Contemporary Irish Culture and Politics (Boundary)

Burke and Tocqueville: New Worlds, New Beings

Seamus Deane

1. Revolutionaries Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville agreed in their analyses of some of the causes of the French Revolution, most particularly on the role of the ‘‘men of letters,’’ and the prestige and influence they gained as the traditional political elites lost power. This new intellectual class became what Daniel Roche has called ‘‘a substitute government, at once omnipotent and powerless,’’ 1 the product of a state that was an unhappy mixture of modern and archaic elements, in which those who once had power lost legiti1. Daniel Roche, France in the Enlightenment, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 422. In opposition to the Tocquevillean view of the enclosure of the literary intellectuals, see Keith Michael Baker, Interpreting the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 12–27; Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994), 300–304. Robert Darnton, in The Forbidden Bestsellers of PreRevolutionary France (London: HarperCollins, 1996), 194–97, both agrees and disagrees with Tocqueville about the ‘‘elaboration of a common culture’’ in the eighteenth century and the function of ‘‘literature, which had done so much to legitimize absolutism in the seventeenth century, [and] now became the principal agent of its delegitimation.’’ boundary 2 31:1, 2004. Copyright © 2004 by Duke University Press.

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macy, and those who gained legitimacy failed to win power. Burke famously contrasted this situation with that in England, where men of letters, particularly those who scoffed at traditional pieties and beliefs, were rewarded with little notice in their lifetimes and near oblivion thereafter. For Burke, this new grouping had the further disadvantage that it substituted the real world with the world of its imaginings, and then was shocked (or would have been so) to see these imaginings realized in actual practice. After the first year of the Revolution this charge was routinely leveled against the philosophes. They had indulged in visionary dreams that had become nightmarishly real.2 This was a pathology that derived from a fundamentally corrupt position that began in the powerlessness of the literary clique and ended in Jacobin dictatorship. As with the colonial predators in India and the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland, these new intellectuals and/or revolutionaries had come to regard themselves as the true representatives of the state and believed its interests were their own. Quarantined within the worlds they dominated, they became criminal or protocriminal formations who practiced violence and injustice and called it civilization. They represented a threat to the French or British states that foolishly nurtured them by policy or allowed them to flourish by default. Of the three groups, the intellectuals were the most serious threat, since they were the creators of the new modern spirit that was to topple France and threaten Europe; the colonists were unwitting conspirators in this process, since they disgraced the name and retarded the development of the institutions—the famous ‘‘British Constitution’’—that made Britain the benign alternative to French modernity. Tocqueville’s reading of the ancien régime as itself being the first revolution (and 1789 the second) initially makes a glaring contrast with Burke’s view of 1688, since Burke argued that the Glorious Revolution was as unrevolutionary as it was possible for a revolution to be. In France, the battle between the nobility and the centralization of administrative power by the Crown, the replacement of society by the state, constituted a revolution that began with Louis XIV rather than with Louis XVI.3 The absolutist state created a caste system in its readiness to exchange power for a commodified version of status without function; titles were sold like fake antiques, and 2. A well-known example would be Mallet du Pan, ‘‘Du Degré d’Influence qu’a eu la Philosophie Française sur la Révolution,’’ Mercure Britannique, no. 13 (February 25, 1799): 342–70. 3. This was recognized by both Mme. de Staël and Tocqueville. See Franco Venturi, The End of the Old Regime in Europe, 1768–1776: The First Crisis, trans. R. Burr Litchfield (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), 280–81.

