Inventing Ireland (81 page)

a time came, mis time and now
we need them. Their dread, makeshift example.

They would have thrived on our necessities.
What they survived we could not even live.
By their lights now it is time to
imagine how they stood there, what they stood with,
that their possessions may become our power.

Cardboard. Iron. Their hardships parcelled in them.
Patience. Fortitude. Long-suffering
in the bruise-coloured dusk of the New World.

And all the old songs. And nothing to lose.
⁵⁴

The new wave of emigration, especially among the educated young, was a challenge to the older generation to consider whether the national renaissance had been successful: a pervasive sense of failure, too deep for words or open admission, had led many to "solve" that intractable problem simply by refusing to discuss it. Society was characterized by a growing rift between righteous traditionalists and jittery revisionists. It
became fashionable to rewrite the key documents of Irish nationalism in bitter acts of dismissive parody.
Paul Durcan caught the sourness of the prevailing mood in a short lyric:

She was America-bound, at summers end.
She had no choice but to leave her home –
The girl with the keys to Pearse's Cottage.
⁵⁵

This bleakness of tone was characteristic of many plays and novels in the 1980s. As young Ireland went into a ferocious reaction against the older pieties, it seemed that no aspects of national tradition would be left unscathed. In
The Journey Home
Dermot
Bolger took the name of a 1916 patriot, Plunkett, for a corrupt gombeen-politician, and filled the narrative with anger against the Christian Brothers, nuns (who beat girls for possessing such pagan names as Sarah), and rural immigrants in Dublin suburbs who, after three decades in the city, persisted in calling Kerry or Cork "home".
⁵⁶
The Woman's Daughter,
his next novel, was equally depressed, but it spoke for the disillusion of many young people who had given up on Ireland, or at least thought they had. Bolger's posture of radical dissent came rather oddly, however, from one who throughout the period was fêted by
The Irish Times
and accorded a seat on the
Arts Council. There was in truth something over-determined about his attacks: he represented a movement which fancied itself the voice of a persecuted modernity while in fact already being fully established and empowered.

Moreover, the writing of
Bolger and his colleagues was considerably less subversive than it sometimes took itself to be. In its underlying sentimentality about its youthful subjects as victims of social tyranny, it grossly exaggerated the malevolence and the importance of priests, teachers, politicians. Although it prided itself on its realistic engagement with the sordid aspects of Dublin life, it may have
unintentionally ratified the old pastoral notion of rural Ireland as real Ireland. The city, in Dermot Bolger's world, was not a place in which a happy, modern life was possible: it was not depicted as the vibrant zone of creativity which Dublin by then had become. His attacks on the clergy furthered the illusion that they were still a force to be reckoned with: but by 1985 even the most conservative bishops had privately conceded to journalists that the battle for traditional Catholicism was lost. The books of Bolger and his colleagues were much admired in England, where they were read as indicating a new cutting-edge realism in Irish
writing: but soon the conservative undertow was all too apparent, as well as the conceptual clichés of a strangely caricatured Dublin landscape of horses in high-rise flats and doomed young things in squalid bed-sits.

In
The Lament for Arthur Cleary,
however, Bolger achieved a work of rare command and power. Here he broke free of the prevailing clichés by the simple expedient of translating a famous Irish-language poem into modern terms. It tells of how a young Irishman returns from a sojourn on the Continent only to find the Dublin that he loved now gone forever, and his own doom sealed. When he accepted the Irish past as a basis on which to know the Irish present, Bolger impressed as a writer: but when he went to war against the past, he was left dependent on his own resources, which could never be equal to the challenge. In his texts, he found it difficult to register a variety of voices, and this was symptomatic of a generation which, in its anxiety to redefine the Irish condition, sometimes seemed unwilling to allow any voices other than its own to be heard. In that respect, also, they were all too like the older gang which they were reacting so strongly against.

