Inventing Ireland (3 page)

Inventing Ireland,
though long, is bound together by recurring and developing themes. It begins with an outline of the Anglo-Irish antithesis as a slot-rolling mechanism devised by the English; against its either–or polarities both Wilde and Shaw offered a more inclusive philosophy of interpenetrating opposites. This became the Yeatsian method, defined most fully in
A Vision.
The androgynous hero and heroine represented natural refinements of such thinking, to be explored in the very different works of
Augusta Gregory, Yeats, Joyce,
Synge and
Elizabeth Bowen. A corollary was the notion of the self-invented man or woman. Nietzsche had said that those who haven't had
a good father are compelled to go out and invent one: taking him at his word, this generation of Irishmen and Irishwomen fathered and mothered themselves, reinventing parents in much the same way as they were reinventing the Irish past. Throughout that process, as Synge saw more clearly than most, there were major reversals in the relations between mothers and daughters, fathers and sons: families split into their constituent parts and the free person was born. The link between such
self-invention and a Protestant spirituality was explored in a whole set of texts produced in the 1920s and 1930s, as an implicit critique of the alarming new tendency of Catholic Ireland to equate itself with nationalist Ireland in the early years of the Free State.

All of this put into even sharper focus the meaning of the debate about national identity, which had been initiated by Douglas Hyde and the Gaelic League in 1893 and which registered the choice as one between nationality or
cosmopolitanism by the turn of the century. Were the Irish a hybrid people, as the artists generally claimed, exponents of multiple selfhood and modern authenticity? Or were they a pure, unitary race, dedicated to defending a romantic notion of integrity? These discussions anticipated many others which would be heard across the "Third World": in Ireland, as elsewhere, artists celebrated the hybridity of the national experience, even as they lamented the underdevelopment which seemed to be found alongside such cultural richness. At the level of practical politics, the 'green' and 'orange' essentialists seized control, and protected their singular versions of identity on either side of a patrolled border, but the pluralist philosophy espoused by the artists may yet contain the shape of the future. The century which is about to end is once again dominated by the debate with which it began: how to distinguish what is good in nationalism from what is bad, and how to use the positive potentials to assist peoples to modernize in a humane fashion. Each section of my narrative opens with an italicized 'Inter-chapter' which briefly sketches political developments, so that readers who wish can map literature against the blunter realities of history.

I owe thanks to many more people than can be mentioned here. Some of the deepest debts go back farthest: to inspiring teachers Brendan Kennelly, the late Dick Ellmann, the late Máirtín Ó Cadhain, Barbara Wright and Paddy Lyons; to generous colleagues Lyn Innes, Terence McCaughey, Richard and Anne Kearney, Angela Bourke, Liz Butler-Cullingford, Chester Anderson, Porter Abbott and Seamus Deane; and to helpful friends Ulick O'Connor, the late Eilís Dillon, Tony Cough-Ian, Carol Coulter, Adrian and Rosaleen Moynes, Joan Hyland, Dillon
Johnston, Tim Pat Coogan, Rand Brandes, Patrick Sheeran, Richard Murphy, Roy and Aisling Foster, Gabriel and Brenda Fitzmaurice, Desmond Fennell, Nina Witoszek, Nicky and Eleanor Grene, Phil O'Leary, Máirín Ní Dhonnchadha, Séan Ó Mórdha, Liz Curtis, Owen Dudley Edwards, Anthony Roche, Janet Clare, Michael D. Higgins, Jerusha McCormak, Bob Tracy and Rob Garrett. I recall with fondness many inspiring conversations with my dead friend Vivian Mercier: in all the richness of his tragic being, he was a model of the old-fashioned philologist who took for his home the entire world. Edward Said, another such, has been unstinting in his encouragement: his own work is a touchstone in these endeavours. Brian Friel's kindness and encouragement over the years have been more helpful than he knows. Neil Belton's editorial work has been a constant illumination, all the more helpful in coming from a publisher who is not in full accord with many of my interpretations. Antony Farrell was also most supportive.

