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Études irlandaises
42-2 | 2017 Varia
Édition électronique URL : http://journals.openedition.org/etudesirlandaises/5229 DOI : 10.4000/etudesirlandaises.5229 ISSN : 2259-8863
Éditeur Presses universitaires de Caen
Édition imprimée Date de publication : 29 novembre 2017 ISBN : 978-2-7535-7388-8 ISSN : 0183-973X
Référence électronique Études irlandaises, 42-2 | 2017 [En ligne], mis en ligne le 29 novembre 2017, consulté le 24 septembre 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/etudesirlandaises/5229 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/ etudesirlandaises.5229
Ce document a été généré automatiquement le 24 septembre 2020.
Études irlandaises est mise à disposition selon les termes de la Licence Creative Commons Attribution - Pas d’Utilisation Commerciale - Partage dans les Mêmes Conditions 4.0 International. 1
SOMMAIRE
Études d'histoire et de civilisation
La « force illocutionnaire » et l’« usage stratégique du langage » dans les discours du DUP et du Sinn Féin : quel rôle dans la polarisation de la scène politique nord-irlandaise au début des années 2000 ? Magali Dexpert
Class Struggle in the 1916-23 Irish Revolution: A Reappraisal Olivier Coquelin
“Un nouveau dictionnaire anglais-irlandais” : léirmheas Francach ar fhoclóir Éireannach Seaghan Mac an tSionnaigh
A Frank Exchange of Views: Communicating through Violence in Ireland, 1565-1610 John Patrick Montaño
Perceptions of the mentally ill Irish population during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Michael Robinson
Art et Image
The Rising Goes Digital : Century Ireland.ie Anne Goarzin
Gothic and Noir: the Genres of the Irish Contemporary Fiction of “Containment” Sylvie Mikowski
Singing and Speaking in Louis MacNeice's The Burning Perch Dominique Delmaire
Decadent Tourism in Derek Mahon’s The Yellow Book Joanna Kruczkowska
The Orphan Decade: Elizabeth Bowen’s 1930s Novels Anna Teekell
Comptes rendus de lecture
David LLOYD, Beckett’s Thing. Painting and Theatre. Edinburgh University Press, 2016 Alexandra Poulain
Michael McATEER, ed., Silence in Modern Irish Literature, Leiden, Brill, 2017 Bridget English
Alexandra POULAIN, Irish Drama, Modernity and the Passion Play, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016 Hélène Lecossois
Études irlandaises, 42-2 | 2017 2
Richard BARLOW, The Celtic Unconscious. Joyce and Scottish Culture, Notre Dame, Indiana, University of Notre Dame Press, 2017 Camille Manfredi
Marie MIANOWSKI, Post-Celtic Tiger Landscapes in Irish Fiction, London, Routledge, 2017 Sylvie Mikowski
Niall Ó DOCHARTAIG, Katy HAYWARD and Elizabeth MEEHAN (eds), Dynamics of Political Change in Ireland: Making and Breaking a Divided Ireland, Milton Park/NewYork, Routledge, 2016 Philippe Cauvet
Asier ALTUNA-GARCÍA DE SALAZAR (dir.), Ireland and Dysfunction. Critical Explorations in Literature and Film. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017 Isabelle Le Corff
Jim SMYTH (ed.), Remembering the Troubles: Contesting the Recent Past in Northern Ireland, University of Notre-Dame Press, 2017 Catherine Conan
Eamon MAHER, Eugene O’BRIEN, Tracing the Legacy of Irish Catholicism. From Galway to Cloyne and Beyond, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2017 Alexandra Slaby
Raphaël INGELBIEN, Irish Cultures of Travel: Writing on the Continent, 1829-1914, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016 Michelle Milan
Vincent MORLEY, The Popular Mind in Eighteenth-century Ireland, Cork University Press, 2017 Thierry Robin
Études irlandaises, 42-2 | 2017 3
Études d'histoire et de civilisation Studies in History and Civilisation
Études irlandaises, 42-2 | 2017 4
La « force illocutionnaire » et l’« usage stratégique du langage » dans les discours du DUP et du Sinn Féin : quel rôle dans la polarisation de la scène politique nord-irlandaise au début des années 2000 ?
Magali Dexpert
Introduction
1 Les élections à l’Assemblée nord-irlandaise qui se sont tenues le 26 novembre 2003 représentent un tournant de l’histoire politique en Irlande du Nord dans la mesure où elles ont témoigné d’une radicalisation de la scène politique de la Province (déjà amorcée avec les élections locales et à Westminster de 2001). Ces élections ont en effet marqué le remplacement des partis modérés de la Province, l’Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) et le Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), par les deux partis les plus opposés et les plus radicaux : le Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) et le Parti républicain Sinn Féin en tant que représentants respectifs de la communauté unioniste et nationaliste1 mais également en tant qu’acteurs principaux du processus de paix nord- irlandais.
2 Toute tentative de mieux comprendre le succès électoral du Sinn Féin et du DUP (succès qui s’est par ailleurs inscrit dans la durée) ainsi que la radicalisation de l’électorat nord- irlandais nous amène à nous interroger sur les principes linguistiques et sociologiques qui sous-tendent l’analyse du discours politique. Les théories des linguistes, sociologues et philosophes tels que John Austin, Pierre Bourdieu, Jürgen Habermas et Paul Chilton permettent en effet de dégager certains concepts clés nécessaires à l’analyse du
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discours politique et, dans le cas présent, à la compréhension du succès politique des partis qui nous intéressent. 3 Ainsi, après avoir analysé les campagnes électorales et les résultats du Sinn Féin et du DUP lors des élections de 2003, nous nous intéresserons principalement à la notion de « force illocutionnaire2 », théorisée par Austin et développée par Bourdieu et à ce qu’Habermas définit comme « l’usage stratégique du langage3 » dans le but de les appliquer à l’analyse du discours politique du DUP et du Sinn Féin. Ainsi, cette étude pourra rendre compte du rôle du discours politique de ces deux partis pour s’imposer comme les acteurs incontournables de la scène politique nord-irlandaise.
Les résultats des élections de novembre 2003 et les campagnes du Sinn Féin et du DUP
4 Les élections à l’Assemblée nord-irlandaise de 2003 ont illustré le triomphe des partis radicaux nord-irlandais et ont confirmé la tendance des élections de 2001 à l’issue desquelles le Sinn Féin était déjà devenu le premier parti nationaliste de la Province et le DUP était en passe de remplacer l’UUP en tant que premier parti unioniste. En novembre 2003, les deux partis sont en effet parvenus à transformer l’essai de 2001 pour se placer en tête des suffrages. Le DUP est ainsi devenu le premier parti politique de la Province et le Sinn Féin s’est placé en deuxième position, ce qui impliquait que tous deux seraient dès lors les acteurs principaux du processus de paix4.
5 Malgré un durcissement des positions de l’UUP et du SDLP pendant la campagne électorale5, sans doute dans le but de limiter la progression de leurs rivaux (ce qui confirmait également une volonté de répondre à la radicalisation déjà amorcée de l’électorat nord-irlandais), les voix en faveur du Sinn Féin progressèrent de 5,8 points par rapport aux élections précédentes à l’Assemblée nord-irlandaise en 1998 pour atteindre 23,5 % (et procurer au parti 6 sièges supplémentaires). Le DUP, lui, progressa de 7,7 points par rapport aux élections de 1998 pour atteindre 25,7 % des suffrages (et remporter 10 sièges supplémentaires)6. 6 L’analyse du discours du DUP éclaire cette progression. Dans son « Manifeste pour un Accord équitable » (Fair Deal Manifesto) de 2003, afin de convaincre l’électorat unioniste, le DUP applique une stratégie politique déjà présente lors des élections précédentes : effrayer l’électorat en attaquant la politique de l’UUP et en dénonçant celle des républicains du « Sinn Féin/IRA ». 7 Dans un premier temps, le message du chef du parti, Ian Paisley, donne le ton de ce manifeste qui se veut très offensif et dresse un bilan catastrophique des cinq dernières années (depuis la signature des Accords de Belfast). Ainsi, Ian Paisley commence par souligner l’importance de ces élections : « Ces élections [représentent] le rendez-vous de l’Ulster avec son destin. […] l’occasion de rétablir l’ordre […] et de négocier un nouvel Accord7 », afin de mobiliser les électeurs unionistes. Parce que, selon lui, le camp de David Trimble a seulement contribué à offrir des concessions8 aux républicains, le chef du DUP demande aux électeurs de s’interroger sur l’avenir de la Province si l’UUP sortait une fois de plus majoritaire aux élections à l’Assemblée. Commence alors le récit d’un scénario catastrophe :
Terrorists running the police, a joint role in the affairs of Northern Ireland for Dublin, Irish language and Gaelic culture given
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prominence, British culture and identity no longer in existence in many parts of the Province, Sinn Féin ministers in charge of policing and justice and large areas of our towns and cities abandoned to the will of terrorists9.
8 La solution que propose alors Ian Paisley aux électeurs unionistes est de voter pour le DUP afin de « mettre fin au cauchemar d’une association entre David Trimble et Gerry Adams », dans la mesure où « après les élections, il est probable que le Sinn Féin soit le premier parti nationaliste10 ». Le parti fait donc appel aux électeurs unionistes pour qu’« Ian Paisley contrôle plus de cinquante pour cent des sièges unionistes de l’Assemblée11 » et soit en mesure de négocier un nouvel Accord.
9 Dans un second temps, le parti en appelle directement aux électeurs pour faire le bilan de la politique des unionistes de l’UUP : « Jugez l’UUP sur ses résultats et posez-vous la question : “l’Union est-elle plus forte aujourd’hui qu’il y a cinq ans12 ?” » Une chronologie intitulée : « Rapport de l’échec de l’UUP13 », entend fournir une réponse à cette question en faisant état de la « trahison » de l’électorat unioniste par l’UUP, notamment en acceptant la mise en place des Accords de 1998 et, surtout, en formant un gouvernement avec le « Sinn Féin-IRA » sans désarmement préalable des paramilitaires républicains14. Cette démonstration permet donc au DUP d’arriver à la conclusion suivante : « Vous ne pouvez pas faire confiance aux unionistes : […] Vous ne pouvez pas vous permettre de leur donner une autre chance15. » Le DUP ne s’arrête pas ici dans sa critique de la politique de l’UUP : la page 12 du manifeste de 2003 intitulée « Le vrai cauchemar de l’Irlande du Nord16 » où la photo de Gerry Adams et David Trimble apparaît sur un fond noir, tente d’alerter les électeurs unionistes sur le fait que le contrôle d’une majorité des sièges de l’Assemblée par l’UUP est « une perspective terrifiante pour l’unionisme en Irlande du Nord17 » : « des ministres du Sinn Féin/IRA incontrôlables, Gerry Adams Premier ministre adjoint, le Sinn Féin/IRA au gouvernement de façon permanente18 ». 10 La critique de l’UUP et de sa tentative de partager le pouvoir avec les républicains amène, par la suite, et logiquement, le DUP à faire également le procès du Sinn Féin. Le discours du DUP apparaît ainsi totalement inchangé par rapport aux années précédentes : le parti ne parle pas du Sinn Féin mais du Sinn Féin /IRA afin de souligner le lien entre le parti républicain et le groupe paramilitaire, et il expose le programme politique du Sinn Féin selon sa perspective (dans une page où les portraits de Gerry Adams et Martin McGuinness sont associés à la photo d’un terroriste cagoulé et armé 19) : obtenir une Irlande unie par tous les moyens (y compris par les armes) dans la mesure où « le soi-disant cessez le feu » de l’IRA n’est qu’une « man?uvre illusoire20 ». Ici, le but est clairement d’alarmer l’électorat unioniste et, surtout, de démontrer que le DUP reste lucide sur ce qu’il pense être la véritable politique républicaine. Selon le parti, en effet, « l’échec du Sinn Féin à se plier aux règles démocratiques fait que sa place au gouvernement est totalement inacceptable. […] Le DUP est opposé aux terroristes au gouvernement21 ». 11 Après avoir attaqué ses rivaux politiques et les républicains, le parti propose enfin ce qu’il présente comme sa vision alternative aux Accords de Belfast : « La vision du DUP pour la dévolution » (The DUP vision for devolution). En revanche, ici aussi, le ton du parti est celui de l’attaque et le DUP ne propose pas nécessairement de solutions concrètes alternatives aux Accords de 1998, si ce n’est les démanteler :
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The DUP is committed to devolution […] but not devolution at any price. Our vision for devolution is of an Assembly which is stable, effective and accountable to the people of Northern Ireland. The DUP is totally opposed to the devolution of Policing and Justice to the institutions created under the Belfast Agreement. However, if accountable institutions could be created, then this could be considered. […] Under the Belfast Agreement, ministers were free to take decisions which were not accountable to the Assembly. […] No decisions should be taken which are against the wishes of the Assembly. […] The Belfast Agreement created institutions which were unstable. […] We need a form of government which can survive the bad behaviour of any party and will not collapse after an election. […] We are seeking a mandate for a new Agreement22.
12 Le fait que le DUP ne propose pas de solution à la crise politique dans la Province laisse ainsi entrevoir une période délicate de négociations avec les gouvernements irlandais et britannique et le Sinn Féin.
13 Le manifeste du Sinn Féin pour les élections de 2003 (« Un Programme pour le Gouvernement », Agenda for Government), quant à lui, se distingue fortement de celui du DUP Sur le plan de la forme, tout d’abord, le manifeste républicain se veut beaucoup plus sobre que celui du DUP. Il n’y a pas de montage photographique ou de mise en page sophistiquée mais dix-sept points23 abordés un par un et au sujet desquels le parti expose ce qu’il a pu faire jusqu’à cette période et ce qu’il envisage de faire pendant les années à venir. Il semble en effet que ce manifeste soit le reflet de la volonté du Sinn Féin d’apparaître comme un parti respectable et présent sur la scène politique nord- irlandaise uniquement pour servir les intérêts de ses électeurs. Le mot d’ordre du parti pour ces élections est « l’égalité » (le mot est d’ailleurs employé à près de 100 reprises dans son programme), concernant l’issue du processus de paix mais également des sujets touchant au quotidien de la population nord-irlandaise comme les services publics, l’éducation, la santé, le logement… 14 Contrairement au DUP, le Sinn Féin se prononce en faveur de la mise en application des Accords de Belfast et souhaite « rester ferme24 », en dépit des difficultés récemment rencontrées25. Il est sous-entendu que le parti ne renoncera pas aux Accords et continuera de négocier avec les unionistes et le gouvernement britannique pour rétablir les institutions politiques de la Province. De plus, au lieu de fonder son argumentation sur l’attaque de ses opposants politiques et les difficultés liées à la mise en application des Accords, le Sinn Féin prend appui sur ce qu’il a été en mesure de fournir à la communauté nationaliste dans le cadre de la dévolution des pouvoirs à l’Assemblée nord-irlandaise. Ainsi, la vision positive des années écoulées proposée par Sinn Féin s’oppose à celle (négative) du DUP :
We took far-reaching decisions in the Department of Health and Education. […] Our overall approach has been rooted first and foremost on equality but we also advanced an agenda based on equality, accountability and inclusiveness. This is an approach we will go forward with in the next five years. […] Sinn Fein’s strategy of negotiation has given rise to justice, equality and human rights; […] Initiatives to ensure momentum in the peace process; the political
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engagement with unionists, […] the advances secured for the Irish language; the IRA’s engagement with General de Chastelain and putting arms beyond use26.
15 Toujours en opposition au DUP, le Sinn Féin élude complètement le fait que le parti d’Ian Paisley puisse devenir la voix principale de l’unionisme et, donc, le principal parti auquel les républicains auront affaire dans les années à venir. Ainsi, le parti républicain s’engage à faire du rétablissement des institutions politiques nord-irlandaises, de la mise en application des Accords de Belfast, de la réforme des services de police et du système judiciaire et de la négociation avec les unionistes, ses priorités pour la période 2003-200827. Le parti envisage même la préparation d’un projet de loi sur l’unité irlandaise et l’implication politique du Sinn Féin dans les domaines de l’éducation, de la santé, de l’économie, ou encore du développement régional se veut être à l’échelle de l’Irlande (All-Ireland)28. Au regard du résultat des élections, le programme des républicains apparaît donc difficilement réalisable, compte tenu de l’opposition farouche du DUP à toute tentative de se rapprocher de la République d’Irlande et d’affaiblir l’Union.
16 Probablement dans le but de démontrer que le Sinn Féin n’est pas responsable de la suspension de l’Assemblée nord-irlandaise en 2002, le parti insiste également sur le fait qu’il a pris « des initiatives pour faire progresser le processus de paix » et que « là où d’autres ont baissé les bras, […] le Sinn Féin est retourné à la table des négociations […] pour s’assurer que les élections continuent et que les promesses de l’Accord du Vendredi Saint soient tenues29 ». En effet, dans le cadre de ce que Mitchel McLaughlin définit comme une « stratégie de négociation30 » le parti républicain définit le dialogue avec les unionistes comme « la clé du progrès politique futur31 ». De plus, afin de convaincre l’électorat nationaliste que la stratégie pacifique (Peace Strategy) du Sinn Féin a jusqu’à présent été efficace, le parti dresse le bilan de ce qu’il a été en mesure d’accomplir pour la communauté nationaliste depuis son implication dans le processus de paix :
We have seen the removal of the Government of Ireland Act, withdrawal of British troops from the streets, re-opening of hundreds of border roads beginning of demilitarisation, release of political prisoners, establishment of new political institutions (including the historic all-Ireland Ministerial Council) ending years of British rule, recognition of the Irish language […]. Republicans led the way in bringing about these changes through our peace strategy32.
17 Même si le parti républicain reste lucide sur les difficultés liées au partage du pouvoir avec les unionistes, son objectif pour les années suivantes est de favoriser le rétablissement des institutions politiques nord-irlandaises et de continuer le dialogue avec les unionistes.
18 À présent que les campagnes respectives du DUP et du Sinn Féin ont été évoquées, il convient d’analyser l’usage stratégique du langage de la part de ces deux partis pour s’imposer sur la scène politique nord-irlandaise.
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« L’usage stratégique du langage » : « délégitimation » et « auto-légitimation de groupe »
19 Selon Habermas, l’usage du langage devient « stratégique » dès lors que des intérêts altèrent la communication et son objectif principal de compréhension33. Afin d’illustrer ce point, le linguiste Paul Chilton distingue différentes catégories de fonctions stratégiques du langage. L’une d’entre elles, dite « coercitive », s’illustre, selon lui, par la situation dans laquelle les acteurs politiques se positionnent eux-mêmes et positionnent les autres acteurs dans une relation particulière34. C’est précisément l’exercice auquel se sont livrés le Sinn Féin et le DUP en 2001 puis en 2003. En effet, l’intérêt étant de s’attirer les voix d’une majorité de l’électorat unioniste, le DUP s’est positionné en tant que parti uni, fort et comme le meilleur défenseur de l’Union entre l’Irlande du Nord et le Royaume-Uni et des intérêts protestants, tandis que l’UUP était taxé de divisé, de faible et d’incompétent. Le Sinn Féin, même s’il n’a pas attaqué aussi violemment le SDLP, s’est également positionné en tant que « seul parti pour l’ensemble de l’Irlande35 », en opposition au SDLP, un parti nord-irlandais. Ce faisant, le parti républicain apparaissait bien mieux placé que les nationalistes sur l’échiquier politique pour promouvoir la réunification irlandaise.
20 Une autre fonction stratégique du langage identifiée par Paul Chilton, qui nous intéresse particulièrement pour cette étude, est celle de légitimation et de délégitimation. Cette dernière a été largement utilisée dans les discours et manifestes du DUP depuis la signature des Accords de Belfast afin de présenter ses rivaux politiques de l’UUP et les républicains de façon négative. Cette stratégie, qui prend la forme d’avertissements, d’attaques verbales, d’insultes et d’accusations, avait déjà été mise en ?uvre en 1998, lors du congrès annuel du DUP, lorsqu’Ian Paisley avait dit de David Trimble :
He’s a liar, a cheat, a hypocrite, a knave, a thief, a loathsome reptile which needs to be scotched. I will let the people of Ulster detect for themselves the traitor and then pass their own verdict36.
21 De plus, dans son manifeste de 2001, le DUP attaquait déjà l’UUP, tout en soulignant que la politique de ce dernier jouait en la faveur d’autres ennemis, les républicains :
The broken pledges of […] David Trimble have allowed Sinn Féin/IRA to reap all the benefits of the appeasement process without giving anything in return – not even the decommissioning of a single bullet. […] The UUP leadership can’t be trusted anymore37.
22 Enfin, dans son manifeste de 2003, le DUP mettait en garde contre les répercussions néfastes, d’un point de vue unioniste radical, des Accords de Belfast sur la Province, en utilisant une rhétorique de la peur :
Four more years of the Belfast Agreement is likely to mean a Sinn Féin/IRA Deputy First Minister, a Sinn Féin/IRA Policing and Justice Minister, Sinn Féin/IRA back in government, more all-Ireland rule and a fundamental weakening of the Union38.
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23 Contrairement au DUP, le discours du Sinn Féin ne répond pas à une stratégie de délégitimation puisque le ton des dirigeants du parti, depuis leur implication dans le processus de paix, n’a pas été pas celui de l’attaque mais plutôt celui de la volonté d’intégration et d’ouverture aux autres partis39. On peut tout de même souligner que le discours du Sinn Féin (depuis la mise en ?uvre de sa stratégie de paix) répond à ce que Chilton définit comme une stratégie « d’auto-légitimation de groupe40 », dont la fonction est de légitimer les membres d’un groupe en termes de valeurs et d’identité propres à ce groupe. Un exemple qui illustre bien cette composante du discours républicain est celui du congrès du Sinn Féin, le 10 mai 1998. À cette occasion, le Sinn Féin a dû exposer et justifier le changement de stratégie nécessaire à la participation des républicains dans le processus de paix : l’abandon de l’abstentionnisme au sein des institutions politiques nord-irlandaises. Cette décision a ainsi soigneusement été présentée comme faisant partie d’une stratégie de groupe et participant de la lutte vers l’idéal républicain : la réunification irlandaise.
This attendance policy will be underpinned by a strategy as directed by the Ard Chomhairle. It will be based upon our strategic objectives and our political goals and will be subject to regular review. Like all Sinn Féin strategies, this attendance strategy will be wedded to others, e.g. mobilisations, campaigning, the international dimension and the need to build a 32 county struggle41.
La force illocutionnaire : l’usage de la rhétorique de la croyance et du « capital de notoriété »
24 Toujours dans le cadre de l’analyse des discours du DUP et du Sinn Féin, il est également intéressant de prendre en considération les propos du sociologue Pierre Bourdieu qui s’appuient sur ce que le linguiste John Austin avait déjà défini comme « la force illocutionnaire42 » d’un discours, dans son ouvrage, Quand dire, c’est faire (How to do Things with Words). Selon Austin, théoricien des actes de langage, le pouvoir du discours se trouve dans les mots eux-mêmes. Sa théorie est en effet fondée sur le principe que le langage est souvent utilisé afin d’accomplir des actions. Austin fait également « allusion, […], à des “procédures conventionnelles” qui doivent être observées pour qu’un énoncé performatif soit heureux43 ». Mais c’est Bourdieu qui propose de mesurer précisément l’impact des conditions sociales sur le discours, puisque c’est justement là, selon lui, que réside tout le pouvoir ou la force d’un discours. Il s’intéresse particulièrement à « la manière dont les groupes […] luttent pour le pouvoir et l’influence44 » dans le champ politique puisque ce dernier est « étroitement lié au thème du langage et du pouvoir symbolique […] [et] le lieu par excellence où les mots sont des actions45 ». En effet, selon Bourdieu, Les agents du champ politique sont engagés en permanence dans un travail de représentation par lequel ils entendent construire et imposer une vision particulière du monde social tout en cherchant à mobiliser le soutien de ceux sur qui […] leur pouvoir repose46. 25 Dans le cas du DUP, ce, « travail de représentation » va jusqu’à prendre des allures théâtrales, comme le remarque l’auteur Ed Moloney (l’un des biographes de Paisley) :
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DUP annual conferences were invariably among the most colourful and ritualised pieces of theatre in British and Irish politics. […] No performance was complete without colourful, sometimes wounding and always personal insults being hurled at the DUP’s many enemies in Ireland – Catholics and Nationalists, who were by definition the traditional enemy; and the Ulster Unionists who were the real enemy, not least because their votes were coveted by DUP leaders47.
26 Par ailleurs, le parti est effectivement parvenu, dès 1998, à imposer une vision très négative du processus de paix et de la politique de son rival, l’UUP, dans une « logique de la conquête du pouvoir48 », afin de mobiliser le soutien de l’électorat unioniste. « Nous avons fait apparaître les conditions qui rendaient l’Accord de 98 inacceptable et la moitié de la communauté unioniste en a convenu49 », déclarait en effet un dirigeant du DUP en 2007. Aussi, les énoncés du parti ont pris un « statut relationnel50 », dans la mesure où ils n’ont pris sens qu’en rapport aux autres acteurs du champ politique.
27 Le Sinn Féin, en revanche, a présenté une vision positive du processus de paix pour la communauté nationaliste et le discours du parti s’est alors caractérisé par une rhétorique du progrès, de la transition vers l’idéal républicain et de l’engagement. En effet, lors de son discours au congrès du Sinn Féin le 9 mai 1999, Gerry Adams s’était exprimé en ces termes :
The most important political development […] in recent modern Irish history was the Good Friday Agreement. The Good Friday Agreement is not an end in itself, but a transition towards a full national democracy in Ireland. For Irish republicans the struggle for full independence and sovereignty is not over. We committed ourselves to implementing the Agreement. I want to make it absolutely clear to the people of this island and to our many friends […] that Sinn Féin is totally committed to the peace process51.
28 Contrairement au Sinn Féin, les discours du DUP et de son dirigeant, Ian Paisley, reflètent l’usage de la rhétorique de la croyance, ce qui n’est en rien surprenant, dans la mesure où Paisley est également le chef et le fondateur de l’Église Presbytérienne Libre. Ainsi, dans ses discours, les ennemis du DUP prennent la forme de « forces malignes52 » et l’IRA et David Trimble les traits de « Judas53 ». De plus, les discours du chef du DUP s’achèvent souvent sur un extrait de la Bible ou une prière. Ainsi le discours de Paisley du 8 mai 2004, lors du Congrès annuel du parti, allait-il s’achever sur : « Que la grâce de notre seigneur Jésus Christ, l’amour de Dieu et la communion du Saint Esprit soient avec vous tous, Amen54 ».
29 Le grand nombre de références bibliques qui caractérisent les discours de Paisley semblent également participer de leur « force illocutionnaire ». En effet, comme le souligne Bourdieu, le langage religieux, ou la rhétorique de la croyance, confère au discours une efficacité performative55 qui renforce la force illocutionnaire du discours politique, même si, dans le cas du DUP, cette rhétorique n’est pas employée à des fins religieuses. De plus, il remarque que « le capital personnel de “notoriété” et de “popularité” fondé sur le fait d’être connu et reconnu dans sa personne […] est souvent le produit de la reconversion d’un capital de notoriété accumulé sur d’autres terrains56
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». Dans le cas de Ian Paisley c’est du terrain religieux dont il s’agit. Terrain qui lui a permis d’acquérir « “un nom”, “une renommée” […] [et] une maitrise professionnelle de l’éloquence57 ». 30 Du côté républicain, il semble également bien que la « reconversion d’un capital de notoriété » ait contribué à faire le succès électoral du Sinn Féin, si l’on considère le passé paramilitaire et de prisonnier politique de personnages influents tels que Gerry Adams et Martin McGuinness. Ce capital de notoriété, bien que lié aux campagnes violentes de l’IRA, a sans aucun doute contribué à faire apparaître le Sinn Féin comme un défenseur ardent des droits des nationalistes et un adversaire redoutable face au DUP de Ian Paisley. D’ailleurs, comme le remarque Ed Moloney, tandis que le DUP est parvenu à dominer l’unionisme, plus de catholiques ont eu tendance à voter pour le Sinn Féin dans une logique de réponse défensive58. Cela a d’ailleurs contribué à démontrer que les extrêmes de la scène politique nord-irlandaise se trouvaient, au lendemain des élections de 2003 dans une situation de « dépendance mutuelle59 ».
Conclusion
31 Comme le montrent les manifestes du DUP et du Sinn Féin, la radicalisation de la scène politique nord-irlandaise au début des années 2000 a été le résultat de facteurs multiples. Premièrement, le contexte de suspension des institutions politiques n’a pu que convaincre l’électorat unioniste que les Accords de Belfast n’étaient peut-être pas la réponse aux difficultés propres à la politique nord-irlandaise, légitimant ainsi le discours du DUP. De plus, il est indéniable que l’absence de désarmement des paramilitaires républicains a également joué en la faveur des unionistes radicaux, qui se targuaient à l’époque de ne jamais partager le pouvoir avec les républicains si l’IRA n’était pas désarmée. Ainsi, les difficultés politiques rencontrées par David Trimble et les attaques dont il a été la cible ont bénéficié électoralement au DUP En revanche, compte tenu de ces mêmes difficultés, la majorité de la communauté nationaliste a donné son soutien aux républicains du Sinn Féin, dans la mesure où le parti s’est positionné en tant que défenseur du principe d’égalité et de la mise en place des Accords.
32 Ces conditions politiques, si elles ne rendent pas compte à elles seules de la radicalisation politique nord-irlandaise, se sont tout de même révélées être le terrain fertile à l’élaboration des stratégies politiques du DUP et du Sinn Féin. Le pouvoir du langage politique du Sinn Féin et du DUP tient à différentes composantes, propres à chacun de ces deux partis. Dans les deux cas, néanmoins, ces composantes du discours s’inscrivent dans une logique de conquête du pouvoir politique. Chez le DUP, les stratégies coercitives et de délégitimation répondent à un principe d’usage stratégique du langage. Ainsi, on s’aperçoit que la rhétorique de la peur et de la religion participent de la force illocutionnaire du discours d’un parti dont le capital de notoriété a été renforcé par son chef grâce à la popularité de ce dernier sur le terrain religieux. Concernant le Sinn Féin, en revanche, la force du discours républicain réside dans une stratégie de légitimation de groupe et dans une rhétorique de progrès, d’engagement et de transition, lesquelles ont su séduire l’électorat nationaliste.
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NOTES
1. Aux élections de 2003, le DUP est devenu le premier parti politique de la Province et le Sinn Féin s’est placé en deuxième position. Le DUP a remporté 25,6 % des suffrages et le Sinn Féin 23,5 %. Paul Dixon, Northern Ireland, The Politics of War and Peace, 2 nd edition, Hampshire, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, p. 304. 2. Bourdieu, Pierre, Langage et Pouvoir Symbolique, Paris, Fayard, 2001, p. 163, 189. 3. « Strategic use of language », dans Paul Chilton, Analysing Political Discourse, Theory and Practice, London, Routledge, 2004. p. 45. 4. Malgré la suspension de l’Assemblée en 2002, le nouveau ministre aux Affaires nord- irlandaises, Paul Murphy, souhaitait restaurer la dévolution des pouvoirs dans la Province. 5. Dixon, Paul, Northern Ireland, The Politics of War and Peace, op. cit., p. 303. 6. Political party support in Northern Ireland, 1969 to the present. Site internet : [cain.ulst.ac.uk/issues/politics/election/electsum.htm]. Consulté le 15 mars 2013. Dixon, Paul, Northern Ireland, The Politics of War and Peace, 2nd edition, Hampshire, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. p. 304. 7. « This election is Ulster’s date with destiny. It is the occasion to put things right, […] and to negotiate a new agreement. » Democratic Unionist Party, The DUP’s vision for devolution – Fair deal manifesto 2003, Northern Ireland Assembly Election Manifesto, Belfast, 2003. Site Internet : [http://www.DUP2win.com]. Consulté le 16 février 2007, p. 3. 8. « The destruction of the RUC, the withdrawal of the Army, the release of terrorist prisoners, the elevation of Sinn Féin/IRA members to government office without evidence of the destruction of weaponry, the creation of ever-expanding all-Ireland institutions […]. » Ibid., p. 3. 9. Ibid. 10. « Stop the nightmare of David Trimble partnering with Gerry Adams ». « After the election Sinn Féin is likely to be the largest nationalist party. » Dans ibid., p. 3. 11. « […] Ian Paisley controls over fifty percent of the unionist seats in the assembly. » Ibid., p. 4. 12. « Judge the UUP on its record and ask yourself the question : “Is the Union stronger today than it was five years ago?” » Ibid., p. 8-9. 13. « The UUP record of failure. » Ibid., p. 8-9. 14. Ibid., p. 8-9. 15. « […] you can’t trust the Ulster Unionists : […] You can’t afford to give them another chance. » Dans ibid. 16. « Northern Ireland’s real nigntmare. » Ibid., p. 12. 17. « A terrifying prospect for Northern Ireland. » Ibid., p. 12. 18. « Uncontrolable Sinn Féin/IRA ministers, Gerry Adams as Deputy First Minister, Sinn Féin/ IRA permanently in government. » Ibid. 19. Democratic Unionist Party, The DUP’s vision for devolution – Fair deal manifesto 2003. Site internet : [http://www.DUP2win.com]. Consulté le16 février 2007, p. 7. 20. « So-called ceasefire », « illusionary tactic. » Ibid., p. 7.
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21. « Sinn Fein’s failure to follow democratic rules makes its place in government totally unacceptable. […] The DUP is opposed to terrorists in government. » Ibid., p. 7. 22. Ibid., p. 16. 23. Sinn Féin delivers ; Priorities 2003-2008 ; Peace Process ; All-Ireland Development ; Policing ; Equality and Human Rights ; Education ; Health ; Economy ; Regional Development ; Agriculture and Rural Development ; Arts, Culture and the Irish Language ; Women ; Children’s rights ; Housing ; Environment ; Multi-culturalism. Sinn Féin, Agenda for Government, Northern Ireland Assembly Election Manifesto, Dublin, 2003. Site Internet : [cain.ulst.ac.uk/issues/ politics/docs/sf/sf03man.pdf]. PDF Consulté le18 juin 2008. 24. « Stand firm. » Dans ibid., p. 3. 25. Il s’agit notamment de la suspension de l’Assemblée nord-irlandaise en octobre 2002 et donc, du retour de l’administration directe de Westminster dans la Province. 26. Ibid., p. 6. 27. Ibid., p. 12. 28. « An all-Ireland charter of human rights; an all-Ireland economy, all-Ireland agricultural development strategy; an all-Ireland policy approach to arts and culture. » Dans ibid., p. 12-13. 29. « Initiatives to advance the peace process. » « When others gave up […] Sinn Féin […] returned to the negotiations […] to ensure that the elections went ahead and that the promise of the Good Friday Agreement is delivered. » Dans ibid., p. 16. 30. Interview de Mitchel McLaughlin, alors membre du Sinn Féin et de l’Assemblée nord- irlandaise, menée par l’auteur à Stormont le 7 décembre 2009. 31. « The key to future political progress. » Dans Sinn Féin, Agenda for Government, Northern Ireland Assembly Election Manifesto, op. cit., p. 16. 32. Ibid. 33. Habermas, dans Paul Chilton, Analysing Political Discourse, Theory and Practice, London, Routledge, 2004. p. 45. 34. Ibid. 35. « the only-Ireland party. » Sinn Féin, Westminster Election Manifesto 2001, Building an Ireland of Equals, Dublin, Sinn Féin, 2001. Site Internet : [cain.ulst.ac.uk/issues/politics/ docs/sf/sf01.pdf]. PDF Consulté le 18 juin 2008. p. 1. Sinn Féin, Local Government Election Manifesto 2001, Changing the Face of Local Government. Dublin, Sinn Féin, 2001. Site Internet : [http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/issues/politics/docs/sf/01/htm]. Consulté le 24 avril 2013, p. 1. 36. Ian Paisley, dans Paisley, Ian, Speech to the Annual Conference, 28 novembre 1998. Site internet : [http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/events/peace/docs/ip281198.htm]. Consulté le15 mars 2006. 37. Democratic Unionist Party, Leadership to put things right!, Westminster and Local Government Elections Manifesto, Belfast, 2001. Site Internet : [http:// www.DUP2win.com]. Consulté le 16 février 2007. p. 6. 38. Democratic Unionist Party, The DUP’s vision for devolution – Fair deal manifesto 2003, Northern Ireland Assembly Election Manifesto, Belfast, 2003. Site Internet : [http:// www.DUP2win.com]. Consulté le 16 février 2007. p. 4.
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39. « We can’t make peace without the unionists. We have to make peace with each other. […] Because if the unionists don’t engage in this process, it’s going nowhere. » Grogan, Dick, « Adams says move to unarmed strategy could come sooner than later », The Irish Times, 29 août 1994. 40. « Self-legitimisation in the group. » Chilton, Paul, Analysing Political Discourse, Theory and Practice, op. cit., p. 127. 41. Sinn Féin Ard Chomhairle Paper to 1998 Sinn Féin Ard Fheis, Site internet : [sinnfein.org/ ardfheis/98ardfheis/repap.html]. Consulté le 6 novembre 2012. 42. « illocutionary force ». Austin, John, How to do things with words (Second Edition), Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1976. p. 146. 43. John B. Thompson, dans Bourdieu, Pierre, Langage et Pouvoir Symbolique, Paris, Fayard, 2001, p. 19. 44. Ibid., p. 43. 45. Ibid., p. 44. 46. John B. Thompson, dansibid. 47. Moloney (ed.), Paisley, From Demagogue to Democrat ?, Dublin, Poolbeg Press, 2008. p. 334. 48. Ibid. p. 226. 49. Interview with DUP source, October 2007. Dans Moloney (ed.), Paisley, From Demagogue to Democrat ?, op. cit., p. 362. 50. Pierre Bourdieu, Langage et Pouvoir Symbolique, op. cit.,p. 46. 51. Gerry Adams, Address to the Sinn Féin Ard Fheis, 9 mai 1999. Site internet : [http:// cain.ulst.ac.uk/events/peace/docs/ga/9599.htm]. Consulté le 19 novembre 2007. 52. “Evil forces”. Dans Ian Paisley, Speech at the DUP Annual Conference in the Ramada Hotel, Belfast, 8 May 2004. Site internet : [http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/issues/politics/docs/ dup/paisley080504.htm]. Consulté le 15 mars 2006. 53. Ibid. Paisley, Ian, Speech to DUP Annual Conference, 28 novembre 1998. Site internet : [http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/events/peace/docs/ip281198.htm]. Consulté le 15 mars 2006. 54. « The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the communion of the Holy Ghost be with you all, Amen. » Dans Paisley, Ian, Speech at the DUP Annual Conference in the Ramada Hotel, Belfast, 8 May 2004. Site internet : [http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/issues/ politics/docs/dup/paisley080504.htm]. Consulté le 15 mars 2006. 55. Pierre Bourdieu, Langage et Pouvoir Symbolique, op. cit., p. 173. 56. Ibid. p. 244. 57. Ibid. 58. Moloney (ed.), Paisley, From Demagogue to Democrat?, op. cit., p. 363. 59. « Mutual dependence ». Dans Gerry Moriarty, « Mutual dependence ties DUP and Sinn Féin fortunes », The Irish Times, 10 mai 2004, p. 7.
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RÉSUMÉS
Depuis le mois de mai 2007, les partis politiques autrefois considérés comme les plus radicaux d’Irlande du Nord se partagent le pouvoir politique dans le cadre de la dévolution dans la Province. Si l’on se positionne strictement du côté des deux partis en présence, il est possible d’apporter quelques explications à leur conquête de la scène politique grâce à l’étude de leurs manifestes politiques mais également grâce aux théories des linguistes que sont John Austin, Pierre Bourdieu, Jürgen Habermas ou encore Paul Chilton. Ce travail permettra alors de mettre à jour les stratégies discursives mises en place par les deux partis en présence pour se positionner en tant que partis incontournables de la scène politique.
Since May 2007, Northern Irish political parties formerly considered as being radical ones have been sharing power within the framework of devolution in the Province. Some explanations to their political success and conquest of the political area can be provided by the analysis of their political manifestos but also thanks to linguistic theories developed by John Austin, Pierre Bourdieu, Jürgen Habermas or Paul Chilton. Thus, this study will reveal the two parties’discursive strategies that enabled them to position themselves as key political leaders.
INDEX
Mots-clés : Democratic Unionist Party, Sinn Féin, élections à l’Assemblée nord-irlandaise de 2003, analyse du discours politique, manifestes politiques Keywords : Democratic Unionist Party, Sinn Féin, Northern Irish Assembly elections 2003, political discourse analysis, manifestos
AUTEUR
MAGALI DEXPERT
Université Pierre Mendès France Grenoble 2 – IUT de Valence
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Class Struggle in the 1916-23 Irish Revolution: A Reappraisal
Olivier Coquelin
1 Up until the 1970s most of the studies exploring the Irish revolution or general Irish history had focused exclusively on its political and military aspects. This unique approach may be explained by the fact that the revolutionary activity had been primarily devoted to military and political purposes, so as to federate the cross-class nationalist community around the supreme goal of Irish independence. A marked turning point in Irish historiography, therefore, occurred only after F. S. L. Lyons’ 1971 famous essay Ireland Since the Famine had paid a particular attention to social and economic issues, thereby paving the way for other themes being dealt with, including gender, sectarianism, the social background of revolutionaries1…
2 But while the socioeconomic dimension of the Irish revolution has since been recognized, on the other hand, analyses have tended to downplay its historical significance2. Hence, except for a few monographs (e.g. Diarmaid Ferriter’s most recent A Nation and not a Rabble, the Irish Revolution 1913-23 and Gavin M. Foster’s The Irish Civil War and Society: Politics, Class and Conflict, also published in 20153) and those specifically dedicated to labour and land disputes in the revolutionary era (e.g. Emmet O’Connor’s Syndicalism in Ireland, 1917-1923, and Conor Kostick’s Revolution in Ireland: Popular Militancy 1917 to 19234), socioeconomic issues have hitherto been pushed into the background or diluted in political and military studies that have remained dominant in mainstream academic research – one particularly relevant example is the otherwise compelling monograph by Charles Townshend entitled The Republic: The fight for Irish Independence, 1918-19235. 3 According to Charles Townshend and Terence Dooley, this traditional approach can be traced back to Patrick Lynch’s 1966 article “The social revolution that never was” in which, to explain why the Irish Revolution was never a social revolution, the author contends that, “by 1916 most agricultural holdings had been purchased by their occupiers, subject to land annuities, which were not then a matter of contention. The tenant had become a proprietor, the owner of his land; and little land remained, to which the system of voluntary purchase could be applied6”. Lynch nonetheless
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acknowledges that “sporadically, advantage was taken of the unsettled conditions in the country to show that an aggressive spirit of social unrest still existed7”. Likewise, John Regan would much later concur with this finding: Any chance of real social revolution had been substantially undermined by land reform and the creation of an increasingly conservative peasant proprietorship in Ireland sponsored by various British Governments in the four decades before independence8. 4 In line with this view, which has been held by other historians over the past decades9, Peter Hart argues in his 2003 The IRA at War, 1916-1923 that “not only did the Irish revolution not bring social transformation, there was no socially revolutionary situation in Ireland, even in prospect”. This not least because “most farmers owned their farms by 1922”, although “this is not to say that nothing happened in terms of social unrest, or that nothing important happened, but rather that nothing revolutionary happened10”.
5 Hence the substantial amount of social unrest, whether industrial or agrarian, that spread across revolutionary Ireland is not included in this otherwise convincing three- dimensional process consisting of three interwoven struggles: a war against the British State; an ethnic and communal conflict; a fratricidal struggle in the nationalist community11. 6 Even though Hart’s study undoubtedly challenges the prevailing historiographical tradition in many respects, it remains nonetheless disputable. The present article will therefore seek to reappraise its relevance by assessing the extent to which “class struggle” was an integral part of the Irish Revolution, as much as the other overlapping struggles suggested by Hart12. In so doing, it will, first, define the concept of “class struggle” and then depict its various manifestations in revolutionary Ireland. 7 Although the concept of class struggle is central to Marxist theory of history, many authors before Karl Marx had analysed social classes and their development and antagonism throughout history. Writing on March 5, 1852, to his friend Joseph Weydemeyer Marx himself acknowledged that he did not originally draw up the concept: And now as for myself, I do not claim to have discovered either the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me, bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this struggle between the classes, as had bourgeois economists their economic anatomy13. 8 The “bourgeois” historians and economists whom Marx alluded to actually included liberal thinkers such as François Guizot, Augustin Thierry, François Mignet, John Wade and David Ricardo14. Further down, in the same letter, Marx summarized his own contribution to class theory in these words: My own contribution was 1. to show that the existence of classes is merely bound up with certain historical phases in the development of production; 2. that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat; 3. that this dictatorship itself constitutes no more than a transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society. 9 But how, in Marx’s view, were the different classes dialectically connected? What were the conditions and mechanisms whereby the process of class struggle was triggered? Elaborating on his thoughts on this issue in other writings15, Marx thus posited that a class really comes into existence when its members not only share common socioeconomic features, but also become aware of the inherent antagonism between
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their common interests and those of other social groups, as a result of conflicting relationships to the means of production. Class consciousness and identity, therefore, acts as a catalyst for social conflict and competition that will inevitably lead to revolutionary change and, in the case of industrial capitalist society, to “the dictatorship of the proletariat”.
