Inventing Ireland (54 page)

Here, as in the cases of Yeats, Joyce and many others, the revolt of the son is not the usual cliché of rebellion against a tyrannical parent, but the subtler instance of a protest against a colourful but self-divided father's inability to offer any clear lead at all.

All children in colonies, writes Salman Rushdie in
Midnight's Children,
possess this power to reinvent their parents and to multiply their fathers as the need arises. Saleem Sinai, the protagonist of Rushdie's novel, has "the gift of inventing new parents for myself whenever necessary":
²²
since he was born at the founding moment of the new state, this is appropriate, because India too is trying to father itself. A land which was an imperialist fiction attempts to constitute itself an irrefutable fact, with "a new myth to celebrate, because a nation which had never previously existed was about to win its freedom . . . catapulting us into a country which would never exist, except by the efforts of a phenomenal collective will".
²³
Androgyny becomes in that book the prerequisite of the person who would become his own father, and mother too.

In Joyce's
Ulysses,
likewise, Stephen Dedalus becomes "himself his own father", "made not begotten", on the selfsame principle which leads Christy Mahon to liquidate his own father in order to be free to conceive of himself. This repudiation of the biological parent in a colonial situation takes on a revolutionary character, since it involves not just a rejection of authority but of all official versions of the past; and it proclaims a determination to reinvent not only the self but the very conditions which help to shape it. Inventing a better father
necessarily demanded that Irish writers invent an alternative version of the past. Fathers, in such a situation, often give children "the impression of being undecided, of avoiding the taking of sides, even of adopting an irresponsible and evasive attitude".
²⁴
If the child were to confine his points of reference to the family unit, the ensuing frustrations could prove "traumatic": but, under stress of events, a younger generation which had previously looked to the father to determine its values now discovers that each must seek them for him- or herself.
²⁵

Of no spiritual progress are these remarks more true than of the life of W. B. Yeats as traced in
Autobiographies,
which he had intended to call
Father and Son
until his discovery that
Edmund Gosse had already used the tide.
²⁶
Yeats's was the story of a father who had made "being undecided" a vocation, reworking and revising his paintings to such a degree that the man ruined his own career.
²⁷
John Butler Yeats praised the myopic sincerity of Polonius – "to thine own self be true" – perhaps because his own personality was so irresolute and indeterminate. Looking back over many years, the son wrote: "it seems to me mat I saw his mind in fragments, which had always hidden connections I only now begin to discover".
²⁸
It was left to the son to articulate a holistic vision which was implicit but unexpressed in the father's life. John Butler Yeats had, indeed, held up Edward Dowden as a perpetual warning of what happens to gifted men who refuse to trust their own natures and so cannot become themselves, lapsing into provincialism. In other words, he read his own fate in Dowden's, as surely as William Butler Yeats read his own possible destiny in his father's.

The autobiography thus becomes a sustained and strenuous attempt to vindicate the father's insistence that "some actual man" be felt behind a poem, "with a speech so natural and dramatic that the hearer would feel the pressure of a man thinking and feeling".
²⁹
In short, it will in its final moments bring into being – rather than simply report – the self which lay in fragments behind all of it until that point; and so Yeats also will be reborn as the self-invented child of his own writings. The Prodigal Father was delighted rather than dismayed by this implementation of his secret desire. The son, rejecting the father's prudent counsel, did not reject the father, recruiting his experience in the creation of a new set of values. Indeed, so "reinvented" did John Butler Yeats feel by his more famous offspring that he chose to end his days in New York, as far as seemed decent from the son's pervasive influence.

The self thus created becomes thereby the ideal reader of the text, of which it is the son and creation. But the process is nothing like as easy as that glib formulation makes it seem. For one thing, there is the
problem of inappropriate form; for another, there is the impeding culture of censorship. The opening pages of Joyce's
Portrait
encapsulate the problem, in the story told about a moocow by Stephens father and in Stephens song:

O, the wild rose blossoms
On the little green place.

