Changing States

Transformations in Modern Irish Writing

Robert Welch Nfa, Robert Welch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9781138440135
• eBook ISBN: 9781134870622
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In Changing States Robert Welch examines the work of the major authors of modern Irish literature in the context of the transformation from Gaelic to twentieth-century post-industrial culture. The force of Irish writing, uniting authors as various as Yeats, Heaney, Synge, Beckett, Joyce and Mairtin O Cadhain, largely derives, Welch argues, from their need to respond to the challenges of this transformation. Writing against a sense of loss, their work is distinguished by certain key features: an intense awareness of the power of language; a provisionality in regard to character; a preoccupation with change and an obsession with the past and its meaning. Robert Welch draws attention to the crucial but often hidden aspects of modern Irish writing. He examines its flexibility; its scepticism; its concern with form; and ultimately the need for change, and the fear of it. He provides a unique in-depth study of individual authors in the context of cultural and linguistic developments, that will be an invaluble text for anyone interested in Irish life and literature or in language and translation.

1 CHANGE AND STASIS IN IRISH WRITING

We think of Irish culture as deeply divided. There are good reasons for this: the main one being that the Irish went through a profound shift in cultural orientation in surrendering one language for another, Irish for English, in the nineteenth century. Ireland, unlike most other European countries, did not have the opportunity of fully experiencing the experiments of individualism, enterprise, collectivity and modernization that are known as the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Being a colony of England, Ireland was cut off; her people experienced Europe, in the modern period, that is to say from about 1600, through an English transmission. There were exceptions, such as the Irish propagandists of the Counter-Reformation trained in Louvain and elsewhere, who returned to Ireland to promote the Catholic interest; or the sons of those Catholic houses who were sent to study at Salamanca and Lisbon. But these men could not be said to have constituted themselves into a body of settled opinion, back in Ireland, that affected Irish life and thought. There were waves of rumour and agitation, depending on what crisis was at hand, for which poets and apologists, trained in Counter-Reformation propaganda techniques, were often responsible; but these were frequently contradictory, as between one occasion and another.

There was no consensus: how could there have been when the basic structure of Irish life had been torn apart by Mountjoy’s defeat of the Irish at Kinsale? We are dealing, in Ireland’s case, with an example of an almost completely successful colonial takeover. There was no settled body of Irish life and thought in the modern, secular, urbanized and predominantly middle-class sense in which that phrase tends to be applied. When we use it we think of the established norms of polite society, of theatres, perfume, salons, cafés; its business and its art; its eating and its drinking; Moll Flanders’ interiors, Zola’s kitchens and drawing rooms. We think of newspapers, a publishing industry, authorship, artists and their modern dependence upon and conflict with materialistic society. We think of parliaments and courts; of the power language may have in these environs, to persuade, affect, deceive and stultify. All of this large arena of modern European culture, so dependent on the way language creates and reflects society, is, to a great extent, absent from Irish life up to the nineteenth century. There were, of course, theatres in eighteenth century Dublin. There was a tradition of political thought upon which Swift built; but even that, when it came closest to defining distinct forms of Irish life, did so in a spirit of exasperation with the customary English assumption that everything that mattered happened in London and on the ‘mainland’, to use a word which still comes readily to some lips in Ireland.

From Kinsale to the end of the nineteenth century one cannot say that there was such a thing as ‘Irish life and thought’: there was English life and thought which sometimes accommodated an Irish accent for added vitality. Ireland, cut off from Europe, mastered by Britain, was not in a position to evolve modern forms of life which would develop from the pre-existent forms, patterns, social organizations and emotional predispositions that were there in Gaelic Ireland.

This is a catastrophic and, for that very reason, satisfying reading of Irish cultural history. It is a traumatic reading in the precise sense of that word. Something went wrong: what went wrong, it is often argued, is traceable to the English presence in Ireland. It is easy to see this line of thinking deployed by cultural nationalists. The only way in which the damage can be undone, the argument goes, is by openly admitting that Irish culture from Kinsale onwards has been, in all major respects, English; and that in the last twenty years it has become Anglo-American. The logic here leads to setting up the Irish language as the only true icon of Irishness: everything else is pussyfooting and special pleading. We see writers like Alan Titley, Michael Hartnett and Nuala ní Dhomhnaill either explicitly or implicitly making this analysis and taking appropriate action. They write in Irish because no other language will do; no other language will convey, for them, those interior states of being that all writers who are real writers want to talk about. They experience the trauma of the fracturing of Irish culture and attempt the healing process in their own work and language.

