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LITERATURE |
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Oscar Wilde once sighed to Yeats that "we Irish have done nothing,
but we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks"; Samuel Beckett
claimed that Irish writers had been "buggered into existence by the
English army and the Roman pope". Irish writing has always flouted and
challenged, experimented and fantasized, from the great anti-novel,
Joyce's Ulysses , to what some see as the great anti-play, Beckett's
Waiting for Godot . Much Irish writing concerns the dysfunction of real
life, but this is usually laced with wild, fantastical and spiritual
imaginings; one of the country's great contemporary novelists, Patrick
McCabe, claims, in a typical Irish inversion, this should be deemed
"social fantastic" not "poetic realism". Authors from Swift to Roddy
Doyle present us with the conflict between high ideals and sordid
reality, a conflict captured by Beckett when he claimed he wanted to "sit
around, scratch my arse and think of Dante." Tension has also come from
writing in a language that belongs, essentially, to another tradition.
This is most clearly articulated by Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney who
sees the conflict between his folk background, what he deems "hearth
culture", and expressing himself in poetry, the most formal genre in
English, as the central dynamic in his work. Thus any study of Irish
literature must begin with an examination of the folk culture and
tradition to which Irish writers belong.
The Gaels
Irish writing first appeared in the fifth century AD when monastic
settlers brought Classical culture into contact with a Gaelic
civilization that had a long and sophisticated oral tradition. Faced
with the resistance of the pagan bards, the newcomers set about
incorporating the Celtic sagas into the comparatively young system of
Christian belief. These ancient tales told of war and famine, madness
and love, death and magical rebirth - story sequences from deep in the
folk memory. One of the earliest of these, the Taín Bó Cuailnge (Cattle
Raid of Cooley), deals with a rumps between Cúchulainn , a prototypical
Celtic superman, and the mighty Queen Medb, over the theft of a prize
bull. The best translation of the epic is, without doubt, Thomas
Kinsella's The Taín (1969), which has an excellent introduction and a
map of areas relating to the tale. The series of tales concerning
Cúchulainn, known as the Ulster Cycle , were, from the eighth century,
superseded by those concerning the exploits of Fionn Mac Cumhaill and
his posse, the Fianna, known as the Ossianic Cycle . Fionn was a more
disturbing and sophisticated figure, not only a warrior but a poet, sage
and mystic; in the most prominent tale in the cycle, Tóraigheacht
Dhiarmada agus Ghráinne (Pursuit of Diarmaid and Gráinne), Fionn is
represented as a jealous, ageing warrior, irate at being cuckolded by
the young Diarmaid and chasing him and his former lover Gráinne around
Ireland.
Later Irish artists made much of the early tales, sometimes with less
than proper reverence; in Beckett's novel Murphy (1938), for instance, a
character attempts suicide by banging his head repeatedly against the
bronze buttocks of the statue of Cúchulainn, which adorns the lobby of
Dudlin's GPO. Another tale which has proved an inspiration to many
writers is Buile Shuibne (Frenzy of Sweeney), a twelfth-century text
detailing the adventures of the king Sweeney who, driven mad by the
noise of incessant warfare, seeks refuge in the tree tops of Ireland,
where he writes lyrical nature poetry. This tale was one of the
inspirations behind Flann O'Brien's novel At Swim-Two-Birds , while
Seamus Heaney's Sweeney Astray (1983) is a lyrical translation of the
mythical wanderings of the mad king.
Fairy tales from this Celtic era reveal a world of witches, imps and
banshees, all jollying around in a Manichaean struggle with the forces
of love, wisdom and goodness - which, refreshingly, do not always
triumph. Check out Kevin Danaher's In Ireland Long Ago (1962) for full-blooded
retellings.
The start of the literary tradition
Between the 1690s and the 1720s the hated penal laws were passed,
denying Catholics rights to property, education, political activity and
religious practice. British misrule created widespread poverty which
devastated the countryside and ravaged the population. It's in this
period that Anglo-Irish literature began.
