Twentieth-Century Irish Literature

Aaron Kelly

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781350308909
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This Guide surveys existing criticism and theory, making clear the key critical debates, themes and issues surrounding a wide variety of Irish poets, playwrights and novelists. It relates Irish literature to debates surrounding issues such as national identity, modernity and the Revival period, armed struggle, gender, sexuality and post colonialism.

CHAPTER ONE

Irish Literature and Criticism in the Revival

Anglo-Irish Irelands: Yeats and his inheritances

Given the political impetus behind Arnold’s Celticism, its desire to endorse and galvanize a settled and homogeneous British nation, it may seem odd that the Irish nationalist Yeats should take up Arnold’s template in his own essay ‘The Celtic Element in Literature’. But it does need to be acknowledged that where Arnold saw the different races as complementing one another in a unified British State, Yeats seeks to turn Arnold’s model against its own putative logic. Yeats argues that if Saxon and Celt are so racially, historically and culturally distinct in their identities and values, then this necessitates political separatism and an Ireland unfettered by British domination and materialism. Nonetheless – as will be discussed in due course with regard to those critical paradigms opposed to Yeats’s project – while his political intentions are radically different from Arnold’s, Yeats does broadly accept the racial designations and assumptions of Arnold’s lectures. Yeats is eager, however, to stress his deeper and more profound attachment to Celtic culture than Arnold, in a manner that helps explain the reasons for his own and Lady Gregory’s systematic effort to collect, recuperate and rewrite a disparate array of Irish folk cultural sources into a literary tradition, such as in Representative Irish Tales (1891). Yeats claims:

When Matthew Arnold wrote, it was not as easy to know as much as we know now of folk-song and folk-belief, and I do not think he understood that our ‘natural magic’ is but the ancient religion of the world, the ancient worship of Nature and that troubled ecstasy before her, that certainty of all beautiful places being haunted, which it brought into men’s minds.¹

Yeats is here trying to establish an organic connection with that folk culture, which, in turn, itself provides a direct bond with nature. Yeats contrasts this Celtic union with the natural world with the alienation from, and indeed loss of, nature in even the very best of Western European literature and its pastoral modes, so that he writes of the ancient Roman poet Virgil (70–19 BC), William Shakespeare (1564–1616) and the Romantic poet John Keats (1795–1821):

They looked at nature in the modern way, the way of people who are poetical, but are more interested in one another than in a nature which has faded to be but friendly and pleasant, the way of people who have forgotten the ancient religion.²

Thus, for Yeats, ‘all folk literature, and all literature that keeps the folk tradition, delights in unbounded and immortal things’.³ So where Arnold sought to petrify Celtic culture, Yeats endeavours to claim it as a timeless resource which is able to offer him access to a people, a collective tradition, untrammelled by the limitations of his contemporary society. To that end, he rewords Arnold’s theories about the Celts’ reaction against the ‘despotism of fact’ and thorough melancholy, which, he argues, stem from

that melancholy which made all ancient peoples delight in tales that end in death and parting, as modern peoples delight in tales that end in marriage bells; and made all ancient peoples, who, like the old Irish, had a nature more lyrical than dramatic, delight in wild and beautiful lamentations.⁴

We can discern here the implacable anti-modernity that is given directly political shape in a play such as Yeats’s Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), wherein Michael Gillane is required to renounce the material world of money, possessions and marriage in order to answer the lament of his nation personified as Mother Ireland or Cathleen. What is truly Irish, it is implied, is either that which has been uncontaminated by the material world, or that which is once more prepared to renounce the petty concerns of that world. Hence, what Ireland needs to restore to itself is not to be found in Dublin or Belfast for example, but in a realm where the artist may commune with a rural, peasant people themselves at one with nature.

It can be pointed out that the melancholy attributed to the Celtic peasant not only by Yeats but also by Arnold and Renan before him is particularly disingenuous, to put it mildly, in an Irish context, given the Famine (which directly impinges on Arnold’s lectures) and a broader history of dispossession, poverty and suffering. The social and historical conditions producing a vast Irish folk and ballad tradition of loss and lament are thus recoded and decontextualized as an immemorial metaphysical disposition. Yeats’s sense, in the above passage, that it is he and the urban intelligentsia who suffer ‘penury’, inverts the reality of social inequality in assembling a model of spiritual debasement designed to transfigure the rural poor into keepers of cultural riches. A Yeats poem such as ‘The Fisherman’ is creatively charged by its attempt to construct an ideal rural peasant to whom Yeats’s work may be dedicated in the face of an acknowledgement that such a figure does not exist, that realities may be very different. It is Yeats’s intention, however, that art is to have a transformative role, that it may redeem a society lost to materialism and philistinism. His use of the peasantry as a point of access to an ‘ancient’ world also discloses that part of Yeats’s revival mission was to repair a rupture in Irish history and tradition caused by Ireland’s subjugation and the imposition of the British culture that he sees as the vehicle of modern, materialist corruption. While the marginalization of the Irish language and the fragmentation of Irish culture prevent any sense of cultural continuity, Yeats endeavours to restore and recuperate out of that discontinuity, if not a unitary tradition, then a unity of purpose that may finally make Irish culture whole again in the present. So the lessons and achievements of antiquity that have been preserved in however disparate and fragmentary a form, the remaining repositories of Irish culture, may speak once more and assume their full meaning in the present and in the transformation of Irish national life.

