Inventing Ireland (33 page)

In general, his rebels are shown as vain, strutting fellows in gaudy uniforms at the start of the play, and as frightened cowards all too anxious to doff their green jackets for the safe anonymity of civilian
clothing at the end. O'Casey achieves a typically piercing, but partial, insight on this point. One of his reasons for resigning from the Citizen Army was his opposition to the wearing of uniforms, which he felt would simply mark out volunteers more closely as targets for their military enemies.
²⁹
This was no better than the costume drama to which Marx had said all previous revolutions had been reduced. All the Cuchulanoid rhetoric all the revivalist archaisms, had been a story of mistaken identity in which the protagonists were never free to become themselves. In
The
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
Marx had written:

An entire people, which had imagined that by means of a revolution it had imparted to itself an accelerated power of motion suddenly finds itself set back into a defunct epoch and, in order that no doubt as to the relapse may be possible, the old dates rise again, the old chronology, the old names, the old edicts which had long become a subject of antiquarian erudition, and the old minions of the law, who had seemed long decayed.
³⁰

O'Casey, like Marx, had no doubt that when a real revolution finally happened, the people would not mistake themselves for historic actors, but would wear their own clothes.

This insight is wonderfully dramatized by O'Casey: moreover, the fact that the tenements were once the splendid town-houses of the
Georgian gentry permits him to play off the irony of inappropriate garb against the irony of an inappropriate setting for such everyday squalor and sudden heroics. In such moments, however, he is too strict with others and not half strict enough with himself. After all, that crisis of representation which troubled the rebels also bedevils the artist, because of the inability of inherited forms to contain an unprecedented action: and there is no evidence that O'Casey addresses the problem
with any rigour. His play offers no
formal innovation of its own, resting content with familiar techniques, and it takes no account of the possibility that the rebels themselves resorted to traditional imagery as a camouflage for their radical innovations. When Cuchulain is used to underwrite a welfare state, or Christ to validate the process of decolonization, then the donning of historical garb may not be quite as conservative as O'Casey thought. Nietzsche had argued that even modern man "needs history because it is the storage closet in which all the costumes are kept": such a one notices that none really fits him, so he keeps trying on more and more, unable to accept the fact that he can never be really well-dressed "because no
social role in modem times can ever be a perfect fit".
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All one can do is wriggle about in the old forms and, in doing that, improvise something slightly new: but O'Casey despises even that strategy.

He is unable, therefore, to allow for any complexity of motive. There can be no suggestion that the Rising might have been Clitheroe's way of seeking to advance the fortunes of his family and install a government which would dismantle the tenements in an independent Ireland. O'Casey, instead, has him return to the Citizen Army because he is bored with his recently-married wife and anxious for the social acclaim that accompanies the new rank of captain. There can be no rendition, either onstage or off, of the hope generated by nationalism at the time in the hearts of many socialists. Both Marx and Engels had argued that the Irish had a duty to pursue national rights in order to promote international socialism: only if British rule in Ireland were broken could socialists in Europe expect the collapse of imperialism and with it of chauvinist attitudes in Britain itself. Connolly had contended that until the national question was solved, socialism would never blossom in Ireland, a belief vindicated in the decades since his death, when a social revolution was prevented by a fixation upon the politics of
partition. O'Casey, however, does not embody those arguments at any phase of his play: nor does he make it apparent that the young rebels of 1916 were but part of a European movement.

Pearse's sanguinary rhetoric is divorced from its cultural context, in order to heighten its ferocity: but it was all too typical of its time. To say, in 1915, as Pearse did, that "the old heart of the earth needed to be warmed with the red wine of the battlefields. Such august homage was never offered to God as this, the homage of millions of lives gladly given for love of country"
³²
was not so very different from the lines of
Charles Péguy:

Happy are those who have died in a just wan
Happy the ripe stalks and the harvested grain.