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intellectual systems and opinions had the glamour of novelties traded in the salons and journals by writers innocent of the practicalities of political life. If the British ancien régime, ushered in by 1688, was, in Tocqueville’s terms, wholly unlike the centralizing French system, it did nevertheless mark a real advance in the achievement of liberty, if not of equality. Ireland, with its bad aristocracy and its peculiarly decayed version of society, was excepted from this benign analysis. In this respect, Tocqueville’s views chimed with those of Burke, although there were important differences. Tocqueville did not contrast the emergent modern society with a venerable and traditional order that must, by every rhetorical resource available, be rendered sacrosanct and timeless. On the contrary, he claimed that the centralized administrative state had concealed its operations behind an increasingly venal facade of traditional codes. His famous disagreement with Burke’s analysis of the Revolution is rooted in this. ‘‘Burke does not realize that what stands before his eyes is the revolution which will abolish the old common law of Europe; he does not understand that this is its sole purpose.’’ 4 Burke, in other words, believed the French system could be reformed, that the intermediate bodies, such as the parlements, could be revived, that a monarchy and nobility of the kind espoused by Montesquieu could be restored. He did not realize that the Revolution was already complete. The ancien régime had not been replaced by the Revolution; it had been the Revolution.5 The modern world had finally discarded the camouflage of the ancient European order Burke hastened to lament and defend.6 4. Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Régime and the Revolution, ed. François Furet and Françoise Mélonio, trans. Alan S. Kahan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), bk. 1, chap. 5, 107. 5. Simon Schama’s Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (London: Knopf, 1989) develops this element of Tocqueville’s argument ‘‘further than his account allows it to go’’ (xv). 6. See François Furet, ‘‘Tocqueville,’’ in A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, ed. François Furet and Mona Ozouf (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1989), 1021–32. The most thorough extension and transformation of Tocqueville’s claim that the Revolution completed rather than reversed the centralizing processes of the absolutist regime that preceded it is in Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern WorldSystem III: The Second Era of Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730– 1840s (London: Academic Press, 1989), 52: ‘‘The transformation of the state structure was merely the continuation of a process that had been going on for two centuries. In this regard Tocqueville is correct. Thus, the French Revolution marked neither basic economic nor basic political transformation. Rather, the French Revolution was, in terms of the capitalist world-economy, the moment when the ideological superstructure finally caught up with the economic base. It was the consequence of the transition, not its cause nor the moment of its occurrence.’’

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Besides the importance and political insulation of the men of letters and of the new moneyed interest, Tocqueville also followed Burke and others in emphasizing the importance of Paris; the historical parallel with the Reformation; the emergence of an unprecedented form of ruthlessness, manifest in the men of the new generation; and the connection between this and the antireligious character of the revolution. He followed in the steps of such commentators as Portalis, who claimed that Rousseau was right to declare that the principal objects of a society were liberty and equality, but that the consequences drawn from this by him and even more so by his followers had been catastrophic. Only in France, Portalis claimed, had writers become ‘‘une véritable puissance dans l’État’’ and had dared to assert that they, rather than the clergy, had the exclusive right to teach morality as a secular science.7 Such commentary was in part indebted to Burke, but it is also characteristic of the varied French Restoration analyses that attributed to militant anti-Christian ideologies a particular ferocity of temperament that was unprecedented in European, even human, history. Burke’s account of the arrival of this new species is resumed in that of Tocqueville and many of his liberal and conservative contemporaries; the French Revolution had created ‘‘new beings who . . . have since formed a race which has perpetuated itself, and spread among all civilized parts of the earth. . . . We found them in the world when we were born; they are still with us.’’ 8 These revolutionaries had completely overthrown the limitations, even the idea of limitation, that religion imposed. The existence of people with such radical and destructive beliefs made the possibility of a European alternative to American democracy a frightening prospect. 2. Americans In America, ‘‘while the law permits the Americans to do what they please, religion prevents them from conceiving and forbids them to commit, what is rash or unjust.’’ 9 America was not a secular country. It had reorga7. Jean-Etienne Marie Portalis, De l’usage et de l’abus de l’Esprit philosophique pendant le dix-huitième siècle (Paris: Moutardier, 1827), 2:446, 336, 434. 8. Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the Revolution, 208–9. 9. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Phillips Bradley, 2 vols. (reprint, 1945; New York: Vintage, 1990), vol. 1, pt. 1, chap. 17, 305. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as DA, followed by volume, book, part, chapter, and page numbers, where appropriate. On the idea of limitation in Tocqueville, see Marcel Gauchet, ‘‘Tocqueville,’’ in New French Thought: Political Philosophy, ed. Mark Lilla (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), 91–111.

