The Imaginary Irish Peasant

7KH,PDJLQDU\,ULVK3HDVDQW $XWKRU V (GZDUG+LUVFK 6RXUFH30/$9RO1R 2FW SS 3XEOLVKHGE\Modern Language Association 6WDEOH85/http://www.jstor.org/stable/462684 . $FFHVVHG Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mla. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Modern Language Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to PMLA. http://www.jstor.org EdwardHirsch The Imaginary Irish Peasant EDWARD HIRSCH, profes- A man who does not exist, sor of English at the University A man who is but a dream . W. B. Yeats, "TheFisherman" of Houston, is the author of three books of poems: For the Sleepwalkers (Knopf; 1981), Wild Gratitude (Knopf, 1986), which won the National Book HROUGHOUT THE nineteenth century, but particu- larly in there was an in- Critics' Circle Award, and The postfamine Ireland, increasing terest in the rural customs and stories of the Irish country people. Night Parade (Knopf, 1989). This interest deeply intensified during the early years of the Irish He has published articles on Literary Revival-indeed, it was in this period that the Irish peasant Irish literaturein ELH, Genre, was fundamentally "created" and characterized for posterity. By Modern Drama, Novel, and placing the peasant figure at the heart of their enterprises, key Revival other journals. writers such as W. B. Yeats, John Synge, George Russell (AE), Isabella Augusta Gregory, and Douglas Hyde were partici- pating in a complex cultural discourse motivated by crucial economic, social, and political needs, as well as by pressing cultural concerns. They also established the terms of an argument that has affected virtually all subsequent Irish literature. From James Joyce and Flann O'Brien onward, few major Irish writers have not felt compelled to demythologize the peasant figure that was first imagined by the Revivalists. One thinks of Patrick Kavanagh's assertion that his "childhood experience was the usual barbaric life of the Irish country poor" (Self Portrait 9); of Sean O'Faolain's vehement contention that the "Noble Peasant is as dead as the Noble Savage" (T. Brown 81); of Seamus Heaney's "archaeological" poems and Michael Longley's three "Mayo Monologues" that implicitly crit- icize idealizations of Ireland's past and its people; or of the re- lentlessly bleak vision of Irish rural life and society in John McGahern's first three novels: The Barracks (1963), The Dark (1965), and The Leavetaking (1974). One legacy of the Revivalist's glorification of the country people has been a nearly endless in- tertextual regress in Irish literature. The romantic myth of the peasant was so powerful that not until the late 1970s and early 1980s did Irish writers systematically begin 1116 Edward Hirsch 1117 to interrogate and dismantle the terms of the Re- and fictions about rural life. The rural figures de- vivalist argument, the reductive centering of the lineated by the major Irish authors were so com- country people in Irish literature.Both the Dublin pelling that some readers and critics have periodical the Crane Bag (which started publish- mistakenly considered them real or historically ing in 1977) and the Field Day Theatre Company accurate. Indeed, each figuration of peasant life (founded in Derry in 1980) have been instru- claimed a special empirical status for itself, ar- mental in this questioning. In a yearly stage pro- guing for its own literal verisimilitude. But this duction and in a succession of polemical supposed empiricism was the brilliant ruse of an pamphlets, the directorsof Field Day (Brian Friel, elaborate cultural discourse. Beyond their real Stephen Rea, Seamus Heaney, Tom Paulin, Da- differences, most Irish writers had a common be- vid Hammond, and Seamus Deane), all from lief in a single undifferentiated entity called "the Northern Ireland, have set out to "contribute to peasants." This process of turning the peasants the solution of the present crisis by producing into a single figure of literary art ("the peasant") analyses of the established opinions, myths, and may be termed the "aestheticizing" of the Irish stereotypes which had become both a symptom country people. Such aestheticizing takes place and a cause of the current situation" (Hederman whenever a complex historical group of people and Kearey vii). One fundamental aspect of this is necessarily simplified by being collapsed into enterprise has been an assault on Irish essential- one entity, "the folk." Yeats's spiritualized fish- ism, on what Seamus Deane calls "the mystique ermen, Synge's wandering tramps, and Joyce's of Irishness," especially as it has been embodied hard and crafty peasants are all emblems of that in an anachronistic Irish culture ("Heroic Styles" imaginary entity. 