10 Among the proponents of the liberal class-conflict theory, some dismiss Marx’s conception of class struggle as totally irrelevant16, while others recognize its merits, at least to some extent17. Thus, for example, the French philosopher and sociologist, Raymond Aron, contends that Marx’s empirical definition of class makes it acceptable for non-Marxists, albeit with reservations. Economic conflicts between employees and business owners for the distribution of national income undeniably exist in industrial society. On the other hand, Aron disputes Marx’s assertion whereby each of the antagonistic classes has its own conception of society and, as such, aspires to power. In Marx’s class theory, the growing pauperization of the workers arising from the development of capitalist production will thus inevitably incite them to overthrow the capitalist system to establish a new mode of production. The fact is, however, that as aggregate income increased over time in the most developed countries, the rivalry between classes grew less intense and violent, thereby weakening the revolutionary movement. Class struggle in the Marxist sense of the term gradually gave way to what Aron calls “quarrelsome satisfaction” (« La satisfaction querelleuse »), in the form of peaceful resolutions of conflicts designed to ensure more equitable income distribution within the existing order. Such a trend, of course, is at variance with Marx’s prediction. But while capitalism does not necessarily create the conditions conducive to revolution, this does not mean that those conditions do not exist. For class struggle to develop into revolution, Aron argues, two seemingly contradictory sentiments must prevail: hope and despair – that is, hope for a new society resulting from profound dissatisfaction with existing conditions. Two sentiments, Aron points out, that are mostly felt in backward capitalist and predominantly agrarian countries, such as Russia in 191718. 11 It remains to be seen to what extent the industrial and agrarian conflicts that occurred in the 1916-23 Irish revolution fit with the Marxist and liberal or nonexclusively Marxist perspectives on class struggle. 12 The failure of the Dublin general strike of 1913, together with the outbreak of the First World War, somewhat curbed industrial unrest in Ireland, which had intensified since the creation of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union (ITGWU) by James Larkin in 1908. The significant growing demand for food products and raw materials engendered by the war effort actually brought prosperity to the country, which the industrial workers and labourers hardly benefited from, unlike many farmers, employers and shopkeepers. Thus, the post-war economic boom provided an incentive for the former to claim their share of the general growth in prosperity. They did so in an unprecedented wave of wage strikes that coincided with the upsurge in trade union militancy in the later war years19. At that time, the Irish Labour movement was embodied by the Irish Trade Union Congress (ITUC), which had dramatically increased the number of its affiliates since the 1914 annual meeting, rising from below 110,000 to 230,00020 in 1920. This dramatic growth in union membership was mainly the result of the diverse campaigns led by the most powerful Irish trade union, the ITGWU, which could count on 100,000 members by 1920 – as compared with 30,000 before the 1913 Dublin Lockout –, about 40 % of them working in agriculture21. This means that, in
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addition to the industrial sector, the ITGWU had also made a significant breakthrough in rural areas since the agrarian outbreak of 1917, thereby organising tens of thousands of labourers, landless farmers and smallholders within four years22. 13 Thus, from 1918 to 1921, what was known as the wages movement translated into 782 industrial strikes – as against 307 in the years 1914-1918 –, most of them being successful23. But social turmoil also included boycott, cattle driving and land seizures perpetrated by all those left behind the land reforms implemented since 1903, including not only the landless tenants and labourers but also the significant portion of smallholders who had not purchased sufficient land for the economic viability of their holdings24. Knowing that between two thirds and three quarters of the Irish farmers became landowners by 1914 and that the land purchase and emigration processes were suspended for the duration of the War, such a phenomenon can by no means be ignored and tends to indicate that agrarian unrest was more intense and radical than suggested by Lynch, Regan, Cronin and Hart25. Two trends of rural agitation actually prevailed in the revolutionary period: one based on strike actions for better wages and working conditions led by labourers belonging to the ITGWU – and this mostly in the east; and the other on land seizures carried out by the smaller farmers and labourers for the break-up of the larger estates and their redistribution – and this mostly in the west26. Concurrent with these traditional patterns of conflict, however, emerged an alternative organizational method, named “soviet” after the council movement that developed as part of the 1917 Russian Revolution. Initially established as auxiliaries within the wages movement, the one hundred or so Irish soviets nonetheless differed from the latter in two aspects: their action did not rest upon work stoppage but on the continuity of production or management conducted exclusively by the workers themselves, not without having first ousted or ignored the official owners, managers or rulers. 14 Anyhow, the wages movement that widely spread throughout the country in the thriving period 1917-21 essentially aimed at achieving a fairer distribution of the wealth created during the war years. The conflicts were most certainly fought between antagonistic classes aware of themselves as groups sharing common socioeconomic interests adverse to those of other groups (employers and shopkeepers vs workers and employees; farmers vs labourers), each being specifically represented by one or several organizations: the various trade unions for the workers, labourers and employees; the Irish Farmers' Union for the farmers; the Irish Association of Employers for the employers. But the aim for each class was not to claim or seize power in the name of a specific conception of society. Class struggle, therefore, was not used as a political tool designed to maintain or overthrow the current system, although many striking workers were imbued with the radical spirit of syndicalism27 instilled by the most active trade union, the ITGWU28. And such radicalism often expressed itself symbolically through the “red flag” that was conspicuously hoisted or displayed during rallies and demonstrations, all along what Emmet O’Connor calls “the red flag times29” that also saw the ITUC – re-named the Irish Labour Party and Trade Union Congress (ILPTUC) – endorsing a socialist constitution and manifesto at a special conference in November 191830. 15 As for the agrarian conflicts for land widely carried out by small farmers and landless labourers against landlords and graziers in the west of Ireland, here too class struggle aimed less to subvert the existing system based on private property than to conquer
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land or redistribute it more fairly – except for those attempts at establishing collectively-run farms in County Galway in 192031. 16 The same finding also partly applies to the “soviet” occupations that some workers resorted to, when work stoppage or negotiation proved insufficient to get the expected results. As Donal Ó Drisceoil points out: “In all cases of ‘soviets’ up to 1921, the employers’ property was returned once demands had been met32”. However, regarding the fact that “the employers’ property was returned once demands had been met”, it must be reminded that, in some cases, the workers did it reluctantly and at times following negotiations brought about under the threat of the Sinn Féin Government, as in the Castleconnell soviet and the Bruree soviet where Constance Markievicz, the then Minister for Labour, would have threatened to dispatch republican soldiers to force the workers to leave the premises peacefully33. Furthermore, the practice of workers’ self- management that underpinned the soviet occupations made them appear as genuine subversive experiments – comparable to those Russian factory committees which took over their plants and ran them independently of the owners and managers throughout 191734. This is well illustrated by the poster displayed at the entrance door of the Bruree mill (Co. Limerick), which read: “Bruree Mills and Bakery are now the property of the workers. The mill and shop are open for the sale of bread, flour and meal. It is hoped to reduce prices and do away with profiteering within a day. By order of the workers35”. Not to mention the subversive symbols that accompanied these workers’ action: starting with the name “soviet” used to identify them, but also through the “red flag” raised over some of the occupied factories or slogans such as, “Bruree Workers Soviet Mills, We make Bread not Profits”, that was printed over the door of entrance to the Bruree mill. Here class struggle in the Marxist sense of the term was arguably still in its infancy. But fairly soon, the economic conditions would allow it to mature. 17 Thus, the post-war economic boom gradually gave way to a slump as of late 1920. With it, social unrest in Ireland gradually turned into struggles against wage cuts imposed by the employers and farmers. The tide was now turning in favour of the latter, to the extent that, to quote Emmet O’Connor, “labour was […] coming close to conceding what had been won since 191436”. Such circumstances arguably fostered further hardline stances among labourers and farmers, as well as the resurgence of soviets which, from tactical tools used to complement the wages movement, were henceforth increasingly viewed as genuine alternatives to traditional private property rights37. Emblematic of this trend were the Cleeves soviets. 18 Cleeve is actually the name of a family who, at the time of the Irish Revolution, ran a network of some 100 creameries, separation stations, condensed milk factories and mills located in Counties Limerick, Tipperary and Cork. About 3,000 people worked for this business empire, which also processed the milk of some 5,000 farmers. From 1918 onwards, Cleeves, like many other Irish companies, underwent major social disputes over wages, working hours and conditions, some of which were to take the form of factory seizures in which the workers kept their plant running under their control. These workers’ self-managed occupations were naturally dubbed “soviets”, starting with the Knocklong creamery (Co. Limerick) in May 1920, followed by the Bruree mills and bakery (Co. Limerick) in August 1921, and 39 creameries, along with mills and other workshops (Co. Limerick, Tipperary and Cork), for several months in 1922. In the latter case, the plants were taken over in response to a lockout resulting from an unsettled dispute about pay and staff cutbacks. Here the workers’ decision to resume production
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was justified on the ground that such closing down would “[imperil] the means of livelihood of 5,000 farmers, [risk] the destruction of national produce to the extent of thousands of pounds a week, and [throw] 3,000 workers and their family out of work, to beg and starve38”. It was therefore “in the interest of the community, and to preserve the industry for the nation” that the workers were instructed to carry on work. These designs, both communal and national, were encapsulated in their motto, “the Sovereign People39”. Yet this revolutionary impulse, embodied in the need to create a new mode of production for themselves and the whole nation, proved short-lived due to the joint effect of the farmers’ boycott and the intervention of the Free State Army40, both being in line with what Emmet O’Connor calls “the conservative response” to social disorder41. Not to mention the official Labour leaders whose refusal to use subversive methods to carry out their revolutionary goals42 naturally led them to ignore the soviets showing the slightest sign of subversion43. This also means that the ITGWU’s involvement in virtually all the soviets set up in the revolutionary era was mostly initiated by the rank and file – or by the union’s communist officials from 192144. 19 Of course, such a subversive trend in the period 1921-23 did not spare the rural areas, which witnessed several attempts at implementing collective ownership of land, as in the village of Broadford (Co. Clare) in 1922 where the Going estate was managed as a soviet for a few months by tenant farmers merely demanding “a reduction in first and second term rents and […] distribution of grass lands among the small tenants”. To this end, a “Committee of farmers, tenants, workers and Transport Union workers on the Going estates” was created, with one of its members elected as its secretary. Paradoxical as it might seem, however, the Going estate became self-managed and autonomous, while remaining officially the landlord’s private property. This ambiguous situation was characterized by the Broadford Committee’s decision to pay what it reckoned to be a fair rent for six months, namely £110 which was much less than the payment expected by the landlord’s agent. In addition to this, the Committee or “soviet” endeavoured to support the local community in two ways: first, by converting part of the estate into common fields for meadowing; and second, by letting lands for tillage to landless men in Broadford45. Other similar “soviet” experiments were also conducted in County Clare in 1922-23 – in Toovahera, Kilfenora, Ballyvaughan and other areas in the neighbourhood of Crab Island –, here too, by tenant farmers left on the sidelines of the 1903 and 1909 land reforms, and yearning for a fairer distribution of land and a drastic reduction of rents that they imposed by taking over the estates they worked on46. 20 If credence is to be given to Raymond Aron’s proposition whereby hope and despair are necessary prerequisites for class struggle to develop into revolution, as Marx saw it, a large part of the lower strata of Irish society was therefore imbued with revolutionary sentiment in 1921-23. From industrial workers to agricultural labourers to small farmers, many of them undoudtedly felt extreme dissatisfaction with existing conditions and, in this case, not only with their employers’ attempt at cutting their salaries and the slow pace of land distribution, but also with their failure to win concessions through strike action, negotiations and land seizures. This feeling of despair towards the system in place led some of them to practically express hope for a new and better organisational structure, particularly in the form of self-managed soviets, as an alternative to the current private property rights, and this outside the country’s most industrialized areas. This revolutionary impulse, embodied in the need
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to create a better life for themselves and the local community or national community, was all the more conspicuous in one of the 1922-23 Cleeve soviets that, according to the Voice of Labour: These men were straining every nerve to secure perfection in the product they were manufacturing; that no possible slur should be cast upon the Workers’ Factory, (in which), the minutest detail failed to escape the keen observation of the Works manager (who was only a worker and) whose fervent enthusiasm and love of his work was a constant urge to the best in every man and woman47. 21 Class struggle most assuredly permeated the revolutionary era in a two-stage process, each corresponding to a specific approach: the liberal or nonexclusively Marxist approach prevailing in the period 1917-21; and the Marxist approach prevailing in the period 1921-23. Class struggle, therefore, can hardly be considered of secondary importance compared with the political and military conflicts confronting Ireland at that time, not least because of the high number of strikes and soviets that swept across the country between 1917 and 1923: in the industrial sector alone, there were 1199 strikes – including 28 involving over 1,000 workers each – and more than 100 self- managed soviets as of 1920, most of which were creameries48. So much so that, as Emmet O’Connor puts it: “Never since has the working class confronted the rationale of capitalism so profoundly or so extensively49”. As for the land conflicts in the west of Ireland, Fergus Campbell points out that “far from being resolved, serious grievances remained unaddressed and provided the basis for renewed land agitation on a scale not seen since the days of the Land War (1871-81)50”. This, Campbell adds, notably translated into the forcible seizure and redistribution of hundreds of grazing farms throughout Connacht, at times in the form of experiments in collective land ownership, thereby infringing private property rights51.
22 Furthermore, all these manifestations of class struggle were not without causing great concern in the Irish revolutionary movement, which responded accordingly. The strategy of cross-class unity adopted by the republican leadership thus justified using every possible means to eradicate anything that could sow the seeds of division within the nationalist community, and in particular class struggle52. As a result, some of the self-managed soviets were compelled to cease operations under the threat of military intervention uttered by the Sinn Féin government, and several significant measures were taken to resolve the agrarian crisis and take control of the land agitation – a National Land Bank was created in 1919 to accelerate the process of land purchasing through loans made available for the tenants anxious to purchase their own farms; the following year saw the establishment of the Land Settlement Commission and land courts designed to implement a redistribution of grazing land; then, during the Civil War, the Free State government decided upon using strong-arm tactics too, through the Special Infantry Corps specifically created to suppress agrarian turmoil, strikes and any infringement of the law altogether53. 23 Thus, while there is no denying that, in Peter Hart’s words, “nothing [socially] revolutionary happened” during the Irish Revolution, at least on a large scale, that “there was no socially revolutionary situation in Ireland, even in prospect”, is however more than debatable54. For there was clearly a socially radical and revolutionary potential, whether industrial or agrarian, in Ireland during the 1916-23 Revolution. And despite the support and involvement of some sections of the republican and trade union rank-and-file members in the social conflicts, such a potential was discouraged and hampered by the main leaders of both movements: in the name of a moderate and
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conservative vision of Irish political independence, which admitted of no social hindrance, for the former; and, in the name of a peaceful and gradualist vision of social revolution, which eschewed subversive and illegal action, for the latter. 24 Hence one is entitled to believe that the Irish Revolution was actually a melting pot of “motivations, expections and opportunities55”, to quote Diarmaid Ferriter’s own words, in which class struggle featured as prominently as the other ingredients – even though social radicalism was eventually defeated and was not to give rise to progressive forces sufficiently powerful to counterbalance independent Ireland’s conservatism established by “the reactionary elements among the elite of Sinn Féin56”.
NOTES
1. F. S. L. Lyons, Ireland Since the Famine, London, Fontana Press, 1985 [orig. 1971]; Diarmaid Ferriter, A Nation and not a Rabble: the Irish Revolution 1913-1923, London, Profile Books, 2015, p. 51-85. 2. Reflective of this trend is notably Richard English’s research work on republican socialism. See, for example, Richard English, “Socialism: Socialist Intellectuals and the Irish Revolution”, in Joost Augusteijn (ed.), The Irish Revolution, 1913-1923, Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2002, p. 203-223. 3. Diarmaid Ferriter, op. cit.; Gavin M. Foster, The Irish Civil War and Society: Politics, Class and Conflict, Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2015. See also Desmond Greaves, Liam Mellows and the Irish Revolution, London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1971; Arthur Mitchell, Revolutionary Governments in Ireland: Dáil Éireann 1919-1922, Dublin, Gill and Macmillan, 1995. 4. Emmet O’Connor, Syndicalism in Ireland, 1917-23, Cork, Cork University Press, 1988; Conor Kostick, Revolution in Ireland: Popular Militancy 1917 to 23, Cork, Cork University Press, 2009 [orig. 1996]. See also Arthur Mitchell, Labour in Irish Politics, 1890-1930: The Irish Labour Movement in an Age of Revolution, Dublin, Irish University Press, 1974; Fergus Campbell, Land and Revolution, 1890-1921, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005. 5. Charles Townshend, The Republic: The fight for Irish Independence, 1918-1923, London, Allen Lane, 2013. See also Joost Augusteijn, From Public Defiance to Guerrilla Warfare: The Experience of Ordinary Volunteers in the Irish War of Independence, 1916-1921, Dublin, Irish Academic Press, 1996; Ronan Fanning, Fatal Path: British Government and Irish Revolution, 1910-1922, London, Faber and Faber, 2013; Michael Hopkinson, The Irish War of Independence, Kingston, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002; Michael Hopkinson, Green against Green: The Irish Civil War, Dublin, Gill and Macmillan, 1988. 6. Charles Townshend, “Historiography: Telling the Irish Revolution”, in Joost Augusteijn (dir.), From Public Defiance to Guerrilla Warfare: The Experience of Ordinary Volunteers in the Irish War of Independence, 1916-1921, op. cit., p. 5; Terence Dooley, “The Land for the People”: The Land Question in Independent Ireland, Dublin, University College Dublin Press, 2004, p. 17.
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7. Patrick Lynch, “The Social Revolution that Never Was”, Desmond Williams (dir.), The Irish Struggle, 1916-26, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966, p. 41, p. 49. However, one year before Lynch, Nicholas Mansergh had pointed out that although the 1903 Wyndham Act had virtually settled the land question, it did not prevent Irish farmers’ patriotic feelings from stirring during the War of Independence. Hence the so-called Irish question was at that time essentially a political question as “national sentiment was shown to be the fundamental force”. See Nicholas Mansergh, The Irish Question, 1840-1921: A Commentary on Anglo-Irish Relations and on Social and Political Forces in Ireland in the Age of Reform and Revolution, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1965, p. 83-110. 8. John M. Regan, The Irish Counter-Revolution, 1912-36, Dublin, Gill and Macmillan, 1999, p. 377. Regan’s position on this issue is confirmed in the introduction to the collection of chapters he edited with Mike Cronin in 2000: “There is little evidence of a social component within the Irish revolution and less again in its settlement. Such potential as there wasn for social upheaval had to agreat extent been defused by the transfer of land back to native ownership under a series of reforming land acts at the end of the nineteenth, and the beginning of the new century”. Mike Cronin and John Regan, “Introduction: Ireland and the Politics of Independence, New Perspectives and Re- consideration”, Mike Cronin and John Regan (eds.), Ireland: The Politics of Independence, 1922-49, Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2000, p. 1-2. 9. See, for example, Michael Laffan, The Resurrection of Ireland: the Sinn Féin Party, 1916-1923, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999, p. 315; John A. Murphy, Ireland in the Twentieth Century, Dublin, Gill and Macmillan, 1975, p. 10; Francis Costello, “Labour, Irish Republicanism and the social Order during the Anglo-Irish War”, The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, vol. 17, no 2, 1991, p. 16. 10. Peter Hart, The IRA at War, 1916-1923, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003, p. 21. 11. Peter Hart, op. cit., p. 19-20. See also Peter Hart, “Definition: Defining the Irish Revolution”, in Joost Augusteijn (ed.), From Public Defiance to Guerrilla Warfare: The Experience of Ordinary Volunteers in the Irish War of Independence, 1916-1921, op. cit., p. 24-27. 12. Although the term “ethnic cleansing” Hart used in this book and other writings to emphasize the scale of violence perpetrated by the IRA against Protestants in the South may seem exaggerated and has been passionately taken issue with ever since. On this contentious issue, see for example Brian P. Murphy and Niall Meehan, Troubled History: A Tenth Anniversary Critique of Peter Hart’s The IRA and its Enemies, Aubane, Aubane Historical Society, 2008, [http://aubanehistoricalsociety.org/], last accessed 20 December 2016. 13. Marx-Engels, Correspondence 1852, “Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer in New York”, London, 5 March 1852; [https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/letters/ 52_03_05-ab.htm], last accessed 5 April 2016. 14. Neil Davidson, How Revolutionary were the Bourgeois Revolutions?, Chicago, Haymarket Books, 2012, p. 115-117. 15. See, for example, Chapter VII in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, first published in 1852. [https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th- brumaire/ch07.htm], last accessed 6 April 2016. 16. See, for instance, Ludwig Von Mises, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1962 [orig. 1951], p. 314-358.
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17. See, for instance, Joseph Shumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, New York/ London, Routledge, 2003 [orig. 1942], p. 1-58. 18. Raymond Aron, La Lutte de classes : nouvelles leçons sur les sociétés industrielles, Paris, Gallimard, 1964, p. 21-127, p. 197-309. 19. Emmet O’Connor, op. cit., p. 8-13, p. 20-25. 20. If one refers to the 1911 census, this figure accounts for approximately 37 % of all workers – including agricultural labourers –, themselves representing roughly one third of the working population, out of a total population of 4,390,219 inhabitants. See W. E. Vaughan and A. J. Fitzpatrick (eds.), Irish Historical Statistics, Dublin, Royal Irish Academy, 1978, p. 3; Census of Ireland, 1911, General report, Occupations of the people, 1912-13, Cd.6663, CXVIII, 1, p. XXVIII-XXX. 21. Irish Labour Party and Trade Union Congress, Report of the Twenty-Sixth Annual Meeting, 1920, Published by Authority of the National Executive, p. 145-154; Irish Labour Party and Trade Union Congress, Report of the Twenty-Sixth Annual Meeting, 1921, Published by Authority of the National Executive, p. 75, [http://centenaries- ituc.nationalarchives.ie/annual-reports/], last accessed 20 December 2016. For the proportion of ITGWU members in agriculture in 1920 and ITGWU membership in 1913, see Desmond Greaves, The Irish Transport and General Workers’s Union: The Formative Years, 1909-1923, Dublin, Gill and Macmillan, 1982, p. 91, p. 259. It is important to note that, except for Congress membership for 1914, which is only mentioned in the 1921 annual report, these figures do not take account of such affiliated organisations as the trades’ councils, but only include the members of each affiliated trade union. 22. Emmet O’Connor, op. cit., pp. 37-39; Terence Dooley, “The Land for the People”: The Land Question in Independent Ireland, op. cit., p. 17-18. 23. Public Record Office London, Strikes and lockouts, 1914-21, Lab 34/14-20, Lab 34/32-39, figures cited in Emmet O’Connor, ibid., p. 25. However, the Irish workers’ achievements should be somewhat qualified given that the significant wage increases won as a result of strike actions hardly compensated for the rising retail price of food. See David Fitzpatrick, “Strikes in Ireland, 1914-21”, Saothar, vol. 6, 1980, p. 32. 24. Terence Dooley, “The Land for the People”: The Land Question in Independent Ireland, op. cit., p. 17-18, p. 33-56. According to the 1911 census, the agricultural class was the largest occupational group consisting of 780,867 people, of whom 761,791 were employed in fields and pastures, comprising 613,021 farmers (together with their sons and relatives), graziers, shepherds, gardeners and farm servants, as well as 148,770 agricultural labourers. See Census of Ireland, 1911, op. cit., p. XXVIII-XXX. 25. Terence Dooley, “The Land for the People”: The Land Question in Independent Ireland, op. cit., p. 29, p. 31; Paul Bew, “Sinn Féin, Agrarian Radicalism and the War of Independence, 1919-1921”, D. G. Boyce (ed.), The Revolution in Ireland, 1879-1923, Basingstoke/London, Macmillan Education, 1988, p. 221; Diarmaid Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland, 1900-2000, London, Profile Books, 2004, p. 62-63, p. 159; Fergus Campbell, “Land and Revolution Revisited”, Fergus Campbell and Tony Varmey (eds.), Land Questions in Modern Ireland, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2016 [orig. 2013], p. 151-154. 26. Conor Kostick, op. cit., p. 110; Paul Bew, ibid., p. 220.
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27. Syndicalism can be defined as a doctrine aimed at organising the workers as a whole into “one big union” to achieve working class control of all industries by direct means, with a view to establishing a socialist society. 28. Emmet O’Connor, A labour History of Ireland, 1824-1960, Dublin, Gill and Macmillan, 1992, p. 67-116. 29. Emmet O’Connor, “Syndicalism, Industrial Unionism, and Nationalism in Ireland”, Steven Hirsch and Lucien Van Derr Walt (eds.), Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World, 1870-1940 , Brill, Brill Academic Publishers, 2010, p. 210. For accounts of struggles or gatherings of workers or labourers displaying the red flag, see for instance The Kerryman, 10 May 1919, p. 4; Leitrim Observer, 12 April 1919 p. 2; The Nenagh Guardian, 4 September 1920, p. 4, 26 November 1921, p. 3; The Freeman’s Journal, 22 November 1921, p. 3. 30. The 1918 manifesto reveals that the ILPITUC’s ultimate aims were notably “to win for the workers of Ireland, collectively, the ownership and control of the whole produce of their labour; to secure the democratic management and control of all industries and services by the whole body of workers”. See Irish Labour Party and Trade Union Congress, Report of a Special Congress, Nov. 1 st and 2 nd, 1918, Published by Authority of the National Executive, p. 122-123, p. 165-169, [http://centenaries- ituc.nationalarchives.ie/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/24th-annual-report-1918.pdf], PDF, last accessed 22 January 2017. 31. Fergus Campbell, Land and Revolution, op. cit., p. 280-282, “Land and Revolution Revisited”, op. cit., p. 151-152. For a retrospective account of this collective experiment, see Kevin O’Shiel, “The Dail Land Courts”, The Irish Times, 14 novembre 1966, p. 10. 32. Donal Ó Drisceoil, Peadar O’Donnell, Cork, Cork University Press, 2001, p. 13. 33. See the offical organ of the ITGWU, The Voice of Labour, 10 December 1921, p. 4. 34. On the Russian factory committees, see Oskar Anweiler, The Soviets: The Russian Workers, Peasants, and Soldiers Councils, 1905-1921, New York, Pantheon Books, 1974 [orig. 1958], p. 125-128; Marc Ferro, Des Soviets au communisme bureaucratique, Paris, Gallimard, 1980, p. 74-82, p. 86-87, p. 191. 35. Cited in The Freeman’s Journal, 31 August 1921, p. 5; The Irish Examiner, 31 August 1921, p. 4; The Irish Independent, 31 August 1921, p. 4. 36. Emmet O’Connor, Syndicalism in Ireland, op. cit., p. 106. 37. Ibid., p. 103, p. 114-116. 38. Cited in The Irish Times, 15 May 1922, p. 5. 39. Ibid. 40. For a detailed account of the Cleeve soviets, see David Lee, “The Munster Soviets and the Fall of the House of Cleeve”, David Lee and Debbie Jacobs (eds.), Made in Limerick, vol. 1, History of Industries, trade and commerce, Limerick Civic Trust, 2003, p. 287-306, [http://www.limerickcity.ie/media/limerick%20soviet%2015.pdf], PDF, last accessed 8 January 2016; D. R. O’Connor Lysaght, “The Munster Soviet Creameries”, Irish History Workshop, vol. 1, 1981, p. 36-49. 41. Emmet O’Connor, Syndicalism in Ireland, op. cit., p. 154. 42. The report of the 1922 annual meeting of the ILPTUC thus specifies: “It is the duty of the Labour Party to make use of whatever instrument and power the political struggle has placed in its hands. As we have been willing to make use of the
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opportunities which Town and Urban Councils and Poor Law Boards provide to further the cause and protect the interests of the workers, though neither of them accords with our ideals, so we ought to work the new Governmental machine if it is established, even though it is not built according to our design, provided it can be adapted for turning out the products we require. […] The object of the Irish Labour Party is, and must be, to establish in Ireland a Co-operative Workers’ Republic. In the course of the struggle to attain this ultimate social, political, and economic freedom, Labour must demand and work for many ameliorative reforms”. See Irish Labour Party and Trade Union Congress, Report of the Twenty-Seventh Annual Meeting, 1922, Published by Authority of the National Executive, p. 62, p. 64, [http://centenaries-ituc.nationalarchives.ie/wp- content/uploads/2014/10/28th-annual-report-1922.pdf], PDF, last accessed 23 January 2017. 43. For example, while the 1920 Knocklong and the 1921 Arigna soviet are referred to in the report of the 1921 annual meeting of the ILPTUC, no mention is made of the 1922-23 Cleeve soviets in the 1922 and 1923 reports. See Irish Labour Party and Trade Union Congress, Report of the Twenty-Sixth Annual Meeting, 1921, op. cit., p. 13; Irish Labour Party and Trade Union Congress, Report of the Twenty-Seventh Annual Meeting, 1922, op. cit.; Irish Labour Party and Trade Union Congress, Report of the Twenty-Eighth Annual Meeting, 1923, Published by Authority of the National Executive, [http://centenaries- ituc.nationalarchives.ie/annual-reports/], last accessed 23 January 2017. 44. Emmet O’Connor, Syndicalism in Ireland, op. cit., p. 131. 45. On the Broadford soviet, see Michael McCarthy, “The Broadford Soviet”, The Old Limerick Journal, no 4, 1980, p. 37-40, [http://www.limerickcity.ie/media/Media, 3937,en.pdf], PDF, last accessed 23 January 2017. 46. On these land soviets, see The Freeman’s Journal, 3 May 1923, p. 4, p. 5, 9 May 1923, p. 5, 17 May 1923, p. 6, 25 May 1923, p. 6. 47. The Voice of Labour, 27 May 1922, p. 8. 48. Public Record Office London, Strikes and lockouts, 1914-21, Lab 34/14-20, Lab 34/32-39; Public Record Office London, Strikes and lockouts, 1921-23, Lab 34/39-41, figures cited in Emmet O’Connor, Syndicalism in Ireland, op. cit., p. 25, p. 100. 49. Emmet O’Connor, ibid., p. 110. 50. Fergus Campbell, Land and Revolution, op. cit., p. 280. 51. Ibid. 52. Referring to the agrarian unrest that had swept across the country before the setting up of the Dáil courts in 1920, a Dáil report pointed out: “All this was a grave menace to the Republic. The mind of the people was being diverted from the struggle for freedom by a class war, and there was every likelihood that this class war might be carried into the ranks of the republican army itself which was drawn in the main from the agricultural population and was largely officered by farmer’s sons”. Ministry for Home Affairs (compiled and edited by Erskine Childers), The constructive Work of Dáil Éireann, n° 1, The National Police and Courts of Justice, Dublin, The Talbot Press, 1921, p. 12. 53. Terence Dooley, “The Land for the People”: The Land Question in Independent Ireland, op. cit., p. 46-49, p. 82; Fergus Campbell, Land and Revolution, op. cit., p. 255-257; Emmet O’Connor, Syndicalism in Ireland, op. cit., p. 162-163. 54. Peter Hart, The IRA at War, op. cit., p. 21.
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55. Diarmaid Ferriter, A Nation and not a Rabble, op.cit., p. 231. 56. Fergus Campbell, Land and Revolution, op. cit., p. 282.
ABSTRACTS
In line with the view generally held by most historians over the past decades, Peter Hart’s The IRA at War, 1916-1923 (2003) tends to play down significantly the importance of the social disputes in the 1916-23 Irish Revolution. Hart justifies his approach by the fact that those disputes did not pave the way for radical social change in the new Irish Free State. However respectable this statement may be, it remains nonetheless disputable given that, in Terence Dooley’s own words, “other than acknowledging some contribution of agrarian issues to the revolution, historians have failed to take up the challenge of exploring them in greater detail or, indeed, to be fully convinced of their existence” (see ‘The Land for the People’: The Land Question in Independent Ireland, Dublin, University College Dublin Press, 2004, p. 17). This observation is also consistent with the fact that such subversive experiments as the 1918-1923 Irish Soviets have hitherto been examined somewhat on the fringe of mainstream academic research. As part of a project devoted to the latter, the present article will therefore seek to reappraise the relevance of Hart’s analysis by assessing the extent to which “class struggle” was an integral part of the Irish Revolution.
Dans le sillage de pensée de la plupart des historiens de ces dernières décennies, l’ouvrage de Peter Hart, The IRA at War, 1916-1923 (2003), tend à minimiser grandement l’importance des conflits sociaux qui eurent lieu au cours de la Révolution irlandaise de 1916-1923. Hart justifie cette approche par le fait que ces derniers n’ouvrirent pas la voie à de profonds bouleversements sociaux au sein du nouvel Etat libre d’Irlande. Toute respectable que puisse être cette affirmation, elle n’en demeure pas moins discutable, étant donné que « hormis le fait de reconnaître aux problèmes agraires quelque rôle dans la révolution, les historiens n’ont pas pris la peine de les étudier en profondeur, voire se sont montrés des plus dubitatifs quant à leur existence », pour citer Terence Dooley (voir « The Land for the People »: The Land Question in Independent Ireland, Dublin, University College Dublin Press, 2004, p. 17). Cette remarque vaut également pour les expériences subversives, telles que les soviets irlandais de 1918-1923, que la recherche universitaire traditionnelle a jusqu’ici quelque peu ignorées. S’inscrivant dans le cadre d’un projet consacré à ces dernières, cet article se veut donc un réexamen de l’analyse de Hart, à travers lequel est évalué l’ampleur de la “lutte des classes” dans la Révolution irlandaise.
INDEX
Mots-clés: Irlande, révolution, lutte des classes, conflits sociaux, syndicat, soviet, conservatisme Keywords: Ireland, revolution, class struggle, social dispute, trade union, soviet, conservatism
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AUTHOR
OLIVIER COQUELIN
Université de Caen Normandie
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“Un nouveau dictionnaire anglais- irlandais” : léirmheas Francach ar fhoclóir Éireannach
Seaghan Mac an tSionnaigh
1 Bhreac T. O’Neill Lane réamhrá Lane’s English-Irish Dictionary (1904) i bPáras, mar a raibh tamall de bhlianta caite aige i mbun post ceannais mar chomhfhreagraí d’irisí agus do nuachtáin Shasanacha, le tréimhse caite aige roimhe sin i Londain mar luathscríobhaí, agus tréimhse roimhe sin arís aige caite mar mhúinteoir náisiúnta1 i dTeampall an Ghleanntáin in Iarthar a chontae dúchais2. Is fearr a thuigfear an comhthéacs stairiúil sóisialta cultúrtha inar foilsíodh tuairimí léirmheastóireachta Marie-Henri d’Arbois de Jubainville ar Lane’s English-Irish Dictionary sa phíosa scríbhneoireachta is príomhábhar don alt seo, ach cuntas a thabhairt ar na cúinsí ar leith a thug T. O’Neill Lane go Páras agus abhaile arís go Luimneach ar deireadh. Creidim go bhfaighfear sa mhéid seo a leanas léargas tábhachtach ar shaol na nÉireannach inimirceach sa tréimhse fin de siècle.
An Luimníoch i Londain
2 Ar an liosta a tugadh in Lane’s English-Irish Dictionary de dhaoine a d’íoc síntiús leis i dtreo is go bhféadfaí an chéad fhoclóir sin uaidh a fhoilsiú, bhí ainm Aeneas O’Neill, gaol do T. O’Neill Lane ar thaobh a mháthar. Luadh gur seoladh poist sa Times i bPáras a bhí ag Aeneas, as Brosnach Chiarraí ó dhúchas dó, agus go deimhin, ceaptar gurbh é siúd a fuair post do T. O’Neill Lane san institiúid iriseoireachta chéanna i Londain an chéad lá3. Ba dheirfiúr d’Aneas agus col ceathrar dó féin chéadnuachair O’Neill Lane chomh maith. Ar an 19 Márta sa bhliain 1878 a pósadh sa Church of the Sacred Heart, Eden Green, Islington an bheirt, agus d’aistríodar an uair sin go 78 Pentonville Road, Clerkenwell, Holborn4 mar ar mhaireadar in aontíos le hAeneas go dtí an lá deiridh d’Eanáir na bliana dár gcionn nuair a cailleadh Mary de dhroim an fhiabhrais seoil5.
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Pobal na nGael i bPáras
3 Phós T. O’Neill Lane athuair, saolaíodh clann dó, agus nuair a theip ar an gcaidreamh sin le casadh an fichiú céid, bhain sé Páras na Fraince amach dó féin. Níorbh fhada go raibh sé sáite sa phobal Gaelach a d’aimsigh sé ann, agus is é a bhí freagrach as Gaeil Pháras na linne a chur ar bhóthar na Gaeilge. Deirtear go raibh sé ina leasuachtarán agus ina mhúinteoir le craobh Pháras Chonradh na Gaeilge6, agus níor mhiste talamh slán a dhéanamh de go raibh baint aige le bunú na craoibhe áirithe seo a chruinníodh i bhfoirgnimh de chuid Eaglais Naomh Seosamh i bhfoisceacht bheag don Arc de Triomphe san ochtú arrondissement. Más ann a thagadh Gaeil Pháras le chéile in ainm an Chonartha ar dtús, níor luaigh foilseacháin chomhaimseartha Chonradh na Gaeilge gurbh é a leithéid de láthair eaglasta a roghnaíodh mar bheannad dá bhaill – ba é “50 Avenue Hoche” an cur síos neodrach ba nós a dhéanamh ar an ionad a bhíodh acu dá gcuid imeachtaí, agus is é mo mhórthuairim féin ná gur léirigh sé seo fonn a bheith ar Chonradh na Gaeilge gan béim a leagan ar an gceangal idir cúrsaí creidimh agus gluaiseacht na teanga. Saothar fiúntach ar son ghluaiseacht na Gaeilge a deineadh tráth sa sáipéal seo mar sin, ach más ea, is é an misean anglafóin i bPáras is cúram d’áitritheoirí 50 Avenue Hoche sa lá atá inniu ann, agus iad ag freastal trí Bhéarla ar pharóistigh ó níos mó ná daichead tír ar fad7.
4 Bhí O’Neill Lane siúlach scéalach idirnáisiúnaithe, agus a ainm in airde i measc thuairiscí áirithe de chuid An Claidheamh Soluis taca an ama seo ina raibh suntas á thabhairt d’idirnáisiúnú chúis na teanga, agus caint ar chraobh Pháras den chéad uair. Tuairiscíodh in eagrán an 17 Samhain 1906 de An Claidheamh Soluis go raibh caint dar theideal ‘The Irish Language’ tugtha ag Uilliam Mac Giolla Brighde os comhair bhaill Chonradh na Gaeilge Pháras, a dúradh a bheith i mbun staidéir dhíograisigh ar an nGaeilge a bhuí le “able guidance” ó T. O’Neill Lane. As Béarla a scríobhadh an tuairisc seo, ach aisteach go maith, is é an gearán a deineadh ann ná gur i mBéarla a labhair Mac Giolla Brighde nuair ba léir nár rómhaith an tuiscint a bhí ag an slua a bhí i láthair ar an nGaeilge8. Dealraíonn sé ó pháipéir O’Neill Lane go raibh an Fhraincis ar a thoil aige, agus abairtí mánla Fraincise le feiscint ar feadh a chuid nótaí pearsanta9. Bhí sé le tuiscint ó dhuilleachán Lúnasa 1906 An Claidheamh Soluis roimhe sin gurbh é féin agus “Ms. O’Hart” a roghnaíodh mar theachtairí thar cheann Chraobh Pháras d’Ard-Fheis Chonradh na Gaeilge 1907. Bhíothas ag tuairisciú faoi Eanáir na bliana sin go raibh rath ag teacht ar chraobh Chonradh na Gaeilge Pháras inar reachtáladh oíche thaitneamhach “scoraíochta” tamall roimhe sin10. 5 Más ea is dóichí de ná gur i nóchaidí an naoú aois déag a tháinig an Luimníoch fir seo go Páras, is cosúil ón bhfianaise atá le fáil ina chnuasach leabhar11 gur in ardchathair na Fraince a bhí cónaí buan air anuas go dtí an bhliain 1908 ar a laghad; “Paris 1908” a bhreac sé ar an gcóip de The Sketch Book le W. Irving a bhí aige, mar shampla, agus is í sin an tagairt is déanaí ar fad a mhaireann dá sheal i bPáras. Is amhlaidh a d’fhill sé ar Iarthar Luimnigh ina dhiaidh sin chun díriú isteach go lánaimseartha ar Lane’s Larger English-Irish Dictionary a foilsíodh ar deireadh sa bhliain 1916, bliain tar éis bháis dó. 6 Ní foláir nó thagadh a cuid oibre leis an Times agus na himeachtaí den chineál a d’eagraíodh sé i gcomhar le craobh Pháras Chonradh na Gaeilge salach ar na cúraim a bhain leis na bailchríocha a chur ar an dara heagrán méadaithe den saothar foclóireachta a bhí á chur le chéile ag T. O’Neill Lane ar feadh fiche bliain, agus go deimhin, bhí sé mar ghearán i réamhrá Lane’s Larger English-Irish Dictionary ag an
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bhfoclóirí a shaothraigh go haonarach gur chuir dualgais sheachtracha éigin i bPáras isteach ar dhéanamh an chéad fhoclóra12. Agus d’ainneoin an cheangail Pharásaigh, ní raibh craobh Pháras Chonradh na Gaeilge i measc na síntiúsóirí i ndeireadh an fhoclóra, fiú amháin. Dealraíonn sé ón gciúnas cáipéisíochta nuair a d’fhill O’Neill Lane ar Luimneach gur i léig a chuaigh an chraobh chéanna. Is teist shoiléir é seo dar ndóigh ar an tionchar suntasach is féidir a bheith ag pearsain láidir ar ghluaiseacht phobail.
Léirmheastóireacht ar Lane’s Larger English-Irish Dictionary
7 Bhí an dara saothar foclóireachta uaidh beagnach a trí oiread ní ba mhó ná Lane’s English-Irish Dictionary (1904), ach is don réamhiarracht neamhiomlán sin a thagraíonn formhór mór an ábhair léirmheastóireachta a scríobhadh ar aon ghné de shaothair saoil T. O’Neill Lane. Is míbhuntáiste é an méid sa tslí is gur fágadh míchothroime ar an léirmheastóireacht atá déanta ar shaothar T. O’Neill, ach don leith eile, bhain sé de bhuntáiste go raibh O’Neill Lane ina bheatha chun an mhórchuid den méid a scríobhadh ina thaobh a léamh. Fuair sé moladh agus spreagadh cuí sna léirmheasa a foilsíodh i nuachtáin éagsúla na linne13, ach má fuair, ní raibh léirmheastóirí na n-irisí acadúla chomh fáiltiúil céanna. Tá na léirmheasa binbeacha a scríobh Mícheál Ó hIcí ar fhoclóirí O’Neill Lane agus an Duinnínigh araon anois ina n-eachtraí suntasacha d’annálacha na foclóireachta Gaeilge, ach is dócha nach mór an chuimhne atá ar an léirmheas ó Marie-Henri d’Arbois de Jubainville a foilsíodh in imleabhar XXV den Révue Celtique (1904), arb é a spreag an t-alt seo uaim. Tugaim thíos an bunléirmheas i dteannta leagan Gaeilge a aistríodh ón bhFraincis:
Il vient de paraître un nouveau dictionnaire anglais-irlandais, Lane’s English-Irish Dictionary (Focloir béarla-gaedhilge [sic]) compiled from the most authentic Sources by T. O’Neill Lane, London, David Nutt, 1904, in-80, ix-581-11 pages. Le but de l’auteur n’est pas de constater l’état actuel de la langue irlandaise, ni d’en donner l’histoire. M. O’Neill Lane a voulu mettre à la disposition de ses compatriotes un vocabulaire assez complet pour qu’ils puissent rendre en leur langue tous les mots anglais dont ils ne connaissent pas d’équivalents irlandais, soit que ces équivalents irlandais, après avoir existé, soient tombés en désuétude, soit que ces équivalents aient toujours fait défaut à la langue irlandaise. Pour constater l’usage présent il a voyagé dans toutes les parties de l’Irlande où l’irlandais se parle encore, et, pour compléter le vocabulaire actuel, il a consulté un grand nombre de textes moyen- irlandais où se rencontrent des mots aujourd’hui malheureusement inusités. A notre grand regret, la plupart de temps, M. O’Neill Lane ne se donne pas la peine d’indiquer pour chaque mot l’endroit, texte ou comté, où il l’a trouvé et quand il le dit, ou la formule qu’il emploie manque de précision et le contrôle est impossible, ou la citation qu’on peut vérifier amène quelquefois de fâcheux résultats. Il est difficile de considérer comme assez précis la rédaction suivante à l’article abundance, p. 5 : Keating, neart airgid, « abundance of
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money ». Littéralement neart airgid veut dire « force, puissance d’argent ». Dans quel ouvrage et à quelle page Keating a-t-il employé cette expression? Sur ce point, M. O’Neill Lane garde le silence. Nous dirons, nous, que pour être puissant, l’argent n’a pas toujours besoin d’être abondant ; souvent la quantité nécessaire pour rémunérer un travail quelconque dépend de la pénurie plus ou moins grande de celui à qui on offre un salaire et de celui qui offre ce paiement. A l’article abigail « servante », « suivante », on voit citer par M. O’Neill Lane le mot acmaing avec un renvoi précis B[ook of] L[aws], II, 284, 30 ; il s’agit des Ancient Laws of Ireland, tome II page 284, ligne 30. Acmaing est une variante orthographique de eacmaing (même tome, même page, ligne 14), que la traduction anglaise, p. 285, rend par able « capable » ; à là même page, un peu plus bas, acmaing est traduit par capability « capacité ». Dans l’ancienne langue, ce mot est une 3e p. du s. du parfait signifiant « il a atteint », « il est arrivé » (Windisch, Irische Texte, t. I, p. 517, 518). Ce mot paraît avoir pris dans la glose du Senchus Mór la place du substantif écmong servant d’infinitif au verbe et désignant le fait d’atteindre le but (Windish, Irische Texte, t. I. p. 518), d’où le sens de dérivé de capacity proposé par M. R. Atkinson, Glossary to Brehon Laws, p. 289 ; atteindre le but prouve qu’on a la capacité d’y arriver. Mais entre cette idée et celle de servante, il n’y a pas de rapport. D’autre part, M. O’Neill Lane ne se pique pas de copier exactement les mots : p. 3 à l’article Able (strong), il renvoie à lá Genèse, vi, 4, pour un mot signifiant « fort » et pour lequel il donne d’abord la notation árachdach, puis la notation árrtachda. Mais dans l’édition de la bible irlandaise qui est datée de 1852, on lit árrachdach avec deux r au lieu d’árachdach avec une seule r; et dans l’édition princeps, 1685, árrtachta avec un t et non un d à la dernière syllabe árrtachda comme écrit M. O’Neill Lane. S surmonté d’une barre veut dire acht et non achd (The english-irish Dictionary [sic], Paris, 1732, p. 716). D’après le même dictionnaire de 1732, M. O’Neill Lane a écrit, p. 82, Buskin (brodequin), buatais. Or, le dictionnaire en question porte : Buskins (brodequins) buataisidhe. M. O’Neill Lane a substitué au pluriel le singulier sans en avertir le lecteur, il a en outre de son chef remplacé par un a l’u de lá seconde syllable de buatisidhe. Ailleurs, M. O’Neill Lane a reproduit sans critique les énonciations du dictionnaire de 1732. Dans ce livre, au mot buffet « soufflet », on lit dornn nó bos nó bas. Je ne nie pas que dornn dont le sens propre est « poing » que bos, bas, dont le sens propre est « paume de la main » n’aient pris le sens accessoire et insultant de soufflet. Ce sens qui ne justifie pas, dans le dictionnaire de 1732, l’exemple do bhualadh le dornnuibh nó le basaibh, est donné pour dorn dans les dictionnaires d’O’Reilly et de la Highland Society of Scotland. Mais M. O’Neill Lane, qui prétend travailler à créer une langue littéraire en Irlande devrait éviter le danger d’attribuer au même mot trop de sens différents : dorn signifie « poing », « poignée », « manche » : pourquoi y ajouter le sens de « soufflet » que dornadh exprime plus clairement ?
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Le livre de M. T. O’Neill Lane ne fera pas faire grand progrès à la science des langues ni à la clarté de l’irlandais14.
8 Tá foclóir nua Béarla-Gaeilge anois ar an bhfód: Lane’s English-Irish Dictionary (Focloir [sic] béarla-gaedhilge [sic]) compiled from the most authentic Sources by T. O’Neill Lane, London, David Nutt, 1904, in-80, IX-581-11 pages.