One of the most prominent of the early pamphleteers and agitators was
John Toland (1670-1722), whom the authorities gave the dubious
distinction of being the first Irish writer to have his work publicly
burned. But the first big-league player arrived in the angry little
shape of Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral,
Dublin. Swift was a cantankerous but basically compassionate man who
used his pen to expose viciousness, hypocrisy and corruption whenever he
saw it, which in eighteenth-century Dublin was pretty often. Swift was a
master of satire; in one of his 75 pamphlets, A Modest Proposal , he
proposed that the children of the poor should be cooked to feed the rich,
thereby getting rid of poverty and increasing affluence, and his
masterpiece, Gulliver's Travels (1726), is as terrifying now as it ever
was. He died a bitter man, leaving in his will an endowment to build
Dublin's first lunatic asylum, adding in a pithy codicil that if he'd
had enough money he would have arranged for a 20ft-high wall to be built
around the entire island. He is buried in the vault of St Patrick's,
where, as his epitaph says, "Savage indignation can rend his heart no
more".
The other great satirist of the eighteenth century was Laurence Sterne
(1713-1768). A tremendous wit with more mad whimsy than venom, his
greatest work Tristram Shandy was once memorably described as "the
greatest shaggy dog story in the language".
The elegant prose of Edmund Burke (1729-97) - graduate of Trinity
College, philosopher, journalist and MP - argued for order in all things,
decrying the French Revolution for its destruction of humanity's basic
need for faith. He is a complex and difficult figure, and his ideas are
claimed in Ireland both by the civil-liberties-trampling Right and by
elements of the progressive Left.
1780-1880: The Celtic Revival
Towards the end of the eighteenth century, a Europe-wide vogue for all
things Celtic prompted a renaissance in Irish music and literature. This
period also saw the birth of that misty, ineffable Celtic spirit, which
was to influence Yeats a century later. A couple of important books
appeared, inlcuding Joseph Cooper Walker 's Historical Memoirs of the
Irish Bards (1786) and Edward Bunting 's General Collection of Irish
Music (1796).
Dublin at the tome of the Act of Union with Britain (1801) had long been
a truly European city, frequently visited by French, German and Italian
composers. Indeed, Handel's Messiah was first performed in Dublin's
Fishamble Street. One Irish composer and writer who thrived under the
European influence was the harpist Turlough O'Carolan (1670-1738), who
met and traded riffs with the Italian composer Geminiani.
At the turn of the century a series of Irish harp festivals began, their
purpose being to recover the rapidly disappearing ancient music. With
their evocation of the bardic tradition they became a focus not just for
nifty fingerwork but for political agitation. The harpists continued
into the nineteenth century until Thomas Moore (1779-1852) finally stole
many of their traditional airs, wrote words for them, published them as
Moore's Irish Melodies (1808) and made a lot of money.
The concomitant literary revival entailed a resurrection of the Irish
language too, and although few went so far as to learn it, it became a
vague symbol of an heroic literary past that implied a fundamentally
nationalist world view. John Mitchell's Fenian movement, provoked by
Britian's callous response to the Famine, was at least as influenced by
the Celtic Revival as it was by the new revolutionary ideas being
imported all the time from Europe. The Fenians were to provide a bridge
between the heroic past and the demands of modernism and had a huge
impact on the thinking of Yeats and other leaders of the Celtic revival.
One of their supporters, James Clarence Mangan (1803-49), inaugurated in
My Dark Rosaleen (1846) the image of suffering Ireland as a brutalized
woman, awaiting defence by an heroic man. In a country where visual and
literary imagery of the Virgin Mary is ubiquitous, the symbolism escaped
nobody.
The nineteenth-century novel
The unease generated among the aristocracy by the growth of Irish
Nationalism and the Fenian Rebellion of 1848 found expression in novels
showing the peasantry plotting away in their cottages against their
masters up in the mansion - the "Big House" sub-genre of Anglo-Irish
writing, represented by such writers as Lady Morgan (1775-1859).
Typically, such a book would involve an evil-smelling Irish hoodlum
inheriting the mansion and either turning it into a barn or burning it
to the ground. Castle Rackrent (1800) by Maria Edgeworth (1776-1849) is
one of the few good Big House novels, its craftily resourceful narrator
telling the story of the great family's demise with a subtle glee.