"That was his song" – but, of course, it wasn't since it was derived; and, furthermore, it was liable to mistaken, childish recitations:

O, the green wothe botheth . . .
³⁰

The
language which so enmeshes the child is the language of the father. The hand lifted by Christy Mahon against Father Time Bearing his Scythe, the hand raised against the wielder of the
logos,
is the same hand which arrogates to itself the right to reshape the given lines into the contours of art, symbolized by a green rose. Synge and Joyce, after all, tell versions of the same story. At the start of
The Playboy,
Christy Mahon is given a narrative by the villagers, effectively telling him who he is, but he ends by writing his own script: "I'll go romancing . . ." Similarly, at the outset
of A Portrait,
Stephen hears the father's tale of a moocow, but concludes the book writing a poem and a diary.

Yet Stephens final mastery is of a limited kind, involving many humiliating compromises with a received language. He recognizes, as he performs in the school play, that his script has been written by others: "the thought of the part he had to play humiliated him".
³¹
Even his own poem seems derivative, nineties-ish pastiche. Yet underlying the book is the desire to find an enabling narrative, which would permit a person to represent the self: as
Hannah Arendt has written in another context –

The principle of explanation consists in getting the story told – somehow, anyhow – in order to discover how it begins . . . The basic assumption is that the telling of the tale will itself yield good counsel. This second look at his own history can transform a man from a creature trapped in his own past to one who is freed of it.
³²

The older generation in a colony on the eve of revolution behaves with irresolution: suspicious of occupier values, it finds, nonetheless, that it cannot break through to a newer system. The young write narratives
attacking the old in hopes of forcing their parents into a declaration of their "true" underlying feelings. All of this serves merely to erode even further the self-confidence of the elderly, to a point where their influence virtually ceases to exist. The result is a fatherless society, in effect a society on a semi-permanent war footing; and so it is no surprise when the vacuum thus created is filled by the self-created codes of the young.

The Freudian theory of patricide is but an extreme version of this story: for "it is not Oedipus which produces neurosis; it is neurosis – a desire that is already submissive and searching to communicate its own submission – that produces Oedipus".
³³
What was written, again and again through the Irish revival, was an
Anti-Oedipus,
which saw the ancient tale not as awful tragedy but as happy comedy. True, the children of Oedipus felt the pangs of fear and guilt which assailed the scattered offspring of Old Mahon – but Christy's comic patricide becomes the basis of a true morality, and it is his insurgency which makes History possible. The ensuing search for a father-surrogate may be rooted in a desire to erase the
memory
of the necessary patricide. .. but no surrogate and no actual father can suffice for the child who must invent a self. For, as Nietzsche wrote:

With what water could we cleanse ourselves? . . . Shall we ourselves not have to become Gods, merely to seem worthy of it? There never was a greater event and on account of it, all who are born after us belong to a higher history than any history hitherto.
³⁴

The fathers in
A Portrait
and
The Playboy
are so unvital that they can scarcely
see
their sons at all. Having told Stephen the moocow story, "his father looked at him through a glass".
³⁵
Old Mahon, on reaching the Mayo village, fails utterly to recognize his son in other people's descriptions of him. But it is the fathers who are crucially absent from their own lives: in any but the biological sense, they are scarcely fathers at all. Hence the repeated use of the forename "Stephen" in
A Portrait
rather than the ridiculed surname of the father ("What kind of a name is that?").
³⁶
The progress of Stephen is registered through the book, despite the inevitable humiliations and compromises, in his increasing control over the language which repeatedly threatened to control him. In its phases, it uncannily recapitulates the growth of Christy Mahon through three distinct zones of discourse: from the discourse imposed by others at the outset, through the excessively flowery idiom of the adolescent period, to the terseness of the diary.