9 Ní chun tuairisc a thabhairt ar stádas reatha na Gaeilge ná ar stair na teanga a chuaigh an t-údar i mbun an tsaothair. Is é a theastaigh ón Uasal O’Neill Lane a dhéanamh ná stór focal a bheadh cuíosach cuimsitheach a sholáthar dá chomhthírigh i dtreo is go mbeadh ar a gcumas na focail Bhéarla nach eol dóibh leagan Gaeilge a bheith acu a aistriú ina dteanga féin, bíodh na leaganacha sin sa teanga cheana agus iad ligthe i ndearmad ó shin, nó gan a leithéid a bheith inti riamh roimhe sin. Thaisteal sé seo a bhfuil fágtha de na ceantair in Éirinn a bhfuil an Ghaeilge fós á labhairt iontu le fáil amach cad iad na nósanna atá sa treis sa teanga bheo, agus i dtreo stór focal an lae inniu a leathnú amach, chuaigh i gcomhairle mórán téacsanna Meán-Ghaeilge ina bhfaightear focail nach n-úsáidtear lenár linn, faraor. 10 Ba chúis díomá dom nár lig an leisce don Uasal O’Neill Lane tagairt a dhéanamh i gcás gach aon fhocail don cheantar, don chontae, ná don téacs ina bhfuair sé é, agus fiú nuair a rinneadh a leithéid, baineann easpa cruinnis leis an tslí a gcuirtear an t-eolas sin i láthair leis an toradh nach féidir le duine an tagairt a fhiosrú nó más féidir, ní mór a bheadh aige dá bharr. 11 Ba dheacair a áiteamh go bhfuil an sliocht seo a leanas ón iontráil faoin gceannfhocal abundance, lth. 5., cruinn go leor: Keating, neart airgid, “abundance of money”. Is é an chiall a bhaineann le neart airgid ó cheart ná “fórsa, cumhacht an airgid”. Cén saothar inar luaigh Keating an nath cainte seo, agus cén leathanach? Fanann an tUasal O’Neill Lane ina thost maidir leis an méid sin. Is é a déarfainnse faoi seo ná nach gá i gcónaí go mbeadh an t-airgead flúirseach chun go mbainfeadh cumhacht leis; is minic a bhraitheann an méid cúitimh a éilítear as saothar éigin ar chúinsí an té a mbeadh an tuarastal á thairiscint dó, chomh maith le cúinsí an té atá á thairiscint. 12 Faoin gceannfhocal abigail, feicfimid gurb é an focal acmaing a mholann an tUasal O’Neill Lane, agus tagairt chruinn aige do B[ook of] L[aws], II, 284, 30. Is é atá i gceist leis an méid sin ná Ancient Laws of Ireland, imleabhar II leathanach 284, líne 30. Litriú malartach de eacmaing is ea acmaing (an t-imleabhar céanna, an leathanach céanna, líne 14), agus is é an t-aistriúchán Béárla a thugtar ná able lth. 285; is é capability an t- aistriúchán a thugtar ar acmaing beagáinín níos faide síos ar an leathanach céanna. Sa tSean-Ghaeilge, b’ionann an focal seo agus foirm na haimsire chaite den bhriathar, an tríú pearsa uatha, mar shampla, “fuair sé”, “tháinig sé” (Windisch, Irische Texte, iml. I, lth. 517, 518). Is cosúil ó fhianaise atá i ngluais an Senchus Mór (Windish, Irische Texte, iml. I. lth. 518) go raibh an fhoirm seo tar éis ionad an ainmfhocail écmong a ghlacadh, agus is ar an mbonn sin a thug an tUasal. R. Atkinson le fios in Glossary to Brehon Laws lth. 289 gur bhain an fhobhrí capacity leis an bhfocal. Má éiríonn le duine a sprioc a bhaint amach, is ionann é sin agus a rá go bhfuil an cumas ann chuige, ach níl aon bhaint beag ná mór ag an méid seo ar fad le tuairim O’Neill Lane faoi Abigail. 13 Rud eile de, ní chuireann an tUasal O’Neill Lane de stró air féin na focail a thras-scríobh i gceart go fiú; déantar tagairt do Geineasas, vi, 4 faoin gceannfhocal Able (strong) ar lth. 3 i dtaca le focal a litríonn sé ar dtús mar árachdach, agus mar árrtachda ina dhiaidh sin. Ach is árrachdach le dhá r seachas árachdach gan ann ach aon r amháin atá le léamh
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againn san eagrán Gaeilge den Bhíobla a foilsíodh sa bhliain 1852. Agus is é atá i mbuneagrán na bliana 1685 ná árrtachta le t seachas d sa siolla deireanach ar nós mar atá ag an Uasal O’Neill Lane a thugann árrtachda. Acht seachas achd atá i gceist le S agus barra os a chionn (The english-irish Dictionary, Paris, 1732, lth. 716). 14 Ar chuma fhoclóir na bliana 1732 arís, tugann an tUasal O’Neill Lane Buskin (brodequin), buatais ar lth. 82. Ach, is é atá sa bhfoclóir úd ná Buskins (brodequins) buatuisidhe. An uimhir uatha atá ag an Uasal O’Neill Lane in ionad an iolra, gan an cur chuige sin a chur in iúl don léitheoir, agus anuas air sin, tá a curtha aige in áit an u sa dara siolla den fhocal buatuisidhe. 15 In áiteanna eile, tugtar ráiteachais fhoclóir na bliana 1732 gan aon scagadh a dhéanamh orthu. Léimid dornn nó bos nó bas faoin gceannfhocal buffet sa leabhar seo. Ní shéanaim go bhfuil an chiall mhaslaitheach bhreise ‘buille’ anois ag dornn agus ag bos, bas, focal gurb é “caol na láimhe” an bhunbhrí a bhaineadh leis. Ní léir ón mbrí seo cad chuige go dtabharfaí an sampla do bhualadh le dornnuibh nó le basaibh i bhfoclóir na bliana 1732, cé gurb é an bhrí chéanna a thugtar faoin gceannfhocal dorn i bhfoclóirí Uí Raghallaigh agus an Highland Society of Scotland. Ach ba cheart go seachnódh an tUasal T. O’Neill O’Neill Lane gan an iomad fobhríonna a thabhairt d’aon fhocal amháin, más é an sprioc atá aige ná teanga liteartha a fhorbairt in Éirinn; “lapa”, “dornán”, “muinchille” atá i gceist le dorn mar atá: cad is fiú an bhrí bhreise “buille” a chur léi nuair is soiléire a chuireann dornadh an méid sin in iúl? 16 Ní mór an leas a dhéanfaidh leabhar an Uasail T. O’Neill Lane do léann na teangeolaíochta ná don tuiscint atá againn ar an nGaeilge15. 17 Tháinig an léirmheas feannta seo amach cúpla mí i ndiaidh Lane’s English-Irish Dictionary, agus mar atá ráite, bhí na scileanna cuí teanga ag T. O’Neill Lane le go dtuigeadh sé achasáin an Fhrancaigh léannta. Ba dhóigh le duine go raibh eolas leis ag T. O’Neill Lane ar cérbh é an tUasal d’Arbois de Jubainville a raibh cáil bainte amach aige i dtosach a ghairme dó féin mar shaineolaí ar logainmneacha na Gaille, agus a thug aghaidh ar léann Ceilteach an Oileánra Bhriotanaigh go gairid roimh theacht O’Neill Lane go Páras. Deirtear gurbh í an Ghaeilge an teanga Cheilteach ba mhó dar thug d’Arbois de Jubainville spéis, agus suim faoi leith aige in institiúidí dlí na hÉireann sa mheánaois. Chuir sé eagrán den Táin amach sa bhliain 1907, mar shampla, agus bhí sé ina ollamh leis na teangacha Ceilteacha in Collège de France go dtí gur cailleadh é sa bhliain 191016. Ársaitheoir a bhí ann don chuid is mó, agus ní dócha ón méid thuas go raibh aon eolas rófhairsing aige ar chaolchúis na Nua-Ghaeilge, é ag caitheamh anuas go botúnta ar O’Neill Lane de dheasca “abundance of money” a bheith aistrithe i gceart aige mar “neart airgid”. Bhain caolchúis leis an liúntas a cuireadh i leith O’Neill Lane gan tuiscint mar is ceart a bheith aige ar script leath-uingeach na Gaeilge ar an mbonn gur roghnaigh sé an leagan nuashonraithe “árrachtach” seachas an bunleagan “árrtachdach” a thabhairt san athfhriotail a dhein sé ar abairt ó Gheineasas an Bhíobla. Ach fiú nuair a bhain cur chuige ní ba choimeádaí le cinntí eagarthóireachta T. O’Neill Lane, níor mhó ná sásta a bhí d’Arbois de Jubainville a dúirt go raibh O’Neill Lane ag cloí go neamhchriticiúil le ráiteachas áirithe de chuid fhoclóir Uí Bheaglaoich agus Mhic Cruitín, cáineadh a chuirfeadh léirmheas Mhíchíl Uí hIcí i gcuimhne don té a léirfeadh17. 18 Ní raibh ceachtar den bheirt léirmheastóirí, ná T. O’Neill Lane féin, ina mbeatha faoi 1916 nuair a foilsíodh Lane’s Larger English-Irish Dictionary go bhfeicfidís ar chuir T. O’Neill Lane a gcuid moltaí i bhfeidhm nó nár chuir. Dealraíonn sé nár mhór an aird a
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thug an foclóirí orthu. Tá pléite agam leis an tionchar a bhí ag Ó hIcí ar Lane’s Larger English-Irish Dictionary i mball eile18. Chomh fada agus a bhaineann sé le moltaí d’Arbois de Jubainville de, tá sé le tabhairt faoi deara gurbh í an bhrí chéanna, “buille”, a tugadh athuair i gcomhair an fhocail “dorn” faoin gceannfhocal “buffet” in Lane’s Larger English- Irish Dictionary, ach don leith eile, chinn O’Neill Lane an focal conspóideach úd acmaing a bhaint ar fad den iontráil faoin gceannfhocal “abigail”. San uimhir uatha a d’fhan “buatais”, le “a” sa dara siolla seachas an “u” a bhí i mbunfhoclóir Uí Bheaglaoich agus Mhic Cruitín mar a bhfuarthas an focal, gan aon chuntas ó O’Neill Lane ar an modh eagarthóireachta a bhain le hathruithe litrithe den chineál sin, murab ionann agus Daniel Foley na glúine a tháinig díreach roimhe19. Ba é An Foclóir Beurla Guoidheilge (1732) le Conchobhar Ó Beaglaoich agus Aodh Buidhe Mac Cruitín an foclóir ba mhó ar bhain T. O’Neill Lane admhad as, foclóir eile a cuireadh le chéile i bPáras, ach faoi mar a bheifí ag súil i gcás foinse teanga a bhí ar an bhfód le nach mór dhá chéad bliain, dhein O’Neill Lane athruithe éagsúla os íseal ar thromlach na bhfocal agus na bhfrásaí a d’ardaigh sé leis. Ní i gcás “buatais” amháin a d’athraigh O’Neill Lane “u” go “a”; faoin gceannfhocal “bane”, mar shampla, luadh ‘comhluadar’ le foclóir Uí Bheaglaoich agus Mac Cruitín, ach ba é “comhluadur” an bunleagan a thugadar siúd20. Maidir le “árrachdach” an Bhíobla, an fhoinse ba mhó ar fad a bhí aige, chloígh O’Neill Lane le “t” seachas “d”, ach ar aon fhocal le d’Arbois de Jubainville, thoil sé an dara “r” a chur isteach ina leagan nuachóirithe “árrachtach”. Baineadh an frása “neart airgid” den iontráil faoin gceannfhocal “abundance” maille leis an tagairt éiginnte do Keating ina thaobh a léirigh d’Arbois de Jubainville a bheith neamhchúntach. Ar chuma an fhrása shamplaigh “neart airgid” a tugadh sa chéad fhoclóir, is í “tá neart saidhbhris aca” an sampla léirithe ar fónamh a chuir O’Neill Lane ina áit, ainneoin a raibh le rá ag d’Arbois de Jubainville faoin difear séimeantach idir “neart” na Gaeilge agus “abondance” na Fraincise. Bhí an ceart ag d’Arbois de Jubainville O’Neill Lane a lochtú ar an mbonn nach raibh an córas deismireachtaí sa chéad fhoclóir iomlán a dhóthain áfach. Cé gur thathagaí i bhfad an liosta údar a ghabh le réamhrá an fhoclóra leasaithe, bhí mórán botún cló san eolas a soláthraíodh ann, agus anuas ar fhoinsí a bheith sa liosta údar nár luadh i gcorp an fhoclóra in aon chor, luadh foinsí i gcorp an fhoclóra nár tugadh sa liosta údar.
Measúnú
19 Mar le hearráidí dá leithéid, ní mór a mheabhrú gur fhoclóireacht amaitéarach a bhí ar siúl ag T. O’Neill Lane a shaothraigh as a stuaim féin óna óige i leith nó go gcuirfí a thogra pearsanta i gcrích. Ón uair gur ina aonar a chuaigh sé i mbun oibre, mórán cúram eile ar láimh aige idir an dá linn, agus a dhóthain d’ainnise an tsaoil aige, bhí sé buíoch de pé aiseolas a bhí le fáil aige ó dhaoine eile, rud a chur sé in iúl le barr umhlaíochta i réamhrá Lane’s English-Irish Dictionary:“I shall feel extremely obliged to such persons as may notice errors or omissions if they will write to me on the subject.” Ba shuarach an ráiteas ó Marie-Henri d’Arbois de Jubainville sa líne dheireanach dá léirmheas siúd nár mhór an leas a dhéanfadh Lane’s English-Irish Dictionary do léann na Gaeilge, ach tá an chuma ar na hiontrálacha feabhsaithe faoi na ceannfhocail “Abigail”, “Able”, agus “ Abundance” in Lane’s Larger-English Dictionary nach raibh O’Neill Lane gan beann ar fad ar a chomhairle. Fuarthas lochtanna go leor ar an réamhleagan de shaothar foclóireachta T. O’Neill Lane, ach níor chuir a leithéid aon chur isteach air, agus d’éirigh
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leis i ndeireadh thiar mórfhoclóir míorúilteach a chur ar fáil i gcomhthéacs ilteangach idirnáisiúnta do phobal suthain na Gaeilge.
NOTES
1. Seaghan Mac an tSionnaigh, “Varia III: Litir ó T. O’Neill Lane”, Éigse, Uimh. 39, 2016, lgh. 250-255. 2. Seaghan Mac an tSionnaigh, “Seoda Ghaeilge Luimnigh”, Comhar, Iml. 75, Uimh. 7, 2015, lgh. 18-20 3. James Quinn agus James McGuire, eag., The Dictionary of Irish Biography, Iml. 5, 2009, lth. 297. 4. General Register Office, England, MXG922305, Certified copy of an Entry of Marriage, 12 Deireadh Fómhair 2016. 5. General Register Office, England, DYE066850, Certified Copy of an Entry of Death, 11 Deireadh Fómhair, 2016. 6. Cló IarChonnacht & Fiontar DCU, “LANE, Timothy O’Neill”, [http:/www.ainm.ie/ Bio.aspx?ID=147], 2013. 7. An tAthair Aidan Ó Troighthigh, comhfhreagras pearsanta, Eanáir 2016. 8. An Claidheamh Soluis, 24 Samhain, 1906, lth. 10. 9. Tá nótaí seo i seilbh leabharlann Choláiste Mhuire Gan Smál, Luimneach. 10. An Claidheamh Soluis, 26 Eanáir, 1907, lth. 10. 11. Tá an cnuasach seo i seilbh Choláiste Mhuire Gan Smál, Luimneach. 12. Timothy O’Neill Lane, Lane’s Larger English-Irish Dictionary, Baile Átha Cliath, The Educational Company of Ireland, 1916, lth. VII. 13. An Claidheamh Soluis, 28 Bealtaine, 1904, lth. 10; Irish Times, 29 Meitheamh, 1903, lth. 8; Irish Times, 10 Meán Fómhair, 1904, lth. 14; Irish Times, 4 Aibreán, 1908, lth. 7. 14. Marie-Henri d’Arbois de Jubainville, Révue Celtique, iml. XXV, Páras, Émile Bouillon, 1904, lgh. 353-355. 15. Marie-Henri d’Arbois de Jubainville, Révue Celtique, iml. XXV, Páras, Émile Bouillon, 1904, lgh. 353-355. Mise a chuir Gaeilge air, faoi mar a chuireas romham a dhéanamh i bhfo-nóta in The West Limerick Man Who Wrote a Dictionary, 2015. 16. Georges Dottin, Annales De Bretagne, Iml. 25, Uimh., 25-4, 1909, lgh. 605- 611. 17. Michael O’Hickey, ‘Irish Lexicography’, The Irish Ecclesiastical Record, Nollaig, 1904, lgh. 521-532. 18. Seaghan Mac an tSionnaigh, Focail agus Foclóireacht T. O’Neill Lane, Baile Átha Cliath, Coiscéim, 2013, lgh. 254-256. 19. Daniel Foley, An English-Irish Dictionary, Baile Átha Cliath, William Curry, 1855, lgh. III-IV.
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20. Conchubhar Ó Beaglaoich agus Aodh Mac Cruitin, Foclóir Béarla agus Gaoidheilg, Páras, Guerin, 1732, lth. 52.
RÉSUMÉS
Baineann an t-alt seo le gné shuaithinseach den saol Gaelach i bPáras sna blianta roimh Éirí Amach na Cásca. Tugtar ann léiriú ar chúinsí Chonradh na Gaeilge sa tréimhse, agus tugtar téacs iomlán an léirmheasa a d’fhoilsigh an scoláire Francach H. d’Arbois de Jubainville sa Révue Celtique ar an gcéad fhoclóir a chuir T. O’Neill Lane amach. Pléitear an uair sin na moltaí a rinneadh sa léirmheas sin a cuireadh i bhfeidhm, agus nár cuireadh i bhfeidhm ar Lane’s Larger English-Irish Dictionary.
Cet article aborde les expériences des Irlandais à Paris à travers les activités des branches de Conradh na Gaeilge dans les années précédant la révolution irlandaise. Il inclut le texte intégral, assorti d’une analyse de ses recommandations, de la critique que H. d’Artois de Jubainville publia dans la Revue Celtique à propos du premier dictionnaire de T. O’Neill Lane de Templeglantine, lexicographe et enseignant qui commença à Paris à élaborer le Lane’s English-Irish Dictionary.
INDEX
Mots-clés : la lexicographie irlandaise, la diaspora irlandaise, les études celtiques, la ligue gáelique, la renaissance gaélique
AUTEUR
SEAGHAN MAC AN TSIONNAIGH
Coláiste Mhuire Gan Smál
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A Frank Exchange of Views: Communicating through Violence in Ireland, 1565-1610
John Patrick Montaño
1 S. J. Connolly’s work on Contested Ireland has revealed the extent of cooperation and coexistence in early modern Ireland; this alternative to the assumptions about inveterate conflict are surely welcome, but the trope of Irish incivility remained potent throughout the period1. The allegedly barbarous nature of Ireland, rooted in cultural differences exemplified in land use, the erection of permanent buildings, fences, roads, clothing, hair and language opened spaces for cultural conflict that regularly took the form of destruction and violence on both sides. Significantly, the destruction and violence was often directed at cultural objects as well as people. One way to understand these actions is to examine the cultural and political meanings of violence in Ireland in the light of the cultural differences that informed the civilizing process and plantations. In particular, the way that such violence served as a form of communication or performance in these years.
2 Scholars have written of executions and pardons as instruments for communicating state power through violence or mercy, but in each case as a demonstration of a restoration of the appropriate political order disrupted by offenders. This posed a particular problem in Ireland, as the legitimacy of the state was not yet recognized in many areas, the Irish as Catholics could never be true subjects, and for many like Spenser, pardons could never work in Ireland due to the barbarous incivility of the natives2. Thus, the ongoing disorder in Ireland meant that the violence there, intended on one side to demonstrate the power and authority of the state, might also take the form of resistance and defiance on the other. So while much violence was retributive in nature, it will be the goal here to turn to some examples and to understand how they might be viewed as texts and that they were filled with meaning and clearly intended as communicative. English writers in the 1500s recognized the way that language often served to inhibit or to get in the way of communication. A perfect example of this is the use of agricultural metaphors to portray Ireland as savage and barbaric, a wild and
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neglected place in need of cultivation. Regarding this Eamonn Grennan writes: “it is an easy transition from here to the metaphorical notion of the Irish as uncultivated ground in which a civil state must be planted.” The ideas of planting civility, of cutting off evil customs, of pruning branches and ripping up weeds in order to allow the land to bear fruit are all images drawn from the benign activity of husbandry. But once the ripping up becomes dispossession, the pruning and cutting off become murder and executions, and the planting becomes colonization then the metaphors are difficult to sustain “in the context of political fact3”. More to the point, when language and metaphors are used to communicate a superior culture or to justify a particular form of civility then the response often takes the shape of resistance to the more concrete non- textual expressions of the culture being promoted. With that in mind, I want to try to read cultural confrontations as texts, or a form of communication that demonstrate the awareness – on both sides of the divide – of the essential distinctions situated in cultural differences4. 3 An early example of violence being conflated with symbolic actions can be seen in the fact that the Proclamation offering a reward for Shane O’Neill’s “head, body, or proof of having killed him,” was careful to include his symbolically provocative act of entering “the Englisshe Pale… with banners displayed, as an open enemye, traitour, and rebel.” Shane was making no secret of his defiance and disrespect, and people in London marveled at his hostility and enmity. Camden was incensed and even a bit befuddled that, with barbarous Pride hee [Shane] rejected all such honourable Titles, in comparison to the name of O-Neal… and boiled in Hatred against the English, in such sort, that he named a Castle which he built in the Lake Eaugh [sic], Feoghnegall, that is, The hatred of the English, and strangled some of his own men for that they fed on English bread5. 4 Shane’s rejection of English titles and authority is understandable, and his animosity towards his enemies not at all surprising. The resentful name ascribed to his castle was, if nothing else, the English projecting their habit of encoding cultural differences. More significant here is the tale that he asserted his cultural hostility by executing some followers for eating “English bread”, the most emblematic product of cultivated fields. Here we see the bitter cultural dialogue in Ireland finding common ground that would lead to several frank exchanges of views in the years to come.
5 Shane’s decision openly to defy the queen’s authority and laws by displaying his banners, was a performative act intended as much for his Irish followers as for officials in Dublin and London. In the event, it helped commit the government to his destruction, and whatever role Sidney or others may have had in his murder, the elimination of O’Neill was far too great a triumph to allow to pass unnoticed. The Scots for their own reasons “hewed him to peeces…” even burying him “wrapped in a kernes shirt, and so without all honor”, but such limited ignominy was insufficient for O’Neill’s English enemies. “After a few daies he was taken up againe by capteine Piers… and his head was sund[e]red from the bodie, and sent to the lord deputie who caused the same to be set upon a stake or pole on the top of the castle of Dublin6.” In a perfect example of how the emphasis on civility, cultivation, land, and rituals were conflated into a single strategy, when Sidney captured Shane’s treasure on Coney Island, he took anything not nailed down, but also renamed it Island Sidney and the largest lake in Ulster Lough Sidney. The deputy’s triumphalist humiliation of Shane O’Neill contributed to the growing trend of public, symbolic, ritualized displays of enemies
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being brought low and degraded by both sides in the conflict. Similarly, the cultural and cartographic erasure of the O’Neill stronghold [and Lough Neagh] was another sign of both the reformed landscape and of the English determination to remain. Indeed, such official alterations and public performances formed a key element in the cultural conflict in Elizabethan Ireland7. 6 For both sides, performative rituals and symbolic actions played an important role in communicating power and defiance. Writing about the texts available for an analysis of political ideology in Ireland, Hiram Morgan reminds us that “the transmission of ideas was not only multilingual, it was also multimedia,” and laments that there is “no analysis of the rituals whereby the state attempted to project its power or of the Gaelic and Catholic alternatives used to undermine it.” Similarly, Chandra Mukerji points to the relevance of material culture and other forms of evidence when studying the illiterate or oral cultures, emphasizing the visual rather than written records, and the importance of vision, actions, and ritual over words8. Spiking Shane’s head on Dublin Castle was more than a representation of state power, it was an undeniable and grisly demonstration of it. For the Irish, it did not take much imagination to develop their own set of symbolic actions designed to indicate their defiance and disdain for official authority. As Clodagh Tait shows, the propaganda value of the appropriate death of a member of one’s own group, or the inappropriateness of the death of one’s enemies was hugely important for establishing the justice or iniquity of the cause. On the one hand, the spectacle of power and the admonitory display of state power could not impress the Irish as it was rooted in injustice, while on the other hand the attacks on settlers, their lands and possessions was viewed as further evidence of their savagery, inhumanity, and irredeemability9. 7 Canny argues that an incipient Irish political consciousness accounts for “morbid concern with the ritual humiliation performed by the Irish on the corpses of soldiers killed in battle – rituals that were quite obviously in direct imitation of English practice10”. While the continuing failure of the English to subdue the natives no doubt contributed to their use of brutality as a means to reduce costs, it is undeniable that violence speaks volumes and that people on both sides were determined to communicate with their violence. At the same time, public spectacles intended to publicize the defeat and submission of Irish leaders and the elimination of native culture remained part of the official campaign to make known the inexorable advance of civility11. However, it is indicative of the centrality of the ideology and rhetoric of civility that the Irish accepted the importance of such actions, and increasingly relied on them to contest the cultural strategy that underpinned official policy in Ireland. 8 One example is the way Sidney sought to communicate the ongoing metamorphosis in Ireland through ceremonies, submissions, executions, and the creation of material culture representing the new civil society emerging in the island. One of his most prominent achievements in this realm was the stone bridge built across the Shannon at Athlone. From a strategic point of view, Sidney boasted that the bridge was a means to tame “all Connacht [so] that now [the Irish] dare not stir to any rebellion.” But from a cultural and communicative standpoint, the bridge was intended as an expression of aesthetic and political messages, and an “assertion of cultural and military might.12.” The solidity of the bridge indicated clearly the settlers’ intention to stay, to replace, to remove and to install their own institutions and culture. Sidney’s plaque also
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announced the recent political changes, stating “THE ARCHE REBEL SHANE O NEYL OVER THROWEN [and] HIS HEAD SET ON THE GATE OF THE SAID CASTEL13”. 9 In the same way that Sidney hired masons to magnify his own accomplishments in Ireland, he also took care to make sure the spoken and printed word were monitored carefully to limit their exploitation by those hostile to English influence and order. During a visit to Kilkenny Sidney was appalled by the Butlers’ willingness to patronize Irish poets who sang the praises of Butler's military prowess, and ordered “all the Irish poets in the vicinity of Kilkenny… arrested, divested of their belongings, whipped, and ordered to leave the region14”. But just as the poets and their neighbors found themselves on the receiving end of the same harsh messages, they soon learned to use the language of cultural communication. When Sir Francis Cosby boasted of taking 125 O’More and O’Connor heads in 1564, Rory Óg O’More’s response included the massacring of settler husbandmen and the decapitation of any English soldiers he laid his hands on15. For both sides, the barbarity of their enemies demanded a balanced and parallel level of savagery. And throughout the 1560s and 70s the use of violence became the primary text and language of communication in Ireland. 10 One of the first examples of triumphalist symbolism occurred at the end of 1568, when Carew sallied out of Kilkenny and “caused great execution to be done upon a great number of Edward Butler’s followers.” The slaughter of over four hundred galloglass may have been welcome, but the carnage that ensued as 1600 others attempted to flee with “few or none escap[ing]”, shocked even the citizens of Kilkenny, no doubt aware that Carew’s claim to have lost not single man in an attack on 2000 meant that most of the victims were unarmed and unprepared for battle. As a way of celebrating his victory (and concealing the number of innocents), Carew returned to Kilkenny with “everie capteine and souldier carrying two Gallowglasses axes in his hand16”. Well accustomed to these public displays of Irish defeats and the manipulation of imagery intended to deride native customs through an “expressive lexicon” of actions that contained “a communicative logic that all could understand”, the rebels learned to engage in symbolic violence in turn17. 11 During the Butler Revolt of 1569, Sidney learned that the Butlers “are become friends to the Geraldines and hath sworne to take the hedde of all such as shall confesse themselves to be true subjects unto the Queene18”. Similarly, the earliest settlers in the Midlands were singled out by the rebels, with many led about in halters and their cultivated fields, fences, and homes destroyed. The Butlers overran Queen’s County and killed “very many of the inhabitants of the same, but most specifically all the Englishmen”, and all the farmers in the area put to the sword. Sir Edmund Butler’s rage reached such a pitch that he exhibited his hatred of English settlers by having “dead men’s bodies to be stripped out of their English garments and their hose and doublets (being stuffed with straw) he would set up as marks for his kernes to throw their darts at19”. Again we see the English and the several manifestations of their civility and culture made the target for native anger and defiance. The official determination to eliminate the barbarous customs of the natives was clearly understood by those in Ireland; but the scattered revolts in 1569 make it plain that the objects of the English colonial strategies were perfectly capable of speaking the language of cultural contestation. 12 Consequently, the regular markets and fairs intended to regulate trade became targets for native hostility. 1569 saw the Assumption Day fair at Enniscorthy turned into an all
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too convenient opportunity for pillage. The hostility to the agents of the commercial aspects of English culture at a “fair [that] is far the greatest of any in Ireland,” was noted by Sidney, who condemned the Irish for attacking “most of the merchants of the good town of Washford, either in their own persons, their wives or their servants, who were ravished, killed or spoiled20”. Here we see rebels in Ireland able to recognize the symbols of a foreign culture and economy and attacking towns, fairs, merchants, “and their Irish adherents” because of their association with the English. Forces on both sides were accustomed to communicating with their violence, using it as a form of performance that carried both symbolic and practical messages. Butler put much of the town to the sword, drove others into the river Slaney to drown, and unleashed an orgy of rape before setting Enniscorthy on fire: the prospect of booty was attractive, but demonstrating the power of the rebels and the state’s inability to protect its subjects provided a message of strength and defiance21. 13 The response to these actions was led by one of the great communicators through violence, Sir Humphrey Gilbert. He took it as practice “infringeable” that whenever arriving in rebel territory “he killed manne, woman, and child, and spoiled, wasted, and burned, by the ground all that he might: leaving nothyng of the enemes in safety, which he could possiblie waste, or consume, freely admitting that killing any and all civilians “by the sworde was the waie to kill the menne of warre by famine”. Years later, Fitzwilliam was instructed that “such notorious indecencies, even to the invasion of and spoiling of the Englishe pale, may not be suffered to pass without some example of justice”. Furthermore, these examples were not intended simply to punish the native leaders, but also “for the terror of others that… [otherwise] may be otherwise hereafter eftsones incouraged to do the like”. Here we see the emphasis on the role of spectacle and the significance of imagery and display, but as always the violence inflicted on images, symbols, and natives would soon be returned in kind22. 14 Destroying recently built houses was not only a statement of hostility to English civil norms, for the Burkes’ had a much more particular point to make. They turned their rage against those contributing to the material culture that most offended them, and “bett away the masons and other laborers wich were workinge in the wall (appointed by me [Sidney] to be made in Aprill last…) and sought for the stones where upon the [royal] Armes were cutt, [in order] to have broken them, swearing that none such should stande in any wall there23”. It is clear that the rebels were joining Sidney and others in their acceptance of architecture as a canvas for the assertion of and cultural political messages. The centrality of cultural conflict in Tudor Ireland can be seen in the Burkes recognition that clothes, houses, walls, and gates were as significant as the display of the royal arms in Connacht and that their resistance needed to incorporate them all. 15 In the same year, Sir Thomas Smith’s venture in the Ards ended with his son being murdered by an Irishman of his own household, then boiled, and fed to the dogs, an incident that gave “the Irishmen greate cause of rejoisinge.” Unwilling to tolerate such barbarous behavior, Nicholas Malby hunted down Smith’s murderer, “slew him likewise… and so left him to the Wolves jaws, to be devoured and eaten24”. Camden’s “likewise” illustrates how well people at the time, and annalists later, grasped the significance of violence as a means of expression. Far from being mindless or random, Malby’s violent response was an appropriate means to dramatize the importance of
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official power, an act that was extremely visible and entirely unambiguous. English lives and bodies were precious and sacrosanct, Irish ones were not25. 16 The justification for the atrocities and massacres received its greatest explication in the works of Edmund Spenser, but the language of chastisement and castigation was a key component in the official discourse under Elizabeth26. The increasing savagery – manifested most often in the slaughter of noncombatants – was no doubt related to the religious divisions after 1534, but New English officers were regularly praised for their willingness to rely on fire and sword when dealing with the Irish. As Nicholas Canny shows, Spenser and his circle advocated a humanistic use of the sword, “fierce wars”, and “virtuous action” as the best strategy for eliminating barbarous Irish customs and creating the tabula rasa most suited to receive whatever imprint the government chose27. 17 Remarkably, Leicester – like so many reformers before him – had never been to Ireland, yet was fully persuaded by others that the Irish were “a proud, dissembling, and malicious people and always unfaithful.” Accordingly, for Leicester there could be only one solution: “Such a people therefore deserves continually ye rodd, and syldome to be stroked on the hedd.” Nearly a year later he was sending the Lord Deputy similar advice, reminding him that the Irish were accustomed to “evill lyving as wyld savages… [so nothing] but the sword must keep them under”. As a leader of the puritan faction at court, Leicester prayed that he might live to see the “governor of that land not to sprare the sword, nor to ceasse contynuall following the marshall [sic] trade… for law ys lost upon such, till theye first know obedience and fear28”. By 1590 the discourse of virtuous use of the sword, muscular humanism, and the association of violence and reform would be a commonplace in the writings of Edmund Spenser, Lodowick Bryskett, Barnabe Rich, John Derricke, William Herbert, Richard Beacon, Barnaby Googe and the host of Irish officials linked to the Leicester and Sidney faction at court. 18 Similarly, officials soon justified and praised the eradication of barbarism and the savage people it sustained with agricultural imagery as well. Turning to agriculture and cultivation for metaphors to convey the need for atrocities, Holinshed commended Perrot in 1573 for executing “infinite numbers… and having thus rid the garden from the weeds, and rooted up the fields from these thornes”. William Camden condemned the Burkes for destroying Athenry again in 1576, recognizing that they did so owing to the “barbarous hatred which they bore unto them who began to favor Lawes and Humanity”, while Holinshed reduced the problem to a simple horticultural matter: As the husbandman then prospereth best, when his fields and gardens are weeded and clensed from thornes, brambles, and briers, prepared for the fire, even so shall the magistrate injoie the quiet state of the commonwealth when justice taketh place… and the wicked (prepared for the gallows) according to their deserts punished29. 19 The Irish Council wrote to the second earl of Essex about the continuing problems in Ulster by saying that “those monstrous treasons took their first root there, and from thence have poisoned all the other provinces of the realm, and therefore [it is] requisite to have a main blow stricken at this root, the sooner to shake and scourge all the branches that are grown out of it30”. The very imagery that justified planting of Englishmen could also be used to advocate the uprooting and pruning of the Irish.
20 The claim that O’Neill was “the very root, or seedman of all the rebellion in Ireland”, may seem metaphorically benign, but when read alongside Spenser’s development of
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the idea it takes on a more menacing tone. For Spenser the only sure instrument for reforming Ireland was “the sword; for all these evills must first be cut away by a strong hand, before any good can bee planted, like as the corrupt braunches and unwholesome boughs are first to bee pruned, and the foule mosse cleansed and scraped away, before the tree can bring forth any good fruite31”. In the View, the “evils” to be eliminated are Irish customs, but is clear that the blunt tools used for the pruning would make no distinction between people and plants. 21 The atrocity at Mullaghmast and the death of Rory O’More provide my example of the importance of symbols and rituals in the cultural conflict in Tudor Ireland. Clodagh Tait writes about the propaganda value of a public demonstration of the inappropriate nature of an enemy’s death. For Patricia Palmer, the admonitory display of state violence through the spiking of heads and other disfigured body parts was intended to “represent the amputation of the old order: its defunct extremities set out as mutilated trophies to proclaim the triumph of the new32”. The significance of taking and displaying the severed heads of the enemy was taking on a new meaning in the 1570s, signifying the ultimate defeat or the eternal damnation of the victim. The Irish recognized the power of the intended message and Rory Óg’s followers both suffered and inflicted significant losses in trying to save their leader’s body from the abattoir of English justice: “The rebel’s body, though dead, was so well attended and carried away, as it was the cause of the death of a good many of men on both sides; yet carried away it was33.” Eventually, Rory’s head was brought to Dublin and spiked on the Castle walls, but his body hidden away by followers who were determined that their leader’s body would not face the dishonor of being quartered and set up as a trophy by his enemies. 22 It should come as no surprise that the litany of treachery, severity, atrocity, and humility became part of contemporary lore. Sir Brian MacPhelim’s murder was a “sufficient cause of hatred and disgust” between the settlers and natives, and the Irish were quick to imitate the violence and the cultural expression of hatred through symbolic acts and the destruction of things. Similarly, the English detestation of barbarous customs was fully reciprocated by the Irish, who communicated their resistance and hostility to the civilized world order being devised for them through the same violence, symbolism and metaphors. Their loathing for English ways was clearly understood by the settler community, who would use it as a rationale for brutal repression in Ireland. Canny claims that ritual mutilations of the English were direct imitation of English practices, and that “the Irish, again in imitation of the English, expressed their defiance of English rule by resorting to symbolic actions34”. With brutality and symbolic destruction as primary texts of discourse, the fears and abhorrence of each side for the other was made plain through violence.
NOTES
1. S. J. Connolly, Contested Ireland: Ireland 1460-1630, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007.
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2. Peter Lake and Michael Questier, “Prisons, Priests and People”, in England's Long Reformation, ed. Nicholas Tyacke, London, Routledge, 1998, p. 196; K. J. Kesselring, Mercy and Authority in the Tudor State, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 144, 185. 3. Eamon Grennan, “Language and Politics: A Note on Some Metaphors in Spenser's A View of the Present State of Ireland”, Spenser Studies 3, 1982, p. 101, 106-07. The importance of agricultural metaphors is also discussed in Nicholas Canny, “Edmund Spenser and the Development of an Anglo-Irish Identity”, Yearbook of English Studies 13, 1983, p. 7-14. 4. The preceding paragraph is based on ideas, expressed far more eloquently, by Patrick J. Wolfe in his Plenary Lecture, “Beyond the Pale(stine) of Settlement: Settler Colonialism, Its Barriers and Its Contradictions,” 27 June 2007, Fifth Galway Conference on Colonialism. One is also reminded of Sean Ó Tuama’s claim that the “Tudor subjugation of Ireland may well have been unique in the attention paid to cultural as well as territorial conquest”. 5. Proclamation of Shane O’Neill as Traitor, HMC, Haliday MSS, (1897), 174, 2 August 1566; William Camden, Annales: the True and Royall History of the Famous Empresse Elizabeth, London, 1625, p. 167. It should be noted that Camden wrote later and the story may be apocryphal. 6. Richard Holinshed, Chronicles of England, Ireland and Scotland, 2 vols., London, John Harrison, 1587, p. 117. Sidney relates his reception of the gory trophy, “pickled in a pipkin”, in his Memoir, Ciarán Brady (ed.), A Viceroy's Vindication? Sir Henry Sidney's Memoir of Service in Ireland, Irish Narratives, Cork, Cork University Press, 2002, p. 53. 7. Hiram Morgan, “Overmighty Officers: the Irish Lord Deputyship in the Early Modern British State”, History Ireland, Winter, 1999, p. 18. According to Morgan, Sidney later returned to Whitehall leading 200 Irish gentlemen “in echoes of a Caesarean triumph”. 8. Hiram Morgan (ed.), Political Ideology in Ireland, 1541-1641, Dublin, Four Courts Press, 1999, p. 20, 57; Chandra Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 315. 9. Patricia Palmer, “‘An Headlesse Ladie’ and ‘a Horse Loade of Heades’: Writing the Beheading”, Renaissance Quarterly 60 (2007): 31; Clodagh Tait, Death, Burial and Commemoration in Ireland, 1550-1650, New York, Palgrave, 2002, p. 6, 20. 10. Nicholas Canny, “Dominant Minorities: English Settlers in Ireland and Virginia, 1550-1650”, Historical Studies 12, 1977, p. 59, 62-63; Christopher Maginn, “Civilizing” Gaelic Leinster: The Extension of Tudor Rule in the O'Byrne and O'Toole Lordships, Dublin Four Courts Press, 2005, p. 104. 11. Padraig Lenihan and Clodagh Tait David Edwards, ed., Age of Atrocity: Violence and Political Conflict in Early Modern Ireland, Dublin, Four Courts Press, 2007, p. 22. David Edwards points out that, “the deliberate butchery of large numbers of defenseless people was no longer deemed dishonorable”, even though it was unprecedented, in the years after Henry’s death. He lists among other examples 200 O’More kerne in 1547, 140 O’Neills in 1549, 200 MacDonnells in 1556, 74 O’Tooles in 1556, and the butchery of the MacDonnells while asleep and at peace in 1563, ibid., p. 72. 12. Sidney to Cecil, 1566, quoted in John Bradley, “Sir Henry Sidney's Bridge at Athlone, 1566-7”, in Ireland in the Renaissance c. 1540-1660, ed. Thomas Herron and Michael Potterton, Dublin, Four Courts Press, 2007, p. 173; Harman Murtagh, Athlone: History and Settlement to 1800, Athlone, Old Athlone Society, 2000, 42. Bradley notes that some of the
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stone used in the bridge came from the Franciscan friary nearby, another example of the logic of elimination whereby objects like the friary were culturally destroyed by being transformed into a symbol of settler control. 13. Bradley, “Sidney's Bridge at Athlone”, p. 184. 14. David Edwards, The Ormond Lordship in County Kilkenny, 1515-1642: The Rise and Fall of Butler Feudal Power, Dublin, Four Courts Press, 2003, 189; David Edwards, “The Butler Revolt of 1569”, IHS 38, no. 111, 1993, p. 243; David B. Quinn, “Government Printing and the Publication of the Irish Statutes in the Sixteenth Century”, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 49, Section C, 1943, p. 46, 55, 66. 15. Vincent P. Carey, “The End of the Gaelic Political Order: the O'More Lordship of Laois 1536-1603”, in Laois: History and Society, ed. Padraig G. Lane & William Nolan, Dublin, Geography Publications, 1999, p. 227-230. 16. PRO SP 63/26/59, Carew to Sidney, 26/12/68; John Hooker, Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, 2 vols, London, John Harrison, 1587, 2:130; Thomas Leland, The History of Ireland from the Invasion of Henry II, 3 vols., London, Nourse, Longman, Robinson & Johnson, 1773, 2, p. 250. 17. David Cressy, “Different Kinds of Speaking: Symbolic Violence and Secular Iconoclasm in Early Modern England”, in Protestant Identities: Religion, Society, and Self- fashioning in Post-Reformation England, ed. Muriel C. McLendon and Joseph P. Ward and Michael McDonald, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1999, p. 19-22. 18. PRO SP 63/28/38, Jaspar Horsey to Sidney, 18 June 1569; Brady (ed.), A Viceroy's Vindication, p. 64. 19. James Hughes, “Sir Edmund Butler of the Dullogh”, Journal of the Royal Historical and Archaeological Association of Ireland 4th series, 1, 1870, p. 185; Steven G. Ellis, Ireland in the Age of the Tudors 1447-1603: English Expansion and the End of Gaelic Rule, New York, Longman, 1998, p. 293; Brady (ed.), A Viceroy's Vindication, p. 62; Hubert Butler, “An Anti-English Butler”, Journal of the Butler Society 1, 1968, p. 23; Richard Bagwell, Ireland under the Tudors, 3 vols., London, The Holland Press, 1885-90, 2: p. 156. Sir Edmund, captain and seneschal of the Butler forces, characterized Sidney’s attacks on coyne and livery as the deputy expecting him “to ride up and down the country like a priest”, Viceroy’s Vindication, p. 62. 20. HMC Salisbury MSS, 1: 417, Richard Walshe to the Lord Chancellor, 17 August 1569; Hughes, “Sir Edmund Butler”, 191-197; AFM, s.a. 1569; Brady (ed.), A Viceroy's Vindication, p. 63. 21. David Edwards (ed.), introduction, 22. Butler sent a similar message when he killed the women and children in Shillelagh after their men had fled before him, Bodleian Library, Carte MS 131, fo. 83, 1568. 22. Bodleian Library, Carte MS 57, fo. 403, Council in England to Fitzwilliam, 22 August 1572; Cressy, “Different Kinds of Speaking”, p. 19, 21. 23. PRO SP 63/56/6; Sidney’s letter is printed in, Arthur Collins, Letters and Memorials of State in the Reigns of Queen Mary, Queen Elizabeth, King James, King Charles the First, Part of King Charles the Second and Oliver's Usurpation, 2 vols. (London, 1746), 1: p. 119. The meaning of the Burkes’s actions were readily understood at the time and after, with Camden explaining that they, “with a barbarous hatred which they bore unto them who began to favor Lawes and Humanity, killed the workmen”, Camden, Annales of Elizabeth, p. 368.
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24. PRO SP 63/42/55, Essex to the Privy Council, 20 October 1573; Camden, Annales of Elizabeth, p. 319. 25. David Riches, “The Phenomenon of Violence”, in The Anthropology of Violence, ed. David Riches, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1986, p. 11-12. 26. In Patricia Palmer’s view, Spenser was by no means the first writer to advocate brutality, just the first one to justify it in the name of humanism. Far from being morally objectionable, the savagery is in fact virtuous, William Palmer, “That ‘Insolent Liberty’: Honor, Rites of Power, and Persuasion in Sixteenth-Century Ireland”, Renaissance Quarterly 46, no. 2, 1993, p. 323. 27. Canny, “Spenser and Anglo-Irish Identity”, 6; Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British, 1580-1650, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 14; Canny, “Dominant Minorities”; Nicholas Canny, “Introduction: Spenser and the Reform of Ireland”, in Spenser and Ireland: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, ed. Patricia Coughlan, Cork, Cork University Press, 1989, p. 10-14; David Edwards, “Ideology and Experience: Spenser's View and Martial Law in Ireland”, in Political Ideology in Ireland, 1541-1641, ed. Hiram Morgan, Dublin, Four Courts Press, 1999, 149-55; Patricia Coughlan, “‘Some Secret Scourge which Shall by Her Come unto England’: Ireland and Incivility in Spenser”, in Spenser and Ireland: An Interedisciplinary Perspective, ed. Patricia Coughlan, Cork, Cork Universiy Press, 1989, p. 50-61. 28. Bodleian Library, Carte MS 56, fos. 103-05, Leicester to Fitzwilliam, 5 December 1572 and ibid., fos 220-220v, 26 October 1573; see PRO SP 63/56/34, Malby to Elizabeth, 20 September 1576 and ibid., 63/68.46i, Fitzwilliam Remembrance, 1579, for more of the same on the need for severity. 29. Hooker, Holinshed's Chronicle, op. cit., 2: p. 134, 141; Camden, Annales of Elizabeth, p. 368. 30. CSP Ireland, 1574-85, 1? Malby to Elizabeth? October 1576; Walter Bourchier Devereux, Lives and Letters of the Devereux Earls of Essex in the Reigns of Elizabeth, James I, and Charles I, 2 vols. London, John Murray, 1853, 2: p. 24, Irish Council to Essex, November 1575; Philip H. Hore, The History of the Town and County of Wexford, 6 vols., London, Elliot Stock, 1899-1911, 6: p. 99. 31. PRO SP 63/82/45, Bryskett to Walsingham, 21 April 1581; Edmund Spenser, A View of the State of Ireland: From the First Printed Edition (1633), ed. Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley, Oxford, Blackwell Publishers, 1997, p. 93. 32. Palmer, “Writing the Beheading”, op. cit., p. 32, 39; Tait, Death and Burial, op. cit., p. 6; Palmer, “Insolent Liberty”, p. 315. 33. Brady (ed.), A Viceroy’s Vindication, op. cit., p. 101; Lord Walter Fitzgerald, “Historical Notes on the O'Mores and their Territory of Leix to the End of the Sixteenth Century”, Kildare Archaeological Society Journal 6, 1909-11, p. 39. 34. Canny, “Dominant Minorities”, op. cit., p. 62-63.
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ABSTRACTS
The introduction of agriculture to supplant the pastoral society of Ireland was at the heart of the civilizing mission in Ireland after 1530. But the altered landscape and material culture associated with this change in land use soon served as new points of cultural conflict, with hostility and resistance from both sides directed at objects as well as symbols and members of the two cultures. The emerging violence in Tudor Ireland will be read here as a type of text for communicating difference.
L’introduction de l’agriculture pour supplanter la société pastorale de l’Irlande fut au cœur de la mission civilisatrice entreprise dans le pays après 1530. Mais la modification des paysages et la culture matérielle associée à cette mutation dans l’usage de la terre servirent bientôt de nouveaux points de désaccords culturels, où l'hostilité et la résistance des deux côtés furent dirigées contre les objets aussi bien que les symboles et membres des deux cultures. La violence émergente dans l’Irlande Tudor sera représentée ici comme un type de texte où s'exprime la communication de la différence.
INDEX
Mots-clés: agriculture, communication de la différence, culture matérielle, désaccord culturel, paysage, violence Keywords: agriculture, communicating difference, cultural conflict, landscape, material culture, violence
AUTHOR
JOHN PATRICK MONTAÑO
University of Delaware
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Perceptions of the mentally ill Irish population during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
Michael Robinson
1 Analyses of British discriminatory perceptions of the Irish population during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are well versed in the historiography. In particular, the Irish were perceived to be drunkards, thieves, aggressive and unhygienic. Yet, in comparison, psychiatric discourse has received far less attention from historians. This article is an attempt to redress this imbalance. In addition to demonstrating that mental ill-health was an ingredient of anti-Irish perceptions, it will also suggest that descriptions of the mentally unstable Irishman also constituted a “pro-union psychiatry” where, in an attempt to delegitimise Irish political positions and demands for self-rule, Britons portrayed the Irish as childlike, volatile and mentally unwell. The strength of anti-Irish psychiatry survived the First World War. Thus, this research aims to contribute towards the historiography of anti-Irish perceptions and extend burgeoning research which has explored the intrinsic relationship between imperialism and psychiatric diagnoses1.
Anti-Irish Racism before the First World War
2 By 1900, perceptions of the Irish were a consequence of firmly established ideas of race. 2 This would impact upon, and be influenced by, the influx of Irish migrants who arrived in Britain in the aftermath of the Irish Famine, 1845-1852. Whilst the 1841 census records that over 400,000 Irish-born were living in Britain3, this number had increased to 781,119 in the census of 18814. Whilst recognising the long history and complex nature of anti-Irish views, this escalation in the migrant population offers an integral explanation as to why anti-Irishness was at its most vicious in Victorian society5.
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3 Due to police discrimination and judicial bias, the Irish were overrepresented in Victorian criminal statistics, being especially prone to arrests as a result of drunkenness, theft, prostitution, and fighting6. Indeed, Irish criminality was overwhelmingly concentrated in these less-serious or petty categories and was not particularly associated with graver crimes such as murder. However, when engaging with these statistics, it is important to remember that Irish migrants largely settled in industrial areas which were already overcrowded, dirty, and deprived before their arrival en masse from the 1830s7. It was, therefore, poverty, rather than ethnicity, which explained Irish exceptionalism with regards to prostitution, alcoholism, criminality, and public order offences8. Nevertheless, these descriptions became fundamental ingredients within anti-Irish racism, hardening existing anti-Irish prejudices which purported a predisposition to brutality and savagery9. 4 Irish migrants, settling in huge numbers in over-crowded and poverty-ridden areas, were also associated with importing disease and mental illness10. For example, in 1886 and 1870 local press reports in Lancashire discussed the “Irish problem”, a widely-held assumption that Irish authorities exported its mentally-ill population to the North- West of England in order to pass the responsibility of “ould Ireland’s demented children” to regional asylums11. An analysis of nineteenth-century British asylum casebooks demonstrates anti-Irish sentiments were evident as Irish patients became stigmatised12. “Bad Irish character” was referenced with Irish patients being portrayed as volatile, aggressive, criminal, ill-disciplined and in need of strict management from asylum staff13. In 1883, the Commissioners in Lunacy Report wrote that Rainhill Asylum in Merseyside had “an excessive proportion of bad cases; many of them natives of Ireland and turbulent in disposition14”. One Irish patient in Rainhill Asylum was described as being “quite demented and resembles more a monkey than a human being” in 187315. These “scientific” theories of the simian Irish repeated the widely-held belief that the Irish might be the ever-elusive missing link between humans and chimpanzees. Connotations of the Irish being “ape-like” became a notorious racist cliché in Victorian Britain repeated by historians and travel writers16. Opinions of Irish emotionality, immaturity, mental fragility, and liability to insanity became widespread in British society to the extent that they influenced the medical opinion of asylum staff. As with suppositions that the Irish were prone to public disorder and criminality, however, theories regarding mental disposition were seemingly verified by evidence.
The Irish in the Asylum, 1820-1913
5 Despite the huge increase in the provision of Irish asylums during the nineteenth century, applications for asylum care continued to rise17. The dramatic build-up in the asylum population in Ireland is demonstrated in the following table.
Table 1: Asylum Population, 1851-191418
Year Asylum Population
1851 2,802
1861 4,623
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1871 7,831
1914 24,815
6 As a result of the dramatic decrease in the Irish population, the annual report produced by the inspectorate of lunatic asylums in the country stated in 1906: Lunacy is extraordinarily prevalent in Ireland. In the lunacy inspectors' office in Dublin castle, I was given the last comparison they had published of the insanity rates in England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland. English and Welsh insanity per 10,000 people was 40.8; Scottish, 45.4; Irish, 56.2. The Irish rate for 1916 showed an increase to 57.119. 7 Indeed in 1909, Irish Parliamentary Party journalist, R. Barry O’Brien, lamented that “the three scourges which afflict Ireland… Emigration, Tuberculosis and Lunacy20”. The increasing numbers of people certified as insane in the country seemingly offered conclusive evidence for the suggestion that the Irish race was susceptible to mental illness21.
