed into an explosive volley of insults and threats - such as “that was the last omelette you’ll ever eat in my house, ya bitch” (C, 84) or “up your arse you, Babbybobby Bennett, you fecking kiss-reneger” (C, 80) - and if the film does arouse their ire, it is not for the inauthentic picture which it conveys of the Aran archipelago, but rather because of the boredom incurred by sitting though a seemingly interminable shark-hunt orchestrated by “wet fellas with awful sweaters on them” (C, 84).5 Helen, “a pretty girl of about seventeen”(C, 19), impatiently announces “if it was me had a role in this film the fecker wouldn’t have lasted as long. One good clobber and we could all go home” (C, 79) and other than exasperation with Man of Aran’s longwindedness, or incredulity that “if Colman King can play a role in a film anybody can play a role in a film, for Colman King is as ugly as a brick of baked shite and everybody agrees” (C, 13), Flaherty’s depiction of the West is not engaged with in McDonagh’s text. Rather than critiquing the discrepancy between authentic Ireland and Hollywood mediations of Irishness, Man of Aran is simply dismissed as “a pile of fecking shite” (C, 85), leaving the bemused New York Times reviewer of the play, for one, with “no sense that Mr McDonagh himself has any strong view about the film, except as a comic device”.6 Whereas Llewellyn-Jones interprets this as the failure of Cripple to capitalise on “the potential of its satire of exploitative and fanciful aspects of film-making” (Llewellyn-Jones, 125), Fintan O’Toole, on the other hand, argues that the irreverence of McDonagh’s work is “an important cultural moment” in itself, describing it as “a moment of liberation” (Kilroy, 57). According to O’Toole, McDonagh’s work demonstrates that “we’re no longer enthralled [sic] to those stage-Irish stereotypes, or the need to get out of them”, and that because they have “have lost their power”, McDonagh can play with the stereotypical rhetoric and stable props of stage-Irishness throughout his work without feeling compelled to deconstruct them and offer authentic representations in their place (Kilroy, 57). Yet its intertextuality with Man of Aran is not the only manner in which Cripple engages with Hollywood’s depiction of Ireland, and a soliloquy performed by Billy somewhat mitigates O’Toole’s claim that

5

See Kurdi , “Ireland mustn’t be such a bad place” for a discussion of this, pp4159 6 “Is the new hot playwright profound or just slick?”, (no byline provided) New York Times, 26 April 1998, CD-ROM

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McDonagh is unreservedly “liberated from an anxiety about stageIrishness” (Kilroy, 56). The stage opens on “a squalid Hollywood hotel room” (C, 74), in which an ailing Billy performs a lengthy monologue, punctuated by verses of “The Croppy Boy”, lamenting that he is “without a mother to wipe the cold sweat off me, nor a father to curse God o’er the death of me, nor a colleen fair to keep tears o’er the still body of me” (C, 74). Hearing the ominous “wail of banshees…far as I am from me barren island home”, Billy wonders if heaven could possibly be “more beautiful than Ireland even” (C, 75) and the scene concludes with his apparent death. However, when Billy subsequently reappears on Inishmaan, it is revealed that, rather than part of the drama proper as has hitherto been conveyed, Billy was required to perform this soliloquy as a screen-text for a Hollywood film, and he derides “the arse-faced lines they had me reading for them” (C, 88). As in Stones, the film industry’s imitation of Irishness is a “rake of shite” (C, 88) on which the playwright casts a critical eye, leading LlewellynJones to grudgingly concede that Cripple contains a “slight element of deconstruction” (Llewellyn-Jones, 126). Nonetheless, the exigency of this critique is not such that McDonagh cannot playfully exploit theatrical form itself through an astute “awareness of the potential, implied audience”, identified by Grene as a central tenet of theatricality. (Grene, 3) Conscious that the audience is conditioned into accepting that which presented is upon the stage as authentic, McDonagh works this knowledge to effective comic effect by implying the soliloquy is a “genuine” expression of Billy’s feeling, and subsequently allowing its true dramatic status to emerge skilfully plays with the suspension of disbelief on which drama is contingent. It is not, as Llewellyn-Jones claims, that Cripple is “less satisfactory as a critique of the image-making process” (LlewellynJones, 124) than Stones but instead that it engages with the conventions of representation from a predominantly metatheatrical rather than ideological perspective. Llewellyn-Jones’s failure to evaluate Cripple in appropriate terms also leads her to object that “just as Man of Aran does not convey an authentic picture of Ireland, neither in a way does McDonagh” (LlewellynJones, 126) Indeed, McDonagh evokes 1934 Inishmaan with neither historical or psychological verisimilitude: Helen has “murdered Jack Ellen’s goose and Pat Brennan’s goose” (C, 66) for a fee, her brother Bartley is fixated with imported “sweeties” (C, 30) from “Boston Massachusetts” (C, 17) and, in order to elicit information about the ill-

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health of his fellow islanders, Johnnypateenmike lures Dr McSharry to his house “under false pretences” (C, 47), instructing his elderly mother – whose demise he is attempting to hasten by “feeding whiskey for breakfast” (C, 45) - to “cough, Mammy” (C, 47) at apposite moments. Yet interpreting the inauthenticity of McDonagh’s Inishmaan as a flaw of the text is indicative of “the need”, identified by Colin Graham and Richard Kirkland, “to bring cultural theory into the context of Irish Studies” as, rather than seeking to authentically represent the Aran Islands of the 1930s and thereby failing in this, the gleeful delight which McDonagh takes in pronouncing his dramatic landscape to be unreal demarcates Cripple as a postmodern text (Graham & Kirkland, 2) Indeed, a number of commentators have drawn upon the postmodern concept of pastiche in exploring McDonagh’s work to both celebrate and censure the playwright alike.7 O’Toole, for example, praises the “utterly 90s sensibility in which knowing and playful pastiche becomes indistinguishable from serious and sober intent” (O’Toole, 1996) which he feels McDonagh displays throughout his Leenane Trilogy, whilst for Richard Pine the shortcoming of the oeuvre is precisely that it is “caught in the dichotomy between the styles of parody and pastiche” (Pine, 350). As defined by Fredric Jameson, pastiche is: The imitation of a peculiar or unique idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists. (Jameson, 17)

Jameson has, however, drawn criticism for his interpretation of pastiche as a depoliticised aesthetic; Linda Hutcheon, for example, challenges the orthodoxy that “postmodernism offers a value-free, decorative, dehistoricised quotation of past forms” by arguing so simple a division as 7

Shaun Richards, ““Outpourings of a morbid, unhealthy mind”: critical condition of Synge and McDonagh”, Irish University Review, vol 33, issue 1, March 2003, pp201-215; Robert Butler, “Back to Eire but this time it’s Blarney”, Independent, 12 January 1997, Lexis-Nexus; Michael Lachman, “Happy and in Exile: Martin McDonagh’s Leenane Trilogy” in Michael Boss and Eamon Maher (eds), Engaging Modernity: readings of Irish politicS, culture and literature at the turn of the century (Dublin: Veritas, 2003), pp194-207; Michael Billington, “Playboy with a limp”, Guardian, 9 January 1997; Dominic Dromgoogle, The Full Room: an A-Z of contemporary playwriting (London: Methuen, 2000); Jose

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proposed by Jameson cannot be drawn between parody and pastiche, but instead that “parody has a wide range of forms and intents – from that witty ridicule to the playfully ludic to the seriously respectful” (Hutcheon, 94). Such objections notwithstanding, the Jamesonian concept of pastiche as “blank parody” offers a valuable way of understanding the absence from Cripple of any “healthy linguistic normality”. McDonagh, the London-raised offspring of Irish parentage, claims to have adopted a West of Ireland setting for his work as this provided the distance, both literal and psychological, which enabled a distinct and original voice as a playwright to emerge. Describing himself in retrospect as a “poor imitation of Pinter and Mamet” (Cavendish, 2001) prior to his linguistic relocation, McDonagh remarked: I sort of remembered the way my uncles spoke back in Galway, the structure of their sentences. I didn’t think of it as structure, just as a kind of rhythm in the speech. And that seemed an interesting way to go, to try to do something with that language that wouldn’t be English or American. (O’Toole, 1997) 8

What McDonagh recalled from childhood holidays as a “strange and heightened” speech style (O’Toole, 1997) thus informs both the syntax and vocabulary of Cripple of Inishmaan, from remarks like or “trying to get to America be the mainland they were” (C, 23), to words such as “gasur” (C, 83) and “biteen” (C, 26), signifying a young boy and a small amount respectively. The invocation of this particular idiolect has given rise to considerable speculation about the influence upon McDonagh of John Millington Synge, who strove to capture in his work the rhythm and cadence of Aran speech.9 However, the deliberate slippages from his purported “Synge-song” indicate that McDonagh is not simply attempting 8

Dominic Cavendish, “He’s back, and only half as arrogant”, Daily Telegraph, 6 April 2001, Lexus-Nexus; Fintan O’Toole, “Nowhere Man”, Irish Times, 26 April 1997, taken from www.ireland.com; see also Sarah Hemming, “Gift of the Gab”, Independent, 2 December 1996, Lexis-Nexus 9 Sean O’Hagan, “Wild West”, Guardian, 24 March 200, Lexus-Nexus; Benedict Nightingale, “Frighteningly funny trio”, Times, 28 July 1997; “Theatre Must See”, Guardian, 5 February 1997; Benedict Nightingale, “When Irish Eyes are mocking”, Times, 9 January 1997; Richards, “Outpouring of an unhealthy morbid mind”;

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to transcribe that which is “superb and wild in reality” (Synge in Smith, 112) to the stage in like fashion. For example, Billy dismisses ‘that cow business”, his predilection for “staring at cows”, as being “blown up out of all proportion” (C, 108) whilst Johnnypateenmike is likewise reminded that “doctor-patient confidentiality” (C, 47) precludes a discussion of the other islanders’ health. That this idiomatic inconsistency is not simply an oversight on McDonagh’s part but is instead a knowing example of pastiche, or what Jameson also terms “the play of random stylistic allusion” (Storey, 187), is evinced in the attention which is called to these linguistic incongruities. When Billy justifies forging a doctor’s letter to ensure his passage to Inishmore on the grounds that it was “the only avenue left open to me” (C, 95), for example, his aunt amusedly remarks “avenues, now, do ya hear…it’s always big-talk when from America they return” (C, 95), and Helen’s response to being told she resembles “one of them ragged-looking widow women waiting on the rocks for a rascal who’ll never return to her” (C, 70), is “that sentence had an awful lot of Rs” (C, 70). John Waters compares McDonagh to Flann O’Brien because of “the humorous gauze” (Waters, 47) through which both writers filter their material, and both writers also take similar pleasure in signalling their work to be “self-evident sham” (O’Brien, 25), rather than striving to provide a documentary account of the real Ireland, what Daniel Corkery approvingly described as “the genuine expression of the nation’s soul” (Corkery, 229). McDonagh further challenges what Ondrej Pilny identifies as “the dominance of the realist mode” (Pilny, 225) within the Irish theatrical tradition through his use of repetition, as present in Kate’s chant of “not a word, not a word, not a word, not a word, not a word, not a word, not a word” (C, 54) and the circuitous conversations in which his characters eerily echo each other: Eileen: Kate: Eileen: Kate: Eileen:

I have one bad arm and one arm with a knock. The knock will go away. The knock will go away. And you’ll be left with the one bad arm. The one bad arm will never go away. (C, 6)

On a thematic level, this repetition effectively conveys the stultifying monotony of Aran life: Billy even contemplates suicide to escape the tedium of “nothing but shuffling to the doctor’s and shuffling back from the doctor’s and pawing over the same oul books and finding any other way to piss another day away” (C, 92). However, as Steven Connor notes,

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because “it is in the moment when we recognise that a repetition has taken place that language begins to baulk in our apprehension as arbitrary, systemic and material” (O’Connor, 15), repetition is a critically destabilising technique which strips language of the invisibility and “naturalness” which it normally assumes. With Hutcheon contending that the keynote of postmodern texts is “de-naturalizing the natural” (Hutcheon, 31), repetition has thus, Connor observes, “acquired a particular power in the cultural era we have come to know as the ‘postmodern’” (Connor, 2). Indeed, just as McDonagh emphasises the discrepancies in his dramatic register, he here directs the audiences’ awareness to the deliberate artifice of his repetitions, with Eileen remaking to Kate “already once you’ve said that sentence” (C, 6), thereby dispensing even further with suspension of disbelief in favour of playful ludic. Jean Baudrillard observes that “whereas representation tries to absorb simulation by interpreting it as false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation itself as simulation” (Baudrillard, 173) and this offers a deft summation of the crucial difference between Stones in his Pockets and The Cripple of Inishmaan.10 In Stones, The Quiet Valley’s representation of Ireland is a false representation which must be exposed as such to counter Hollywood’s abuse of Irish economic and cultural capital, thereby providing a contemporary instance of a work in which “authenticity and claims to authenticity underlie the conceptual and cultural denial of dominance” (Graham, 133). In Cripple, on the other hand, the notion of representation is supplanted by a “simulacrum” of Irishness, a self-consciously artificial dramatic landscape which celebrates its own dissonance from reality and, as John Storey asks, “if there is no real behind the appearance, no beyond or beneath, what can be called with validity a representation?” (Storey, 181) or, conversely, a misrepresentation. If Irish drama has been driven by “a sense that the country needs to be represented, and represented in an authentic manner” (Pilny, 225), then Stones and Cripple represent a contemporary moment of divergence, one text perpetuating the tradition to counter a form of colonial dominance not, perhaps, envisaged by the founders of the National Theatre, the other ingeniously inverting the concept of representation itself in darkly comic fashion.

10

see also Kurdi, “Ireland mustn’t be such a bad place so”, pp41-59

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References Baudrillard, Jean. 2001. Selected Writings. Ed. Mark Poster. Cambridge: Polity Press. Billington, Michael. 2000. “Celebrity Fantasy”. Guardian. 25 May. —. 1997. “Playboy with a Limp”. Guardian. 9 January. Cavendish, Dominic. 2001. “He’s Back, and Only Half as Arrogant”. Daily Telgraph. 6 April. Lexus-Nexus. Connor, Steven. 1988. Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text. Oxford: Blackwell. Corkery, Daniel. 1925. The Hidden Ireland. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan. Graham, Colin and Richard Kirkland, eds. “Introduction”. Ireland and Cultural Theory: the Mechanics of Authenticity. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999. 1-6. Graham, Colin. 2001. “…Maybe That’s Just Blarney: Authenticity in Irish Culture”. Deconstructing Ireland: Identity, Theory, Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 132-53. —. 2003. “Subalternity and Gender: Problems of Post-colonial Irishness”. Theorizing Ireland. Ed. Claire Connolly. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 150-61. Grene, Nicholas. 1999. The Politics of Irish Drama: Plays in Context from Boucicault to Friel. Cambridge: CUP. Harrington, John P., ed. 1991. Modern Irish Drama. New York: Norton. Hutcheon, Linda 1989. The Politics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge. Jameson, Fredric. 1990. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso. Kilroy, Ian. 2000. “The One-Trick-Pony of Connemara?” Magill. January. 54-7. Kurdi, Maria, 2000. “‘Ireland Mustn’t Be Such a Bad Place, So, If the Yanks Want to Come Here to Do Their Filming’; Reflections on the West and Irishness in Martin McDonagh’s Plays”. Codes and Masks: Aspects of Identity in Contemporary Irish Plays in an Intellectual Context. Frankfurt am Maim: P Lang. 41-59. Llewellyn-Jones, Margaret. 2002. Contemporary Irish Drama and Cultural Identity. Bristol: Intellect. O’Brien, Flann. 2001. At Swim-two-Birds. London: Penguin. O’Toole, Fintan. 1997. “Nowhere Man”. Irish Times, 26 April. www.ireland.com Peach, Linden. 2003. The Contemporary Irish Novel: Critical Readings. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Pilny, Ondrej. 2004. “Martin McDonagh: Parody? Satire? Complacency?” Irish Studies Review. 12.2.: 225-32. Pine, Richard. 1999. The Diviner: The Art of Brian Friel. Dublin: University College Dublin Press. Storey, John. 1997. An Introduction to Cultural Theory and Popular Culture. London: Prentice Hall. Synge, J.M. “Preface”. Playboy of the Western World. Plays, Poems and Prose. Ed. Alison Smith. London: J.M. Dent. Waters, John. 2001. “The Irish Mummy: The Plays and Purposes of Martin McDonagh. Druids, Dudes and Beauty Queens: The Changing Face of Irish Theatre. Ed. Dermot Bolger. Dublin: New Island Theatre. 30-55.

