Inventing Ireland (84 page)

Copernicus, like Marx or Freud or
Loyola, becomes the inventor of a new discourse. Copernicus's severance of traditional ties robs him not just of old securities but of nationality too: behind the mask of "Ermlander", says the author, "he was that which no name or nation could claim. He was Doctor Copernicus".
²⁴
In short, he was a type of the pure artist for whom tradition is not a
datum
so much as a personal renegotiation with and reinvention of all that has gone before. Seen in this context, anti-nationalist revisionists are in a number of ways rather like the nationalist historians whom they debunk: both take the world as a given and Irish tradition as a stable element in that handover. Both accept the paradigm of the imperialist in that they overlook the actual violence of the colonial "translation" itself – the nationalist by returning to a point of mythic origin, the revisionist by treating the translator's effect that is the "native" as a cause, both literal and metaphorical. Above all, both agree that Ireland marks the outer limits of their enterprise. Banville, however, feels unable or unwilling to write from within that secure culture, and so he takes up a position beyond it, writing of all those forces which have made the very phrases "Irish tradition" or "German culture" problematic.
²⁵

The most chastening discovery of Banville's Copernicus is that the space once occupied by God is now filled with a void: and so, the maker of the ultimate fiction having absconded, all secondary fictions become self-enclosed. If the world is not a translation of a more perfect one elsewhere, then art and science can hardly claim any longer to be renditions of the world, being merely stylistic arrangements of experience. Banville once, in a sly parody of Shelley, said that novelists are the unacknowledged historians of the world:
²⁶
the implication, of course, is that the historians will not acknowledge that there is a sense in which they might also be novelists. So he deliberately took for subject a scientist of whose life few facts were known, leaving him free to vivify that life and its setting with an overlaid consciousness which can quote
Wallace Stevens or Henry James. In much the same manner, Shaw in
Saint Joan
had his medieval characters talk as if they had already read Marx and Nietzsche.

All of these writers are
post-nationalist, insofar as they are committed to a project of
perpetual
translation. The nationalist, being merely the effect
of
a single act of translation, mistakenly takes himself for the original cause: but Irish artists have long known that such singularity is a delusion. They have known estrangement from all languages as the natural condition of their work: this has meant that they have been able to make a home in many. Far from being ill-fitted to modernity, they have taken it as the one sure given, and so theirs has been a genius for adjustment. While their people have scattered across the face of the earth, moving from neolithic communities to the hyperreality of Hell's Kitchen, the writers have shown similar gifts of adaptation. Beckett wrote his greatest masterpieces in French before translating some of them "back" into English; and then he reverted wholly to creation in English, but only when French had become
"trop facile".
Liam O'Flaherty began writing in Irish, soon switched to English, and oscillated between them after that. Flann O'Brien and Brendan Behan wrote most of their work in English, but each also wrote major texts of the modern Irish language. Joyce, the greatest of them all, wrote his last text simultaneously in about two dozen languages. Even today
Finnegans Wake
poses stupendous problems for a translator: how is the job to be done? Out of what language? And into what base-language? How can any version begin to render the plurality of the text?

All of these artists repeatedly disproved the widespread delusion that one can produce original work only in one's mother tongue. They recognized that every true translation, every text, must retain for the reader some sense of the foreignness of its originals. Beckett offered the most extreme case of this self-estrangement, but many other writers also sought it – "the most extraordinary form of humiliation that a writer, who is not a bad writer, could inflict upon himself'.
²⁷

These observations suggest that modern Irish writing set up shop under the sign of Babel. That biblical myth rehearsed the forces and themes of Irish art, being at once a story of imperialism and of its counter-image in nationalism, and of the punishments attendant upon either. God the Father, who alone was the origin of a universal language, was driven by anger to punish the Semite imperialists who built their tower "as high as heaven" and their affliction was a proliferation of "mother tongues". Instead of filiation, they knew affiliation. That myth is a warning against all who would seek to impose an official language of enlightenment, whether English in the nineteenth century or Irish in the twentieth. The builders of the tower were guilty, after all, of wanting to make a name for themselves, of wishing to construct themselves solely by the act of self-naming.
²⁸

Against such hopeful simplicities, the myth insists that identity is dialogic, porous. Friel's
Translations
mocks the notion of a
cordon sanitaire
placed around a self-sufficient Ireland and it accepts that translation, however difficult, is absolutely necessary. The occupants of Babel were punished because of their vain belief that they could do away with evil and create an absolute purity.

