From The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction
The weakness of Goethe, according to J. M. Synge, was that he had ‘no national and intellectual mood to interpret. The individual mood is often trivial, perverse, fleeting, [but the] national mood [is] broad, serious, provisionally permanent." In all the surveys we have of the canon of Irish fiction, there is no such complaint. Ireland, from the time of Jonathan Swift to the present, has been, it seems, awash with ‘national and intellectual mood’, especially national mood, so that those writers who have sought to evade the opportunities to interpret this, who have sought to deal with the individual mood, however trivial, perverse and fleeting, seem now oddly heroic and hard to place. The purpose of much Irish fiction, it seems, is to become involved in the Irish argument, and the purpose of much Irish criticism has been to relate the fiction to the argument.
Thus if you want to read about the vagaries of the human heart, or the fleeting nature of love or time, read Goethe’s lyrics; but if you want to know about the unreliable nature of narrative in a time of landlords, read Maria Edgeworth. If you want to know how love can lead to marriage, read Jane Austen; but if you want to delve into the secret and dark unconscious of an embattled ruling class, read Bram Stoker, Charles Maturin and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. If you want to read prose in which language is presented as neutral, barely noticeable, then read English fiction, because, as Terry Eagleton points out, ‘language is strategic for the oppressed and representational for their rulers’, and Ireland is, of course, oppressed and language in Ireland ‘is weapon, dissemblance, seduction, apologia anything, in fact, but representation ’
‘Reality’ in Ireland, as well as language, has been a problem from the beginning. Maria Edgeworth wrote to her brother about it in 1834: ‘It is impossible to draw Ireland as she now is in the book of fiction realities are too strong, party passions too violent, to bear to see, or care to look at their faces in a looking glass. The people would only break the glass and curse the fool who held the mirror up to nature distorted nature in a fever.’ Lady Morgan, in the previous year, wrote, ‘we are living in an era of transition. Changes moral and political are in progress. The frame of the constitution, the frame of society itself, are sustaining a shock, which occupies all minds, to avert or modify.’ Under such conditions, she wrote, ‘There is no legitimate literature, as there is no legitimate drama."
If you wanted to write a history of love in Ireland in the nineteenth century, at a history of adultery, you could more fruitfully look to politics rather than to literature: the love which Robert Emmet had for Sarah Curran; the life and times of Daniel O'Connell; Pamell's relationship with Katharine O’Shea. If you want accounts of the male hero facing destiny, equipped with will and talent and sex appeal, or accounts of the doomed protagonist, and you want these to be story shaped, in Ireland you look to the lives of the nineteenth century leaders, whereas in England you look to Daniel Deronda or In France to Emma Bovary.
Irish history reads like a form of fiction, full of love stones with ill fated lovers dying with a smile, so daring and sweet their thought. Those central moments in French history are communal and urban, but the crucial moments in Irish history seem more like a nineteenth century novel in which the individual, tragic hero is broken by the society he lives in. We have no communards, no rabble in the streets. Instead, we have personal sacrifice as a metaphor for general sacrifice.
It is staking how much this activity self consciously resembles literature. just as a poem may move and influence the reader, so too a song or a story or a novel, and 30 too Irish political action from Wolfe Tone to Bobby Sands. This is perhaps why historical revisionism since the 1970s in Ireland has so been so powerful and persuasive: many of the events themselves in their first telling had the shape and tone of fiction. Many of the revisionists, for very good reasons, took considerable offence at this idea.
And then, if you want to observe what it is like to inherit a tradition in which it is readily accepted that the novel cannot compete with the world, which is something that Tolstoy never accepted, not Dickens, not Melville, then follow the strange literary careers of those who sought a way out: Gerald Griffin attempting a love story and a murder story in The Collegian, using the rise of a new Catholic class as his background; or Oscar Wilde or Robert Tressell moving over to taunt the English; or George Moore desperately, and at times successfully, trying to become a French novelist in Ireland.