GHOST WRITER: BECKETT’S IRISH GOTHIC SINEAD MOONEY

This essay aims to suggest that the works of Samuel Beckett may be fruitfully read in the light – or rather, the darkness – of the Irish Gothic mode. Critics such as Andrew Gibson have frequently pointed out that there are components of Beckett’s manifestly heterogenous writings that “cannot wholly be accommodated within clear definitions of modernist and/or postmodernist experiments in narrative” (Gibson, 2). These unassimilable elements, which Gibson links to Todorov’s concept of the “fantastic” in the sense of engendering “hesitation” and doubleness, suggest, I want to argue, aspects of the Gothic. A mode which, since its emergence as the shadow side of the Enlightenment privileging of reason, has transmuted from the formulaic to the largely indefinable, will not allow for a succinct definition within the bounds of this article. However, convergences between Beckett’s oeuvre and Gothic are not difficult to discern. Perhaps most integrally, David Punter’s nomination of “disequilibrium” as the trademark of the Gothic, a condition wrought by the juxtaposition of “a tendency towards moral and structural stabilising” and a “contrary inclination towards fragmentation, instability and moral ambivalence”, has obvious parallels in Beckett’s continual postulation and cancellation of forms of order (Punter, vol 1, 43). Both subvert any view of physical reality as at all knowable or analysable; both are fascinated with metamorphosis, doubling and “all that mocks or undermines a rational tradition’s positive, unified, propositions - all that tends towards destruction or threatens definitions of a stable ‘self”’ (Jackson, 109). However, as a flood of recent analyses have demonstrated, Gothic narratives have never escaped the concerns of their own times, the longevity of the Gothic mode being in part due to its displaced or disguised political charge, its faculty for conveying through oblique, symbolic, or allegorically-coded language cultural fears and anxieties suppressed or ignored by more official modes of writing. It is thus specifically as a form of terminal point to the mode of specifically Irish Gothic I want to place Beckett’s writings, contextualising his deliberately

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depleted recycling of Gothic tropes originally established in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This article thus considers Beckett’s deployment of alienated wanderers, settings which trap or engulf the human form, liminal states, and vengeful circularity of narrative logic, in relation to the pervasive sense of inertia, depletion and paralysis experienced by the dwindling Protestant community in the Free State. If we read Gothic primarily as a displaced mode of dissent from a cultural mainstream, a space for expressing things which cannot find a place in the masternarrative of a cultural moment, then Beckett’s Gothic represents his non serviam to post-independence Ireland, while also allowing him to evade some of the formal problems associated with the legacies of modernism and classic realism. The mode known variously as Irish Gothic, AngloIrish Gothic and Irish Protestant Gothic is generally deemed to begin with Edgeworth and Maturin, develop through Le Fanu and Stoker, and decline into the twentieth century in Yeats and Bowen – and, I want to argue, Beckett. It departs from the English Gothic of Walpole and Radcliffe, and their successors, by its explicit relation to the politics and history of the Anglo-Irish (McCormack, 831). That this strand of strongly supernatural fiction was written largely by members of the Protestant Ascendancy is, for many critics, due to the latter’s increasing political and economical marginalisation and psychological insecurity in the face of rising Catholic nationalism. Indeed, as Roy Foster remarks: “As the Ascendancy took to castellating their houses, they gothicised their fiction, possibly for much the same reasons” (Foster, 219). Thus, Irish Gothic offers, according to influential readings pioneered by Seamus Deane and Terry Eagleton, a displaced and oblique account of the eclipse of the once-Ascendant Irish Protestant minority. Eagleton, in particular, adapts Fredric Jameson’s concept of the “political unconscious” to argue that Protestant Gothic may be read as the “political unconscious of Anglo-Irish society”, the place in which its fears and fantasies most definitively emerge, a “fantastic subtext” allowing repressed self-perceptions of the equivocal socio-cultural position of the (powerful but declining) Ascendancy to be refigured in distorted but suggestive fictional form (Eagleton, 188). At its simplest, this is to argue that these Anglo-Irish supernatural stories, with their evocations of aboriginal guilt, demonic familiars and spectrally-besieged houses, helpless victims preyed upon by an unseen but deadly threat, condone the displaced expression of the social and cultural anxieties of a beleaguered and paranoid minority. After its late nineteenthcentury apotheosis in the form of Sheridan Le Fanu’s ghost stories, offering their dislocated and helpless response to Fenianism and the

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disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, the twentieth century sees a depleted form of Gothic in texts such as Yeats’s Purgatory (1939), with its deployment of ghosts, murderous iniquity and a family secret to enforce its eugenicist thematics, and the doomed, sentient houses of Elizabeth Bowen’s fiction. I want to argue that the young Beckett’s profound cultural unease at his position as a Free State Protestant allows us to essay an Irish Gothic-inflected reading of his dislocated wanderers and stage figures enduring their fantastic incarcerations, which, together with his continual investigation of the impotent and residual, and his active ‘ruining’ of literary form, constitute a form of post-mortem on the tradition. Given the simultaneity of Irish Gothic with what F.S.L. Lyons has termed the “phase of contraction” of the Protestant experience in Ireland1, the survival of certain Gothic tropes into the writings of the Irish Free State, with its ever-increased contraction of the Protestant population and concomitant sense of ineffectuality and threat, is not surprising. In fact, the paranoia which converted the relatively powerful Anglo-Irish into the victimised in nineteenth-century Gothic is no longer a fearful fantasy, but an alarmingly imminent prospect. The Southern Protestant population declined by 34% between 1911 and 1926, so that by the mid-1920s the threat of absorption by the Catholic population was a tangible one: this was due variously to Protestant emigration, to the especially high levels of fertility manifested by Irish Catholics in the Free State and to the propagation of the Vatican’s controversial Ne Temere decree. Beckett who enrolled as a student in 1923, and was, briefly, a lecturer in Modern Languages there, would have been particularly aware of the predicament of the Protestant bastion of Trinity College, which was enduring one of its bleakest periods; financially precarious, remote from contemporary Irish affairs, it endured a measure of public hostility as an anachronistic symbol of anglicisation, and saw its graduates leave the country (Brown 1985a, 114). Terence Brown, though writing of Northern Protestantism, has noted a “primal sense of siege [...] infused with millennialism” (Brown 1985b, 8), which is entirely apt to the discourses of Free State Protestantism. Speaking at the 1946 General Synod, Archbishop Gregg warned that a church “which cannot count on a younger generation is doomed to early extinction” (Bowen, 1983, 117). The similarity of this kind of pronouncement to the classically Gothic trope of inconclusive but continually hovering death is no accident, and it is one which Beckett 1

‘You can detect, I think, four main phases […] first of settlement, second of ascendancy, third of contraction, and finally of siege.’ Irish Times (January 9th, 1975): 12.

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would use in his first radio play, All That Fall, which views Free State Protestantism as condemned to a “lingering dissolution”. That the younger Beckett, still albeit uneasily based in Ireland, was aware of the manner in which the prospect of survival was weighing on the Irish Protestant psyche, is indubitable; in this, his early essays in criticism, his novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women and his selfrevelatory correspondence with the poet Thomas MacGreevy stand alongside the writings of a disparate band of Protestants negotiating their marginalisation at the hands of Irishness as a Catholic-nationalist construct, including Hubert Butler’s essays, Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal and the later poetry, drama and polemics of Yeats. While Butler and MacNeice variously address inertia, and Yeats’s latterly selfconsciously Protestant sense of marginalisation expresses itself as an interest in O’Duffy’s Fascism, eugenics and various attempts to make a virtue of necessity by embracing Anglo-Irish solitude rather than the “crowd”, Beckett’s own sense of exclusion as a Protestant is sharply, though more diffusely, evident. Both in his published writings and his correspondence of the period, his Protestantism is a continual preoccupation. Writing to McGreevy of his dislike of the “Jesuitical” poetry of Mallarmé, he describes himself as “a dirty low-church P[rotestant] even in poetry”.2 This apparently throwaway remark, a mere nod to the sectarian rhetoric of the day, is amplified by the tone of contemptuous disgust in which he dissents from any kind of collectivity, referring at one point to the idea of the nation as “a nameless and hideous mass, whether in Ireland or in Finland”,3 and of finding “his neighbours a coagulum as alien as a protoplast or God”.4 A muted sectarian consciousness also motivates in both Dream of Fair to Middling Women and More Pricks Than Kicks characterisations of the author-figure, Belacqua, the “penny maneen of a low-down low-church Protestant highbrow”.5 By 1938, in a letter responding equivocally to MacGreevy’s study

2

Letter to Thomas MacGreevy, 18 October 1932 (TCD). Letter to Thomas McGreevy, 31 January 1938 (TCD). 4 Letter to Thomas McGreevy, 8 September 1934 (TCD). 5 Dream of Fair to Middling Women (Dublin: Black Cat Press, 1992), p.100. Variations on this phrase occur at other points throughout both texts: “Distant lights on a dirty night, how he loved them, the dirty low-church Protestant!” appears in both Dream (227) and More Pricks Than Kicks (1934; London: Picador, 1983, p.78); In More Pricks Than Kicks, on the occasion of the shooting of a 3

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of Jack B. Yeats, Beckett’s sense of isolation from what he perceives as an increasingly priest-ridden mainstream has hardened, and he writes of his chronic inability to understand as a member of any proposition a phrase like “the Irish people”, or to imagine that it ever gave a fart in its corduroys for any form of art whatsoever, whether before the Union or after, or that it was ever capable of any thought or act other than the rudimentary thoughts and acts belted into it by the priests [...] 6

This stance - that of the interloper stranded amid an incomprehensible and alien population - is precisely that which is the premise for Irish Gothic in its late, Free State phase, premised upon the exclusion of Protestants from shaping state ideology, and from Catholic Ireland in general. Most famously, these residual Gothic tropes appear in works like Yeats’s Purgatory, with its ghostly eternal recurrence of the misbegetting of a child and, metaphorically, of a nation, or Elizabeth Bowen’s disquietingly alive Big Houses, conscious of their own impending demise in a way their inhabitants are not. As a form of defence these are metaphors for the Protestant predicament, in which Beckett’s mature writing – with its ghostly revenants, its grotesque incarcerations, its narrative investment in entropic decline - shares, albeit in a semi-parodic and self-impoverished manner. All That Fall, Beckett’s first foray into radio drama, written in English in 1956, for broadcast on the BBC Third Programme in 1957, offers a particularly clear instance of how a play set among the denizens of his own genteel suburban Protestant past – an indulgence in local colour highly atypical of Beckett – is traversed by Gothic motifs which emerge organically from the play’s preoccupation with the impotence, decay and lessening entirely appropriate to Southern Protestantism. Critics have chiefly remarked, often rather disapprovingly, on the play’s unusual realism, and have felt the need to excuse its comparative lack of formal innovation. Certainly, the play has frequently been read, rather reductively, as a quasi-naturalistic drama about the Protestant suburban Dublin of the 1920s in a way which would not be conceivable of any other work in Beckett’s oeuvre. Significantly, however, several of its early reviewers recognised the play’s essentially Gothic nature. Julia Strachey,

priest, the narrator remarks “It was a mercy that Belacqua was a dirty low-down Low Church Protestant and be able to laugh at this sottish jest” (p.184). 6 Letter to Thomas McGreevy, 31 January, 1938 (TCD).

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writing in The Spectator in 1957, views the play as representative of Beckett’s entire oeuvre as the articulation of a “Gothic Soul”: For this is all one territory, the place of some primal catastrophe, the dismal platform where stood the fatal block and guillotine. And the figure that haunts there, every night punctually as twilight falls – is it any wonder that he wanders eternally around it [...] head under arm, refusing to leave the dismal place; cursing; raising his sightless eyes every few paces upwards ... to whom? (Andonian, 210).

Though somewhat melodramatic in her expression, Strachey is entirely accurate on the play’s quintessentially Gothic “nightmarish quality”, a quality noted by Martin Esslin in support of the contention that the whole muted drama may be its protagonist’s bad dream (Esslin, 131). Furthermore, Beckett’s own description of the play’s genesis in a 1956 letter to Nancy Cunard uses classically Gothic terms: “Never thought about a radio play technique, but in the dead of t’other night got a nicely gruesome idea full of cartwheels and dragging feet and puffing and panting which may or may not lead to something” (Worth, 197). The Gothic, or Gothic-parody, sound effects which radio enables take precedence over character or setting and, as a result, we experience the play primarily as an eerie soundscape of halting footsteps, snatches of Death and the Maiden and “Lead, Kindly Light”, and voices, torn across by deathly silences. Beckett’s original inspiration grasps the essentially ghostly nature of radio drama, in which voices emanate from silence and return to it, conjuring brief snatches of illusion in which we are never, in Beckett’s hands, allowed to entirely believe. While All That Fall has close textual parallels with Endgame, the stage play it most closely adjoins in time, many of which link both plays to their Southern Protestant context and to the Gothic – eschatological rhetoric, a tyrannical and impotent blind man, a doomed child, a decaying world – All That Fall, by nature of its medium, forces us to share the blindness Endgame can only tell us about. Insisting on the importance of its medium, what one review refers to as the “brief disembodied life” of the radio play (Andonian, 207-8), Beckett always refused categorically to consider the play being presented on stage, insisting in 1957 that “[w]hatever quality it may have depends on the whole thing’s coming out of the dark” (Zilliacus, 3). The play operates, thus, along a fundamental tension: that of voices emanating from silence and returning to it. Beckett is primarily interested in a strange condition of suspensions between existence and non-existence, entirely appropriate to the death of his caste, and entirely appropriate to the transience of radio as