The Irish fought back, appropriating the well-made novel for themselves.
Gerald Griffin (1803-40), John Banim (1798-1842), William Carleton
(1794-1869) and Charles Lever (1806-72) emerged as the voice of the new
middle class, protesting at the stereotyping of the Irish as savages,
and demanding political and economic rights.
This period also saw the entry of the Anglo-Irish into the crisis that
would haunt them until their complete demise in the 1920s, as they
struggled between the specifically "Anglo" and "Irish" sides of their
identity. This kind of angst can be found running throughout the work of
Sir Samuel Ferguson (1810-86), Standish O'Grady (1846-1928), and Douglas
Hyde (1860-1949), the founder of the Gaelic League (1893) who went on to
become Ireland's first president in 1937.
The writing of E.O. Sommenville (1858-1949) and ( Violet) Martin Ross
(1861-1915) - cousins and increasingly improverished daughters of the
Ascendancy - is typical of nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish confusion.
Their work, such as Some Recollections and Further Experiences of an
Irish RM (1899) and the powerful novel The Real Charlotte (1894), is
imbued with a geniune love of Ireland and the ways of the Irish
peasantry, yet occassionally there's a chilling sense that the status
quo is in danger. The peasants, previously marginalized in the tradition,
now seem to keep intruding in unwelcome ways, sneaking into the upstairs
rooms, interrupting their betters or conspring behind the bushes in the
estate's well-kept gardens.
Meanwhile Bram Stoker (1847-1912) was busily writing his way into the
history books with a novel that would enter modern popular culture in
all its forms, from the movies to the comic book. Dracula is a wonderful
novel, more of a psychological Gothic thriller than a schlock horror
bloodbath, and its concerns - the nature of the soul versus the bestial
allure of the body, for instance - are curiously Irish. Bur even this
had its political implications. With its pseudo-folkloric style and its
pitting of the noble peasants against the aristocratic monster
debauching away in his castle, its symbolism is inescapably
revoluntionary and romantic.
The story of the stage Irishman
It's one of the delicious twists of fate which seem to beset Irish
literary history that the country's most important early dramatist only
took up writing by mistake. One evening a young Derry actor named George
Farquhar was playing a bit part in the duel scene of Dryden's Indian
Emperor at the Dublin Smock Alley theatre when, in a moment of tragic
enthusiasm, he accidentally stabbed a fellow actor, almost killing him.
Understandaly shaken, Farquhar gave up he stage for good and went off to
London to write plays instead.
Farquhar (1677-1707) is often credited with the invention of the stage
Irishman, the descendants of whom can still be seen in many soap operas
and situation comedies on British television to this day. Effusive in
his own way, but basically sly, stupid and violent, this stock character
stumbled through the dramas of Steele (1672-1729), Chaigneau (1709-81),
Goldsmith (1728-74) and Sheridan (1751-1816), tugging his forelock,
bumping into the furniture and going "bejayzus" at every available
moment. In fact Irish stereotypes had existed in the British tradition
for many centuries before these dramatists had at least the good sense
to make some money out of them. The stage Irishman was brought to his
ultimate idiocy by Dion Boucicault (1820-90), whose lepprechaunic
characters seeme to have staggered straight out of the Big House novel
and onto the London stage. Boucicault, however, has undergone something
of a revival in recent years, with a few critics arguing that his
unstable and unpredictable dramas were subversiv attacks against the
version of colonial reality imposed upon Ireland in the nineteenth
centruy.
Boucicault's chum, George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), turned out ot be the
kind of stage Irishman the English couldn't patronize out of existence.
A radical socialist and feminist, he championed all kinds of cranky
causes and some very admirable ones, and lived long enough to be a
founder member of CND. His cerbral and often polemical plays - of which
Saint Joan is perhaps the best - have remained a mainstay of theatre
repertoire.
