There are many reasons behind the publication of the In the Wake of the Rising issue of The Stinging Fly in this centenary year of the Easter Rising. Perhaps the most important one, I would say, is that any literary magazine, whether it likes it or not, is a product of the times in which it is made. Hopefully, it is also an inspirational and critical response to those times. So it was both tempting and necessary to put out a public call for submissions for this edition of the magazine, in order to engage with this year of national introspection, this year right now, 2016, this here moment. The issue would open up an alternative space for writers to re-read and respond to the events of that Easter Monday, the background and the legacy, and to the Proclamation itself, a founding document of the Republic, outside of the official events and memorials planned by the government of the day. The writers were free to respond to this material in whatever way they wanted, in any shape or form.
This spirit of immediacy, the heat of the moment, is a vital energy for a magazine these days, as much as it was for the great variety of printed material produced in the years leading up to the Rising, and after. It was the time of the manifesto, the pamphlet, the bill poster and the public lecture, the articulation of the aims and objects of clubs and societies and groups like The Co-Operative Movement (1894), The Irish Literary Theatre (1899), Inghinidhe na hÉireann (1900), The Sinn Féin Resolutions (1905), The Constitution of the Irish Citizen Army (1913) – and let’s not forget 1912, and Ulster’s Solemn League and Covenant, and the pledge to use “all means to which may be found necessary to defeat the present conspiracy to set up a Home Rule Parliament in Ireland”. Or outside of Ireland, the Futurist Manifesto (1909), Du Cubisme (1912), Wyndham Lewis’s Vorticist manifesto and the first feminist manifesto by Mina Loy (both 1914).
Padraig Pearse is said to have been responsible for most of the words in the Proclamation, with some additions by James Connolly and Thomas MacDonagh. The typesetter was able to identify Pearse’s “beautiful upright script” in the handwritten document given to him by Connolly in the secret printing press in the back of Liberty Hall. Re-reading the Proclamation, and the story of the Rising which stretches back at least as far as the era of the Irish Literary Revival and the extraordinary output of its thinkers and writers who set about trying to create an identity for the paralysed country, a national imagination, can we rekindle any of the energy of that time and use it for ourselves in our own day as we look for a better way of organising this society?
And for writers, there is another question which the magazine hopes to ask in some way: what if anything is left of the tradition of Realism, and the original design of that form to hold a microscope or a mirror, cracked or not, up to the world in order to see it better and change it? Do writers today have any interest in social change, any belief at all in the transformative role of literary culture in the life of the nation or is the feeling of a shared reality crumbling with the ice-caps? And perhaps, it might be asked, do the technological revolutions of the last few decades offer a real alternative to the traditional publishing house just as the development of the mobile guerrilla printing press did for the radicals of a century ago?
History is a story told by the victors. Or a tale touted by an idiot, signifying nothing. Or maybe it’s about the fantasies of men maddened by some woman’s yellow hair or a nightmare the artist must wake out of. The Tricolours and the copies of the Proclamation have been sent to every school in the country at the same time as history has been removed from the curriculum as a compulsory subject. “History,” Foucault wrote, “becomes effective to the degree that it introduces discontinuity into our very being.” There is no easy chronological route back to 1916. Is the ideological function of the centenary an attempt to produce a sham experience of continuity, of dubious integration, power trying to legitimise itself before our eyes, on our screens, or is it the final nail in the coffin, the lock on the cemetery gate, the last dry wake for the dream of sovereignty as this small patchily decolonised island launches itself, warp-speed, into the global future™?
“A passion-driven exultant man sings out/Sentences that he has never thought…” – that was Yeats on his quest for a new literature for a new country, for a pure de-Anglicised mode of expression. Ireland was to be made like any other work of art. Joyce opted instead for his (un)scrupulous realism. Style is everything, they would both agree. For each of them, literature was the zone of struggle to create a different type of reality than the one forced upon them. By re-imagining what I am now, and where I am, by refusing to be told, by hurting the words, I can also imagine how things might become. And in that sense, the work is always a contribution to change.
As for me, my first sight of the Proclamation was on the wall of a narrow hall of a house in the Creggan estate up on the hill in Derry, May of 1981. The house was the family home of Patsy O’Hara, the first of the hunger strikers from Derry to die on the fast for political status for republican prisoners, and I was waiting in that hall with my father in a queue that went out the door and up the street, to see the body of the 23-year-old martyr in his coffin in the front room. My father was talking to another man – about racing pigeons probably – while we waited, and to pass the time I found myself reading this creepy stained page trapped in a gold metal-work frame on the wall. It had the look of one of those Wanted Dead or Alive posters from the cowboy films but the words made me think of the yarns we had to do in Irish class about garrulous, big-thighed heroes. I had time to read it a few times before we moved up the queue and I got my first glimpse into the living room where two people, a man and a woman, were standing to attention, wearing balaclavas and black berets at the head of the coffin, and a small, grey, dented fan was spinning silently on a shelf.
On the way home in the car I asked my father what it was, this Proclamation thing. He told me to pay it no mind, that it was a death warrant, and those men who had signed it were executed by the Brits. Just for writing it? I mind asking him, incredulous, a touch awed – I knew the cops and army would shoot you at the drop of a hat or a paving stone from a rooftop but this was a new one: you could be stood blindfolded opposite a firing squad just for writing your thoughts down – and he said, Aye sure that’s what they wanted, to be ghosts, to bloody scare the people off their knees. And then he went off on his usual rant about why the people never do what you tell them to, only a good pigeon could be relied on not to act the maggot. I wasn’t really listening; I was thinking about getting back to the house and writing some massive big words in the back pages of my school jotter.
Don’t forget either, that only a few months after the first performance of the Proclamation at the GPO, the poet Hugo Ball, read aloud the first Dadaist manifesto in Zurich, which, in a rough translation, ends: “Each thing has its word, but the word has become a thing by itself. Why shouldn’t I find it? Why can’t a tree be called Pluplusch, and Pluplubasch when it has been raining? The word, the word, the word outside your domain, your stuffiness, this laughable impotence, your stupendous smugness, outside all the parrotry of your self-evident limitedness. The word… is a public concern of the first importance.”
What, reader, is your new word for Freedom?
[ stingingfly.orgOpens in new window ]
Sean O’Reilly is the author of Curfew and Other Stories, Love and Sleep, The Swing of Things and Watermark. He teaches in the Irish Writers Centre and at the American College Dublin. He also leads the Stinging Fly fiction workshops. Love Bites and Other Stories will be published by The Stinging Fly Press later this year