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a medium, where “only the present speaker’s presence is certain” (Zilliacus, 56). That the play is, among other things, a meditation on the inevitable absorption of the genteelly-doomed suburban Protestant community – to which the “all that fall” of Psalm 145 referred to in the title most specifically refers – is clear. Maddy Rooney, the play’s garrulous Church of Ireland septuagenarian protagonist, haltingly making her way to meet her blind husband off the train, is, palpably, a later version of the listless and tormented figures which people Le Fanu’s ghost stories. Haunted by the memory of her dead daughter and her own childless state, she ruefully realises her own deadly entrapment by “gentility and churchgoing”, while her despotic (and possibly infanticidal) husband enacts his own daily version of the classically Gothic living death in his deathly Dublin office. The evening of Southern Protestantism is evoked via a tissue of references to death, sterility and decay – the ‘encircling gloom’ of “Lead, Kindly Light”, the “shrouding” of the light, references to Dante’s damned, and much debate on the infertility of hinnies, which conceivably constitutes a sardonic sideswipe at Yeatsian eugenics – while Maddy intersperses her querulous discoursing on a “lateness” that seems to be a cultural predicament, rather than a simple matter of missing a train, with parodic sub-Gothic declarations. “What have I done to deserve all this, what, what?” she muses at one point. “So long ago ... No! No! [...] Sigh out a something something tale of things. Done long ago and ill done” (Beckett 1990, 174), while even the passing of a shop-van on the road occasions thoughts of “vile dust fall[ing] back upon the viler worms” (Beckett 1990, 175). The Irish Gothic squire, Byronic or beset in its various literary incarnations by Maturin and Le Fanu, is being subjected to a characteristically Beckettian “lessening”, akin to the manner in which the once-secure Ascendancy has descended to a form of residue in a neutralto-hostile Free State, the “dregs of landlordism” as the TD Ernest Blythe said of the Free State Protestant Senators (White, 81). But this human ‘residue’ in All That Fall becomes a kind of Gothic monster, simultaneously too visible and curiously insubstantial, the “misfit” signalled by the name of a distracted spinster co-religionist encountered at the station. Maddy’s reiterated desire to be out of her problematic body, the “two hundred pounds of unhealthy fat” with which so much play is made, derives from her horror of being looked at, an anguish at perception which resurfaces throughout Beckett’s work, notably in his Film, but which appears to have its genesis in the uneasy

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conspicuousness of being a Protestant “spectacle”. The trope of being looked at with mass hostility recurs throughout Protestant Gothic as forms of haunting, and also, in a less defamiliarised mode, in the sentient landscapes of Bowen’s The Last September and, famously, in the spinsters’ ball scene of (Catholic) George Moore’s A Drama in Muslin. At the play’s outset, Maddy is made uneasy by the gaze of the “great moist cleg-tormented eyes” of the hinny whose sterility symbolises that of Maddy and her barren caste, but later by a surrounding populace which is frequently viewed as hostile or mocking, to the extent that she exclaims, in a classic instance of Protestant Gothic siege mentality, “I should not be out at all! I should never leave the grounds!” (Beckett 1990, 182). Maddy’s unwieldy body makes her – or symbolises her status as – a spectacle of conspicuous, unintegrated Protestantism, suggesting both a site of contradiction within the Free State body politic, and a target for the missiles and jeering of the significantly-named Lynch twins, possibly textual descendants of the ferociously fertile Lynch family of Watt, here symbolic of the conspicuous fecundity of Free State Catholics, the “happy little healthy little howling neighbours’ brats” (Beckett 1990, 193) Dan Rooney hates so much it may have prompted him to commit infanticide on the train. Far from committing to a pronatalist strategy in order to replenish the Protestant population, Beckett’s Protestants are actively-lifedenying, colluding in their own extinction.7 The imminence of this fate is signalled by the play’s continual elision of “home” into death, “our long home”, its Gothic metaphorics of torpor and engulfment (in contrast with the sardonic play with the toilet door resurgence of the Irish language, which is clearly going to outlast the denizens of Boghill) and the fact that Maddy’s paradoxical body appears to combine over-visibility with a certain spectrality, eliciting continual anxious insistences on her continuing, if residual, presence: “Do not imagine, because I am silent, that I am not present, and alive, to all that is going on” (Beckett 1990, 185). Her body, in fact, appears to be subject to the kind of confusion or blurring surrounding the fact of partition. It is even possible to date the play’s setting – astonishingly in an oeuvre which is regarded as entirely ahistorical – to some point shortly after partition, as indicated by Maddy Rooney’s plaintively confused response to being mocked by onlookers as she struggles up the station steps: “Now we are the laughing stock of the twenty-six counties. Or is it thirty-six?” 7

See Terence Brown, ‘”Some Young Doom”: Samuel Beckett and the Child’, Ireland’s Literature: Selected Essays (Mullingar: Lilliput Press, 1988), pp.117126.

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Beckett’s representative southern Protestant, a depressive, conspicuous freak, given to voicing thanatological desires “to be in atoms ... in atoms!” (Beckett 1990, 185), is helplessly disoriented by the different versions of Ireland competing for legitimacy – the twenty-six counties of the Irish Free State, the six counties of Northern Ireland, and the thirty-two counties of the ideal but now phantom Republic. All That Fall, therefore, offers an uncharacteristically explicit account of Beckettian Gothic’s roots in a Foxrock of genteel dwindling and alienation from Free State cultural nationalism. As such, it also suggests an oblique avenue into the rest of Beckett’s corpus, where Gothic tropes, though everywhere evident, have a less clear relation to their bedrock in the experience of Free State Irish Protestantism. As with much of his later work, where manuscript analysis demonstrates what S.E. Gontarski has dubbed an “intent of undoing” – a gradual deconstruction of an initially cohesive story over the course of the writing process – Protestant Gothic gestures and conventions tend to become divorced from their matrix and float free, troubling textual surfaces remote from material with any obviously confessional content.8 However, certain Gothic strains remain almost constant throughout. The hallucinatory quality of his prose and drama, the ruins, follies, tunnels, graves and narrative otherworlds, purgatories or varieties of Zwischenwelt from which his creatures bear witness to lives half-lived elsewhere, “above in the light”, strongly suggest an investment in traditional Gothic terrain. Beckett’s Gothic, far from embracing the notions of representative “Irish homeliness” promulgated by Daniel Corkery in the 1930s, embraces the oppositional, denigrated and essentially Gothic qualities Corkery associated with the Anglo-Irish novel, namely “the freakish, the fanciful, the perverse”.9 The hopeless habitual wanderings of Beckett’s shuffling moribunds, and their mutation into the bedridden solipsists which succeed them (before the retreat into the closed spaces of the work after How It Is), all partake of this complex rejection of “home” for an investment in unheimlich spaces which, as well as offering unsettlingly porous boundaries between states, suggest, as William Patrick Day phrases it, “a naturally monstrous universe [...] unbounded by the laws of the material world and without divine or spiritual order” (Day, 37). 8

See SE Gontarski, The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic Works (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985). 9 Daniel Corkery’s Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature views alienation as a defining characteristic of the Anglo-Irish novel, finding in it ‘no Irish homeliness’, ‘for normal and national are synonymous in literary criticism.’ (1931; Cork: Cork UP, 1955), p.3.

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Beckett’s topographical Gothic – with its interest in the representation of netherworlds, cages and garrisoned spaces – is also very clearly a reactive rejection of the radiant landscapes of the literature of the Celtic Revival, as well as dissenting from the optimistic assumption that nature is support and comfort and a source of right moral feeling. In his Bookman review essay “Recent Irish Poetry”, Beckett’s excoriation of those of his contemporaries he deems “antiquarians” or “twilighters”, is frequently conveyed in terms of a culpable neglect of self-perception for the charms of Tír na nÓg, and what he scornfully dubs the “décor” of the Irish landscape, in which, as he complains of James Stephens, “the poet appears as beauty expert” (Beckett 1983, 72). Thus, the twilight in which Beckett’s own landscapes are most characteristically seen – the “light black” of Endgame, the palette in shades of grey of the late dramaticules – is a markedly different variety to the Celtic, and partakes of the Gothic construction of the external world as hostile, alien and terrifying. It is both entirely congruent with Beckett’s defensive contempt for the institutions of the Free State and the microcosm of the family which shares its metaphorical field. If, as has been argued, the sequestered castle from which there is no escape is, for Maturin, Ireland itself, a land thronged with the spectres of the past and haunted by the memory of ancient crimes, then Beckett’s work obsessively fingers the state of being in a suspended condition, in some form of Zwischenwelt, which has obvious relevance to the limbo-like state of his co-religionists in post-independence Ireland. Whereas Elizabeth Bowen’s displaced characters are frequently caught between Ireland and England, Beckett’s are not allowed any such grounded geographical referents, and are most frequently caught between life and death, spectral revenants who, in classic ghost-story mode, pace their narrow space – like Le Fanu’s Austin Ruthyn, who strongly resembles in his ghostly pacing Beckett’s May in Footfalls – in the familiar no-land of the Beckettian stage and page, and make their muted appeals for expiation. Like Stoker’s Dracula and James’s Quint, they are border beings, belonging to that category of creatures which according, to Christopher Craft, “abrogate demarcations” and who move with ease between “exclusive realms” (Craft, 117). Read in this light, even the continually reiterated Beckettian crime, that of being born, reads like a savagely passive-aggressive reaction to hostile responses to the awkward residual presence of Protestantism in the new state. Thus, it is entirely apt to find a resurgence in Beckett’s work of the nineteenth-century Irish Gothic tropes of incarceration and siege, and a

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metaphorics of engulfment frequently expressed through landscape – the crypt, the abyss, the threatening landscape, the coffin, spaces which cramp or dwarf the human body – so that his creatures, like so many Gothic characters, undergo what MaryBeth Inverso calls “seizures of a kind of space sickness” in a landscape endlessly shifting and unstable (Inverso, 112). Beckett’s lifelong cast of disintegrating dotards, tramps and elderly wanderers, only ambivalently alive and straying through Gothic loci – desolate, deserted and silent places – in a kind of eternal present, may be read as a depleted parodic version of Maturin’s doomed Melmoth the Wanderer. Seamus Deane has suggested Maturin’s novels are indicative of the political homelessness characteristic of Protestant writers who did not ally themselves with the new cultural nationalism - their experience of Ireland being therefore marked by alienation and estrangement after the Act of Union (Deane, 217). Protestant Gothic as a whole is characterised by its problematisation of the concept of “home” already canvassed in relation to All That Fall. In its terminal Free State version, this is hardly surprising, given both the recent blurring of the borders of what that “home” – which, as Angelika Bammer points out, works within the same metaphorical field as “nation” and “family” (Bammer, x) – might be, and the propagandist vehemence of the Irish Ireland movement, which, as Terence Brown demonstrates, rendered Southern Protestant homeless, as they “found themselves being treated in the newspapers, in political speeches and polemical pamphlets as strangers in their own land” (Brown 1985a, 106). The four novellas, written in French shortly after Beckett’s first visit to Ireland after the end of the second world war, offer a liminality which is both formal and thematic, a dream-logic or metaphorics of dispossession and expulsion which, despite its essentially Gothic hallmarks, retains unmistakable elements of specifically Irish cultural reference. A series of possibly post-mortem narrators are suddenly and inexplicably expelled from the security of various shelters in a succession of violent ejections which mimic both the birth-trauma of the individual and of a state. Typically, these nomads then wander across an unnamed landscape which is familiar yet strange, characterised by a Gothic “grandeur and desolation” (Beckett 1995, 90) “ruined follies”, city ramparts “[c]yclopean and crenellated” (Beckett 1995, 61, 63), continually in search of hidingplaces from a populace generally perceived as hostile; they find refuge in ruins which they fortify against unexpected incursions which will attempt to dislodge them again. In classic Gothic mode, these hunted narrators are surrounded by manifestations of a “slovenly and wild” Catholicism

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perceived with the fascinated alienation that characterises all Beckett’s creatures (Beckett 1995, 52). Priests, lawyers and policemen blur into a succession of Kafkaesque authority figures, accusing them of causing a public disruption, moving them on, and continually requiring evidence of religious allegiance and “credentials”. Given that these waifs and strays “can hardly have a home address under these circumstances” (Beckett 1995, 54), the only verification of identity they can offer is, significantly, the politically-charged marker of the bowler hat, the preferred adornment of the Beckett tramp. One of the few constants throughout Beckett’s career, the bowler frequently makes, along with bicycles, “a silent transit across the Beckett paysage intérieur” (Kenner, 117), and, as Hugh Kenner and Vivian Mercier have influentially argued, acts as a symbolic condensation of affiliation to Irish Protestantism.10 The bowler, always associated with the paternal, often ill-fitting and frequently regarded with resentment, links Beckett’s elderly waifs and strays to the Anglo-Irish Protestantism of his ancestry, which clings like a “scurf of placenta” to even his most disembodied writings, offering a reminder as to the problematic identity which gives Beckett’s Gothic its impetus. If not straying abroad, Beckett’s creatures are frequently subject to grotesque captivities, which, I want to argue, reflect the sectarian-cultural claustrophobia of which the young Beckett was so uneasily aware. Beckett’s writings for page and stage enact continual ghoulish confinement plots, so that the wrongful imprisonments and live burial tropes of Gothic find their counterpart in the presentation of increasingly grotesque incarcerated, often mutilated, figures. The immobilised stage figures are among his best-known images, and, while the plays frequently lack the external trappings of Gothic space, they retain its most sinister characteristic: the fact that they are exitless, akin to the narrow confines of Poe’s coffin or the cavity of Radcliffe’s Udolpho. They are plays which, as MaryBeth Inverso writes, have “lost the sense of an outdoor realm”, plays whose world seems most akin to the airless, exitless, interior domain of Gothic fiction (Inverso, 120). Endgame (1957) incarcerates a oncepowerful ex-landowner, now confined, blind and crippled, dependent on a sullen servant, inside a refuge outside of which all is ‘corpsed’; meanwhile, his superannuated amputee parents, the “accursed progenitor[s]” at whom he rails, die quietly in their dustbins, in a savage Gothic re-casting of the domestic arena – home and nation conflated – as 10 See Vivian Mercier, Beckett/Beckett (New York: Oxford UP, 1977), p.51 and following.