In his The Irish Novelists Thomas Flanagan wrote that
the nineteenth century Irish novel established no tradition. Between Carleton’s death [In 1869] and the beginning of the new century Ireland produced no prose writer of real stature . . . When a novelist of commanding talent did appear the greatest perhaps of his age he owed little to the work of his predecessors. Ireland was Joyce’s theme, as it had been theirs, and he shared their involvement in issues of race, culture and nationality. But in his work the theme finds its expression in irony, in a passion which mocks both itself and its object . . . It matters not at all that there were Lush novelists before Joyce, for their work was entirely useless to him. They had established no conventions by which the actualities of Irish life could be represented.
It seems to me, however, that it matters a great deal that there were Irish novelists before Joyce. The absence of conventions left him free to understand that the English and French novel, the novel which played with the conflict between restriction and freedom, depended for its even tone, its sense of stable character, even its use of linear time, on certain connections between the writer and the reader which were uncertain in Ireland, and indeed between the individual and the society which were equally uncertain. Anyone, with the exception of George Moore, who had tried, failed. This failure, this great peculiar gap between Edgeworth (1767-1849) and Moore (1852-1933), filled by the Gothic novelists, or by half geniuses like Carleton who would have flourished in any other society, or by Anthony Trollope adapting himself so happily to local conditions, made that much clear. Ireland, in the years around the Famine, could produce songs and stories, but had trouble with a deeply layered structure like a novel, in which the individual choice and the individual destiny are central.
Moore remained concerned about what could be done, and not done, in Ireland. He wrote the first version of his series of short stories, The Untilled Field (1903), to be translated into Irish, to furnish ‘the young Irish of the future with models‘.’ They were then translated back into English, being, Moore said, ‘much improved after their bath in Irish’.‘ Terence Brown has written that ‘the manner suggests the book has been translated from some more culturally innocent language’, but it also reads like Moore was wandering in an unknown country, in which the possibility of sophisticated psychological portraits, such as that of Esther Waters, did not exist. These are half-formed narratives, full of raw desires and a quaintness which Moore would have mercilessly mocked in any other writer. They are of interest for two reasons. They are the first concerted efforts to explore this hidden Ireland since William Carleton. Also, they stand in relation to the stories in Joyce’s Dubliners, written in the same decade, as shadow does to light. In fact, the last scene of ‘The Dead’, a story for which George Moore expressed great admiration (‘l regretted that I was not the author of it’), owes much to the ending of Moore’s Vain Fortune. ‘In that book,’ Richard Ellmann writes,
a bridal couple receive, on their wedding night, a message that a young woman whom the husband jilted has just committed suicide. The news holds them apart, she asks him not to kiss her, and both are tormented by remorse. The wife, her marriage unconsummated, falls off at last to sleep, and her husband goes to the window and looks out at ‘the melancholy greyness of the dawn'. For the first time he recognizes, with the force of a revelation, that his life is a failure, and that his wife lacks the passion of the girl who has killed herself."
Also, Joyce was scathing about Moore’s The Lake, but, Ellmann writes, ‘this rejection did not keep him from making use of the book later. He remembered the ending when he came to write the visionary scene at the end of the fourth chapter of Portrait... a Young Man . . . Joyce winnowed Moore of the preposterous; he found him a good man to improve on.’” (In 1904, in Pola, Joyce gave Nora Barnacle a copy of ‘Mildred Lawson’, the first story in Moore’s Celibates, to read. The story ends with a. woman ruminating in bed. Nora thought that Moore didn’t know how to finish a story, for Joyce, it helped to inspire Molly Bloom’s soliloquy.)
George Moore, of course, could make no sense of Ulysses. He was locked into a system of novel writing which had cost him dear to learn. ‘It is absurd to imagine that any good end can be served by trying to record every single thought and sensation of any human being,’ he said.” Moore, who specialized in seeing no reason, could see no reason why the minor acts of Leopold Bloom should be associated With the acts of Ulysses. He was out of his depth.