8 Irish-born patients also constituted the most prominent ethnic identity after the native-born population in English asylums22. For example, at the Rainhill, Prestwich, Lancaster and Whittingham asylums, the Irish population constituted around ten per cent of the patient population with the next highest demographic, Scottish-born patients, totalling just over one per cent23. Occurring at the same time as widespread concern regarding high asylum numbers in Ireland and unfavourable descriptions of the Irish migrant population in British towns and cities24, large Irish populations under treatment in British asylums was attributed by the local press and medical officials to a national predisposition for institutionalisation25. 9 Over the past thirty years, academics have re-visited the issue in an attempt to explain the augmentation in Irish lunacy figures placing a “greater emphasis on the social and cultural forces that inflect diagnosis and perceptions of illnesses26”. Historians have theorised that the asylum becoming a place of refuge during the famine years27, the increase in people living beyond the age of sixty-five28, the asylum not being feared in the same way as the workhouse29, and abuses in the highly-flawed Dangerous Lunacy legislation of 1857 were contributory factors to explain the inflation of Irish patients30. 10 With regards to Irish-born patients in British asylums, it has, again, been argued that it was the poverty Irish migrants faced during the period which often caused their admittance into an asylum rather than any inherent racial characteristics31. The loss of contact with friends and family that accompanied migrant life was another potential explanation for these institutional tendencies32. Historians have also theorised that doctors, largely Protestant, educated, and middle-class men, were influenced by popular assumptions of the working-class and Catholic Irish which ensured many Irish inmates were retained within the asylum longer than the English-born contingent33. 11 Despite the absence of any empirical data, a similar narrative reporting an Irish predisposition to mental illness was prevalent regarding “functional nervous diseases” such as neurasthenia. Some medical texts stated that practitioners often dealt with a neurasthenic temperament in its most acute stage rather than a treatable ailment. Arguments of a “neurotic temperament” were formulated, and hereditary, racial and national health had a fundamental role in its explanation34. Medical textbooks
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designated race, alongside hereditary, gender, and age, as a contributory factor to explain the existence of such a disorder35. Shortly before the commencement of the First World War, one article in The Lancet decreed that the nationality of a patient diagnosed with neurasthenia should be considered before recommendation for treatment36. The ailments were presented by the medical establishment as very un- English disorders37. Perceptions of functional nervous disorders were offered by high- profile British medical officers during the Victorian and Edwardian as particularly prevalent in countries which apparently accommodated simpler and more impulsive populations38. As George Mosse points out, “Hysteria and nervousness became racial characteristics39”. 12 Connotations of the childlike, volatile, and emotionally unsuitable Irish person were long-standing in British thought40. In 1852, The Edinburgh Review commented: “That strange mixture of strong passion and playfulness… was so prominent a part of Irish character… distinguished by a capricious instability of national temper, which time has but little modified.” This description would persist throughout and beyond the nineteenth century41. Even seemingly placid descriptions could belittle the Irish. Descriptions of being creative, emotional, playful, and zealous also accompanied depictions of children42. The need for paternalistic relations with the Irish was emphasised by Robert Knox, arguably the most high-profile promoter of racial determinism43. The Irish were thus presented as immature and in need of discipline by others more sufficiently capable than themselves44. 13 This connotation of being immature and childlike is worth highlighting. Mental health historians have continuously noted the intrinsic relationship between childhood and insanity in medical and political discourse during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The mentally ill were often treated and described as children needing constant supervision from a mature parental figure45. In an article for the Journal of Mental Science, published in 1894, Dr Thomas Draper, the Resident Medical Superintendent of Enniscorthy District Asylum, further emphasised Irish mental instability: Temperament and racial characteristics have, no doubt, much to do with susceptibility to mental derangement, and here the Irish are at a disadvantage. An excitable brain is an easily disturbed brain; and the quick witted, passionate, versatile and vivacious Celt has, for those qualities which made him so charming, too often to pay the price of instability46. 14 Perceptions of Irish immaturity, emotionality, and mental instability undermined the Irishman’s capability for self-government and therefore legitimised English policy and control in Ireland47.
15 The political influence on this kind of psychiatric discourse has recently been explored in slave narratives. During the mid-nineteenth century, freed slaves in the United States of America were believed to be prone to insanity on account that they were psychologically unsuited and unprepared for liberty and freedom. Diana Louis terms this discourse as being part of a “pro-slavery psychiatry48”. Similar aspersions were cast upon the Irish as a result of “pro-Union psychiatry”. For example, one critic argued the Irish were unsuitable to have a say in their own government owing to their “fierce passions” of which one unenviable trait was “the unreasonableness of children49”. In the aftermath of the United Irish rebellion, on 6 June 1798, the Morning Chronicle stated “the minds of the insurgents are so diseased and so infatuated”. Those involved in the
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rebellion were depicted not as staunch rebels ideologically opposed to British rule but as momentarily mentally ill50. 16 Such a concept reflected a firmly-established notion of the relationship between Britain and Ireland: as a physician and allegorical patient. Fenian activities in the 1860s allowed the British press to repeat the supposed mental instability of the Irish agitators. The Daily Telegraph described “a feeling that Ireland is inflicted with an incurable disease… we may use the strait-waistcoat for her mad fits”. The prognosis for recovery was also poor: “We can have no certain hope of seeing her one day clothed and in her right mind.” Such associations were also evident in a satirical cartoon published in the aftermath of the Fenian Clerkenwell Bombing in 1867 where the intervention of a paternal British physician, Dr John Bull, ensured Paddy was no longer a danger to himself or others by admitting him into an asylum51. 17 The Land War of 1879-81 again prompted widespread press depictions of the mental and moral sickness of the Irish people where a “strait waistcoat” was required for the good of Ireland and the British Empire52. Indeed, even constitutional nationalists could equate more radical nationalists with the Irish propensity to mental illness. For example, Denis Kilbride, an MP for the Irish Parliamentary Party, replied to Sinn Féin supporting agitators during a political address by stating: “there were so many young men in the asylums in Ireland and so many damned lunatics outside53.” 18 From the French Revolution onwards, “revolutionary insanity” gained legitimacy in medical discourse. These politically-motivated diagnoses became seamlessly interwoven into already-established derogatory views of the Irish54 Perceptions of the emotional Irish race being susceptible to mental instability were thus widespread in Victorian and Edwardian England55. Indeed, Louis argues that one way in which “pro- slavery psychiatry” lingered was in the treatment of African-American soldiers with continued aspersions they were predisposed to breakdown lingering throughout the twentieth century56. A similar narrative is evident in Ireland with the treatment of the Irish Tommy at the Front57.
The First World War and the Inter-War Period
19 Like the Irish in civil society, the Irish Tommy was perceived by the military establishment to be innately aggressive, and therefore an ideal shock troop, yet careless, ill-disciplined, prone to criminality, and filthy58. In a repeat of nineteenth- century British discourse, a paternal relationship was advocated at the Front. Rowland Fielding, a battalion commander of the Connaught Rangers, wrote home to his wife stating: “Ireland will always be Ireland. It is a land of children with the bodies of men.” Again, like children, he confided to his wife that Irish troops were mentally fragile who were “easily made happy” but, also, “easily depressed59”. The War Office Committee of Enquiry into Shell-Shock included the testimony of Major Pritchard Taylor, who was a member of the Royal Army Military Corps during the conflict, who stated during his testimony that the Irish were liable to breakdown in comparison to their British-born comrades60. The committee’s report thus concurred listing “racial characteristics” as a “general predisposing cause” of shell-shock61. Irish nervous casualties received more dismissive and punitive treatment at the Casualty Clearing Hospitals at the front owing to their nationality62. Such perceptions lingered into the post-war world impacting upon the disabled Great War veteran.
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20 At a conference of Neurological Deputy Commissioners of Medical Services held at London Headquarters on 17 June 1921, it was stated that waiting lists for treatment amongst mentally ill Great War veterans in “South Ireland” far outweighed comparative regional figures in the rest of the United Kingdom63. Dr A. Baldie, a Ministry of Pensions neurological expert, attributed this difference to “a definitive Neurasthenic temperament that was prevalent amongst the South Irish”. Another official attending the conference, Dr Wallace, asserted that it was “indisputable” that those subject to mental illness were more likely to enlist in Ireland64. Previous research has already ably demonstrated that the lack of investment, treatment facilities and employment opportunities help to explain the inflated waiting-list figures in “South Ireland65”. Indeed, the fact that waiting lists for medical treatment for all disabilities in “South Ireland”, regardless of physical or psychiatric diagnosis, were similarly inflated demonstrates that socio-political and economic reasons had an impact on returning disabled veterans66. 21 In 1920, the National Federation of Discharged and Demobilised Sailors and Soldiers wrote to the office of the British Prime Minister asking him to intervene and improve the plight of the physically and mentally disabled Great War veteran in Ireland67. Whilst accepting that the letter effectively conveyed their desperate plight, the Ministry of Labour advised Lloyd George’s office not to reply. The department explained “the trouble is due to a kink in the Irish brain”. It was decreed that regardless of any British intervention, “it is not in our power, or for that matter, in the power of any department, or of the government as a whole to straighten out this kink68”. As has been demonstrated, such attitudes regarding a “kink in the Irish brain” were long established. 22 Psychiatric aspersions were not restricted to the British ex-serviceman. Following the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, a continuation of conflict ensued in Ireland following a split in the Republican movement over the Anglo-Irish Treaty. Rejecting the compromised dominion status of the Free State, and the partition of Ireland, de Valera and anti- Treaty IRA units took up arms to fight against the Treaty but were ultimately defeated. Once again, political opposition was associated with mental illness with Punch magazine presenting Michael Collins and James Craig as mature farm holders discussing territorial boundaries but equating the anti-Treaty IRA to a mad bull threatening to compromise any constitutional settlement69. 23 This narrative returned with the next seismic event in the Irish political landscape: the election of Eamon de Valera’s Fianna Fáil party in 1932. Ministry of Pensions officials working in the Free State noted the “the possibility of grave developments hereafter” which could impact upon the Ministry of Pensions” running in the state. For example, potential retaliations by the IRA against Leopardstown Hospital were considered70. R.S. Oldham, the Resident Superintendent of the hospital, described the situation as one of “grave uncertainty and anxiety71”. As a result, plans for evacuating staff, patients, and confidential official documents to Britain were put in place should the situation deteriorate72. 24 In an attempt to defuse the situation, Oldham offered his services to the British government to act as an intermediary between de Valera and the British Government during this political impasse. A psychiatrist of Anglo-Irish stock, Oldham believed that he had a unique insight into the contrasting “mental outlook” of Britons and Irishmen. He was particularly considerate of de Valera’s supposed state of mind: “I have the
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medial knowledge which I deem essential for dealing with the psychological problem presented by Mr. de Valera’s mind73.” This viewpoint was shared by the Foreign Secretary, Sir John Simon, who wrote to Ramsay Macdonald, Premier of the National Government, describing de Valera as “the exalted lunatic who is at the head of the Government in Dublin74”. Regardless, nothing came of Oldham’s offer to act as an intermediary, but neither was there any Republican retribution aimed towards Leopardstown Hospital or the Ministry of Pensions75. 25 Once again, these theses reflected societal discourse. During the inter-war period, numerous literary depictions of fictional Irish characters displayed clear symptoms of a variety of mental illnesses. Memoirs, genealogical stud-books”, and anthropologists, all emphasised such mental traits were hereditarily passed on between races and, as a result, characteristics mostly remained confined between certain peoples including the Irish76. Popular novelist, George Birmingham, published A Lunatic at Large (1922) which repeated theories purporting a racial defect inherent amongst the Irish which explained the apparent prevalence of lunacy in Ireland77. Indeed, as Peter Barham argues: “race-based psychiatry” in Britain “held its own well into the twentieth century78”. Perceptions of Irish mental instability was part of this medical discourse. 26 In addition to politically-motivated psychiatry in Ireland, perceptions of the unhygienic Irish migrant population lingered into the 1920s. British Government officials continued to hold that Ireland took advantage of the migrant passages to Britain by exporting her “indigent” and mentally-ill residents to clog up the English asylum. In 1924, a leading official at the British Treasury inferred: It seems to me that so long as this country continues to give free admission to casual Irish labour every harvest time, and so enables the Free State both to relieve local unemployment, and to bring home English-paid wages, we have a good case for asking that they shall not take the opportunity to dump her lunatically minded population on to us in that way79. 27 Without a hint of irony, the same official conceded: “I have no information, but I suspect a good proportion of the civilian Irish lunatics in this country come from these annual migrants80.” As has been demonstrated, this thesis was an uncomplicated continuation of prejudices evident in the previous century.
Conclusion
28 Politically-motivated diagnoses and anti-Irish perceptions of the migrant population collaborated to formulate aspersions purporting an Irish predisposition to mental illness. With these post-war examples in mind, this article would therefore dispute previous shell-shock historians who have argued that the First World War marked a “turning point” and a “major milestone” in the history of psychiatry81. Nevertheless, returning to the aforementioned empirical data which suggests an Irish predisposition to institutionalisation during the nineteenth century, the psychological impact of the Famine remains an omission in the historiography. On 26 September 1914, The Lancet, contended that the inflation of institutionalisation in Irish asylums was a “legacy of mental weakness dating from the sufferings of the famine years82”. Whilst this article has stressed the collaboration of anti-migration discourse and politically-motivated diagnoses on psychiatric discourse, it also wishes to encourage further consideration of the psychological impact of the Famine by historians in the future83.
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NOTES
1. Erik Linstrum, Ruling Minds: Psychology in the British Empire, Harvard, Harvard University Press, 2016. 2. Rather than simply denoting skin colour, as its meaning represents in the twenty- first century, the definition of “race” and racial distinctions were divided along physical features, language and conduct in the nineteenth century. See Santanu Das (ed.), Race, Empire and First World War Writing, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011, p. 12; L. P. Curtis, Anglo-Saxons and Celts: A Study of Anti-Irish Prejudice in Britain, Bridgeport, New York University Press, 1968, p. 18 and p. 48. 3. MacRaild, Irish Migrants in Britain, 1750-1922, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillas, 1999, p. 156. 4. John Archer Jackson, The Irish in Britain, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963, p. 10-11. 5. MacRaild, Irish Migrants in Britain, op. cit., p. 156. 6. Roger Swift, “Crime and the Irish in Nineteenth century Britain, 1871-1921”, in Roger Swift and Sheridan Gilley (eds.), The Irish in Britain, 1815-1939, London, Pinter Publichers, 1989, p. 165-78; Alan O’Day, “Varieties of anti-Irish behaviour, 1846-1922”, in P. Panayi (eds.), Racial Violence in Britain in the Nineteenth and twentieth centuries, London, Leicester University Press, 1996, p. 30-31; F. Finnegan, Poverty And Prejudice: A Study of Irish Immigrants in York, 1840-75, Cork, Cork University Press, 1982, p. 153. 7. Catherine Cox, Hilary Marland and Sarah York, “Itineraries and Experiences of Insanity: Irish migration and the management of mental illness in nineteenth Century Lancashire”, in Catherine Cox, Hilary Marland and Sarah York (eds.), Migration, Health and Ethnicity in the Modern World, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, p. 39. 8. Jacqueline Turton, “Mayhew’s Irish: the Irish poor in mid nineteenth-century London”, in Roger Swift and Sheridan Gilley (eds.), The Irish in Victorian Britain: The Local Dimension, Dublin, Four Courts Press, 1999, p. 146; Walter Ralls, “The Papal Aggression of 1850: A study in Victorian Anti-Catholicism”, Church History, vol. 43 no. 2, 1974, p. 244. 9. Donald MacRaild, Irish Migrants in Britain, 1750-1922, op. cit., p. 164; Swift, “Crime and the Irish in nineteenth century Britain, 1871-1921”, op. cit., p. 177; Mark Finnane, Insanity and the Insane in Post-Famine Ireland, London, Croom Helm, 1981, p. 74; Liz Curtis, Nothing But The Same old Story: the roots of anti-Irish racism, London, Information on Ireland, 1984, p. 10; John Harrington, The English Traveller in Ireland: Accounts of Ireland and the Irish through five centuries, Dublin, Wolfhound Press, 1991, p.65 and p. 88-89; Andrew Hadfield and John McVeagh, Strangers to that Land: British Perceptions of Ireland from the Reformation to the Famine, Gerrards Cross, Colin Smythe, 1994, p. 46. 10. Cox, Marland and York, “Itineraries and Experiences of Insanity”, op. cit., p. 40 and p. 55. 11. Bernard Melling, “Building a Lunatic Asylum: ‘A Question of Beer, Milk and the Irish’”, in Thomas Knowles and Serena Trowbridge (eds.), Insanity and the Lunatic Asylum in the Nineteenth Century, London, Routledge, 2015, p. 60-63.
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12. Catherine Cox, Hillary Marland and Sarah York, “Emaciated, Exhausted and Excited: The Bodies and Minds of the Irish in Late Nineteenth-Century Lancashire Asylums”, Journal of Social History, vol. 46, no. 2, 2012, p. 517. 13. Ibid., p. 512. 14. C. Cox, Marland and York, “Itineraries and Experiences of Insanity”, op. cit., p. 51. 15. C. Cox, Marland and York, “Emaciated, Exhausted, and Excited”, op. cit., p. 515. 16. David Day, Conquest: How Societies Overwhelm Others, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 84; Curtis, Anglo-Saxons and Celts, op. cit., p. 84. 17. Pauline Prior, “Overseeing the Irish Asylums: Inspectorate in Lunacy, 1845-1921”, in Pauline Prior (ed.), Asylums, Mental Health Care and the Irish, 1800-2010, Dublin, Irish Academic Press, 2012, p. 222-4. 18. Table adapted from ibid., p. 227. 19. Ruth Russell, What’s the Matter With Ireland?, New York, 1920, p. 40-41. 20. Elizabeth Malcolm, “Ireland’s crowded madhouses: the Institutional Confinement of the Insane in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Ireland”, in Roy Porter and David Wright (eds.), The Confinement of the Insane: International Perspectives, 1800-1965, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 326. 21. Ibid., p. 327. 22. C. Cox, Marland and York, “Itineraries and Experiences of Insanity”, op. cit., p. 36; Malcolm, “A most miserable looking object”, op. cit., p. 121. 23. Liverpool Record Office (M 614/RAI 4), Report of the Medical Superintendent, Lancaster Asylum, 1920, p. 33; Report of the Medical Superintendent, Rainhill Asylum, 1913, p. 28; Report of the Medical Superintendent, Prestwich Asylum, p. 106; Report of the Medical Superintendent, Whittingham Asylum, 1919, p. 148. 24. C. Cox, Marland and York, “Itineraries and Experiences of Insanity”, op. cit., p. 55. 25. Ibid., p. 47. 26. Ian Miller, “Review of Irish Insanity, 1800-2000”, Irish Studies Review, vol. 23 no. 4, 2015, p. 503-504. 27. Damian Brennan, “A Theoretical Exploration of Institution-based Mental Health Care in Ireland”, in Pauline Prior (ed.), Asylums, Mental Health Care and the Irish, 1800-2010, op. cit., p. 289-292. 28. Finnane, Insanity and the Insane in Post-Famine Ireland, op. cit., p. 143. 29. Ibid., p. 109-110; Elizabeth Malcolm, “The Institutional confinement of the insane in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ireland”, in Roy Porter and David Wright (eds), The Confinement of the Insane: International Perspectives, 1800-1965, op. cit., p. 323; Brennan, Irish Insanity, Routledge Advances in Sociology, 2015, p. 81; Elizabeth Malcolm, “The House of Strident Shadows’: the asylum, the family, and emigration in post-famine rural Ireland”, in Greta Jones and Elizabeth Malcolm (eds.), Medicine and Disease and the state in Ireland, 1650-1940, Cork, Cork University Press, 1999, p. 186. 30. Pauline Prior, “Mental Health Law on the Island of Ireland, 1800-2010”, in Pauline Prior (ed.), Asylums, Mental Health Care and the Irish 1800-2010, op. cit., 2012, p. 320. 31. Elizabeth Malcolm, “A most miserable looking object – The Irish in English Asylums”, 1851-1901: Migration, poverty and prejudice”, in John Belchem and Klaus Tenfelde (eds.), Irish and Polish Migration in Comparative Perspective, Essen, Klartext
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Verlag, 2003, p. 125-126; John Fox, “Irish Immigrants, Pauperism and Insanity in 1854 Massachusetts”, Social Science History, vol. 15 no. 3, 1991, p. 331. 32. Malcolm, “A most miserable looking object”, op. cit., p. 131; Cox, Marland and York, “Itineraries and Experiences of Insanity”, op. cit., p. 55. 33. Malcolm, “A most miserable looking project”, op. cit., p. 129-131. 34. Tracey Loughran, “Hysteria and neurasthenia in pre-1914 British medical discourse and in histories of shell-shock”, History of Psychiatry, vol. 19 no. 73, 2008, p. 38-39. 35. Tracey Loughran, “Shell-Shock in First World War Britain: An intellectual and Medical History, 1860-1920”, PhD Thesis, Queen Mary, University of London, 2006, p. 61. 36. J.S.R. Russell, “Treatment of Neurasthenia”, Lancet, vol. 2, 1913, p. 1453-56. 37. Loughran, “Hysteria and Neurasthenia in Pre-1914 British Medical Discourse and in Histories of Shell-shock”, op. cit., p. 40. 38. Andrew Scull, Madness: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 61-62. 39. George Mosse, “Shell-Shock as a social disease”, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 35 no. 1, 2000, p. 103. 40. Arnold also prominently voiced the view that the Irish were incapable of self- governance in On the Study of Celtic Literature, London, David Nutt, 1910; Curtis, Apes and Angels: the Irishman in Victorian Caricature, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1971, p. 18; Harrington, The English Traveller in Ireland, op. cit., p. 265. 41. Curtis, Anglo Saxons and Celts, op. cit., p. 53-55. 42. [http://www.victorianweb.org/history/race/Racism.html]. 43. Edward Lengel, The Irish Through British Eyes: Perceptions of Ireland in the Famine Era, London, Praeger, 2002, p. 131. 44. Ibid. 45. Diana Louis, “Peculiar Institutions: Representations of Nineteenth-Century Black Women’s Madness and Confinement in Slavery and Asylums”, unpublished PhD thesis, Emory University, 2014, p. 113. 46. An edited copy of On The Alleged Increase of Insanity in Ireland, by Dr Thomas Draper, Resident Medical Superintendent, Enniscorthy District Asylum, 1894, “Voices of Doctors and Officials”, in Pauline Prior (ed.), Asylums, Mental Health Care and the Irish: Historical studies 1800-2010, op. cit., p. 282. 47. Curtis, Anglo-Saxons and Celts, op. cit., p. 54-55. 48. Louis, “Peculiar Institutions”, op. cit., p. 77-118. 49. Steven Fielding, Class and Ethnicity: Irish Catholics in England, 1880-1939, London, Open University Press, 1993, p. 9. 50. Michael Di Nie, The Eternal Paddy: Irish Identity and the British Press, 1798-1882, London, University of Wisconsin Press, 2004, p. 59. 51. Ibid., p.165. 52. Ibid., p. 175 and p. 215. 53. Paul Redmond, “Denis Kilbride M.P. 1848-1924”,unpublished MA thesis, University of Maynooth, 2003, p. 318.
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54. Ibid., p. 79; Martin Miller, “The Concept of Revolutionary Insanity in Russian History” in Angela Brintlinger and ilya Vinitsky (eds.), Madness and the Mad in Russian Culture, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2007, p. 105-106. 55. Curtis, Anglo Saxons and Celts, op. cit., p. 53-55. 56. Margaret Humphreys, Intensely Human: the Health of the Black Soldier in the American Civil War, Baltimore, John Hopkins University Press, 2008, p. 9 and p. 55-56; R.F. Jefferson, “Enabled Courage’: Race, Disability, and Black World War II Veterans in Post- War America”, The Historian, vol. 65 no. 5, 2003, p. 1104; E. Dwyer, “Psychiatry and Race during World War II”, Journal of Medicine and Allied Sciences, vol. 61 no. 2, 2006, p. 143. 57. Similarly, with regards to English soldiers, the non-officer class were believed to be less civilised than their officers ensuring that they were more likely to suffer from hysteria than the more respectable neurasthenia. 58. Joanna Bourke, “Irish Tommies: The Construction of a Martial Manhood, 1914-18”, Ballàn 6, 1998, p. 13-30; Nicholas Perry, “Maintaining Regimental Identity in the Great War: The Case of the Irish Infantry Regiments”, Stand To 54, 1998, p. 5-11.; Terence Denman, “The Catholic Irish soldier in the First World War: The ‘Racial Environment’”, Irish Historical Studies, vol. 27, no. 108, 1991, p. 352-365. 59. Bourke, “Irish Tommies”, op. cit., p. 20. 60. The Southborough Report, War Office COmmittee of Enquiry into “Shell Shock” (1922), Southborough Report, London, HMSO, p. 87. 61. Ibid., p. 96. 62. Joanna Bourke, “Effeminacy, Ethnicity and the End of Trauma: The Sufferings of ‘Shell-Shocked’ Men in Great Britain and Ireland, 1914-39”, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 35, No. 1, Special Issue: Shell-Shock, Jan., 2000, p. 57-69. p. 62; Joanna Bourke, “Shell-Shock, Psychiatry and the Irish Soldier”, Adrian Gregory and Senia Paseta (eds.) Ireland and the Great War: “A War To Unite Us All?”, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2002, p. 62. 63. NA (PIN 15/56), Memorandum on Conference of Neurological D.Cs.M.S. held at Headquarters, 17 June 1921, p. 7. 64. Ibid., p. 4. 65. Bourke, “Shell-Shock, psychiatry and the Irish Soldier during the First World War”, op. cit., p. 155-171. 66. NA (PIN 15/56), Memorandum on Conference of Neurological D.Cs.M.S. held at Headquarters, 17 June 1921, p. 4. 67. NA (LAB 2/855/ED5412/7/1921), National Federation of Discharged and Demobilised Sailors and Soldiers, Dublin, to David Lloyd George, 17 February 1920. 68. Ibid., Ministry of Labour to Prime Minister’s Office, 24 March 1920. 69. [http://Punch.photoshelter.com]. 70. NA (MH 79/451), The Position of Leopardstown Hospital Dublin in the event of a crisis arising in the Irish Free State, 16 June 1932; G.C. Tryor to J.H. Thomas, Dominions Office, London, 21 June 1932. 71. NA (MH 79/451), RS Oldham, Leopardstown Park to Ministry of Pensions, Dublin, 17 July 1932.
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72. Ibid., The Position of Leopardstown Hospital Dublin in the event of a crisis arising in the Irish Free State, 16 June 1932; G.C. Tryor to Dominions Office, London, 21 June 1932; “Confidential Note written by RS Oldham”, 4 June 1932. 73. Ibid., R.S. Oldham, Leopardstown Park, to Ministry of Pensions, Dublin, 17 July 1932. 74. Paul M. Canning, “The Impact of Eamon De Valera: Domestic Causes of the Anglo- Irish Economic War”, Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, Vol. 15, No. 3, Autumn, 1983, p. 179-205. 75. Although the economic trade war ensued between the two governments and lasted between 1932 and 1938; Kevin O’Rourke, “Burn Everything British but Their Coal: The Anglo-Irish Economic War of the 1930s’”, The Journal of Economic History, vol. 51 no. 2, 1991, p. 357-366. 76. Curtis, Anglo-Saxons and Celts, op. cit., p. 20-21 and p. 53-55. 77. Malcolm, “Ireland’s Crowded Madhouses”, op. cit., p. 315. 78. Barham, Forgotten Lunatics of the Great War, op. cit., p. 9. 79. Ibid., The Treasury, London, to Colonial Office, London, 17 September 1924. 80. NA (T 161/223), The Treasury, London, to Colonial Office, London, 17 September 1924. 81. Anthony Babington, Shell-Shock: A History of the Changing Attitudes to War Neurosis, London, Leo Cooper, 1997, p. 122; Wendy Holden, Shell-Shock, London, Channel 4 Books, 1998, p. 137. 82. Bourke, “Effeminacy, ethnicity and the end of trauma”, op. cit., p. 61. 83. Ian Miller, “Review of Irish Insanity, 1800-2000”, Irish Studies Review, vol. 23 no. 4, 2015, p. 503-504.
ABSTRACTS
Analyses of British discriminatory perceptions of the Irish population during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are well versed in the historiography. Previous works have demonstrated that the Irish migrant population were perceived to be drunkards, thieves, aggressive and unhygienic. Yet, in comparison, psychiatric discourse has received far less attention from historians. This article is an attempt to redress this imbalance. In addition to demonstrating that mental ill-health was an ingredient of anti-Irish perceptions, it will also suggest that descriptions of the mentally unstable Irishman also constituted a “pro-union psychiatry”. In an attempt to delegitimize Irish political positions and demands for self-rule, Britons portrayed the Irish as childlike, volatile and mentally unwell and, therefore, incapable of governing themselves and legitimising the Union. The strength of this anti-Irish psychiatry survived the First World War and would persist throughout the inter-war period. This research aims to contribute towards the historiography of anti-Irish perceptions and extend burgeoning research which has explored the intrinsic relationship between imperialism and psychiatric diagnoses.
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Les analyses des perceptions discriminatoires des Britanniques envers la population irlandaise au cours des XIXe et XXe siècles sont bien ancrées dans l'historiographie. De précédents travaux ont démontré que les membres de la population migrante irlandaise étaient perçus comme des ivrognes et des voleurs, agressifs et sales. Pourtant, en comparaison, le discours psychiatrique a reçu beaucoup moins d’attention de la part des historiens. Cet article tente de remédier à ce déséquilibre. En plus de démontrer que le trouble mental était un des éléments des sentiments anti-irlandais, il suggérera également que les descriptions de l’Irlandais comme étant mentalement instable constituaient aussi une « psychiatrie en faveur de l'Union ». Afin de délégitimer les positions politiques irlandaises et les revendications d'autonomie législative, les Britanniques représentaient les Irlandais comme étant infantiles, instables et mentalement déséquilibrés et par conséquent incapables de se gouverner eux-mêmes, légitimant ainsi l’Union. La force de cette psychiatrie anti-irlandaise survécut à la Première Guerre mondiale et persista durant l’Entre-deux-guerres. Cette recherche a pour but de contribuer à l’historiographie des perceptions anti-irlandaises et d’étendre la recherche émergente qui explore les relations intrinsèques entre l’impérialisme et les diagnostics psychiatriques.
INDEX
Mots-clés: migration irlandaise, obusite, psychiatrie, racisme anti-irlandais Keywords: Anti-Irish racism, Irish migration, psychiatry, shell-shock
AUTHOR
MICHAEL ROBINSON
University of Liverpool
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Art et Image Art and Image
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The Rising Goes Digital : Century Ireland.ie
Anne Goarzin
1 The “decade of commemorations” initiated on May 1st, 2013, in Ireland has brought about a wide range of new media projects which aim at remembering events and understanding how ideals are elaborated and how men and women chose to enact them over the period 1913-23. Two distinct online platforms were launched as part of this commemorative effort in Ireland. As interfaces, they can be understood as “places or surfaces where two bodies or systems come together1”. They can involve a human and a machine (for example, a computer, a phone, a tablet) or two humans (individuals engaging in a debate or dialogue via a social network or a discussion forum), or perhaps two machines. Media scholars Nicholas Gane and David Beer stress that “interfaces enable the formation of networks across or between different beings, objects or media. Interfaces are thus not confined to new media, for we engage with people and technical objects frequently in our everyday lives, and not always through the use of digital technologies2.” Images, books, diaries and letters are therefore points of contact between humans and digital technologies.
2 One significant example is the project entitled “Inspiring Ireland 1916: Weaving Public and Private Narratives”. It has the support of the Minister for the Diaspora and is conveyed through the Digital Repository of Ireland (DGI). As a collaborative project which features cultural artefacts and stories of 1916, it calls for digital users in Ireland and abroad to contribute their own resources to the platform. As an archive of the digital age, it stores personal memorabilia such as a “digitized photos, diaries, posters, aural recordings, video, and ephemera3” and makes them available to the public following an online submission and a selection process4: As part of the Inspiring Ireland 1916 project, a number of collection days are being held across the country and abroad, allowing members of the public to bring in documents, objects and other material relating to the 1916 Easter Rising and tell the story attached to them. Items will be digitized and returned to their owners. This collection is made up of the digital objects created from the items donated by the public at those collection days. The items include personal correspondence, medals, souvenirs, pamphlets and postcards, ephemera and other personal
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memorabilia. The collection days present an opportunity for members of the public to contribute to the Inspiring Ireland project and share their personal and family narratives of the Easter Rising5. 3 There is a notable shift towards an increasingly individualized archive. Indeed as Gane and Beer remarked as early as 2008, “For now, there is less of a ‘gatekeeper’ approach to public archives as these are often assembled through public work of individuals […] and tend to be policed through the local and decentralized actions of their users (although this may well be starting to change)6.” By extension, moving away from the archival aspect of the Digital Repository Ireland, this remark ties in with Lev Manovich’s observation that the computer has become a filter for culture, providing “cultural interfaces […] which structure ‘the ways in which computers present and allow us to interact with cultural data7.’”
Century Ireland: Online news and simulated real-time
4 In order to illustrate these changes in the uses of and in the relation with new media, I propose to focus on Century Ireland as a case study. An online project hosted by RTÉ, Century Ireland is funded by the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht and curated by Boston College History Professor Michael Cronin. My aim here is to assess how the technological environment of Century Ireland engages with the question of the archive, and to examine the relation between users and media technology. I will also interrogate the creative potential of such assemblages.
5 The Century Ireland interface imitates the format of an online newspaper. It integrates a blog (which serves as an archive of previous blog posts), a Twitter feed, and features commercial posters dating back to the period of reference (the early to mid-20th century). An “Archive” section proper also lists past issues of Century Ireland going back to 2013. The overall framework interrogates the historical perception of Ireland at the time and its relation with other countries and nations in time and space (fig. 1). The platform uses the device of simulated real-time, implying that the user is willing to accept that we are speaking of 1916 as if it were today. It is this fundamental discontinuity that allows him/her to assemble with the experiences featured on the website8. The “online newspaper” refers to past events in the present tense and keeps track of them by tagging them on Twitter with the hashtag #onthisday or @CenturyIRL (fig. 2). For example, the online edition for June 1917/2017 features headers such as “Extraordinary celebrations as final rebellion prisoners released” (19 June 1917) or “Eamon de Valera to run for vacant East Clare seat” (20 June 1917). There are a few exceptions to this simulated “real-time” mode however, especially with the insertion of longer reads available through the slideshow, which offer in-depth analyses and interpretations of key moments or social history in the past tense (for example, “Messines Remembered” or “White weddings in war-time Ireland”). 6 What kind of archives does the website offer ? Looking back, Mike Featherstone9 has argued that as it became a central feature of the onset of modernity, the archive could no longer be envisaged as a collection of documents in a walled, official government record. As a result the question of what went into the archives and what could be retrieved by whom became crucial. He has also emphasized that “the archive is a
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crucial site for national memory […] and that because of this, it is also ‘a place for creating and re-working memory10’”. 7 Types of archives today are no longer limited to the guarded confines of an official depository of knowledge. As archives online open, they can be seen as a benefit for internet users. They can also be interpreted in a broader sense as more personal documents are found in web cultures and circulated on a variety of web devices – phones, computers and tablets. Tellingly, one of the main changes over the last decade or so has been the rise of the figure of the “prosumer”. This neologism defines a user who is not merely consuming content but also also producing it, especially through social media where numerous instances of what sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has described as a “confessional society11” are to be found. 8 The technological mediation afforded by Century Ireland makes for an interesting entanglement of historical material archived online and of the individual perception of users, who are now familiar with the creation and circulation of their own archives (starting with Facebook). They are used to taking on an agential role in social networks. Reflecting on this, David Beer points that we now need to understand how archiving is central to culture and how different systems of classification lead to different understandings of cultural forms and different cultural encounters. Bowker and Star’s […] suggestion that we uncover these processes by taking three steps is pertinent here : “recognizing the balancing act of classifying”, “rendering voice retrievable”, and “being sensitive to exclusions12”. 9 Here, I argue that what goes on when browsing through the interfaces and its ramifications is not a waste of time. Jennifer Pybus13 insists that such activity should be envisaged as a combination of “immaterial labor” (as she characterizes the online approach of the digital user) and of an attention to archival material (letters, objects, or oral testimonies). Granted, the organizational display and choice of online archives owes much to human agency and especially to the expertise of historians and scholars14. Yet on the other hand, new media technologies fuel affective perceptions which might be less controlled. Simultaneously, the visual image has become a ubiquitous instrument that zooms in, connects one to the internet, moves things on the screen from one place to another, changes the temperature and so on. New practices have developed alongside these new forms: “New media moves us from identification to action15”, Manovich claims. As they become instruments, they allow us to relate differently to “reality” and to interact with them.
10 A striking example of this is the interactive Dublin Rising created, powered and conveyed by the global, Dublin-based Google through the online Google Cultural Institute16. Through the click of an icon or a shift left or right, it provides the user with a better understanding, and more importantly with a virtual experience of the space of the city as well as of the extent of its destruction17 (fig. 3.1 and 3.2).
Entangled territories: Practicing Century Ireland
11 Century Ireland is thus much more than another online environment commemorating 1916, and I suggest that the website in fact embodies material relations. Here, the notion of “embodied virtuality” coined by Katherine Hayles seems relevant : she proposes that there is a complex network of relations or an interweaving that occurs
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between “the technologies of information as well as the biological, social, linguistic and cultural changes that initiate, accompany and complicate their development18”. This entails that the body should not be seen as distinct or outside of cultural imagings such as those of Century Ireland : “Information, like humanity, cannot exist apart from the embodiment that brings it into being as a material entity in the world19”, Hayles says. She sees the human as interfacing with, rather than as isolated from technological environments and flows of information and data and argues that “new forms of subjectivity […] might be born out of the interface between human bodies and computer-based technologies20.” Another consequence of this is also that the circulation of information online via a website and social networks and the deliberate, didactic and linear sorting of events and dates is likely to be questioned by new, less institutional interactions.
12 In this sense, the platform in itself fully constitutes a valid topic to be studied through the prism of cultural studies. Indeed cultural studies’ role, according to theorist Raymond Williams, is to address the “structure of feeling” and to try and answer the question of “what it feels to be alive at a certain time and place21”. This also implies taking stock of the way in which all elements in “a whole way of life” are related and how we live those relationships, Lawrence Grossberg says : Everyday life is not simply the material relationship; it is a structure of feeling, and this is where I want to locate affect. This is what I call “territorializing.” It is about how you can move across those relationships, where you can and cannot invest, where you can stop/rest and where you can move and make new connections, what matters and in what ways22. 13 I thus propose to examine Century Ireland as a virtual territory where users may experiment with the structure of feeling and affective apparatuses. The ubiquity of forms afforded by Century Ireland allows users to choose and select the elements (stories, events, images) to which they feel attuned. As a result, what occurs online is an interconnection or co-presence of human (reader, viewer) and non-human entities (objects, sounds, the computer, even the web)23. Century Ireland allows one to err through the various manifestations and relations between events, actions and reactions. In this regard the structure of the website nods to the relative confusion of the Rising, as does poet Theo Dorgan: “The Rising was not a seamlessly-conceived process, it contained in itself a number of divergences and contradictions, and even as it got under way it began to revise itself drastically, not least in its military aims and objectives 24”.
14 Beyond clear-cut opinions and assessments of the event, of its outcome or its lasting consequences, the digitized material of Century Ireland elicits various affective reactions. It offers an insight into the various shapes and guises of affect, this generally other than conscious knowing, vital forces beyond emotions – that can serve to drive us towards movement, toward thought and extension, that can likewise suspend us (as if in neutral) […] or that can even leave us overwhelmed by the world’s obstinacies and rhythms, its refusals as much as its invitations25. 15 These affective qualities, rather poetically termed by affect theorists Gregg and Seigworth “an inventory of shimmers26” can be figured in many ways, they say, […] as excess, as autonomous, as impersonal, as the ineffable, as the on-goingness of process, as pedagogico-aesthetic, as virtual, as shareable (mimetic), as sticky, as collective, as contingency, as threshold or conversion point, as immanence of
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potential (futurity), as the open, a vibrant incoherence that circulates about zones of cliché and convention, as a gathering place of accumulative dispositions27. 16 We might then envisage Century Ireland as a mediascape where the all-out internet medium becomes entangled with the more traditional paradigm of the archive. An online cultural object with a commemorative ambition, it might take the user down the straightforward path signposted with solid visual and contextual material, dates, chronologies, key figures or symbolic objects. But the nature of the medium allows the user to simultaneously go down the other, less predictable path that leads to the entanglement of social networks.
17 This might also lead us to acknowledge that being online is now a “default condition” and that the internet is “all over”, as contemporary artist Artie Vierkant mischievously asserts28. Far from being finished, it is virtually “all-out” and “everywhere” : Simply put, the relationship between reality and its online mirror has changed to the point that the real and the digital have merged into a single thing: Isn’t Google real? … It’s rather related to a general shift from modem connection (being online as a conscious choice) to seamless connectivity (being online as a default condition) … from small communities to online crowds29… 18 And while Vierkant theorizes the potential of this moment he terms “Post-Internet” for the contemporary visual arts, his approach is also relevant for our study because it calls for approaches beyond the internet as medium in its materiality, and beyond methods of presentation or dissemination of the object. Even though Century Ireland does not claim a status as a work of art, it is undoubtedly located in the post-Internet age where ubiquitous authorship and networked culture exemplify recent cultural shifts and changing technological habits. The website is thus not merely informative, commemorating past events. Rather, the user might become entangled in the present with what she/he encounters there. The interface presents objects and encourages their dissemination online, through sharing images, sounds or links via Twitter, Facebook or YouTube30.
19 In this way, Century Ireland reactivates the discussion on how we relate to archival objects and to other users. Do we make the conscious choice of a phenomenological concern about things, entailing intentional emotions? Or is our relation to them non- intentional, impersonal, unmediated affect, and are we affected by things? In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Sarah Ahmed insists that an either/or answer can only be provided in a perfect intellectual world of definitions. She suggests that we “explor[e] the messiness of the experiential, how bodies unfold into worlds, and the drama of contingency, how we are touched by what comes near31”. 20 As a virtual territory where collective history is archived in order to be commemorated and individual stories are remembered, and as a post-Internet platform providing default connectivity and dissemination as well as a historical linear narrative Century Ireland is a captivating place. Here, the non-intentionality of affect and the intentionality of emotion meet32. This calls in turn for an examination of how our browsing the platform may translate into new practices. I will argue that the confrontation with the archive produces a tension towards futurity which assembles past and present affects across the disseminated narratives of the news or through personal stories. It is this re-appropriation and recreation of stories that makes the archive lean towards artistic creation.
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Creative Possibilities
21 Going back to the notion of the archive, let us examine how Michel Foucault’s complex definition of the archive becomes specially relevant here. In The Archeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, the philosopher defined the archive as a practice and as a virtuality or a potential. He wrote that “between tradition and oblivion, it reveals the rules of a practice that enables statements both to survive and to undergo regular modification. It is the general system of formation and transformation of statements33”. Jennifer Pybus, a keen Foucault reader, adds that instead of a sum of texts or a passive corpus, the archive according to Foucault is “immanently productive” and operates as that “which differentiates discourses in their multiple existence and specifies them in their own duration34”. Rather than comforting our sense of subjectivity and history, it disturbs it : its locus is the gap between our own discursive practices. […] it deprives us of our continuities ; it dissipates that temporal identity in which we are pleased to look at ourselves when we wish to exorcise the discontinuities of history; it breaks the thread of transcendental teleologies […] it […] bursts open the other, and the outside35. 22 Thus, far from merely recovering a discourse on the forgotten and recovered origin, Foucault conceives of the archive as a “dispersion that we are and make36”. It might thus be argued that Century Ireland implements this discourse on the archive by conferring to it the dimension of affect, or life, or vitality.
23 Significant material objects in the Rising are referenced by Lisa Godson and Joanna Brück in the section devoted to material culture: “Among the objects associated with the Easter Rising, the most iconic include uniforms, flags and the Proclamation of the Irish Republic37.” But it should be noted that in this case, the archive does not stand merely as historical evidence38. Instead, these objects embody and perform the Rising by allowing to bring the public in contact or to connect their individual “flow” with other entities and stories, in keeping with Bruno Latour’s theory of the social as “associations” and “complex and dynamic connections” – rather than as a “special part of reality”, a projection, a passive entity39. The platform makes visible the changing perception of symbols of the rebellion and enables the forging of connections between humans and objects with, and across media. 24 More importantly, what is recreated is “actual / carnal connections through the virtual40” as Lisa Blackman writes in Immaterial Bodies, disputing the aloofness of the web-user as mere flâneur. For example, the digital user of the Century Ireland platform is able to relate to short pieces of material information (News in Brief: “Recipes for wives and maids: Fish fritters41”). If there is time, she/he might alternatively opt for extensive analyses (“Focus”) or dwell on the context with the “Themes42”. She/he may also choose to pass on a particular event or conversely, to engage with the specificity of an archived piece through lesson plans for Junior cycle students, where archival material such as the half-copy of the Proclamation and visual art works relevant to the period43 are referenced. 25 Interactivity is key here. A constellation of media is made accessible through the website itself. The user might review opinions aired on Twitter, where questions are raised regarding how we engage with material that is no longer there, starting with merely rhetorical questions: (“1916 Easter Rising Bolands Mills long gone, how do we
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remember and forget revolutions?” #UCD1916 @ucdarchaeology); and moving towards more focused discussions of social conditions then and now (“#UCD1916 the absence of any women's names in Yeats poem reflected the male dominant cultural discourse – something that is changing in 2016”). Other tweets might start discussions on the by- products of the commemoration, or about the re-materialization of what is no longer there. 26 Archives trickle into the everyday: “Commemorative stamps are out #witnesshistory #EasterRising @ireland2016 @Postvox- But do you like them? Right people?” Immaterial and non-visual information thus circulates. Similarly, on the Century Ireland website, the recollection process of the death of 16-year-old Mary Redmond starts with a song and goes on with the voices of interviewees at Glasnevin Cemetery, recalling how the girl was killed by a random bullet on her doorstep. Such assemblages of sound, story and place has the user re-imagine the relationships and the boundaries. The platform gives us an opportunity to think in terms of intensities, not just in terms of binaries, “us and them”, “then and now” because it shows processes and encounters and emphasizes “thresholds and tensions, blends and blurs44” rather than fixity. This is exemplified by the release of records by the Dublin Metropolitan Police or of testimonies presented in the RTÉ History Show: 1916 Eyewitness Accounts from the National Folklore Collection45. Mimetic communication entails an emotional contagion, a circulation between bodies which leads into “more immediate, visceral, non- intentional ways in which bodies are conscripted by media technologies46”, Lisa Blackman writes. 27 Ubiquitous and shared authorship also denotes the point where “the extraordinary is now also the ordinary – the myth is also the everyday47”. The digital platform indeed conveys positive knowledge by offering new contents from the DRI (Digital Repository of Ireland), but something happens that also creates new entanglements. And this, Vierkant argues, is one of the challenges of change the post-Internet era : The goal of organizing appropriated cultural objects after the Internet cannot be simply to act as a didactic ethnographer but to present microcosms and create propositions for arrangements or representational strategies which have not yet been fully developed. Taking a didactic stance amounts to perpetuating a state of affairs of art positioned in contradiction to an older one-to-many hierarchy of mass media48. 28 By making incursions into ways of articulating new relationships and new objects (archived voices and testimonies, everyday stories and objects, the city or nation then and now) the platform enhances potentialities and unlocks the door to creativity. The website triggers intergenerational and aesthetic connections. For this not just a “mature” affair involving adults: the stories of children and older civilians are acknowledged through archives, whether as suppressed lives or voices, refuting the idea that the Rising was a rather small and absurd affair. Indeed on the community’s level, it was not. Connections between the members of a family and relatives were reactivated during the commemorations. Most notably, this is the case of the series of YouTube videos produced by RTÉ for Century Ireland, which involved relatives of individuals who took part in the Rising, either on the rebels’ side or as police49. Another effect of the website was to bridge the gap between the younger “digital natives” who “see digital technologies as the primary mediators of human-to-human connections” and their parents who are often seen as “digital immigrants50”.
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29 The impact and the effect of forgotten voices from the past is substantial and it means that Century Ireland avoids being utterly haptic. It succeeds in addressing “the way in which affects, trauma, forms of shames and so forth are communicated intergenerationally51”. Sociologist Vikki Bell has stressed elsewhere the importance of “‘generational carnal connection52”, while Paul Connerton has emphasized the importance of “relationships which are transmitted by mediums and practices other than the speaking subject: this might include film, television, photographs, fiction and less inscribed, more embodied practices of remembering53”. 30 Another modality of the circulation of the archive is the creative form taken by The Sackville Street Art Project, which proposes to symbolically commemorate some of the 262 dead civilian dead through the creation of 3-D houses evocative of their lives54. The community-based artistic project aimed to create actual, not virtual objects in the form of personalized “houses” symbolizing lost innocent lives. The guidelines for potential artists might come across as slightly disturbing however, because they require that an individual or a group “pick a dead civilian” – much in the way that classrooms were made to support a (live) soldier in the 1914, or “marraines de guerre” (war godmothers) wrote to men in the trenches to boost their morale in France. The archival dimension is still at the heart of the project and attests to its legitimacy, but it also allows to expand into an individual reading of the events. 31 Another instance of this would be The Little Museum’s “Little Stories, Little Prints” project, part of the 1916 Commemorative Visual Arts Project through Printmaking, which first went on display at the Ireland Funds Gallery, January 16-25, 201655. The prints speak of experiences of political and intimate time; of hauntings and ineffable loss, combining the use of online archive with the medium of the (very) “pre-internet” prints, which are also rendered accessible online.