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one of lethally pathological compulsions and what Eagleton aptly calls “that Hobbesian social order known as the family” (Eagleton, 196). In Play (1963) three dead heads are condemned to an afterlife confined in funeral urns, tormented into repeating the story of their adulterous crime at the whim of an inquisitorial spotlight in Beckett’s Gothic treatment of the drawing-room farce. The mutilation or persecution of the human inhabitant by the Gothic structure is, as MaryBeth Inverso notes, a monstrous perversion of the domestic function of the home which offers shelter, warmth, hospitality (Inverso, 110). The Gothic deconstructs the sacrosanct domestic hearth of Irish Ireland, converting the house into an instrument of the hostile cosmos; the proscenium stage, in this light, may be regarded as another Gothic container or cage. In prose, there is an analogous relentless retrenchment of the space available to Beckett’s increasingly rudimentary figures, from the unnameable limbless protocreature in his jar of the final trilogy novel, to the progressively more cramped cylinders and rotundas of works like The Lost Ones, Imagination Dead Imagine and All Strange Away. Progressively cramped into ever smaller textual spaces, as both texts and the shrunken and minimal interiors they obsessively construct lessen, these texts enact a pressure from without being brought to bear on these depleted miniature worlds. In this, they act as virtual metaphors for Beckett’s kind, Free State Protestants quailing under increasing cultural pressures from without. Of course, Beckett’s engagement with Gothic extends into formal matters, the form and thematics of Gothic being remarkably synchronous. If, as Elizabeth Napier claims, Gothic prose fiction exhibits, in several ways, “procedures of fragmentation and disjunction”, it is because the Gothic is about fragmentation and disjunction (Napier, 7). This is certainly an apt description of Irish Gothic’s paranoid investigation of marginal states of being: the tattered, blotted, weather-beaten manuscript over which the intrigued and troubled John Melmoth pores is the Gothic text incarnate, and finds an equivalent in Beckett’s creatures’ preoccupation with what the Unnamable calls “the manual aspect of this bitter folly”, their dropped pencils, textual hiatuses, omissions and the corrosive doubt which underscores every scarcely-achieved statement. For Jan Gordon, the artefact upon which the Gothic setting models itself is the fragment, the Gothic fragment in this sense including not only what has never been finished, but also that which was once complete and whole which has now lapsed into ontological incompleteness – the crumbling ruin of the house of fiction which Beckett’s ravaged texts so strongly resemble (Gordon, 213). The result is what Andrew Gibson dubs Beckett’s “liberation of the

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fragment” (Gibson, 156), the dismissively-titled forms like “fizzles”, “precipitates” and “residua”, the savagely untidy, self-divided, broken texts which flaunt their own incompleteness and narrative incompetence. Beckett’s demolition drive towards the untroubled surfaces of the realist mode is, of course, a classically high modernist railing against the “chloroformed cabbages” of the realism of Balzac and Austen, but it is also a savage dissent from the normative narrative, the “cut-and-dried sanctity and loveliness”, of Irish national identity in the Free State, as he calls it in his “Recent Irish Poetry”, and which, I would argue, is the urnarrative against which he musters his iconoclasm (Beckett, 1983, 71). Writing about his perception of Kafka’s form, which he sees as “almost serene”, he suggests that Kafka’s heroes, unlike his, are “not spiritually precarious [...] not falling to bits” whereas, significantly, “my people are falling to bits”. What he views in his own writing as the “consternation behind the form” is thus linked explicitly to the decrepit nature of his characters, which it constructs and mimics, but also to the dwindling and fragmentation of his caste (Shenker, 2). His preoccupation with entropic decline inheres even in the relentless circularity and repetitiveness of his narrative logic, and its rejection of action in favour of dreamlike or hallucinatory narrative structures, suggesting that in the Beckett world, as in the Gothic, no action can really occur (Day, 44). The Gothic’s darkly parodic relation to the realist mode allows Beckett’s stories to foreground the inadequacy of any given account; the Gothic narrative, with its illegible letters, mise-en abîme and unreliably garrulous retainers, is entirely unable to render an account that is not in some way confused, distorted, slanted or thoroughly unverifiable. Beckett’s Trilogy – which retains many of the trappings of the Gothic novel with its bleak parodies of the deathbed confession, the mysterious and exacting agencies which stipulate the writing of these accounts, their shrunken topography of increasing claustrophobia of bed and urn, inhabited by ever more denatured and disembodied figures, their embedded narratives, their half-illegible tales scribbled in pencil in a child’s exercise book – raises this unreliability to a consummate degree. Narrative emerges in a flow which appears to flood straight from mind to page, in which statements are made, then testily dismissed as “rigmarole”, flatly contradicted, or rendered vague to the point of opacity, as though their author were consistently smudging or erasing his pencilled marks. The notion discussed earlier of the domestic structure mutating into a monstrous, alien presence likewise animates the monstrous transfiguration of narrative in Beckett’s hands into a tool for the undermining of all

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precepts, dogmas, formulas, whether aesthetic, ethical, empirical, or metaphysical.

References Andonian, Cathleen Culotta, ed. 1998. The Critical Response to Samuel Beckett. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. Bammer, Angelika. 1992. ‘The Question of Home’, New Formations 17. Beckett, Samuel. 1932. Letter to Thomas MacGreevy, 18 October (TCD). —. 1934. Letter to Thomas McGreevy, 8 September (TCD). —. 1938. Letter to Thomas McGreevy, 31 January (TCD). —. 1983a. More Pricks Than Kicks (1934) London: Picador. —. 1983b. ‘Recent Irish Poetry’, in Ruby Cohn ed., Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment. London: Calder. 70-76. —. 1990. Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber. —. Dream of Fair to Middling Women. 1992. Dublin: Black Cat Press —. Complete Short Prose 1929-1989. 1995. Ed and intro. SE Gontarski. New York: Grove. Bowen, Kurt. Protestants in a Catholic State: Ireland’s Privileged Minority. McGill: Queen’s University Press, 1983. Brown, Terence. 1985a. Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, 19221985 London: Fontana. —., ed. 1985b. ‘The Whole Protestant Community: the Making of a Historical Myth.’ Derry: Field Day Theatre Company. Brown, Terence. 1988. Ireland’s Literature: Selected Essays. Mullingar: Lilliput Press. Corkery, Daniel. 1955. Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature (1931). Cork: Cork UP. Craft, Christopher. 1984. “‘Kiss Me with Those Red Lips’: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula”, Representations 8:107-33. Day, William Patrick. 1985. In the Circles of Fear and Desire: A Study of the Gothic Fantasy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Deane, Seamus. 1997. Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing Since 1790. Oxford: Clarendon. Eagleton, Terry. 1995. Heathcliff and the Great Hunger. London: Verso. Esslin, Martin. 1982. Mediations: Essays on Brecht, Beckett and Media. New York: Grove Press. Foster, Roy. 1993. Paddy and Mr Punch: Connections in Irish and English History. London: Allen Lane.

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Gibson, Andrew. 1990. Reading Narrative Discourse: Studies in the Novel from Cervantes to Beckett. Houndmills: Macmillan. Gontarski, S.E. 1985. The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic Works. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Gordon, Jan. 1983. ‘Narrative Enclosure as Textual Ruin’, Dickens Studies Annual 11: 209-238. Inverso, MaryBeth. 1990. The Gothic Impulse in Contemporary Drama. Ann Arbor and London: UMI Jackson, Research Press. Jackson, Rosemary. 1981. Fantasy: the Literature of Subversion. London: Routledge. Kenner, Hugh. 1961. Samuel Beckett: a Critical Study. London: John Calder. Lyons, F.S.L. 1982. Culture and Anarchy in Ireland 1890-1939. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McCormack, W.J. 1991. ‘Irish Gothic and After, 1820-1945' in The Field Day Anthology II. General editor Seamus Deane. Derry: Field Day. Mercier, Vivian. 1977. Beckett/Beckett. New York: Oxford University Press. Napier, Elizabeth R. 1987. The Failure of Gothic: Problems of Disjunction in an Eighteenth-Century Literary Form. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Punter, David. 1980. The Literature of Terror: a History of the Gothic from 1765 to the Present. London: Longman. Shenker, Israel. 1956. ‘Interview with Samuel Beckett’. New York Times, May 6. White, Jack. 1975. Minority Report. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan. Zilliacus, Clas. 1976. Beckett and Broadcasting. Abo: Abo Akademi.

JOYCEAN FORM IN JAMES KELMAN’S EARLY FICTION PAUL F. SHANKS

Important to both James Kelman and James Joyce’s fiction is an awareness of voice and the implications of translating voice into text. Their work foregrounds the tension between spoken and written forms of language. In the following article, I intend to examine the ways in which Kelman and Joyce put into question the degree to which narrative might be used to frame or to reproduce the “subject”. Discussion will centre upon Joyce and Kelman’s treatment of narrative point of view and the ways in which the idea of surveillance (of both the “self” and the “other”) comes to play such an important part in their work. The formal techniques I will be specifically referring to will be interior monologue and free indirect discourse. The names, Joyce, Beckett and Kafka are frequently invoked in criticism of James Kelman’s work: however, the comparisons made are often piecemeal and unsubstantiated.1 It is my aim to illustrate the formal and contextual basis of these similarities rather than to merely indicate their presence. In the Dubliners short story, “The Two Gallants”, an opposition is created between a forensic, almost voyeuristic method of character description and the representation of thought patterns through the use of free indirect discourse. In the initial description of Lenehan, externalities are dispassionately catalogued and behaviour is described in terms of cause and effect: The narrative to which he listened made constant waves of expression break forth over his face from the corners of his nose and eyes and mouth. 1

C.f. Ellen-Raissa Jackson and Willy Maley”s introduction to the sequence of essays in “Kelman and Commitment”: “often compared with a whole host of major European literary figures—Beckett, Joyce, Kafka, Zola—he also belongs firmly within a radical Scottish tradition, and is keenly aware of, and arguably part of new literatures in English” (2001: 23).

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The overall impression is one of clinical precision: it is as if the character (Lenehan) is not an active agent in his own motions. As R.B Kershner has noted, “all the characters of ‘Two Gallants’ appear to be mechanical dolls or marionettes, ambulatory masks with nothing behind their faces” (1989: 87). The narrative eye in this initial description is similarly mechanistic, recording reality in a way which corresponds to Hugh Kenner’s discussion of style in Gulliver’s Travels: “we are told only the things an observer would have experienced, and told them in the order in which he would have experienced them. Moreover, Experience is equated with the discrete reports of the senses” (1978: 4). In “Two Gallants”, this method of narration becomes indicative of a materialistic and self-regarding mindset, one which is constantly aware of an observing eye. Lenehan, his companion Corley, and the other Dubliners of the story are all engaged in a series of artificial performances. That this performance takes its toll becomes apparent when the narrative eye homes in upon the “ravaged look” of Lenehan’s face “when the waves of expression passed over it”. This type of seeing and being seen comes to have historical and cultural implications in the context of the story. At one stage, the narrative lingers upon a street harpist which the two encounter during their walk: “not far from the porch of the club a harpist stood in the roadway, playing to a little ring of listeners, glancing quickly from time to time at the face of each new-comer and from time to time, wearily also, at the sky” (Joyce 1993a: 46). The harp itself is then personified and appears to re-enact the feminised trope of Ireland’s betrayal:2 “his harp, too, heedless that her coverings had fallen about her knees, seemed weary alike of the eyes of strangers and of her master’s hands” (1993a: 46). Later, the Harpist’s air appears to articulate Lenehan’s movements, drawing attention, once again, to his puppet-like servility: “his softly padded feet played the melody while his fingers swept a scale of variations idly along the railings after each group of notes” (ibid: 47-8).3 2

C.f. Jackson and McGinley (Joyce 1993a: 47). According to Jackson and McGinley, “Lenehan, in emulating the harpist, is vicariously emulating Corley’s amorous fingerwork”, (ibid). 3

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Lenehan then gradually becomes aware of the tedious and repetitious nature of his activities: he is “troubled” by the thought of “how he could pass the hours till he met Corley again” and seems tired of talking, tired of being “visible”. However, there is a momentary reprieve to this state in “The Refreshment Bar”: upon receiving the bodily sustenance of “hot grocer’s peas” (perhaps a secular version of the Host), Lenehan begins to reflect upon his current predicament: He would be thirty-one in November. Would he never get a good job? Would he never have a home of his own? He thought how pleasant it would be to have a warm fire to sit by and a good dinner to sit down to. He had walked the streets long enough with friends and with girls. Experience had embittered his heart against the world. (ibid .49)

Although Lenehan’s thoughts are focalised through the narrative voice, what is noteworthy here is the abrupt switch to interiority. It is as if the panoptic eye, which regulates Lenehan’s outward behaviour, has eased in intensity, allowing time for contemplation.4 But this also points to a negative predicament: Lenehan can only give voice to his desires internally and there is no sense at the conclusion to this story that he will escape his condition: his rakish lifestyle is, like the paralytic city in which he wanders, an interminable and enclosed circuit. By the time of Ulysses, Joyce’s method of framing his protagonists has become considerably more complex. It is here that he begins to use the technique of interior monologue in which the random fluctuations, the vocalised and half-complete thoughts of his protagonists are represented upon the page. In “Proteus”, for instance, the narrator is a barely discernible presence and seems merely to provide a framework through which the thoughts of Stephen Dedalus might be translated into text: “Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells. You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time” (Joyce 1993b: 36). The fluctuation in personal pronouns complements Stephen’s analysis of the protean nature of perception, indicating the instability and the potential multiplicity through which the self might relate to time (the “nacheinender”) and space (the “nebeneinander”).5 In 4

I am aware that this is a rather Beckettian reading (see, for instance, Beckett’s discussion of the “flight from extraneous perception” in “Film”, Beckett, 1986: 323). 5 For a useful and succinct account of these terms, see Jeri Johnson’s notes to The 1922 Text (Joyce 1993b: 784n).

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addition to the exchanges of pronoun used to situate Stephen’s spatial perceptions, there is also an ongoing dialogue in which Stephen refers to his past self (or selves). The tone of these is self-incriminating and often self-mocking: “remember your epiphanies on green oval leaves, deeeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria?” (1993b: 41). Nevertheless, however much Stephen might critique his younger self there is an implicit irony to the way in which he is also being narrated and this would appear to be one of the consequences of Joyce’s framing technique.6 The narrative, in borrowing from Stephen’s idiom, reveals a specific and somewhat limited outlook upon the world: as Joyce commented to a translator of Ulysses, the reader “will know early in the book that S.D.’s mind is full like everyone else’s of borrowed words”.7 For instance, the references to Shakespeare draw attention to Stephen’s predilection towards literary allusion while the arbitrary way in which they are invoked suggests that they are being used as a shield against an all too painful reality. Stephen’s self-conscious mode of thinking has its repercussions: as James H. Maddox notes, “throughout the day” he has “an obsessive sense of being watched” (Maddox 1978: 18). At one point he wonders “who watches me here” (1993b: 48) while, near the end of “Proteus”, he has a sudden awareness of another”s presence: “Behind. Perhaps there is someone” (1993b: 50). At times, Stephen appears to exemplify Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the “word with a sideways glance” in which the speaker of the text is constantly aware of a potentially hostile audience. (1984: 205, 230). He makes ironic reference to himself, recalling a derisory comment made earlier by his acquaintance, Buck Mulligan (“Telemachus”, 1993b: 17): “my Latin quarter hat. God, we simply must dress the character. I want puce gloves” (ibid: 41). He frequently thinks of himself as putting on a persona (“a side-eye at my Hamlet hat”) though this works in counterpoise to his sense of vulnerability (“If I were suddenly naked here as I sit”) (ibid: 47). It is unsurprising, therefore, that Stephen projects upon the landscape an image of ravishment similar to the vignette of the Harpist in “Two Gallants”: “under the upswelling tide he 6

Or, alternatively, it might be the consequence of the novel form itself. According to Bakhtin, one of the defining features of novelistic discourse is that it represents “the image of another’s language and outlook on the world”: “the author represents this language, carries on a conversation with it, and the conversation penetrates into the interior of this language-image and dialogizes it from within” (Bakhtin, 1981: 46). 7 “Letter to Valery Larbaud”, 4 June 1928, in MacCabe, 1978: 117.

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saw the writhing weeds lift languidly and sway reluctant arms, hising up their petticoats, in whispering water swaying and upturning coy silver fronds. Day by day: night by night: lifted, flooded and let fall. Lord, they are weary” (ibid: 49). The image of ravishment is a recurring motif in Joyce’s fiction which sometimes indicates a distinctly marked sense of cultural identity. In this instance, the image reflects the “weariness” which Stephen feels at being involved in an act of performance which is also an act of debasement. By always seeing himself in terms of the cultural “other”, Stephen has become alienated from both himself and the community (Dublin) of which he is part. When Stephen (earlier in the day) expresses empathy for the Jews he remembers encountering at the Paris Stock Exchange he is also, by implication, referring to his own sense of dispossession: “not theirs: these clothes, this speech, these gestures” (ibid: 34). Unsurprisingly, with this level of proximity and irony towards character, there is considerable difference in critical opinion as to how one might read Joyce’s interior monologues. On one level, it is important to see the textual rendering of Stephen and Bloom through free indirect discourse and interior monologue as an enabling device that allows for an “authentic” and dynamic representation of character (Maddox, 1978: 7 and Lawrence, 1981: 48). Alternatively, there are those who argue that, while Joyce’s narrative is magnetised towards the discursive idioms of certain characters, it is identifiably separate. For instance, in the “Telemachus” episode, Hugh Kenner identifies three distinctive types of narrator: a Georgian (and deliberately parodic) style of narration; a narrator instilled with Stephen’s idiom (according to Kenner’s own “Uncle Charles Principle”) and, finally, the voice which directly represents Stephen’s own thoughts (Kenner, 1978: 68-73).8 According to Seamus Deane, however, Joyce’s use of “stream of consciousness” should be seen differently from that of other writers who were using similar techniques at the time: [Joyce] does not use the method straight forwardly by imitating the voice of his characters as he depicts their inner consciousness. He caricatures them. He uses them as a ventriloquist uses his dummy, pretending that they

8

Hugh Kenner”s “Uncle Charles Principle” arose from the phrase in Joyce”s Portrait, “uncle Charles repaired to his outhouse”. Kenner argues that, in this and in similar instances, Joyce not only draws from the idiom of his character but also chooses the vocabulary which the character would have chosen to narrate him/herself.