James Stephens, who may or may not have been born on the same day as Joyce, was more sympathetic to the later work, having called Dubliners "a rather dnsconnected, unpleasant prose work’." In 1927 Joyce decided that Stephens should finish Finnegans Wake, if he should prove unable to. Stephens had attempted a grim, spare poetic realism in the short novel The Charwoman's Daughter, but was also interested in myth and story and legend, which he explored, fluently and confidently, in his masterpiece The Crock of Gold. The problem which faced Stephens as an artist, a dealet in both dtsdlusion and pure Illusion, has been clearly identified by Seamus Deane:
The repeated attempts . . . to conjoin these worlds of Gaelic myth and Irish reality is, of course, a symptom of the increasing strain to which the heroicizing impulse of the Revival was subjected, especially in the aftermath of the political settlement of 1921. The society itself made the discrepancy between mythological grandeurs and quotidian pettiness so severe that it became Impossible to incorporate them satisfactorily in fiction.“
Stephens’s work and, indeed, his silence as a writer of fiction for the last quarter century of his life (he was, like George Moore, a great talker) are instructive. He was interested in language, tone and form as much as Moore was interested in psychology and society. And both Moore and Stephens remain fascinating figures in the same way as Catalan painters like Santiago Rusinol or Isidre Nonell remain fascinating for their connection with Picasso. The story of how they were prepared to go a certain length with him (including to Paris, like Moore and Stephens) but no further is like the story of Moore and Stephens, crippled by the very problems which were the making of Joyce: how to find a formal structure and a tone in language which would not only reflect the Irish heritage the mixture of poor realities and grand dreams but become the Irish heritage.
During the years when Joyce was writing Ulysses the Catalan painter Joan Miro, who viewed Barcelona as a centre of paralysis and moved to Paris as soon as the First World War ended, was becoming increasingly uneasy about inherited ideas of perspective. Just as Joyce attempted what T. S. Eliot called ‘an anti style’ in Ulysses, Miro viewed perspective as a great lie and sought to find a system for his art which would deal with the true shape of things. ‘With the exception of the primitives and the Japanese,’ he wrote, ‘everyone has painted only the great masses of trees and mountains . . . that which interests me above all else is the calligraphy of a tree or the tiles of a roof, and I mean leaf by leaf, branch by branch, blade by blade of grass.’
Joyce realized that if he did not find a language, a form and a style which were new and inventive, he would be lost as Moore, to some extent, and certainly Stephens were lost. He was against plot-lines and character development and closure, as Miro was against perspective. He tried, then, to find a system which would capture the strange beauty of consciousness, just as Miro developed a dream iconography for his paintings.
We grow to love Leopold Bloom not because of the story in which he plays a part, not for his adventures in the plot, but because of the rich way he notices things, because of the way he remembers, and then becomes distracted, then is reminded of something, and then watches, notices again, wishes and makes calculations. Some of his observations are desperately funny, as when he agrees with himself that wine is a suitable drink for the chalice, rather than Guinness, say, or ginger ale. But he is always burdened with other matters, such as his father’s death, his son’s death and his marriage, and then once more he is distracted.
Leopold Bloom in Ulysees is, however, more than anything else a verbal construct; he is made with language, and this making is on display, much as Miro's flat colours or Picasso’s theatricality are on display. Joyce is not answerable to any earlier tradition in fiction or conditions in Ireland, yet he feels free to play with both, at times as though history were the fit of laughing from which he was trying to recover.
Joyce’s sense of Irish society, as we know from Dubliners, was more acute and vivid than that of contemporaries like Moore or Stephens. (Indeed, as a young man, he taunted Stephens with this.) And in the years between the rise of Parnell and the use of de Valera there was a peculiar and intense aura around politics and religion in Ireland, Ireland was to be, after the fall of Parnell, in Yeats’s phrase, ‘like soft wax’.“ Ireland was about to become a vacuum which various competing forces sought to fill ch: Irish Parliamentary Party, Sinn Féin, the Gaelic League, the Gaelic Athletic Association, the Catholic Church, the rabble, the Abbey Theatre and the Unionists. The possibilities surrounding this aura gave Joyce his great subject, which was language.