Yet even Shaw paled in comparison to the ultimate king of the one-line
put-down, Oscar Wilde (1856-1900). After a brilliant career at Oxford -
during which he lost his virginity and his Irish accent - Wilde went on
to set literary London alight, creating the smiling resentment that
would finally destroy him. In The Picture of Dorian Gray he expanded on
the Gothic tradition os Stoker and Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-73) to explore
the fundamental duality of the romantic hero. But it was in his
satirical plays, particularly The Importance of Being Earnest , that he
was at his most acerbic. A brilliant and gentle man, he poured scorn on
his critics, openly espoused home rule for Ireland and lived with
consummate style until the debacle of his affair with Lord Alfred
Douglas. This self-obsessed bimbo persuaded Wilde into a foolish libel
action against his thuggish father, the Marquess of Queensbury, which
Wilde lost. Immediately afterwards he was arrested for homesexuality,
publicly disgaced and privately condemned by his many fair-weather
friends. He served two years in prison where he wrote his finest works,
The Ballad of Reading Gaol and De Profundis (published after his death
in 1905). In early 1900 one of Ireland's greatest, and most tragic,
writers, died alone and distraught in Paris. "I will never live into the
new century", he declared. "The English would just not allow it."
Irish modernism: Poetry and drama
Shortly before Wilde's death, the myth of the fallen hero had entered
the vocabulary of Irish literature with the demise of Charles Stuart
Parnell, Protestant hero of the Irish Nationalist community. Savaged
from the pulpit and the editorial page for his adulterous involvement
with Kitty O'Shea, Parnell had resigned in disgrace, defended by only a
few lonely voices in the literary world. He died shortly afterwards, and
Irish constitutional politics dies with him.
The changed atmosphere of Irish life is caught in the work of J.M. Synge
(1871-1909) and George Moore (1852-1933), who wrestled to accommodate a
tradition they now saw rapidly slipping into the hands of the priests.
Synge's The Playboy of the Western World (1907), with its parricidal
hero, is the last and perhaps the most brilliant attempt at a
fundamentally English view of Irish peasant life, and was greated by
riots when it opened at The Abbey. His friend George Moore identified
Catholicism as a life-denying and authoritarian creed, and his
extraordinary volume The Untilled Field (1903) in many ways anticipates
much later writers.
Meanwhile the separatist Sinn Féin party made great advances, and in
1916, led by the poet Pádraig Pearse (1879-1916) and James Connolly
(1868-1916), an important socialist figure and powerful writer, there
was an armed insurrection in Dublin. It was crushed savagely. Connolly
and all the other leaders were court-martialled and shot, thereby
becoming heroes overnight, and leading Yeats to observe that everything
had been "changed utterly" and that "a terrible beauty" had been born.
William Butler-Yeats (1865-1939) is one of the most written-about but
most elusive characters in Irish literature. A Protestant aristocrat who
argued for Irish independence, he helped found the world's first
national theatre, The Abbey, before the nation even existed. He wrote
early Iyrical ballads about gossamer fairies and stunning sunsets until,
stricken with desire for the beautiful Maude Gonne, he began reaming out
some of the century's greatest works of unrequited love. Much of the
work of his middle period lambasts the Dublin middle class for its money-grabbing
complacency - September 1913 is well worth a read if white-lipped rage
is your thing. In 1923 Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize for Litearture,
though he had become somewhat disillusioned with the world, expressed in
his bleak poem The Second Coming , part of the collection Michael
Robertes and the Dancer (1921). Yeats' later period is more problematic,
however, producing a series of spare, lucid but complex meditations on
the artist's task. The influence of Yeats, in many ways the father of
modern Irish litearature and one of the most important English languuage
poets of all time, cannot be underestimated.
Until the 1920s Yeats kept up a friendship with Sean O'Casey
(1884-1964), who was that rarest of things, a working-class Irish
writer. The Dublin slums in which he was born were later immortalized in
his trilogy, Shadow of a Gunman (1923), Juno and the Paycock (1924) and
The Plough and the Stars (1926). As with Synge, O'Casey's first nights
were occassions for rioting and were usually attended by more policeman
than punters - The Plough and the Stars' overt criticism of Irish
nationalism particularly enraged the Dublin audience. It was actually
Yeats who had to lead the coppers' charge into the stalls to break up
the fracas and he later harangued the audience, screeching that the very
fact they had broken up his play meant that O'Casey was a genius, and
that "this was his apotheosis"; O'Casey's journal records that while he
smiled nervously and twiddled his thumbs backstage he couldn't wait to
get home so that he could look up the word "apotheosis" in the
dictionary. In 1928, after the rejecion of his play The Silver Tassie ,
dealing with World War I, O'Casey moved to England, eventually settling
in Devon, where he wrote several plays on the subject of workers'
struggles and injustice.
