Dreaming Shamrocks
Like any child who grew up in an Anglo-Irish household, and one strung between Catholic and Protestant - or rather, in Brendan Kennelly's acute phrase, between Protholic and Cathestant - I have always had to live with the treadmill of competing sentimental symbols. The exile has a gift for nostalgic kitsch, and among eziles the Irish are the virtuosos of ethnic schmaltz. Who else could have so maliciously burdened the world with "Irish Eyes", Saint Patrick's Day and misty-eyed reverence for a national shrub? Who else could have turned a history of colonial defeat into an iconography of plucky and spunky grit?
The Catholic side of my family was suffused with memories of the Motherland so dim, so inaccurate and so loaded with the machinery of invention that it was difficult to tell where actual misery ended and imagined magnificence began. A popular song, sung at Christmas around the piano, went like this:
The sea O the sea aghradh-gheal mo chroi
Long may it roll between England and me;
God help the poor Scotsmen, they'll never be free.
But we are surrounded by water!
Long, garrulous and drunken debates consisted in recounting, with interminable litanies of past British indecencies, the noble suffering and resistance of the gamey Paddies, whom only God, by inventing whiskey, had prevented from otherwise ruling the world.
That this same family had settled comfortably in a commuter-belt English town of fake Tudors, cattle auctions and Rotary Clubs, did not seem to perturb them one iota. The enemy was the enemy. Nor did it confound them that their "image-repertoire", to use the fashionable phrase, was of a dubious authenticity. Ireland for them, as Mayoites, was the West, the Gaeltacht - a fabled tract of the imagination thick with mists, supernatural trees and apple-checked peasants. The race sprang from this Land. The Land was a racial memory, clung to with delusionary fanaticism. What Bishop O'Dwyer once called "the sacred fire of nationality" seemed burn in every article of furniture.
This is why the Parade today sends chills down my spine. March 17th seems to me to be the perfect day to go to Cancun for 24 hours. The spectacle of those prancing kilted step-dancers, kelly-green plastic derbys and brawling fellow-Micks spilling out of all those Emerald Inns and Paddy Reilly's yelling slurred back-to-front refrains of "Danny Boy", and the usual counter-demonstrations of the ritually excluded gays and lesbians protesting its “homophobia” is enough to turn my blood to ice. Over the whole affair hangs the ghost of ethnic mysticisms past and present, and the shade of a thousand ax-grinding ancestors.
For while the Irish in New York may paint their faces green on Saint Patrick's Day like demented Celtic wood sprites as they roil their way from MacQuigan's to Milano's, their mythologies are in fact anything but simply Irish. They are as likely to be the fruit of British imperial myth-mongering and anti-industrial European Romanticism as of any Gaelic atavism. The symbols are even more impure than the race. The "Ireland" that is being celebrated has largely disappeared, and in reality barely existed in the first place. Like the Parade itself, it was invented in the nineteenth century, and all too easily reveals its dubious foundations. No gays in our march, thank you.
Recently, Irish academics have weighed in anew on this delicate and testy subject, from Thomas Cahill's charmingly boastful How the Irish Saved Civilization, to Declan Kibern's more sober and politicized Inventing Ireland and, simultaneously, there has been an explosion of cannily marketed Celto-nostalgia in the United States. Frank McCourt and James Caroll have cashed in on the commercial memoir gravy train with their accounts of miserable Irish childhoods, Riverdance sells sexualized stepdance which pundits claims reveals a newly liberated hibernian sexuality freed from the constraints of a thousand years of Catholicism ( “the pounding and joyful cadence of hard-soled shoes,” as the Times coyly put it ) and just as the Hostess snack company dyes its “snowball” dessert cakes green for the fateful day, Governor Pataki signs legislation which makes the Famine of Black ‘47 obligatory history in all New York schools. Irishness has entered the American ethnic mall along with many others, and with the usual commercial chutzpah. A Seamus Egan soundtrack courtesy of the Shanachie Entertainment Corporation, a cacophony of IRA movies ( minus the bomb-singed eight year old children, of course ) and a rash of Irish Village bars complete with hob-nailed boots, “peat fires” and heirloom chairs. The “Irish lovefest” is upon us.
Certainly, my matriarch, Mary O'Kane of Clare Island, Mayo, had no doubt that the Irish had saved civilization, though had you suggested that they had "invented" themselves from a strange assortment of literary texts over the last two hundred years or so, topped off now with a media blitz of stunning sentimentality, instead of drawing upon the inexhaustible well-spring of Celtic Truth, an apoplectic reaction would have ensued, probably followed by a blood clot.