Equally, Yeats’s effort to reassert a sense of Irish cultural tradition entails a rejection of the contemporary British supplanting and inferiorization of it. Part of the point of Yeats’s association of his own project and the folk culture which supports it with the ancient past is to proclaim that Ireland does have a worthy and noble culture with a history and an authority of its own. It is not merely a regional or provincial variant of British culture, nor indeed a cultural dead-end that has served its limited aims and been eclipsed by the achievements and advancements of England. The linking of the present to the ancient past seeks to circumvent the Anglicization and disruption of Irish cultural tradition, and it jointly serves to aggrandize Irish literature as being one of the formative sources of the great literary traditions of the Western world (before its contamination by Britishness). Yeats also approvingly reiterates Renan’s claim that the Lough Derg purgatory had a key influence on The Divine Comedy of Dante (1265–1321). Yeats goes on to link ‘The Celtic Movement’ with a pan-European Symbolist which includes the German composer Richard Wagner (1813–83), the English Pre-Raphaelite painters and poets such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–82), the French poets Villiers de l’Isle Adam (1840–89) and Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–98), the Belgian poet and playwright Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949), the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906) and the Italian poet, playwright and novelist Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863–1938). For Yeats, all great literatures must create ‘a sacred book’.⁵ Yeats’s own art similarly strives to produce such a ‘sacred book’, an epic Irish text to inspire and redeem the nation. His reclamation of the heroic myth of Cuchulainn in a play like On Baile’s Strand (1904), or of the many heroes of both ancient legend and more recent Irish literature and politics who people his poetry, are all enlisted to shake the foundations of a complacent, materialist society through an eruption of the sacral, restorative intoxication and power of art. Such art, Yeats intended, would reconstitute the Irish nation according to its own heroic ideals, and behind such epic idealism stands Yeats himself as the supreme artistic hero. Indeed, Yeats carefully dates the prefatory note to his Autobiographies as 25 December 1914 so that the book of his life is brought into being on Christmas Day and thereby (somewhat mischievously, perhaps) positions Yeats as the new Messiah. Though adept at self-promotion, Yeats did also more selflessly commit himself to collective projects like the Irish Literary Theatre and its commitment to advancing the work of a whole gamut of writers.

In another essay, ‘The Theatre’ (1900), Yeats outlined the goals of that national drama:

We must make a theatre for ourselves and our friends, and for a few simple people who understand from sheer simplicity what we understand from scholarship and thought. We have planned the Irish Literary Theatre with this hospitable emotion, and that the right people may find out about us, we hope to act a play or two in the spring of every year; and that the right people may escape the stupefying memory of the theatre of commerce that clings even to them, our plays will be for the most part remote, spiritual and ideal.⁶

In this excerpt there is the familiar effort to connect Yeats’s own intellectual ambitions and reading of Irish culture with a (somewhat condescendingly defined) ‘simple’ popular audience in an authentic bond that once more resists the depredations of commerce and modern life. But it is in this endeavour that Yeats builds upon the work of a number of figures in the second half of the nineteenth century who similarly sought to reconcile the intellectual and the people in the reclamation of heroic forms. The historiography of Standish O’Grady had sought to retrieve the ‘heroic period’ of Irish history, which encapsulated ‘the spirit of a whole nation’, since ‘those heroes and heroines were the ideals of our ancestors, their conduct and character were to them a religion, the bardic literature was their Bible […] The same human heart beat in their breasts as beats amongst us today. All the great permanent relations of life are the same’.⁷ And, in terms that are echoed in Yeats, this timeless transmission of these essential Irish heroic virtues is made more exigent by the sprawling corruption of the modern world, of what O’Grady terms ‘the vastness and populousness of this age’.⁸ So, as with Yeats, there is in such sentiment a deeply ingrained fear of modern society and the modern masses and a hope that the return of heroic forms will give shape and meaning to what is perceived as chaos.

The essay ‘The Necessity for De-Anglicizing Ireland’ (1892) by Douglas Hyde comparably wills the salvation of a shapeless Irish society. Hyde felt that the British occupation of Ireland had disrupted the continuity of Irish history and that the Anglicization of Ireland had ruined the autonomy and integrity of Irishness as an identity of its own. Consequently, Hyde argued, Ireland was in a ‘half-way house’, neither one thing nor the other, since people had turned their backs on the language and culture of their true Irish heritage and had instead sought to copy and emulate English culture. For Hyde, this was a doomed servility since the Irish were not English and their second-order approximation of Anglicized culture left Ireland in its present ‘anomalous position’. The political and social upheavals and failures of nineteenth-century Ireland, Hyde averred, were directly attributable to ‘the race diverging during this century from the right path, and ceasing to be Irish without becoming English’.⁹ In particular, it was the revival of the Irish language, and more generally Irish culture itself, which were vital weapons in defeating the ‘West Britonism’ – the mimicking of British culture – that had contaminated Ireland. So, in Hyde’s model, both Irish culture and nationality are ideal...