Culture Shock Is our newfound fascination with the memorabilia of our revolutionary past a way of supplying by proxy the idealism that is being lost amid our wealth, asks Fintan O'Toole?
In 1991, the 75th anniversary of the 1916 Rising, I was working at the Abbey Theatre, one of the few public institutions to pay much attention to an event that was still widely regarded as at best awkward, at worst dangerous. We staged two plays together, Sean O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars, itself a reflection on the 10th anniversary of the Rising, and Tom Murphy's The Patriot Game, initially written for the BBC to mark the 50th anniversary and now radically reconfigured for the stage.
For the opening night of The Plough, we had a poignant and pointed exhibit in the Abbey foyer, on loan from the Pearse Museum at St Enda's. It was Patrick Pearse's handwritten text for his most famous speech, the brilliant and highly theatrical oration at the graveside of O'Donovan Rossa that is critically referenced in O'Casey's play. The idea was to suggest a low-key but perhaps fruitful reflection on memory and reality, art and life.
The concept fell as flat as a cartoon character run over by a steam-roller. Nobody paid the slightest attention to Pearse's document. It was just an odd bit of paper stuck up on the foyer wall. Back then, such iconic documents had no magic, no whiff of sanctity. It was not just that Pearse was a deeply unfashionable figure but that historic documents in general didn't carry any great freight of significance.
If anyone were to try to do something like this now, it would probably be impossible. For one thing, the document itself would be so valuable - it would surely be worth at least €500,000 - that no museum would want to let it out and, if they did, the cost of insurance would be prohibitive. For another, the appearance of the sacred artefact would, in this context, be counter-productive. Far from being uninteresting, it would be too interesting. The play would be consigned to second place, its light dimmed in the glow of such a bright star.
Some of this, of course, has to do with money. We are all familiar with the way you look differently at a painting when you're told that it is worth €1,000 or €100 million. "Priceless" is almost the same as "worthless", but big numbers have, in our commodified world, an ineluctable glamour. And there is a circular logic to this phenomenon. An object is marvellous because someone has paid a fortune for it and they've paid a fortune for it because it's marvellous. Certain kinds of Irish historic objects have now entered into the field of self-fulfilling prophecy, where the price of one is a function of the price of the last one sold, and each step in the process ups the magical ante.
But there is something else going on too: the arrival of republican chic. Those who spent their lives in the armed struggle for Irish independence were, for the most part, poorly-off. Most of the 1916 leaders in particular died with little in the bank except outstanding debts, and left their families in various stages of penury. But they have become enormously desirable to the Irish rich. The huge sums paid out at Adam's auction for revolutionary memorabilia this week and at a similar sale last year are not coming from the pockets of the men of no property. The objects are being acquired by the most comfortable and broadly the most conservative sections of Irish society.
At the root of this phenomenon are, I reckon, two distinctive cultural forces. One is secularisation. Irish Catholicism had a deep seam of popular piety centred on relics. As tends to happen in Irish culture, this impulse has not gone away but has been transmuted into a different form. Some of it has gone into the acquisition of art, with paintings by certain artists (notably Jack Yeats) giving access - appropriately private and exclusive - to a kind of sanctity. But part of it has gone into the acquisition of objects associated with the patriot dead. In the case of the 1916 leaders, the transition is especially easy, since some of them (Pearse in particular) imagined themselves in part as religious martyrs and were quickly embraced as objects of crypto-religious veneration after their deaths. While the rub of a relic traditionally healed bodily ailments, perhaps these relics are acquired to heal psychic ailments, supplying by proxy the idealism that is being lost amid our new-found wealth.
The other force at work is broader and less specific to Ireland. One of the most intriguing phenomena in the development of modernity is the quick shift from the suppression of a particular culture to its fetishisation. The Gaelic clans of Highland Scotland were smashed at Culloden and then, via the novels of Walter Scott, glamourised by the English and lowland forces that had done so. Native Indians were scarcely broken and herded into reservations before they were feted as noble savages.
Communism had barely fallen before western businessmen were eating in trendy restaurants called Pravda and Mao and revolutionary iconography was being used to sell mobile phones. Perhaps this is what we are seeing in Ireland now. If so, the emergence of republican chic marks not the revival of violent nationalism, but the certainty that it is safely dead.