Her rooms were a temple to Celtic Truth, defiant, lush and softly militant. Above her bed there hung a lithograph entitled The Bard, showing a Moses-like Irish poet of the age of Cuchulain strumming upon a gigantic Irish harp - the very one you see on a glass of Guinness - on the edge of a storm-tossed ravine frothing with native shrubs. With his huge, muscle-knotted arms, flowing white beard and prophetic scowl - the arms necessary, one supposes, for the deft wielding of that ten-foot seventy- pound harp - The Bard glowered down on Mary O'Kane's sleep, in which, she said, she dreamt every night of Inishboffen and Clare islands and their sprightly goats, Lough Derg ( a famous pilgramage site in Donegal ) and its sacred stones, the cromlechs and raths, the time-worn crosses and dreamscenes, as Joyce put it, "as wonderfully beautiful as...as when the Sligo illuminators gave free reign to their artistic fantasy long long ago in the time of the Barmecides."
In this timeless landscape of windswept heroes, of Kathleen Ni Houlihans, Ossians and our own ancestral 16th century pirate Kathleen O'Mally - ovaried buccaneer and terror of the English - the incunabula of folk myth is overlaid with memories of wretched realities : mass evictions, indifferent overlords of the Ascendency, the Land War - exactly that embittered Mayo immortalized by Synge in Playboy of the Western World. My grand-parents migrated out of that internal Third World and, looking back from the comparative safety of their new British destinations, heaved a sigh of relief, a relief obviously loaded with shame and intense nostalgia, and then set about re-working the reality to make it more in accord with the latent, "spiritual" greatness of the Race.
The Irish as a whole have made this into a psychological, not to say literary industry, with wish fulfillment, inferiority complex and bitterness toxically meshed.
At a Saint Patrick's Day speech in 1853, Archbishop John Hughes of New York made the following remark:
“But the very misfortunes of a temporal kind that have fallen on Ireland have sent forth the children of that unhappy land to every clime and every latitude, and wherever they are found...not only do they cherish fond memory for the apostle of their native land, but they propagate it, and make the infection as if it were contagious...”
And as they soared further and further away from the source of their complexes, so their need increased to invest it with a kind of heraldic weight, a tradition which did not in fact exist. My great-aunt would ritually summon us to her room to inspect the family's "coats of arms." These were a set of china saucers with heraldic shields inside their rims, a yule, a red boar and an emerald shrub. Where did the boar come from? And the lone yule? Who had given it to them? Who knows, perhaps her father found the saucers in a pawn shop in Newcastle and embarked on a little self-invention. The lives and above all histories of migrants are rarely without blurred lines and copious twilight zones.
In their different ways, Cahill and Kiberd indulge in a national pride of a related order. For what the suffering individual or family in exile must have constructed for itself as a worthy uniqueness, a form of subversive superiority in the face of obvious historical inferiority ( not imagined but all too real, the inferiority of the suppressed ) the wider culture sustains too, despite political or ideological differences. Hence Cahill merrily tells us that we all owe Ireland an incalculable debt, for without her we would be barbarians - the later defeats suffered by the land of monastic scholars and brilliant Latinists being just an ironic inversion of the older truth, namely that of the Gaels holding aloft the torch of Civilization during the Dark Ages. That he has to downplay a puny hamlet called Constantinople or a backwater like Muslim-Jewish-Christian Spain as repositories of this same Western Civilization is no matter. The important thing is to make the peripheral central and the reputedly "backward" a progressive agency of civilization.
Similarly, though in a markedly different spirit, Kiberd, with his rather pious leftist moralisms, has to assure us that Ireland is an impeccable Third World colony, staged an impeccable protoype Third World revolution-cum-liberation struggle and is now actually more enlightened, in some ways, that its former colonial master, Britain. How so? Because it has negociated forms of modern citizenship via a written constitution which the colonially-impoverished Brits, malnourished by an as yet unwritten constitution haven't gotten around to yet. What these modes of political enlightenment are exactly - in a country where for decades thousands of women have had to cross the Irish Sea simply to get an abortion - we are deftly not told, just as we are not provided with a meditation on the interesting fact that Zaire, Communist China, South Africa and Albania had and have had "written constitutions." Some of them, like that of Ireland, written in English.
Kiberd, in fact, romanticizes Ireland in a different way. There are no leprechauns or aislings or swooning bards in his romanticism, but there are plenty of "liberationist" heroes, fragile Third World solidarities and a notion of Irish consciousness as inherently modernist by virtue of its pioneering confrontation with Imperialism. Ireland, he contends, has more in common with Kenya and Algeria than with France or Germany. To be Irish is to be iconoclastic relative to "imperial Europe". The Irish can claim to be "the niggers of Europe", in Roddy Doyle's phrase, and reap a certain politically correct credibility thereby.
What, then, is the relation between Ireland and Imperialism, which Liberd claims is at the root of "inventing Ireland"?
