ESSAY:The elements that today might form a national culture – language, religion, nationalism – are no longer so readily identifiable here, where the effect of Tiger affluence was not individualism but conformism
THINGS ARE often studied only when they start to go wrong. The end of things is the moment when we start to understand them: and only when they are understood do we begin to realise what might be lost. For instance, sociology emerged as a discipline in that era when society was no longer felt to fit like a glove. Perhaps the fairly recent development of Irish Studies on campuses is less a cause for celebration than a warning: that the identities which it sponsored were, in effect, being codified before their possible eclipse.
Such fears have, of course assailed Irish people long before now. After the defeat at Kinsale, the poets of the 1600s proclaimed the collapse of Gaelic Ireland, but in lines of such throbbing vitality as to rebut that very thesis. A tradition lived on in the lament for its passing, and ever afterward the imagination of apocalypse became a major mode of Irish writing. In the cryptic words of Samuel Beckett: “Imagination dead. Imagine”. Beckett’s imagination was vivified by failure: it was success which he found difficult, as when he described his Nobel Prize of 1969 as a catastrophe.
Tiger Ireland, likewise, never fully evolved literary forms for coping with affluence. Only the more popular genres of so-called chick-lit and crime novel engaged sustainedly with the bright lights and shiny surfaces. Strictly literary artists continued to deal mainly with the past. The more that contemporary finance broke up old cultures, the more necessary its sponsors in New York and London found it to celebrate writers who could supply vivid accounts of what had been erased.
The appeal of Irish plays in New York was that their authors still knew how to tell a good story in colourful language. In London, many of the same plays permitted English audiences to address, at a safe remove, their own unresolved national question, through the years when the Cross of St George supplanted the Union Jack at sporting events.
The lure of national cultures and identities seemed to have been rediscovered after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Liberal democrats began to turn to the nation-state for projections of identity. Tony Judt, for one, constantly expressed the hope that the nation-state might act as a brake on the depredations of global capital.
Such hopes seem naive now. The current financial crisis shows just how ill-fitted are the legal and political frameworks of even powerful states to cope with predators. Yet each community seeks still to respond in a national way, regulating the degree of pain felt by its various groups, if not the behaviour of the ultimate authors of all the affliction.
It wasn’t meant to be like this. Through the second half of the last century, those who abandoned religious practice or nationalist pieties felt that they were getting something far more valuable and useful in return – individual freedom and material well-being.
Such a crisis has occurred before in Ireland, albeit in a far more devastating way – but against a similar backdrop in which many patterns of traditional wisdom had recently been surrendered. In the 1830s, Irish people made a desperate bargain with a modernising economy by giving up their native language and culture, only to find that modernity failed them.
“It was not until the Famine struck,” writes Seán de Freine, “that the active sociocultural edifice was revealed for the barren shell it had become”. The loss of Gaelic cultural codes, before they could be replaced by new ones, exposed a terrible vulnerability in the community, as marketeers carried the day.
BUT WASN’T IT ever thus – the Irish language about to vaporise, the Irish novel about to die, the Irish theatre on the verge of extinction? True enough – but the laments of a Douglas Hyde, a Sam Beckett or a WB Yeats were informed by a definite sense of what was to be mourned, of what was being lost. The elements that today might form a national culture are not so readily identifiable. The Irish language? Gone in most places by the 1860s. Traditional religion? In free fall since the 1970s. Political nationalism? Emphatically repudiated in the Belfast Agreement. Far from being addicted to so-called core values, our people are willing to jettison them once they seem no longer of immediate use.
WB Yeats believed in a sense of place, in a mythology that married people to rock and hill. So did the socialist Bernard Shaw, who said that “the men of Ireland are mortal, her hills eternal”. Well, after the despoliation of Tara, maybe not.
In a truly democratic society, the land itself together with the wisdom of the dead and the interests of the yet unborn, would be factored into all our judgements and debates. But the “present tensism” of policies with no import beyond the last or the next election prevents such awareness. So does the decision, taken in the 1990s, to reduce the emphasis on history in the national curriculum. A whole generation has since emerged with a diminished sense of the chronology of their own culture.
And without a clear sense of the past, younger people may lack a corresponding sense of the future, in whose name they might cope with current challenges.
Sometimes, when a people are about to surrender a culture, outsiders come to its rescue. It was TS Eliot, a young man from St Louis, Missouri, who saved English poetry in the 1920s, abetted ably by other outsiders like Pound and Yeats. In the previous generation, the English novel had been reconfigured by an American named James and a Pole named Conrad – as it would be by Joyce in the next decades. All cultures which survive strongly do so because they are open to injections of new life from without.
It would not, therefore, be altogether surprising if immigrant writers from Africa or Eastern Europe reopened a dialogue with Cúchulainn and Deirdre. They may well find inspiration and new meaning in these marginal figures, who exist still as buried memories of that landscape in which these newcomers are choosing to live. The model of what Eliot did in English in 1922 is clear enough: in The Waste Landhe described a fallen, jaded city, emptied of serious human encounter, but by invoking The Fairie Queeneand The Tempest, The Fisher Kingand Brahma, he showed how seemingly lost traditions could flow like tributaries back in to the present, resacralising the landscape.