These writers make a simple straightforward analysis and they act upon it. In their writings occur some of the most significant insights that are being recreated in contemporary Irish writing. One of the main sources of the power that writers such as Nuala ní Dhomhnaill display is the intensity with which they approach the entire question of language itself, seeing it as comprising latencies and persuasions that determine modes of thought and behaviour. For ní Dhomhnaill and for Hartnett the loss of the Irish language was a cataclysmic blow to the psyche of the Irish people in that it ripped out and tore asunder all the secret interiors that sponsor the manifold activities that go to make up a culture. That such interiors are not immediately accessible to our thinking to begin with is only evidence of their intrinsic and radical nature: what is at the root of a situation takes tremendous trouble to keep itself hidden.

On the other side of the coin are the linguistic or cultural behaviourists. They say: language is merely a set of counters; and those mysteries to which the cultural nationalists lay claim are romanticism, mantra-seeking, bog-digging for treasure-troves of words. The cultural behaviourists would argue that Irish people should get on with what they have. In any case, they say, whatever it is to be Irish now is involved with the capitalisms of the West and the emerging capitalisms in post-Communist eastern Europe. Why trouble ourselves over traumas that may or may not have taken place a century ago? This view, in its robust common sense, has certain attractions.

But which is right? It may be that we do not need to back either of these two horses. It may be that the way we pose the question about tradition is itself part of the problem. Irish culture, now, and for the last one hundred years, has been preoccupied with the question of continuity, and this at a time when it seems that the idea of continuity and the related one of community are cracking up irremediably. One response to this breakdown is to lament it and to try for wholeness and integrity. But what if cultures do have within them periods of fracture and cleavage, even to the point of trauma? And what if the test of a culture is its capacity to survive these cleavages and even to be strengthened by them? A culture either survives or it does not. If it does not then it does not have the ability to reactivate itself by means of those things which seem to threaten it by demanding so much. Think of what Shaw says about ‘creative evolution’ in the preface to Back to Methusalah:

the will to do anything can and does, at a certain pitch of intensity set up by conviction of its necessity, create and organize new tissue to do it with…. Evolution shews us …vitality doing all sorts of things: providing the centipede with a hundred legs, and ridding the fish of any legs at all; building lungs and arms for the land and gills and fins for the sea.¹

This could equally be applied to culture and its evolution and transformations. If a culture cannot make the adaptation that necessity demands, then it will die and probably deserves to die, in that it has not answered life’s call.

One of the most striking examples of cultural survival in Ireland is in music. Indeed, it is scarcely correct to talk of survival here because there is ample evidence of robust cultural health. In the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s there has been a burgeoning of new talent, a standard of musicianship and excellence, that no one would have foretold in the early 1960s. And the extraordinary thing is that this new phase of Irish music entirely carries over, effectively translates, the traditions, techniques and very airs that Edward Bunting found in Belfast in 1792. Two hundred years have passed since then and listening to Nioclás Tóibín singing ‘Bán Chnoic Eireann Ó’ or Peadar Ó Riada’s Cúil Aodha choir chanting ‘Abha an tSulláin’ it is as if time has been set aside, and we hear back two, three, four hundred years.

Music is freer to do this than the other arts are because it does not have the responsibility of denotation. Words signify, they denote; we traffic with time in the arts of language, and with history and its events. And when we deal with history we come back to fracture and cleavage, the ‘nightmare’ of Stephen Dedalus. We come back to the stumbling block of discontinuity. When we listen to Sean Ó Riada’s ‘Mairseáil Rí Longsigh’ we experience no sense of discontinuity; there is wholeness, unity; but always in the arts of language there is consecutiveness, and that reminds us of the cultural failures and abortions of the nineteenth century, the century of ‘silence’ as Thomas Kinsella, following Sean de Fréine, has called it.² And yet we experience Irishness; we know that there is such a thing, now, as an ‘Irish way of life’ and even though, as with the rest of the elements that comprise that complex, there is much that is tawdry in it, we know it is there. It is there because we have not yet ceased to will it to be there, in Shaw’s language of creative evolution.

What is this Irish way of life, and how may it be described? History will not really help here, because history, with its correct insistence on consecutiveness, events, discontinuities, fractures, leads us back into the dilemma. If Irish culture has survived, and a good deal of evidence tends to suggest it has, then it will have done so by preserving itself through change. It will have been able to change because it will have held on to the basic patterns, the deep structures; it will have held on to them by changing them in ways that help to accomplish fuller and more extensive expression.