The great trauma of Ireland, he suggests, was its loss of Gaelic. Especially in his wonderful chapter on Oscar Wilde, Kiberd recognizes the subtle ambiguities of the Anglo-Irish symbiosis, just as he understands that the reclaiming of a subdued identity, whatever that is, is dependent upon a reaching-out to the alien. But his meditation on the profound and unconscious allegiances of language itself is not sufficiently free from the grinding gears of his political world-views, which demand proud autochthonous cultures unmutilated by colonial humiliations. Ireland lost Gaelic, and so it was thrust into a neurotic and demeaning struggle with English. He reads his Irish authors through the lens of this displacement, imagining them as symtoms of the"decolonizing mind."
But history, in some respects, evades his simple indignations. All cultures are humiliated. contaminated, marginalized, eclecticized and remoulded at some point in their history. For three hundred years the English themselves, conquered by the Latinized and Frenchspeaking Normans, were forced to speak a language other than their own, a language which turned theirs inside out. This cataclysmic event, however, is rarely used to explain the "British mind." The English were surely traumatized by their colonial subjugation, but they were hardly obliterated or impoverished by it. It gave them access to a different civilization, whose technology, law, and intellectual life they integrated into their own. Two centuries were enough to effect that exuberant and fruitful melt-down. Do we read medieval English literature as it emerged away from French as an example of a "decolonization" comparable to that of post-colonial Nigeria?
As for Kiberd's parallels between Ireland's post-colonial literature and that of Africa? The only thing they have in common is that without Bnglish they would not exist. Nguge, Achebe and Soyinka are writers of English, not of African languages, just as Oscar Wilde, Synge and Beckett could not write a line of Gaelic. Imperialism called them into being, made them possible and continues to assure their existence.
Irish nationalism appeared as a force in the late nineteenth century, at exactly the moment that Gaelic began to seriously die away. It is an ideology of the English language, just as Irish culture is mostly a culture of the English language. Consider this passage by the Irish journalist Hubert Butler, from The Bell inl941:
"It is a strange time to maintain the theory that a distinctive culture cannot exist without cultural intercourse, but since the mainspring of our freedom was not political theory but the claim that Ireland possessed and could develop a unique culture of her own, it is seasonable to examine this claim. It need not take us long, not longer than a walk down O"Connell Street past the bookshops, the cinemas, the stationers, the theatres, the hotels. By the time we are in Parnell Square we can have no doubt that after twenty years of effort, the culture of Ireland is overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon, nakedly or in word-for-word translation. The machinery of the national culture is of the approved ( international ) model, but the wheels have never once gone round."
Today, cruelly enough, we are not much interested in the particularism of the ancient Thracians, Lydians or Madedonians as enthnologically unique peoples, even if we should be. A terrible law of spiritual economy comes into play: we are interested in the fact that they operated in Greek. If they had done so in Thracian, Lydian or Macedonian languages to the exclusion of Greek, they would have disappeared for us. The imperial language does not demean or impoverish them, let alone condemn them to perpetual marginality ( for in a language there are no margins, all is center ); it thrusts them, ambiguously but brilliantly, onto the world stage.
Speaking the language of Athens hardly made Alexander the militaristic barbarian or Aristotle the provincial Thracian a mutilated buffoon, any more than speaking English made Joyce a traumatized "nigger". The construal of either as protoypes of Third World iconoclasm and oppression, as traumatized subjectivities grappling with the ripple effects of cultural imperialism, is a deft romanticism.
And as far as the Irish in particular are concerned, it skips over the delicately tricky but rather obvious fact that they are not, when all is said and done, black. If they were, their history in America, as elswhere, would have been different from what it has actually been. (During the 1996 Saint Patrick’s Day Parade in Chicago’s South Side the black Morgan Park high school band, a part of the parade, was pelted with chicken bones, beer cans and hot dogs, apparently in a spontaneous expression of racial solidarity ). Whatever nationalists say, there is no racial dynamic between Irish and British, for to all intents and purposes they are the same race, indistinguishable from each other. For the Irish to see themselves as Europe's "riggers" today is an unadulterated gesture of politicized narcissim, a narcissim as fanciful, as self-deluding and as kitsch as to see themselves as a race of saints, bards and druids. In both cases, a fashionable and dubious primitivism authenticates the racial soul.