The language of Ulysses moves from the plain, clipped, almost throwaway style for solitary moments -shitting, masturbating, thinking -to the cross-talk of friends, associates and colleagues in which speaking is half claptrap or small talk, full of witticisms, quotations and half baked opinions, laced like all of the book with snatches of song. The style is always fluid. Bloom’s stream-of-consciousness can be broken by clear description of what is going on around him. The pub talk can be broken, as in Barney Kiernan’s, by Bloom’s efforts to be serious and almost solemn. Other scenes and situations are described in a language which is playfully baroque. Molly Bloom’s soliloquy is direct and passionate.
Throughout the book there is a game being played between public and private discourse. The language of provincial (or indeed cosmopolitan) journalism, the language of nationalism and religion, and public rhetoric of all sorts ate parodied, thrown up in the air and let float back down, all the more to tease them and humiliate them. Ireland was slowly becoming ‘Ireland’ with its Gaelic League, its Sinn Féin, its Abbey Theatre, its urgent need to de-Anglicize, its feeling, as John O’Leary said to Yeats, that ‘a man must have upon his side the Church or the Fenians’." The supposed ancientness of Ireland is the source of much laughter and many jokes in Ulysses, so too Ireland’s natural resources, which both the Citizen and Skin-the-Goat (assuming it was he) extol in different sections of the book. ‘And our wool that was sold in Rome in the time of Juvenal and out flax and out damask from the looms of Antrim and out limerick lace, out tanneries and our white flint glass down there by Ballybough.“
Joyce loved lists, the longer and more incongruous the better, as Miro loved painting squiggles and Picasso loved painting eyes. Joyce loved the aura around proper names. There is a sense in Ulysses that anything which is held sacred in Ireland, especially respectability, history, nationalism and Catholicism, will be ridiculed Joyce did not need the Church or the Fenians. Instead, sanctity will be offered to ordinary experience -something which had not figured much in previous Irish writing and also to memory, love and sex, to companionship, to long, shapeless days and city life, to men half down on their luck, to song.
To that extent Ulysses is a deeply political book in which Joyce too joins those who sought to mould the soft wax of Ireland. He set his masterpiece against any narrow idea of a nation; his nation of 1904 was made up of different people in the same place. Yet Ulysses: is also, in an odd and admirable way, a deeply patriotic and liberating book. Most of the Irish fiction written before Joyce was written for an English audience; much of it sought to describe Ireland's history and landscape and people as peculiar and alarmingly dramatic. Some of the most talented writers, from Oliver Goldsmith to Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu to George Moore, had set their novels in England. But Joyce’s work is almost hermetically sealed in Ireland.
Ulysses is full of local references names of people, streets. places; it is full of figures of speech and lines of songs. Nothing in ever explained in the book, but Irish readers get most of the references. The book depends on the idea that the City being described is not the centre of paralysis, but rather the centre of the world. Local references and proper names are not there to add colour to the book; most of the time the effect is entirely natural and often poetic. When names appear which have also appeared in Dubliners (and this happens throughout) there is a double pleasure in knowing what a name like Gretta Conroy means and then in meeting her briefly once more.
To understand the idea that this book was written first for an Irish audience, all one has to do is imagine Virginia Woolf reading the book and coming across the many proper names and missing the resonance which each one has in Ireland. Take the list of clergy, for example, who appear in the ‘Cyclops’ section at an imagined meeting to discuss the revival of Irish sport: ‘the rev. T. Brangan, O. S. A.; the rev. J. Fiavin, the rev. M. A. Hackett, C. C.; the rev. W. Hurley, C. C.; the rt rev. Mgr M’Manus, V. G.; the rev. B. R. Slattery, O. M. 1.; the very rev. M. D. Scally, P. P.; the rev. F. T. Purcell, O. P.; the very rev. Timothy canon German, P. P.; the rev. J. Flanagan, C. C. . . ." This list is, first of all, funny because it is based on the lists you still read in Irish provincial and indeed daily newspapers, and because it plays with titles and hierarchy but it is also graphic it is easy to imagine these priests in a group photo, strong farmers’ sons. None of this is explained anywhere, and most of it could not be felt by a non-Irish reader. This is merely one example of the ways in which Joyce handed Ireland back to Irish readers in his book, how he made Ireland the centre of the known world. The Citizen would have been proud of him.