Conclusion
32 Century Ireland thus offers a rich virtual terrain though which issues of transmission and reception are addressed. It allows to assess new ways of dealing with the archives as users, and to consider how we interact and create with them in the age of the post- Internet, where the virtual mode has overwhelmingly become the default approach. While the archival material displayed by the website gives a new lease of life to the Rising as it multiplies the modalities of its visibility. It also opens up onto networks that enable users to relate to the events that are 100 years old, and to relate with others. As media theorists Gane and Beer claim, “The Internet is not simply a playground for self- publicizing individuals, for potentially it is also a site for new virtual communities and perhaps even the emergence of an ‘electronic agora’ […]56”. All this takes archival material into different directions and connects it to new, often personal stories. Upon closer examination, Century Ireland appears to illustrate crucial changes in the public’s approach to digital media and in their awareness of seamless connections between archive, networks, life and affect.
33 The platform avoids the obstacle of sticking with politically correct compassion and shifts towards a more ethically elevated perception of the Rising. This new perspective is in keeping with Lauren Berlant’s statement that “To be moved by the suffering of some others (the ‘deserving’ poor, the innocent child, the injured hero), is also to be elevated into a place that remains untouched by other others (whose suffering cannot be
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converted into my sympathy or admiration)57.” Countering the assumption that the new media age is one of “me-centered” individuals, Century Ireland, with its wealth of entries and material, fuels compassion, sympathy and aesthetic creation. It evidences the vitality of a combined reflexivity on Irish history, its commemoration, as well as its creative restitution.
Figure 1 : Century Ireland website, screenshot of the April 1916/2016 edition.
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Figure 2 : Screenshot of @CenturyIRL. Twitter account.
Figure 3.1 : Screenshot of the G.P.O interactive image. Dublin Rising, Google virtual tour [https:// dublinrising.withgoogle.com]
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Figure 3.2. : “The destroyed Liberty Hall building being viewed from modern day O'Connell Bridge” [https://dublinrising.withgoogle.com/welcome/]
NOTES
1. Nicholas Gane, David Beer, New Media : The Key Concepts, London, New York, New Delhi, Sydney, Bloomsbury (2008), 2012, p. 55. 2. Ibid. 3. “‘Inspiring Ireland 1916: Weaving Public and Private Narratives’ uses fascinating objects – digitized photos, diaries, posters, aural recordings, video, and ephemera – to tell the stories that surround the Rising, and paint a picture of everyday lives in 1916. Combining expert narrative with iconic objects from the National Archives of Ireland, the National Library of Ireland, the National Museum of Ireland and RTÉ Archives alongside ‘found’ objects from private collections, Inspiring Ireland 1916 creates a dynamic, multi-media reflection on the people, events, and legacy of 1916.” See [http:// dri.ie/launch-inspiring-ireland-1916](last accessed January 11, 2017). 4. The website’s guide to deposit the archives stipulates “Assess your collection in terms of DRI’s remit and collection policy. Our collection policy will provide you with an overview of the types of data, digital assets and collections which the Digital Repository of Ireland aims to preserve. You should also review the file formats, metadata and the copyright status of your collection. If your research involves people, you should also review the DRI Restricted Data policy.” [http://www.dri.ie/about/ guide-to-deposit](last accessed June 26, 2017). 5. “Inspiring Ireland 1916 – Public Memorabilia” [https://repository.dri.ie/catalog/ 1c18df827], and Letters of 1916.
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6. Nicholas Gane, David Beer, New Media…, op. cit., p. 11. 7. Lev Manovich (The Language of New Media, Cambridge, MA., MIT Press, 2001, p. 70), cited by N. Gane, D. Beer, New Media…, op. cit., p. 56. 8. By acknowledging this “un-reality”, one is also authorized to question more generally the traditional idiom of culture. Indeed the inherent risk of a website is that it might be seen as “filtering” mediation or as potentially manipulating, or culturally homogenizing. 9. Mike Featherstone (“Archive”, in Theory Culture, and Society, 23, (2-3), 591-6, 594), quoted by David Beer in Popular Culture and New Media: The Politics of Circulation, Basingstoke, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, Kindle Version, p. 47. 10. D. Beer, Popular Culture and New Media…, p. 47. 11. Ibid., p. 52. 12. Ibid., p. 62. 13. “The term affective labor”… grasps “the corporeal and intellectual aspects of the new forms of production, recognizing that such labor engages at once with rational intelligence and with the passions or feeling” (Jennifer Pybus in Ken Hillis and Susanna Paasonen and Michael Petit (eds.) Networked Affect, Cambridge, Massachusetts, The MIT Press, 2015, p. 7). 14. « Century Ireland is produced by a team of researchers at Boston College Ireland and the project is funded by the Department of the Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht. » The team includes historians Mike Cronin, Mark Duncan and Paul Rouse as well as several scientific advisors like Catríona Crowe, Head of Special Projects at the National Archives of Ireland. See http://www.rte.ie/centuryireland/index.php/about-century- ireland/ (last accessed November 7 2017). 15. Lev Manovich, Ibid., in N. Gane and D. Beer, p. 59. 16. [ https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/beta/project/easter-rising-1916] (last accessed June 26, 2017). 17. Here is an example of what the app proposes to explore: “The destroyed Liberty Hall building being viewed from modern day O'Connell Bridge. […] There are even digital copies of significant documents relating to the location and audio recordings of eyewitness accounts. For example, stop four on the tour brings users to Dublin Castle and City Hall where the first fatalities of the Rising died, Constable James O’Brien and Captain Seán Connolly. One of the most valuable accounts of these deaths is Helena Molony, one of the rebels who went to take the castle. “Dublin Rising 1916-2016” allows users click on an actor’s rendition of her testimony as they look at the scene as it exists today.” See [https://dublinrising.withgoogle.com/about/ ] (Lastaccessed Jan 11, 2017). 18. Katherine Hayles, How We became Posthuman : Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics, Chicago, Chicago U.P., 1999, p. 29. 19. Ibid., p. 49. 20. N. Gane, D. Beer, New Media…, op. cit., p. 13 (referencing Hayles, ibid.) 21. Lawrence Grossberg, “Affect’s Future”, in The Affect Theory Reader, p. 310. 22. Ibid., p. 313.
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23. From a Latourian perspective, this is Actor-Network Theory, where “actors” refers not to individual intention and action, but to the co-presence and relations of entities of all kinds (human, animal, neither). See Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford, OUP, 2007) and An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence (Cambridge, Harvard UP, 2014). In Karen Barad’s terms, such exchanges and transformations are called entanglements. See Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham and London, Duke UP, 2007) and Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of how Matter comes to Matter”, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, University of Chicago, Vol. 28. No. 3, p 801-831, 2003. 24. Theo Dorgan, “To Rise Again, Revising the Rising”, Études Irlandaises : L’Irlande et la république, passée présente et à venir/Ireland’s Republic Past, Present and Future (eds. Clíona Ní Riordán and Karin Fischer), vol. 41, no. 2, 2016, p. 137. 25. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (eds.) The Affect Theory Reader, Durham and London, Duke U.P., 2010, p. 1. 26. Gregg and Seigworth (eds.), The Affect Theory Reader, p. 1. 27. Ibid., p. 9. 28. See Artie Vierkant, “The Image Object Post-Internet”, 2010, PDF, [ http:// jstchillin.org/artie/pdf/The_Image_Object_Post-Internet_us.pdf.] The term calls for further explanation : coined in 2009 by artist Marisa Olson, it has been applied mostly to art but it may be expanded to cultural objects. Vierkant situates it between two artistic and more broadly, two cultural modes, while insisting that the “post-Internet” is not a discrete moment. On the one hand “New Media Art” [in the late 1990s] was focused on the materiality of the media and the “specific workings of novel technologies rather than a sincere exploration of cultural shifts in which that technology plays only a small role”. On the other, “Conceptualist Art” [initiated in the 1960s] ignored the physical substrate “in favor of disseminating the artwork as image, context, or instruction” – and did so by examining the work’s reception through language (within and around it). In other words, the materiality of the technology and its conceptual potential have tended to be examined separately.(See also Hito Seyerl, “Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?” [http://www.e-flux.com/journal/49/60004/ too-much-world-is-the-internet-dead/] (Last accessed January 12, 2017). Further reading in Domenico Quaranta, “Internet State of Mind: Where can Medium Specificity Be Found in Digital Art ?” p. 426 in Lauren Cornell and Ed Halter, Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the Twenty-First Century, Cambridge, Massachusetts, The MIT Press, 2015). 29. Domenico Quaranta, “Internet State of Mind: Where can Medium Specificity Be Found in Digital Art?”, p. 426 in Lauren Cornell and Ed Halter, Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the Twenty-First Century, Cambridge, Massachusetts, The MIT Press, 2015. 30. Sarah Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 2nd edition, New York, Routledge, 2014, p. 210. (Italics in original). 31. Ibid., p. 210. 32. “For Massumi”, Sara Ahmed writes, “if affects are pre-personal and non- intentional, emotions are personal and intentional; if affects are unmediated and escape signification; emotions are mediated and contained by signification.” (in Ahmed, p. 207).
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33. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, New York, Vintage, 1982, p. 130 34. Jennifer Pybus quoting Foucault, in “Accumulating Affect: Social Networks and Their Archives of Feelings”, in Ken Hillis, Susanna Paasonen, Michael Petit (eds.), Networked Affect, Cambridge, Massachusetts, The MIT Press, 2015, p. 239. 35. M. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge…, op. cit., p. 131. 36. Ibid. 37. [ http://www.rte.ie/centuryireland/index.php/articles/material-culture-and-1916] (last accessed Jan 11, 2017). 38. Ibid.: “Now museum collections are being used to tell different histories. Although museums in Northern Ireland tended to avoid the topic of the Rising from its foundation through the ‘Troubles’, a Christmas card (designed by George Irvine, a Protestant and member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood) recently acquired by Fermanagh County Museum is one of a variety of items relating to the Rising that provide opportunities for difficult, contentious and complex histories to be addressed. Here, the power of objects lies not in their use as ‘evidence’ but as pivots around which different understandings of the Rising can be explored and discussed.” 39. N. Gane, D. Beer, New Media…, op. cit., p. 31. Latour says that “What is important in the word network is the word work. You need work in order to make the connection”. 40. See Lisa Blackman, Immaterial Bodies: Affect, Embodiment, Mediation, Thousand Oaks, Calif., Sage Publications Ltd., 2012, p. 67. 41. [ http://www.rte.ie/centuryireland/index.php/blog/recipes-for-wives-and-maids- fish-fritters] (last accessed January 11, 2017). 42. These thematic approaches might concern Gallipoli, Sir Roger Casement, The Battle of the Somme or the Lockout, which open up onto online exhibits of their own. 43. [ http://www.rte.ie/centuryireland/index.php/articles/lesson-plan-national- gallery-of-ireland] (last accessed January 11, 2017). 44. Gregg and Seigworth, The Affect Theory Reader, p. 4. 45. [ http://www.rte.ie/centuryireland/index.php/listen/rte-the-history-show-dublin- metropolitan-police-files] and [http://www.rte.ie/centuryireland/index.php/listen/ rte-history-show-1916-eyewitness-accounts-from-the-national-folklore-collec] (last accessed January 11, 2017). 46. L. Blackman, Immaterial Bodies…, op. cit., p. 18. 47. A. Vierkant, “The Image-Object Post-Internet…”, op. cit. 48. Ibid. 49. The programme “1916 Primetime Special: Was the Rising Justified?” was presented by David McCullagh and Miriam O'Callaghan from the GPO. Broadcast 23 March 2016. “Part 1 features a report by Barry Cummins in which he explores the background to the Rising with contributions from historians and the families of Volunteers, policemen and British soldiers including Dr Fearghal McGarry, Prof. Charles Townsend, Prof. Diarmaid Ferriter, Ruth Dudley Edwards.” [https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=BtW1YXfsCZI] (last accessed June 26, 2017). 50. J. Pybus, Networked Affect…, op. cit., p. 215. 51. L. Blackman, Immaterial Bodies…, op. cit., p. xx.
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52. Cited by L. Blackman, p. xx (quoting V. Bell, Culture and Performance, The Challenge of Ethics, Politics and Feminist Theory, Oxford, Berg, 2007). 53. L. Blackman, p. xx. (citing P. Connerton, How Societies Remember. Cambridge, CUP, 1989). 54. See [http://1916sackvillestreet.com/] (last accessed Jan 11, 2017): “Welcome to the 1916 Sackville Street Art Project. Ireland is on the eve of a significant anniversary that is the centenary of the proclamation of the Irish Republic. There were more civilians killed during the 1916 Easter Rising than British Soldiers or Irish Volunteers. These men, women, and children who were killed have no memorial. They lie in graves in Dublin… some forgotten, until now…” 55. See [http://www.littlestorieslittleprints.com/] (last accessed January 11, 2017). 56. N. Gane, D. Beer, New Media…, op. cit., p. 78. 57. Quoted by S. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, op. cit., p. 192.
ABSTRACTS
The “decade of commemorations” initiated on May 1st, 2013 in Ireland has brought about a wide range of new media projects which aim at remembering events and understanding how ideals are elaborated and how famous or anonymous figures and women, anonymous or not chose to enact them, focusing on the 1913-23 period. This paper examines the Century Ireland website [http:// www.rte.ie/centuryireland/]. It proposes to assess how archival material related to the Rising contributes to the elaboration of an alternative discourse that takes affect and immateriality into account and engages the users of these interfaces.
La « décennie de commémorations » qui a été initiée en 2013 en Irlande a fait émerger de nombreux projets sur le web. Ils ont pour objectif de se souvenir et de comprendre comment se sont mobilisés les idéaux d’hommes et de femmes connu(e)s ou anonymes durant la période 1913-23. Cet article s’intéresse au site web Century Ireland [http://www.rte.ie/centuryireland/]. Il s’intéresse au glissement qui s’opère depuis les archives matérielles du soulèvement de 1916 vers une histoire alternative du soulèvement qui prend en compte l’affect et l’immatériel et implique les utilisateurs des interfaces.
INDEX
Mots-clés: 1916, Soulèvement de 1916, Century Ireland.ie, étude numérique, archive, théorie de l’affect, post-Internet Keywords: 1916, The Rising, Century Ireland.ie, digital studies, archives, affect theory, Post- Internet
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AUTHOR
ANNE GOARZIN
Université Rennes 2
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Gothic and Noir: the Genres of the Irish Contemporary Fiction of “Containment”
Sylvie Mikowski
1 In 2010, writing about Anne Enright’s The Gathering1, Liam Harte expressed his amazement in front of what he called “the continuing proliferation of first-hand accounts of child physical, sexual, and psychological abuse, within Irish families as well as within the state’s network of industrial schools”, as well as “the plethora of recent films, plays, art works, and autobiographies that anatomize Irish childhoods from plural perspectives2”. To a certain extent, Harte was providing an answer to Declan Kiberd’s own regrets as to the relative absence, in his opinion, of literary responses to the social changes entailed by the prosperity of the Celtic Tiger3. As a matter of fact Harte’s remark casts light on the reason why Irish artists and writers may have, at least to a certain extent, left aside the portrayal of the effects of the economic boom: they seem to have been far more eager to respond in their own way to the scandals of clerical abuse that broke out in the years 2000. The four official reports published between 2009 – when the Ryan report was made public – and 2011 with the Cloyne report, set in relief the fact that it was not just isolated individuals, but the whole of Irish society who had to suffer the devastating and long-lasting consequences of several decades of generalized child abuse or child neglect, most especially at the hand of clerical orders, with the complicity of the State. The reports were appalling not only because of what they revealed of the nature of the crimes, but most of all because of the sheer scale on which they were committed. The slogan used by the “One in Four” association in the introduction to their newsletter is quite revealing in this regard, claiming: “We want Ireland to move from a society where one in four is sexually abused, to a society where nobody is abused4.” Such widely-spread and long-lasting victimization was bound to take on the dimension of a collective trauma, to be compared in its consequences to a war, a natural disaster, a revolution or a dictatorship. Artists with their heightened sensitivity were prone to perceive those effects more clearly, more acutely and more readily than politicians, journalists, critics
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or even sociologists. In this regard, their role in society is comparable to that of whistle-blowers. Enright’s 2007 The Gathering is a case in point, and it has often been analyzed through the critical lens of trauma studies. Liam Harte for instance in the chapter mentioned above presents the novel as “an attempt to replicate the damaged psyche of the trauma survivor5”; he goes on to argue that The Gathering is “the most searing fictional representation to date of the devastating effects of the trauma of child sexual abuse in Ireland on identity, agency, and relationships, and of the corresponding, profoundly difficult need to counteract silence and forgetting through disclosure”. Sarah C. Gardam supports that opinion and reads the novel as “an exploration of sexual trauma” and simultaneously as “an investigation of the inevitable human trauma of the split subject6”. In Carol Dell’Amico’s words, “Enright’s embedding of traumatic personal and national histories in the testimonial mode constitutes the basis of the novel’s exploration of history’s forms, nature and uses7”.
2 However, Enright was actually not the first Irish writer to tackle the difficult issue of child abuse. As early as 1965, John McGahern already told the same story of sexual trauma in The Dark8. But the novel was written at a time when readers and critics were not prepared to understand it as such. As a result, the immediate consequences for the book and its author were censorship and banishment. Enright’s novel and the critical readings it has entailed have now made it possible to re-consider The Dark not just as an existential quest, as it has often been defined, but as a trauma narrative raising the same issues as The Gathering. The first of those issues is the necessity for writers to devise a narrative mode liable to convey the disorientation, the dislocation of personal identity, and the blurring of the truth engendered by the trauma of child abuse. The other feature of the representation of sexual abuse is the attention it draws to the body in its most repulsive, or rather abject representations. 3 The search for a proper stylistic expression of the trauma of sexual abuse and of the representation of the abject, initiated in its time by McGahern but only clearly recognized by the critics in The Gathering, paved the way for such a novel as Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, published in 2013. Through the experimental form she uses, McBride explores even further the limits of readability in its effort to render the workings of a damaged psyche. According to Dominick La Capra, “the literary (or even art in general) is a prime, if not the privileged, place for giving voice to trauma9”. However, as the very essence of trauma lies in the fact that it cannot be directly represented, artists need to display strategies not straightforwardly referential that can prove appropriate, explaining why, to quote Roger Luckhurst, “The trauma aesthetic is uncompromisingly avant-garde: experimental, fragmented, refusing the consolations of beautiful forms, and suspicious of familiar representational and narrative conventions10”. 4 The avant-garde nature of John McGahern’s writings, which many critics initially failed to distinguish when they labelled him a realist, or even parochial novelist11, has now widely been acknowledged by such commentators as Eamon Maher, Dermot McCarthy, Stanley Van der ziel, or Richard Robinson12. This experimental aesthetics is also recognizable in The Gathering, but it was decidedly taken one step further by Eimear McBride when she resorted to a broken-up, a-grammatical, dislocated syntax all along the narrative of A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing 13. The three narratives have indeed in common their avoidance of “familiar representational and narrative conventions”, as well as their confessional mode.
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5 However, contrary to the theory of trauma narrative as being necessarily avant-garde, the point of this chapter is to analyze Irish narratives of sexual abuse which rely on well-established, traditional tropes and themes. They involve two recognized genres in particular: gothic literature and noir literature. It is my contention that the reason for this affinity between the reality of clerical abuse and its literary representations through gothic or crime fiction lies in the expression used by James M. Smith in the title of his much-acclaimed 2007 book, Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment14. As a matter of fact, Smith had already used the word “containment” in an article published in 2001 entitled “Remembering Ireland’s architecture of containment: ‘telling’ stories in The Butcher Boy and States of Fear 15”. In that earlier article Smith argued that the changes happening in the 1990s and epitomized by the election of Mary Robinson ushered in a new Ireland ready to confront its past and to renegotiate its identity through a new openness to a plurality of stories. Foremost among those stories, according to Smith, were those of institutional abuse, which had so far remained secret through the combined efforts of Church and state. In Smith’s own words, the function of those stories was to “excavate the nation’s architecture of containment16”. Now the awful connotations of the verb “to excavate” bring to mind the appalling discovery made in 2014 of an unmarked graveyard lying behind a former home run by the Roman Catholic Church, where almost 800 children died between 1925 and 1961. The graveyard was discovered in the former grounds of one of Ireland’s “mother-and-baby homes” run by the Bon Secours order of nuns. One minister at the time declared: “How can we show in Ireland that we have matured as a society if we cannot call out these horrific acts of the past for what they were? They were wilful and deliberate neglect of children, who were the most vulnerable of all… The only way we can address that injustice is to tell their story, to determine the truth17.” 6 What is striking in the language used to refer to those revelations is that, although meant to describe facts which were all too real, both Smith’s and the minister’s words are also typical of the lexical field of gothic literature – whether meant as a historical tradition18 or a mode of writing 19; thus the stories which “excavate” the past may remind us of all sorts of horror tales, including the most famous Irish one: Dracula, the undead creature who in order to survive has to carry along through all his travels forty coffins filled with earth20. Likewise, the word “horrific” employed by the minister to describe the burying of hundreds of dead neglected children sounds like an echo of the vocabulary of “horror” proper to the literature of terror. The emphasis placed by Smith on the architecture of institutional abuse is also in keeping with the central role played by a certain kind of landscapes, settings and buildings in Gothic tales, which often revolve around innocent young women locked up in attics, dungeons or ruined castles, sometimes even buried alive or forgotten in lonesome graveyards. According to specialist Chris Baldick, gothic combines “a fearful sense of inheritance in time with a claustrophobic sense of enclosure in space, these two dimensions reinforcing one another to produce an impression of sickening descent into disintegration21”. Writing about Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy in the article mentioned above, James M. Smith demonstrates that the architecture of containment proper to institutional abuse in post-independence Ireland led to the same kind of disintegration, in this case the gradual descent into madness of the novel’s protagonist Francie Brady. However, in my opinion, if Smith does call McCabe’s novel “dark and satiric”22, he overlooks the novel’s narrative strategy and stylistic devices, limiting it to a mere testimony meant to
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“indict” and to “expose” the architecture of containment. Smith goes as far as comparing the fictional Francie Brady to a real-existing case-study, a boy called Brendan O’Donnell; he even draws a parallel between The Butcher Boy and the documentary film “States of Fear”. 7 Contrary to this reading of the novel as a realistic example of institutional abuse, I would like to pinpoint how McCabe’s novel precisely departs from the codes of realist fiction and resorts to the generic features of gothic literature in order to arouse in the reader’s imagination the same type of terror and anxiety produced in their own times by such tales as The Monk, Uncle Silas, “The Fall of the House of Usher”, Frankenstein or Dracula. Although one of the earliest depictions of child-abuse in contemporary Irish fiction, after John McGahern’s The Dark, Patrick McCabe’s 1992 The Butcher Boy is perhaps one of the most unsettling of them all, subverting as it does all sorts of narrative conventions. The opening lines of the novel confront the reader with a voice whose origin cannot easily be placed: “When I was a young lad twenty or thirty or forty years ago I lived in a small town where they were all after me on account of what I done on Mrs Nugent23.” To a certain extent, the narrator’s apparent inability to situate himself in time echoes the fate of so many protagonists of gothic tales who have likewise lost their bearings and for whom time has ceased to flow naturally. A case in point is Jonathan Harker who anxiously confides in his diary that he has become unable to distinguish between night and day or to tell how much time has elapsed since his imprisonment in Dracula’s castle. The opening line of The Butcher Boy also suggests the character’s paranoid streak, as he claims to have been pursued by everybody – “they were all after me” –. This reads like another echo of the plight of many gothic protagonists who rightfully or not feel they are persecuted by evil forces, such as Charles Maturin’s Melmoth, or Reverend Jennings in Sheridan Le Fanu’s story “Green Tea”. However one of the most disturbing questions raised by the narrative strategy devised by McCabe is to decide whether Francie embodies what French critic Joel Malrieux calls “the phenomenon24”, or if he plays the role of the victim of the traditional gothic tale. 8 Indeed on the one hand, Francie’s ability to modulate his voice and to impersonate the various characters he comes across, whether real or imaginary, suggests an uncanny capacity to morph into whatever shape he chooses, and even to take possession of other people’s bodies, the way vampires and other monstrous creatures do. The most monstrous aspect of his character is of course the horrific murder he commits when he kills Mrs Nugent with a butcher’s knife usually meant to slaughter pigs, then rips her stomach open and guts her innards the way you do with a slaughtered animal. On the other hand, we also discover that Francie was brought up in a dysfunctional family, by a father who was himself an orphan, who took to drinking and finally abandoned his family. As to Francie’s mother, after years of depression, she ended up committing suicide. Even though an orphan, Francie is let down by the village community, and by the state and church institutions supposed to look after such vulnerable individuals as himself. They place him in a reformatory school, which Francie calls “the house of a hundred windows25”. The obvious exaggeration regarding the number of windows, besides calling forth the boy’s distorted view of reality, draws attention to the threatening aspect of the building itself, a typical trope of many gothic narratives whose plot revolves around such fearful locations, such as Count Dracula’s castle, or Uncle Silas’s mansion where Le Fanu’s female narrator is also trapped. The phrase also calls to mind the correspondence between the architectural design of an institutional
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building and its repressive, corrective, even destructive function, evidenced by Michel Foucaut in Surveiller et Punir26. Not only is Francie locked up in that institution like the typical prisoner of gothic tales, but once inside he is also assaulted by a paedophile priest, himself reminiscent of the lecherous clerical figures who populate gothic narratives. 9 However, despite Francie’s obvious sufferings, McCabe makes the persecuted become a persecutor, suggesting how even though himself a victim of abject treatment, the boy comes to incarnate the part of itself that society finds revolting and seeks to eliminate. Through the definition she gives of abjection in Power of Horror27, Julia Kristeva reminds us that all societies rely on a number of purifying rituals28: likewise, Francie, because he comes from a poor, damaged family, embodies the archaism, unruliness, disorder and uncleanliness that a modernising Ireland wants to repress through a process of abjection. McCabe’s butcher boy is also a reincarnation of the gothicised child of 19th century Victorian literature, the uncanny or monstrous child. According to Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben in their introduction to Neo-Gothic: Horror, Violence and Degeneration in the Re-Imagined Nineteenth Century, the monstrous child becomes even more prevalent in neo-Victorian fiction, and “does so as the after-image of horrific historical traumas (for example slavery, child prostitution and racism)29”. In the case of Ireland, it is quite obvious that the traumatic past of which Francie is the after-image is institutional child abuse, the memory of which was repressed but keeps reappearing in a nightmarish fashion. 10 Dermot Bolger, who in his first novel The Journey Home described his youthful protagonists as the “children of limbo30”, also revives and re-appropriates some of the tropes of gothic fiction in his novel A Second Life, a first version of which was published in 1993 in the wake of the revelations regarding the Mother and Baby homes and the Magdalene Asylums, and that he “renewed”, as he puts it, in 2010. The title itself harks back to the theme of the double which looms so large in gothic literature. Indeed, the protagonist Sean, as an adopted child, has a double identity which returns to haunt him after he goes through a near-death experience as a consequence of a car-crash. Despite the deep coma he falls in, Sean survives the accident and therefore resurrects as it were from the dead. While unconscious, he is visited by the vision of a young man’s face, a sort of Doppelgänger returning from the distant past. Haunted by the image of that face, Sean undertakes a frenetic search through the archives of the Botanic Garden, where he was taken for walks as a child. He finally discovers that the face was probably that of a 19th century gardener living at the time of the Famine, of whom he may possibly be a reincarnation. The story is also double in the sense that Bolger alternates Sean’s narrative with that of his birth mother, who still thinks of him as Francis, has been living in England for almost thirty years, and who experiences a sort of telepathic warning of her son’s accident. According to Freud in his famous essay on the Uncanny31, the fear aroused by the reappearance of a familiar object under the traits of its unfamiliar double must be assigned to the return of what the unconscious has repressed. The traumatic truth that was thus repressed and silenced in Sean’s case revolves around the circumstances of his birth: how his mother was taken by force into a Mother and Child Home to deliver her baby, how it was taken away from her at birth and given out for adoption. Sean’s mother never told anyone, not even her husband and daughters, about the existence of that first child; when she sought information about her son’s fate, the Church administration denied her the right to know of his whereabouts. In the present time of the narrative, Sean has to dig into a series of family
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and state secrets when he decides to investigate his real origins. With a good deal of irony, Bolger highlights the clash between a postmodern, ultra-liberal Ireland, and its archaic history of gothic violence, terror and repression towards women and children, in a scene where Sean goes to visit the convent where his mother was locked up in the 1950s. Indeed, the convent has now been transformed into a high-profile school for girls, the ancient delivery ward has been rehabilitated into a brand new science laboratory, and the school boasts several national science awards and two women TDs as former students. The burial plot where the women who died in child birth and the stillborn children were buried had to be excavated and the bodies cremated so as to build a new extension for the school. Bolger thus suggests that the new Ireland was literally built upon the forgotten ruins and bones of those women and children who were abused and neglected in the past, and how the traces of their existence were erased as much as possible. That constitutes an example of what Paul Ricœur in his book Memory History Forgetting calls “forgetting through the effacing of traces 32”. Conversely, when Sean confronts the nuns with this now invisible past, they claim what Ricœur calls “the right to forgetfulness”. But Ricoeur argues that there is a thin line between amnesty and amnesia and that the injunction to forget is a sure way of depriving private and collective memory of “the necessary crisis of identity which makes a lucid re-appropriation of the past and of its traumatic significance possible33”. 11 Like McCabe and Bolger, Sebastian Barry in his 2008 novel The Secret Scripture34 borrows the themes and tropes of gothic literature to emphasise the forced forgetfulness imposed by the Irish State and Church authorities. Presented as a manuscript discovered by chance under the floor boards of an ancient psychiatric hospital about to be renovated- yet another example of a building which comes to stand for a past that everyone wants to destroy and forget about- the protagonist Roseanne’s written self- narrative of her life alternates with the medical and personal notes taken down by her psychiatrist Dr Grene. Barry thus reactivates a narrative device proper to several gothic tales, that of the allegedly “real” manuscript, used for example by Le Fanu in The Purcell Papers, Edgar Allan Poe in Manuscript Found in a Bottle, or by Stoker in Dracula, in order to enhance the prevailing importance of the archive. On the other hand, the device also draws attention to the sheer textuality of the past, which comes to us only in the shape of narratives, and is therefore always open to questioning, and denial, as suggested by the epilogue to Stoker’s Dracula : “We were struck with the fact, that in all the mass of material of which the record is composed, there is hardly one authentic document; nothing but a mass of type-writing35.” Roseanne has been living in the hospital for an indefinite period of time. Incarcerated like so many gothic heroines for her alleged insanity, she embodies an Irish version of the madwoman in the attic, for the only reason that she gave birth to an illegitimate child. Like many gothic heroines too, it was a Catholic priest who first persecuted her and finally obtained to have her institutionalised. Like Sean’s mother in Bolger’s novel, her child was taken away from her and given out to adoptive parents. Dr Grene, who may embody the rational scientist in search of the truth and in this regard comparable to Dr Seward in Dracula or to Dr Hesselius in LeFanu’s In a Glass Darkly, starts an inquiry on Roseanne’s past. As he tries to retrace her story through documents and archives, he eventually discovers he is the very son that Roseanne had to abandon at birth. This melodramatic plot development, to which gothic fiction frequently resorts to as well, comes after Roseanne has reported several violent, horrific incidents in her life, equally proper to melodrama. She thus recalls the secret burial of an IRA soldier in the cemetery of which Roseanne’s father
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was the keeper, or a fire started by the same father in a girls’ orphanage while he was trying to burn rats to death, an incident which caused him to commit suicide by hanging. Roseanne’s narrative repeatedly recurs to the traditional lexical field of the literature of terror, as in: “It was then the horror of horrors happened36”, “I had never seen such terror37”, “Terror rose in me from the cold flags of the floor38”, “I was frightened, I was terrified of this house39.” Through Roseanne’s story, which spans over several decades, from the Irish War of Independence to the present, Barry suggests that it is Irish history itself, with its hidden crimes, horrible secrets and forgotten victims, which is the gothic nightmare par excellence, as is made obvious in the following phrases: “In a country of cupboards, every one with a skeleton in it, especially after the civil war, no one was exempt40”, or “The savage fairy-tale of life in Ireland in the twenties and thirties41”, or again : “the strange chapters of this country’s bewildering story42”. 12 Like McCabe, Bolger and Barry, John Banville has contributed to the writing of a chapter of the moral history of his country, to paraphrase James Joyce’s famous claim43, and he too chose genre fiction to write it. Writing under the pen-name of Benjamin Black, but exposing the sham at the same time by having his real name printed on the book cover, Banville has so to speak been using his own Doppelgänger to indulge in crime fiction, creating the recurring character of Quirke, a pathologist turned sleuth. There is in fact a direct lineage between gothic and noir, as is evidenced by Edgar Allan Poe creating the character of Inspector Dupin, or Wilkie Collins mixing investigation and anguish in The Moonstone. However, John Banville declared in several interviews that it was his discovery of Georges Simenon which aroused his desire to experiment with crime fiction. On the other hand, one of his most recent publication under the name of Black is subtitled A Philip Marlowe Novel 44, showing fiction’s eerie capacity to resurrect characters abandoned by their dead creators. A number of critics have remarked that Banville had already written about crime in his supposedly “serious” novels such as The Book of Evidence 45. Yet Banville had also always displayed a strong reluctance to be labelled an “Irish” writer writing about Irish matters, contrary to what he started doing in the Benjamin Black novels. Situated in the Dublin of the 1950s, their plots quite obviously rely upon the 1990s revelations about the collusion of State and Church in institutional abuse. Of course it is impossible to decide whether Banville wanted to write crime fiction in the first place and discovered in such real documents as the Ryan and Murphy reports the right material he needed to spark his inspiration; or if he wanted to write about the scandals and chose the genre of crime fiction in order to do so. The fact remains that the features of noir fiction are especially well- suited to the recreation of the atmosphere of secrecy, degeneration and corruption that hovered about State and Church activities in 1950s Ireland. In the same way as Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammet or James M. Cain described Los Angeles as a vicious and savage urban jungle deprived of spiritual values, and the large city generally speaking as symbolic of sterile modernity, corruption, and death, Benjamin Black uses Dublin as the grimy, dark, gloomy backdrop to his character’s investigations. The character of Quirke, a lonely, melancholy man who stands on the fringes of high society and is thus able to watch its customs and uncover its secrets, is typical of the marginalised, rough-tempered but honest and dedicated private eye, in the manner of Chandler’s Philip Marlowe or Hammet’s Sam Spade. Like them too Quirke figures a modern avatar of the avenging knight or of the frontier cow boy, whose quest for truth and justice is motivated by a troubled past. Indeed we discover in the course of the
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series of novels that Quirke himself was an orphan who grew up in several institutions, including an industrial school located by the sea-side, perhaps inspired by Letterfrack Industrial School in County Galway. Quirk’s job as a pathologist leads him to literally make dead bodies reveal their secrets, another echo of the excavation of the past mentioned above. In the absence of reliable archives, documents or traces, proper to the criminal activities of the Catholic Church in the institutions it was running, the pathologist turned investigator has to gather and decipher all kinds of clues. The very name of his occupation also draws attention to the pathologies that he strives to bring to light, and which extend to the whole of society. Indeed Quirke like Marlowe or Spade is not only interested in solving a mysterious murder, but seeks to stand up against the political corruption of his country. The plots of Benjamin Black’s novels always criss- cross the upper-class world made up of judges, wealthy industrials, high-profile politicians, with that of the catholic clergy with its typical lot of lecherous or dangerous-looking priests and tyrannical nuns, residing in isolated, enclosed institutions. The unravelling of the mystery generally exposes crimes of child abuse, incest, or child trafficking, together with the imprisonment and the enslavement of women in the Magdalene asylums. However the resolution of the mystery at the end of the novels matters less than the creation of a heavy atmosphere of suspicion and danger, where evil, pain and death lurk everywhere. The denouement generally fails to cleanse the city of its corruption, as the political power of those who manipulate the strings backstage is not broken in the end, as is the case also in Dashiel Hammet’s Red Harvest46 for instance. The ubiquity of evil which permeates the world is reminiscent of the ethos and aesthetics of American southern Gothicism such as illustrated by William Faulkner, whose Temple Drake may have been an inspiration for Quirke’s daughter Phoebe, especially in the episode of Christine Falls47 where she is assaulted by a driver in the same way as Temple is in Sanctuary.
Conclusion
13 As a conclusion, we may recall Terry Eagleton’s argument to explain the amazing predominance of Irish gothic literature at the end of the 18th and all through the 19th century: “Violent, criminal, priest-ridden, autocratic, full of mouldering ruins and religious fanaticism, it was a society ripe for Gothic treatment, having much of that literary paraphernalia conveniently to hand48.” To that theory Eagleton added the extra implication that Irish gothic was mostly the work of Anglo-Irish members of the Protestant Ascendancy, assigning this trend to what he called “the political unconscious of Anglo-Irish society49”. The 1990s revelations about institutional child abuse in Ireland revealed the same combination of violence and crime, covered up by a similar alliance of religious fanaticism and autocratic state power as in the late 18th and in the 19th centuries. It gave rise in the late 20th and early 21st centuries to a new wave of gothic and noir literature, all at the hands of Catholic writers this time, engaged in the same task of violently expressing the return of the repressed and using the same tropes and themes to do so as their predecessors.
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NOTES
1. Anne Enright, The Gathering, London, Jonathan Cape, 2007. 2. Liam Harte, Reading the Contemporary Irish Novel 1987-2007, Oxford, Wiley-Blackwell, 2014, p. 22. 3. Declan Kiberd, The Irish Writer and the World, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 278. 4. Source: http://www.oneinfour.ie/ (Last accessed November 7 2017). 5. Liam Harte, Reading the Contemporary Irish Novel 1987-2007, op. cit., p. 223 6. Sarah C. Gardam, “Default(ing) to the Oldest Scar: A Psychoanalytical Investigation of Subjectivity in Anne Enright’s The Gathering”, Études irlandaises n o 34.1, Printemps 2009, p. 100. 7. Carol Dell’Amico,”Anne Enright’s The Gathering: Trauma, Testimony, Memory”, New Hibernian Review, vol.14, no 3, Autumn 2010, p. 59-73. 8. John McGahern, The Dark, London, Faber & Faber, 1965. 9. Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University, 2001, p. 190. 10. Roger Luckhurst, The Trauma Question, London, Routledge, 2008, p. 81. 11. See in particular Rüdiger Imhof, Contemporary Irish Writers, Tübingen, Günter Naar Verlag, 1990. 12. Eamon Maher, John McGahern, From the Local to the Universal, Dublin, The Liffey Press, 2003; Dermot McCarthy, John McGahern and the Art of Memory, London and Bern, Peter Lang, 2010; Stanley Van der ziel, John McGahern and the Imagination of Tradition, Cork, Cork University Press, 2016; Richard Robinson, John McGahern and Modernism, London, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016. 13. Eimear McBride, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, London, Faber & Faber, 2013. 14. James M. Smith, Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment, Notre Dame (Ind.), University of Notre Dame Press, 2007. 15. James M. Smith, “Remembering Ireland’s architecture of containment: ‘telling’ stories in The Butcher Boy and ‘States of Fear’”, Eire-Ireland: Journal of Irish Studies, Fall- Winter, 2001. 16. Ibid., p.111-130. 17. The Telegraph, “Ireland considers inquiry into mass grave of children at Catholic Church home”, 4 June 2014, [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ ireland/10875876/Ireland-considers-inquiry-into-mass-grave-of-children-at-Catholic- Church-home.html] (Last accessed November 7 2017). 18. As Fred Botting or David Punter would have it. 19. In the sense used by Christina Morin and Niall Gillespie in Irish Gothics : Genres, Forms, Modes, and Traditions, 1760-1890, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 20. Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897). Chapter XVIII “Dr Seward’s Diary”. 21. Chris Baldick, The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009, p. XIX.
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22. James M. Smith, Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries…, op. cit., p. 125. 23. Patrick McCabe, The Butcher Boy, London, Picador, 1992, p. 1. 24. Joël Malrieux, Le Fantastique, Paris, Hachette, 1992. 25. Patrick McCabe, The Butcher Boy, op. cit., p. 66. 26. Michel Foucaut, Surveiller et Punir, Paris, Gallimard, 1975. 27. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection, transl.by Leon S. Roudiez, New York, Columbia University Press, 1982. 28. Ibid., p. 90-113. 29. Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben, eds, Neo-Victorian Gothic: Horror, Violence and Degeneration in the Re-Imagined Nineteenth Century, Amsterdam and New York, Rodopi, 2012, p. 13 30. Dermot Bolger, The Journey Home, London, Penguin Books, 1991. 31. Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny (1919), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XVII (1917-1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, p. 217-256. 32. Paul Ricœur, Memory History Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey & David Pellauer, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2009, p. 418. 33. Ibid., p. 460. 34. Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture, London, Faber & Faber, 2008. 35. Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897), New York/ London, Norton critical edition, 1997, p. 326. 36. Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture, op. cit., p. 50 37. Ibid., p. 76. 38. Ibid., p. 111. 39. Ibid., p. 265. 40. Ibid., p. 162. 41. Ibid., p. 142. 42. Ibid., p. 188. 43. James Joyce, Letter to Grant Richards, 20 May 1906; Stuart Gilbert, ed., Letters, Vol. 1, New York, Viking Press p. 63; Richard Ellmann, ed., Selected Letters, Faber 1975, p. 88-89. 44. John Banville, The Black-eyed Blonde:A Philip Marlowe Novel, London, Macamillan, 2014. 45. John Banville, The Book of Evidence, London, Secker and Warburg, 1989. 46. Dashiell Hammet, Red Harvest, New York, Albert A. Knopf Inc., 1929. 47. John Banville, Christine Falls, London, Picador, 2006. 48. Terry Eagleton, Heathcliffe and the Great Hunger, London/New York, Verso, 1995, p. 188. 49. Ibid., p. 187.
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ABSTRACTS
This article argues that the trauma of sexual abuse, particularly child abuse, was represented as early as 1965 in John McGahern’s The Dark, but was only recognized as a major theme in Irish fiction with the publication of Anne Enright’s The Gathering in 2007. Both works, together with Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, display the kind of avant-garde aesthetics that critics generally associate with the representation of trauma. However, other recent Irish novels have represented the trauma of sexual abuse and of institutional containment through tropes and themes proper to two traditional genres, gothic and crime fiction. Such is the case for Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy, Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture, and John Banville’s Benjamin Black novels.
John McGahern fut un des premiers romanciers irlandais à représenter le traumatisme de l’abus sexuel, survenu particulièrement dans l’enfance, dès la publication de The Dark en 1965 ; mais que ce ne fut qu’avec The Gathering de Anne Enright (2007) que ce thème fut reconnu comme majeur dans la fiction contemporaine, comme le montre aussi le roman de Eimear McBride A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing. Or la critique a souvent soutenu l’idée que la représentation du traumatisme dans la littérature passe nécessairement par des formes avant-gardistes. Cet article vise à montrer que, contrairement à cette théorie, plusieurs œuvre romanesques évoquant les scandales sexuels ainsi que la maltraitance institutionnelle, dénoncés en Irlande à partir des années 1990, empruntent leurs procédés à des genres traditionnels, comme la littérature gothique et le roman noir. C’est le cas de The Butcher Boy de Patrick McCabe, de The Secret Scripture de Sebastian Barry, ainsi que des romans de Benjamin Black écrits par John Banville.
INDEX
Mots-clés: The Butcher Boy, A Second Life, The Secret Scripture, The Dark, The Gathering, Benjamin Black, abus sexuels dans la fiction, littérature gothique, roman noir, études sur le traumatisme Keywords: Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy, Dermot Bolger's A Second Life, Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture, John McGahern's The Dark, Anne Enright's The Gathering, Benjamin Black, child abuse in literature, gothic, trauma studies, noir fiction
AUTHOR
SYLVIE MIKOWSKI
Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne
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Singing and Speaking in Louis MacNeice's The Burning Perch
Dominique Delmaire
1 The “lyrical impulse”, which, according to Louis MacNeice himself, had returned with Visitations (1957), was only further confirmed in the subsequent volumes, Solstices (1961) and The Burning Perch (1963) 1. In the latter, the issue of the voice becomes prominent, notably in “Budgie”, the keystone poem of a collection that owes it its title and in which the speaking bird, whose voice is “a small I Am2”, stands in part for the poet struggling with self-expression and communication. The volume's shifting voices – “running on from one thing to the next” in “Soap Suds”, or “wry, civilized, ironic3” in “Memoranda to Horace” – reflect the “many different selves” of an “incorrigibly plural4 ” poet. For all these fluctuations, The Burning Perch may still be regarded as an “attempt at articulating a personal voice5”, a way both “to introduce myself to me” – as MacNeice had put it earlier6 – and to address, and often dialogue with, various real, historical or imagined persons: Mary Wimbush in “To Mary” and “Coda”, the “ladies and gentlemen” of “The Suicide”, the milkman and the airman of “The Pale Panther”, the various trees of “Tree Party”, and many other addressees, such as fellow poet Horace (to whom MacNeice declares, “I would pitch on the offchance/My voice to reach you7”), not to mention, of course, the attentive reader implied in every poem. Thus welcomed and heard by another, the lyrical subject can, as Jean Michel Maulpoix has shown, recognize himself and fully exist8.
2 This lyric voice may sing or speak. “In the days that were early the music came easy”, recalls MacNeice, whose finely tuned ear could distinguish the similarly “easy music” of Blake from the “subtle music” of Yeats’s “little mechanical songs” – as Yeats himself called them – or the “very intricate music” of T. S. Eliot's “The Waste Land9”, owing to “a lifetime’s acuteness of hearing10” which began with early exposure to “the delicate pattern of nursery rhymes” sung by his mother and went on all the way to his reprise of children's rhymes and songs in poems such as “Children’s Games11”. 3 Singing, however, is not, for MacNeice, the be all and end all of poetry. Nursery rhymes themselves are at the same time subtly musical (the very opposite of the “far cruder music” which many adults demand once they have stopped appreciating them) and
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made up of the “running trochees and dactyls of ordinary English speech”; likewise, the “simple notes” of “wellworn tunes” can, in “Off the Peg”, gain “the power of speech12”. Overindulgence in music is, in MacNeice's view, actually often harmful. By dismissing “the pull and thrust of meaning” the poet runs the risk of compromising clarity for the sake of “the music of the verse”, “sacrificing […] thought to music and colour13”. Certainly, as Mladen Dolar has pointed out, singing “brings the voice energetically to the forefront […] at the expense of meaning14”, a danger Socrates was already cautioning against in Plato’s Phaedrus – a reference MacNeice seems to have had in mind when he comments on “the repetitive/Cicadas endors[ing] [Horaces's] sleep after lovemaking” in “Memoranda to Horace15”. Just as Socrates and Phaedrus were at risk of being “lulled to sleep by the locusts’ song because of [their] mental indolence16”, the music of rhyme (“naturally suited to verse which imitates song rather than speech”, as Derek Attridge notes17) may, in MacNeice’s view, “[lull] the reader into a pleasant coma18”. 4 That is why the poet should not just sing, but also speak, “employing all kinds of devices to atone for the lack of the one great asset, which the speakers had and he has not, the tones of the spoken voice19”. MacNeice’s “own preference is for poetry which is musical” but which is also characterized by “(a) system and (b) significance20”. Thought, meaning, communication are all-important. As Peter MacDonald points out about the poet's late work, his “mastery of form” and “extraordinary technical control of phrase and timing” contribute to the reader’s impression of “straightforward speaking – to what MacNeice in the 1930s would have called ‘communication’ [...]21”. 5 MacNeice’s attraction to both music and speech warrants a study of the poetic voice in The Burning Perch in relation to these two poles. In addition, because MacNeice himself advised the “poetry reviewer” to discuss such “points as the relation between a poet’s sentence structure and verse pattern, […] or his variation of stresses”, and because of his own admission that “many of the poems here have been trying to get out of the ‘iambic’ groove which we were all born into22”, one feels emboldened to give this study a markedly rhythmic spin. Accordingly, I shall argue that, as the poetic voice rises to prominence by setting itself off against its metrical environment, it takes on very different characteristics depending on whether this environment is strictly accentual- syllabic, as in some of the pieces in the collection, or more akin to the “dolnik” verse form (a term which will require some elucidation) that colors much of The Burning Perch. 6 Four poems in the volume are in regular tetrameter23: “Château Jackson”, “The Grey Ones”, “Birthright”, and “Greyness is All”. “Château Jackson” begins like this: Where is the Jack that built the house That housed the folk that tilled the field That filled the bags that brimmed the mill That ground the flour that browned the bread That fed the serfs that scrubbed the floors 7 The unrelenting mechanical repetitiveness which it shares with the other three places it in the category of “ictosyIlabic meter, where there is both a primary regulation (of beats) and a secondary one (of the measure)” – that is, of “the number of syIlables between any two ictus within the line24” – without the positional flexibility of beats allowed by more complex meters; this creates what MacNeice calls “the monotonous regularity of well-timed stresses25”, well suited to suggest the inexorability of the fate that man has brought upon himself in the form of quasi-certain nuclear annihilation in
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“Greyness is All” (“Until the final switch is thrown/To black out all the worlds of men26 ”) and other poems of the collection.
8 More importantly, as Groves notes, “the inflexibility of that pattern seems to crush aIl resistance (and thus lifelikeness and interest) out of the language-material”, thus, in Xavier Kalck’s words, “dispossessing the poet of his voice, as if the device of repetition itself took the lead27”. These poems exemplify that “sheer hypnotic force” of which, according to MacNeice, the early twentieth century had become suspicious “on the ground that [it] saves thinking or excuses the lack of thought28”. Neil Corcoran goes further: in his view, “[r]epetition is the realisation of death29”, or as Joseph Attié puts it, “mortiferous”, because it “can endlessly repeat itself without any change to the subject30”, thus precluding any manifestation of the latter in the text, be it through thinking, speaking or singing. In truth, only disjunction, that is, non-coincidence (in Adolphe Haberer’s terms, “le décalage qui fait jouer différence et répétition31”), permits the appearance of the subject. This is the difference between repetition and rhythm. As Attié cogently remarks,
[Le rythme] suppose la répétition, mais la répétition n'engage pas toujours un rythme. […] L'efficace du rythme revient à centrer le sujet pour, à chaque fois, le décentrer hors du même, vers un ouvert, impossible à circonscrire à l'avance32.