Some time during the 1920s, a young student named Samuel Beckett happened to notice a leprechaun sitting nonchalantly in the New Square of TrinitY College, Dublin. This sighting, while it may seem remarkable to an American, and would probably be unlikely in Harvard Yard, is not unrepresentative of the magical propensities of the Emerald Isle. Nothing could be more normal than to see "little people", as my family would frequently attest : it was not even rare for my uncles and aunts to point mischievously through the French windows into the suburban lawn and wink, seeing the child teeter on the edge of their own gullibility and will-to-magic. Finally, giving in to the collective psychosis I would indeed see the little green man sitting on the willow tree in a dapper Robin Hood hat and emerald hose, waving at me with a pair of tiny gardening shears in one hand. They seem to follow us around, the little people, trailing us like racial holograms with a life of their own. In fact, I sometimes see them in Tomkins Square Park, in the same Robin Hood hats and bright green pointed buskins - for leprechauns always wear the dandy attire of the year 1450.
Naturally, folk imagery has more to it than little green imps. It is part of a catalogue of emotively glamourized places, names and times. In an essay called The Sense of Place, Seamus Heaney begins with this observation:
"I think there are two ways in which place is known and cherished, two ways which may be complementary but which are just as likely to be antipathetic. One is lived, illiterate and unconscious, the other learned, literate and conscious. In the literary sensibility, both are likely to co-exist in a conscious and unconscious tension."
He goes on to note that there is in Irish poetry a whole genre known as dinnseanchas that is, poems and tales "which relate the original meanings of place names and constitute a form of mythological etymology." With the loss of Gaelic, this sense of etymological place has been lost; and indeed, as far as his first way of knowing place is concerned, one could amend it to saying that there is a way which is unlived, illiterate and unconscious.
"We have to retrieve the underlay of Gaelic legend," Heaney goes on, "in order to read the full meaning of the name and to flesh out the topographical record with its human accretions." But of course, this does not happen very much even in a language which dwelled in a place for thousands of years. The "underlay" is simply forgotten, becomes invisible through the inevitable disconnections of passing time. What happens instead is that the illiterate and unconscious attacthment to names and places becomes an emotion of the primitive, an ersatz emotion depending on submerged echoes crisscrossing chaotically in the language. An "etymological mythology" in the worst sense.
An Englishman hears the word "Christchurch" and feels a complex of national sentiments - Thomas Hardy? Oxford-Wessex? Ivied and crocketed towers? Golden medieval stone?An Irishman hears "Glen Inagh" or "Fingal's Cave" and feels something equally unsure. The echo which reverberates through them no longer has anything to do with the organic connection of word to place, or of word to race, or of word to event. It is a chain-reaction of synthetic images, uncontrollable in its potent sentimentalism.
Here is Joyce on the Irish litany of key-words:
"...the lovely lakes of Killarney, the ruins of Clonmacnois, Cong
Abbey, Glen Inagh and the Twelve Pins, Ireland's Eye, the Green Hills of Tallaght, Croaght Patrick, the brewey of Messrs. Arthur Guiness, Son and Company ( Limited ), Lough Neagh's banks, the vale of Ovoca, Isolde's tower, the Mapas obelisk, Sir Patrick Dun's hospital, Cape Clear, the glen of Aherlow, Lynch's Castle, the Scotch house, Rathdown Union Workhouse at Loughlinstown, Tullamore jail, Castleconnel rapids, Killballymacshonakill, the cross at Monasterboice, Jury's Hotel, S. Patrick's Purgatory, the Salmon Leap, Maynooth college refectory, Curley's hole, the three birthplaces of the first Duke of Wellington, the rock of Cashel, the bog of Allen, the Henry Street warehouse, Fingal's Cave - all these moving scenes are still there for us today rendered more beautiful still by the waters of sorrow which have passed over them and by the rich incrustations of time."
Joyce's catalogue is not only a parody of the literature of national tourist offices to come, it is the hideous X-ray of a national soul abbreviated in two dozen listless and "incrusted" topographic names - an X-ray that could performed on any country's consciousness, in so far as that consciousness lies embedded at the level of the unlived, the illiterate and the unconscious. But Joyce's venom arises because in Ireland, a generation of revivalist intellectuals had given the excercise a measure of patriotic credibility. Here is Yeats, in his preface to Augusta Gregory's translation of the Gaelic Cuchulain of llluirtheme.
“We Irish should keep these personages much in our hearts, for they lived in the places where we ride and go marketing, and sometimes they have met one another on the hills that cast their shadows upon our doors at evening. If we will but tell these stories to our children the Land will begin again to be a Holy Land, as it was before men gave their hearts to Greece and Rome and Judea. When I was a child I had only to climb the hill behind the house to see long, blue, ragged hills flowing along the southern horizon. What beauty was lost to me, what depth of emotion is still perhaps lacking in me, because nobody told me, not even the merchant captains who knew everything, that Cruachan of the Enchantments lay behind those long, blue, ragged hills.”