Joan Miro, throughout his long career, tried to return painting to two dimensions, to the making of marks on a surface. He wanted to erase the pretense of depth. He loved the flatness of the Romanesque tradition, it was like the blood in his veins, he said. Joyce too found in the Odyssey a map that he could follow so that his use of detail and his creation of structure in Ulysses was not simply a matter of establishing verisimlitude but of unleashing irony. He made it clear that words and sentences are marks on a page, sounds we make, rhetorical systems and ways for us to perform. The idea offered Joyce a new beginning in the creation of fiction.
Between Carleton and Joyce there remains one extraordinary phenomenon in Irish literary history, and that is what Roy Foster calls ‘Protestant Magic’, the tradition of Gothic fiction which includes Maturin, Le Fanu, Stoker and leads on to Yeats and certain elements in the work of Elizabeth Bowen. ‘The fact that Anglo-Irish writers . . . should have exhibited such fascination with madness and the occult, terror and the supernatural, is in one sense surprising,' Terry Eagleton writes.
'They belonged, after all, to a notoriously hard headed social class which habitually chided the Catholic masses for their infantile superstition. But Protestant Gothic might be dubbed the political unconscious of Anglo Irish society, the place where Its fears and fantasies most definitively emerge . . . And if lrish Gothic Is a specifically Protestant phenomenon, it is because nothing lent itself more to the genre than the decaying gentry in their crumbling houses, isolated and sinisterly eccentric, haunted by the sins of the past. Gothic carries with it a freight of guilt and self torment, and these are arguably more Protestant than Catholic obsessions . . . For Gothic is the nightmare of the besieged and reviled . . . in this case a minority marooned within a largely hostile people to whom they are socially, religiously alien.'
The Catholic natives, in other words, put the fear of God into Protestants of all sorts, even though it didn’t seem like that to either party at the time. The Catholics also, through their religion and superstition and their abiding sense of community (not to speak of the open nature of their suffering), got all their fears out of their system. The other crowd became anal-retentive, neurotic and paranoid. Thus we got Melmoth and Dracula and Uncle Silas.
‘Uncle Silas’ Elizabeth Bowen wrote,
has always struck me as an Irish story transposed to an English setting. The hermetic solitude and the autocracy of the great country house, the demonic power of the family myth, fatalism, feudalism and the ‘ascendancy’ outlook are accepted facts of life for the race of hybrids from which Le Fanu sprang. For the psychological background of Uncle Silas it was necessary for him to invent nothing.
‘The line of Irish Protestant Supernatural fiction,’ Roy Foster writes,
is an obvious one . . . marginalized Irish Protestants . . . often living in England but regretting Ireland, stemming from families with strong clerical and professional colorations, whose occult preoccupations surely mirror a sense of displacement, a loss of social and psychological integration, and an escapism motivated by the threat of a takeover by the Catholic middle classes a threat all the more inexorable because it is being accomplished by peaceful mans and with the free legal aid of British governments. The supernatural theme of a corrupt bargain recurs again.
Indeed, a strong theme in Protestant gothic is a mingled repulsion and envy where Catholic magic is concerned. The Jesuit order in Melmoth manipulated darker forces than the eponymous hero. In Dracula, Van Helsing is a Dutch Catholic who brings the Host, with a papal dispensation, to combat the undead at Whitby.
This shape of Irish history in one of its manifestations gave life to the Gothic imagination that is, the idea of history as unfinished business, the idea of the dispossessed locals lying in wait, impelled by the wrongs done to their ancestors, the idea that the crimes committed by the settlers still hang in the air. Joep Leerssen in his Remembrance and Imagination describes this
recurrence of the dead past, bursting into the living present; the awareness of buried, unfinished business yet awaiting definitive settlement .. . is present in much of the tradition of the Irish Gothic . . . It is no surprise that the figure of the aristocratic vampire, undead remnant of a feudal past battening on the Vitality of the living. is an appealing one for Irish authors. The frisson of Irish Gothic (from Melmoth to Dracula) and the appeal of the Big House theme . . . lay partly in the fact that ‘the lively expectation of the young‘ tended to be ‘devoured by the guilt and errors of their elders’. The theme reverberates with worried reservations as to the straightforwardness of time, with an uncanny sense that the Irish history, the sheer weight and bloodiness and persistence of it will trouble the present's course of it to the future.