The School of Irish Studies, Ballsbridge, and the Faculty Research Fund and Academic Publications Committee of University College Dublin offered financial support and this is gratefully acknowledged. I am also very thankful to Beverly Sperry, Clodagh Murphy and Ciara Boylan of the Night Owl Bureau in Dublin for their most professional and friendly help in preparing this rather long work. A deep debt is also owed to many gifted students – Debbie Reid, Dermot Kelly, Emer Nolan, Carol Tell, Lance Pettitt, Ronan MacDonald, John Redmond, Caitriona Clutterbuck, Glenn Hooper, Brendan Fleming, Declan Collinge, Jeff Holdridge, Fuyuji Tanigawa, Minako Okamura, Clíona ó Gallchóir, P.J. Mathews, Derek Hand and Taura Napier – who have gone on to teach others what first they imparted to me. Many friends overseas have also been of great assistance: Krista Kaer in Estonia; Muira Mutran in Brazil; Maria Kurdi in Hungary; Chen Shu in China; Carla de Petris and Rosangela Barone in Italy; Shaun Richards in England; Ihab Hassan and David Lloyd in the United States; Mary Massoud in Egypt.

Since this book is finally a personal statement about the Irish imagination, it would have been unthinkable without the support of my beloved wife, who has greatly complicated and enriched my understanding of my country. My gratitude also to Damien Kiberd and Marguerite Lynch for lively and irreverent debate over more than a quarter of a century about "the matter with Ireland"; and to my father and mother for sharing memories of the old days with me.

Declan Kiberd
Clontarf, Dublin, 1995

If Ireland had never existed, the English would have invented it; and since it never existed in English eyes as anything more than a patchwork-quilt of warring fiefdoms, their leaders occupied the neighbouring island and called it Ireland. With the mission to impose a central administration went the attempt to define a unitary Irish character. Since the first wave of invaders was little more than an uneasy coalition of factions, its members had no very secure identity of their own, in whose name they might justify the incursion. Many Norman settlers gradually became "more Irish than the Irish themselves": many others became hybrids, who partook fully in Irish cultural life, while giving political allegiance to London. So the makers of Crown policy in Ireland made ever more strenuous attempts to define an English national character, and a countervailing Irish one.

Ireland was soon patented as not-England, a place whose peoples were, in many important ways, the very antitheses of their new rulers from overseas.
¹
These rulers began to control the developing debate; and it was to be their version of things which would enter universal history. At the outset, they had no justification other than superior force and cohesive organization. Later, an identity was proposed for the natives, which cast them as foils to the occupiers, thereby creating the impression that those who composed it had always been sure of their own national character. What began as a coalition of diverse interests, banded together for purposes of territorial expansion into places like Ireland and the Americas, was later homogenized for reasons of imperial efficiency.

From the later sixteenth century, when
Edmund Spenser walked the
plantations of Munster, the English have presented themselves to the world as controlled, refined and rooted; and so it suited them to find the Irish hot-headed, rude and nomadic, the perfect foil to set off their own virtues. No sooner had these stereotypes taken their initial shape than
they
were challenged by poets and intellectuals writing in the Irish
language, and they rapidly learned to decode those texts which presumed to decode them. Spenser was astute enough to sense the immense power of the poets, who stood second only to their chieftains in the political pecking-order; and he was also impressed by the "pretty flowers" and beauty of their imagery. This was precisely why he called for the removal of their heads, because "by their ditties they do encourage lords and gentlemen", which was to say Gaelic lords and Gaelic gentlemen.
²
During his sojourn in Munster, many ancient manuscripts of the province were cut up to make covers for the English-language primers then being circulated among schoolchildren. "We must change their course of government,
clothing, customs, manner of holding land, language and habit of life", wrote
Sir William Parsons, "it will otherwise be impossible to set up in them obedience . . ."

In his
View of the Present State of Ireland
(1596), Spenser outlined his programme. The Gaels must be redeemed from their wildness: they must cut their glibs of overhanging hair (which concealed their plotting faces); they must convert their mantles (which often concealed offensive weapons) into conventional cloaks; above all, they must speak the English tongue. "The speech being Irish", he wrote, "the heart must needs be Irish". The native poets knew ruin when they saw it staring them in the face. So they replaced the old word
gaill
for
foreigner
with a new one
Bédrla,
meaning "English language", and this they employed as a metonym for the new element in population. One wrote

Is treise Dia ná fian an Bhéarla . . .
(God is stronger than the English-speaking churls . . . )
³