Translation, however, allows a people to reach back longingly to a lost universal language, but only in the knowledge that it can never be repossessed. Banville's Copernicus suspects as much: "If such harmony had ever existed, he feared deep down, deep beyond admitting, that it was not to be regained".
²⁹

"To restore great things", said
Erasmus, "is sometimes a harder and nobler task than to have introduced them".
¹
The exponents of the Irish Renaissance shaped and reshaped an ancient past, and duly recalled it, giving rise to an unprecedented surge of creativity and self-confidence among the people. The task facing this generation is at once less heroic and more complex: to translate the
recent
past, the high splendours and subsequent disappointments of that renaissance, into the terms of a new century. Perhaps the greatest wrong committed by the English in Ireland, after their coming, was their refusal to open themselves fully to all the experiences that followed, to achieve a true translation of that culture towards which they nonetheless moved, as if animated by some undeclared need. It was left to Yeats, Hyde and their generation to point to the lesson and to bring to England a knowledge which the colonists themselves had signally failed to glean. There is nothing especially surprising about that blindness: it is a peculiarity of imperialists everywhere that they fail to identify with human experience, "but also fail to see it as human experience".
²

What
was
surprising, however, was the willingness of large numbers of nationalists to countenance the notion of
Irish exceptionality. Preening themselves on some occasions for being "like no other people on earth", arraigning themselves on others, they often failed to regard Irish experience as representative of human experience, and so they remained woefully innocent of the comparative method, which might have helped them more fully to possess the meaning of their lives. As an exceptional instance, Ireland was always there to be studied by others: the narcissistic fantasy of some nationalists was a little like that of the naïve Aran islander who gravely told J. M. Synge that "there are few rich men now in the world who are not studying the Gaelic".
³
The proliferation of courses in Irish Studies in Britain and North America and beyond may have fed such narcissism: but it has not yet prompted
any group of native intellectuals to make a reciprocal gesture by studying the ways in which outsiders choose to see them. For instance, an institute of British Studies, based in one or other of the universities, might valuably monitor the ways in which the British constructed their own world (and the Irish as a vital part of it). Instead of this, however, many Irish-born scholars have internalized the external models, producing analyses which owe far more to the narrative methods of
Heart of Darkness
than their authors might care to admit.

The aim of recent Irish historians has been worthy enough: to replace the old morality-tale of Holy Ireland versus Perfidious Albion with a less sentimental and simplified account. However, the more seductive writers among them tended to appeal to the old Manichaean mentality, choosing simply to invert its workings: whatever the nationalists had extolled, they tended to deride. Nationalism in Ireland, as in most other countries, was a broad and comprehensive movement, containing progressive as well as conservative elements. Compelled by the tacts of history to admit that nationalism often found itself in alliance with socialism, feminism and even pacifism, the historians tended nevertheless to characterize even cultural nationalism as Anglophobic and anti-Protestant. "To a strong element in the Gaelic League", wrote
Roy
Foster in the most influential and brilliant synthesis of this school, "literature in English was Protestant as well as anti-national". With conclusive eloquence, he deduced that "the emotions focused by cultural revivalism around the turn of the century were fundamentally sectarian and even racialist".
⁴