‘Anglo Irish literature,’ Corkery wrote in the first essay, ‘as the phrase is understood, is mostly the product of Irishmen who neither live at home not write primarily for their own people.’ Exile, or, in Corkery’s term, ‘expatriation’, has been ‘a chronic disease from Goldsmith’s time, Steele’s time, Sheridan’s time, Burke’s time, [Thomas] Moore’s time, Prout’s time, Wllde’s time, to our own time of Shaw, Joyce and [George] Moore’."
Writers not in exile from Ireland are in exile within Ireland. These Corkery deems ‘colonial’ and they include Maria Edgeworth: ‘No other book [Cattle Rackrent] did as much in the creation of what was to prove the most favoured of the moulds which subsequent writers were to use. This Colonial literature was written to explain the quaintness of the humankind of this land, especially the native humankind, to another humankind that was not quaint, that was standaxd, normal.’ The work of Edgeworth and others, including Somerville and Ross, according to Corkery, ‘is all written for their motherland, England, by spiritual exiles’.
Borges versus Corkery, then. Ireland as a state of mind, when it is ‘enough to feel Irish, different’, or Ireland as a matter of class and race. In Writer and Politics, Conor Cruise O’Brien tried to define Irishness: ‘Irishness,’ he wrote, ‘is not primarily a question of birth or blood or language: it is the condition of being involved with the Irish situation, and usually of being mauled by it?“ This is surely too grim. Perhaps it would be closer to the truth if it read: Irishness is not primarily a question of birth or blood or language: it is the condition of being involved with the Irish situation, and, if die candidate is a writer, often being crowned by it.
For Borges and his generation in Buenos Aires, the real world was elsewhere: they spoke and read French and English, and in their imagination they belonged to Europe, but when they lifted their heads from books, or came back from abroad, they were In a cultural backwater, and they had no intention of becoming chroniclers of their half-formed time or their badly formed country. They realized that they had no choice but to merit then own time and their own country. They believed, as many Irish writers came to believe (and later writers Garcia Marquez in Colombia and Amos Turtola in Nigeria came to believe), that you cannot write social realism in an underdeveloped country.
There are certain odd similarities between Borges and the Jonathan Swift of Gulliver's Travels. Both lived far from what they believed was the centre of things. Both mimicked the language of reportage, using a tone which was po-faced, dry, factual and elaborate to describe invented worlds and systems. There is a central urge in both their imaginations tn make things strange, to refuse to deal with the familiar world. Although Borges suffered from a savage lack of indignation, neither had much regard for mankind. (Borges wrote: ‘Mirrors and copulation are abominable, for they multiply the number of mankind) They both spent their formative years in cities Dublin and Buenos Aires which were being substantially rebuilt and re-created.
Gulliver's Travels stands in the beginning of the great tradition of Irish masterpieces which delight in the shifting, uneven tone, the unreliable structure, the comic turn, which read as though the writer believed that no one had ever written a book before. People in ....many stories have a nightmare that the millions that left Ireland will return which gives the Irish a deep fear of dispossession.
.....
a similar intensity emerges when writers describe a dance... this offers a way of showing the society at its most formal and threatening, but it also offers an occasion, perhaps the only occasion, for an individual to escape and thus an opportunity for the writers to show the relationship between restriction and freedom. Those hours in the dance-hall, or the formal party, become then a cauldron which many Irish writers have chosen to stir. There are four accounts of dances in this anthology and there could have been many more. ‘The Dead’ is, of course, included. In all these stories, with the possible exception of Thurston’s, the dance results in a degree of misery for the individual, offers us a microscope so we can see all the more clearly how harsh and vicious the society is or how oddly isolated the individual is (Joyce). In the Irish tradition, no one writes well or easily about happiness. (Mary Lavin’s story ‘Happiness’ is about death.)