The Norman invaders had lost their will to extirpate native traditions and had lived happily among the Irish, among whom they were known as Old English: they became the real villains of Spenser's
Irish writings, which obsessively insist that on this occasion the programme for cultural cleansing must be completely achieved. The fear of hybridity assailed many of the new settlers who worried that, becoming neither Irish nor English, they might fall into the chasm of barbarism which all too easily could open between two discrepant codes. A portrait of
Sir Thomas Lee made in 1594 depicted a physically as well as spiritually hyphenated man: conventionally Elizabethan in apparel to his waist, but bare-legged and bare-footed as any Irish kern, the implication being that he might lapse into utter savagery unless the erasure of Irish culture was completed. For their part, the native poets had similar worries. They denounced the exponents of cultural fusion,
sarcastically addressing audiences of whose loyalty they could no longer be sure as "a dhream Ghaoidhealta ghallda" (O people Irish-English); or they berated an ambivalent leader "lena leath-bhróig Ghaelach agus a leath-bhróig Ghallda" (with one shoe Gaelic, and the other shoe English). They reserved their most bitter mockery for the broken English spoken by those apers of the new fashions, whose abjection illustrated their theory that to be Anglicized was not at all the same thing as to be English.

The sheer ferocity of Spenser's writings on the Irish resistance – a ferocity quite at odds with the gentle charm of his poetry – can only be explained as arising from a radical ambivalence. He wished to convert the Irish to civil ways, but in order to do that found that it might be necessary to exterminate many of them. He marvelled at the capacity of Ireland to enforce a gentle man to violence, a violence which "almost changed his very natural disposition".
⁴
Already, this seductive island was manifesting its fatal tendency to convert even the most rational and cultivated of Englishmen into arrant tyrants. This tyrannizing may have owed much to the remarkable
similarity
of the two opposed peoples. The Irish, despite their glibs and mantles, actually looked like the English to the point of undetectability, their poets were court poets, whose dudes were, like those of Spenser himself, to praise the sovereign, excoriate the kingdom's enemies, and appeal in complex lyrics to the shared aesthetic standard of a mandarin class. Just as Spenser attributed the woes of England to the irreligious behaviour of its people, so did the Irish poets absolve God of all blame for the calamity now overtaking them. In the words of Seathrún Céitinn (Geoffrey Keating), a poet-turned-priest:

Éigceart na nÉireannach féin
Do threascair iad do aoinbéim.

(The wrongs of the Irish themselves
Are what overturned them in a single moment.)
⁵

It was, perhaps, a subliminal awareness of this resemblance which distressed Spenser, as it would so many of his contemporaries and successors. One English scholar has marvelled at the way in which
Sir Walter Ralegh's sophisticated tolerance, "so notable when he spoke about the native inhabitants of the Orinoco or Virginia, dried up very rapidly at the edge of the Pale".
⁶

The struggle for self-definition is conducted within language; and the English, coming from the stronger society, knew that they would be
the lords of language. Few of their writers considered, even for a passing moment, that the Irish might have a case for their resistance. Henceforth, Ireland would be a sort of absence in English texts, a
Utopian "no place" into which the deepest fears and fondest ideals might be read. The two major Irish
stereotypes on the English national stage embody those polarities of feeling: on the one hand, the threatening, vainglorious soldier, and, on the other, the feckless but cheerily reassuring servant. They have survived into the modern period in such identifiable forms as
O'Casey's Captain Boyle and Joxer, or
Samuel Beckett's Didi and Gogo: but they were cleverly and soothingly conflated by Shakespeare in the sketch of Captain Macmorris in
Henry the Fifth.

The scene is a clear instance of English wish-fulfilment in a play written not long after the defeat of the Queen's men at the Battle of the Yellow Ford. Anti-Irish feeling was high in Elizabethan London, as the danger of an Irish-Spanish alliance grew weekly; so Shakespeare causes his Irishman to allay all fears of treachery. When a Welsh comrade-at-arms seems to question Irish fidelity to the crown, Macmorris explodes:

In other words, the captain says that there is no Irish nation. The word is mentioned for the good reason that
Hugh O'Neill, the earl of Tyrone, had just called and led the first nationwide army of resistance against the English in the field of battle. He had welded rival princes into a coherent force, by appealing to them with such sentences as "it is lawful to die in the quarrel and defence of the native soil". "We Irishmen", he told them, "are exiled and made bond-slaves and servitors to a strange and foreign prince".
⁸