9 Now MacNeice does avail himself of this possibility in the aforementioned poems. One example can be taken from “Greyness is All” (l. 9-11): If only some black demon would o B -o-B ô B o B Infuse our small grey souls we could o B o B O B o B At least attempt to break the wire o B o B o B o B33 10 Here emphasis on “black demon” or “small grey souls” is achieved by means of consecutive stresses, and it will have special significance, as I shall demonstrate later on. Technically, the first of these two perfectly allowed variations (specifically: “(on)ly some black de(mon)”, scanned as “-o- B ô B”) is called, in Derek Attridge’s terminology, a “rising inversion”; it changes nothing to the expected alternation of beats and offbeats, except that it momentarily speeds up the movement of the line, by compressing the two syllables of the double offbeat into the space of one, and then slows it down, by creating a short break on the following silent offbeat. What makes it quite special here is that it is the only such variation in the entire poem. Similarly, “Birthright” features its only falling inversion – i.e. the reverse (B ô B -o-) of a rising inversion and “a highly disruptive presence34” in tetrameter verse – on “jaw dropped and I” in the penultimate line, “My jaw dropped and I gaped from drouth”, thus materializing through the slight pause between “the disruptive pair of emphasized beats35” (“jaw” and “dropped”), the actual “jaw-dropping” of the speaker’s “gap[ing]” mouth. MacNeice himself comments on a similar phenomenon, which he calls “an equivocation of rhythm itself significant”, in the famous Thomas Nashe poem, “Adieu, Farewell Earth's Bliss”, citing the following line: Strength stoops unto the grave, O B ôB - o - B
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11 about which he declares that “the first three syllables of the lines are beautifully varied with great emotional effect36”, thus showing how fully aware he is of the emotional charge released by such a rhythmic figure.
12 Another rising inversion, similar to that of “Greyness is All”, is to be found in “The Grey Ones“ (l. 19). The only one of its kind and therefore all the more significant, it occurs almost exactly halfway through the poem, at a crucial moment when the speaker recounts his confrontation of the Grey ones’ Gorgonian stare: Every such what and where betwixt B - o - B o B o B Your fact and fancy stays transfixed o B o B o B o B By that one unremitting stare 19 - o - B ôB o B o B Which cancels what you never were, o B o B o B o B 13 This is what Joanny Moulin terms “la rencontre définitive du Réel”, which “dissolves the illusion of the ontological subject37” and about which, according to Lacan, nothing can be said – except maybe in a heavy stammer: /one un—/.
14 Although these variations remain within the bounds of strict accentual-syllabic meter – in the sense that they do not upset either the beat count or the syllable count – one can see how much of the subject's emotions or affects they carry. Yet MacNeice often goes much further, bypassing the very principles of strict octosyllabic verse altogether. This happens – again only once – in “Château Jackson”. 15 There is, in this frighteningly regular piece, a major irregularity at the end of the first section, where the line That built the house that Jack built? o B o B o B ô B 16 conspicuously misses an offbeat between “Jack” and “built”. Indeed, for it to remain acceptable within the poem’s metrical design, it would have had to be, for instance: That built the house that this Jack built? o B o B - o - B ô B 17 which is a line with the right number of syllables and the now familiar rising inversion at the end. But in MacNeice’s poem, an implied offbeat occurs between two emphasized beats without any prior or subsequent compensation in the form of a double offbeat (as is the case in a rising or falling inversion), causing a major dislocation in the meter. Of course, the original nursery rhyme need not abide by such rules since it is in dolnik verse, which, as we shall see, includes offbeats of variable sizes, from triple to implied, and most commonly double, as in “This is the dog that worried the cat” or “This is the cow with the crumpled horn”.
18 This rhythmic disruption both dramatizes the enigma of Jack’s identity and whereabouts, and points up the reappearance of the speaking subject who had seemingly been erased by the self-perpetuating word machine that is the poem. In particular, the offbeat occurs in a silence, and is hence associated with “exactly what cannot be said”, which is Jacques-Alain Miller’s definition of the “aphonic” voice of unutterable desire38, as it manifests itself in “Greyness is All”, a poem in “almost always iambic tetrameters39” except for one slightly, yet fundamentally, different line (l. 12):
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At least attempt to break the wire o B o B o B o B That bounds the Gadarene hens' desire. o B o B -o- B o B 19 Again, the “free” double offbeat in “Gadarene hens” is not technically allowed in strict syllabotonic verse. It makes the line extra-metrical, allowing the couplet’s rhythm to literally act out its statement, that is, attempt “to break the wire/That bounds the Gadarene hens' desire” – in other words, let the poet's own desire (possibly the “black demon“ discussed earlier) break free from the constraints of the chosen form. The “Gadarene hens’ desire” might ultimately be construed as the Hyde part of the poet's psyche, “the self which, as a poet, he would wish to suppress and subordinate”, and which now resurfaces and “complements and corrects Jekyll, sometimes indeed by sabotage40”.
20 Interestingly, the two transgressive rhythmic patterns discussed so far – the uncompensated-for implied offbeat of “Château Jackson” and the free double offbeat of “Greyness is All” – occurring each only once, not only manifest the way in which the poet’s voice pries open a rigid metrical form; they also point to an altogether different model which, though largely under-discussed, is very old and common, both in popular and art poetry: the “dolnik”. 21 The dolnik (from the Russian original) is an “intermediary verse form in several European literatures; it occupies a transitional position between syllabotonic and accentuaI verse41”. It has been “the staple of popular song and verse [...] since at least the beginning of the thirteenth century42” and widely used by many poets throughout the centuries, as early as the Middle Ages (“The majority of the thirteenth- to fifteenth- century lyrics printed in the Norton Anthology use dolnik verse43”), and abundantly so in the last two centuries – especially in the Romantic and Victorian eras – including by Coleridge, Blake, Swinburne, Tennyson, Browning, Kipling, Walter de la Mare, Yeats, Frost, Auden, Langston Hughes, John Betjeman, Sophie Hannah, etc44. “Dolnik verse proper has a number of definite properties: it is always in four-beat measures (including the possibility of the fourth beat’s being virtual), is always rhymed, and always varies in the number of inter-beat unstressed syllables45”. In addition, as Attridge notes about the nursery rhyme “Tom, Tom, the piper’s son” (scanned B[o]BoBoB), “the absence of unstressed syllables between many of the beats encourages the emergence of a powerful, regular rhythm, propelling the reader away from the modulations of the spoken language and towards something more like a chant46”– something we will need to keep in mind. 22 Among earlier MacNeice poems in dolnik are “Bagpipe Music47”, scanned as follows by Attridge48: Annie MacDougall went to milk, caught her foot in the heather, B - o - B o B o B[o] B o B -o- B o Woke to hear a dance record playing of Old Vienna. B o B o B [o]B o B -o- B oB o 23 and “London Rain49”: The rain of London pimples o B o B o B o [B] The ebony street with white o B - o - B o B [oB]
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And the neon-lamps of London - o - Bo B o B o [B] Stain the canals of night B - o - B o B [oB] 24 It is to be noted that in the latter example, the fourth beat is not sounded, even though it remains quite perceptible. This is perfectly legitimate and happens regularly in the even lines of a ballad in “common meter”, for instance.
25 The springy lilt that characterizes these poems is also present in a great number of pieces in The Burning Perch, in particular – and significantly – in the opening and closing poems, “To Mary”: Forgive what I give you. Though nightmare and cinders, o B - o - B - o - B - o - B o The one can be trodden, the other ridden, o B - o - B - o - B o B o 26 and “Coda”: So much for the past; in the present B ~ o ~ B [o]B o B o There are moments caught between heart-beats B o B o B - o - B o When maybe we know each other better. o B - o - B o B o B o 27 as well as in the central one, “Budgie”: The budgerigar is baby blue, o B -o- B o B o B Its mirror is rimmed with baby pink, o B -o- B o B o B Its cage is a stage, its perks are props, o B -o- B o B o B Its eyes black pins in a cushionette, o B O B -o- B o b Its tail a needle on a missing disc, o B o B ~ o ~ B o B 28 In fact, the whole of The Burning Perch is placed, as it were, under the sign of the dolnik, if the acceptation of the term can be loosened enough to allow for enjambment and lack of rhyme, and thus include, in addition to the poems already mentioned: “Pet Shop”, “After the Crash”, “Spring Cleaning”, “Another Cold May”, “New Jerusalem”, “Charon”, “The Introduction”, “Children's Games”, “Tree Party”, “Sports Page”, “This is the Life”, “Goodbye to London”, and “Coda”.
29 The dominant effect created by the dolnik rhythm in most of these pieces is one of inherent briskness and bounciness which usually triumphs over whatever other impression may be generated by the poem. In “Pet Shop”, for instance, the reader experiences a feeling of surfeit due to excess of description which is only compounded by a slow-moving syntax hindered, as Xavier Kalck points out, by the breaks in each line50: Cold blood or warm, crawling or fluttering O B o B [o] B - o - B - o - Bric-a-brac, all are here to be bought. B - o - B o B - o - B Noisy or silent, python or myna, B - o - Bo B - o - B o
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Fish with long silk trains like dowagers, B o B O B o B - o - Monkeys lost to thought. B o B o B In a small tank tiny enamelled 5 - o- B ô B ôB -o- B o 30 In truth, however, these breaks or stalling points in the syntax do not matter so much in the end, as they are literally absorbed by the insistent rhythm. The first line, for example, features a very common dolnik configuration, found also in Hopkins’s “Inversnaid”: This darksome burn, horseback brown, o B o B [o]B o B 31 in which the sudden rhythmic suspension resulting from the virtual offbeat ([o]) only adds to the impetus of the line and generates its characteristic dolnik lilt, which elsewhere is produced by “the varying number of syllables between the beats51”. This is even more noticeable in line 5: In a small tank tiny enamelled - o- B ô B ôB -o- B o 32 where the two consecutive virtual offbeats are framed by double offbeats, creating an effect of systole/diastole which, coupled with the alliteration on “tank tiny”, causes the line to spring up again – as did line 1 owing also to the assonance on “warm, crawl”. In short, the brisk energy of the dolnik overcomes the stuffiness of the atmosphere. And when the pace temporarily breaks into a wooden trochaic rhythm in stanza four (“Rabbit, hamster, potto, puss”), it is only to pick up the dolnik momentum all the better again: Something to hold on the lap and cuddle B - o - B - o - B o B o 33 The same could be argued about the sprightly pace of “To Mary”. Here, the energetic, overpowering rhythm, combined with the multiple run-ons, most appropriately conveys the speaker's unflinching resolve and headlong rush toward his “improbable” destination, literally overriding the bleakness and adversity depicted.
34 It is probably, however, in “Children's Games” that the reader can get the full measure of the dolnik’s irresistible drive, boosted by multiple instances of syncopation due to missing beats and offbeats. This is magnified by the fact that the poem is a collage of nursery rhymes and children’s counting-out and other games, popular sayings, etc. that often involve a collective voice. Peter Groves’s comment on “Tom, Tom, the piper’s son” – echoeing Derek Attridge's previously quoted remark – about the chant-like character of such verse, seems especially fitting at this stage: The first thing we notice about this is its insistent rhythmicality: simple meter co- opts the strong isochrony we find in counting and listing [...] and tends to distort the performance of the verse away from naturalistic speech, towards chanting. It thus represents a communal verse-form, easily chanted in groups (e.g. of children, Shakespearean witches, protestors, and so on)52. 35 Here is a tentative scansion of the beginning of “Children's Games”: Touch me not forget me not, touch me forget me, B o B o B o B[o]B o[Bo]o B o [B] Throw salt over your shoulder when you walk under a ladder, o B ôB - o - B o[Bo] B o B o B o B o
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Fly away, Peter, they are waiting in the Vatican, B o B[o] Bo[Bo] B o B o b o B -o- Come back, Paul, to your Macedonian runaround. B o B [oBoB] -o- B o B o B -o- Hop scotch and somersault ring a ring of raspberries. B ô B o B o B [o] B o B o B o b Who shall we send to fetch her away? Touch wood and turn again. B - o - B o B -o- B [o] B ô B o B o B I'm the king of the barbican, come down you dirty charlatan. B o B - o - B o b o B o B o B o b When you see a magpie put salt upon her tail. B o B o B o [B] o B o B o B 36 While the poem is a hodgepodge of very disparate cultural elements – which, in Xavier Kalck’s view, “cause the song to break down53” – it is arguably held together as a powerfully chanted piece by the sheer thrust and “almost incantatory swing54” of the dolnik rhythm. It acquires the same kind of ritualized and quasi-magical efficacy as a rhyme like “Here we go round the prickly pear” in T. S. Eliot's “The Hollow Men”: Here we go round the prickly pear B - o - B o B o B Prickly pear prickly pear B o B[o] B o B 37 I would argue that the chanting in “Children's Games” puts on an equal footing, and digests in the same manner, the unexpected juxtaposition of the game of hopscotch and the (rewritten) nursery rhyme of “Ring a ring of roses” on one hand, and the unspeakable horror of the suggested lynching scene on the other, in a kind of communal ritualizing of that horror.
38 While this return to an oral tradition of collective chanting and singing may be motivated by MacNeice’s lifelong enthusiasm for popular verse forms that are “historically […] associated with song55”, it does not quite seem to allow the poet’s own voice to be heard, in the way it is heard through, for instance, the rhythmic transgressions he permits himself in strict tetrameter, as those are not only fully allowed by the dolnik, but are what defines the form. So the question for him now is how to reclaim a more personal voice within a verse form which seems to induce a kind of trance-like, musical Nietzschean disappearance of the subject56. This is a fine line indeed, which MacNeice encapsulates in the following terms: “while it is an asset to have an idiom, an idiom is only valuable as a differentiation of what is communal57”. Expressing his own voice is going to require, in particular, leaving behing the overpowering “rhythmicality of song58”. 39 One way of doing this is by dislocating the form, in a manner which is reminiscent of what he did with tetrameter verse. In “Budgie”, for example, the dolnik is pushed to its limit and begins to crack at the seams, as it were, with the normally very rare triple offbeat slackening the rhythm, making it bulge into a succession of paeons [B ~o~], a foot used in Greek comedy. This is abundantly displayed in those scenes where the parrot is absorbed in the contemplation of himself, and it is, of course, part of the satirical force of the piece: The small blue universe, so Let me attitudinise, o B O B o - o - B ~ o ~ B -o- Let me attitudinise, let me attitudinise, B ~ o ~ B -o- B ~ o ~ B -o-
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For all the world is a stage is a cage o B o B - o - B - o - B A hermitage a fashion show a crèche an auditorium o B ~ o ~ B ~ o ~ B ~ o ~ B o Or possibly a space ship. Earth, can you hear me? o B ~ o ~ B o B - o - B o Blue for Budgie calling Me for Mirror: B o B ~ o ~ B o B o Budgie, can you hear me? The long tail oscillates, B ~ o ~ B - o - B O B - o - 40 What it also shows, to an admittedly extreme degree, is that, by speaking, the subject – here caricatured as a budgie with which the poet partially and self-derisively identifies – can upset the fragile balance of the dolnik rhythm and make it stop singing.
41 Another way is to use formal features that belong more naturally with duple meters – such as enjambment and mid-line syntactic breaks – and tend to lessen the dolnik's vitality. That is the case in “To Mary”: Forgive what I give you. Though nightmare and cinders, o B -o- B - o - B - o - B o The one can be trodden, the other ridden, o B - o - B - o - B o B o We must use what transport we can. Both crunching - o - B o B - o - B o B o Path and bucking dream can take me B o B o B o B o 42 or in “The Grey Ones”, where run-ons occur in between quatrains, a most usual place in dolnik verse, in which syntax normally meshes with lineation. In “After the Crash”, they actually prevent what could have been the fourth silent beat in an instance of three-beat dolnik, and propel the reading onward to the next line instead: When he came to he knew Time must have passed because The asphalt was high with hemlock Through which he crawled to his crash Helmet and found it no more Than his wrinkled hand what it was. 43 In all these examples the absence of rhyme also contributes to steering the rhythm away from the dolnik, as rhyme normally clinches the periodic unity of each quatrain. “Another Cold May” is an extreme case of enjambments and mid-line syntactic breaks: With heads like chessmen, | bishop or queen, The tulips tug at their roots and mourn In inaudible frequencies, | the move Is the wind's, | not theirs; | fender to fender The cars will never emerge, | not even Should their owners emerge to claim them, | the move Is time's, | not theirs; | elbow to elbow [...] 44 Here “the rhythmicality of song” seems to have been truly lost and replaced by the “unpredictable variety of speech59”.
45 To break with the “easy music” he had praised in these anapaestic lines from Autumn Joumal, “ln the days that were early the music came easy/On cradle and coffin, in the corn and the barn60”, the poet may also choose a duple rhythm, which “will dominate
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the language less than a triple rhythm” – normally “furthest from spoken English (and nearest to song)61”. 46 In poems like “Réchauffé” or “The Introduction”, his hesitation between the dolnik and a more accentual-syllabic kind of verse is certainly perceptible. In “Réchauffé”, many lines have a dolnik swing, switching freely from iambs to anapaests: And yet who knows what sudden thrust o B o B o B o B In the guts, what gripe in the mind, might burst - o - B o B - o - B o B The dams on the breast of the mad? o B - o - B - o - B 47 Yet the final stress clash in the first lines of each stanza (e.g. “of the dark tombs” in “The food on the walls of the dark tombs”, or “of the sun’s rays” in “The hands on the ends of the sun’s rays”, both scanned: “-o- B ô B”) is undolnik-like62. In fact, this very same rising inversion, found in the first and last lines of “The Introduction” (respectively “in a grave glade” and “in a green grave”), calls to mind a famous line by Andrew Marvell from “Thought in a Garden”, “To a green thought in a green shade”, in which it is duplicated. This rhythmic figure, used only in the strictest of accentual- syllabic verse (Marvell’s iambic tetrameter is a case in point), thus gestures toward an altogether different metrical context, one which is associated with meditation and self- expression, and which conflicts with the prevailing dolnik trend upheld in “The Introduction” by means of the nonsensical “crawly crawly”, that is, at the expense of, precisely, thought and meaning. In “Réchauffé”, the rising inversion in the first line of each stanza definitely clashes with the plain triple rhythm of the last line, which is an apocopated replica of the first one (e.g. “The hands on the ends of the sun” [l. 14] echoes “The hands on the ends of the sun’s rays” (l. 8]). The “uncanny ring” of this truncated line, suggesting that “the possibility of catastrophe lies only a small variation on normality away63”, results precisely from the tension between two metrical systems. While the last line has a self-perpetuating ternary motion that makes it oracular, non- human and possibly menacing, the first one has more of the reassuring characteristics of spoken language.
48 Those are some of the ways in which the poet’s voice attempts to reconquer some ground against the almost irresistible dolnik. Did Louis MacNeice also have in mind this tug-of-war between singing (or chanting) and speaking when he described the poems in The Burning Perch as “two-way affairs”? And was he speaking also for himself when he declared about T. S. Eliot, “I admired Eliot's technique – the blend of conversation and incantation64”? The key to understanding the place of the poet’s voice in The Burning Perch might be the notion of compromise, which MacNeice appears to have shared with Yeats and Auden regarding the right distance to adopt vis-à-vis popular poetry and song. As he perceptively noted in terms that could apply to him, in both Yeats and Auden there is a compromise; they do not go more than halfway towards the genuine ballad or street-song; the poet achieves some of the simplicity or the directness or the swing of the primitive form but he does not pretend away (as the early Yeats tried to) his own sophisticated self65.
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NOTES
1. Louis MacNeice, Selected Literary Criticism, Alan Heuser (ed.), London, Faber & Faber, 1987 (henceforth SLC), p. 211. See also Peter McDonald, Louis MacNeice: The Poet in His Contexts, Oxford Clarendon Press, 1991, p. 177; Peter McDonald, “Louis MacNeice: Irony and Responsibility”, Matthew Campbell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry, Cambridge, CUP, 2003, p. 63; Robyn Marsack, The Cave of Making: The Poetry of Louis MacNeice, London, OUP, 1985, p. 105. 2. The Burning Perch, London, Faber & Faber, 2001 [1963] (henceforth BP), p. 37. 3. Peter McDonald, “Louis MacNeice: The Burning Perch”, Neil Roberts (ed.), A Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1991, p. 493; William T. McKinnon, Apollo's Blended Death: A Study of the Poetry of Louis MacNeice, London, OUP, 1971, p. 192. 4. Louis MacNeice, The Poetry of W. B. Yeats, London, Faber & Faber, 2008 [1941] (henceforth PWBY), p. 146; “Snow”, Collected Poems, London, Faber & Faber, 1979 (henceforth CP), p. 30. 5. Peter McDonald, Louis MacNeice: The Poet in His Contexts, p. 194. 6. Modern Poetry: A Personal Essay, London, OUP, 1969 [1938] (henceforth MP), p. 64. 7. BP, p. 39. 8. See “La quatrième personne du singulier. Esquisse de portrait du sujet lyrique moderne”, Dominique Rabaté (dir.), Figures du sujet lyrique, Paris, PUF, 2005 [1996], p. 155. 9. Autumn Journal, XVIII, l. 1-4, CP 136; PWBY, p. 141; MP, p. 166. 10. Peter McDonald, “Louis MacNeice: The Burning Perch”, p. 493. 11. MacNeice, MP, p. 36; BP, p. 27. 12. MP, p. 36 (italics mine), 41; BP, p. 46. 13. SLC, p. 32 (the author's italics); MP, p. 174, 56. 14. A Voice and Nothing More, Cambridge, MA (USA), MIT Press, 2006, p. 30. 15. BP, p. 40. 16. Plato, Phaedrus, 259a, Harold N. Fowler (ed. and trans.), Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vol. 9, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, 1925. Ibid., 259a. 17. Moving Words: Forms of English Poetry, Oxford, OUP, 2013, p. 56. [Henceforth MW.] 18. MP, p. 131. 19. Ibid., p. 139. 20. Ibid., p. 134. 21. Peter McDonald, “Louis MacNeice: Irony and Responsibility”, p. 65. 22. SLC, p. 169, 248. 23. Julian Gitzen (“Louis MacNeice: The Last Decade”, Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 14, No. 3, October 1968, p. 140) counts twenty, but quite possibly because he includes the loose tetrameter verse that technically belong to the dolnik, as will be shown later.
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24. Peter L. Groves, “Meter”, Erik Martiny (ed.), A Companion to Poetic Genre, Hoboken (N.J.), Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, p. 40, 36. 25. MP, p. 142. 26. BP, p. 32. 27. Groves, op. cit., p. 40; Kalck, Muted Strings. Louis MacNeice's The Burning Perch, Paris, PUF-CNED, 2015, p. 122. 28. PWBY, p. 145. 29. “The Same Again? Repetition and Refrain in Louis MacNeice”, Cambridge Quarterly, Vol. 38, No. 3 (2009), p. 217. 30. Mallarmé le livre. Etude psychanalytique, Nice, éditions du losange, 2007, p. 374 (my translation). 31. Louis MacNeice, 1907-1963 : l'homme et la poésie, 2 vol., Bordeaux, Presses Universitaires, 1986, p. 699. 32. Op. cit., p. 374. 33. The scansion model used in this study is the one developed by Derek Attridge in The Rhythms of English Poetry (London, Longman, 1982) and Poetic Rhythm. An Introduction (Cambridge, CUP, 1995), and Thomas Carper and Derek Attridge in Meter and Meaning: An Introduction to Rhythm in Poetry (New York and London, Routledge, 2003). This system, which relies on beat-offbeat metrics, distinguishes between stresses and beats. These may coincide – as when emphasized beats (B) alternate with unemphasized offbeats (o) – or may not – in which case beats can be unemphasized (b) and offbeats emphasized (O). Offbeats can also be “implied” (ô), that is, not realized by a syllable and thus equivalent to a pause between two syllables that are not separated by punctuation or a syntactic boundary. (When these latter are divided by a punctuation mark, the implied offbeat is called a “virtual offbeat” and is symbolized by “[o]”.) Finally, offbeats can be double (-o-) or triple (~o~), that is, associated with two or three syllables. I am thankful to Pr. Derek Attridge for his precious feedback on the scansions proposed in this study. 34. Attridge, Poetic Rhythm, p. 119. 35. Carper and Attridge, op. cit., p. 83. 36. MP, p. 121. 37. Louis MacNeice: The Burning Perch, Neuilly-sur-Seine, Atlande, 2016, p. 136 (with my translation.) 38. “Jacques Lacan et la voix”, De la Voix. Quarto, Vol. 54 (1994), p. 51, 48 (my translation). 39. Kalck, op. cit., p. 122 (my emphasis). 40. MacNeice, MP, p. 77. 41. Marina Tarlinskaja, “Beyond ‘Loose Lamb’: The Form and Themes of the English ‘Dolnik’”, Poetics Today, Vol. 16, n° 3, “Metrics Today” I (Autumn 1995), p. 497. 42. Derek Attridge, “The Rhythms of the English Dolnik”, 2016, yet to be published, p. 5. 43. Attridge, MW, p. 155. 44. See MW, chpt. 7. 45. Attridge, “The Rhythms of the English Dolnik”, p. 10.
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46. MW, p. 151. 47. CP, p. 96. 48. MW, p. 184. 49. CP, p. 161. 50. Ibid., p. 51. 51. Attridge, “The Rhythms of the English Dolnik”, p. 8. 52. Ibid., p. 36. 53. Ibid., p. 117. 54. Attridge, MW, p. 159. 55. Ibid., p. 152. 56. See Amittai F. Aviram, Telling Rhythm. Body and Meaning in Poetry, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1994, p. 214: “this moment at which the subject begins to lose itself is also the moment at which music comes in to fill the gap. Music is left when the subject falls away”. 57. MP, p. 74. 58. Attridge, MW, p. 147. 59. Attridge, MW, p. 147. 60. First lines of section 18 (CP, p. 136). 61. Attridge, MW, p. 124. 62. See Tarlinskaja, op. cit., p. 501, 510. 63. Kalck, op. cit., p. 106; McDonald, The Poet in His Contexts, p. 198. 64. SLC, p. 248; MP, p. 58. 65. PWBY, p. 149.
ABSTRACTS
The Burning Perch has come to epitomize the much-praised “lyrical return” of a poet who is known to have had an ear for fine rhythmic nuances. In addition, a large number of poems in the collection are in “dolnik” (or near-dolnik) verse, which is the meter of balladry, nursery rhymes, and much of the popular poetry commonly associated with song. In this context, it becomes especially interesting to study the poetic voice in relation to the intrinsic dialectic between singing and speaking at work in the book. This essay examines how, through the perpetual reassertion of this voice against any rhythmic environment liable to smother it, a compromise is achieved which sacrifices neither “the swing of the primitive form” (MacNeice) nor the poet’s desire for articulate meaning.
De l’avis général, The Burning Perch incarne désormais le « retour du lyrisme » chez un poète dont, par ailleurs, la sensibilité aux plus subtiles nuances rythmiques est bien connue. En outre, le mètre utilisé dans un grand nombre de poèmes du recueil est grosso modo le « dolnik », c’est-
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à-dire celui qui prévaut dans les ballades et comptines, ainsi que dans une bonne partie de la poésie populaire indissociable de la chanson. Dans un tel contexte, il devient particulièrement intéressant d’étudier la voix poétique dans son rapport à la dialectique de la parole et du chant intrinsèquement à l’œuvre dans le livre. On essaiera de montrer comment, grâce à l’acte de résistance renouvelé de cette voix contre toute emprise rythmique susceptible de l'étouffer, un compromis est atteint par lequel ne sont sacrifiés ni le « “swing” de la forme primitive » (MacNeice) ni le désir du poète d’exprimer un sens intelligible.
INDEX
Mots-clés: Louis MacNeice, voix, chant, parole, dolnik Keywords: Louis MacNeice, voice, singing, speaking, dolnik
AUTHOR
DOMINIQUE DELMAIRE
Université Lumière-Lyon 2
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Decadent Tourism in Derek Mahon’s The Yellow Book
Joanna Kruczkowska
1 In his fin-de-siècle volume, The Yellow Book of 1997, Derek Mahon ponders on a series of processes leading to contemporary disintegration where ‘the centre cannot hold’. As one of its reasons, the poet indicates pollution by tourism resulting in the formation of pseudo-places and tourist paradises; in globalisation and standardisation of tourism characteristic of consumerist and technologised societies; in commodification of mythical narratives including Greek and Celtic mythology and folklore; while the shadow of Yeatsian and Cavafian Byzantium looms high over the whole collection, marking the subtle border between the artifice, myth and reality. This article will try to decipher essential intertextual and interdisciplinary connotations of the poems from The Yellow Book addressing the problematics of tourism, and to identify the author’s position vis-à-vis this expansive phenomenon transformed into a robust sector of economy. Apart from the universal perspective, it will also investigate the intersection of Irish and Greek landscapes which provides a nexus for Mahon’s deliberations on tourism in the collection under discussion.
2 Although most of The Yellow Book is located in Ireland, among its most powerful and memorable images are those of the Cycladic archipelago, which I have discussed in detail elsewhere2. Mid-way through the volume, “Aphrodite’s Pool3” apparently humorously depicts this Greek tourist paradise. Enjoying his holidays by a swimming pool on an Aegean island, the speaker of Mahon’s poem shuttles between now, then and the future, from the Arcadian “god-familiar hills” through spaceships, to finish up as a decadent emperor facing the long-gone Atlantis. This self-mocking presentation of the holiday culture pivots one of the central themes of The Yellow Book: the one of decadent tourism. At the end of the collection, “Christmas in Kinsale4” with its different glimpse at the Cyclades offers a spiritual or imaginary antidote to that decadence by counterbalancing a long catalogue which elaborated on Irish, global and cosmic civilisation in crisis. The last three lines of this poem – the “blue Cycladic dawn” when a human being faces nature in a solitary meeting – constitute a coda to the whole collection. Simultaneously separated from and attached to ‘here’ and ‘there’, this
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paradoxical Greek homecoming nurtures the potential and intensity of resisting the dubious blessings of the global village. 3 Taking a very general view of Irish and Greek tourism juxtaposed in The Yellow Book, one notices that Greece’s reliance on tourism, one of the fastest developing branches of economy worldwide, is much more substantial than Ireland’s. With the exception of merchant shipping perhaps, Greece has never had a competitive economic alternative to tourism and could only dream of becoming a “Hellenic Tiger”, although one could venture a small-scale analogy with Ireland in other, pre-Tiger sectors such as agriculture or once flourishing fisheries. Nonetheless, the effectiveness of selling a tourist image of both Greece and Ireland provides one of the most fertile grounds for comparison between the two countries. Just as any other industry, tourism makes heavy use of marketing strategies. The Aegean, for instance, where the Cyclades are located, has been merchandised as “the symbolic landscape of Greek island tourism, the pure expression of the 3 S’s (sea, sand, sun)5” although sandy beaches are a rarity on Greek islands, not to mention their small size and lack of comfort when compared to the Northern European seaside. Analogously, a first-time visitor to the Emerald Isle who relies on the marketed image of the rolling green hills may realise only on arrival that many of them are unwalkable because of turf, which in addition forms a fawn and tawny moonscape leaving greenery to the visitor’s imagination. Simplified and aggressive tourist campaigns contribute also to contesting critical spaces originally endowed with different meanings and now targeted for consumption. These spaces – both physical and mental – involve sacred, historical and mythological landscapes promoted as ‘national heritage’. While antiquity and Middle Ages sell well in both countries, few tourists are aware of the – barely marketable – Greek and Irish civil wars and their traces. Recent conflicts equally clash with the interests of the tourist industry, although strangely enough, the acute 2015 bank crisis in Greece, for instance, did not translate into a decrease in the influx of foreign tourists. 4 Derek Mahon’s Yellow Book engages with some of these problematics. Similarly to the issue of merchandising Greek mythology in “Aphrodite’s Pool6”, “On the Automation of the Irish Lights7” depicts the process of compromising Celtic sea mythology as tourist attraction in Ireland. Irish folk-lore in this poem stands for the departing wisdom of the sea culture, alongside lighthouses/ivory towers symbolising an older, profounder world of learning and eventually transformed into “visitor centres”. Another poem, “An Bonnán Buí8”, reflects on current political and military conflicts as an obstacle to tourism. With the benefit of his first-hand Belfast experience and from the distance of an outsider9, Mahon ironically reports on the concerns of the inhabitants of the North immersed in the conflict: “Do we give up fighting so the tourists come/or fight the harder so that they stay at home?” While The Yellow Book was published between the ceasefire and the Good Friday Agreement, and tourists indeed started to flock to the North at the turn of the 20th and 21st century, Belfast murals tours which cater for a specific branch of disaster tourism feeding on either genuine interest in recent history or sensation seeking inclinations remain a small-scale extravaganza. Yet another poem of the collection, “shiver in your tenement10”, mentions the times (1960s) before the advent of an intensely marketed strand of Irish tourism, the literary one: “The days before tourism and economic growth/… when pubs had as yet no pictures of Yeats and Joyce.” The Yellow Book registers the poet’s return from the United States to the understated Ireland of the Joyce Country, the Yeats Country, the Leopold Bloom tours of Dublin etc. Knowing that Mahon is a keen literary tourist himself11 we realise that he
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must be drawing a decisive line between his own poetic ‘pilgrimages’ and mass flocking to the portraits of the bards. 5 His engagement with the questions of Irish tourism reminds the reader of his being on the one hand “a great poet of place,” as his monographer Hugh Haughton called him in an article12, and on the other, “an exile and a stranger”, “the existential outsider” characterised by “migrant cosmopolitanism13”, “the poet of repeated dislocation14” as other critics observed following the more habitual trend in Mahon criticism. The poet would probably have embraced, before his settling down in Kinsale at least, the epithet he employed to describe one of his masters, Louis MacNeice: “A tourist in his own country.” “But of what sensitive person is the same not true? The phrase might stand, indeed, as an epitaph for modern man”, the poet continues15, raising the issue of tourism onto the level of philosophical discussion in the age of existentialism, postcolonialism and Zygmunt Bauman’s seminal theories of nomadism16. 6 Many of the arguments connected with tourism in The Yellow Book revolve around the concept of a pseudo-place. The first poem of the collection, “Night Thoughts17”, opens with the following epigraph from Paul Fussell’s Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars: One striking post-war phenomenon has been the transformation of numerous countries into pseudo-places whose function is simply to entice tourists18. 7 In his book, Fussell remarks that “places are odd and call for interpretation. They are the venue of the traveler. Pseudo-places [the venue of the tourist] entice by their familiarity and call for instant recognition: ‘We have arrived’19”. Ireland, just as Greece, abounds with pseudo-places: man-transformed, kitsch-selling tourist oases. In “Night Thoughts” Mahon depicts a transformation of a place into a similar pseudo-place: reshaping the “work of years”, i.e. historical Dublin houses, into “a Georgian theme- park for the tourist”. In one of the archival Yellow Book notebooks, Haughton has discovered a more dramatic fragment about the “beginning of the end for Fitzwilliam Square” with “the developers” in “the tempting park” performing “demolition and reconstruction20”. Such processes of transformation necessarily entail a manipulation of memory, an imposition of alternative, hypothetical or subjective historical narratives, a re-forming of national heritage.
8 Theme parks, especially popular in Anglophone and Scandinavian countries, correspond to modern Greek replicas of ancient buildings or, in extreme cases such as Knossos, to the ostentatious reconstructions of archaeological sites. In various degrees operative worldwide, this trend of ‘restoring’ the past in Greece has been perplexingly dominated by foreigners for whom antiquity remains a paragon of beauty. Starting with the 19th-century philhellenes, archaeologists and neoclassical architects (Arthur Evans, Heinrich Schliemann, Theophil Hansen) who erected ancient-style residences and public utility buildings in the heart of Athens, the list of foreigners inspired by antiquity continues into the present with ex-bohemian partial residents of Greek islands. Mahon admiring the “wash-house like a temple to the Muses” by the swimming pool in “Aphrodite’s Pool” may be playing with this convention. Yet in “Night Thoughts” this foreign element intruding upon the local territory links to the concept of a pseudo-place not only via tourism but also through a different type of migration characteristic of a globalised economy. The poet employs the term “McAlpine’s fusiliers” for construction workers at the Dublin theme park, borrowing the phrase from the 1960s ballad about the Irish unskilled labour emigrating to Britain in the late
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1930s to work in the canals. While in the original song they work “with Russian, Czech and Pole/… underneath the Thames in a hole21”, now Poles and Czechs have been working on construction sites in Ireland. Although they officially started to contribute to the Irish economy only after their accession to the European Union in 2004, they may have had their (illegal?) share in the construction boom in Dublin at the time when Mahon’s poem was written. 9 The extent to which Mahon was prophetic about landscape transformations in Ireland – alongside Fintan O’Toole who probed them exactly the same year, coming to the conclusion that their “speed and scale… induced a sense of internal exile, a sense… that Ireland has become somehow unreal22” – can be estimated from the current perspective of the post-crisis years. Eóin Flannery in his recent book Ireland and Ecocriticism comments that “the hangover from the Celtic Tiger period leaves many Irish citizens scrambling for a new set of codes… with which to engage with the altered landscapes of the country” and calls Mahon “a pioneering Irish poet of engaged ecological conscience” despite the fact that “symptoms of industrialism and indiscriminate urbanisation… both repel and fascinate Mahon’s humanism and aestheticism23”, as the decadence in The Yellow Book had evinced as well. 10 In “Night Thoughts” the author equates tourist migration with an invasion where the multiplied ‘Other’ resemble aliens from outer space. To realise the scale of this expansion of tourism it suffices to quote one line of this poem, where “the new world order” emerges next to “the bus tours” as equally momentous (“Never mind the new world order and the bus tours24”). Already back in 1975, Louis Turner and John Ash in their seminal Golden Hordes proposed a definition of tourism as “involving mass migration of people who collide with cultures far removed from their own25”. Just as to any economic or political migration, this definition can be applied to Mahon’s perception of organised tourism in The Yellow Book. Although the invaders with their “baseball caps” in “Night Thoughts” bear resemblance to Americans visiting Ireland and would thus contradict a notion of “colliding with a culture far removed from their own”, the time and manner of their ‘visit’ as well as the locals’ reaction to it evidence a huge discrepancy with the host culture. The poet working at night, self-mockingly seeking “sententious solitude” and “ancient memory” reminiscent of the pre-Romantic Graveyard School, to his dismay inspects that incongruity “between three and four/ before the first bird and the first tour bus.” When tourists turn up at four o’clock in the morning, the pseudo-place, to quote Fussell again, “calls for instant recognition: ‘We have arrived’”. Mahon observes with horror that “even in the bathroom I hear them shouting out there”. Describing this morning intrusion in science-fiction terms, Mahon’s “space invaders” pun plays on the notion of an extra-terrestrial on the one hand, and an invader of a domestic (private and public) space on the other. The tension between the outer and the inner has been prompted by the exclusion of the tourist from the place and by their striving for inclusion in the familiarity of the pseudo-place domesticated by their self-confident behaviour and casual attire, however inappropriate it may look to the locals (“goofy in baseball caps and nylon leisurewear”). “The tourist is a dupe of fashion”, Mahon could repeat after James Buzard’s The Beaten Track26, although the latter referred to the fashion for places, otherwise also manifest in The Yellow Book. Neither in Dublin nor in Greece is the poet immune to alien tourist invasions: in “Aphrodite’s Pool”, despite the solitary character of his travel, the speaker (“the incongruous visitor”) who sits “aloof from the disco ships and buzzing bikes”
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remains intensely aware of their presence, just as he apprehends the planes passing over his head and the “perpetual motion” of the ships on the sea below. 11 Last but not least, in “Night Thoughts” American tourists-invaders evoke a notion of re- or counter-colonisation. America, colonised by a handful of nations who eliminated the natives and were further bolstered with influxes of immigrants from different countries including a significant population from Ireland and Greece, is now ‘the empire that strikes back’: touristically, culturally, politically, economically. That counter-colonisation emerges also in other poems of The Yellow Book in reference to the phenomena such as New Age, globalisation (“Christmas in Kinsale”), “yahoos, yippies, yuppies, yoga, yoghurt, Yale” (“At the Chelsea Arts Club27”), or even climate change: Irish “climate now [being] that of the world at large / in the post-Cold War, global- warming age / of corporate rule, McPeace and Mickey Mao” (“America Deserta28”). In keeping with his paradoxes, Mahon calls himself “an alien among aliens during my New York time29”, the phrase annotating (1) his own isolation in America, (2) American alienation of an-individual-in-the-crowd type, (3) America’s isolation, and (4) American exceptionalism. This (post)colonial context comes to the fore when, back home from his stay in America, Mahon watches the news …with sanctimonious European eyes the continuing slave narrative, people in chains… and the silent roar of ‘ant-like’ migration… …not far from liberal republic to defoliant empir30. 12 Obviously, the concept of the defoliant empire emerges in the very title of “America Deserta” echoing deserted America and America as desert.
13 The second poem of The Yellow Book, “Axel’s Castle”, apart from castigating organised tourism and its standardisation resulting in exhaustion, also touches upon another vital concern of The Yellow Book: spiritual tourism, or rather, its surrogate, the turning places of worship into pseudo-places visited in the spirit of indifference and irritation: in our post-modern economy one tourist site is much like another site and the holy city comes down to a Zeno tour, the closer you get the more it recedes from sight and the more morons block your vision31. 14 The superb “Zeno tour” joke sums up the case of tourism as subject to Zeno’s paradoxes where motion remains an illusion of the senses since time and space can be divided ad infinitum. The tourist, in other words, can never reach his destination; he can only multiply, just as pseudo-places continue to spawn in a customised way irrespective of their location. Time and space being relative, the tourist experience is stripped of authenticity. Mahon’s narrative, its rhythm and meaning, echo W. H. Auden’s “First Things First”: …a world where every sacred location Is a sand-buried site all cultured Texans do, Misinformed and thoroughly fleeced by their guides.32 15 Incontestably, the “cultured Texans” show correspondence with tourists of Mahon’s “Axel’s Castle” as well as the American tourists of “Night Thoughts”. Buzard quotes this fragment of Auden’s 1950s poem in his Beaten Track in the context of “the wholeness of the wholly touristic place, inauthentic, trumped-up, corrupted, commodified”, “an engulfing ersatz cultural domain, totally administered or pre-packaged as spectacle”,
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observing that already in the 19th century flourished “uncomfortable impressions that tourism destroys the ‘sanctity’ or unity of culture33”. Part of Buzard’s argument in the book rests upon the analysis of the stereotypes attached to anti-tourism; in this light, the affinity between Mahon’s and Auden’s poems appears all the more revealing.
16 Although in “Axel’s Castle” Mahon speaks from the vantage point of the country’s indigene, one may speculate whether the invectives he throws at tourists may not resonate with a deportment of an anti-tourist. As early as 1950s, Alan Brien identified the anti-tourist as the one tortured by “tourist angst”, i.e. “a gnawing suspicion that… you are still a tourist like every other tourist34”. Fussell describes the anti-tourist as a pretending traveller motivated by self-protection and vanity35. In “Axel’s Castle”, Mahon’s emblematic self-irony either completely commits him to the idea of self- protective and vain anti-tourism, or on the contrary, undermines this notion, when he defines himself as an armchair explorer in an era of cheap flight diverted by posters, steamer and sea-plane at rest in tropical ports… I get sea-breezes in my own galley all right. 17 This approach strikes elitist and democratic notes at the same time. As Graham Huggan writes in his Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins36, “late twentieth-century exoticisms are the products… of… a worldwide market – exoticism has shifted… from a more or less privileged mode of aesthetic perception to an increasingly global mode of mass-market consumption37”. As an individual “diverted by [tropical] posters”, Mahon enjoys the egalitarian right to mass consumption of tourism; as an advocate of privileged aesthetic perception, however, he stays on the side of the elitist traveller. The aesthetic perception, obvious for any writer and embodied in his belief in the flight of imagination, is partly responsible for Mahon’s resentment of organised tourism: “why/travel”, he continues in “Axel’s Castle”, “when imagination can get you there in a tick/and you are not plagued by the package crowd?” This manifesto may also bring to one’s mind the poet’s mental travel via translation, the fruit of which he has gathered in Adaptations (2006) and The Echo’s Grove (2013). Alternatively however, this declaration sounds unusual for someone so well travelled as Mahon, whose sensitive relation with home (Northern Ireland) and seeming preference for undefined isolated locations or even displacement have attracted critical attention.
18 One may also wonder whether Mahon’s covet in “Axel’s Castle” may be symptomatic of a spiritual anti-tourist’s. Huggan suggests that “for spiritual tourists, [a] deeper involvement [with society and culture] includes a quasi-religious dimension. Society and culture are collapsed into a search for ‘inner meaning’” yet “the need for deeper involvement may actually preclude close cultural contact 38”. As transpires at the end of The Yellow Book (“Christmas in Kinsale”), Mahon’s private engagement with Greece transports him into a particular dimension of spiritual travel. Travel, not tourism, we should emphasise. Contrary to the views (such as Huggan’s) that a traveller, an extinct species, has become nothing more but a tourist, I believe that the difference between a tourist and a traveller lies in the mode of perception and the style of travel. While a tourist searches for the recognisable (or the exotic) skimming the surface of reality, a traveller makes attempts, in a slow mode, to interact with local life. Where a tourist compares, a traveller differentiates. Having in mind probably the Grand Tour, Fussell observes that “before the development of tourism, travel was conceived to be like study, and its fruits were considered to be the adornment of the mind and the
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formation of judgement39”. I would argue that this is still possible, even if the traveller, according to Fussell, now situates himself between “the excitement of the unpredictable attaching to exploration” and “the pleasure of ‘knowing where one is’ belonging to tourism40”. In The Yellow Book however, before the reader reaches this stage in the final “Christmas in Kinsale”, the author confronts him with tourists- barbarians in the never-land of Byzantium. 19 In The Golden Hordes, the authors attribute the “mass migration of people who collide with cultures far removed from their own” to both tourists and barbarian tribes. The authors provocatively diagnose that “today the Nomads of Affluence… are creating a newly dependent social and geographic realm: the Pleasure Periphery… a tourist belt surrounding the great industrialized zones of the world” such as the sea resorts of the Mediterranean41. Although Ireland cannot compete with the Mediterranean, its marginal geographical position and scarce industry contributes to the perception of the island as a part of the “tourist belt”. “A comfortably dispersed population and a heavy reliance on imports has spared Ireland much of the true ecological cost of living in the developed world”, Michael Viney observes in A Living Island 42. Interestingly, Mahon notes in “An Bonnán Buí” that the margin of the margin, the North of Ireland, also starts to compete for a place in that belt, and time has shown, with moderate success. Musing on the invasion of tourists-barbarians, “An Bonnán Buí” was reprinted in Mahon’s New Collected Poems of 2011. The peace process in the North being well under way, the poem was reproduced with a new ending43: an invocation to “go with the flow44” reflecting the poet’s preoccupation with the issues of global ecology and natural flow imagined as a pattern for social change in later volumes such as Harbour Lights and Life of Earth. 20 It is interesting to observe on this occasion a peculiar shift in the perception of the barbarian related to travel and periphery in the Irish context: the one from the native to the tourist. At the beginning of his Irish Orientalism Joseph Lennon documents how for centuries “Irish histories opened with passages about the ancient origins of the Irish in the East… This written link between Irish culture and West Asian cultures has its roots in Ancient Greek and Roman depictions of borderlands: in Ireland, Asia and Africa where outlanders with magical and barbaric traits lived45”. This perspective relates the reader of Mahon’s Yellow Book to the colonial history of Ireland and to the negative perception of the native by the English coloniser, most famously by Edmund Spenser in A View of the Present State of Ireland. Barbarians in The Yellow Book represent yet another perimeter of the empire. Manifest in the already mentioned American counter-colonisation of Europe and the clash of civilisations, of outer and inner space, the terrestrial and the extraterrestrial, the concept of the empire also underlies poems such as “At the Shelbourne46” inspecting the fall of the Big House in Ireland and, periphrastically, of the British Empire; or “The World of J. G. Farrell47” drawing a map, after Farrell, of the world where “the Union Jack comes down” (one of these places being “even, who knows… Ulster too”). Over all these connotations in The Yellow Book presides the shadow of another empire: the Yeatsian and Cavafian Byzantium 48. Mahon relishes images of declining empires just as Cavafy did, and on translating Cavafy in Greece in 1974 after the recent collapse of the military regime the Irish poet was reading Cavafy’s favourite book, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire 49. The reader of The Yellow Book has to beware of trespassing the subtle border between myth and reality while rambling through Mahon’s lands of make-believe which thrive on “the stuff of myth50” and “perceptual difficulties, the tromple-l’oeil/of virtual reality 51”
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trying to weigh artifice and “artistry” against “the pastiche paradise of the post- modern52”. The poet “creates personal mythology out of friends and idols” setting “the Bohemian decadence of the past against the modern late capitalist decadence” by means of style, Haughton observes53. Decadence provides the author with “a model of the writer’s alienation from the dominant ideologies of a utilitarian society”, David G. Williams adds, though Mahon often employs a self-mocking attitude on posing as poète maudit54. 21 Excess and decadence, ‘truth’ and illusion, the pseudo-place, cultural and spiritual tourism, and the finality of destination all mingle in the spirit of Byzantium in Mahon’s volume. Although the inauthentic tourist experience led the author to consider the position of an anti-tourist, in “Aphrodite’s Pool” he emerges as a mock tourist, a “fat, unbronzed, incongruous visitor”. The humorous tone of the poem can also indicate traits of a “‘cool’ and role-distanced” post-tourist, the term coined by John Urry in The Tourist Gaze. The post-tourist acknowledges tourism as a game with “emphasis on playfulness, variety and self-consciousness”, or rather, “a series of games with multiple texts and no single, authentic tourist experience55”. Mahon’s speaker enjoying his holidays between “god-familiar hills” and “disco-ships56” is indeed “freed from the constraints of ‘high culture57’”, whereas drifting on the raft in the swimming pool “under the fairy lights and paper frills/of a birthday party” and flirting “like some corrupt, capricious emperor58” qualify him as an “untrammelled pursuer of the ‘pleasure principle’”, where “the world is a stage and the post-tourist can delight in the multitude of games to be played59”. 22 The shadow zone of Byzantium in The Yellow Book also sneaks into “An Bonnán Buí”. Arguments for or against tourists in Northern Ireland seem to be waged between complacency or compromise on the one hand and truth on the other, or between illusion and reality, where tourists are offered the first. The world devised for tourists- barbarians in Mahon’s poem and in Cavafy’s “Waiting for the Barbarians60” is an outcome of negotiation between barbarism and civilisation, populism and democracy, where cultural achievements have been raised (or rather, lowered) to the level of barbarian excess and superficiality. The glitter and glamour of precious jewellery and dress (Cavafy) and of “the shining city” (Mahon) go hand in hand with a ban on “illustrious speakers’… lofty oration and demagogy61” (Cavafy) and “the bigots shrieking for their beleaguered ‘culture’” (Mahon), neither of whom tourists- barbarians cannot understand. It could be argued that the Republic of Ireland and modern Greece both yielded to the barbarian-tourist invasion by embracing it as an alternative to older occupations (fishing, farming) which have been in decline ever since62. In Northern Ireland, if we were to believe Mahon’s speculations in “An Bonnán Buí”, “those people [the tourists-barbarians] would have been a solution, of sorts” (Cavafy) bringing a promise of economic profit and ironically, peace as its side effect. Yet the irony, much akin to Cavafy’s, makes the reader suspicious about the marriage of tourism and peace, a marketing stratagem used by the tourist industry ever since the end of the First World War. Buzard observes how the century which has lamentably defined itself as an era of “world” wars, of war- making made conceivable on a global scale, has also helped to sustain the dubious counter-image of tourism as a means to world peace and understanding. The installation of official tourist ministries in the aftermath of the Great War was justified and partly driven by such an ideal… [S]hortly after the Second World War,
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John Pudney… announced that “a travel agency, implying a liberty of choice and circulation, is the very antithesis of war63”. 23 The author demonstrates how the trend of “A Philosophy of Tourism and Peace” continued into the 1980s, promoted by authors of an academic textbook on tourism64 which employed totalitarian economic newspeak under the cover of “tourism’s culture industry65”. The history of Northern Ireland and consequently Mahon’s own biographical background being riddled by acts of terrorism, one can pose a question whether at the present historical moment in the 21st century, defined by global terrorism, society regards the liberty of circulation as “the very antithesis of war”.