There are three other subjects which seem to engage Irish writers deeply. The first one is fire. The burning down of houses has a distinguished career in Irish writing. Prose is attracted to fire, like Maeve Brennan’s heroine in ‘The Morning after the Big Fire’ it loves the drama of fire, its sweeping destruction.The second subject which makes prose become vivid is the killing of women by men.The third subject is fathers and sons. In several stories a battle between love and fear, hatred and duty, takes place. The urge to kill or destroy or learn to hate is the central drama in Bernard Mac Laverty’s ‘Life Drawing’ and Neil Jordan’s ‘Night in Tunisia’.The murdering of women, the fascination with fire, the use of the dance-hall as an arena for terror and fear, the dread of the familiar figure turned stranger back from exile, the urge to kill the father -these are some of the tropes which followers of the Irish tradition will recognize. The preponderance of vast, ambitious and ironic masterpieces, matched by an astonishing flowering of Gothic fiction. And the absence of images of domestic harmony, the dead fathers and mothers and dead children. Leopold Bloom’s father committed suicide, his son is dead, his wife is being unfaithful to him, Stephen’s mother is dead. .....Is it possible, then, to talk about a national style, a way of approaching language form and character, which is specifically Irish? Most commentators, in this context, will cite the famous encounter between the English Jesuit and young Stephen in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Stephen uses the word ‘tundish’ to describe what the Jesuit calls a funnel, and then begins to contemplate his own relationship to the English language: ‘The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine‘ How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot Speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech . . . My soul frets in the shadow of his language.’Capitalism had no heroic phase in Ireland, and Ireland does not have many natural resources, but there is language, which, like software skills in the 1990s, we have come to possess and repossess deeply and sonorously. Language in Ireland, it seems, is both culture and nature.In Irish writing, we have survived to inherit the tension between the Latin of non serviam, Satan’s and Stephen Dedalus’s insistence on remaining apart from the fold, and the Anglo-Saxon of the groans and moans which fill the work of Samuel Beckett. One language has faded to a large extent, which means that the other one, English, the one we use now, could fade too, slip and fail. In Beckett’s play All That Fall Mr Rooney says ‘sometimes one would think you were struggling with a dead language’, and Mrs Rooney replies: ‘Well, you know, it will be dead in time, just like our own poor clear Gaelic, there is that to be said." English, in this argument, both belongs to the Irish writer and does not. And the idea of this dual and ambiguous inheritance sounds true -just as does Stephen’s unrest of spirit. But it may not be true; it may even be pure nonsense. The terms seem plausible when used to describe an entire culture, but, when used to describe an individual’s relationship with language, the gestures are too broad. Every writer’s soul, including writers in Wolverhampton and London, frets in the shadow of his or her language. George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Graham Swift possessed and possess the language more sonorously than most of the English themselves. That is what writers, whether in England or in her former colonies, try to do. Not a word out of place and yet every word somehow under suspicion, and the play between the two. In this way, all of us who use language are Irish; all of us fret in its shadow.When You write, whether in England or in Ireland, it feels like an act of will. YOU decide each sentence, you cut and reshape, you reimagine; you change the ending; you make an infinite number of choices and decisions. The process of imagining and writing seems like an entirely autonomous process. What I do comes from me, the writer feels. It is entirely mine. I am free.How is it then that we can find a shape for Irish writing which goes beyond the personal into the communal? How is it then that we can make the following statements about Irish writing: there is almost no version of domestic harmony at the end of an Irish novel; there is almost no version of domestic harmony at the beginning of an Irish novel; there is no Irish novel which ends in a wedding, or a match being made. Irish fiction is not like that; Irish fiction is full of dislocation and displacement.It is hard to think of any good fathers in the canon of Irish Fiction and drama. Fathers in Irish writing are absent, or angry, or mad, or strangely silent.In 1891 W. B. Yeats wrote: ‘I notice very distinctly in all Irish literature,’ he wrote in the introduction,'two different accents the accent of the gentry, and the less polished accent of the peasantry and those near them; a division roughly into the voice of those who lived lightly and gaily, and those Who took man and his fortunes with much seriousness and even at times mournfully . . . There is perhaps no other country in the world the style and nature of whose writers have been so completely governed by their birth and social standing.'