Irish modernism: Fiction
As the tide of history turned towards Nationalism and Republicanism, and
Yeats wondered glumly whether the tradition would die with the
aristocracy, one of the seminal figures of literary modernism was
emerging in Dublin. While still a student at the new University College
- established in 1908 as a college for Catholic middle-class youth along
lines suggested by Cardinal John Henry Newman - James Joyce (1882-1941)
set himself against the world of politics and religion, and announced
that he would bcome, in his own pharse, "a high priest of art". His
subsequent career was to be the epitome of obessive dedication.
Dubliners (1914), his first book, continued where George Moore had left
off, evoking the city as a deathly place, its citizens quietly
atrophying in a state of emotional paralysis. A Portrait of the Artist
as a Young Man is largely autobiographical and deals with Stephen
Dedalus's decision to leave Ireland, criticizing the country as a
priest-ridden and superstitious dump. After ten years of trying to get
it published, Joyce finally had the bad luck to get it printed in 1916,
the year of the Easter Rising. Perhaps understandably, lack of
patriotism was not fashionable. Joyce was condemned by just about
everyone who mattered and quite a few people who didn't.
His next novel, Ulysses , came out in 1922, another flashpoint in Irish
history, as the new Irish government went to war with its former
comrades. Modelled on Homer's Odyssey , the book follows Stephen Dedalus
and Leopold Bloom through one day and one night of Dublin life,
recording their experiences with a relish and precision that repulsed
the critics, including Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence. The book was
widely banned and its self-exiled author was condemned as a
pornographer. Ulysses is a kaleidoscope of narrative techniques; Joyce's
last work, the vast Finnegans Wake (1939), is the only true polygot
novel, a bewitching - and often impenetrable - stew of languages,
representing the history of the world as dreamed by its hero, Humphrey
Chimpden Earwicker (alias "Here Comes Everybody", "Haveth Childers
Everywhere" etc.) Critics of different persuasions see it as either the
pinnacle of literary modernism or the greatest folly in the history of
the novel.
The other great Irish modernist, Samuel Beckett (1906-89), emigrated to
Paris and became Joyce's secretary in 1932. One writer has remarked that
while Joyce tried to include everything in his work Beckett tried to
leave everything out, and that's a pretty good summary. Backett is
bleak, pared down, exploring the fundamental paradox of the futility of
speech and yet its absolute necessity. A modernist in his devotion to
verbal precision, Beckett is on the other hand a dominant figure in what
has been termed the postmodern "literature of exhaustion". As he said
shortly before his death - "I have never been on my way anywhere, but
simply on my way." Despite his reputation for terseness, Beckett was a
prolific writer - the best places to start are the trilogy of novels,
Molloy, Malone Dies (both 1952) and The Unnamable (1953), and the play
Waiting for Godot (1949).
The absurd prose and hilarious satire of Flann O'Brien (1912-66) has
earned him the reputation of being Ireland's greatest comic writer. His
comic vision of Purgatory, The Third Policeman (1967), includes the
famous molecular theory, which proposes that excessive riding of a
bicycle can lead to the mixing of the molecules of rider and machine -
hence a character who is half-man, half-bike. O'Brien's other great
book, At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), is a weird mélange of mythology and
pastiche that plays around with the notion that fictional characters
might have a life independent of their creators. Under one of his
several pseudonyms, Myles Na Gopaleen (Myles of the Little Horses), he
wrote a daily column for the Irish Times for many years, and his
hilarious journalism is collected in The Best of Myles and Myles Away
from Dublin .
Traditional fiction continued, of course - for instance. Brinsley
MacNamara (1890-1963) devastatingly protrayed small-town life in The
Valley of the Squinting Windows (1918). But many writers had moved away
from social observation and into a kind of modernist fantasy that had
its roots way back in the Celtic twi-light. James Stephens (1882-1950),
a writer with an unjustly insignificant international reputation, used
absurdity as a route to high lyricism. His The Crock of Gold (1912), is
a profoundly moving fantasy on the Irish mythological tradition, part
fairy story and part post-Joycean satire - in a sence, a precursor of
"Magic Realism".