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This reading is useful if applied to certain episodes. For instance, in the “Wandering Rocks” episode, Father Conmee’s monologues are virtually indistinguishable from public speech. Conmee’s thoughts are superficial and self-regarding and there is no sense of a distinction between his private self and his public role. However, Deane’s reading is insufficient if applied to the characterisation of Bloom and Dedalus. In the earlier episodes, Joyce systematically attempts to render consciousness by framing it, even coercing, it into a third person narrative mode. The abandonment of this technique (roughly half way through Ulysses) indicates the desire for another direction, a multiplication of the ways in which it might be possible to frame and to reproduce both physical and/or textual worlds (c.f. Lawrence 1981: 55). However, it is the earlier narrative style that relates most closely to that which Kelman was trying to achieve in his fiction. In the short story, “An Old Pub Near the Angel”, Kelman made one of his earliest attempts at combining a third person narrative perspective with interior monologue. At this stage in Kelman’s style, there is a marked division between the narrative voice and the voice of the character: “Charles wakened at 9:30 a.m. and wasted no time in dressing. Good God it’s about time for spring surely” (1989: 13). The juxtaposition of third and first person narration (respectively, in past and present tense) can be compared to similar exchanges in Ulysses.9 In the “Calypso” episode, for example, the contrast between the narrator and Bloom’s staccato thoughts creates a dynamic sense of immediacy: “he crossed to the bright side […] The sun was nearing the steeple of George’s church. Be a warm day I fancy. Specially in these black clothes feel it more. Black conducts, reflects (refracts is it?) the heat” (Joyce 1993b: 55). However, it is in The Busconducter Hines, that Kelman makes his first novel-length experiment with free indirect discourse. Sticking more closely and (perhaps) less intrusively to character than Joyce, Kelman combines the relative autonomy of first person narrative (an “I voice”) within a predominantly third-person framework. As Cairns Craig has noted, what Kelman manages to avoid in his text is that “moment of 9

Nevertheless, it has to be noted that similar techniques at this level can be found in the works of Kafka (particularly Metamorphosis) and in Dostoevsky”s later novels.

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arrest” in which the narrative encloses its subject in quotation marks (indeed, Kelman, in representing dialogue dispenses with quotation marks altogether), (Craig 1993: 103). The stylistic difference between Joyce and Kelman becomes clear if we compare the relationship between narrator and monologue in, for instance, the second half of “Nausica” which, like “Proteus”, is almost entirely focused around the central character’s thoughts: “Mr Bloom with careful hand recomposed his wet shirt. O Lord, that little limping devil. Begins to feel cold and clammy. After effect not pleasant” (Joyce 1993b: 353). There is a clear distinction here between the careful and measured tone of the narrator and Bloom’s limpid ejaculations. In Hines, the transition is less marked: for example, in the following exchange, a relatively neutral narrative voice switches, almost imperceptibly, into the voice of Rab Hines: “Paul rose from the floor with his thumb still in his mouth, his gaze shifting a moment to capture the tin; and he was passing it to Hines without any sign of resentment; just a thing to be done, you pass tobacco tins to the auld man”(Kelman 1992: 90). At other points in the narrative the text seems to have all the features of first person narrative but it attains a dialogic nature due to the frequent shifts of personal pronouns and the switches between writerly and demotic speech forms: Pause. The fellow rolls a cigarette. The charlatan did not accept his just reward in the house cum flat but employed it to advance himself towards his place of work. Now that he has come so far it would appear there is to be no turning back. Glasgow thoroughfares can be mysteriously still, the slightest breath of wind seeming not to exist. The smell of fresh tobacco on the nostrils first thing is an astonishing item. Did you hear the one about the woman with the green lips. A disgusting verbal jape. There is no time for such knavery; come on there you there Hines! get crunching to your fucking place of work, the poor auld punters by christ they await, they stand chittering at bleak outposts, their pitiful attempts to attain body heat while where is the blooming bus. O for fuck sake but it’s freezing man can you imagine lying in your kip, the breakfast in bed and that, brought by this amazing big blonde with no knickers. Shut up ya cunt I’m going to my work. (Kelman 1992: 113)

The narrative voice is heteroglossic in that it illustrates the clash between several types of language: in the extract above, abstract nouns (“an astonishing item”); outmoded forms of “high” register (“a disgusting verbal jape”) and Glaswegian demotic (“it’s freezing man”) jar against one another to humorous effect. At the same time, an internal dialogue,

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sometimes playful and sometimes argumentative, is dramatised through subtle modulations of voice (from “you” to “I”): in this instance, Hines is trying to suppress a sexually arousing daydream. In an interview with Duncan McLean, Kelman discusses some of the implications of this type of narrative: There’s an “I” voice about three times in the book…eh…in reference to the main character, or perhaps it’s the narrator, I don’t know […] It’s very possible, you see, that Hines could be writing that novel. I mean that it is technically possible within the framework of the novel. Nothing that happens happens outwith the perception of Hines, for instance, absolutely nothing. So Hines could have written every single thing […] A lot of people refer to themselves in the third person. I could describe it as a first person novel written in the third person. (McLean 1985: 65)

“Could” is the important subjunctive here: the alternations of personal pronoun convey a sense of polyphony10 while the presence of a heterogenous narrative voice creates ambiguity: at several points in the text it becomes hard to tell who exactly is speaking. The key switch in the narrative style of Hines is from a controlled, almost fly-on-the-wall, perspective to a sequence of passages which use the type of free indirect discourse described above. The transition to interior monologue coincides logically with the development of the narrative: at first, the reader can infer that Hines’s gradual withdrawal stems from an inability to regulate or to censor the encroachment of an increasingly “pointless” yet threatening set of social circumstances. Early on in the narrative, Hines begins to play the childish game of physically excluding what is disagreeable to him: “Hines grunted, he shook his head and his eyelids shut; he inserted his forefingers into each ear and began chanting unintelligibly” (Kelman 1992: 40). Later, this mode of play increases in intensity: Hines becomes compulsively aware of his body as a threshold, both in its potentiality as a site of control and as a private space from which it might be possible to exclude the external world: Back on the settee he raised the cup to his lips and allowed the coffee to enter his mouth; but he was restricting the gap so that it could only trickle through. He pushed a finger against the skin beneath his bottom lip, to the point where the coffee would have been parallel on the other side. Fuck sake. He drank most of the rest at once… 10 C.f. Sue Vice’s Bakhtinian reading of Kelman”s How Late It Was How Late, in Introducing Bakhtin (Vice 1997: 91-111).

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[…] He got up from the settee but he went ben the kitchen and got the quilt from the bed and back on the settee he stretched along it, drawing the quilt over himself, right over his face, and turning in to face the rear of the settee. He closed his eyelids, he stuck his forefingers into each ear. (1992: 55-7)

In the incident with the coffee it is as if Hines is trying to freeze-frame the moment of consumption but the alarming nature of this contemplative moment causes him to swallow the rest of the drink rapidly. Hines’s sensory withdrawal at the end of the scene appears symptomatic of his inability to gain any “real” form of control over his life. This sense of “losing control” is a central theme in much of Kelman’s work: frequently, it relates to a broader backdrop of social and economic powerlessness. The point at which Hines’s anger seethes to the surface is a transitional point within the novel’s form. The tenuous threshold which Hines has managed to maintain between inner and outer self appears temporarily to crumble and this breakdown is reflected in the text itself: Yes, 1 thing about auld Bufuckingcanan, he’s the salt of the bastarn earth. I dont know what it is with you Sandra I really dont I mean…He shook his head. He had glanced away from her […] A grandmother for christ sake. Out for cream fucking doughnuts; Jesus christ almighty! He flung the Evening times from his lap and grabbed the tobacco, getting the lid off the tin, seeing the fingers twitch, the fingers twitching away, in their grasp at the lid, of the tin DANGER: HM Govt. Health Depts’ WARNING THE MORE YOU SMOKE THE MORE YOU RISK YOUR HEALTH. The door closed. The door had been closing. And its bang. He pressed a forefinger against a nostril of his nose and blew through the other. There is a gas-fire such that 3 sections exist, each containing 24 toty rectangles behind which lurk several 100 pointed particles of an unknown nature but that they glow whitely when at hot heat; this gas-fire can be leaking mysteriously. (1992: 73)

It is here that many of the key dilemmas of Hines come into active conflict: unable to control his feeling of class resentment towards Sandra’s boss, Hines’s unexpected outburst foregrounds the feeling of class rage which has been bubbling beneath the foregoing narrative. This loss of control is then reflected in the attention which Hines pays to the movements of his hands; it is reflected in the sudden invasion onto the

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page of the Government Health warning; and finally, it is reflected in the abrupt appearance of interior thought (Hines’s anxiety over another domestic threat, the faulty gas fire). In this instance, the formal fragmentation of the text reflects both social and psychological fragmentation. From this moment onwards, we are given a deeper insight into Hines’s mindset: he is constantly aware, for instance, of the way in which he appears as an object in other’s eyes and views his own behaviour with cynicism. He is all too aware of his complicity within a type of performance, a formal act of self-alienation. Once again, this tension is reflected stylistically in the text where archaic and writerly phrases are used to parodic effect. Other members of the green were there. He greeted them cordially albeit with a concealed smile of supercilliousness at the thought of himself there sitting there at this exact moment in the eternal scheme of things. Consolation was his, however, deriving as it did, via his experience, oftimes verified via countless other mornings whence the ragings of a darkly brain had indeed given way to a calm but firm detachment. Had a mirror been handy he could have watched his face. It would have been interesting to witness the outward appearance. (ibid: 152)

These speech acts are strategies of self-protection in that to generate a false self is also to elude invasive eyes. Hines seems well aware of this effort in his observation of other people: For each individual a guise exists but this guise is shabby, it can be seen through; face upon face, the tired the sullen the crabbit, the timid the cheery and so on. In the windows he could see their reflections, the strange frowns every now and then. That concentration. (ibid: .86)

However, Hines’s frequent desire to “watch his face”, to see himself from the perspective of an “other”, indicates that he is divided from himself precisely because of the sense of alienation and cynicism with which he regards his “public” role. Cairns Craig, who situates Kelman’s work within a particularly bleak and embittered Post-Industrial sense of Scottish identity, argues that his protagonists have “a brutal awareness that the Scottish working class, who saw themselves as the carrier of historical change […] are now the leftovers of a world which has no need of them’ (Craig 1993: 102). The alienation Hines feels towards his job is epitomised when he imagines that “in the years to come, when one-manbuses rule the roost, they will have him cast and hoisted above the garage

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exit, as an example of The Busconductor” (Kelman 1992: 112). His alienation from himself becomes clear when he imagines the relief of seeing his own doppelganger: Should he have witnessed another Hines enter and go about his various bits of business it would have been very scary indeed, and yet also relaxing perhaps. Especially if the event took place during a long hot summer spell and he made straight to the sink to sluice cold water on his face and neck, washing off the sweat. (ibid: 162)11

The reader (and Hines) gradually becomes aware that the voice being used to articulate Hines is also a doppelganger of sorts, a substitute self. This is indicated when the narrative claims that “this isnt Hines who’s talking. It’s a voice. This is a voice doing talking which he listens to. He doesnt think like it at all. What does he think like. Fuck off” (ibid: 167). Cairns Craig has argued that it is in this sense that Hines illustrates the interpellation and the potential “multiplicity” of the modern subject: “voices can erupt into the self because it is already the space of the Other” (Craig 1999: 102). While the voice which speaks through Hines does, on the one hand, appear to offer a form of autonomy, it also becomes a source of entrapment; a voice which Hines is compelled to listen to: “there is a voice such that it cuts about discharging commands and stuff. In a square rectangle there lived a triennial unit once upon a time. The head is a strange item, Hines cant get into his” (Kelman 1992: 213). Eventually, it would appear, the insufficiency of this voice becomes apparent in Hines’s wish to maintain “clarity” via “silence” (1992: 213). This type of clarity seems implicit in the conclusion to the novel which returns to an impersonal and “concrete” mode of representation. In the interview referred to earlier, Kelman differentiates himself from Joyce while also admitting to a similarity of intent, suggesting that Joyce might have envied the ways in which he manages to switch from a “concrete” perspective to an “I” voice: I know, for instance, that what I do in Hines Joyce does not do in Ulysses, but I really do think he would have liked to have done that. (Laughter) […] I’m talking about the transition, and I mean just in a technical way […] the type of facts a statement of something; that straight concreteness, you 11

Water is an important motif in Hines: at certain points it represents danger (for instance, in the opening scene with the soup pot of water) or it represents the elemental passing of time (note the frequency of rain, snow and ice in the novel); but here it seems to play an almost cathartic cleansing role.

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Nevertheless, whether it is ever really possible to create a “value” free text is questionable and is a dilemma which Joyce certainly seemed aware of (hence the rapid and sometimes baroque fluctuations of style in Ulysses).12 However, in The Busconducter Hines what is notable is the way in which certain value systems appear to encroach upon the voice of Hines and to regulate the formal shape of the text itself. What makes Hines such an effective novel is the way in which it uses form diagrammatically in order to represent the social and political issues at stake. In conclusion, I have argued that Joyce and Kelman represent at a formal level a culturally marked opposition between public and private modes of subjectivity. I have also noted the way in which their texts reveal a dialogic friction between autonomous subjectivity and the invasive nature of voices external to the self. Hopefully this discussion has achieved its purpose in identifying some of the key similarities in Joyce and Kelman’s use of form. It might further be argued that these texts enact a peculiarly modern sensibility where voices that constitute the “self” are in constant conflict with one another and where there is no respite from the unrelenting gaze.

References Bakhtin, Mikhail, 1981. “From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse.” Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Michael Holquist ed., The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press: 41-83. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Trans. Caryl Emerson. London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Beckett, Samuel. 1986. The Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber. Craig, Cairns, 1999. The Modern Scottish Novel. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999.

12

The later episodes of Ulysses, in dispensing with a “metalanguage”, draw attention to the way in which narrative traditions may be formed. For instance, the narrative style of “Ithaca”, while initially alienating the reader through its encyclopaedic inventory of “facts”, illustrates the relativity of all modes of representing “reality”.