Sympathy for this Celtic Twilight longing could be sustained by those, like Kiberd, who tend to think that creating a national consciousness has its forgivable moments of weakness. But, on the other hand, it is difficult of think of, say, Rilke or Gombrowicz - men from nations easily as tragic and marginal as Ireland - carrying on about the sacred legends of the stones of Prague or the mystical lore of the Polish hinterland. ( Rilke loathed Prague and said so: he had his own reasons to hate what he called "that fish." ) When Sean O'Faolain talks of "a blazing love of place and a fond memory for the lost generations of the tribe," he is cooing the language of ethnic nostalgia. There is nothing especially "modernist" about the Irish revivalist movement, or the national movement either, for that matter. Both, indeed, were provincial and reactionary.
To say, as Kiberd does, that Beckett and Joyce are modernists because they are Irish, and not because they became Europeans is delusional. "The Celts," declaims Kiberd, "are the leaders in art," pointing to the somewhat traditional form of European masters like Gide and Lawrence; but Proust and Rolland and the Surrealists and Jarry and Musil were hardly "traditional" compared to Yeats, Synge or Wilde. Ireland produced no avant-garde music or painting comparable to that of France or Germany or Russia. And Joyce and Beckett themselves were nitrically scornful of most Irish art. To link decolonization with brilliant modernist iconoclasm is a precarious manoeuvre, at best. One need only think of Proust in his cork-lined study, anally studying his investment portfolios.
The Celtic Revival, in fact, which was the scaffold upon which the "invented" Ireland rested, was always a profoundly divided affair, and rarely a very indigenous one. Its roots, as it happened, were not even in Ireland at all. The movement began in London in the 1750s, and was a clear offshoot of European Romanticism. All of its essential traits derive from the latter, not from immemorial Celtic forms.
Between around 1760 and 1800, there was a veritable explosion of Celtic scholarship centered on antiquarian societies in the British capital. The first of these was the Cymmrodorian Society, founded in 1751 under the patronage of the Prince of Wales. Within two decades, Celticism had exploded on the British literary scene, and was hailed as the ressurrection of a largely extinct tradition. It is often claimed by Mar~ists that Imperialism simply manufactured images of anne~ed cultures for its own nefarious purposes; in reality, the motives and outcomes are much more complex. The search for an indigenous mythology and the abandoning of the Classical one had other roots. And the search for the image of a timeless, agrarian and spiritual society was created not by a need to proove the Celts to be child-like and simple, but by a need to rebel against the nascent industrial age. This is classic Romantic iconoclasm, not Imperial conniving.
Kiberd, for one, portrays a supposedly similar case in India, describing British officials like Warren Hastings as Imperial thugs with no interest in the true native culture but a rapacious one. Nothing could be more inaccurately cliched, dependent as it is on the biased testimony of Edmund Burke. It was Hastings who revived the almost defunct pedagogy of Hinduism, which centuries of Muslim vandalism had practically destroyed; and who founded the first modern Vedic schools. Similarly with Ireland.
By 1838, Algernon Hubert could entitle a pamphlet Essay on the Neo-Druidic Heresy in Britannia, and the mountain of serious scholarship on Celtic antiquity amassed in the eighteenth century was the basis of everything to follow, both callow and enlightened. Celtomaniacs and neo-Druids sprouted like mushrooms in the British back yard. Celtic poets like Lewis Morris and Evan Evans set in motion a Celticizing craze. From Mason's Caractacus to MacPherson's Ossian, a Celtic iconography was created and then popularized. A vast amount of buried Welsh literature was recovered, translated and printed, and the Scots and Irish followed. A play like Llwyd's Beaumaris Bay is so thick with annotations that it is almost a scholarly index in its own right.
It is also worth noting that it was Protestants who led the revival of Gaelic learning in Ireland. Most of the philological, archaeological and antiquarian research which ressurrected that culture came via the Royal Irish Academy, and its largely Prostesant scholars.
The Irish Prostestants, however, because of their roots in the Ascendancy, or British rule, lived in something of a twilight world. The historian Michael Sheehy sees their culture, strongest in the eighteenth century, as "elitist, unhistoric, cosmopolitan and synthetic in composition." However, their writers, from Samuel Ferguson and Christina Brooke, to Standish O'Grady and Petrie, were the founders of the romantic Celtic Irish of current lore. From them we derive our heroic, spiritual Gaelic peasantry, our "unique elemental vision" and our romanticization of Druids, Gael aristocrat war-lords and our sundry contributions to Civilization with a capital C.
That all this was built on a moribund native culture by an elite whose ultimate allegiance lay elsewhere is typically ambiguous. Their heir was Yeats, a man caught precariously between the same contradictions: an anglicized Protestant in London espousing ancient
Gaelic wisdom and dreaming of Innisfree and its wattle huts...in English, of course.