24 Mahon has openly used Cavafy’s “Waiting for the Barbarians” in an earlier poem located in Northern Ireland. Published in 1972 at the height of the conflict in Ulster, “After Cavafy66” later known under the title “Poem Beginning with a Line from Cavafy” (Poems 1962-1978)67 opens with Cavafy’s line “It is night/And the barbarians have not come.” This line introduces the first part of Mahon’s poem devoted to the heroic Celtic past, juxtaposing the Irish pastoral-historical narrative with the English coloniser’s, or perhaps featuring exclusively the English narrative of the Irish (anti) pastoral. The second part of Mahon’s poem, starting with the line “Or if they [barbarians] have [come]…”, comments on the ‘Troubles’, where the barbarians engage in local populism, propaganda and (para)military actions. In a wider perspective, Mahon’s 1970s collections including Lives proliferate with images of ‘barbarians’ as either ‘savage’ or ‘primitive’ civilisations, or the contrary, as the Western most ‘civilised’ culture. Two most famous poems of The Snow Party (1975), for instance, ironically collate empires, utopias and dystopias such as, on the one hand, the detached, stagnant Japan with its ceremonies (“The Snow Party68”) or the “cold dream/Of a place out of time/a palace of porcelain” (“The Last of the Fire Kings69”), and on the other, the European inquisition burning people at stakes (“Snow Party”) and “the fire-loving people” of Northern Ireland (“The Last of the Fire Kings”). Similar ideas endure in The Yellow Book with its cause-and-effect sequence of barbarism and empire, where barbarism represents a domestic political force leading to the decline of the empire (“America Deserta”), and to the diffusion of barbarism outside of the empire in the form of tourism (“Night Thoughts”). 25 To quote the more immediate, Irish, framework of Byzantium in The Yellow Book, the hidden and evident allusions to Yeats’s poetry attest to Mahon’s inevitable dialogue with the celebrated predecessor, starting with the volume’s title hinting at the fin-de- siècle journal where Yeats would publish. “I have sailed the seas…” Mahon’s traveller could repeat after Yeats, though the modern Cycladic paradise, objectively speaking, has little in common with the Yeatsian paradise of art; quite the contrary, “monuments of unaging intellect” lose the battle against carnal passions of tourism extolled in “Aphrodite’s Pool”. Destination, nonetheless, remains elusive for both poets; just as Yeats’s artifice of Byzantium, a vision of lost Atlantis haunts “Aphrodite’s Pool” (“underwater light/glows like Atlantis in the Aegean night”), paradoxically adding to the inauthenticity of this mock tourist experience. The apocalyptic “Christmas in Kinsale”, in turn, merges with Yeats’s and Cavafy’s image of chaotic endings and frantic waiting: waiting for the ‘new blood’. Paraphrasing Yeats’s “Second Coming,” Mahon depicts “the young… slouching into Bethlehem” in the spurt of a pseudo-spiritual New Age tourism, urged to various sacred mountains by the desire to watch the advance of the new millennium, “the aisling and the dreamt apocalypse”, though “the oracles are dumb” in this world dominated by technological progress and ecological disaster.
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Meditating in the Yeatsian vein: “Does history, exhausted, come full circle?” Mahon eventually heralds a revival: “A cock crowing good-morning… like a peacock… in Byzantium,/… life begins.” Being “a waste theorist70” (the opinion Haughton elaborates on in an excellent article71), Mahon recycles rubbish to produce a new beginning. At this exact point, The Yellow Book closes with a dream vision of… the Cyclades. I dreamed last night of a blue Cycladic dawn, a lone figure pointing to the horizon, again the white islands shouting, ‘Come on; come on!… 26 This ending discloses Mahon the spiritual traveller. The lucidity of the Cycladic landscape, which he once compared to the Irish islescape in the poem “Achill”72, counterbalances the increasing disorder of the contemporary world. Indeed, it counterbalances the apocalypse. In this reunion with nature, mnemonic, imaginary and subconscious, Mahon meets his own self in the “lone figure pointing to the horizon” on the oneiric island. As I have already observed73, his homecoming to the place situated abroad epitomises his journey into the inner world, the only territory remaining private in the contemporary world; “the more public the lifeworld realm, the greater the pull towards the inner self”, Theano Terkenli remarks in her essay “Home as a Region74”. Hugh Haughton spotted in Mahon’s archival notebook a list from the Private Eye magazine which in my opinion must have provided a structural design for “Christmas in Kinsale”: “litter, waste, junk, ephemera, collecting, recycling, antiquarianism, fetishism, museums, the home, memorabilia, memory, mess, disorder, space and freedom75”. Applied to Mahon’s poem, the list clearly reveals the position of the Cycladic dawn as the one of “space and freedom”. The Cyclades in “Christmas in Kinsale” represent a carte blanche, an unwritten space simultaneously loaded with potential meanings, a geographical region retrieved from Mahon’s sentimental map and forming a mental and spiritual zone of his private myth. Emphasised by the open ending of the poem (three dots), this unbounded space – a traveller’s ideal of an unexplored territory – constitutes Mahon’s response to the age of organised tourism.
27 Greece – and more specifically his travels, mainly to Paros, in 1974-1997 – has provided the poet with a paradigm of authenticity and liberation which seems lost on the era of homo turisticus. It must be added here that the Greek islands in “Christmas in Kinsale”, rather than with antiquity “where Greek sculpture was established” as some critics observed about this poem76, should be associated with the contemporary model of human relationships and of interaction between humans and nature (though indeed “Greek sculpture was established” on Paros and the Cycladic landscape and architecture can be read in terms of form, “the beautiful and the sublime77”). The “white islands” of the Greek archipelago in “Christmas in Kinsale” are akin to Mahon’s “Irish vistas of sea and seashore as tokens of metaphysical perspectives” but they do not “invoke ultimate states of post-history, post-existence78”. For, contrary to Longley and Heaney, as he travelled in Greece, Mahon was more interested in modernity and prehistory than in the classical heritage and post-existence79. 28 Ensuing from this examination of Mahon’s poems is a hesitant though mostly negative attitude to the phenomenon of tourism. Oscillating between the positions of a traveller, an armchair traveller, an anti-tourist, a mock tourist and a post-tourist, the author meditates on (fake) spiritual tourism, consumerism, postcolonial heritage, mythology, pollution by tourism, and many other issues related to domestic and foreign spaces. Exactly this differentiation between the domestic and foreign space is also responsible for his shifting attitude: quite naturally, in Ireland he tends to assume an anti-tourist
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view, while in Greece, for instance, he juggles the roles of a mock tourist, a post-tourist and a traveller. The confines of these positions are never clear-cut, however, as they interact with the poet’s turbulent relationship with home, his sense of (self-)exile, and his spiritual affinity with the Cycladic landscape. 29 His pejorative approach to tourism is not alienated; as Buzard notes at the very beginning of his book, “most English speakers also recognize a distinct negative connotation for ‘tourist’80”. The tenets of The Yellow Book can be acutely summed up with a quote from Buzard: Mahon’s volume represents one of the instances suggestive of “the tourist’s peculiar place in modern representations of… the possible decline of civilization, or of the processes of true and false (‘touristic’) perception81”. Bearing in mind this vaster frame of reference it becomes evident that, although tourism is one of the numerous themes discussed The Yellow Book, Mahon’s contribution to this philosophical and historiosophic reflection cannot be overrated.
NOTES
2. In my forthcoming book Irish Poets and Modern Greece: Heaney, Mahon, Cavafy, Seferis, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. See also my chapter “Irish Poets on Paros: O’Grady, Mahon, Longley, Brennan”, in the forthcoming collection of essays and poems: Landscapes of Irish and Greek Poets (ed. Joanna Kruczkowska, Peter Lang Oxford, scheduled for 2017). 3. Derek Mahon, The Yellow Book, Loughcrew, The Gallery Press, 1997, p. 37-38. 4. Ibid., p. 56-57. 5. Theano S. Terkenli, “Towards a Theory of the Landscape: the Aegean landscape as a Cultural Image”, Landscape and Urban Planning, Vol. 57, 2001, p. 197-208; quote p. 204. 6. For a detailed discussion of how this poem relates to trading the myth in Greece, see Chapter 1 of Irish Poets and Modern Greece and my “Derek Mahon’s Seascapes Mediated through Greece: Antiquity in Modernity, Nature in Abstraction”, in Marie Mianowski (ed.), Irish Landscapes: New Myths, New Perspectives, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, p. 69-80. 7. Derek Mahon, The Yellow Book, op. cit., p. 54-55. 8. Ibid., p. 26-27. 9. The poet left Belfast in 1960s, returning briefly to the North as a Poet in Residence at the University of Ulster at Coleraine in 1977-79. 10. Derek Mahon, The Yellow Book, op. cit., p. 18-19. 11. See my Irish Poets and Modern Greece where I discuss his literary trips in Greece and in other places. 12. Hugh Haughton, “On Sitting Down to Read ‘A Disused Shed in Co Wexford’ Once Again”, The Cambridge Quarterly, Vol. 31 No. 2, 2002, p. 183-198; quote: p. 185. On this
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theme, see also Frank Sewell, “‘Where the Paradoxes Grow’: the Poetry of Derek Mahon”, Coleraine, Cranagh Press, 2000. 13. Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, Writing Home Writing Home: Poetry and Place in Northern Ireland 1968-2008, Cambridge, Brewer, 2008, p. 155. 14. Terence Brown, “Mahon and Longley: Place and Placenessness”, in The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry, ed. Matthew Campbell, CUP, 2003, p. 139. 15. Derek Mahon, Journalism: Selected Prose 1970-1995, Loughcrew, The Gallery Press, p. 25. 16. I discuss Mahon’s quote in the context of Bauman’s views in Chapter 1 of Irish Poets and Modern Greece. Zygmunt Bauman, “From Pilgrim to Tourist – or a Short History of Identity”, in Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay, London, Sage, 1996, p. 18-36. 17. Derek Mahon, The Yellow Book, op. cit., p. 12-13. 18. The quote without Mahon’s omissions reads as follows: “One striking post-Second War phenomenon has been the transformation of numerous former small countries into pseudo-places or tourist commonwealths, whose function is simply to entice tourists and sell them things” (Paul Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars, OUP, 1980, p. 43). 19. Ibid. 20. Hugh Haughton, The Poetry of Derek Mahon, OUP, 2010, p. 277. A different note in Mahon’s notebook refers to Umberto Eco’s Travels in Hyper-Reality (p. 273). 21. “McAlpine’s Fusiliers”, The Mudcat Cafe, 31 Jul 1999, Web, 20 May 2015, [http:// www.mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=12665]. 22. Fintan O’Toole, The Ex-Isle of Erin: Images of Global Ireland, Dublin, New Island Books, 1997, p. 173 (qtd. after Hugh Haughton, The Poetry of Derek Mahon, op. cit., p. 266). 23. Eóin Flannery, Ireland and Ecocriticism: Literature, History and Environmental Justice, New York and London, Routledge, 2015, p. 2, 27, 24. 24. Derek Mahon, The Yellow Book, op. cit., p. 13. 25. Louis Turner and John Ash, The Golden Hordes: International Tourism and the Pleasure Periphery, London, Constable, 1975, p. 11. 26. James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to ‘Culture’ 1800-1918, Oxford, Clarendon, 1993, p. 1. 27. Derek Mahon, The Yellow Book, op. cit., p. 36. 28. Ibid., p. 46. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., p. 47. 31. Ibid., p. 14-15. 32. W. H. Auden, Collected Poems, New York, Random House, 1976, p. 445. 33. James Buzard, The Beaten Track…, op. cit., p. 11. 34. Alan Brien, “Tourist Angst”, The Spectator, 31 July 1959, p. 133. 35. Paul Fussell, Abroad…, op. cit., p. 47.
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36. To an extent, both Ireland and Greece can be perceived as postcolonial margins, although they may have lost some of this status with the influx of immigrants after the 2004 EU accessions. 37. Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins, London, Routledge, 2001, p. 13. 38. Ibid., p. 194. 39. Paul Fussell, Abroad…, op. cit., p. 39. 40. Ibid. 41. Louis Turner and John Ash, op. cit., p. 11. 42. Michael Viney, The Living Island, Dublin, Comhar, 2003. 43. Consistently with Mahon’s practice of ceaseless revisions. 44. Derek Mahon, New Collected Poems, Loughcrew, The Gallery Press, 2011, p. 209. 45. Joseph Lennon, Irish Orientalism: A Literary and Intellectual History, Syracuse, Syracuse UP, 2008, p. 5. 46. Derek Mahon, The Yellow Book, op. cit., p. 16-17. 47. Ibid., 49-50. 48. I refer to Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium” (rather than “Byzantium” despite their similarities) and to Cavafy’s “Waiting for the Barbarians.” 49. For more details see Chapter 1 and 4 of my Irish Poets and Modern Greece. 50. Derek Mahon, The Yellow Book, op. cit., p. 25. 51. Ibid., p. 21. 52. Ibid., p. 19. 53. Hugh Haughton, The Poetry of Derek Mahon, op. cit., p. 276. 54. David G. Williams, “‘A Decadent Who Lived to Tell the Story’: Derek Mahon’s The Yellow Book”, Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 23 No. 1, Summer 1999, p. 111-126; quote: p. 115, 114. 55. John Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies, London, Sage, (1990) 2005, p. 92, 91. 56. Derek Mahon, The Yellow Book, op. cit., p. 37. 57. John Urry, op. cit., p. 91. 58. Derek Mahon, The Yellow Book, op. cit., p. 37. 59. John Urry, The Tourist Gaze…, op. cit., p. 97. 60. Quoted here in Stratis Haviaras’ translation: C. P. Cavafy, The Canon, transl. Stratis Haviaras, Athens, Hermes, 2004, Cavafy Archive, 1995-2012, Web, 13 Dec 2015. 61. The original reads here δημηγορίες, which is a neutral term for “public speech”. 62. The role of the European Union in this process of transformation is yet another matter. 63. James Buzard, The Beaten Track…, op. cit., p. 334-335. Internal quote from: John Pudney, The Thomas Cook Story, London, Michael Joseph, 1953, p. 173. 64. Robert W. McIntosh and Charles R. Goeldner, Tourism: Principles, Practices, Philosophies, New York, Wiley, 1984, p. 485. 65. James Buzard, The Beaten Track…, op. cit., p. 333-334.
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66. Derek Mahon, Lives, OUP, 1972, p. 24. 67. Derek Mahon, Poems 1962-1978, OUP, 1979. See also my Chapter 4 of Irish Poets and Modern Greece devoted to Mahon’s translations from Cavafy. 68. Derek Mahon, New Collected Poems, p. 62. 69. Ibid., p. 63-64. 70. Hugh Haughton, The Poetry of Derek Mahon, op. cit., p. 310. 71. Hugh Haughton, “‘The bright garbage on the incoming wave’: Rubbish in the Poetry of Derek Mahon”, Textual Practice, Vol. 16 No. 1, 2002, p. 323-343. 72. Derek Mahon, Antarctica, Loughcrew, The Gallery Press, 1985. 73. Cf. my article “The (Im)palpable: Two Cycladic Landscapes by Derek Mahon and Michael Longley”, which discusses “Christmas in Kinsale” from the ecocritical perspective; Landscapes, Vol. 17 No. 2, 2016, p. 3-22. 74. Theano S. Terkenli, “Home as a Region”, Geographical Review, Vol. 85 No. 3, Jul 1995, p. 324-334; p. 333. 75. Hugh Haughton, The Poetry of Derek Mahon, op. cit., p. 274. 76. Jefferson Holdridge, “Night-Rule: Decadence and Sublimity in Derek Mahon from The Yellow Book to the ‘Italian Poems’”, Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 17, 2002, p. 50-69; quote: p. 63. 77. Ibid. 78. Terence Brown, op. cit., p. 135. I have also compared Irish and Greek seascapes in “Derek Mahon’s Seascapes”. 79. For more details see my Irish Poets and Modern Greece. 80. James Buzard, The Beaten Track…, op. cit., p. 1. 81. Ibid., p. 2.
ABSTRACTS
Derek Mahon in his Yellow Book addresses the issue of tourism as one of the realms of modern decline. Among numerous landscapes, the volume reveals a comparative Irish/Greek framework focusing on the two countries with substantial reliance on tourist industry. This article examines social connotations of tourism and a range of hesitant attitudes of the poet towards this phenomenon, indicating, as one of the reasons for this hesitation, the juxtaposition of domestic and foreign spaces.
Dans The Yellow Book, Derek Mahon aborde le tourisme comme l’une des manifestations du déclin moderne. Parmi de nombreux paysages, ce volume révèle une trame mettant en parallèle l’Irlande et la Grèce, deux pays fortement tributaires du secteur du tourisme. Cet article examine les implications sociales du tourisme et les hésitations que suscite cette question chez le poète, dues notamment à la juxtaposition de l’espace national/domestique et de l’espace étranger.
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INDEX
Mots-clés: Derek Mahon, poèsie irlandaise, tourisme, The Yellow Book, Cyclades Keywords: Derek Mahon, Irish poetry, tourism, The Yellow Book, Cyclades
AUTHOR
JOANNA KRUCZKOWSKA
University of Lodz – University of Athens This research was supported by a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship within the 7th European Community Framework Programme under REA grant agreement no. 623747. Project website: http://www.irellas.com.
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The Orphan Decade: Elizabeth Bowen’s 1930s Novels
Anna Teekell
1 It is by now a scholarly convention to open a discussion of Elizabeth Bowen with the problem of “placing” her. As Phyllis Lassner remarks in a 2010 review essay in Modernism/Modernity, “the critical dilemma has always been one of situating and stabilizing Bowen’s oeuvre and style in literary history and theory… in short, as a writer and as a person, Bowen’s identity is a trouble-maker1”. Anglo-Irish, Bowen herself once remarked that she felt most at home in the middle of the Irish Sea, being seen as English in Ireland and Irish in England. Born in June 1899, she is half a generation older than “the Auden Generation” and not quite a generation younger than “The Pound Era”, to contextualize by scholarly book title2. Her work has been categorized as a return to Jamesian psychological realism in the wake of Joyce and Woolf, and, conversely, as a dissolution of the novel itself3. She has been adopted as a darling of feminist criticism despite her own assertion, “I am not, and shall never be, a feminist4”. In short, Bowen’s work – and the critical reception of it – has always troubled scholarly categories. As Luke Thurston writes in a 2013 special issue of Textual Practice, Bowen is an “exemplary artist of non-belonging5”. She seems to be, like so many of her characters, an orphan. And yet, for decades now, scholars have felt compelled to try to make her fit somewhere. I want to suggest in this essay that the conversation about placing Elizabeth Bowen is aligned with the conversation about placing 1930s fiction; her novels of the 1930s create an aesthetic that could only belong to that similarly orphaned decade.
2 Like the orphans who populate Bowen’s novels, 1930s fiction seems to stick out of place. Critics are beginning to feel that, like a surplus child, something must be “done” about this writing. Like the orphan Pauline in To the North, Thirties fiction is, “responsive”, “like a bear who you have to keep throwing buns at6”. It responds to its historical moment stylistically, by the self-conscious deployment of modernist techniques, but a critical discourse that early mapped the 1930s as the decade of Auden and Orwell created an overdetermined assessment of Thirties writing as a reaction against a high modernism that was stylistically experimental and politically
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conservative. Thus, the 1930s was read, in its own moment, as the decade of the Group Theatre and the Left Book Club, of poetry of pylons and plain-style prose, assumed to be anti-Fascist as well as anti-Modernist. This designation – almost immediate and curiously longstanding – left little room for anything outside its parameters, and the consciously modernist fiction of the decade was left in a sort of no-man’s-land of literary history7. 3 What the literary history of Thirties prose became, in fact, was a no-woman’s-land, for a focus on Great War memoirs and left-wing, Spanish Civil War-related prose left little room for “lady novelists”, unless bookcased as Modernist Women (like Woolf and Stein) or demoted to the “middlebrow8”. The twinned fallacies that modernism was apolitical and that the political writing of the 1930s was anti-modernist has meant that both the modernist stylistics and deep political awareness underscoring much 1930s fiction has been overlooked. Bowen’s novels of the Thirties are both modernist in style and politically aware, and it is for these very reasons that they are so important to the literary history of the decade. The orphaned Elizabeth Bowen is indicative of the 1930s because she fits no ready-made categories. She demands our critical attention precisely because she is so difficult to account for. 4 Bowen’s 1930s novels trouble the narrative of Irish literary history by appearing to flout both the Gaelic Revival and the anti-revival realism of Seán O’Faoláin and Frank O’Connor, and by being, like their author, seemingly part-time Irish. Her 1930s novels trouble the narrative of English literary history by being resolutely patrician and by appearing – on the surface – neither modernist enough to be Woolvian nor realist enough to be Red. Her carefully articulated worlds might be classed as realist comedies of manners (they are often comic, and everyone behaves nicely), but in this their subject matter elides Bowen’s modernist practices. Her 1930s novels rely on formal devices learnt from Woolf and Joyce, and her characters are infatuated with the modernist trappings of the age of speed. Moreover, Bowen’s prose is carefully wayward, sometimes to the point of opacity, and her characters constantly fret over their inability to articulate themselves. All these are telltale indications of her conscious engagement with the work of high modernism. Thinking through Bowen’s 1930s novels, we begin to see that rather than obscuring the relationship between modernism and 1930s literature in Britain, Bowen’s acute historical consciousness of the decade in which she was writing elucidates that link. In 1935’s The House in Paris, Karen tells her aunt, “I wish the Revolution would come soon; I should like to start fresh while I am still young, with everything that I had to depend on gone9.” Here, Bowen nods to the historical consciousness of the decade – and then winks: Of course, “I shall always work against it”, the upper-class Karen explains, “But I should like it to happen in spite of me” (HP 87). 5 Elizabeth Bowen’s career spans the middle 50 years of the twentieth century. She published 10 novels, half of them between 1929 and 1938. In the course of this decade, Bowen transformed from promising young “lady novelist” to a prolific, best-selling author, and yet, her name springs rarely to the lips when the term “Thirties Writer” comes about10. Here she is, a major writer, the bulk of her major work produced in the 1930s, but because she doesn’t fit the narrative, she is left a sort of critical orphan. Four out of Bowen’s five novels of the decade, The Last September (1929), To the North (1932), The House in Paris (1935) and The Death of the Heart (1938) all feature orphans as protagonists. The figure of the orphan in these texts: parentless, placeless, always
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young, always demanding to be accounted for, is also a figure for the 1930s as a lived decade and the 1930s as a self-conscious literary period11. 6 Nels Pearson has recently argued for a reading of Bowen as a postcolonial cosmopolitan writer, whose novels reveal the postcolonial expatriate’s “unresolved status of… prior national belonging: the feeling that one has yet to belong to a stable consensus of nationhood12”. Reflecting this vexed sense of national belonging, many of Bowen’s novels are also temporally vexed, “shot through by the contrary notion that historical time and traditional social orders are merely interrupted and are still moving toward coherence13”. The orphans who populate Bowen’s Thirties novels are exemplary of these twinned problematics of time and space – from 18-year-old Lois Farquhar’s Anglo-Irish suspended animation in The Last September to Portia Quayne’s peripatetic adolescence in The Death of the Heart, “displacement is the norm of the present, but it has also been the norm of the past14”. Pearson writes, “Bowen heroines are usually in process of negotiating belonging… it is not that they once belonged somewhere else and suddenly feel adrift in the globe-as-universe; rather, they always ‘belong somewhere else’” (324-5). In no characters is this rendered more explicit than in Bowen’s cadre of orphans. I contend that this sense of orphaned unbelonging in Bowen’s Thirties novels is definitively linked to the sense of temporal dislocation brought on by the decade that Graves and Hodge called “the long week-end” – a period defined less by its own lights than by its position between two more actual events – the world wars15. Bowen’s Thirties orphans are lost in place as well as time; like the decade itself, they seem trapped or in transit, waiting for the next thing to happen. 7 The Death of the Heart focuses on the installation of Portia, Thomas’ orphaned half-sister by his father and his father’s mistress, at Thomas and Anna Quayne’s home on Regent’s Park. The nature of her birth has made Portia a lifelong expatriate, since her father lost his home and his place in society when he (grudgingly) left his wife for Portia’s pregnant mother and an itinerant life in off-season continental hotels. “Nothing that’s hers ever seems… to belong to her”, remarks Anna; “it may be because they always lived in hotels” (DH 6). In fact, Anna says to her friend St. Quentin, “She’s made nothing but trouble since before she was born”. “You mean”, he responds, “it’s a pity she ever was?” (DH 7). Portia is presented as a problem to be solved, indeed, a pity. In this, she is not unlike scores of other literary orphans cast, with better or worse luck, upon the pages of so many nineteenth-century novels. But Portia’s orphaned disposition, in 1938, has a particularly dark edge to it. She bears a “suggestion”, the narrator explains, “of scared lurking… like a kitten that expects to be drowned” (DH 47). Indeed, her deportment is disconcerting for this very reason: “Portia had learnt one dare never look for long. She had those eyes that seem to be welcome nowhere, that learn shyness from the alarm they precipitate. Such eyes are always turning away or being humbly lowered – dare come to rest nowhere but on a point in space; their homeless intentness makes them appear fanatical” (DH 58). Arriving from the Continent into London in 1938, keeping her eyes to the ground, nothing of her own to her name – Portia maps not just onto the literary history of the orphan but onto the political history of the refugee. 8 When she appears at Major Brutt’s hotel at the end of the novel, “Portia seemed to belong nowhere, not even here. Stripped of that pleasant home that had seemed part of her figure… she looked at once harsh and beaten, a refugee – frightening, rebuffing all pity that has fear at the root” (DH 385). This depiction, with its twining of pity and fear,
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deliberately recalls the plight of the approximately 80,000 refugees who poured into Britain from the Nazi-occupied Continent between 1933 and the end of the Second World War16. Anna’s reception of Portia maps onto the British reaction to foreign, mostly Jewish refugees in the 1930s: Portia represents an alien interruption into Anna’s carefully constructed habitat, she represents a drain on household economy, and she functions – through her diary, which Anna reads – as a sort of foreign observer of the Quayne world. Portia moves carefully in Anna’s home, “crabwise, as though the others were royalty, never quite turning her back on them – and they, waiting for her to be quite gone, watched” (DH 32). As much as Portia fears Anna, her older sister-in-law fears her. The welcome she receives – so much more concerned about her inability to assimilate, her ‘tainted’ bloodline as Mr Quayne’s bastard, her penury, than her actual wellbeing – is reminiscent of the unwilling “welcome” that the British public – and the Home Office – gave to European refugees17. 9 In 1935’s The House in Paris, Bowen makes the connection between orphan and refugee overt by making the orphaned Leopold Jewish18. By 1938, when The Death of the Heart was published, she didn’t need to; the same year saw the formation of the Intergovernmental Committee for Refugees. To do more than compare Portia to a refugee would be heavy-handed at the expense of the novel. In 1938, Penguin brought out its first two dozen “Specials”, three of which deal explicitly with the refugee crisis. One was Norman Angell and Dorothy Buxton’s You and the Refugee, which argues for the ethical imperative of admitting and assimilating refugees, and might well serve as an alternate title for The Death of the Heart19. Portia may be merely a social refugee, but the mixture of pity and fear with which she is received – the sense that Portia is not just an inconvenient ethical obligation but a potentially subversive one – makes her, at the very least, a figure emblematic of a political refugee20. 10 Portia is not unaware of her historical moment, nor of her position in the Quayne household. At one point, having been sent away from Anna’s drawing room, she says to her older brother, “I do think history is sad”. He responds, More, shady… bunk, misfires and graft from the very start. I can’t think why we make such a fuss now: we’ve got no reason to expect anything better. But at one time, weren’t people braver? Tougher, and they didn’t go round in rings. And also there was a future then. You can’t get up any pace when you feel you’re right at the edge. (DH 36) 11 Thomas’ view of the present moment – “right at the edge” – is in tune with the dominant consciousness in Britain in the late 1930s, with groups like the British Union of Fascists, as Thomas might say, “going round in rings”. The past may be sad, but “there was a future then” that doesn’t seem possible for the characters in The Death of the Heart. For Thomas, this is a historical point, but it also foreshadows Portia’s own plot, on a literary level. She has no future, because the novel will end before the reader even knows if she will go “home” to the cold Anna and Thomas or remain a refugee in the Karachi Hotel21.
12 Strikingly, none of Bowen’s 1930s orphan novels comes to a satisfying conclusion. In each novel, the orphan’s fate is implied but never conclusively “solved”. If the orphans of the nineteenth century novel, the orphans of the gothic (a genre which suffuses Bowen’s work) are generally solvable problems, characters who, by the end, tend to acquire family solidity or a safe haven, Bowen’s 1930s orphans are left hanging in the balance. Unsatisfying and even tragic endings are implied for them, but the novels’ actual conclusions look askance: in this, Bowen’s orphan decade enacts a sort of
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aesthetic for the “low, dishonest decade” which was always certain to end in the conflagration that no one wanted to see22. 13 In The House in Paris, Max, an Anglo-French Jew, makes this remark about his English lover’s rhetorical aesthetic: Nowadays the world is in bad taste; it is no longer ‘history in the making’, or keeps rules or falls in with nice ideas. Things will soon be much more than embarrassing; I doubt if one will be able to save one’s face. Humour [is] no longer possible. Karen will have to find herself something else. (HP 120) 14 What Max means is that she must find some other vehicle for expression. Karen, in an answer that seems to predict Paul Fussell’s thesis in The Great War and Modern Memory, responds, “Irony seems less childish, I daresay23” (HP 120). In any case, to meet the times, something in her very language would have to shift. One of the perpetual troubles in Bowen’s 1930s novels is the deployment of a language commensurate with the history of the moment. Puzzling over how to express herself in a letter, Emmeline in To the North suggests, “Perhaps some day words will be different or there will be others” (TN 125). “Often when she spoke”, the narrator of The House in Paris says of Karen’s friend Naomi, “she seemed to be translating, and translating rustily. No phrase she used was what anyone could quite mean; they were doubtful, as though she hoped they would do” (HP 6). An astute reader of Flaubert, Bowen came of age as a writer knowing that the mot juste would always be a mirage. Her characters seem afflicted with the same problem. As Max tells Karen, “What I say is correct, but never spontaneous, is it? It is too tight or too loose; it never fits what I mean… What I say would often be right if I meant something else” (HP 127). By making both Max and Naomi Anglo-French, Bowen emphasizes the difficulties of communication, but their bilingualism merely magnifies the linguistic problem faced by all of Bowen’s characters24.
15 One of the hallmarks of her writing and the criticism of it is Bowen’s prose, which was once frequently accused by numerous critics of a sort of linguistic failure to thrive. Opaque, baroque, given to twists and turns, her sentences often seem to struggle to say what they mean. This stylistic signature is now readable as a positive part of Bowen’s modernist difficulty, a language dilemma that is shared between her readers and her characters. Consider the opening lines of both To the North and the House in Paris. To the North begins, Towards the end of April a breath from the north blew cold down Milan platforms to meet the returning traveler” (TN 1, emphasis added) The House in Paris opens, In a taxi skidding away from the Gare du Nord, one dark greasy February morning before the shutters were down, Henrietta sat beside Miss Fisher (HP 1, emphasis added) 16 There are five prepositions in each of these sentences – in the second, there are four prepositional phrases even before the subject is introduced. Bowen’s sentences are, as she said about her characters, “almost perpetually in transit25”. For Bowen, the problem of language is intertwined with the problem (and necessity) of movement. Language is performative, a form of movement. “Speech”, Bowen says, “is what the characters do to each other 26”. Her characters, she writes “are in transit consciously” (“Pictures” 287). They feel, they experience, by moving – and as fictional persons, they can only move through language. Bowen’s Thirties novels are obsessed with the technology of movement, both linguistically and mechanically. In her essay, “Prosthetic Goddesses: Ambiguous Identities in the Age of Speed”, Céline Magot aligns Bowen’s novels with Futurism and Vorticism, examining how bodies in Bowen tend to
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merge with the machines that they use. Magot calls To The North “an allegory of speed27 ”. The novel’s very title is in motion, as are all of its characters. One of the novel’s protagonists, Cecilia, “never seems to be happy when she is not in a train – unless, of course, she is motoring28” (TN 14).
17 Cecilia’s sister-in-law, Emmeline, owns a travel agency whose motto is “Move Dangerously” (TN 25). One of Bowen’s radical innocents, and an orphan, Emmeline does just this, driving at breakneck speed, without her glasses. Waiting for a flight to Paris, “Such an exalting idea of speed possessed Emmeline that she could hardly sit still and longed to pace to and fro” (TN 167). Possessed by the need to “move dangerously”, this restless orphan – the first careerwoman in Bowen, by the way – strives to provide the same thrilling anxiety to her clients. She explains, “What everyone feels is that life, even travel, is losing its element of uncertainty; we try to supply that. We give clients their data: they have to use their own wits. ‘Of course’, we always say to them, ‘you may not enjoy yourselves’” (TN 25). In this way, Emmeline’s travel agency sounds like an analogue for modernist reading practices: the data is provided, but to interpret it, the reader has to use her own wits. 18 The brilliant set-piece on the airplane in To The North (which Valentine Cunningham calls literature’s first example of air-mindedness), investigates the implications of new movement technology on language29. Unable to hear each other speak, Emmeline and her lover Markie pass notes to one another across the table. For Markie this means, “The indiscretions of letter-writing, the intimacies of speech were at once his” (TN 170). But the paper conversation, with Markie’s admonition to Emmeline that he will not marry her, is overshadowed by Emmeline’s own linkage of the movement of her travel and the movement of her plot, her relationship with the caddish Markie. In the plane, she thinks, “She was embarked, they were embarked together, no stop was possible; she could now turn back only by some unforeseen and violent deflection – by which her exact idea of personal honour became imperiled – from their set course” (TN 171). Emmeline and Markie’s fraught relationship sounds a lot like our historical notion of the 1930s, a decade that seems an unstoppable movement toward violence, and indeed their relationship ends as the decade does, in a dramatic and undoubtedly fatal crash. The novel’s conclusion doesn’t write the crash, however, but leaves Emmeline and Markie speeding off into the dark, Emmeline’s eyes shut behind the wheel. “Poor Emmeline”, Bowen later remarked, “it was inevitable30”. 19 One of the inevitabilities of travel is, of course, baggage – with all of its physical and emotional connotations. In “Elizabeth Bowen, Howards End and the Luggage of Modernity”, Emily Ridge convincingly argues that luggage is the analogue for fiction in Bowen’s work31. She contrasts this with EM Forster, for whom fiction was a house. In Bowen, Ridge argues, “luggage becomes emblematic of the search for a new kind of form” (111). Luggage encapsulates modernity as movement; displays Bowen’s ambivalent relationship with literary tradition (as in, Forster’s house); stands in for stylistic mobility, and overall, luggage questions the meaning of belonging. I will extend Ridge’s argument by positing that the orphan child is the ultimate piece of baggage. As Henrietta thinks to herself in The House in Paris, “But we’re children, people’s belongings” (HP 55). The trouble is that the orphan child belongs to no one. Leftover (in literary terms, perhaps from the gothic novel), the orphan embodies at once both the past and the future. But being parentless, homeless, the orphan problematizes the present. “The Present” sections of The House in Paris focus on the day
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two half-orphans, Henrietta and Leopold, spend, coincidentally, in transit at Mme Fisher’s gothic Parisian home. Eleven-year-old Henrietta’s mother is dead (much to her embarrassment) and she is on her way from London to her grandmother in the south of France, dispatched overseas with a cerise cockade to identify her as she transfers, like a traveling box, from one chaperone to the next. Leopold is the illegitimate son of Karen and the dead Max. Raised in Italy by American adoptive parents, whom he hates, Leopold has come to Paris at the age of nine for a promised meeting with his mother. The meeting, heartbreakingly, does not come off, and Leopold spends the day waiting for something to happen – waiting, though he does not know it, in the very room where his father committed suicide before his conception was known. Unknowingly, in his little sailor suit, Leopold is the physical embodiment of illicit sexual desire, the residue of a hushed-up past, but also, as his mother hoped, the future of his father: “Why should Max leave nothing?” (HP 207). 20 Leopold’s name deliberately links him to his literary antecedents, as well. With a Jewish father, he is the obvious literary offspring of modernism’s most famous fictional Jew, Leopold Bloom, but instead of looking for a son, Bowen’s Leopold plays the role of Stephen Dedalus, searching for a parent. He is the reverse of Bloom in another way, too. Both novels are framed in the course of a single day, but while Joyce’s Leopold spends his day on the move, Bowen’s Leopold spends the entire novel standing still. The form of the novel underscores this: by bracketing the story of Karen and Max’s affair between the morning and afternoon of the day in Paris, Bowen brackets, as the novel specifies, “The Past” into the middle of “The Present”. In other words, the discontinuous modernist form of the novel enacts the problem of Leopold himself: a relic of the past bracketed into the present32. This plot device also extends Leopold (and the reader’s) wait for his mother by 150 pages while managing, simultaneously, to introduce her into the narrative, creating the impossible account that Leopold hoped his mother would give: the story of “what made me be” (HP 65). The narrator acknowledges that this account is only made possible by Karen’s failure to arrive, and so indicates that the middle of the novel, the section called “The Past”, is only the province of fiction: “Only there – in heaven or art, in that nowhere, on that plane – could Karen have told Leopold what had really been” (HP 66). 21 But what do we do while we wait for Karen’s story? What does the orphan do while he waits for the story which sits between Naomi’s twice repeated line, “Your mother is not coming; she cannot come” (HP 62, 213). The orphan boy is a piece of baggage who must wait for a new handler. And here he must wait, in Beckettian terms, for nothing to happen twice. 22 “I have got to be somewhere”, Henrietta tells Leopold, “I can’t just melt” (HP 53). “But where can you go”, she asks him later, “if nobody knows you’re born?” (HP 55). At once aligned with high modernism though the figure of Bloom and with the spectre of World War II, as a Jewish boy, with no family, alone on a train journey, Leopold embodies the nervous waiting many people felt in the 1930s. He is a character left between – between literary histories, between families, between nations. In her essay “Late Modernism and the Politics of History”, Jean Radford has noted that with the 1935 enactment of the Nuremberg Laws, Leopold “has something to be nervous about33”. By making the wandering Jew into an orphan child, Bowen has altered the stakes: he cannot wander alone. He can only wait, as his mother waited, for something to happen to him.
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23 In the end, something does happen. His mother’s husband, Ray, arrives in her stead, possessed by the imprint this unseen little boy has left, like a ghost, on his marriage. Recklessly crashing both societal and legal taboos, Ray arrives at the house in Paris, claims the boy, and heads with him to the Gare de Lyon to deposit Henrietta with her next baggage handler. In a passage decidedly un-realist in its point of view and tense shifts, Ray and Leopold contemplate their next move: “All right,” said Leopold. “Where are we going now?” Where are we going now? The station is sounding, resounding, full of steam caught on light and arches of dark air: a temple to the intention to go somewhere. Sustained sound in the shell of stone and steel, racket and running, impatience and purpose, make the soul stand still like a refugee, clutching all it has got, asking: “I am where?” You could live at a station, eating at the buffet, sleeping on the benches, buying your cigarettes, going nowhere next. The tramp inside Ray’s clothes wanted to lie down here, put his cheek in his rolled coat, let trains keep on crashing out to Spain, Switzerland, Italy, let Paris wash like the sea at the foot of the ramp. And a boy ought to sleep anywhere, like a dog. But the stolen boy is too delicate. Standing there on thin legs, he keeps his eyes on your face. Where are we going? Where are we going now? (HP 267) 24 The novel ends with the two of them standing at the foot of the station ramp. As in The Death of the Heart and To the North, the ending is implied, not explicit. Ray and Leopold never actually leave the station. They are refugees of a literary history that knows that making it new is past but that the new new thing has yet to arrive. They keep their eyes on us; they demand our attention. They leave us wondering, “Where are we going now?” But the novel, like Ray, refuses to answer.
25 None of Bowen’s orphan novels properly “answer” the question of the orphans at their centers. The violent deaths of Emmeline and Markie, Karen’s dramatic and dreaded reunion with her son, Portia’s unwilling return to Anna and Thomas – all these scenes are denied to the reader, left to his or her own imagination. Even Lois in The Last September is packed off to France before her fiancé is dead two weeks. The reader learns this from her aunt, who responds to an inquiry with a cryptic, “Oh, gone, you know… Tours. For her French, you know” (TLS 300). The reader, however, wouldn’t know; Lois had never mentioned her French. But mourning the death of a British soldier in the middle of the Anglo-Irish War would make her less convenient than ever. So the orphan with the tendency to hide in the Danielstown box-room is boxed off herself, sent away for what may become permanent “Tours”. Not long afterward, the house is burned by the IRA. This novel, populated by homeless Anglo-Irish professional visitors and their endless luggage, ends with the entire Naylor family as implied refugees, as their “door stood open hospitably upon a furnace” (TLS 303). 26 If the Anglo-Irish were, for Bowen, the orphans and refugees of the 1920s, a less hospitable furnace would be prepared for the refugees pouring into England by the end of the next decade. Bowen’s 1930s novels echo the rising anxiety of the “devil’s decade” as it progresses, but in each of the novels, the reader is left in suspense at the end. The Death of the Heart concludes with the Quaynes’ housekeeper, Matchett, preparing to knock at the door of the Karachi Hotel to fetch a Portia who feels, “I’ve got nowhere to be” (DH 377). Meanwhile, Matchett herself has “no idea” where she is, having got into a taxi without listening to where she was being sent (DH 415). Matchett’s anxious taxi ride, narrated in free indirect style from her own troubled thoughts – for “when at moments she thought, she thought in words. I don’t know, I’m sure” – seems to foreshadow the doomed taxi ride that ends Bowen’s World War II story, “The Demon
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Lover” (DH 413). In the 1941 story, the similarly prosaic Mrs. Drover’s taxi driver takes off without her having “said where34”. In The Death of the Heart, the driver unsettles Matchett but leaves her intact at the Karachi Hotel, though the novel refuses to resolve whether Anna and Thomas have “do[ne] the right thing” about Portia (DH 398). “The Demon Lover”, on the other hand, ends with the sounds of Kathleen Drover “scream[ing] freely… as the taxi, accelerating without mercy, made off with her into the hinterland of dark streets” (CS 666). 27 The endings of Bowen’s orphan novels of the 1930s mime their own characters’ seeming inability to speak coherently about the world in which they live. Like Bowen’s characteristic sentences, like her displaced orphans, these novels’ endings are at once arrested and on the move. In Emmeline’s car in St. John’s Wood, at the foot of the station ramp in Paris, at the door of the Karachi Hotel, these novels leave their orphaned subjects on the verge of something happening. Perhaps their refusal to say what is next is akin to Emmeline’s shutting her eyes behind the wheel, for the years to come, “accelerating without mercy” upon the 1930s, were not the ending anyone wanted to tell.
NOTES
1. Phyllis Lassner, “Out of the Shadows: The Newly Collected Elizabeth Bowen.” Modernism/Modernity 17.3 (Autumn 2010): 670. I’d like to thank Phyllis for encouraging me to expand this essay, which began as a conference paper for the panel, “The 1930’s: The Decade Modernism Forgot” at MLA in Chicago, 2014, and I’d like to thank the panel chair and organizer, Erica Delsandro, for her keen insight on this piece from conference paper to essay. I also thank Elka Shortsleeve for her help with my French. 2. See Samuel Hynes’ The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930's, New York, Viking, 1977, and Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era, Berkeley, University of California P, 1971. 3. See Hermione Lee’s Elizabeth Bowen: An Estimation (London: Vision, 1981), and Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle’s Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel: Still Lives, New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1995. 4. Quoted in Maud Ellmann, Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadow Across the Page, Edinburgh, Edinburgh UP, 2004), 18. 5. Luke Thurston, “Double Crossing: Elizabeth Bowen’s Ghostly Short Fiction.” Textual Practice 27.1 (2013): 9. 6. Bowen. ToThe North, New York, Anchor, 2006, 43. Hereafter abbreviated thus: (TN, 43). 7. Though the real canonization of the “revolutionary” 1930s came in the similarly revolutionary 1960s, the writers of the 1930s were adept at self-canonization before the end of the decade. See Louis MacNeice, Modern Poetry, Oxford, OUP, 1938, Muggeridge, Malcolm, The Thirties, London, Hamish Hamilton, 1940, Francis Scarfe, Auden and After:
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The Liberation of Poetry, 1930-1941, London, Routledge, 1941 and Stephen Spender, The Destructive Element: A Study of Modern Writers and Beliefs, London, Cape, 1935. 8. Two important correctives to the old, male-centered 1930s narrative are Maroula Joannou’s edited collection, Women Writers of the 1930s: Gender, Politics and History, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1999 and Jan Montefiore’s Men and Women Writers of the 1930s: The Dangerous Flood of History, London, Routledge, 1996. 9. Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris, New York, Anchor, 2002, 87. Hereafter abbreviated thus (HP, 87). 10. Accounts of the Thirties as a literary decade usually center on Isherwood, Auden, Orwell, Waugh, Greene, Day-Lewis. Recharting the Thirties, edited by Patrick Quinn, London, Associated University Presses, 1996; includes an essay on Bowen’s early mentor Rosamond Lehmann, and renee hoogland’s essay on Bowen’s Friends and Relations. See also Rewriting the Thirties: Modernism and After. Ed. Keith Williams and Steven Matthews, New York, Routledge, 1997. 11. Bowen uses an orphan protagonist again in her final novel, Eva Trout, London, Cape, 1969. I have written about Eva Trout and the Anglo-Irish Gothic in “Elizabeth Bowen and the Orphan Eva Trout,” in Founder to Shore: Cross-Currents in Irish and Scottish Studies. Ed, Shane Alcobia-Murphy, Aberdeen, AHRC Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies, 2011. 12. Pearson, “Elizabeth Bowen and the New Cosmopolitanism” Twentieth-Century Literature 56.3 (Fall 2010): 322. 13. Pearson, Irish Cosmopolitanism, Gainesville, University of Florida Press, 2015), p. 84. Pearson explains that “Irish cosmopolitanism” stems from the overdetermination of national identity during Ireland’s long decolonization, the related postponement and obscuring of Irish international and transnational identity, and the resulting need (or ability) to interlace one’s still-forming Irish identity with one’s often capacious global perspective. Its aesthetic of orientation is not merely double, or happening on two scales, but doubly transformative. Resisting the closure of Irish backgrounds even as it looks beyond them, it also defies historically absolute and geographically abstract images of modern dislocation by depicting extranational experiences that remain suffused with questions of unresolved origin (84). 14. Pearson, “Elizabeth Bowen and the New Cosmopolitanism”, p. 324. 15. Robert Graves and Allan Hodge, The Long Week-End: A Social History of Great Britain 1918-1939, New York, Norton, 2001). 16. Louise London, Whitehall and the Jews, 1933-1948: British Immigration Policy, Jewish Refugees and the Holocaust, Cambridge, CUP, 2001. 17. See London, Ibid. 18. With a Protestant mother and a Jewish father, Leopold would not be considered Jewish under Jewish law, but he is considered Jewish by everyone in the novel – as he would have been by the Nuremberg Laws, which the Nazis enacted the year the novel was published. See Note 28. 19. Norman Angell and Dorothy Buxton, You and the Refugee, London, Penguin, 1938. Angell’s argument was, essentially, that to refuse aid to Jewish refugees was to commit moral and economic suicide. See also Louis Golding, The Jewish Problem, London, Penguin, 1938 and Phyllis Bottome, The Mortal Storm, London, Penguin, 1938.