For the younger artists the surviving hero of the Irish renaissance was Francis Stuart, the "prophet of dishonour" who had always acted as if the writer's duty was to put himself at odds with all consensus viewpoints. His
Black List, Section H
was a wonderfully acerbic account of the revival period, but also an apologia for the author's days in Nazi Germany, from which he had broadcast programmes in the 1940s. This was now "forgiven", however, on the grounds of his exemplary dissident authority: in effect, a fool's pardon was extended to the artist by persons who seemed not at all perturbed by the implicit admission that what such an artist thinks or says is of no consequence, since it will have no social effect. Perhaps this was why so many of the younger generation could portray themselves as dissidents while actually functioning as careerists. Though artists were feted in Charles Haughey's Ireland, an had in fact lost much of its former social power. The rising generation did not speak with a single voice: and its members were too mobile to solidify into schools. Some, such as Dermot Bolger, repudiated Irish nationalism and declared themselves positively uninterested in having a united Ireland.
⁵⁷
On the most urgent question facing the people, these took a line even more conservative than that favoured by the Dublin establishment. They did so with the best will in the world, as a warning to the IRA that the killing was not to be construed as done in their name: but this then led them into an obsessive, sometimes paranoid, search for elements in southern culture which might be complicit in the northern carnage.

By contrast, novelists such as
Roddy Doyle or Joe O'Connor, who took a more relaxed, even humorous, approach to Irish pieties, often seemed to achieve more as artists and as social analysts. Doyle, in particular, explored in his Barrytown trilogy the life of Dublin housing estates. In
The Commitments
he described the attempt by poor teenagers to succeed as exponents of soul music, on the grounds that "the Irish are the niggers of Europe, and the Dubliners are the niggers of Ireland, and the northside Dubliners are the niggers of Dublin".
⁵⁸
He was one of the first artists to register the ways in which the relationship between "First" and "Third" Worlds was enacted daily in the streets of the capital city. Even more impressive was his exploration of the inner world of childhood in
Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
(1993), a book which evinced a nostalgia for the 1960s in which it was set and at the same time checked that tendency with a portrait of a disintegrating marriage. Similarly,
Joseph O'Connors
Desperadoes
(1994), a richly comic novel which cut between the Ireland of the 1950s and the
Nicaragua of the 1980s, was another successful investigation of the similarities and dissimilarities between Ireland and the "Third World" – a concern evident also in the rock lyrics of
U2 and in the campaigns of musician Bob Geldof.

In drama Brian Friel's
Dancing at Lughnasa
was a huge box-office success: its depiction of a priest returned from the African missions, no longer able to distinguish between Irish harvest rituals and African tribal practices, was a further elaboration on a theme touched on by President Robinson and by the more radical members of the Christian clergy. In poetry, Paul Muldoon's epic masterpiece
Modoc
hinted at an equally suggestive set of connections between the experience of the Irish and of the native Indians of America. A puckish, mischievous postmodernism flickered across the sophisticated lines of Muldoon, and it was this element of wry self-mockery which made his writing immensely attractive to many. Traditionally-minded readers found his promiscuous mingling of codes and narratives often exhausting and mind-numbing: but his refusal of what Beckett once termed "the distortions of intelligibility" was quite deliberate, for he hated and still hates the fixed point of view. Even his sternest critics, however, have had to concede the awesome symmetry of his arrangements:

The Right Arm

I was three-ish
when I plunged my arm into the sweet-jar
for the last bit of clove-rock.
We kept a shop in Eglish
that sold bread, milk, butter, cheese,
bacon and eggs,

Andrews Liver Salts,
and, until now, clove-rock.

I would give my right arm to have known then
how Eglish was itself wedged between
ecclesia
and
église.

The Eglish sky was its own stained-glass vault
and my right arm was sleeved in glass
that has yet to shatter.
⁵⁹

Even more noteworthy, however, were the audacious formal experiments in so many texts, indicating a huge and largely justifiable self-confidence in their authors. The content of many works might be bleak enough, but it was often set in dynamic tension with a superb jauntiness of form. The retailing of local gossip in stories of Borgesian economy by "Nina Fitzpatrick", and the swerve from humorous recollection to sombre conclusion in
Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
were cases in point. So was the elliptical structure of John Banville's
Kepler
and its equation of the scientist with an artist whose work deconstructs itself. Perhaps the most spectacular instance of all was Tom Murphy's construction of
The Gigli Concert
as a form of verbal opera. Murphy's drama has its roots in the disorder of rural Irish life, yet it moves always to a moment when routine is elevated to the pitch of sacred ritual: the desire of a successful house-builder to sing with the sweetness of Beniamino Gigli being a case in point. In Murphy's world the ideal and the real never completely lose touch with one another: and in rare moments of benediction they overlap. He has drawn heavily on the gangster movies of
Hollywood for his prototypes of the Irish gombeen man, but there is always an element of affection even in his hardest mockery: and this has meant that he is perhaps the most subtle chronicler of the embourgeoisification of rural Ireland, whether in
A Crucial Week in the Life of a Grocer's Assistant
or in the magnificent
Bailegangaire,
which presents the reminiscences of a bedridden old woman. All of these experiments with form, in novels, poems or plays, indicated that what was afoot was something very like a second literary renaissance.