Irish culture is preoccupied by continuity. But that does not mean that it will always be continuous. Indeed, we may suspect that if a culture is preoccupied by continuity it may have acquired a very highly developed awareness of the presence and pressure of discontinuity. Joyce’s Citizen in the ‘Cyclops’ episode of Ulysses is fanatical in his insistence on the continuity and purity of Irish culture. He is the apotheosis of the cultural nationalist. He wants Ireland to be a fixed thing, defined by him, and there is only one opinion on all matters pertaining to Ireland: his. He wants to annihilate all variations of opinion and subject them to his ordinances and prejudices. There is a superb ironic play going on in Joyce’s text: the inflexibility of the nationalist Citizen, the Cyclops, comes out of a fixation with Britain that dominates every aspect of his thought. He becomes what he hates. His nationalism is a mirror image of the imperialist authority he professes to despise. The one-eyed Cyclops really wishes to convert all the problematic twists and turns of Irish life and history into a continuous narrative of his own devising, which he can weave and unweave on the spot, picking up a personal irritation, a private spleen, and making it part of the overall pattern. The Cyclops dominates through his language; he must, in each of his words, preside over the moment, and seek to prevent his story from straying too far away from a fixed and determined view. This is a strain, a code, a method, very dominant in Irish culture. In music it is repetition; in bardic verse it is the emphasis upon formal perfection, where this aspect of poetry dominates almost completely. When one reads a conventional bardic poem addressed to a chieftain the pleasure resides not in the originality of the approach, or in the shocks of surprise that the linguistic effects may offer; rather the pleasure resides in the very lack of these. Each quatrain aspires to be a repetition, with some variation, of a previous quatrain. The reading of the poem, or its recital, is merely an occasion to facilitate the moment when the unity of Irish culture, its singleness, its one-eyed coherence, may be seen.

This is a highly original poetry in the proper meaning of the term, in that it is preoccupied by harking back to the origin. It takes its situation, often the situation of inauguration, where the chief’s assumption of authority is celebrated, and links it with other inaugurations; compares its subject with other heroes in Irish or classical tradition; and generally establishes the event which is the occasion of the poem as one with many precedents in myth or history. As an art it is entirely traditional, and deeply attentive to continuity.

All literature, it may be said, will have a tendency to move towards stasis, the negation of that very activity of spirit and mind that we expect in works of imaginative vision. However, if we think more closely, this negation, this movement towards stasis, is actually a powerful element in the complex interactions between stasis and activity, between death and life, that go on and that announce themselves in the rhythms of poetry and in the designs of art. But what is remarkable in Ireland, as, for example, in Japan, are the long periods during which an art will not develop at all, or develop only slightly, so strong and powerful are the attractions of the rapture of stasis. Only a culture of great antiquity can allow itself these long static ecstasies of negation, and still survive. Such a culture knows that stasis is one side of the question; that the other side is all frenetic activity and manifold experience. And it is this manifold nature of being itself that is announced to us in that speech of Manannan’s in the seventh century Immram Brain (The Voyage of Bran), where he speaks of the different ways of seeing that are possible. Bran is sailing in his coracle when the sea god speaks:

The light of the sea you are on,
the brilliance on which you row,
has put forth yellow and green;
it is solid land.
Salmon leap from the womb
of the white sea on which you gaze,
they are calves, lambs of pure white,
in amity, without hate.³

Manannan’s vision is the opposite of the Cyclopean fixedness. It is related to the voyaging forth which is the mark of the immram, or voyage tale, which itself is a genre of tale that concentrates a characteristic tendency to formulaic repetition and stasis. In Manannan’s vision the signifiers float into the realm of metaphoric free play. To find an opposite for Manannan in Irish mythology one could look to Balor who, in Cath Maighe Tuireadh (The Battle of Moytura) is opposed to Lugh. Balor, a Fomorian, is associated with darkness, negation; while Lugh, one of the Tuatha Dé Danann, is linked to the sun god (Lughnasa: August) and is known as the Samildanach—’possessing many arts together’. Balor is a Cyclops with a poisoned eye; Lugh is manifold and is related to the Manannan of the Immram Brain.

We may sum up and say that the preoccupation with continuity in Irish culture and literature is linked to a desire for stasis and negation, a human desire, by no means confined to Ireland. Against this, in Irish culture, in culture generally, and continually begot by and begetting its opposite, there is a desire for variation and ceaseless change. A tension of this kind probably underlies all creative activity, and indeed probably lies at the root of language itself.

In language there is a desire to mean, which involves a desire to restrict the play of the possibility of variance in signification; on the other hand there can be no meaning without the arbitrary nature of the sign. Change and stasis continually re-create one another.

My proposition is very simple: the validity of any culture, its strength, will depend on how thoroughly it remains attentive to the interaction between change and stasis. The validity will not depend on local circumstances, otherwise there could be no general statement about the nature of culture, although the ‘minute particulars of mankind’⁴ will be taken up and revealed and filled with wonder in the interplay of change and stasis. If this is true then the actual language itself in which literature is made at any time matters less than that the interaction we have been speaking of should take place. But the interaction may not take place if one of the poles, of change or stasis, is at any time too dominant. A culture may receive a shock, as we may say that Irish culture did in the nineteenth century; and its reaction may be to seek to be static, or to hand over its being, temporarily, to another culture, in Ireland’s case that of Britain. All venture for change then, all the free play of the signifiers in such a circumstance, may be inhibited; or the impulse to stasis may convert them into dead repetition, negative cyclicity, Cyclops.