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20. Bowen’s social circle would have made her well aware of the plight of refugees in Britain. She was particularly close friends with the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, a prominent member of the Jewish community, whose family emigrated from Riga after the Russian Revolution. Bowen also corresponded regularly with her cousin Hubert Butler, who was Ireland’s chief advocate for admitting Jewish refugees, and was personally responsible for saving many lives. See Victoria Glendinning, Elizabeth Bowen: Portrait of a Writer, London, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1997, and Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin, New York, Henry Holt, 1998. 21. The Karachi Hotel appears to cater to ex-colonial civil servants and officers, and as such it represents the long-term physical and spiritual homelessness engendered by British imperialism. 22. W.H. Auden, “September 1, 1939.” The English Auden, London, Faber, 1988. 23. Paul Fussell contends that irony becomes “the appropriate interpretive means” for language and history during and after the Great War, The Great War and Modern Memory, New York, Oxford University Press, 1975, p. 3. 24. This is, of course, magnified by the magnanimous orphan at the center of Bowen’s final novel, Eva Trout (see Paige Reynolds’s “Colleen Modernism: Modernism’s Afterlife in Irish Women’s Writing”, Eire-Ireland 44, p. 3-4 (2009) for an incisive reading of that novel). There are hints of Eva’s origins all over The House in Paris. Close to the end of the novel, the narrator, speaking of Leopold, muses, “A child knows what is fatal. The child at the back of the gun accident – is he always so ignorant?” (HP 248). This becomes the central question of Eva Trout’s conclusion. 25. Elizabeth Bowen, “Pictures and Conversations.” The Mulberry Tree, London, Vintage, 1999, 286. 26. Elizabeth Bowen, “Notes on Writing a Novel.” The Mulberry Tree, London, Vintage, 1999, 41. 27. Céline Magot, “Prosthetic goddesses: ambiguous identities in the age of speed”, Textual Practice 27.1 (2013): 131. 28. This is reminiscent of Francie Montmorency’s description of Lois in The Last September: “She is in such a hurry, so concentrated upon her hurry, so helpless. She is like someone being driven against time in a taxi to catch a train, jerking and jerking to help the taxi along and looking wildly out of the window at things going slowly past. She keeps hearing that final train go out without her” (Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September, New York, Anchor, 2000, p. 118. Hereafter, abbreviated TLS.) 29. Valentine Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties, Oxford, OUP, 1998. 30. Victoria Glendinning, Elizabeth Bowen: Portrait of a Writer, (London, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1997, p. 86. 31. Emily Ridge, “Elizabeth Bowen, Howards End and the Luggage of Modernity”, Textual Practice 27.1 (2013). 32. The “unspokendialogue” of Karen and Ray’s marriage at the end of the novel is presented in dramatic form, reminiscent of the Circe chapter in Ulysses. 33. Jean Radford, “Late Modernism and the Politics of History,” Women Writers of the 1930s: Gender, Politics and History. Ed. Maroula Joannou, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1999. For more on Leopold’s Jewishness, see Phyllis Lassner. British Women Writers
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of World War II, London, Macmillan, 1998 and Neil Corcoran, Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return, Oxford, OUP, 2004. 34. Elizabeth Bowen, The Collected Stories, New York, Anchor, 2006, 666. Hereafter, CS.
ABSTRACTS
This essay reads Elizabeth Bowen’s major novels of the 1930s – all of which feature orphaned protagonists – as mimetic of a decade that has often been critically “orphaned” in literary history. Bowen’s travelling orphans exemplify the problem of the political refugee in the 1930s, and her novels’ deliberately unresolved endings demonstrate an unwillingness to look into a future that seemed already foreclosed. By examining the novels of this orphan decade, in which the characters as well as the prose are simultaneously arrested and on the move, this essay offers a reassessment of Bowen’s novels’ importance to the way we read the 1930s.
Cet essai interprète les principaux romans des années trente d’Elizabeth Bowen, dont chacun inclut quelques protagonistes orphelins, comme mimétiques d’une décennie souvent laissée « orpheline » dans l’histoire de la critique littéraire. Les orphelins itinérants de Bowen illustrent le problème du réfugié politique dans les années trente, et la fin délibérément non résolue de ses romans manifeste une réticence à envisager un avenir qui semble déjà déterminé. En examinant les romans de cette décennie orpheline, où les personnages, aussi bien que la prose, sont simultanément en arrêt et en mouvement, cet essai offre un correctif aux narratifs obsolètes de la littérature anglaise des années trente, ainsi qu’une réévaluation de l’importance des romans de Bowen pour la façon dont nous lisons cette décennie.
INDEX
Mots-clés: Elizabeth Bowen, 1930s, années trente, orphelin, réfugié, déplacement Keywords: Elizabeth Bowen, 1930s, orphan, refugee, travel
AUTHOR
ANNA TEEKELL
Christopher Newport University
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Comptes rendus de lecture Book Review
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David LLOYD, Beckett’s Thing. Painting and Theatre. Edinburgh University Press, 2016
Alexandra Poulain
1 As David Lloyd reminds us in the introduction of his new book, Beckett’s Thing. Painting and Theatre, Beckett was a lover of the visual arts throughout his life. He could spend hours in museums and galleries gazing at individual paintings, practising a certain quality of attention to the composition and materiality of the works, evident in his critical writings on the painting. He was also very well acquainted with Western art history and in theories of modern painting, and it has often been argued that his own writing, especially where it involved a visual dimension, was influenced by specific paintings. This is acknowledged in this book, but tracing influences (a speculative venture except – or perhaps especially – in those rare cases when Beckett himself acknowledged specific influences, as when he claimed that Not I had been inspired by his memory of Caravaggio’s “The Beheading of John the Baptist”) is not what this book is about. Rather it focuses on three painters whom Beckett not only admired but with whom he became friends, saw on a regular basis and with whom he exchanged views on their respective arts (in letters or on long, mainly silent walks): Jack B. Yeats, whom Beckett knew as a young man in Dublin, Bram van Velde whom he befriended in post- war Paris and who features prominently in the “Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit”, and Avigdor Arikha, the young Jewish-Romanian painter whom he befriended in Paris and with whom he remained friends until his death in 1989. The three chapters in the book are devoted respectively to Beckett’s relationship with each of the three painters. Reading Beckett’s writings on these artists very closely, and paying particular attention to the paintings themselves, Lloyd attempts to reconstruct Beckett’s gaze, and to see what it was that Beckett saw in them that opened ways for his own aesthetic search. Thus he shows persuasively how these painters’ experimentations with form and matter translate, at three distinct periods in Beckett’s life, into his visual aesthetic as implemented in his works for theatre, television and film.
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2 The central thesis of the book is that the three painters which Beckett knew most intimately form “a constellation of minor painting” which “challenges the dominant givens of a canonical tradition” (12) and relentlessly looks for alternatives to the relations of domination and possession inherent in the regime of representation. Thus, Lloyd argues, Beckett’s engagement with the works of Jack B. Yeats, Bram van Velde and Avigdor Arikha pointed him out of the impasse of “the subject-object relation”, towards a visual aesthetic that desists from the ethical and political tenets of the Western tradition of representation. The eponymous “thing” which Beckett relentlessly sought to express (not capture!) is what remains of the human after the cataclysms which have left “humanity in ruins” in the post-war era: neither subject nor object, but a “human thing” suspended among its things that resists total annihilation. As he does elsewhere in his oeuvre, Lloyd weaves together the aesthetic, ethical and political strands of artistic work, lucidly teasing out the various implications of the process of representation – and convincingly showing the congruence between the aesthetic and political senses of the term. In the process, he offers a decisive contribution to recent reappraisals of Beckett as a profoundly political writer. 3 While the book offers a tantalizingly new way of thinking about Beckett’s visual imagination and of understanding his work with theatre, television and film, it also provides a fascinating account of the debates raised by formal experimentations in Western post-war painting. More importantly, perhaps, it also provides superb reproductions of over sixty works by Yeats, Van Velde, Arikha and many others, and invents a kind of ethical ekphrasis which seeks to give an account of the paintings (with special emphasis on their materiality, on the quality and degree of exposure of the canvass, or the thickness of the impasto) without “reading” them, and thus reducing them to objects of the commentator’s subjective, interpretive gaze. Finally, in tracing Beckett’s dogged pursuit of an art form that would not somehow imply a form of domination, David Lloyd’s new book makes a compelling argument for the value of human thingness.
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Michael McATEER, ed., Silence in Modern Irish Literature, Leiden, Brill, 2017
Bridget English
1 Staining the Silence… Celebrating the virtues of silence over literary expression, Samuel Beckett famously remarked, “Every work is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness”, pointing to the failure of literature to adequately capture the horrors of a post-war world. Despite this statement, Beckett did not let the corrupting influence of such stains on silence hinder his own artistic production, which explores these themes at length. The complex relationship between writing and silence is the subject of an impressive new collection of essays, Silence in Modern Irish Literature, edited by Michael McAteer, which ambitiously tackles this vast topic in an Irish context, examining the multiple meanings of silence and the difficulties of examining a subject matter that is by its very nature challenging to categorize or represent.
2 In his introduction to the collection McAteer analyses silence in Austin Clarke’s “The Planter’s Daughter”, pointing to some of the inherent problems in investigating this theme. Beginning with Clarke’s lines “Men that had seen her/Drank deep and were silent”, McAteer writes: “The silence to which Clarke’s lines refer carries a range of meanings that direct readers towards the complexity and importance of silence in modern Irish literature” which include “psychological, ethical, topographical and spiritual aspects” (1). The book is accordingly divided into four sections that correspond with one of these categories of silence: Psychologies of Silence, Ethics of Silence, Places of Silence, and Spirits of Silence. This organizational technique works well for the most part, putting thematically similar essays into dialogue. 3 One of the challenges of addressing a topic as broad as silence, as McAteer’s introduction aptly demonstrates, is that the meaning of silence varies according to the literary form and context in which it occurs. Silence in Modern Irish Literature does an admirable job of tackling this challenge, featuring essays that cover poetry, drama, and prose as well as other more underdeveloped genres such as visual “mural language” and the confessional. As this collection makes clear, there is no one way of interpreting
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silence, but there is nevertheless great value attached to the study of this pervasive theme, as it can uncover the marginalized voices that so often go unheard. 4 Silence in Modern Irish Literature is notable not only for its inclusion of a diversity of genres but also for the range of historical periods and the variety of methodological approaches it incorporates. Unfortunately, it is not possible to comment on all fifteen of the fascinating essays in the collection here, but some of the most memorable entries include Emilie Morin’s intriguing links between psychiatric experimentation and mystical Symbolism in early twentieth-century Paris and the influence that these statements on silence had on Beckett and the “modernist aesthetic of muteness” (45) and Heather Ingam’s discussion of the silencing of the Anglo-Irish in Elizabeth Bowen’s novels, arguing that Bowen urges women to move out of the silence and claim language for themselves. An excellent essay by Willa Murphy on the Irish Catholic confessional connects the fixation on the confessional after the 1801 Act of Union, with current debates surrounding clerical child abuse. In one of the strongest essays in the collection, Anne Fogarty draws parallels between the censorship of Kate O’Brien’s The Land of Spices and that text’s concern with sexual repression, the feminine, and the unspoken, arguing that silence is an integral aspect of the symbolic structures of The Land of Spices and reveals the ways that the condition of modern Ireland affected female development. In a fascinating exploration of the language of signs and images Stephanie Schwerter discusses the challenges of translating Belfast’s urban murals into different cultural environments and what is silenced by translation. Thierry Robin’s penultimate essay suggests that Dermot Healy’s A Fool’s Errand interweaves silence and speech in order to merge past and future, living and dead. Finally, the Collection ends on a haunting note with Virginie Roche-Tiengo’s demonstration of the ways that the dead impact on the silences of the living in Brian Friel’s drama. 5 In its vast scope of essays, from the psychic to the topographic, which touch on questions of gender, place, belonging, testimony, language, and death, Silence in Modern Irish Literature leaves a necessary stain on the silence that has too long suppressed voices that are only now beginning to be heard. In its focus on gaps and ruptures in speech, Silence in Modern Irish Literature marks a unique and important contribution to Irish Studies, one that alters approaches to reading practices themselves by shifting the focus from what is articulated, to what remains unspoken, but which nevertheless conveys meaning.
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Alexandra POULAIN, Irish Drama, Modernity and the Passion Play, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016
Hélène Lecossois
1 Irish Drama, Modernity and the Passion Play is a welcome, refreshing contribution to critical studies of twentieth-century Irish drama. It takes its readers on a journey to varied, often unexplored corners as it engages with a wide and eclectic range of plays. Its detailed and contextualised close readings highlight the richness and complexity of the field of twentieth-century Irish theatre. The book looks anew at canonical plays, such as, for example, J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World (1907), W. B. Yeats’s Calvary (1920), Samuel Beckett’s Endgame (1957), Brian Friel’s Faith Healer (1979) or Tom Murphy’s Bailegangaire (1985). Crucially, it also offers perceptive analyses of lesser known plays such as, for example, Augusta Gregory’s The Story Brought by Brigit (1923-1924), Padraig Pearse’s An Rí / The King (1912), Owen (1913), The Master (1915) and The Singer (1916-1917), G. B. Shaw’s Saint Joan (1923), Samuel Beckett’s radio plays (Words and Music (1961), Cascando (1961), Rough for Radio II (1976), as well as an unpublished play The Press (2007) by the distinguished cultural critic David Lloyd.
2 The originality of the book lies in its identifying the Passion as one of the recurring dramaturgical paradigms which define twentieth-century Irish drama. Alexandra Poulain apprehends the Passion play as a lay narrative or spectacle of sacrifice which testifies to the sufferings of the martyred hero and of silenced others, rather than simply as a rewriting of the Passion of Christ in the strict sense of the word. Thus the book argues that the display of the martyred body – or of its effects on an on-stage audience – is a way to restore to visibility forms of violence which are usually hidden from view. As such the Passion constitutes a powerfully efficient political intervention. The particular nature of the oppressive norms which the Passion renders visible varies according to the historical contexts in which the plays were written or first produced. Prominent amongst these forms of oppression figure the sectarianism of Ireland’s (post)colonial states and the sometimes homogenising norms presiding over the definitions of a national or a gendered identity.
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3 Poulain’s close readings are consistently illuminating. Chapter 3 challenges widely accepted readings of Padraig Pearse’s plays as testifying to a fascination for death and blood sacrifice and argues instead that the plays perform “the pragmatic political task of making colonial violence visible” (79). Focusing on Saint Joan, G. B. Shaw’s take on the Easter Rising, chapter 5 highlights the power of the Passion to destabilize patriarchal and sectarian conceptions of nationalism. Chapter 11 proposes a compelling analysis of Beckett’s radio plays as artistic and political interventions demanding a compassionate and ethical response from their auditors. Since Words for Music, Cascando and Rough for Radio II were written for the radio, the Passion does not serve to render violence visible. ‘Instead,’ Alexandra Poulain argues, “relocating ethics in the vulnerable, pathological subject, [the plays] ask that we dispense with the certainty of visuality, listen to the pain and recognise it as, partly, our own” (222). 4 The combination of close readings and fascinating critical perspective makes Irish Drama, Modernity and the Passion Play an important book for Irish studies in general, and Irish theatre in particular.
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Richard BARLOW, The Celtic Unconscious. Joyce and Scottish Culture, Notre Dame, Indiana, University of Notre Dame Press, 2017
Camille Manfredi
1 Enseignant-chercheur à l’Université de Nanyang à Singapour, Richard Barlow, spécialiste en études croisées irlando-écossaises, propose dans The Celtic Unconscious une approche inédite de l’influence qu’eut l’Ecosse sur l’écriture de James Joyce, et en particulier sur celle de Finnegans Wake. Objet de trop rares investigations critiques, la présence écossaise dans l’œuvre et la pensée de Joyce est ici abordée par le biais de micro-analyses et d’exercices de contextualisation tout à fait convaincants.
2 On pourra estimer malheureux le choix d’un titre fleurant d’emblée l’essentialisme culturel et pouvant sembler dissuasif à certains ; ces réserves sont pourtant vite dissipées, puisque dès l’introduction, Richard Barlow annonce envisager cet « inconscient celtique » comme une construction identitaire émanant d’un auteur dévoué à la dés-anglicisation de l’Irlande, de sa culture et – surtout, car c’est le propos de l’ouvrage – de ses paradoxes. Le celticisme joycien est ainsi pensé comme principalement non-anglais, autorisant dès lors une réévaluation des échanges culturels entre Ecosse et Irlande comme révélateurs d’un « esprit celtique » susceptible de ménager les diversités ethniques et linguistiques des deux nations. Pas plus que Joyce Barlow ne propose une vision unifiée, panceltique et simpliste d’un ethos irlando- écossais il ne propose de clé vers une communauté imaginaire qui serait stable et normalisante. 3 Ulysses et Finnegans Wake sont approchés comme les réponses de Joyce à l’impérialisme britannique sous l’angle d’une « esthétique ethno-philosophique » (p. 9) empruntée à David Hume. Le dialogue entre scepticisme et idéalisme initié par le philosophe
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édimbourgeois sert alors de modèle pour détecter les dynamiques concurrentes qui animent l’œuvre de Joyce et que Barlow rapproche de la théorie de la « Caledonian antisyzygy » exposée par G. Gregory Smith dans Scottish Literature: Character and Influence en 1919, une théorie par ailleurs fréquemment convoquée par les critiques de Robert Louis Stevenson et James Hogg. Image d’une réaction au matérialisme anglais, concession toute « celte » (nous dit Joyce) à l’inconnu, l’inconscient devient alors une construction culturelle en soi, proche de l’Autre de Fredric Jameson, cette part cachée d’un environnement culturel qui n’affleure que dans le rêve ou dans la confrontation et union des contraires que « symbolise » (p. 34) l’Écosse. 4 Le premier chapitre se penche sur le personnage de Crotthers dans Ulysses que Barlow nous présente comme un passeur, figure de la liminalité et incarnation des flux entre Ecosse et Irlande, mais aussi entre dominants et dominés. Suivent deux chapitres qui explorent plus avant l’influence de la pensée de Hume sur l’œuvre de Joyce et son rejet du matérialisme historique au profit d’une approche psychomorphe de l’Histoire. Le chapitre 4 approfondit l’idée d’une celticité joycienne conçue comme un « état inconscient » (p.150) et une porte d’entrée vers l’inquiétante étrangeté. Le chapitre suivant, peut-être plus convaincant, se penche sur l’intérêt de Joyce pour le bricolage et le recyclage interculturels de James Macpherson. Ainsi, selon Barlow, « [i]f Macpherson’s work was an effort to construct a memorial for an endangered civilization in the face of modernity and imperialism, Finnegans Wake replicates the attempt to create a spectral “memory”, an inner Celtic state as an alternative to materialism » (p. 158). Le chapitre conclusif est quant à lui dévoué à l’empreinte de Robert Burns et envisage enfin l’influence de Joyce sur les poètes et romanciers écossais du vingtième siècle – dont bien sûr Hugh MacDiarmid. 5 The Celtic Unconscious a le grand mérite de lever le voile sur une part de l’œuvre joycienne jusqu’ici peu explorée. Si le modèle de la « Caledonian antisyzygy » est désormais contesté, il est sollicité avec précaution et à bon escient, systématiquement appuyé sur des exemples concrets tirés des deux romans principalement abordés, Finnegans Wake et Ulysses. L’ouvrage témoigne d’une originalité et d’une rigueur scientifique qui saura satisfaire autant les spécialistes de Joyce que les irlandistes et scotticistes qui trouveront là, à n’en pas douter et probablement dès le paratexte, matière à débat.
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Marie MIANOWSKI, Post-Celtic Tiger Landscapes in Irish Fiction, London, Routledge, 2017
Sylvie Mikowski
1 Dans cet ouvrage, Marie Mianowski invite à une lecture de la littérature irlandaise ultra-contemporaine à travers le prisme de l’espace, du lieu et du paysage. Au premier abord, ces thèmes ne surprendront pas quiconque est familier du contexte irlandais tant la terre, sa possession, sa perte et son contrôle ont joué un rôle majeur dans l’histoire politique, sociale et culturelle du pays. Seamus Heaney avait déjà conceptualisé l’importance du lieu dans l’imaginaire collectif irlandais dans son célèbre texte « A Sense of Place ». Pourtant cette approche semble particulièrement appropriée à l’époque envisagée dans l’ouvrage, celle qui suit l’effondrement de l’économie du Tigre celtique, fondée en partie sur la spéculation immobilière. Ainsi les modifications profondes de la société irlandaise se sont trouvées reflétées par les transformations du paysage urbain ou rural, ce que la littérature a enregistré à son tour, à tel point que la fiction irlandaise des années 2010 a pu donner les signes d’une véritable obsession pour les chantiers de construction, les terrains, les friches et autres « ghost estates », ainsi que pour les personnages de promoteurs immobiliers, de préférence véreux et cyniques. Parmi les œuvres étudiées ici, c’est clairement le cas dans The Forgotten Waltz de Anne Enright, The Devil I know de Claire Kilroy, ou encore dans The Spinning Heart de Donal Ryan. La superbe nouvelle de William Trevor, « At Olive Hill », est également replacée dans le contexte de la fièvre immobilière du Tigre celtique. Mais l’ouvrage établit aussi des liens moins évidents entre écriture et paysage dans A Second Life de Dermot Bolger (dans sa version revue par l’auteur), ou dans City of Bohane de Kevin Barry. Deux chapitres entiers sont également consacrés à l’écriture de l’espace chez Colum McCann. M. Mianowski déplie tout au long des pages les possibilités lexicales et sémantiques des mots « place » et « landscape » : à propos de la nouvelle de « At Olivehill » de Trevor, il s’agit par exemple de l’attachement pour le lieu. À propos de The Forgotten Waltz est établi un lien entre désir de posséder un lieu, soif d’enrichissement et sexualité. En ce qui concerne Donal Ryan, il s’agit plutôt de « place » dans le sens de « community », avec
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toutes les dérives néfastes que la ruralité irlandaise peut entraîner. Et pour introduire le chapitre consacré à McCann, M. Mianowski écrit : « we will first elucidate the notions of place, displacement, and placelessness. » Beaucoup des œuvres analysées ont d’ailleurs autant un lien direct avec un lieu, au sens de « espace habité », qu’avec un paysage : il en est ainsi du domaine de Olivehill, du rôle de la propriété et de la spéculation immobilière dans The Forgotten Waltz, dans The Spinning Heart ou dans The Devil I know, mais aussi des maisons qui jouent un rôle central dans certains récits, comme dans The Gathering, ou dans Transatlantic, qui fait d’ailleurs l’objet d’une magnifique analyse. Une autre analyse particulièrement brillante est celle du roman de Kevin Barry City of Bohane. M. Mianowski suggère que ce que Barry parodie ici, c’est l’aspect névrotique du « sense of place » caractérisant Bohane – autre nom pour l’Irlande d’hier et d’aujourd’hui – qui, à travers une fétichisation du lieu, entretient un rapport stérile et paralysant avec son passé, rapport que M. Mianowski décrit comme « la nostalgie de la nostalgie ».
2 L’ouvrage alterne des micro-lectures très pénétrantes avec des réflexions plus abstraites appuyées entre autres sur les concepts de « containment », ou de « boundedness », inventés par le philosophe australien Jeff Malpas. Marie Mianowski propose non seulement une lecture de certains textes irlandais contemporains, mais une véritable méthode de lecture, qui emprunte ses concepts et ses outils à d’autres domaines que celui de l’analyse littéraire proprement dite, et qui ouvre des perspectives pour l’étude d’autres littératures que celle de l’lrlande. 3 Toutefois, bien qu’adoptant une méthodologie précise et bien définie, les lectures proposées ne sont jamais systématiques, car l’auteure sait distinguer dans chaque texte ses particularités ; de plus, même si le titre de l’ouvrage suggère un ancrage socio- historique, celui de la crise économique datant de 2008, elle n’utilise jamais le texte comme prétexte à un commentaire sociologique mais sait au contraire exalter les qualités esthétiques des œuvres considérées.
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Niall Ó DOCHARTAIG, Katy HAYWARD and Elizabeth MEEHAN (eds), Dynamics of Political Change in Ireland: Making and Breaking a Divided Ireland, Milton Park/NewYork, Routledge, 2016
Philippe Cauvet
1 Cette collection d’articles, publiée sous la co-direction de Niall Ó Dochartaigh, Katy Hayward et Elizabeth Meehan et préfacée par Brendan O’Leary, contient 13 contributions rassemblées en trois chapitres intitulés successivement Contexts, Competition et Complexity. Cette publication est une forme d’hommage à John Coakley dont Brendan O’Leary fait remarquer, à juste titre, la qualité du travail scientifique qu’il a réalisé au cours de sa riche carrière, à Dublin, à Queen’s University Belfast mais aussi à l’échelle internationale – Etudes Irlandaises peut d’ailleurs s’enorgueillir d’avoir publié plusieurs de ses articles.
2 Dès l’introduction, les trois co-directeurs définissent l’objectif ambitieux de l’ouvrage : il s’agit de voir en quoi les interactions entre d’une part, les partis politiques, la société et les idéologies et d’autre part, les structures institutionnelles étatiques et internationales, ont contribué à façonner mais aussi à déconstruire l’espace politique irlandais depuis la partition. Ils affirment aussi que pour répondre à cette question de manière complète, il est impossible d’ignorer les menaces que le résultat du référendum de juin 2016, favorable au Brexit, fait peser sur les fragiles équilibres politiques, sociaux, économiques et culturels qui avaient été trouvés en Irlande depuis 1998. Les « dynamiques du changement politique en Irlande » sont clairement envisagées dans un cadre pluridisciplinaire (histoire, science politique, économie, sociologie…) et pluridimensionnel (dimensions irlandaises, anglo-irlandaises, européennes et mondiales). Naturellement, avec une telle ambition, la question
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majeure (même si d’autres, comme celle des genres par exemple, sont évoquées par Y. Galligan et M. Hoewer) est celle de l’évolution des nationalismes, des nations et des États, britannique et irlandais. 3 Le travail accompli dans cet ouvrage est remarquable et doit, à n’en pas douter, faire plaisir à John Coakley. Il pourra y voir très visiblement le signe de sa grande influence scientifique mais c’est pour deux autres raisons principales qu’on imagine sa satisfaction et celle des autres lecteurs de ce livre. Premièrement, les contributions réunies permettent de comprendre la complexité et la multiplicité des formes du changement politique en Irlande et la façon dont ces changements sont liés à des contextes extérieurs à l’Irlande elle-même. C’est l’un des rares ouvrages analysant la vie politique en Irlande qui ne fasse pas le choix d’un découpage thématique, spatial ou chronologique réducteur. La contribution de Ó Dochartaigh sur la composante territoriale de l’Etat et de l’identité nationale est parfaitement symptomatique de cette démarche délibérément intégrée qui se rapproche de la géopolitique. Deuxièmement, ce qui rend cette collection d’articles encore plus pertinente, c’est sa capacité à combiner deux exigences scientifiques pourtant souvent contradictoires : la profondeur historique (voir les contributions de Laffan, Gallagher, Tonge ou Ruane par exemple) et l’analyse de situations plus récentes (McLoughlin, Arthur, Todd), voire immédiates (Hayward et Howard sur les dynamiques de fermeture culturelle en cours en République d’Irlande et au Royaume Uni ou Andy Pollack sur l’extrême fragilité actuelle de la coopération Nord-Sud). 4 Il ressort de l’ensemble de ces travaux l’idée que le changement politique est consubstantiel à la vie politique sur l’île d’Irlande et que l’accord trouvé en 1998, même s’il résulte de mutations profondes et multiples, est éminemment fragile et contingent, comme l’avaient été avant lui ceux de 1921/1925, de 1973 ou de 1985. Finalement, si un tel constat s’impose à la lecture de cet ouvrage, c’est que la solution adoptée en 1998 ne marquait pas une véritable transformation de la situation mais plus une forme de gestion du conflit. Ce qu’O’Leary présente, dans la préface, comme la preuve de la force et de la flexibilité de l’Accord de 1998, à savoir le passage dans l’opposition du SDLP et du UUP, n’est-il pas aussi le signe de sa faiblesse ? Si ces deux partis nord-irlandais, les plus modérés dans leur camp, ont ressenti le besoin de ne pas rentrer dans le gouvernement nord-irlandais, c’est précisément parce que l’action gouvernementale dans un système consociationnel ne permet pas de transformer la société nord- irlandaise ni de faire de l’Irlande du Nord un espace politique et culturel partagé. Dans un contexte où les Irlandais du Sud et les Anglais montrent une forte tendance au repli culturel (voir la contribution de Hayward et Howard sur le référendum de 2004 en Irlande et celui de 2016 au Royaume-Uni), quel est l’avenir d’une Irlande du Nord où les modérés, dans les deux camps, sont de plus en plus minoritaires ? Aussi remarquables qu’aient pu être l’Accord de 1998 et sa mise en œuvre, ce livre ambitieux et les circonstances particulières dans lesquelles il a été produit (référendum sur le Brexit, absence de gouvernement en Irlande du Nord depuis plusieurs mois, pacte parlementaire entre DUP et Parti conservateur à la Chambre des Communes) nous appellent aussi à prendre conscience du chemin qu’il reste encore à parcourir pour que l’île d’Irlande et l’Irlande du Nord se transforment et deviennent, réellement, des espaces politiques et culturels partagés.
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Asier ALTUNA-GARCÍA DE SALAZAR (dir.), Ireland and Dysfunction. Critical Explorations in Literature and Film. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017
Isabelle Le Corff
1 Ireland and Dysfunction : Critical Explorations in Literature and Film est issu du colloque de l’association espagnole d’études irlandaises (AEDEI) qui s’est déroulé à l’université de Bilbao en 2014. Asier Altuna-García de Salazar réunit dans cet ouvrage une collection d’essais qui sont autant d’occasions d’interroger les aspects dysfonctionnels de la société irlandaise dans la littérature, le théâtre et le cinéma. Les références bibliographiques sont spécifiques à chaque chapitre mais un index permet une circulation aisée dans le livre, celui-ci se divisant en cinq sections. La première, consacrée au cinéma, est composée de deux chapitres, l’un dévolu au cinéma documentaire et l’autre à la fiction. Cinematic Representations of Immigrants in Irish Ethnographic Films : Alan Grossman and Aine O’Brien’s Documentary Work met en évidence la richesse des styles documentaires des films analysés, films qui visent à relater la complexité de l’exil pour des populations migrantes dont les représentations de l’étranger restent trop souvent hégémoniques.
2 Dans un deuxième chapitre c’est la notion d’anomie de Durkheim que Rosa González- Casademont choisit d’explorer dans les films à thématique irlandaise de Kirsten Sheridan. 3 La seconde partie de l’ouvrage, intitulée « Dysfunction, Dislocation and Space » rassemble deux chapitres sur les écrits de Kate O’Brien et un troisième chapitre sur la représentation de Belfast dans le texte et l’image. Aintzane Legarreta-Mentxaka s’interroge sur les occurrences dysfonctionnelles de l’émotion et de la sexualité dans l’œuvre de Kate O’Brien. Eibhear Walshe se penche quant à elle sur le rôle qu’a joué
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l’Espagne dans les écrits d’O’Brien. Dans le cinquième chapitre, c’est la représentation négative de Belfast dans les films, les romans, les nouvelles et les séries TV, qui est au centre de l’étude de Stephanie Schwerter. La troisième section du livre, « Dysfunction: Family, Home And Memory » se compose de 4 chapitres. Dans « Family, Dysfunctionality and New Ireland in Colm Tóibín’s Mothers and Sons », José M. Yebra montre que le romancier offre une nouvelle vision de l’Irlande et des valeurs traditionnelles de la famille et de la religion. Le chapitre 7 est consacré à l’étude de la famille dysfonctionnelle dans A Pagan Place de Edna O’Brien. Sara Martín-Ruiz y définit les différents niveaux de relations au sein de la famille avant d’éclairer les circonstances de telles origines dysfonctionnelles. Dans « The Dysfunction of Memory : Glimpses of Childhood in John McGahern’s Memoir and Edna O’Brien’s Country Girl », Inès Praga-Terente revient elle aussi sur l’Irlande répressive des années 1940 et dresse un parallèle entre les exils traumatiques des deux auteurs. Le chapitre 9, « The Silent Mother of the Dysfunctional Family: A Feminist Approach to Roddy Doyle’s Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha » examine comment à travers le récit de Paddy, Doyle permet au lecteur de comprendre l’expérience intime d’une ménagère nord-Dublinoise à la fin des années 1960. 4 La quatrième section du livre est consacrée aux luttes et quêtes. Maria Gaviña-Costero met en évidence le caractère introspectif du théâtre de Brian Friel dans « In the Beginning was Silence : Brian Friel’s Revisitation of the Artist », et Maria José Carrera montre que l’essai de Samuel Beckett From an Abandoned Work est un exemple de narration dysfonctionnelle. Dans le chapitre 12, Olga Fernández-Vicente interroge parallèlement les relations dysfonctionnelles de James Joyce et de Pio Baroja avec leurs pays respectifs. 5 Une toute dernière section est composée d’un entretien avec Billy O’Callaghan, auteur de trois recueils de nouvelles. O’Callaghan y parle de sa manière d’écrire, des paysages qui l’inspirent ainsi que de sa volonté constante de créer des personnages réalistes. Bien que les questions ne portent pas exclusivement sur le thème de l’ouvrage, l’entretien constitue une richesse indéniable. 6 Le choix de regroupement des articles en sections est parfois artificiel. De même, on peut regretter un déséquilibre entre le nombre important de chapitres dévolus à la littérature en comparaison des deux chapitres réservés au cinéma et des deux chapitres consacrés au théâtre. Malgré ces défauts inhérents au caractère d’ouvrage collectif du livre, l’ensemble traite de manière intellectuellement très stimulante, à l’intersection des études culturelles, littéraires et cinématographiques, des aspects dysfonctionnels de la société irlandaise.
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Jim SMYTH (ed.), Remembering the Troubles: Contesting the Recent Past in Northern Ireland, University of Notre-Dame Press, 2017
Catherine Conan
1 This collection of essays edited by Jim Smyth, from the University of Notre Dame, is published, very timely, in the middle of the “decade of commemorations”. The issue of remembering, always very pressing in Ireland, is even more so when the country commemorates the centenary of the period that saw it through the Ulster Covenant, the Battle of the Somme, the Easter Rising, the Anglo-Irish war and the Civil War. The present collection is informed right from the introduction by A. T. Q. Stewart’s statement that “all history is applied history”, that is, the conviction that remembering the past always says something very valuable about the present. In keeping with the present “spatial turn” in historical studies, Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire also feature in Smyth’s introduction, as they raise the question of space and material objects, which also exist in the present, in the process of remembering. What follows from this theoretical premise is a blend of sociological and historical enquiry which at one point comes, in the introduction, dangerously close to losing the distinction between the event and its imaginary reconstruction, brought together under the umbrella term of “facts” (p. 4). Even though a commemoration certainly qualifies as an event, its “secondary” nature should not be overlooked.
2 As is often the case in studies of the Troubles, accounts of the Republican side of the conflict dominate, as half of the articles are devoted to Republican memories. First- hand narratives of the Troubles, in the article by Jim Smyth and in the form of a text penned down by the father of Cathal Goulding, also describe Catholic nationalist experiences. However, the articles themselves present on the whole an extremely well- informed and balanced account of the issue of remembering the Troubles, which explores areas long neglected by classic Troubles scholarship, notably, in the excellent article by Aaron Edwards, the question of remembering the British soldiers who died in
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active service in Northern Ireland, both within the British army and in Northern Irish public space. One of the most significant issues raised in the volume as a whole therefore appears as that of the definition of a victim. It is one of the most noteworthy achievements of the present collection to enlarge our understanding of the variety of Troubles victims. In particular, a detailed examination of demographic statistics of Troubles victims by Ian McBride reveals that Republican paramilitaries were responsible for more Catholic deaths than any other group, which interrogates received narratives of what the conflict was about, namely a colonial struggle against a British oppressor. The use of opinion surveys, primary source documents, notably Republican pamphlets, and first-hand accounts all contribute to a nuanced reappraisal of the Northern Irish conflict. 3 In particular, several articles return to the Official/Provisional IRA split, and study the processes of forgetting and re-inventing that saw the transformation of the Official IRA from a nationalist organisation involved in armed struggle to a Workers’ Party committed to the defence of socialism by peaceful means. The discussion of the ideological twists and turns of the IRA from the late 1960s offers valuable insights into the nationalist stance, and helps to understand why it never really managed to present a united front. 4 It is to be hoped that this timely collection of essays will show that remembrance is a paradoxical key to bringing a sense of closure that will contribute to lay to rest the ghosts of the Troubles.
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Eamon MAHER, Eugene O’BRIEN, Tracing the Legacy of Irish Catholicism. From Galway to Cloyne and Beyond, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2017
Alexandra Slaby
1 This volume is the latest study of the challenges and prospects of contemporary Irish Catholicism. The word “legacy” suggests that the contributors write on the assumption that Irish Catholicism is dead. What is Irish Catholicism, and what about it is dead? To answer these questions, the editors look at Irish Catholicism with cultural lenses, bringing together academic contributors across the spectrum of the humanities as well as voices from the Church and the media.
2 What happened between Galway and Cloyne? The first section contextualizes the changing relationship between the Catholic Church and the population. The second draws attention to critical voices, and the third presents the challenges that lie on the horizon as Irish Catholicism may face death by “Eucharistic famine” and as Ireland watches its “Catholic twilight”. 3 In the legacy, one finds the Entweltlichung of the Irish Church, its association with state – and identity-building resulting in “the sacred being corrupted by the political”, the Catholic label being loosely and meaninglessly attached to institutions. It may come as a surprise to find among the proponents of disentanglement a cleric, Fr Vincent Twomey, seen as a spokesperson of conservative Catholicism because he was a doctoral student of Cardinal Ratzinger. Maher points out very rightly that Fr Twomey’s views are in fact radical. 4 Parting with those inherited circumstances would enable the Catholic Church in Ireland to be more faithful to the “life-giving word of God”, to become a Church characterized by a service-oriented pastoral approach. A Church that would re-engage
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the religious imagination through art and poetry, and that would recover its theological and spiritual heritage and transmit it from the pulpit during substantial Sunday homilies. 5 Eamon Maher and Catherine Maignant introduce to us “prophetic” or dissident voices from the Irish and French clergy whose bold utterances or warnings compel the reader to reflect upon what is to be held as an eternal truth and what is a matter of circumstance that can be reformed. One such prophetic voice is that of Fr Twomey whose ideas to foster the dawn of a reflective Catholicism in Ireland involve Catholic academies on the German and Austrian model. The clergy also needs to be better trained in theological basics and not only in managerial skills. What is at stake? As Eugene O’Brien shows in a thought-provoking transposition of Terry Pratchett’s Omnia to an Irish Church, a Church that is too big and too heavy risks becoming an empty shell that will have allowed God to wither away. But the decline of organized religion does not “inevitably or directly lead to positive gains for rational or humanist thinking”; it can also lead to superstition, to a diffuse and syncretic spirituality or to the replacement of one transcendence by another, the market of neoliberal materialism. 6 Among its many qualities (expertise and diversity of the contributors, construction of the sequence of chapters), this volume distinguishes itself by its dispassionate tone. It succeeds in avoiding the pro- or anti-Catholic stance. Joe Cleary invites the Irish Catholic world to move from “dead certainties” to “intelligent questions.” This book will definitely contribute enormously to accomplishing that transition.
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Raphaël INGELBIEN, Irish Cultures of Travel: Writing on the Continent, 1829-1914, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016
Michelle Milan
1 The publication of Raphaël Ingelbien’s Irish Cultures of Travel is symptomatic of a growing scholarship on the history of Irish travel abroad and Irish travel writing. Indeed, the book breaks new ground in that it represents the first attempt to chart Irish travel out of Ireland in the long nineteenth century. To date, most of the research in the field has been devoted to travel and tourism in Ireland. In a century marked by massive emigration out of Ireland, it is also understandable that Irish tourism abroad in the period has been overshadowed. The book’s timeline, set between Catholic Emancipation in 1829 and the breakout of World War I, allows the author to investigate the travelling cultures of the Victorian and Edwardian Irish middle classes, including a growing Catholic middle class, in a more systematic way than has ever been done before. The term “cultures of travel” is very apt inasmuch as the Irish travelled abroad for a variety of reasons and with diverse experiences and backgrounds.
2 The book quotes from a wide range of sources, including many anonymous articles in the contemporary press. It also includes the writings of, for example, Mathew O’Conor, Thomas Davis and Selina Martin. Except for an excursion into James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’, the book shifts attention away from canonical literature, turning the spotlight on texts that provide “evidence of remarkable cultural trends” (p. 12). The “reader-oriented approach” claimed in the book is not, however, a reader-response approach as such; rather, the focus is on public discourse. Public discourse on Irish travel shows that national, political and religious identities were often at stake. Such discourse would convey, for example, utilitarian agendas, anti-modern ideas and/or cultural nationalist programmes. Among the topics covered is the antiquarian or historically-minded search for Irish footprints on the Continent (Fontenoy, Montorio, etc.). In an era when women’s sphere was thought to be domestic, their travel opportunities were
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accordingly more limited. Yet, Irish women such as Margaret Stokes or “Mrs. T. Mitchell” provide significant examples of independent female travel. The fifth chapter is arguably one of the most stimulating parts of the study in terms of its firm focus and the material that it analyses. It investigates the rise of Irish pilgrimages to Catholic centres such as Lourdes, Oberammergau and Rome, highlighting the pilgrims’ increased affiliation to a “universal” Roman Catholic Church, and examining Irish Protestant responses to these Catholic spaces. The role played by Thomas Cook’s tourist agency is also significant. Accordingly, Chapter 3 is a welcome attempt to focus on the material conditions for travel and for the dissemination of travel writing, charting some of the sociological, infrastructural and technological changes that contributed to the development of Irish tourism abroad – most notably increased transport facilities and the rise of steam power. 3 As the author admits, such a broad undertaking necessarily means that the book cannot provide an exhaustive treatment of the topic. Many destinations, travellers, texts and themes have not been included. The focus is limited to a number of European sites, but one important debate about travel occurred regardless of specific destinations: a major motif in the discourse on Irish travel was the tension between home and abroad, and the encouragement to “see Ireland first”. It is in this light, and against the background of a developing Irish tourist industry (notably in the rural, Gaelic-speaking west of Ireland) that Chapter 8 revisits Joyce’s “The Dead” and the confrontation between Gabriel Conroy and Miss Ivors. Travel and discourse about travel bring about questions of identity – and in this case, a complex web of identities – which is really the main thread that ties the book together. No doubt it makes an important contribution to the fields of Irish studies and studies of European travel.
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Vincent MORLEY, The Popular Mind in Eighteenth-century Ireland, Cork University Press, 2017
Thierry Robin
1 Vincent Morley est un historien irlandais, spécialiste du XVIIIe siècle –the « long 18th century » de 1691 à 1830, depuis la conquête de l’Irlande par Guillaume III d’Orange jusqu’aux débuts de la campagne pour l’abrogation de l’Acte d’Union menée par Daniel O’Connell. Néanmoins l’ouvrage de Morley ne se donne pas comme objet d’étude les grands personnages de l’histoire irlandaise. Il entend en revanche mieux cerner la culture populaire irlandaise de l’époque par le biais d’un corpus de huit textes originaux. L’auteur en traduit sept pour la toute première fois en anglais. Que faire de l’encombrante langue de l’ancienne puissance coloniale ? Comment rendre compte fidèlement du point de vue du « colonisé », véhiculé par une oralité labile et fuyante en gaélique ? La gageure et la prémisse pour cet ouvrage sont résumables ainsi : dans un souci de fidélité historique, on peut et on doit donner un accès aux non-irlandophones à ce que Morley appelle « l’esprit populaire irlandais », ou autrement dit l’esprit des masses. Le paradoxe est alors triple : c’est par l’écrit et par l’anglais et enfin au XXIe siècle que l’auteur souhaite réévaluer et recentrer une culture gaélique orale du XVIIIe siècle. Les 8 textes présentés s’organisent autour de deux pôles: la poésie entre élégie et poèmes historiques pour la première partie et les chansons pour la seconde – pour certaines anonymes (chapitres 5 et 6). La qualité littéraire de l’ensemble du corpus peut laisser perplexe, comme l’avoue l’auteur lui-même en qualifiant un aisling censé éclairer le texte final sur la période O’Connellienne de « doggerel in both languages » (p. 305). L’aisling est cette forme poétique ou chantée, qui signifie en gaélique « vision » ou « rêve » – selon la définition rappelée dans un glossaire bienvenu constitué par l’auteur, p. VIII. On notera enfin que l’auteur a organisé l’ouvrage autour de 8 thèmes présents dans les 8 textes rassemblés, thèmes pour la plupart déjà abordés dans ses recherches ou articles préalables : le royaume, la foi, la mémoire, la guerre, les patriotes, la terre, la rébellion et enfin en 1830, « Union ? », suivie d’un point
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d’interrogation évocateur. Au-delà du littéraire donc, le livre vaut en soi par l’ampleur de sa traduction du gaélique et la période couverte.
2 On remarquera aussi que l’entreprise de Morley fait écho de façon assumée à celle de Daniel Corkery dont l’ouvrage The Hidden Ireland (1924) citée dans l’introduction (pp. 1-8) fournit ainsi le point de départ de l’analyse. Corkery souhaitait restituer une place à la poésie populaire irlandaise en gaélique. Son ouvrage était censé permettre la reconstruction de la vision du monde de la majorité irlandaise catholique. Celle-ci était dépeinte comme essentiellement pour ne pas dire exclusivement opprimée, rurale et dépossédée au XVIIIe siècle. Selon Patrick Walsh, l’œuvre de Corkery fournit en son temps une forme de doxa au régime nationaliste irlandais après 1922. Morley, dans son ouvrage plus nuancé, vient souligner l’importance cruciale de la continuité et de la tradition portées par les masses au cours de l’histoire. On discerne là en filigrane l’influence de l’école historique du temps long portée en France naguère par Fernand Braudel. En Irlande pour Morley, ce temps long se fait linguistique et gaélique. Les masses irlandaises étaient majoritairement irlandophones avant 1800 dans l’île, fait généralement admis par les chercheurs mais insuffisamment pris en compte dans l’historiographie de l’Irlande. 3 Si l’on ne peut que louer l’effort de réhabilitation objective de l’oralité illustré par l’ouvrage dans la propagation des idées dans une Irlande majoritairement analphabète, catholique et gaélique avant 1800, on peut en revanche être plus sceptique à d’autres égards. Notamment quand l’auteur relègue le discontinu événementiel à une forme d’élitisme précisément et paradoxalement traditionnelle: « Far from being a mark of maturity, the historian’s interest in highlighting apparent discontinuities is characteristic of a very traditional top-down approach to the Irish past » (p. 309). Ce qui est posé comme une évidence conservatrice par l’auteur : « Continuity is invariably more important than change for the great majority of people in any society » mériterait tout autant d’être questionné en nuance que la primauté supposée du discontinu. 4 C’est pourquoi au-delà des mérites indéniables d’un livre qui met en avant des sources méconnues, à une époque trop peu documentée dans la langue gaélique – et pour cause –, on pourra comme Declan Kiberd émettre quelques réserves quant à la critique frontale opérée par Morley contre la pensée de Jürgen Habermas sur la culture de l’imprimé dans l’espace public (p. 311). Comme le rappelle Declan Kiberd1 à juste titre, la tradition orale fait souvent écho à la culture de l’imprimé : « any reader might be struck by the ways in which oral tradition can mimic print culture ». C’est ainsi souvent dans l’entre-deux et le mouvement dialectique plus que dans l’essence supposément stable, fût-elle méprisée, que l’on trouve des clefs en histoire. Mais ce serait ne pas rendre justice à l’originalité du propos de Morley que de le réduire à une pensée monologique. Ainsi le traitement de la religion catholique dans le chapitre 3 offre des analyses aussi riches et nouvelles que nuancées. Enfin, le livre est d’une clarté exemplaire sur la période considérée.
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NOTES
1. Declan Kiberd, “The Popular Mind in Eighteenth-century Ireland review: An elegant and luminous study”, The Irish Times, [http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/the- popular-mind-in-eighteenth-century-ireland-review-an-elegant-and-luminous- study-1.3032259], 15 avril 2017.
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