The motives behind these rather unexpected assertions were of the highest: the desire of the historians was to invent a more ecumenical and inclusive definition of Irishness than the one with which many of them had grown up in the southern state. Denying doctrines of inevitability, they wished to restore to each moment of history the openness which it once had: hence Foster's claim that the 1916 Rising was not the outcome of the cultural revival led by Hyde and Yeats, so much as a discrete event brought on by the conditions pertaining during World War One. This was a classic "revisionist" denial of that Whig view of history which sees everything in the light of what followed. It was a salutary reminder that most protagonists are at the mercy of their immediate moment: but it can be taken too far. To remove a sense of linear causality is to deny oneself and one's readers answers to fundamental questions: Why did the English colonize, exploit and terrorize the Irish? In the name of what values did they put down the 1916 Rising? And why did they so fatally misinterpret the popular mood as
to deliver Ireland into the arms of Sinn Féin? Because he remained incurious about the popular culture which often makes things happen, Foster was reduced in the manner of a
nouveau romancier
to chronicling cataclysmic events without apparent or adequate cause. It can be scarcely surprising that he should have found the Easter Rebellion "irrational". In such a version of
history-without-agency, what seem like the impersonal laws of history are often no more than historians' laws, improvised to meet the needs of a moment.

It would be wrong to infer from this, as some nationalist critics of Foster have done, that his is a heartless, value-free practice.
⁵
If anything, precisely the reverse is true: far from being clinical, his work is the outcome of a deep emotional investment by a patriotic Irishman who believes that the most useful service which he can perform for his people is the devaluation of a nationalism, some of whose disciples are still willing to kill and be killed in its defence. The fact that the rebellion in the north was primarily a protest against economic oppression and political injustice has not prevented the new generation of historians from a scrupulous consideration of whether any links in the chains of events which led to insurrectionary violence might have been forged in their professional smithies. Many of them – Roy Foster and
F. S. L Lyons included – lived as Protestants in an independent southern state which was at times a sponsor of narrow-gauge nationalism and a Catholic triumphalism. These unattractive forces repelled them, as they distressed tens of thousands of liberal Catholics: many thus repelled concluded, against the weight of the evidence, that they must always have been present or at least latent in cultural nationalism. So the Anglophobia and sectarianism of the republic in the mid-century were "read back", in a curiously ahistorical fashion, into the writings and workings of the revolutionary generation. The same historians who had been taught to be sceptical of those, like Yeats, who saw every process in the light of what followed, now suspended that scepticism when it came to their own experience. Yeats was not permitted to "read forward" from the cultural
risorgimento
to 1916, but they could surely "read back" from the frustrations of their own lives.

For all their iconoclasm and for all their overdue revisions, the historians did not in the main challenge the Anglocentric account of the Irish past.
⁶
Instead, they produced the familiar polar narrative beloved of their nationalist precursors, but on this occasion they viewed it more often from a British than an Irish perspective. Far from seeing the British presence in Ireland as a colonial or imperial exercise, they tended to present it as well-meaning, occasionally inept, but rarely
malevolent – very much in keeping with the prevailing view of the role of the military in Northern Ireland. Indeed, one of the
historians,
Ronan Fannning, remarked with some asperity on the indecent haste with which the authorities in Dublin, confronted by the IRA at a time when membership of the European Economic Community seemed more pressing a concern than rehearsing the wrongs of the British, suddenly accommodated the new history. He remarked that ruling regimes always seek to control the presentation of the past in such a way as to buttress and legitimize their own authority.
⁷
As it happened, the spread of free secondary education coincided with the moment when a revised history began to appear in school textbooks. A bitter debate ensued between the old-fashioned nationalists and the revisionists, proving little other than the fact that in Ireland the past is never a different country and scarcely even the past: instead it becomes just one more battleground contested by the forces of the present.

Most of the historians, like the British, remained fixated on a nationalism which they repeatedly deplored but could not transcend by any truly innovative methodology. Telling the old story from the other side's viewpoint was scarcely a breakthrough: more an attempt to trick out Tom Broadbent's benevolent imperialism in slightly updated gear. By refusing to countenance a post-colonial analysis, they colluded – quite unconsciously, of course – with the widespread nationalist conceit of Irish exceptionality: the Irish experience was not to be compared with that of other peoples who sought to decolonize their minds or their territory. In exculpating the British, they certainly did justice to some persons who had been unfairly demonized by nationalist historians, but they also passed rather too swiftly over instances of imperial guilt; and, in the process, they invented some new demons of their own. Patrick Pearse, for example, was no longer to be treated as a plaster saint but as a vulgar egomaniac: the consideration that it is not usual for egomaniacs to sacrifice their lives for a cause did not detain the new commentators, most of whom found it hard to imagine any set of values which might transcend the life of the individual. Yet the revisionist enterprise was genuinely useful: Pearse needed rescuing from his uncritical admirers, who had long ceased to read what he actually said, and the historians sent many back to the original texts, which surprised and delighted a whole new generation of readers. If nationalism was the thesis, revisionism was the antithesis: of its nature it was not so much wrong as incomplete. The dialectic needed to be carried through to a synthesis.

