Understanding Contemporary Irish Fiction and Drama

Margaret Hallissy

• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781611176629
• eBook ISBN: 9781611176636
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

A study of the key themes and events essential to understanding Irish fiction and drama

In Understanding Contemporary Irish Fiction and Drama, Margaret Hallissy examines the work of a cross-section of important Irish writers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries who are representative of essential issues and themes in the canon of contemporary Irish literature. Included are early figures John Millington Synge and James Joyce; dramatists Brian Friel, Conor McPherson, and Tom Murphy; and prize-winning contemporary fiction writers such as Edna O'Brien, Joseph O'Connor, William Trevor, Roddy Doyle, and Colum McCann.

Each chapter focuses on one significant representative piece of contemporary Irish fiction or drama by filling in its cultural, historical, and literary background. Hallissy identifies a key theme or key event in the Irish past essential to understanding the work. She then analyzes earlier literary compositions with the same theme and through a close reading of the contemporary work provides context for that background. The chapters are organized chronologically by relevant historical events, with thematic discussions interspersed. Background pieces were chosen for their places in Irish literature and the additional insight they provide into the featured works.

Chapter 1

“Nothing can happen nowhere”

A Place in the World

“Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.”¹ Novelist Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973), in “Notes on Writing a Novel” (1945), points to the significance of setting in drama and fiction; where action happens is intricately bound up with what happens (plot), who causes it to happen (characterization), and what key idea or impression the work conveys (theme). Just as the reader of a historical novel set in the American South during the Civil War (say, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind) is expected to know that “the South” is shorthand for a set of beliefs and behaviors, readers of Irish writing need to know what various places mean—for they certainly do mean. The physical setting not only provides a stage set or a backdrop for the activities of the characters, but also explains, literally, where they are coming from. While writers often ring changes upon conventions regarding place, it is important to understand what those conventions are, so as to see when they are being altered and for what purpose.

First and most obvious, Ireland is an island. Dictionary definitions of the word island include elements such as the following:

Small, not big enough to be called a continent;

Surrounded by water, therefore taking part of its sense of itself from the ocean that surrounds it;

Isolated, insulated, insular, from the Latin insula (island), with all the connotations of limitation included in these terms.

Small and isolated though it is, the land mass of Ireland contains two countries. The 1920 Government of Ireland Act divided Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom (UK), from the larger Republic of Ireland, which was once part of the UK but is now an independent country. This arrangement, regarded as imperfect even by those who signed the original treaty, was long a cause of political unrest, particularly in the North. The terms Loyalist and Unionist refer to those who advocate the current arrangement, who are loyal to, and therefore wish to be united with, the UK. In contrast the term Republican or Nationalist refers to those who support Ireland’s existence as a political entity separate from Great Britain. A third category, actually a subcategory of Republicanism, encompasses those who are not satisfied with the division established by the 1922 Anglo-Irish Treaty and who believe that the Republic of Ireland should encompass the whole island. This outcome would require the severance of ties between Northern Ireland and the UK, and the expansion of the Republic to include what is now Northern Ireland. For complex religious and cultural reasons, this presents a difficult problem. And while in Irish life all these definitions are the subject of disagreement and admit of subtleties, as political categories do in any country, the reader of Irish literature must at minimum understand the broad outlines of these political differences.

One matter that requires clarification is the fact that some parts of Ireland located in the geographical north are not a part of the political entity called Northern Ireland. For example County Donegal, on the northwest coast of Ireland, is part of the Irish Republic. When such locations are referred to here, the reader should understand that “the north of Ireland” does not equal “the North” or “Northern Ireland”; the prior conventions of capitalization should help make clear this important distinction between directional north and political North.

While there are many Catholics in Northern Ireland and Protestants in the Republic, in general the political distinction suggests a religious one as well, in that Unionists or Loyalists in Northern Ireland tend to be Protestant, while Republicans (who may live in the North) tend to be Catholic. The political loyalty is a tribal one as well, in that Protestant Loyalists tend to feel affiliation to England, the English language, and to English ways in general, while Republican Catholics tend to identify Irishness with the Celtic past and even with the Irish language.