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—. 1993. “Resisting Arrest: James Kelman.” Wallace, Gavin and Randall Stevenson, eds., The Scottish Novel Since the Seventies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press: .99-114. Deane, Seamus. 1985. Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature. London and Boston: Faber. Jackson, Ellen-Raissa and Willy Maley eds. 2001. Kelman and Commitment. Edinburgh Review, 108: 21–122. Joyce, James, 1993. James Joyce’s Dubliners: An Annotated Edition, John Wyse Jackson, Bernard McGinley, eds. London: Sinclair Stevenson. —. Ulysses: The 1922 Text. Jeri Johnson, ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kelman, James, 1989. Not Not While the Giro. London: Minerva. —. 1992. The Busconducter Hines. London: Orion. Kenner, Hugh. 1978. Joyce’s Voices. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Kershner, R. B. 1989. Joyce, Bakhtin and Popular Literature: Chronicles of Disorder. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Lawrence, Karen. 1981. The Odyssey of Style in Ulysses. Princeton: Princeton University Press. MacCabe, Colin, 1978. James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan Press. Maddox, James H., 1978. Joyce’s Ulysses and the Assault Upon Character. Brighton: Harvester. McLean, Duncan, 1985. “James Kelman Interviewed.” Edinburgh Review, no. 71: pp.64-80. Vice, Sue, 1997. Introducing Bakhtin. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

“A DAY ON WHICH NORTHING OF IMPORTANCE HAPPENED”: BRIAN FRIEL’S THE FREEDOM OF THE CITY AND BLOODY SUNDAY DANIEL SMITH

Brian Friel’s The Freedom of the City is, according to F.C. McGrath, “set in 1970 on a day on which nothing significant happened in Northern Ireland” and “makes no attempt to reproduce the events of Bloody Sunday […] but it quite deliberately evokes them” (100). Yet when a Catholic priest appears in the opening scene of the play, waving a white hanky and crouching in fear, only those totally unfamiliar with the iconic images of Bloody Sunday can fail to spot the resemblance to Father Daly (Friel, 107). It is worth noting that the first person to enter is a photographer, who takes pictures of Lily, Michael and Skinner’s corpses. Thus, the opening scene quite explicitly establishes the connection between Freedom and Bloody Sunday, as well as with the images of that day. Friel’s audience (at least at the Abbey theatre where Freedom had its premiere) would immediately have recognised both the reference to actual events and been aware of the importance that those images had in shaping reactions to Bloody Sunday. This device also introduces what is to be the most important aspect of the play, that of (mis)representation of characters and events. Lionel Pilkington states that “Friel’s emphasis is less on a diegesis of these events, than on an investigation of the manner of their representation.” (Pilkington 2001) This seems to be the key to understanding Friel’s partially disingenuous statement that the play is “not about Bloody Sunday.” (Boland 2000) His disavowal of the play’s direct historical reference is a continuation of the process that begins with the relocation (or dislocation) of the familiar events of Bloody Sunday to a date almost two years prior to the 30th of January 1972. Friel actually began work on what was to become The Freedom of the City nearly a year before Bloody Sunday as a play about evictions in the 18th century, which was provisionally titled John Butt’s Bothy. (Boland 2000) While it is clear

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that Freedom is about Bloody Sunday, by changing key details of events, dates and individuals (as well as by downplaying the direct correspondences in interviews), Friel attempts to broaden the perceived concerns of the play. Bernice Schrank comments: As a distancing device, the date change does not do much. If anything, the change in dates reinforces and intensifies the politics of the here and now. It enables Friel to incorporate into what was, historically, an antiinternment march all the accumulated grievances of the Catholic population in Northern Ireland (Schrank 2000)

Eavan Boland claims that it would be “surprising” if Freedom was a political play, for “[t]here has never been anything of the polemicist or the propagandist in [Friel’s] work.” (Boland 2000) The right-wing English press might beg to differ, since they were not slow to apply the label of propaganda to Freedom, and Ulf Dantanus lists some prominent examples (Dantanus 1988) but while it is true that Friel is hardly a polemicist, it is not so easy to dismiss claims that Freedom is not political, at least in the broad sense that it analyses individuals’ relationship with the power structures that govern their lives. However, in 1973, these concerns were not perceived as readily as the more obvious references to a recent, violent, controversial and heavily reported event, and the shock caused by Friel’s engagement with Bloody Sunday was considerable. That these images associated with Bloody Sunday, transposed onto the stage, caused most reviewers at the time to regard Freedom as a political play and one about Bloody Sunday is not astonishing. The visual impact of Freedom should not be underestimated. The naturalistic space of the Mayor’s parlour in which Lily, Michael and Skinner interact is surrounded by three areas whose main function is symbolic. The apron, front; a small area, left; and the “battlements” or city walls, aloft. The left area and the battlements are occupied by characters who comment upon and represent the actions of those inside the Guildhall. Schrank describes a further possible delineation of this space: Whereas the horizontal divisions speak primarily to differences in power and status and their associated languages, the vertical partitioning between soldiers and civilians reveals differences (British vs. Irish), but also unacknowledged commonalities (class, language). It is one of the painful contradictions of this play that those groups who have most in common are pitted against each other, while those who have a vested interest in perpetuating that divisiveness hover out of harm’s way in the battlements above. (Schrank 2000)

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There may be some over-interpretation here: the soldiers are not obviously presented either as working-class heroes nor as victims of class oppression. Their anonymity arises not from their status as undifferentiated representatives of a class or community but from their role as instruments of the state’s power, as indicated by the fact that they are indeed granted an identity of sorts, in the callsigns which they use to refer to each other - “Blue Star to Eagle” (p. 117). The voice of the Protestant working class is also sublimated to the political statements of the representatives of the state; if Friel’s primary message was one of class solidarity, then this is a serious omission. While it is true that the staging of Freedom is by no means based on a purely vertical division between high and low, it may be more instructive to see it in terms of a surrounding discourse rather than a series of discrete sections - albeit one in which physical status plays an important role. The Judge, Army Officer and Priest attempt to represent the action inside the Guildhall from a position of ostensible authority, while the sociologist Professor Dodds, the reporter Liam O’Kelly, and the Balladeer do so from “ground level”, yet their representations are not shown to be more accurate or sympathetic purely as a result of this positioning. The power relations that are acted out therefore do not result from any inherent hierarchical structure, but rather from the audience’s perception of the relationship between each commentator’s statements and the naturalistic action taking place in the parlour. What comprises the “politics of the here and now” on stage in Freedom is a complex interaction of the naturalistic and the symbolic, where performance and staging move between both functions. The walls that box in the Mayor’s parlour represent the actual walls that surround the Guildhall in Derry, walls that have a powerful symbolic component of their own, yet they also stand in the play for the platform occupied by the reactionary forces of the state, whether they are the army, in the form of the Army Officer (p. 126), the law, in the person of the Judge, or the Church, in the form of the Priest. In this role, they act as a barrier, separating these powers from those on the ground, and as a symbolic elevation. The powers that be are placed above the action, which might suggest that they occupy a privileged position with regard to their insight into that action inside the parlour. However, being separated from the past events beneath them by time as well as distance, they never interact directly with Lily, Michael and Skinner, preferring to construct their own narrative of the events that took place inside the Guildhall. In fact, aside from the possible exception of Dodds, none of the commentators, high or

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low, show any indication of being aware of this action at all. Their performances are superficially naturalistic,1 yet the audience is constantly aware of the gaping hole in their perceptions, the hole they are attempting to fill through “eyewitness” accounts and supposition. The gap between what the audience perceives as reality (i.e. the naturalistic portrayal of the three inside the parlour) and what the commentators construct as reality, is thus represented visually on stage by this blind spot in the commentators’ vision. However, as mentioned, there is also an evident chronological split between those who participate in the action in and around the Guildhall, and those who comment on events from a later perspective. It might even be said that the misrepresentation of Michael, Skinner and Lily by those present at the time is more crucial, since the “knowledge” that the Guildhall is occupied by forty armed terrorists leads directly to the deaths of three innocent people. It should be noted that the Army Press Officer appears on the battlements, indicating not just his position as part of the ruling triptych already discussed but also hinting that his misrepresentations are of the same order as the Judge and Priest, in other words, deliberate. However, the fact that this is an announcement that takes place while the three main characters are still inside the Guildhall provides an important demonstration of the different ways in which events can be misrepresented. The loaded suppositions of the Press Officer are reported as fact by O’Kelly, then exaggerated to comically heroic proportions by the Balladeer (pp. 125-7). The failure, is not, therefore, that of representation per se, but rather the failure of these particular attempts at representation. Lionel Pilkington draws the conclusion that this is a totalising critique of the role of representation and state repression: The final impression of The Freedom of the City is not one of political protest, therefore, but of an inevitable and universal complicity between the state and all forms of representation. (Pilkington 2001)

However, all of Friel’s commentators are, in one way or another, unreliable commentators. The priest is an hypocrite, the Balladeer a drunken simplifier, the Journalist a sensationalist. But this does not mean 1

For example, see the Judge’s cross-examination of constable Hegarty, pp. 107-9 and of Prof. Cuppley, pp. 161-2, and the report of Liam O’Kelly, pp. 167-8. All display the pauses, hesitations and corrections of overtly naturalistic speech.

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the breakdown of all representation. In order for the play to function, the audience must accept that the events inside the Guildhall do accurately represent reality. If this is not the case, if we view all representation as inevitably and universally complicit with state repression, then the naturalistic portrayal of Skinner, Michael and Lily is as flawed as any other representation within the play. As an audience, one might adopt such an attitude of extreme scepticism, but this would destroy the premise of the play. While Freedom is a critique of representation, it does not preclude the possibility of an accurate, honest representation, it merely demonstrates that the ones provided by its commentators are wanting. Elmer Andrews describes this process as follows: …however problematic reality may be for Friel, plot and character are not entirely done for in his plays. He warns of all the impostures of narrative, but insists we are still watching a group of human beings or a window on time. (Andrews 1993)

Freedom structurally establishes its own claim to truthful representation in the naturalistic portrayal of the events within the Guildhall: Encouraged to compare what can be seen and heard to take place in the Mayor’s Parlour with the many verbal commentaries and assessments of this action that are made from the outside, this dramaturgical method comes to a head when what the audience can see and hear in the theatre is contradicted by the Judge’s conclusion exonerating the army… That the three civilians are innocent appears as obvious as the immediacy and transparency of the spectator’s perception… Friel’s technique of having the shooting take place immediately after the Judge has finished his magisterial-sounding conclusions reinforces this impression that it is the distortions that are implicit in the Judge’s ‘law and order’ rhetoric that lead directly to the shooting. (Pilkington 2001)

Pilkington concludes that an audience, recognising Friel’s critique of distanced representation, will acknowledge the irony of his use of just such a representation and draw back from the sort of observer activity in which the commentators in the play indulge. However, Freedom depends for its artistic unity and its political message on the audience’s belief in the reality and truth of its central action, against which it can judge these representations, as Pilkington’s own analysis above demonstrates. Joseph Csicsila damns the commentators thus: [E]ach of the peripheral characters, from the sociologist to the balladeer to the priest… sacrifices the notion of Truth as each exploits and

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propagandizes the deaths of the marchers for his own purposes. (Csicsila 2002)

Yet without a core of Truth for which the audience is willing to sacrifice their disbelief, the representations of the peripheral characters cannot be shown to be false. Naturalism as a theatrical convention can be seen as a vehicle for propagating pre-existing ideas about the nature of the world and our perception of it, but as far as Freedom is concerned the important thing is that this mode of representation forms a contrast. Friel is not interested here in deconstructing the precise means by which naturalism lays claim to Truth but rather in showing the difference between the spontaneous action in the Guildhall and the overtly constructed narratives of his peripheral characters. However, not every peripheral character appears equally duplicitous, for a variety of reasons. The level on which the commentators appear, for example, is highly significant, not least because it plays a major role in directing the audience’s sympathies. It is important to note therefore that Dodds appears at ground level, thus making it difficult to automatically dismiss him as an ivory tower academic. While it might be possible to see him as “essentially an academic tourist from the privileged world come to see how the natives live”, (Schrank 2000) he is undoubtedly more sympathetic than Friel’s other peripheral commentators, if only because he at least attempts to engage with the underlying causes of the plight of the poor, and all the more so because the only other commentator to attempt this is so clearly marked as a hypocrite (pp. 124-5). Dodds’ analysis of the “subculture of poverty” may itself be read as patronising, especially if one assumes that Dodds, like the other peripheral commentators is asking us to privilege his conception of reality over the “truth” of events inside the Guildhall, but he does not seem as blatant in his distortions as the others. In part this is an effect of Dodds’ refusal or inability to refer to these events, which (although indirectly as I have suggested) every other character does. Dodds' position on stage is slightly ambiguous: he may enter the same small stage left area as the witnesses at the tribunal, or he may appear on the apron itself. If he is given the prominent position on the apron rather than occupying the small area stage left, the audience’s sympathy for his point of view may be reinforced. Compare the effect of Dodds’ attempt to be inclusive: “Middle-Class people – with deference, people like you and me” with the Judge’s stentorian ponderousness, O’Kelly’s meaningless journalese and the irrelevance of the Priest’s selfinterested anti-communist rant, all delivered from the battlements, high at

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the back of the stage, and our view of Dodds becomes distinctly, if relatively, favourable. Despite the fact that Dodds himself does not refer directly to the events of the 10th of February 1970, (ostensibly the date on which Freedom of the City is set) it should be noted that the action in the parlour does itself point back to his analysis. For example, when he posits that the poor “often have a hell of a lot more fun that we have”, we are immediately treated to the sight of Skinner as the Lord of Misrule, comically dressed in the Mayor’s robes. Taken a step further, however, and we can see how the immanent condescension of Dodds’ theory is brought out. Skinner is not merely playing dress-up, a piece of mindless fun, but rather bursts forth from the dressing room making highly pertinent quotes from Shakespeare and giving the lie to Dodds’ assumption that the poor have more fun because they do not analyse their experiences. Skinner’s recitations are almost too perfectly apt; whether he is a middleclass revolutionary slumming amongst the proletariat or a working-class revolutionary subverting (or reclaiming) the words of the darling of the bourgeoisie, his actions undermine Dodds’ thesis even as superficially they seem to reinforce it. Dodds’ own lack of reaction to events is interesting with reference to this juxtaposition of revolutionary thesis and praxis: (Her voice is drowned by shooting – rubber bullets and CS gas – and immediate pandemonium in the crowd. Panic. Screaming. Shouting. The revving of engines as tanks and water-cannon pursue fleeing groups. More rubber bullets and the quick plop of exploding gas canisters. Very slowly the noise fades to background. As it does, DODDS resumes as calmly as before.) (p. 111)

As scripted, Dodds is alone on stage, delivering his lecture on “inherited poverty or the culture of poverty or more accurately the subculture of poverty”, while a thinly-disguised Bernadette Devlin makes “fiery” but inaudible noises off (pp. 110-111). The result is that simultaneous to Dodds’ claim that the poor are unable to connect their situation with that of the poor all over the world, a crowd of Northern Irish Catholics are attending a meeting directly inspired by the American civil rights movement, consciously appropriating its slogans and songs. The contrast between Dodds’ friendly but somewhat dry manner and the violent events taking place offstage is striking, and further enhances the impression of his analysis as sympathetic, but ultimately flawed, like every commentator’s

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attempt to represent the truth in Freedom. Dodds’ analysis presents a more thorough challenge to the audience’s own prejudices, but even the most sympathetic portrayal of the professor could not overcome the dissonance between his immaculate representation of the state of world poverty and the events taking place on (or off) stage, though that dissonance is admittedly less marked than is the case with the other commentators. Dodds’ allure as a friendly voice in an otherwise hostile and selfinterested pantheon of commentators is undeniable. In 1999, Conall Morrison directed a performance of Freedom in New York, in which the stage direction above was brought out of the wings, as described by the sound engineer, David Nolan: Conall went for showing you things that were described or spoken, so, with Brian’s permission, we essentially had a full-scale riot onstage… For the baton charges, we had radio mikes on each soldier. They came on and started beating on the shields and we fed this through a lot of processing to give it a sort of very ominous and percussive feel – the sound of impending doom. (Coult 2002)