Joseph Lee's
Ireland: Politics and Society 1912–86
brought that moment
even closer. In rhetoric of high voltage, the author declared his agenda with commendable openness – Ireland has been cursed with those who want to "possess" land, jobs, prestige and bereft of those who can "perform" (entrepreneurs, creative social thinkers, a dynamic middle class).
⁸
His work appealed to many cultural nationalists, who had no difficulty in endorsing his argument that the loss of the Irish language had a traumatic effect on Irish self-confidence. Yet explicit in Lee's study was an allegation not unlike that implicit in Foster's: that since the English left in 1921 things had only got worse. Lee's theme was the
failure of economic nationalism – an ideal he judged to have been sapped by emigration, lack of enterprise, cultural introversion, and the absence of a critical intelligentsia. Readers were beguiled by the author's
brio,
by the patriotism which manifestly informed his rather devastating diagnoses, and by his willingness (so untypical of the academic) to offer prescriptions – but it may well be that he overstated his case.

His comparisons were all with smaller European countries, which did not undergo the long nightmare of colonial expropriation and misrule, much less wave after wave of massive emigration. Had he widened his field of vision, he might have conceded that in many respects the Irish achievement has been remarkable: a great modernist literature, a caring community bound together by a high degree of social consensus, an economy which (for all its undevelopment) still features in the top thirty industrial democracies, a stable multi-party system with sufficient independence to pursue through a number of decades a distinctive foreign policy unbeholden to either superpower. Greece, the other former colony of the
European Union, is much less developed than Ireland in most of these respects.

Karl Marx was right to describe Ireland as a crucible of modernity, for in at least two major ways it is arguably more advanced than Britain. It has recognized the need to come to terms with nationalism and has accepted a fully modern form of the state, with a written constitution that has gradually been purged of sectarian accretions. At the start of this century, George Bernard Shaw said that England was still too backward for a
Home Rule movement; and, at the end, that remains the case, with English nationalism locked into an archaic multinational state that fails to recognize modern notions of citizenship or of rights. The extraordinary modernity of Irish thinking and writing deserves to be stressed, when too many commentators have emphasized only backwardness. Equally striking are the constant, usually successful, adjustments to an ever-changing situation. It would be hardly too
much to say that the Irish, despite their reputation, are one of the least conservative peoples of Europe, to judge by the rate at which they have changed over the past century and a half. The need now is to understand the inner experience of those caught up in the process: and my belief is that literature and popular culture can help us to recover many voices drowned out by official regimes or by their appointed chroniclers.

The historians, with the best intentions in the world, rarely acknowledge that they write at the mercy of literature – that for each there is an appropriate form, which dictates a whole range of exclusions as well as inclusions. If Foster has written the story of his land as a
nouveau roman,
then Lee has chosen the
jeremiad.
Man, it would seem, is finally an aesthetic creature who will choose the most "elegant" model which seems to account for the facts – but literary studies may, somewhat paradoxically, serve to remind people of all those messy phenomena which escape such hopeful thematization. This is not to claim a higher truth-value for literature, merely to recognize that it can complete the picture and at the same time draw attention to what the framer chose to exclude. The myths debunked by revisionist historians were in some cases terribly false; yet, if huge numbers of people believed in them, then they also must be accorded their place as decisive agents of history. Moreover, the trauma of those who suffered and the exaltation of those who struggled deserve our accounting. To creative artists may have fallen the task of explaining what no historian has fully illuminated – the reason why the English came to regard the Irish as inferior and barbarous, on the one hand, and, on the other, poetic and magical.