The fate of our land – with fewer crops grown on it every year, but endless ranches being created in a mode of pastoralism – suggests a people who no longer feel married to rock and hill. What they want, at best, is a pleasant view of “scenery”. Land ownership seems more important than land use, in ways that would not be true in France, whose farmers still take pride in bringing their home-grown fruits and vegetables to local markets. The Famine robbed many Irish people of their trust in nature; and thereafter they lived as squatters, who had lost the self-belief of a rooted, earthed people. The writer John McGahern often said that the moment of apparent independence in 1921, far from signalling a revival of national life, was the moment when responsibility for managing the clearance of rural Ireland (which had begun with the Act of Union) was simply passed from one elite group to another.
In that wider context, de Valera’s radio broadcast of 1943 extolling rural values takes on an insurrectionary, anti-colonial intensity. But why did most artists and journalists treat his ideas with such hostility? The exclusion of intellectuals, under conditions of censorship, from the national project after the 1920s may be the real explanation. If they had been included, they might have further developed the Yeats/de Valera themes, as the Palestinian Edward Said did at Sligo in 1986, when he proclaimed Yeats the supreme poet of decolonisation and of a reclaimed national landscape.
The Irish State was solidly established, but the cultural domain, in whose name the whole separatist agitation had been mounted, remained largely marginal, even tokenistic. The family, named as the basis of society in the 1937 Constitution, often functioned as an alternative to the social itself. By the last century’s end, despite the growth of the State, there had been a further shrinkage of the cultural “public sphere”. By then, most people owned cars in which they hurried through streets from one private experience to another. Gated communities emerged on the edge of towns, in which domestic dwellings got much bigger. It was often left to immigrants to become the most enthusiastic users of streets, parks, beaches, galleries – as if Old Ireland were retreating into privatised space.
To understand what a huge reversal this represented, one has only to think of Ulysses, in which "street people" , far from constituting a problem, are seen as vital to a full civic life. In the free circulation of persons through all of Dublin's streets, a young poet can confront his own inner strangeness by taking a late-night bread-roll and coffee with a Jewish ad-canvasser. By the 1990s such meetings seemed less and less likely. Even though the streets of Ireland contained many migrants, asylum seekers and refugees, the literature produced in Tiger Ireland (with some honourable exceptions) seemed largely incurious about the Other. Instead of attempting a total portrait of a city or society, writers tended to focus on this or that sub-group.
This was the period of the property bubble, when people dreamed of owning a house with a garden in which to stoke up a barbecue for a few friends. That was a dream of privacy without loneliness. “Ireland” was now a place you entered by an act of will, on a motor-trip to the Gaeltacht, a walk through a historical interpretative centre or, indeed, a visit to a pub (and pubs were shutting down every week to make way for luxury apartments).
SOME INTREPID souls tried to challenge these trends by abandoning life in crowded anonymous cities and returning to the land. The problem was that by the 1990s, rural Ireland had itself been suburbanised, by the motor-car, fridge-freezer (filled from the nearby town), and by the erection of buildings often at odds with the environment. The whole country, as Frank McDonald noted in this paper, seemed about to become one giant suburb: people joked that Connemara might be renamed Galway 4.
The effect of all this affluence was not individualism but a strange conformism, itself a further sign of lost cultural self-confidence. This took its cue from American “lifestyles” (toned, perma-tanned, bodies clad in designer labels), which for some buttressed “self-esteem” in the vacuum left by a loss of trust in long-term personal relationships. State-run agencies, from the national broadcaster to institutes of education, which had once promoted cultural traditions, now turned over the primary direction of their affairs to accountants.
Yet these were also the years when icons of Irish culture appeared to triumph at a global level. It was often, however, the more simplified forms of Irishness which were encouraged on these circuits. Artist X might seek to write as a citizen of the world, yet in London or New York he or she was renationalised faster than any bank, as “the Irish writer X”. Finance, like crime, might be global; but writing from Ireland was always “Irish writing”, doomed to bear the stigmata of a national origin.
As the Croatian writer – I use the term ironically, of course – Dubravka Ugresic has observed: “it is easy to perform anti-nationalism, but difficult to remain a-national”. Whereas once stage Irishmen conformed at home to all the images which visitors from overseas expected of them, now Irish or Croatian writers on international circuits were compelled to do the same. “They cannot help but remind you,” says Ugresic, “of professional entertainers who know their audiences well”. As Yeats feared as long ago as 1900, they can end up exploiting rather than expressing their material.
In the global market, as Ugresic argues in her book Thank You For Not Reading, identity gives way to branding; literature makes way for celebrity books; and art becomes just another form of business.
That is the background to the tragedy of many contemporary artists and intellectuals. They have declared their embarrassment in the face of simple-minded notions of nation, faith and fatherland; and have helped to erode these forces. But in the collapse of all other “isms”, the market itself becomes the sole remaining ideology – and its idea of a Croatian or an Irish identity is Disneyesque in its naivety.
If the marketeers, who have in the days of plenty taken away so much of cultural value, are now allowed to liquidate what remains – in the name of “retrenchment” – then the world will become not just more cruel but a lot more boring.
Declan Kiberd is professor of Anglo-Irish literature at UCD and author of Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living