The conditions for that renaissance were not so very different from
those which had produced the first one – a highly-educated young population, whose intellectual ambitions often exceeded the available career opportunities. Indeed, the immense reputation of Irish writing in overseas capitals was a great help to aspiring artists. Unlike Kavanagh and his contemporaries of the mid-century, who wrote in the intimidating aftermath of Yeats and Joyce, and who often found it hard to believe that their concerns were of interest to any but themselves, this new generation effortlessly assumed the attention of the world as a natural right. Some reputations were, if anything, too easily won: by the 1990s to be an "Irish writer" in London or New York was for some a passport not only to relative comfort but also to complacency. But the advantages of such a warm welcome more than outweighed the dangers. The rapid international recognition of still-young writers, playwrights and film-makers allowed the more gifted among them to pursue extremely mobile careers, which in turn led to a further internationalization of themes and tones.

Evidence for a "second renaissance" was also to be found in the major films (often with strong literary associations) made by
Neil Jordan (director of
The Crying Game)
and by
Jim Sheridan (director of
My Left Foot
). Unlike their English contemporaries, who often achieved at the age of thirty a technical competence which left them invulnerable to criticism but incapable of development, the Irish artists took risks, improvised, and often brought off quite breath-taking effects. Some indeed were accused of experimentation for its own sake, of engaging in nothing more than a succession of daredevil feats. Most, however, could justly claim that they were driven to test new forms by the exacting nature of their chosen themes. Of no artist was this more true than of Brian Friel, a man whose entire oeuvre achieved early a representative status, as admired in the south as in the north, as often performed overseas as at home, as praised in the academy as it was loved by live audiences.

Translations
is the best known of Brian
Friel's plays. Set in the Donegal hedge-school of Baile Beag in August 1833. it describes the attempt by the British soldiers of the Royal Engineers and their Irish collaborators to transliterate the local Gaelic placenames and
Anglicize them, in the process of mapping the area for the
Ordnance Survey. It is a time of transition in every sense, for it becomes clear that the local hedge-school will soon be replaced by a state-sponsored National School providing free education in English for all.

This was but one of a number of modernizing experiments conducted in the colonial laboratory that was Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century before being applied in England. Another was the introduction of a streamlined postal service years before such a thing was enjoyed in England. The postal system was welcome since it vastly improved communications: the National Schools have had a more ambiguous reputation, since they were often cited by nationalist historians as having played a major part in the decline of the Irish language. So rapid was the transition from Irish to English in some rural areas that William Carleton, the novelist and short story writer, reported attending a wedding where the bride spoke no English and the groom no Irish, with the result that "the very language of love cried out for an interpreter".
¹
This passage may lie behind the central scene of Friel's play, in which the English officer Yolland and the peasant Máire Chatach enact an identical ritual. The Irish language was fatally associated in the popular mind with poverty, backwardness and defeat.

When
Translations
was first staged in Deny in 1980, to launch the Field Day Company, Irish theatre critics had no doubt that, like Heaney before him, Friel was another canny northerner who chose a remote historical event to throw an oblique light on the present. The pressure on Máire Chatach to learn English as a prelude to emigration seemed a scenario out of the 1950s as much as the 1830s; and the
cultural debates in the play seemed to echo resoundingly of the clash between tradition and modernity, between the pastoral Ireland of de Valera and the technological island envisioned by Seán Lemass. The anti-industrial bias of some pastoralists is epitomized in
Friel's play by the
hedge-schoolmaster Hugh who remarks derisively that few of the townsfolk speak English, and then only for commercial purposes to which the
language seems particularly suited. This is certainly a feasible interpretation, given that Friel's own career as an artist has spanned the decades since the First Programme for Economic Expansion in 1958 paved the way for investment by
multinationals. Like many northern nationalists, Friel has looked at this
modernization with very mixed feelings, since the emergent southern élites seemed to be abandoning the commitment to nationalist
nostra.
Some southern critics have gone so far as to accuse Friel of misrepresenting an economic crisis of the 1960s as a merely cultural and linguistic problem of the 1830s. They allege that this is symptomatic of a general retreat by modern Irish writers from the political complexities of modernity into a more private domain of language.
²

By the time the play was written,
P. J. Dowling had proved in
The Hedge-Schools of Ireland
that English rather than Irish was the main subject of study, as well as the major language of instruction,
³
in classes which were hardly the bulwark of Gaelic or indeed Greek civilization portrayed by pious nationalist historians. The school evoked in
Translations
was not typical, but there were establishments of its kind in existence. What proved controversial, however, was Friel's stylized dramatization of adults as pupils in the school. Some literalists, missing the authors irony, complained that the device recalled the imperial theories of the 'childlike' Celts.