In the nineteenth century, however, everything changed. A Catholic, nativist nationalism rooted in the real peasantry arrived. And with the mass rural demonstrations of O'Connell, the foundation of the radical Land League in the 1880s and the militant Gaelic League, the Irish Revival split down the middle into two warring halves. Against the cosmopolitan, romantic Protestant elite, a xenophobic, ethnocentric and Catholic grass-roots movement rose up. Its apostles were men like Daniel Corkery and Pedraig Pearse, and its organ was the National Literary Society.
Like the narodniks in Russia and the followers of Tikal in India, the Gaelic nationalists appealed to a submerged peasantry. Whereas the Protestant Anglo-Irish Celticists had believed that the order of things could be toppled by artist-saints tapping into folk magic, the Catholic militants preached revolution, fierce regionalism and the revival of Gaelic. The Abbey Theatre, Yeats and Lady Gregory's faeries stood across from the Gaeltacht, racially pure Gaelic athletes and Sinn Fein.
The question was which of these two versions of Ireland was more based on naked deception, bigotry and national mysticism. Or rather, how one unconsciously, or consciously, formed the other. ( Many Protestants formed the early Caelic League, and the Protestant Douglas Hyde chaired the National Literary Society until 1915. )
Polycentric, European and middle-class, the Protestant vision was doomed to subside in the early Catholic Free State. But the irony now is that the Ireland envisioned by the Gaelic League is as dead as the proverbial doornail. And instead of the misted isle we see in music videos in New York bars like the recently opened Gaelic Village at Thady Con’s on Second Avenue, with its rolling - yes, emerald - hills, its authentically ethereal, harp-strumming maiden-minstrels and becapped green-eyed peasants propelling their nags through sun-dappled country lanes with a gay tap o’ the marnin to youse and a canny bar or two of "Kate of Gornavilla," we have a fairly impoverished but mildly successful third-tier member of the EEC doing a brisk business in dairy products, pop bands and smugly irrelevant non-alignement.
Perhaps the reason for this is that so much of the lore of Irish mythology was, in' fact, British and European to begin with. The two nationalisms simply invented themselves out of nothing.
But then, there was nothing much to be gained in renouncing the nineteenth and twentieth centuries' favourite past-time, that of ethnic mysticism, and joining the Cosmopolis. That would be simply to admit a fait accompli. That Ireland had become, and is, a province of the empire of English.
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The Celticism of the mid-century was exactly contemporaneous with an almost identical movement within British culture itself. As Martin Wiener has shown, British culture developed an antiindustrial romantic ideology very early on, creating in the midst of the world's first industrial revolution a nostalgic vision of an earlier England, a wholesome, sootless land of sturdy yeomen, happy frocked swains and frolicking milkmaids. With time' this vision came to dominate nineteenth and even twentieth century British visions of England.
The Celticist vision of Ireland in the work of a Daniel Corkery or a Yeats was not so different from the Olde Engelonde vision of Britain in the work of a William Cobbett or a Robert Blatchford, whose influential socialist tract Merrie England published in 1894, was a powerful influence on certain Irish critics, including Corkery himself.
Blatchford claimed that industrialism was a false turn, and that the true soul of ancient, authentic England lay in timeless rural values. The racial soul was rooted in unchanging land,not shifting, heteroclite cities. The ultimate hero was the national peasant ( largely, of course, unknown ); the devil, homo economicus with his factories, his greed and his rootless capital. As William Morris said, "I should be glad if we could do without coal."
The similarity of British and Irish images of their own pasts is striking. In 1904, the British critic C.F.G. Masterman published a symposium known as England. A Nation, subtitled The Papers of the Patriots' Club in which eminent writers from Chesterton to Ensor sounded forth on the immemorial English Soul. And on a land which was, in Wiener's phrase, "ancient, domestic and rural." Mastermann, like E.M.Forster, focused himself anxiously and protectively upon "the well-being of England and the English people; a pride in its ancient history, its ancient traditions, the very language of its grey skies and rocky shores." Here is one of the contributers, George Bartram, giving a taste of the results:
Stay thou green England, fill thy loins with store
Of peasant manhood, sow thou plenteous seed
Of such grim velour as was thin of yore
Be thy strong philtres aye and emermore
The broad green woodland and the wind- swept mead!