Such a period of stasis occurred in Ireland in the nineteenth century in certain areas of culture. But again, students of literature should always remember that culture comprises many things. There was a great deal of other kinds of cultural activity in nineteenth century Ireland; a period of stasis, admittedly, in the literary arts. The arts of language were being worked and deployed in other areas: politics, propaganda, social organization. Those interiors to which the creative arts pay attention may not have been voiced, but O’Connell, Davis, Parnell, in their different ways, were developing what would become the modern Irish way of life. By the end of the century those interiors to which literature and its culture turn, and without which any culture is incomplete, were ready to break from stasis and voyage forth again in variance, difference and change. This is what we call the Irish Literary Revival. It came with such force and strength because of the waiting. At last the waiting could no longer continue and silence had to be broken. The full interchange between change and stasis had to take place again in the literary arts. Yeats arrived and opened up the interplay between change and stasis.

Yeats promoted change by seeking radical continuity, and in searching for that he was venturing into areas of experience, mythology, folklore, and so on with a freshness of address not hitherto seen. He linked these enquiries to the search for the interior that was taking place again in the culture of Europe in the late nineteenth century. He made continuity all the stronger and more radical, all the more charged by change, because of the effort of will required to accomplish it. The tendency to stasis and that to change, the need for continuity and the desire to sally forth and open unforeseen ways of being arrive together in his language, which strains to accommodate a full complex apprehension of what it is like to be.

All of this may be summed up in section III of ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’—the section called ‘My Table’. Yeats has been writing of the problems surrounding continuity, of what can be handed on through the generations. Ancestral houses are built by wild and bitter men, trying to find continuity and stillness, but their heirs may grow soft in leisure. He comes to his own case, his own house, the Tower at Ballylee, which is not a place for soft leisure, but a place to ‘exalt the mind’, a ‘befitting emblem of adversity’. Then he considers his writing table, where a Japanese sword lies, a symbol of changelessness. He thinks of the highly formal, continuous and often static culture that produced it—that of Japan—and is excited by the capacity for stasis and for waiting in that culture. And then the awareness of the poetry opens out, sallies, into the realization that changelessness must embody change, each must charge the other. As the awe of the poetry mounts he considers how a Japanese aristocrat walking in the countryside, in all his formality and sternness, carries an excitement because his mind continuously awakens into difference and variation. As the section concludes, Yeats says: ‘it seemed/Juno’s peacock screamed’: a scream of wonder, excitement, terror and joy, to celebrate the interaction of stasis and change that underlies being and language. This poetry, highly formal, carefully worked, is a kind of fury of wonder at life itself:

• Two heavy trestles, and a board
• Where Sato’s gift, a changeless sword,
• By pen and paper lies,
• That it may moralise
• My days out of their aimlessness.
• A bit of an embroidered dress
• Covers its wooden sheath.
• Chaucer had not drawn breath
• When it was forged. In Sato’s house,
• Curved like new moon, moon-luminous,
• It lay five hundred years.
• Yet if no change appears
• No moon; only an aching heart
• Conceives a changeless work of art.
• Our learned men have urged
• That when and where ‘twas forged
• A marvellous accomplishment,
• In painting or ...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PREFACE: TRANSLATION FOR THE IRISH
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• 1 CHANGE AND STASIS IN IRISH WRITING
• 2 LANGUAGE AND TRADITION IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
• 3 GEORGE MOORE: ‘THE LAW OF CHANGE IS THE LAW OF LIFE’
• 4 W.B.YEATS: ‘THE WHEEL WHERE THE WORLD IS BUTTERFLY’
• 5 J.M.SYNGE: ‘TRANSFIGURED REALISM’
• 6 JAMES JOYCE: ‘HE RESTS. HE HAS TRAVELLED’
• 7 JOYCE CARY: ‘WONDERING AT DIFFERENCE’
• 8 FRANCIS STUART: ‘WE ARE ALL ONE FLESH’
• 9 SAMUEL BECKETT: ‘MATRIX OF SURDS’
• 10 MÁIRTÍN Ó CADHAIN: ‘REPOSSESSING IRELAND’
• 11 SEÁN Ó RÍORDÁIN: ‘RENEWING THE BASIC PATTERN’
• 12 BRIAN FRIEL: ‘ISN’T THIS YOUR JOB TO TRANSLATE?’
• 13 SEAMUS HEANEY: ‘LEAVING EVERYTHING’
• 14 MOVEMENT AND AUTHORITY: ‘SUDDENLY YOU’RE THROUGH’
• CODA: SEERS AND DANCERS
• NOTES