Nevertheless, Friel can be defended on the very grounds on which he was attacked. For one thing, his play ends when the hedge-schoolmaster Hugh promises to teach Máire Chatach the English which she needs – as if to demonstrate by dramatic means how the situation described by Dowling came about. Moreover, in locating the debate at the level of language, Friel was not shirking the realities of politics so much as demonstrating the truth of
Foucault's thesis that "discourse is the power which is to be seized".
⁴
The struggle for the power to name oneself and one's state is enacted fundamentally within words, most especially in colonial situations.

So a concern with language, far from indicating a retreat, may be an investigation into the depths of the political unconscious. After all, one of the first policies formulated by the Norman occupiers was to erase Gaelic culture. It was, however, only in the mid-nineteenth century that
the native language
declined, not as an outcome of British policy so much as because an entire generation of the Irish themselves decided no longer to speak it. O'Connell said that the superior utility of English was such that even a native speaker like himself could witness without a sigh the gradual disuse of Irish, a remark cited by Máire Chatach in
Translations.
To put the matter starkly, Irish declined only when the Irish people allowed it to decline. Brit-bashing mythology which cites the tally-stick, National Schools and Famine as the real causes was designed by politicians to occlude this painful truth, lest it cast a probing light on the contemporary situation, which is that Irish is still dying, still recoverable, but popular will to complete that recovery seems lacking.
⁵

The government survey of 1975 reported that, despite a widespread love of Irish, few persons believed that it would survive as a community language into the next century.
⁶
The statistics were a focus of intense debate in the years that followed, the years in which
Translations
gestated. Far from being an evasion of current debates, the play is an uncompromising reminder that it is Irish, and not English people, who have the power to decide which language is spoken in Ireland. The very fact that audiences are to imagine the play being enacted in Irish is not just a clever double-take, but a conceit which is savagely satiric of those modern audiences which lack proficiency in their own language. If they laugh at the Englishman's halting attempts to express himself to the villagers, they are also in effect laughing at themselves.

Friel, therefore, is no nostalgic revivalist, no exponent of the dreamy backward look. During the controversy which followed
Translations
he said: "the only merit in looking back is to understand how you are and where you are at this moment".
⁷
He believes that culture can be causative, can have political consequences: so, when he discusses language, he sees it as a specific basis for all the politics which may ensue.
Northern Irish writers are more conscious than southern counterparts of this fact, because they grew up in a state where the speaking of Irish was a political act, and where a person who gave a Gaelic version of a name to a policeman might expect a cuff on the ear or worse. The language did not enjoy the levels of support in schools or government which it had in the south. Writers, accordingly, were aware of a cultural deprivation from birth and sought to repair it as best they could.

For them a few token phrases – the
cúpla focal –
were not a perfunctory performance but a glamorous conspiratorial act. Hence me trouble taken by Heaney to provide a version of
Buile Shuibhne.
Like Friel, Heaney finds a poetry in the Gaelic echoes that survive in placenames like Anahorish (
Anach Fhíor Uisce
), their musicality being connected with their poetic refusal to disclose at once all recoverable meanings. He can therefore describe himself as a tourist in Jutland as if he were recounting a motor-drive through the Donegal Gaeltacht:

Something of his sad freedom
As he rode the tumbril
Should come to me, driving,
Saying the names

Tollund, Grabaulle, Nebelgard,
Watching the pointing hands
Of country people,
Not knowing their tongue.
⁸

Friel's love-scene between Yolland and Máire Chatach is based on the same kind of incantatory ecstasy, as if the two lovers can be invested with a special radiance simply by intoning favoured placenames to one another:

Bun na hAbhann . . . Druim Dubh ... Lis na nGall . . . Liss na nGrá . . . Carraig an Phoill . . . Carraig na Rí. . . Loch na nÉan . . .
⁹

To a northern writer with little Irish, however, the melody of local placenames can seem more a rebuke than a ratification. In "A Lost Tradition", a key poem in
The Rough Field,
John Montague treats of his ancestral homeland in County Tyrone. The map of his native townland is studded with placenames derived from an Irish which has been dead in that area for generations. In an ancient Gaelic manuscript, which no contemporary reader can understand, Montague finds an image of his own geography of disinheritance:

All around, shards of a lost tradition, . . .
The whole landscape a manuscript
We had lost the skill to read,
A part of our past disinherited;
But fumbled, like a blind man,
Along the finger-tips of instinct.
¹⁰

Those lines, published in the mid-1970s, may have been another source for Friel:

OWEN: Do you know where the priest (now) lives?