57).1 In a similar vein, the shade of James Joyce The Irish countryside, however, was populated advises the pilgrim in Heaney's long poem "Sta- by a diverse grouping of the rural poor, nearly tion Island" to "let go, let fly, forget," to relin- infinite in its social and economic gradations,that quish "that subject people stuff," and to fill the comprised small farmers, laborer-landholders, element with his own "echo-soundings, searches, landless laborers, and itinerant workers.2 The probes, allurements"(212). Here Heaney borrows people themselves made a central distinction not Joyce's voice to advise his own poetic alter ego only between large absentee landholders and ev- to break the nets of a debilitating, parasitic Irish eryone else but also between those families who cultural discourse. owned any land at all and those who did not. So who are these Irish country people who have The whole concept of an unchanging Irish peas- had such a long and controversial history in Irish antry has been called into question by F. S. L. literature?And precisely what do they represent? Lyons, who suggests that "the general effect of I contend that the portraits of the peasant gen- the economic changes [in Ireland] of the second erated by different Irish poets, dramatists, fiction half of the nineteenth century was to substitute writers, and antiquarians during the Literary Re- a ruralbourgeoisie for a ruralproletariat" (Ireland vival were often radicallyopposed to one another; 41-42). Likewise, Martin J. Waters argues that in fact, each writer undertook to rewrite or to few aspects of Irish life were unaffected by these reconceptualize the peasant characters imagined massive social and economic transformations: by predecessors and contemporaries. Thus Yeats "The notion, then, of an 'Irish peasantry' with a and Hyde created portraits of the peasant that peculiar ethos somehow remaining outside the not only rivaled each other but aimed primarily dynamics of Irish history... is untenable"(161). at overturning the prevailing English colonial The thirty years between 1860 and 1890 saw a stereotype reflected in the stage Irishman. These major reorderingof the rural class structure. The portraits were in turn rewritten by Synge, even countryside was permanently altered by the as Yeats's, Hyde's, and Synge's were reworked in dominant growth of small-farmer proprietor- divergent ways by Joyce, O'Brien, and Kavanagh. ships, the relentless decrease in population in the The writers' alternative conceptions, however, wake of the famine, and the virtual destruction were usually underlined by shared assumptions of a viable Gaelic-speakingcommunity paralleled 1118 The ImaginaryIrish Peasant "TheBallad Singer." Block printby JackB. Yeats. Collectionof the author. by a significant growth in English-literacy rates. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen- These changes indicate that the countryside was turies the Irish peasant was a figure deeply en- going through something like the last stage of ru- coded with social, political, and literary meaning, ral proletarianization (Clark 112-22). Indeed, as and to speak or write about that central image of Malcolm Brown suggests, the agrarian changes Irish identity in the context of the time was to were deep enough to transform the "human na- participate in a special kind of cultural discourse. ture" of the Irish country people (294). That The country people were important to Irish cul- peasants no longer existed as such by the time tural and political nationalists not for their own they were being fiercely "discovered" and por- sake but because of what they signified as a con- trayed by Irish antiquarians and imaginative cept and as a language. To speak about the writers should point up that what mattered to "peasant" was always to speak about something those writers and their urban audiences was not beyond actual rural life. To debate the charac- so much what peasants were but what they rep- teristics of that peasant was to share a vocabulary; resented. This gap or disjunction between the simultaneously, to undermine and attack some- imaginary peasant ("a man who does not exist") one's idea of the peasant was to come uncom- and the real country people illuminates the lan- fortably close to attacking that person's concept guage that informed both Irish culture and, con- of Irish social classes.

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