Nor was it at variance with
Sigmund Freud's declaration (also in 1915) that unless it is placed constantly in jeopardy, life becomes "as shallow as an American flirtation" and that only with the prospect of ten thousand deaths a day "has it recovered its full content and become interesting again".
³³
To the contemporary mind, this is hateful claptrap, but it perfectly reflected the death-wish of many chivalric young men, who truly believed that
duke et decorum est pro patria mori.
The suicidal assassin at Sarajevo epitomized the fashion; and Pearse was a very representative specimen of what the historian
Robert Wohl has called "the generation of 1914". Wohl says that this generation was composed mainly of intellectuals living in large cities, who concerned themselves "with the decline of culture and the waning of vital energies": they were "exalted by the conviction that they represented the future in the present" and dismayed by "their problematic relationship to the masses they would have liked to lead".
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Pearse spoke very deliberately as a member of that generation when he opened a passage in "Peace and the Gael" by saying that "the last sixteen months have been the most glorious in the history of Europe".
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Like others of his generation, he clung to the hope that war would turn out to be a rite of purification, and he considered spiritual values more important than economic facts. He, too, was caught between "a desire to spring forward into the future and a longing to return to the hierarchies and faith of the past".
³⁶

If this detracts from Pearse's originality as a thinker, it serves also to defend him against attempts to portray him as a bloodthirsty fanatic The "European" dimension of Easter 1916 is swiftly passed over in
The Plough and the Stars,
so that the playwright can present nationalism as a pathology. It is never examined or presented in all its mesmeric power rather it is caricatured. The superior validity of socialism is not so much demonstrated as assumed. In consequence, the drama itself is by no means an example of The Playwright as Thinker. The bracing confrontation between nationalism and socialism was well known to O'Casey, if only through
Francis Sheehy Skeffington's open letter to Thomas MacDonagh written and printed in the
Irish Citizen
of May 1915: in it the pacifist radical denied that the war proposed against England could be anything better than "organized militarism".
³⁷
Yet, when the Rising came, Skeffington risked and lost his life in the attempt to prevent discreditable looting: though on principle he could not be a fighter, he became in O'Casey's own words "the ripest ear of
corn that fell in Easter Week".
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This did not impel the dramatist to include his viewpoint in a play which does not brook such subtle intellectual discriminations. It was hardly surprising that Skeffington's widow should have been among its foremost assailants.

The robust, rolling
language of the characters in
The Plough
may be linked to the strident attitudinizing of the playwright, for his failure of political imagination leads to a dramatic weakness as well. There can be no inner conflict in a play filled with set-piece speeches rather than two-way conversations. And the refusal to present the nationalist case can have only one result: it leads O'Casey to conclude that those Dublin slum-dwellers who were fired by the nobility and pragmatism of the rebel leaders were fools. By denying these factors, O'Casey makes the people seem like dupes, with the paradoxical consequence that Ireland's "worker playwright" finds himself satirizing the common people for their blindness. If men like Clitheroe and Connolly have fallen for an abstraction without substance, then this deprives their death of much dignity.

This satirical treatment of the Dublin poor has further implications. Though it is often said that O'Casey's gift was characterization, there are in truth no characters in O'Casey's slum: rather it is populated with
urban leprechauns and sloganeering caricatures, forever jabbering in a sub-language of their own which owes more to the texts of Synge than to the idiom of the Dublin tenements. Those individualizing phrases accorded to figures soon grow wearisome and repetitive. Fluther Good's love of alliteration is entertaining in its way ("It'll take more than that to flutther a feather o' Fluther"), but it is a contrived literary way, the very reverse of the hard-edged realism for which O'Casey is claimed to stand.
³⁹
Fluther's repeated "derogatories" invite the literate, theatrical audience to patronize rather than understand this half-articulate workman in a manner which is not all that different from the "superior" British indulgence of blarney in the nineteenth century. The lovable peasant has been thereby introjected into the native Irish psyche, to reappear as a twentieth-century slum-dweller. The rolling cadences of Synge and the forms of the traditional Abbey play are ill-suited to the rhythms of urban life: O'Casey repeated but did not remodel them. Unlike Pearse and the rebels, he failed to make the older forms vibrate with an authentic contemporary feeling.