However, the Protestant/Loyalist versus Catholic/Nationalist alignment is not absolute. Shades of opinion have existed throughout Ireland’s history, so there are Protestant Nationalists and Catholic Loyalists. Another term with which the reader should be familiar is Anglo-Irish, describing people who live in Ireland (and whose ancestors may have lived there for generations as well) but who some regard as “really” English in that they are descendants of the Planters, the Englishmen granted lands in Ireland by the British Crown, beginning in the mid-sixteenth century. From the point of view of the native Celtic population, such people will always be interlopers, will never be Irish, no matter how long their families have lived in Ireland. From the point of view of some Anglo-Irish, however, they already are Irish and have been for centuries.

Another piece of geographical shorthand is that the eastern coast of Ireland (site of Dublin, the capital of the Republic), is often identified with progress, with Europe (in the literature of the past) and the European Union (in more recent fiction), therefore with the modern and forward-looking in general. The west, on the other hand, is often identified with the traditional, with Celtic folklore, and with the Irish language. Therefore in a work of literature, unless there is evidence of a different authorial intention, the movement from Dublin to the west of Ireland will usually connote a return to traditional ways. Readers of James Joyce’s story “The Dead,” from his 1914 short-story collection Dubliners, or those who have seen the film directed by John Huston, will remember the discussion between the protagonist, Gabriel Conroy, and Miss Ivors. Her Nationalist political stance is made clear by her criticism of Gabriel for refusing her invitation to vacation in the Aran Islands, off the coast of Galway, where he can reconnect with his own country, language, and past. His preference for all things European, thus for taking his holidays in “France or Belgium or perhaps Germany,” earns him her contempt; his identification with the English language and with British culture makes him a “West Briton” in her eyes.² Were Gabriel to agree to visit the Aran Islands, he would, she believes, learn to identify with Ireland, rather than England or the European continent, and the Irish past. Joyce is not the only writer to identify movement from east to west in Ireland this way; it is a convention of Irish literature in general.

If travel west is identified with a return to traditional Irish ways, “the movement westward in space figures simultaneously as a movement backwards in time.”³ The fact that the areas of Ireland where the Irish language is spoken on an everyday basis, the Gaeltacht, are mostly in the west adds to the association of this part of the country with what some define as the true Irish character. If one were to ask “what is ‘authentic’ and what is ‘typical’ in Ireland,” the answer would be by no means clear, but “one traditional answer sees the rural elevated above the urban as a sign of Irishness.”⁴ This sentiment was articulated during a St. Patrick’s Day radio speech in 1943 by Éamon de Valera (1882–1975), then president of the Republic of Ireland, and it is crucial to understanding this association between Ireland and the countryside:

The Ireland that we dreamed of would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as the basis for right living, of a people who, satisfied with frugal comfort, devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit—a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and valleys would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contest of athletic youth and the laughter of happy maidens; whose firesides would be forums for the wisdom of serene old age. The home, in short, of a people living the life that God desires that men should live.⁵

What de Valera was doing in this speech was attempting to preserve the past, freezing what he defined as the national character as it existed in a (perhaps imaginary) Golden Age.

If geography equals authenticity, that situation is rendered more complicated by the fact that, especially in the west, tourism is a major industry, and those who visit the west as tourists—some from other countries, some from the urbanized eastern parts of Ireland itself—want a specific kind of Irish experience: “Rural Ireland offers an ideal retreat for the metropolitan mind exhausted by the rigours of the ‘real’ world. You may observe the comely maidens and athletic youths, the fine old women and the pensive old men, in their natural environment.”⁶ These words echo de Valera’s with a satirical spin, suggesting that the money to be made in the tourist trade is so significant that the inhabitants of the rural west, far from being the simple peasantry of song and story, are sophisticated manipulators of their own image. In modern times the equation west = rural = traditional = authentic might well break down; the visitor cannot be sure that what is seen represents anything like a true Irish experience. If even the Irish cannot define that satisfactorily for themselves, tourists—and readers—cannot be faulted for their confusion. Since authenticity seems to be a problem in Irish culture, why would it not be a problem in its literature? One cannot automatically assume that peasants are virtuous and city dwellers vicious; but one also cannot read these characters without the country/city stereotypes in mind.