This riot was used to cover a scene change, which indicates a difference between this production and Freedom’s scripted, more static yet innovative setup. The staging for the New York version was more conventional, and the juxtaposition of Dodds’ first speech and the violent dispersal of the civil rights meeting is lost. More importantly the structural representation of the lacunae at the centre of the commentators’ various representations is no longer available to the audience. Part of Dodds’ appeal is his partial ability to recognise the play’s central feature; the problem of representation. He suggests, as Nicholas Grene makes explicit, that the tragedy of the three main characters in Freedom is “their failure to adequately represent themselves”. (Grene 1999) Isolated from the discourse that decides their meaning and determines their fate, each of the three main characters in Freedom of the City attempt to defend their own view of the world against the challenges posed by the other two. Their conversation is markedly different from the discourse or discourses that surround them. Indeed, Joseph Csicsila argues that this difference constitutes the central argument of the play, that individual humanity resists such attempts to represent it. (Csicsila 2003) Yet the three main characters are given an opportunity to represent themselves, when, near the beginning of act two, the three stand beside the positions where their bodies lay at the beginning of the play. The stage

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direction before these speeches is instructive: “(When MICHAEL, LILY, and SKINNER speak, they do so without emotion, in neutral accents.)” (p.149). Friel, though he would later address the issue of the standardisation of language as a means of imposing social or cultural dominance (most notably in Translations), seems here to accept that the truth of these three characters would be best expressed in an idiom that is not the same as their naturalistic manner of expression inside the Guildhall. Helen Fulton sums this process up as follows: “When Lily tells us ‘publicly’ that she had a flash of insight before she died, we somehow feel that she is telling us a ‘truth’ that was never articulated in her own words as an individual in the Guildhall.” (Fulton 2003) This view would seem to accord with the one articulated by Dodds when he says: ‘the very moment they [the poor] acquire an objective view of their condition… from that moment they have broken out of their subculture’ (p. 111). Yet Lily has not one “flash of insight” but two. The first, in that “neutral” accent, is detached to the point of abstraction: And in the silence before my body disintegrated in a purple convulsion I thought I glimpsed a tiny truth: that life had eluded me because never once in my forty-three years had an experience, an event, even a small unimportant happening, been isolated and assessed, and articulated. (p. 150)

The second, naturalistic, epiphany is more halting, short sentences and repetition contributing to the sense of a difficult admission being drawn out of her: I told you a lie about our Declan. That’s what Declan is. He’s not just shy, our Declan. He’s a mongol. (She finds the brandy bottle and hands it to him.) And it’s for him that I go on all the civil rights marches. Isn’t that stupid? You and him (MICHAEL) and everybody else marching and protesting about sensible things like politics and stuff and me in the middle of you all, marching for Declan. Isn’t that the stupidest thing you ever heard? (p. 155)

The nature of the staging of Freedom, its structure of representation, and modern theatrical convention generally, may lead to an audience accepting Lily’s “natural” epiphany more readily than her “neutral” one as expressing the essential “truth” of her character. These two speeches are symptomatic of the paradox contained in the structure of Freedom. The characters are able to represent themselves, contrary to Dodds’ insinuation, yet both the methods through which this representation is

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allowed are circumscribed by the structure of the play. The naturalistic dialogue within the Guildhall constantly reinforces the idea that the power structure represented by the peripheral characters has already trammelled the lives of these characters economically, politically and intellectually. Yet the “neutral” speech of the disembodied characters is no more free; their final thoughts are of “astonishment”, “sorrow” and “flippancy” (p. 150). The conclusion one draws from Freedom may be a bleak one: that the power of representation has here been forced into the service of the status quo and that any attempt to wrest it back results in irrelevancy or eradication. I have suggested that Friel’s play itself presents a model by which this process can be displayed openly, even visually. However, in order for this to take place, serious questions about the nature of representation must be sublimated, to an extent that goes well beyond the conventional willing suspension of disbelief.

References Andrews, Elmer. 1993. The Fifth Province in The Achievement of Brian Friel. Edited by Alan J. Peacock. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe. Boland, Eavan. 2000. Brian Friel: Derry’s Playwright (1973) in Brian Friel in Conversation. Edited by Paul Delaney. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan. Coult, Tony. 2002. Interview with David Nolan in About Friel: The Playwright and the Work. London: Faber. Csicsila, Joseph. 2002. “Isn’t it the stupidest thing you ever heard?”: The Everyday Human Struggle in Brian Friel’s The Freedom of the City. In A Companion to Brian Friel. Edited by Richard Harp and Robert C. Evans. West Cornwall: Locust Hill. Dantanus, Ulf. 1988. Brian Friel: A Study. London: Faber. Friel, Brian. 1996. The Freedom of the City in Plays One. London: Faber. Fulton, Helen. 2003. Hegemonic Discourses in Brian Friel’s The Freedom of the City in Language and Tradition in Ireland: Continuities and Displacements. Edited by Maria Tymoczko and Colin Ireland. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Grene, Nicholas. 1999. Friel and Transparency. Irish University Review, Special Issue: Brian Friel. 29:1. McGrath, F.C. 1999. Brian Friel’s (Post)Colonial Drama: Language, Illusion and Politics. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Pilkington, Lionel. 2001. Theatre and the State in Twentieth-Century Ireland: Cultivating the People. London: Routledge.

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Schrank, Bernice. 2000. Politics, Language, Metatheatre: Friel’s The Freedom of the City and the Formation of an Engaged Audience. In Theatre Stuff: Critical Essays on Contemporary Irish Theatre. Edited by Eamonn Jordan. Dublin: Carysfort Press.

LOOKING FOR LITERARY SCOTLAND: J.G. LOCKHART AND THE ‘HORAE GERMANICAE’ DAN WALL

In an August 1818 article for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine entitled ‘Remarks on Schlegel’s History of Literature’, John Gibson Lockhart noted that ‘the good people of the present age’ existed in a time that was ‘beyond all question, the most enlightened which the world has ever seen’ (Lockhart 1818d: 497). However, Lockhart’s feelings towards the cultural landscape of early nineteenth century Edinburgh were less contented. Since the first issue of the re-launched Blackwood’s had left the presses in October 1817, its editorial team, led by Lockhart, aided by John Wilson, and abetted by James Hogg, had railed loudly against the Edinburgh Review, and its associated literary clique. Blackwood’s stock-in-trade was its outspokenness, and Lockhart in particular had acquired a fearsome reputation for scurrilous satire and scalding reviews. During the early years of the magazine, Lockhart and Wilson attracted numerous threats of legal action, along with some stern warnings from William Blackwood himself. However, behind the shrill and savage condemnations of Blackwood’s ideological opponents apparently existed far subtler methods of subversion, based upon coherent aesthetic theories which led Lockhart in particular to deride the state of Scottish literature and criticism at the turn of the 1820s. His handling of German translations (through the ‘Horae Germanicae’ series) between 1819 and 1825 represents a particularly fascinating strategy employed in his attempt to suggest an alternative Scottish literary culture. Through it Lockhart, arguably the major player at Blackwood’s at this time, harnessed the potential of the periodical to foreground literary works which themselves carried a particular cultural resonance in the highly charged arena of contemporary

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literary debate. The translation work undertaken by Lockhart in collaboration with others during this time provides an example of the more measured, instructive content of the magazine, and suggests that Lockhart’s own conception of national culture was both well informed and coherent. The ‘Horae Germanicae’ consisted of extracts from German dramatic works, translated most often by either Lockhart, or another renowned linguist, R.P. Gillies.1 Launched in November 1819, the ‘Horae Germanicae’ ran until Lockhart’s departure from the magazine to edit The Quarterly Review in 1825. It was joined in February 1820 by a short-lived Spanish equivalent (the ‘Horae Hispanicae’), and the following March by an equally intermittent series of Danish literary translations (the ‘Horae Danicae’). There also ran a single number of translated Chinese poetry entitled the ‘Horae Sinicae’ (Lockhart 1818c: 639) and two of Scandinavian literature under the banner of the ‘Horae Scandicae’,2 both introduced by Lockhart. The concept of running a series of extracts from German literary works was initially broached to William Blackwood by the occasional Blackwood’s contributor, John Anster. Writing to Blackwood from Dublin in a letter dated June 11, 1818, Anster offered Blackwood several German translations that had appeared in the Trinity College Gazette in 1817.3 These duly appeared in July 1818,4 well over a year before the ‘Horae Germanicae’ officially began. Among the works the series went on to showcase were, most notably, Goethe’s Faustus,5 and extracts from Coleridge’s translation of Wallenstein,6 alongside pieces by Mullner, Grilparzer, Raupach and Kôerner. These pieces appeared at irregular intervals, and were sometimes numbered wrongly. ‘Horae Germanicae’ 4, and 8 were missed out 1

My attributions follow Strout’s. Alan Lang Strout. 1959. A Bibliography of Articles in Blackwood’s Magazine 1817-1825. Lubbock: Library Bulletin No.5. 2 ‘Horae Germanicae’ 1 appeared in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, February 1818, Vol. 2, 570. ‘Horae Germanicae’ 2 (produced with Maginn) appeared in September 1818, Vol. 7, p.674. 3 MS. 4003, f.1: The Blackwood Archive, National Library of Scotland. 4 “N.R.” (alias John Anster): Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, July 1818, Vol. 3, 416. 5 Produced by Lockhart and John Anster: Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, June 1820, Vol. 7, 235. 6 Abridged with a commentary by Lockhart: Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, October 1823, Vol. 14, 377.

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altogether. Two translations were numbered identically; ‘Horae Germanicae’ 15 of August 1822, and ‘Horae Germanicae’ 15 of January 1823. Additionally, other German translations occasionally appeared separately to the ‘Horae Germanicae’ series (Strout, 161-64). This ad hoc numbering scheme is arguably consistent with Blackwood’s hallmark loose editorial policies and often contradictory opinions. However, further consideration of the ‘Horae Germanicae’ prompts a re-evaluation of the magazine’s serious contribution to the literary culture of the time. The origins of Lockhart’s Germanism can be traced back to his William Blackwood sponsored tour of Germany between May and October 1817. Blackwood, already acquainted with Lockhart, had agreed to pay him over £300 (in advance) for translating a piece of German Literature which he might publish, described by Lockhart as ‘a generous act … and a bold one too, for he had only my word for it, that I had any acquaintance at all with the German language’ (Lang, 118). This act of generosity, in the light of the failure of William Blackwood’s first attempt at launching a monthly periodical between April and August 1817 (under the stewardship of Pringle and Cleghorn), came to have a particular significance to the re-launched magazine. Blackwood’s good faith in Lockhart was rewarded with a translation of Friedrich Schlegel’s Lectures on the History of Literature, Ancient and Modern, which was published by Blackwood in 1818. However, Lockhart’s tour itself, as Andrew Lang noted, is shrouded in uncertainty. Only some of Lockhart’s finely observed drawings made on the tour survive as a testament to that summer. The tour nevertheless underlines the fact that Lockhart’s interest in German literature was a personal one, rather than a deliberate attempt to appeal to William Blackwood, who may himself have been eager to pander to the existing interest in German culture in Edinburgh that had been demonstrated by Scott as early as 1792 (Hart, 52). According to both Lang and Marion Lochhead, Lockhart’s interest in German (and indeed Spanish) literature first arose around 1814 as a diversion from his Classical studies at Balliol College, Oxford (Lang, 48; Lochhead, 28). Lang suggests that Lockhart’s quest to become proficient in both languages reflected the depth of his consideration of literary matters. Although noting that Lockhart harboured no serious desire to become a fully-fledged writer at this point (preferring instead to try for a legal career), Lang suggests that by 1815 he ‘had laid, at least, the foundation of his Spanish and German Lore’ and that ‘literature was already being contemplated by him’ (Lang, 48). Thus, Lockhart’s

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fascination with the state of literature can be seen a motivating factor behind his interest in Schlegel; such a stance is even more compelling when one considers how Lockhart regarded the condition of Scottish literature in 1818: Lockhart at least saw very well, that these illustrious Whigs, with all their learned professors, and Reviewers, and political economies, were really keeping Scotland in a state of “facetious and rejoicing ignorance”. “In Scotland they understand, they care about none of the three,” namely the poetry, philosophy, and the history of the ancient world. (Lang, 122)

Lockhart’s analysis of the Scottish literary landscape, related to Andrew Lang by his friend Mr Gleig, and included in Lang’s 1897 biography of Lockhart, provides a clear insight into the extent to which Lockhart’s readings and translation of Schlegel’s Lectures informed his conception of the state of Scottish literature. Indeed, this remark exhibits a highly Schlegelian view of literature, as do much of Lockhart’s critical contributions to ‘Maga’ during the 1820s.7 For Lockhart, the embodiment of all that was wrong with Scottish literary criticism was Jeffrey’s Edinburgh Review, a magazine which had become known for a succession of unfavourable articles on German literature.8 (Lockhart’s vehement dislike of the Edinburgh surfaces in a letter to William Blackwood from 1819 in which he refers to it as ‘a vile pamphlet’).9 Schlegel’s Lectures themselves were originally given during the winter of 1812, and had not been translated into English until Lockhart’s German tour. From the outset, Lockhart’s debt to them becomes clear: In the following discourses, it is my design to give a general view of the development and of the spirit of literature among the most illustrious nations of ancient as well as modern times; but my principle object is to represent literature as it has exerted its influence on the affairs of active life, on the fate of nations, and on the progressive character of ages. (Schlegel, 1)

7

See also Lockhart 1818b and ‘Remarks on Schlegel’s History of Literature’, Blackwood’s July 1818, Vol. 3, p. 497. 8 Jeffrey’s most notable critical German reviews were perhaps those of Lessing’s Nathan the Wise (Edinburgh Review 8, 1806), and Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister (Edinburgh Review 42, August 1825). See. Morgan, 159. 9 MS. 4003, f.133: The Blackwood Archive, National Library of Scotland.