This queer and neurotic language has a perfect counterpart in Irish revivalist and Celticist writing of the same period. Consider the moderately more rational Lady Gregory, in her Ideas of Good and Evil from The Celtic Element in Literature published in the same year:
“Men lived in a world where anything might flow and change, and become any other thing; and among great gods whose passions were in the flaming sunset, and in the thunder and the thunder- shower, had not our thoughts of weight and measure.They worshipped nature and the abundance of nature, and had always, as it seems, for a supreme ritual that tumultuous dance among the hills or in the depths of the wood, where unearthly ecstasy fell upon the dancers. “
And Yeats, in the Preface already refered to, who refers longingly to "a communion of heroes, a cloud of stalwart witnesses." Back-to- the-land Irish writers like Padraic Colum, Liam O'Plaherty and Sean O'Faolain all claimed to speak on behalf of a Celtic tradition that disdained industrialism and urban life. And Corkery, that fiery apostle of Irish authenticity, located it in the Land, just as his English counterparts did:
“...no landowners in any other country ever knew their territories as these Caels knew theirs since, in the literature, land and literature were almost indivisible. Every bluff and brake they looked on they were aware was known at the other end of the country because it had at some time or other been enshrined in verse or a heoic tale.”
More poetically, we have the character of Nora in Paul Vincent Carroll's The White Steed, defining Ireland thusly.
“There is something here that is nowhere else. It's away far back and away deep down. A man going down a moonlit road from a fair may know it, or a child reading on a broken sill of Niam or Aideen or Maeve. but they will tell you no name for it. They will look away from you and the tears will come with a sudden rush but the cry is within them forever, and neither money nor mating will make them happy.”
Sometimes, the Modern World was conceived as being synonymous with America. Hence Seamus Ridge, in his Conamara Man, a stirring tale of delicious local flavours:
“I do often wonder why I came here. Ach mucha ( oh dear ), but there is a world of difference between this big city and Muighinis the island in Conamara where I was born and where the material wants so necessary to the New Yorker are lacking, but where the fresh air, freedom of the sea, and enjoyment of life is as God meant it to be. Old Paudeen used to say "Look at that stingy thin and wrinkled face of the returned Yank and learn a lesson from it.”
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This linking of Land to national soul was not only not unique to the Irish, it was in fact a pervasive agent in all nationalistic thought in every European country. Far from being a bold innovator in such matters, Ireland was following a European political movement which had its roots in German Romanticism, and in particular in Herder. It was Herder who first declared the mystic notion of the Volk, or Race, to be the driving force of History. It was Herder, calling upon the "little Germans" to rally against the French imperialists under Napoleon, who first claimed the "soul" of the nation to be its only source of authenticity. And who told the Germans to look into their archaic past to find their distinctive present and to defy the cosmopolitan, imperialist French. Distinctive, of course, being the unpleasantly operative word. It is Herder, too, who underwrites most post-colonial Third World nationalism.
The prime exponent of such thinking in Ireland - on a creditably intelligent level - was Corkery . His "Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature" ( 1931 ) has become somewhat notorious as a kind of pamphlet for Irish cultural nationalism, and his earlier books, "A Munster Twilight" ( 1916 ) and "The Threshold of Quiet" ( 1917 ), set out to describe Herder's mystic Volk in their Irish guise.
Like countless German propagandists of the same time, Corkery complains that the current mentality of his homeland is "not national, not normal, not natural." By this he means that folk there speak English and not Caelic. And what does he mean by "normal" and "natural" if not "faithful to ancient racial traits"? He talks endlessly of "other nations", as if those other nations, simply by virtue of being non-Irish, had something universal in common with each other.
Corkery champions the writers of the Irish Land, Seamus O'Kelly, Padraic Colum, T.C. Murray and Darell Figgis, contrasting them with the crowd of rootless ex-pats who have lost their "normalness " - the miserably impoverished and diminished James Joyce, Oscar Wilde and Samuel Beckett. This is like German nationalists declaring Thomas Mann to be "abnormal" because he refuses to paint pictures of Bavarian villages and lederhosen-clad swineherds. Finally, Corkery declares that "normal and national are synonymous in literary criticism", a statement that is surely true only in the worst possible scenarios. It does not occur to him that the displacement of Irish writers from their homeland is their greatest advantage. Not belonging is a more critical state of being than the passive state of belonging.
Corkery's fiction, too, is rich in contrived ethnic-rustic colour. In "A Munster Twilight" we find a landscape of gloomy Kerry glens, "oldtime" Gaelic families, and "out-of-the-world cooms" inhabited by ancient fossil-like life-forms like Old Diarmuid in the story Kanity and his son Michael, who spends his day "chopping furze as food to give to their poor sorry nag." Diarmuid harangues his son with tirades like this:
“Don't be hard, Michael, boy, there's a good time coming; you won't have to face what I had to face, the struggling with landlords, and the law - the law, that would leave a rich man poor and a poor man broken.”
Shoemakers, a Blind Man, one Maggie Maw, farmers, gossips, all speak their dialect with many a "'Twould that", a "'Tis this," and a "'tis something else" to keep the flavour of the "old-time ebb-andflow" alive, while the themes of Land, Nationality and Religion thrum loud and clear throughout. Corkery himself, the disciple of Ruskin, declared of these stories, "I had come upon a reality. I had discovered where my own roots could find comfort...( in ) a sense of the past."