That said, it should be added that this constant preoccupation with
father-figures in revival texts is the tell-tale sign of a society which is unsure of itself and of its ultimate destiny. Its rebellions are conducted not so much against authority figures as against their palpable absence. These gestures rehearse not the erosion of power so much as the search for a true authority, and in them will lurk the danger of re-Oedipalization. The revolutionary slaying-of-the-father most often ends simply by instituting some new father or authority-figure. The very notion of a self-inventing, fatherless being is rooted in the actual experience of a real father; and re-Oedipalization proves difficult to avoid. Freud himself was a case in point. In his Viennese years, he had developed the theory that all politics are reducible to the primal conflict between father and son.
As
a boy, he had been reprimanded by his father for urinating in his trousers: "The boy will come to nothing!" This was, he suspected, the source of his subsequent ambition: at that moment he decided to show his father that he
could
amount to something. Years later, as a successful adult, he had what he called, significantly, his "revolutionary dream", in which a strong son reprimanded a guilty father for the same offence.
³⁷
Though this was a revenge of sorts, it did not trouble the inherited Oedipal categories: Freud, as is well known, was at pains to proclaim his "fatherhood" of psychoanalysis, and it was precisely in that role that he was rejected by Jung and Rank.

In Irish political and social life, matters did not unfold as in the texts of Wilde, Synge and Joyce, or as in the theories of Fanon and Memmi. Instead, the fathers had their revenge on the sons for daring to dream at all. What was conceived as a journey to an open future became instead a nostalgic regression into a protected past. Such an apostasy was possible once the leaders of the emerging nation-state decided to make adolescence itself into an ideology. In other words, the state was to be frozen in Synge's mirror-gazing second phase, and revivalism was made into
an end in itself rather than a means by which to prise open the future. Those who had begun with the claim to have invented new forms of politics almost all ended as conservatives; and it was the military heroism, rather than the creative and critical thought, of the 1916 rebels which they celebrated.

In retrospect, it became clear that in many nationalist treatments of the father-son theme, there had been confusion over who might win the trial of strength, and also over
who was realty who.
The nationalists seemed young, but their muse was old ... as Yeats had warned in a bitter poem:

ON HEARING THAT THE STUDENTS OF OUR NEW
UNIVERSITY HAVE JOINED THE AGITATION AGAINST
IMMORAL LITERATURE

Where, where but here have Pride and Truth,
That long to give themselves for wage,
To shake their wicked sides at youth
Restraining reckless middle age?
³⁸

The tight-lipped young idealists were easy prey for those who asked them to harness their talents to an unmodified colonial administrative machine; and in so doing they betrayed whatever youthfulness they had. Rebels against an authority which failed to be authoritative, they turned out to be in many cases arch-conservatives. The rhetoric of youth was widely used in the new state, but often to occlude the fact that many (including many young dissidents) were being barred from their rightful share in the determination
of
national policy.

In that context, the passivity of males and the assertiveness of females in many texts of the revival may be judged to have carried with it a conservative undertow. The historian
Peter Gay noted a similar conjunction in the art of
Weimar Germany; "again and again there are scenes in which the man puts his head, helpless, on the woman's bosom".
³⁹
In a culture of chronic male unemployment, such moments seem explicable as male self-hatred. If so, the "truth of maternity" and "myth of paternity" may have indicated an element of self-laceration in the art of some Irish males. Gay's comment on the Weimar scene can be translated, with only a little strain, into terms appropriate to life in the new Irish state: "the revenge of the father and the omnipotence of the mother . . . were both equally destructive to the youth".
⁴⁰

Critics of such an analogy, and of the preceding analysis, might argue that a fiercely patriarchal system, such as colonialism, could hardly have left men feeling useless in their domestic spheres; and there is ample evidence to show that the head of the Irish household was often just as autocratic as his British counterpart. It can, indeed, be argued that the patriarchal society of which he was a part would lead the Irish male to strive all the more for control within his own family, if only because of his political and social impotence outside it. But the evidence of Irish texts and case-histories would confirm the suspicion that the autocratic father is often the weakest male of all, concealing that weakness under the protective coverage of the prevailing system. The fathers in Joyce's
Dubliners
come home to beat their sons, in part as a response to the
fact that they are tyrannized in the office. Patriarchal values exist in societies where men, lacking true authority, settle for mere power.