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Lockhart found that Schlegel had identified the potential of literary culture to reinvigorate national identities, define societies and capture the spirit of an age, or Geist. Even more relevant to Lockhart was Schlegel’s analysis of the Enlightenment, which clearly resonated with his belief that its legacy of rationalism had corroded national identity in Scotland. Note how Schlegel here moderates his praise for the Enlightenment and its cultural effects: During the last hundred years, the human mind, more particularly in Germany, has undergone a great, and in one point of view at least, a fortunate alteration. Not that the individual productions of art, or inquiries into science, to which this period has given birth are entitled to indiscriminate praise… but a mighty change has taken place and in the quarter where it was most necessary, in the regard and interest which the world at large bestows on literature; and among us above all other people, as the influence which it has already exerted, and is likely in a much greater degree to exert on us, both as individuals and as a nation. (Schlegel, 2)

Elsewhere in the Lectures Schlegel criticises the impact of rationalism upon literary discourse, and singles out David Hume for particular criticism for an excessively dry handling of historical events. Such an approach to national history is entirely consistent with Lockhart’s attitude towards the Edinburgh literary scene of the 1820s. In particular, it informed his stance against the dominant Edinburgh Whig literati who, Lockhart suggested in Peter’s Letters to His Kinsfolk, propagated a variety of literary criticism tempered heavily by Hume’s radical scepticism. This is a point neatly elaborated upon by Francis Russell Hart: For Lockhart, doing battle less against the Edinburgh Review than against the sceptical anti-nationalism and dogmatic intellectualism it represented, Germany supplied a battlefield, as well as the transcendentalist vantage point Carlyle shortly exploited, from which to attack a variety of negativisms. Lockhart had already translated Schlegel under Blackwood’s auspices. He seems to have found there many facets of his own antiEnlightenment position in criticism and biography. (Hart, 52)

This can be related back, as Hart suggests, to Schlegel’s own explicit denunciation of the dominance of what he perceived to be fusty, overanalytical critical discourse in Germany, from which, he implies, he is rescuing the great works of German imaginative literature (whilst skilfully

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distancing himself from such critics). Significantly, Hart’s quotation also constructs early nineteenth century Edinburgh as a literary “battleground”; in this context the Horae Germanicae assumes a greater significance than is at first apparent. Following in Schlegel’s footsteps, Lockhart set about establishing through the ‘Horae Germanicae’ an alternative model of imaginative literature to which he believed Scotland should aspire. The format of the series is especially important to this end. Each translated piece was prefaced with an introduction, and interspersed with a commentary provided by Lockhart, even if the piece itself had been translated by Gillies (or another contributor). These introductory pieces represent perhaps the most transparently Schlegelian literary analyses to appear in Blackwood’s, with perhaps the exception of a handful of other articles penned by Lockhart on the subject of German literature. What is interesting about the prefaces is their explicitly instructive nature. The reader is guided through the translations, as the introduction to ‘Horae Germanicae’ 1 from the November 1819 issue of Blackwood’s (Adolphus Mullner’s Guilt; or, The Anniversary) demonstrates: The best German critics of the present day seem to be agreed in thinking poorly of their own dramatic literature. They are proud indeed, as they ought to be, of a few masterly pieces in which the intellectual subtlety of Lessing – the uncontrollable fire and energy of Schiller – and the matchless union of reason and passion which characterizes the genius of their Goethe, have been abundantly displayed. But they complain, with justice, that no one of these great men has given them such a number of fine works, composed upon on a set of principles, and in one form, as might furnish any thing like a model for the erection of a true national literature of the drama. (Lockhart and Gillies 1819: 121)

Here Lockhart appears to follow the Schlegelian model closely; the preface is as much about the Lectures as it is about The Anniversary. Yet the choice of the dramatic pieces for the ‘Horae Germanicae’ were significant, in that they presented practical examples of how both Schlegel and Lockhart had their fingers upon the pulse of imaginative literature. This is particularly true of the first of the ‘Horae Germanicae’, which concerns a young Spanish boy named Hugo, who is banished to a Scandinavian castle in order to avoid a curse. Upon returning to Spain, he has the misfortune to fall in love for the wife of a nobleman with whom he

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has formed a friendship. Much is made of Hugo’s attempts to resist her, but upon discovering that she feels the same, his resolve fails, and he duly disposes of the nobleman, courtesy of an unfortunate shooting accident. The couple then flee to Scandinavia, where their existence is tempered by an unbearable sense of guilt which leads them both to an unfortunate demise. Throughout the featured extract (from the play’s climax), Lockhart interjects to remind the reader of Mullner’s skill at representing the guilt endured by the protagonist and his ill-gotten bride, as in this example: …the far more fearful truth which is thus forced upon the guilty mind of Count Hugo, is already, in like manner, suspected by our readers; but nothing can surpass the manner in which the disclosure of that truth is wrung from the remorseful fratricide itself in the anguish of his ungovernable spirit. (Lockhart and Gillies, 121)

The extract published in ‘Horae Germanicae’ number one reflects accurately the type of sentimental literature favoured by Lockhart and Schlegel; one may reasonably speculate that it was deliberately chosen in order to conform to the Schlegleian model. This is consistent with the idea that the ‘Horae Germanicae’ constitutes a clear attempt to employ literature as a weapon against the supposedly corrosive effects of Whig literary criticism. The implication here is that the materials selected for the ‘Horae Germanicae’ were prepared and edited generally produced with a great deal of care, and with the magazine’s aesthetic agenda firmly in mind. What is particularly intriguing is the extent to which such intentions are veiled by Lockhart, his occasional protestations of spontaneity being another possible example of Blackwoodian theatricality. The idea that the numbers of the ‘Horae Germanicae’ were produced without much forethought is one which Lockhart actively cultivates in his preface to Houvald’s The Light Tower (‘Horae Germanicae’ XIV, January 1823): If proof were desired of the variety and energy of German literature, we know not that a better one could be found than in the example afforded by our own pages; for in choosing out fragments for translation, (which, hasty and imperfect as they were, have always been received by our poetical readers with approbation,) we have uniformly except in one instance (that of “Faust”) left the works of the greater and more classical authors untouched. (Lockhart and Gillies, 1823: 4)

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Throughout the series Lockhart manipulates the responses of his audience; here the reader is actively encouraged to regard the selections as random. This assertion, it seems, is highly dubious in the light of the consistency of the series, and the extent to which the introductions and commentaries position it in a specifically Schlegelian context. The Light Tower for, example, like Mullner’s Anniversary, also deals with extreme passions – the infidelity of a wife to her husband, his resultant insanity and death, her bitter guilt at having left him, and ultimately her own death. That the pieces included for selection in the ‘Horae Germanicae’ can be identified as being representative of a particular trend in German drama is acknowledged explicitly by Lockhart in ‘Horae Germanicae’ number three, from the January 1820 issue of Blackwood’s when he states in his introduction to Mullner’s Twenty-ninth of February: By way of giving as much variety as possible to the views we are opening for our English readers into the present condition of German literature – and more particularly into what we consider its most promising department, the tragic drama, we this month insert, not an account of a regular play, but a complete translation of a short dramatic sketch, intended originally for being represented upon a private stage. This is a species of composition wherein all the best of the German poets have occasionally condescended to employ their powers. The stage is the ruling passion of the German people in the present day, and nothing connected with that passion and its manifestations can be regarded as uninteresting. (Lockhart and Gillies, 1820: 397)

Here, Lockhart hints at the coherence of the series as a showcase for the best of German imaginative literature, one based upon Schlegelian aesthetics, and one which dovetails neatly with Lockhart’s stance concerning the state of Scottish literaturel. A parallel with Schlegel’s Lectures emerges here, as Lockhart also attempts to distance himself from the critical circles of 1820s Edinburgh. This is perhaps most apparent in the earlier quotation from Lang (referring to the state of ‘facetious and joyful ignorance’ supposedly fostered by Whig critics). That this critical distance was maintained by Lockhart throughout his career, is a point noted by Francis Russell Hart with reference to Lockhart’s treatment of Burns: Lockhart’s review places the same stress on literary nationality and makes the same juxtaposition of religion and nationality as the twin ‘established centres’ of literary inspiration. It credits Schlegel with having urged the

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reciprocity of nationality and literature, and with having warred effectively against the evils of ‘the philosophy of the last century’. Contrasting Scotland, Lockhart suggests that the ill effects of ‘a single generation of abstract reasoners’ persist in critical journals whose ‘eternal disquisitions have all been operating with slow but sure effect in mouldering down all large aggregates of association, which could form centres of gravity of sufficient power to control and regulate the orbits of our feelings’. (Hart, 94)

Upon reading the ‘Horae Germanicae’, one realises that Lockhart does not merely condemn his critical adversaries at the Edinburgh Review for commercial or editorial reasons; his attacks upon them appear to be motivated by a genuine sense of grievance at the cultural consequences of their hegemony. In Schlegel, Lockhart found the antidote to this supposed poison, a literary mascot that encapsulated his own position. Consider, for example, this extract from Lockhart’s appraisal of Schlegel’s Lectures from August 1818: None seems to have contemplated the tendency of this age with more concern than Frederick Schlegel. The work which we have just read is a noble effort to counteract and repel its effects, to arouse forgotten thoughts and despised feelings, and to make men national and religious once more, in order that they may be great.10

This last quote emphasises how Lockhart’s interests and opinions coincided with Schlegel’s, and shows the extent to which Schlegel’s aesthetic and political ideas had a profound impact upon Blackwood’s critical position. It also suggests that Lockhart’s interest in Schlegel and German literature not only fitted the magazine’s ideological position, but gave it a potent weapon with which to wage war upon its literary enemies. Moreover, in his preface to ‘Horae Germanicae’ number eleven of February 1820 (Kôrner’s Zriny: A Tragedy), Lockhart draws a direct comparison between that particular play and a ballad in Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border,11 highlighting the affinity between German literature and the best contemporary Scottish literature of the time. One can relate this cross-referencing to Phillip Connell’s view that Lockhart’s Germanic interests provided the galvanising force behind Blackwood’s 10

Lockhart: ‘Remarks on Schlegel’s History of Literature’: Blackwood’s, August 1818, Vol. 2, p. 497. 11 Lockhart: ‘Horae Germanicae’ No. 11: Blackwood’s, November 1819, Vol. 13, p. 543.

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attempt to formulate a coherent and distinct conception of Scottish national literature, within the framework of its staunch Toryism: The combination of Lockhart’s Schellingian idealism and John Wilson’s civic idealization of individual and national ‘character’ led both writers to the conclusion that literary history formed the purest expression of the ‘spirit of nationality’, allowing the magazine’s critical apotheoses of Scott, Wordsworth and Burns at once to define a distinctly Scottish literary tradition, and to suggest the sublimation of that tradition into the canons of an all-embracing British national identity. Imaginative literature, and especially poetry, was re-imagined by Blackwood’s as an index of national character and religious feeling, and frequently assimilated to an idealist defence of traditional or ‘popular’ culture considered as an expression of national Geist. (Connell, 236)

Connell’s argument underlines the importance of Schlegel’s lectures, and that through their translation, Lockhart was provided with a theoretical bedrock for the suggestion of an alternative Scottish literary culture, characterised by its sentimentality. Thus, when it arrived, the ‘Horae Germanicae’ itself came to form a crucial part of Lockhart’s attempted rediscovery of the Scottish Geist. In the ‘Horae Germanicae’ Lockhart presents fragments of German literature in a highly controlled way which seeks to shepherd the reader into his own deeply Schlegelian aesthetic position, in order to practically demonstrate the culturally restorative effects of imaginative literature. In this way, Lockhart cleverly utilised the possibilities for showcasing littleknown works of literature provided by the literary periodical to great effect. The ‘Horae Germanicae’ was therefore a highly sophisticated attempt to further the critical agenda of the magazine (and Lockhart himself). Seen in these terms, the ‘Horae Germanicae’ can be regarded as one of the most potent weapons against the culturally ‘toxic’ criticism of the Edinburgh Review that Blackwood’s possessed.

References Connell, Phillip. 2001. Romanticism, Economics and the Question of Culture Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hart, Francis Russell. 1971. Lockhart as Romantic Biographer. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Lang, Andrew. 1896. The Life and Letters of John Gibson Lockhart. Vol.1. London: John C. Nimmo. Lochhead, Marion. 1954. John Gibson Lockhart. London: John Murray. Lockhart, J. G. 1818a. ‘Horae Scandicae’ 1. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine Vol. 2. February. 570. —. 1818b. ‘Remarks on the Periodical Criticism of Great Britain’. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Vol. 2. March. 670. —. 1818c. ‘Horae Sinicae’ 1. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Vol. 2. March. 639. —. 1818d. ‘Remarks on Schlegel’s History of Literature’. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Vol. 3. August. 497. —. 1819. ‘Horae Germanicae’ 11. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Vol. 13. November. 543. —. 1821. Horae Germanicae 11, Kôrner’s Zriny: A Tragedy. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Vol. 8. February. 543. Lockhart J.G. and William Maginn. 1818. ‘Horae Scandicae’ 2. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Vol. 7. September. 674. Lockhart, J.G. and R.P. Gillies. 1819. ‘Horae Germanicae’ No. 1. Mullner’s Guilt; or The Anniversary. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Vol. 6. November. 121. Lockhart, J.G. and R.P. Gillies. 1820. ‘Horae Germanicae’ No. 3, Mullner’s Twenty-ninth of February. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Vol. 6. January. 397. Lockhart, J.G. and John Anster. 1820 ‘Horae Germanicae’ No. 5, ‘Goethe’s Faustus’. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Vol. 7. June. 235. Lockhart, J.G. and R.P. Gillies. 1823. ‘Horae Germanicae’ No. 14, Houvald’s The Light-Tower. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Vol. 13. January. 4. Lockhart, J.G. and R.P. Gillies. 1823. ‘Coleridge’s Wallenstein’. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Vol. 14. October. 377. Lockhart, J.G., and William Ruddick eds. 1977. Peter’s Letters to His Kinsfolk. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press. Morgan, Peter F. 1983. Jeffrey’s Criticism – A Selection. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press. MS. 4003, f.1, The Blackwood Archive, National Library of Scotland. MS. 4003, f.133, The Blackwood Archive, National Library of Scotland. Schlegel, Friedrich. 1818. Lectures on the History of Literature, Ancient and Modern. Trans. J.G. Lockhart. Edinburgh: Blackwood and Sons.

CONTRIBUTORS

Cassilda Alcobia-Murphy completed a primary degree in translation studies and a Master’s degree in Irish and Scottish Studies. Shane Alcobia-Murphy is a lecturer at the University of Aberdeen. He has written two monographs on Northern Irish culture: Governing the Tongue in Northern Ireland (2005) and Sympathetic Ink (2006). Sukanya Basu is completing a PhD on Seamus Heaney at the University of Aberdeen. She has published articles on Heaney in Beyond the Anchoring Grounds (2005) and in the forthcoming collection in the Cross-currents series. Brian Burton completed a PhD at the University of Durham. He has published articles on Mahon in Etudes Irlandaises, Irish Studies Review and Stirrings Still. Conor Carville completed his doctorate at Oxford University and is Programme Director of Irish Studies atSt. Mary’s University College, Twikenham. He has recently published an article on Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark in Irish Studies Review. He is a published poet. Stephen Dornan completed his doctorate at the University of Aberdeen and is a research fellow at the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies. He has published articles in the Cross-currents series and has articles forthcoming in editions of Scottish Studies Review and Irish Studies Review. Ashley Lange is a doctoral candidate at the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies. She has published articles in the Cross-currents series. D.A.J. MacPherson completed his doctorate at the University of Ulster. He has published articles and book chapters in Historical Studies and The Human Tradition in Modern Britain (2006).

What Rough Beasts? Irish and Scottish Studies in the New Millennium 219

Margaret Maxwell completed her doctorate at the University of Aberdeen. She has published articles in Irish Studies Review and the Cross-currents series. Margery Palmer McCulloch is a Senior Honorary Research Fellow in Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow. Her publications include The Novels of Neil M. Gunn: A Critical Study (1987), Edwin Muir: Poet, Critic and Novelist (1993), A Flame in the Mearns: Lewis Grassic Gibbon: A Centenary Celebration (ed. With Sarah Dunnigan, 2003) and Modernism and Nationalism (ed., 2004). Lisa McGonigle is studying for her doctorate at Oxford University and has published articles on Irish culture in Irish Studies Review and the Cross-currents series. Sinead Mooney is a lecturer at NUI, Galway. Her publications include Samuel Beckett (2006) and Edna O'Brien: New Critical Perspectives (ed. With Editor, with Kathryn Laing and Maureen O'Connor, 2006). Paul F. Shanks completed his doctorate at the University of Aberdeen and is currently a research fellow at the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies. He has published articles in three volumes of the Cross-currents series. Daniel Smith is currently writing a PhD at the University of Aberdeen on the representation of violence in Northern Ireland, working primarily with modern film and literature. Dan Wall is completing his doctoral studies at the University of Aberdeen. He has published papers in three volumes of the Crosscurrents series.