Pondering the vexed question of what constitutes genuine Irishness, journalist Fintan O’Toole tells the story of a 1963 opening of a “spanking new high tech factory complex.” New though it was, “this factory was draped in green shamrock-spangled curtains, and the curtains were being held aside by a little Irish leprechaun in a red nightcap and big buckled shoes. It was in many ways a perfect image of modern Irish culture: an increasingly urban and industrialized reality made palatable, both to ourselves and to those whom we wish to attract, by being wrapped up in harmless rural folksy images.”⁷ If, as O’Toole believes, the Irish are falsifying their own culture to themselves, so much the more must the reader who is not Irish watch out for a certain ambiguity in the depiction of rural people and their ways. The Irish in Ireland might be doing what newspaper writer and observer of the Irish American scene Maureen Dezell feels that many Irish Americans do, which is conjuring up what she calls “Eiresatz,” phony cultural elements.⁸

Having taken note of the smaller world of the fiction—north or south, east or west, urban or rural—and how that world shapes the characters, the reader is ready to respond to the smaller levels of setting, the specific details of the place in which the story or drama is set. Whether it be house, pub, store, or any other location, this setting will in some way reflect the larger world of the fiction. In these Irish stories, certain streams of images recur. For one thing the weather, not one of Ireland’s better features, is often a backdrop to the kind of action taking place. The landscape, with its rugged and barren beauty, might compare or contrast with the nature of the characters living thereupon. Above all the sea defines the island, as does the ocean voyage, real or imagined, the promise or threat of which has loomed so large in Ireland’s history.

When the fiction is set on a particular piece of land, especially a farm, or when the land itself is a central issue in a story, the reader must see this against the backdrop of the historical antagonisms summed up in the phrase “the Irish land question.” The land question can be divided into two interrelated subquestions: Who owns the land? And by what right? The colonization of Ireland by England and the consequent redistribution of land ownership lie beneath the modern significance of land in modern Irish literature. Experts have analyzed Irish agriculture, but for the general reader the key fact is that on this small island the soil is not uniformly cultivable. Tourists love to visit the Burren, in County Clare, a rocky, barren landscape that looks like the surface of the moon. Scenic, yes, for those driving by on their way to a nice dinner; but tracts of land such as these must have looked very different to those who had to wrest a living out of the land. Quality of soil—even the mere presence of soil rather than rock—meant the difference between prosperity, subsistence, and starvation. Similarly the size of the piece of land can make its owner a “strong” farmer, something like an agribusinessman, as opposed to a smallholder, a tenant farmer, or a migratory farm worker.

In addition to horticultural factors, historical and political factors also lie behind the passion for land that is reflected in drama and fiction. Land ownership has been a contentious issue for centuries. Beginning with the Tudor monarchs in the sixteenth century, the “Plantation” system parceled out Irish land to Englishmen as a reward for service to the Crown. From the Nationalist perspective, that land was never the British Crown’s to give; it belonged to the native Celtic population, which regarded this land as theirs by hereditary right, even as the Planters regarded the land as theirs by law and by conquest. Under British rule the native Irish former owners, or their descendants, often became tenants on the same piece of land that they had once owned, sometimes answerable to an absentee landlord who delegated law enforcement and rent collecting to an on-site middleman. The effort of some of these tenants and their supporters to reclaim lands they believed were unjustly alienated is a strong theme in Irish history. Land is always fraught with symbolic significance. Therefore when the setting is a rural one, and the characters are farmers, their love for the land is the most overpowering force in their lives; to the land all else must be sacrificed.

In the time leading up to the watershed event of Irish history, the Great Famine beginning in 1845, land came to be held in smaller and smaller plots. Partible inheritance, dividing the land among heirs, allowed the sons of the family to marry young and to raise families on portions of the original, larger, family homestead. But this custom had serious consequences. Because the plots of land were so small, only a crop that can be raised in limited space, and on poor land, was feasible. Thus developed the Irish dependence on the potato. Because the potato is nutritious and can serve as the staple of a healthy diet, when the potato flourished, the population grew as well, to an estimated eight million before the Famine. Then when the potato blight hit, the farmers were not properly situated, with their marginal, less fertile plots of land, to switch to another, unblighted crop. The consequence was mass starvation and mass emigration, which, demographers estimate, reduced the population of Ireland by about half. From this demographic disaster, the population of Ireland has never recovered. Modern writers of fiction such as William Trevor and Joseph O’Connor examine the legacy of that Great Famine.