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In her essay on Uncle Silas Elizabeth Bowen found two qualities besides those listed above which made it an Irish novel: ‘it is sexless,’ she wrote, ‘and it shows a sublimated infantalism’. In much Irish fiction there is a reticence on sexual matters. Molly Bloom lies down alone in Irish Fiction. In the work of other writers sex is furtive and dangerous or never mentioned. In the years after the foundation of the state, one common wisdom was that the Irish imagination and conditions in Ireland made it easier to write short stories than novels (and short stories of course never dealt with sex). Frank O’Connor, Denis Donoghue writes,
regarded the difference between the novel and the short story as only incidentally a matter of length, scale and capacity: the real difference, he thought, was in implication, and the rhythm of implication. The novel refers to a world in which it is possible, however difficult, to live: it implies continuity, latitude of possibility, space to breathe. The short story may offer the same implication, but it rarely does; in common practice, it presents life mainly in the form of constraint and through the feelings of tramps, widows, spoiled priests, monks and only children. O’Connor’s affection for the short story speaks of his affection for marginal people, men withering, caught in the duress of circumstance and passion.Ireland, it is clear, in the years between independence and the First Programme for Economic Expansion (1958), offered ‘constraint’ rather than ‘space to breathe’. A number of short-story writers Frank O’Connor, Sean O’Faolain, Liam O’Flaherty, Bryan MacMahon, Michael McLaverty and Mary Lavin flourished in this period. Their work was formally conservative, with the Joyce of Dubliners and nineteenth-century short fiction as its governing influences, and dealt with states of loneliness and isolation, or used the anecdote, the story told around the fire, as the model. The men wrote a great deal about childhood. ‘There is a sense in which,’ Donoghue says,Frank O’Connor stayed, imaginatively, in the towns of his boyhood, and let the new Ireland mind its own grubby business. Liam O’Flaherty, too, wrote as if his First experiences were definitive and could only be lost if pestered by later matters. Michael McLaverty . . . stayed where he startedi perhaps the experience of childhood and boyhood was too cherished to admit a rival or the fear of a lapse.‘A happy ending was imperative,’ E. M. Forster wrote about his novel Maurice ‘I shouldn’t have bothered to write otherwise. I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows . . . Happiness is the keynote.’ Forster was aware that writing about gay relationships tended towards the tragic. Indeed, there was a movement among gay literary activists in the 1970s to stop this trend. ‘Gay critics made gay writers self-conscious about their sense of appropriate endings,’ Gregory Woods wrote in A Hiring! of Gay Literature. ‘No central gay character could be murdered or commit suicide, even if for reasons clearly represented as being other than homosexuality itself, for fear of enforcing the myth of the tragic queer.”2Irish writing and gay writing have the myth of a tragic destiny in common. It is easy to see why homosexuality as a theme has attracted so many Irish writers. Oscar Wilde’s T be Picture of Dorian Grqy still remains the greatest gay novel ever written, even if Joyce thought that it was too cloaked and tame. Joyce himself dealt with the theme in ‘An Encounter’, one of the stories in Dublin”! which caused the greatest alarm among publishers. Some of the most powerful scenes in the work of Kate O’Brien centre on homosexuality and its discontents, and this is also true in the work of John Broderick. It is remarkable how many times in Irish fiction of the past twenty years the theme has emerged: in the work of John Banville, Val Mulkerns, Ita Daly, Desmond Hogan, Mary Dorcey, Patrick McCabe, Dermot Bolger, Frank Ronan, Joseph O’Connor, Colum McCann, Emma Donoghue.There is a moment in Samuel Beckett’s story ‘The Expelled’ in which our hero watches a funeral pass:'Personally if I were reduced to making the sign of the cross I would set my heart on doing it right, nose, navel, left nipple, right nipple. But the way they did it slovenly and wild, he seemed crucified all of a heap, no dignity, his knees under his chin and his hands anyhow... as for the policeman he stiffened to attention, closed his eyes and saluted... the horses were farting and shitting as though the were going to the fair.'