HUGH: At Lis na Muc, over near . . .

OWEN: No, he doesn't. Lis na Muc, the Fort of the Pigs, has become Swinefort. (NOW TURNING THE PAGES OF THE NAME-BOOK. A PAGE PER NAME.) And to get to Swinefort you pass through Greencastle and Fairhead and Strandhill and Gort and Whiteplains . . . And the new school isn't at Poll na gCaorach – it's at Sheepsrock. Will you be able to find your way?
¹¹

By the play's end, that geography of disinheritance will be complete when Máire Chatach, the person onstage who wants most of all to learn English, will stumble back into the hedge-school with the words:

I'm back again. I set out for somewhere, but I couldn't remember where. So I came back here.
¹²

With cruel irony the master's response to her alienation is not to cure it but to complete it, by teaching her the English which will make her feel at home in the face of these strange roadsigns.

All of these echoes from Heaney and Montague as well as from Joyce and Carleton indicate Friel as exponent of a knowing inter-textuality, and as someone who wishes to inscribe his texts into the contours of a developing national debate. Though
Translations
gathers many threads of that debate together, it also gives rise to many others. Quite late in the play, the hedge-schoolmaster Hugh has decided that every culture must be renewed and that he will learn the new names so as to know his new home. At just that point his son, Owen, who has done most to collaborate with the map-makers, suddenly shouts in a burst of ancestral piety: "I know where I live". His father's response is: "Take care, Owen, to remember everything is a form of madness".
¹³
Four years after the play's performance, in the poem called
Station Island
which he dedicated to Brian Friel, Seamus Heaney causes Carleton to say: "remember everything and keep your head",
¹⁴
i.e. it may be possible to avoid madness and yet recall all. This debate between the members of
Field Day often proved far more challenging and even abrasive than the critiques of the movement mounted from without.

That it is the backward-looking hedge-schoolmaster who finally opts for English, modernity and the world of facts suggests how little an exercise in nostalgia Friel's play actually is. Hugh refuses to fossilize past images which had no roots in reality.
Translations
is a tough-minded
play about the brutal actualities of
cultural power. Some of its peasants may be cunning, others dreamers, but the pragmatists outnumber the dreamers when the chips are down. The sentimental English officer Yolland confesses a sense of guilt for his part in the Ordnance Survey: "it's an eviction of sorts". His Donegal collaborator Owen tersely translates that misty-eyed nostalgia into real words: "We're making a six-inch map of the country. Is there something sinister in that?"
¹⁵

Owen is reminiscent of Shaw's Larry Doyle, a pragmatic fact-facing Irishman who works best with a rather emotional English Celticist, but one who has enough of the rebel in him to sense that, if the Irish are to fight successfully, they had better master the language of their colonizers. By far the most complex character onstage, Owen sees the positive potential in the mapping: for example, placenames lost by natural attrition within the Gaelic culture might be restored. Owen in this play is only seen as abject when he wilfully mistranslates a sentence or a name, or when he wilfully endures such a mis
translation (for instance, submitting to the name Roland). However, a true translation, true to the genius of both traditions, appears to Friel as the least of all evils in the negotiation between tradition and modernity. The problem is that a translator is often a traducer, especially when working out of a minor and into a major imperial language.

Thus Owen becomes Roland and Bun na hAbhann, equally inexplicably, Burnfoot, as an English grid is remorselessly imposed on all Irish complexities. This is a noted feature of imperialism: its desire not so much to translate Irish values into English words as to translate English values into Irish terms.
¹⁶
In this fashion they are imposed, much as the citizens of California have, by the assiduous use of water-sprinklers, converted the brown grass of the southern parts of that state into a facsimile of the English lawn: a reminder that imperialism can be ecological as well as linguistic.
John Dryden's hopeful aphorism – that landmarks are more sacred than words and never to be removed
¹⁷
– is well and truly rebutted in Friel's play, at the end even the physical appearance of the landscape is to be changed by a scorched-earth policy.