The captain's name indicates that he is a descendant of the Norman settlers of the Fitzmaurice clan, some of whom changed their surnames to the Gaelic prefix "Mac": they remained politically loyal to the crown, despite their identification with Irish culture. Macmorris chides his colleagues for retreating when "there is throats to be cut", but his very emphasis has its roots in his pained awareness that a figure of such
hybrid status will forever be suspect in English eyes. In
Shakespeare's rudimentary portrait are to be found those traits of garrulity, pugnacity and a rather unfocused ethnic pride which would later signalize the
stage Irishman – along with a faintly patronizing amusement on the part of the portraitist that the Irish should be so touchy on questions of identity. Even more telling, however, is the fact that some of the Irishman's first notable words in English literature are spoken as a denial of his own otherness. On Shakespeare's stage only fresh-faced country colleens are permitted to lisp charmingly in the patois "Cailín ó cois tSiúire me" (I am a girl from the banks of the Suir). Macmorris is the first known exponent on English soil of a now-familiar literary mode: the extracted confession. So he is made to say what his audiences want to hear.

If colonialism is a system, so also is resistance. Postcolonial writing, in a strict sense, began in Ireland when an artist like Seathrún Céitinn took pen in hand to rebut the occupier's claims. He had been reading those texts which misrepresented him, and he resolved to answer back. He represented the Old English, those Gaelicized Normans who were especially demonized as hybrids in Spenser's
View
: but his ambition was to clear the reputation of the native Irish as well. This gives his comments a certain objectivity: and he is honest enough to tell much that is not flattering. His scholarly scruple is clear in the tentative tide which he appended to his text
Foras Feasa ar Éirinn
(A
Basis
for the Knowledge of Ireland), which was assembled mainly after the publication of Spenser's View in 1633. A Tipperary man who was born in 1570 and educated at Bordeaux, Céitinn returned in 1610 to witness Gaelic Ireland dying on its feet after the crushing defeat of O'Neill at
Kinsale a decade earlier and the subsequent Flight of the Earls. He might properly be seen as one of the first counter-imperial historians, in that his object was not only to reply to Spenser,
Stanyhurst and the English writers, but more particularly to save the lore of ancient Ireland from passing into oblivion. Like the revivalists of three centuries later, Céitinn feared that the national archive had been irretrievably disrupted and that his country, to all intents and purposes, was about to disappear. He mocked the ambitious young English historians who had endlessly recycled the same clichés current since the time of Cambrensis, in a tyranny of texts over human encounters:

... óir atáim asoda, agios drong díobhsan óg; do chonnairc mé agus tuigim prímh-leabhair an tseanchusa, agus ní facadarsan iad, agus dá bhfacdís, ní tuigfidhe leo iad. Ní ar fhuath ná ar ghrádh droinge ar bioth seach a chéile,
ná ar fhuráileamh aon duine, ná do shúil re sochar d'fháil uaidh, chuireas romham stair na hÉireann do scríobh, ach de bhrí gur mheasas nár bh'oircheas chomh-onóraighe na hÉreann do chrích, agus comh-uaisle gach fóirne d'ar áitigh í, do dhul i mbáthadh, gan lua ná iomrádh do bheith orthu.

(. . . I am old, and a number of these people are young. I have seen and understood the chief books of history, and they have not seen them, and if they had seen them they would not have understood anything. It was not for hatred or love of any tribe beyond another, nor at the order of anyone, nor in hope to get gain out of it, that I took in hand to write the history of Ireland, but because I thought it was not fitting that a country like Ireland for honour, and races as honourable as every race that inhabited it, should be swallowed up without any word or mention to be left about them.)
⁹

In the Díonbhrollach or introduction, Céitinn (sounding at times like the Edward Said of his era) laments the fact that "truth" has now become a function of learned judgement rather than the sum of a whole people's wisdom. "Ireland", he complains, is never to be seen in itself, but as a flawed version of England, as a country still entrapped in the conditions from which England liberated itself in 1066.

With devastating wit, Céitinn proceeds to show how, even on a purely textual level, the English writers have been amazingly selective in what they have culled from one another, and he unsparingly exposes the contradictions which nonetheless mar their testimonies. Accusing them of writing to a formula – blame the Irish – he compares them to the beetle, which disdains to alight on summer flowers but joyfully rolls itself in dung. Marvelling at Spenser's ignorance of the history of the Irish nobility, he jocosely concludes that, on the score of being a poet, the man allowed himself the licence of invention