The Famine, and the depleted population thereafter, had further consequences with regard to land ownership. According to historian Paul Bew, “the Irish experience has been of foreign conquest, poverty and oppression. The most obvious and significant feature of social life was the existence of a mainly Protestant landlord class extracting rent from a mainly Catholic peasantry.”⁹ Several other factors aggravated the landlord-tenant relationship: the practice of rack-renting, or charging excessive rent; eviction or the threat of eviction (the latter of which, historian Kerby Miller says, was “alarmingly frequent” and highly effective),¹⁰ and the inability of the tenant to achieve an ownership stake in land that he nevertheless regarded as his own. This led to political and social unrest and the formation of rural organizations with three basic demands: security of tenure, a fair rent, and the right to sell land.

During the course of the latter half of the nineteenth century, and under pressure from agrarian violence, the British Parliament passed a series of Land Acts, which cumulatively “involved a transfer of the greater part of Ireland from the landlord to the peasant class.”¹¹ The degree of change achieved is illustrated by the difference between an early law and a late one. The Landlord and Tenant Act of 1860 “was based on the view that land is exclusive property of the landlord, and that the tenant’s interest is simply that of an individual who has agreed to pay a certain remuneration for the use of the land for a limited period”; accordingly the law tightened up the rules under which landlords could evict tenants for nonpayment of rent.¹² In contrast the Land Law Act of 1881 guaranteed tenants the “three F’s,” issues that had been long under contention: “a fair rent,” “fixity of tenure,” and “free sale of his interest in his holding.”¹³ Finally under the Purchase of Land Act of 1885, the tenants became the sole owners of the land.¹⁴ What happened in the intervening years to loosen the hold of the British landlord class over the land was the formation of agrarian protest movements that, often through violence, asserted the rights of the native Irish over the Anglo-Irish. The issue can be summed up thus: “Was the soil of Ireland for supporting the largest number in a sufficiency of comfort, or was it to provide a very much smaller number with a great and unnecessary abundance?”¹⁵ The answer, to the native Irish, was the former.

Land ownership also has a psychological dimension in Irish literature, in that it stands as a metaphor for male maturity. After the Famine, to prevent recurrence of at least some of the conditions that led to it, the custom of primogeniture began to replace partible inheritance. The eldest son of a family inherited the full parcel of land, but he could not marry until he did inherit. The inheritance factor, coupled with the Irish Catholic Church’s strict sexual morality, led to long periods of celibacy until one’s parents were dead, because most land passed from owner to owner via inheritance, not sale. On those rare occasions when pieces of land were available for sale, the hunger for that land often became obsession.

If land itself were not enough of a motivator, the social status related to landholding was. The difference between “smallholders,” “middling farmers,” and “strong farmers” was in the amount of land that they held. The smallholder would raise food mainly for his own family’s consumption; the strong farmer was a nineteenth-century version of the modern agribusinessman; and the middling farmer was somewhere in between.¹⁶ The amount of land a farmer owned was not only a status symbol; it was the means by which he moved beyond mere subsistence. In addition the kind of crops that a farmer could raise profitably, or his ability to devote some land to easy and profitable pasturage, was contingent upon the amount of land t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Introduction
• 1. “Nothing can happen nowhere”: A Place in the World
• 2. Just Tell Them the Story: Tradition Bearing
• 3. “The abuse of language”: Irish, English, American
• 4. An Gorta Mór: Hunger as Reality and Metaphor
• 5. “Terrible beauty”: The Easter Rising
• 6. The Big House: Symbol and Target
• 7. “Fanatic heart”: A Legacy of Violence
• 8. “Lots of fun at Finnegan’s Wake”: The Drinking Life
• 9. “But come ye back”: The Yank
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index