His Synge-song is admittedly lovely, but well removed from the clipped, cutting edge of inner-city Dublinesque eloquence, which always contains an implied rebuke to the poverty which has given rise to it. Fluther's eloquence, on the other hand, is poetry talk rather than
poetry: its patent factitiousness permits the audience to find him charming rather than worrying. It is O'Casey's invitation to his knowing followers not to distress themselves unduly with the plight of a worker whose linguistic reach hilariously outstrips his educational grasp. If pastoral obfuscations of rural poverty were the work of an affluent
urban middle class, then this inner-city pastoral was also its invention, proof positive that decades of rising food prices had left the poor citizens as outcasts of the new state, and outcasts who could now safely be sentimentalized by those who had helped to repress them. The old
canard
that O'Casey's plays attracted the poorer people of Dublin to the Abbey was exploded by
C. S. Andrews, who described the actual audience for
The Plough
as the new Free State élite.
⁴⁰
Though there was much in the play to make such people gasp, there was even more to soothe and to reassure. This was especially the case in the handling of dramatic form: the author was so incurious, so derivative in this that one can only wonder if he ever suspected that his art might be complicit with the counter-revolution.

In
The Plough and the Stars
the radical tradition of the
strong woman and hesitant male, which lent so much excitement to the plays of Wilde, Synge, Shaw and Yeats, is degraded to the level of a dead formula. The critique of the subterranean English elements in Irish nationalism is prosecuted skilfully enough: the rebels and the British soldiers accuse one another of "not playing the game", and a prim
Victorianism underlies Ginnie Gogan's protestations of Irish national chastity. As always, however, O'Casey is far more a prisoner of the prevailing English stereotypical forms than are any of his characters: in his use of music-hall routines and in his Arnoldian view of Irish eloquence. This man who had been scathing of the Abbey's charge of a shilling admission-fee nonetheless submitted his play to its directors. O'Casey gave the appearance of challenging a triumphalist nationalism in his audience: but the truth is that he outraged only the radical republicans in it. Covertly, his play exercised a powerful appeal over the new élite, a grouping which had already begun to deny the very processes which had led to its installation. There was, of course, an element of bravado in the prostitute/flag scene on its first staging in 1926, creating a tension between platform and audience which may have served to distract from the lack of inner tension in the text. But with every passing year, as the ruling élites grew less and less radical in thinking, the appeal of O'Casey's Dublin plays actually increased.
⁴¹
He could be touted as a plebeian genius, given a welcome which was a testimony to the wonderful tolerance of the ruling order: but that order
was never likely to be disturbed by his aborted dialectic his failure to carry through the implications of his more promising analyses.

The
protests against
The Plough and the Stars
were led not by narrow-gauge nationalists but by socialist republicans like
Liam O'Flaherty and
Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington. Somewhere or other along the line, the young O'Casey's project had inverted itself: he who had glimpsed the future at a moment before it could be fully realized in history seemed to fall back, exhausted, upon the available forms. His failure was similar to that of the middle-class nationalists whom he despised: in decades to come they would ban republicans from their airwaves and demonize them in public debates, for much the same reasons that he kept them on the edge of his stage.

A case could be advanced for O'Casey as an experimentalist in the narrower sense that his play combats the Victorian ideal of a central character who gathers in a single focus a drama's disparate meanings.
The Plough
certainly resists such Bradleyesque analyses and insists on being treated as a matter of overall design. O'Casey's concern is the fate of an entire community, rather than of this or that individual. Not even Fluther could be held to embody the moral pattern: he is but one of a number of persons for whom the audience's sympathies are aroused only to be defeated by some later let-down. All this links up with O'Casey's equal distrust of military
heroism and might be praised as a socialist stratagem were it not already a well-known caricaturist's technique. There are no heroes on O'Casey's stage for the same reason that there are no heroes in the world of the cartoon: instead, all are clowns or victims, whose unawareness of their own failure to measure up to their ideals leaves them reassuringly ridiculous where otherwise they might have been frightening. The transformation of the simianized Land League agitator into a lovable Irish peasant by cartoon artists in London returned the Irish to the realms of the reassuring in many a gentleman's magazine. It may well be that O'Casey's inner-city caricatures appealed equally to suburban audiences, disarming by comic mockery a potentially threatening group and consigning them to the official unconscious, where they could enact a role similar to that once played for English people by the Irish.