Postwar literature
Ireland in the late 1940s and 1950s suffered severe economic recession
and another wave of emigration began. Added to this, the people had in
1937 passed a constitution - still operational today - which enshrined
the Catholic Church's teachings in the laws of the land. Intolerance and
xenophobia were bolstered by an economic war against Britain and a
campaign of state censorship which was truly Stalinist in its vigour.
Books which had never been read were snipped, shredded and scorched by
committees of pious civil servants.
No history of postwar Irish literature would be complete without at
least a mention of The Bell , a highly influential but now defunct
literacy magazine. In its two runs, between 1940 and 1948 and 1950 and
1954, it was a forum for writers like Frank O'Connor (1903-66), Seán Ó
Faolain (1900-91) and Liam O'Flaherty (1897-1984), all of whom were
veterans of the independence war, and all of whom became outstanding
short-story writers. They chronicled the raging betrayal they felt at
state censorship and social intolerance - O'Connor's Guests of the
Nation (1931) is perhaps the most eloquent epitaph for Ireland's
revolutionary generation, a terrifying tale of the execution of two
British soldiers by the IRA that influenced Brendan Behan's The Hostage
(1958) enormously. The Bell also opened its pages to writers like Peadar
O'Donnell (1893-1985), a radical socialist who, only six months before
he died, publicly burned his honorary degree from the National
University of Ireland on the occasion of a similar honour being
conferred on Ronald Reagan.
In an infamous speech President Eamonn de Valera envisaged a new rural
Ireland full of "comely maidens dancing at the crossroads and the
laughter of athletic youths". But writers such as Denis Devlin
(1908-59), Francis Stuart (1902-90), Mary Lavin (1912-96) and Brian
Moore (1921-99) took up the fight for truth against propaganda. Their
youths and maidens didin't dance. They were too busy packing their bags,
or wandering in bewilderment across the desolate pages of an Ireland
that had failed to live up to its possibilities. In their poetry Austin
Clarke (1896-1974) and Thomas Kinsella (b. 1928) mourned the passing of
hope into despair and fragmentation.
Patrick Kavanagh (1906-67) was an exception to all the rules. His poetry
is almost entirely parochial, celebrating what he called "the
spirit-shocking wonder of a black slanting Ulster hill", and his
contemplative celebrations of the ordinary made him perhaps Ireland's
best-loved poet. But as time went on, the harshness of relaity began to
press in on his work. His long poem The Great Hunger (1942) portrays
rural Ireland - the same Ireland he had formerly extolled - as
physically barren, with the blasted landscape an incisive metaphor for
sexual repression. Its publication was widely condemned and the writer
was even questioned by the police, an event he discussed with customary
venom in his own short-lived journal, Kavanagh's weekly .
The forces of reaction were again about to wage war on Irish literature.
O'Casey's anti-clerical play The Drums of Father Ned was produced in
Dublin in 1955 and received aggressive reviews. Three years later there
was a proposal to revive it for the new Dubin Theatre Festival. The
Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid, insisted that the
plans be dropped, and when the trade unions stepped into the fray on his
behalf, he succeeded. The year before, the young director Alan Simpson
had been arrested and his entire cast threatened with imprisonment for
indecency following the first night in Dublin of Tennessee Williams's
play The Rose Tattoo . The important novelist John McGahern (b. 1935)
lost his teaching job in a Catholic school in 1966 following the
publication of his second book, The Dark (1965), which was immediately
banned. It's a marvellous novel, dealing tenderly with adolescence and
clerical celibacy.
A more celebrated literary victim-in this case a self-destructive
one-was Brendan Behan , who died in 1964, only six years after the
publication of his first book, Borstal Boy . He spent the last years of
his life as a minor celebrity, reciting his books into tape recorders in
Dublin pubs, drunk and surrounded by equally drunk admirers, some of
whom sobered up for long enough to try and save him from becoming the
victim of his own myth.
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