Corkery championed Gaelic intensely, but saw his hopes for it dashed utterly. The Irish, mysteriously, just did not seem to want to speak it. He came to see all Irish literature written in English, including his own, as an abortion, a judgement that no-one would second relative to the brilliant and roving Euro-Irishmen. In the end, Corkery's phrase "The Hidden lreland", his 1924 book on the poetry of Gaelic Munster, has become the name of an association of Irish tourist hotels modeled on country houses, The Hidden Ireland Ltd. That "Ltd.", of course, tells us everything we need to know about the gap between nationalist fantasy and national reality.
Later, this racial Romanticism could also be seen as a violent response to the crisis of industrialism as it destroyed immemorial ways of life. Certainly, German fascist propaganda, clearly rooted in Herder, sounds exactly the same notes as its Irish nationalist counterpart. As Sheehy notes of Irish nationalism: "the old paganism was adapted to national socialism." - a perfect description of Nazi mythology. Rural truth and beauty, peasant manhood, mystical exaltation...the motifs are the same. And the enemies are always cosmopolitans of one kind or another: Americans - always shrivelled "stingy Yanks" - Jews or Brits, foreigners, capitalists, imperialists and industrialists. And underlying both was a sense of racial ancientness, of ancestral uniqueness.
The chauvinism of what came to be known as "Celtomania" was succinctly described by the Celtic scholar Salomon Reinach, in an article in the Revue Celtique for 1898:
La Celtomanie est une doctrine qui peut se resumer ainsi: "Les Celtes vent les plus ancien peuple de la terre; leur langue, mere des autres langues, s'est conservee presque intact dans le bas- breton; ils etaient des profondes philosophes...
( Celtomania is a doctrine which can be resumed as follows: "The Celts are the oldest people on earth; their language, mother of all other languages, is conserved almost intact in Low-Breton; they were profound philosophers...)
Certainly, the images of the invented Ireland bear the mark of a crisis, but it is not just the crisis of a people freeing itself from a colonial yoke. At the end of the nineteenth century, cultural nationalist movements all over Europe crystallized around symbols of fading cultures. For the Irish, of course, it was the Gaelic culture, which was largely already defunct. What happened was that new secular elites manipulated these symbols as they struggled with traditional religious leaders for command of their communities. It is this manipulation of symbols that we are dealing with, as the historian John Hutchins has pointed out, and not any true manifestation of ethnic renewal in the modern world.
Ireland, like Germany, or her colonial "sister" India, and for that matter like England herself, had an intellectual elite with a vested interest in the promulgation of an Arcadian Golden Age. In India, for ezample, the British-trained Indian elite ressurrected the fabled Ramraj or Hindu Golden Age, which became a potent factor in Indian nationalism ( it litters the thought of Ghandi ).
But the Ramraj like the Golden Age of Gaeldom, was an invention - an invention powered for the most pert by British-sponsored scholarship. The actual natures of the historical societies were far too inconvenient to be actually taken into consideration. Nationalism arose, therefore, from what Sheehy has called "an inept and sentimental concept of culture", a purely symbolic rehashing of murky and little understood history. Hating the English, worshipping the peasantry, idolizing the nation's unique qualities, painting the face green and telling ourselves that God invented whiskey to prevent the Irish from ruling the world were, and are, part and parcel of that sentimental ineptitude. An ineptitude tinged, as it is in all cultures, with a hint of confabulating menace.
*
Perhaps all of this explains why, when it comes to that fatal day in March when the Irish in New York paint their faces green, and reenact their nationalist-pagan-Catholic myths, all neatly inherited lock stock and barrel from the great nineteenth century, my first impulse is to find a steel-reinforced bunker twenty feet beneath the earth and lie there immobile, waiting for the ticker-tape and emerald gee-gaws to be cleared away, the brogue to recede, the pipes and fifes to die away and normal, homogenized Americans to re-emerge from the banal tribal orgy of face-paint, tartars and plastic shamrocks. My great-aunt, who had little idea what a "Saint Patrick's Day Parade" is, was or could have been, would have been astonished at that anachronistic and alien spectacle. No doubt she would have muttered something darkly about "American showbiz." She would probably have been able to guess that it was invented as a kind of ethnic mass spectacle in the 1860s, designed to make the Irish feel good about themselves. A kind of early Million Man March. The nationalist newspaper editor Patrick Ford once opined that "On this one day in the year an Irishman is a MAN."
He then asked, anticipating, of course, a rhetorical "nay", "Is Saint Patrick's Day only a day-dream?" Of course, that it exactly what it is - and if only it were.