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nized the spheres of religion and politics, but the autonomy granted to each did not rob religion of its presiding influence as a rebuke to human pride and as a system of belief that allowed the dream of an ultimate reconciliation of opposing forces within the social system to become an important feature of the country’s ideology. Such a notion, according to Tocqueville, energizes citizens to achieve perfect equality, ‘‘a chimera that draws men on and retires before them.’’ Hence the desire for equality ‘‘always becomes more insatiable in proportion as equality is more complete.’’ Americans remain close to their famous dream, always ‘‘near enough to see its charms, but too far off to enjoy them’’; from this derives the melancholy that often haunts the inhabitants of democratic countries (DA, 2:2:13:138–39).10 Yet while Tocqueville may have had serious reservations about the virtual melancholy, the increasing social uniformity, and the dullness of the American system, he preferred these to the despotic opportunities offered by the European systems, to which the idea of an ultimate social harmony was quixotic. Tocqueville’s almost mystical belief in the principle of equality as the dynamic of all modern history allows him to indicate those features in the European and the American political systems that were in or out of tune with it and therefore to make his analyses inevitably assume the form of some contrast or conflict between modern and archaic elements. This becomes in his work a governing style of argument that is certainly discernible in Burke but has for him no comparably molding force. It also persuades Tocqueville to make the rather astonishing claim that America is the only country in the world to achieve democracy without a ‘‘democratic’’ revolution, that it was, so to say, born to equality and therefore did not have to undergo the long European struggle with feudal and neofeudal systems that inhibited the growth of equality there. ‘‘The great advantage of the Americans is that they have arrived at a state of democracy without having to endure a democratic revolution, and that they are born equal instead of becoming so’’ (DA, 2:2:3:101). At the time of the American Revolution, Burke saw it not as a global event but as an internal British quarrel which, if anything, highlighted the dangers of a foolish policy that gave to the forces of religious 10. This compares interestingly with Mme. de Staël’s claim that the English are more melancholy than the French because the achievement of political liberty and virtue requires reflection, and reflection leads one to dwell on serious matters. See Germaine de Staël, De la Littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales (Paris: Maradan, 1800), and Oeuvres (Paris: F. Didot, 1836), 1:267. Notable among various anticipations of this view is J.-H. Meister, Souvenirs d’un Voyage en Angleterre (Paris: Didier, 1791), 167–68.

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Dissent a political victory in America they would never have won at home. But it was their distinguishingly British combination of Protestantism and liberty that made them, in Burke’s eyes, formidable rebels.11 For him, at that stage, settler colonies were extensions of the national ethos, although in America the dissenters’ influence (and memories) intensified the colonists’ aggravation with the authoritarian attitudes of the government in London.12 Tocqueville agreed with the Burkean analysis, although he extended it further to enhance the well-known connection presumed to exist between the commercial spirit, the ‘‘spirit of religion’’ and the ‘‘spirit of liberty.’’ The New England settlers sought ‘‘with almost equal eagerness material wealth and moral satisfaction; heaven in the world beyond, and well-being and liberty in this one’’; they were ‘‘at the same time ardent sectarians and daring innovators’’ (DA, 1:2:43). For Tocqueville, what America had retained and the French had lost was the sense of limitation that accompanies religious belief. Thus, in the light of 1789 and after, the American Revolution was more and more frequently interpreted as an example of what a true revolution could be, and its status was accordingly upgraded. Tocqueville’s comments on it have sometimes the apocalyptic nature of his comments on the French Revolution. He wants to see America as the culmination of an inevitable evolution while also believing that it was an unforeseeable and extraordinary innovation. ‘‘In that land the great experiment of the attempt to construct society upon a new basis was to be made by civilized man; and it was there, for the first time, that theories hitherto unknown, or deemed impracticable, were to exhibit a spectacle for which the world had not been prepared by the history of the past.’’ Sometimes he forgets that he had claimed America had never had a feudal past. ‘‘A democracy more perfect than antiquity had dared to dream of started in full size and panoply from the midst of an ancient feudal society’’ (DA, 1:1:25; DA, 1:2:35). But it was America’s ‘‘feudal’’ present, as represented by the slaveowning South, that was more threatening to the vision of America that emerges in the first volume of Democracy. There were indeed several Americas—one in New England, one in the South, one in the western states, and the most elusive of all, the idea of America that Tocqueville formed in 11. For an interesting discussion of Burke’s view of the American, British, French, and Irish national characters and their relation to policy, see Frederick A. Dreyer, Burke’s Politics: A Study in Whig Orthodoxy (Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1979), 60–67. 12. See Jack P. Greene, ‘‘Empire and Identity from the Glorious Revolution to the American Revolution,’’ in The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 2, The Eighteenth Century, ed. P. J. Marshall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 208–30.

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the course of his autopsy on the France that had died in the Revolution and had not yet been reborn into modernity. But feudality was not an entirely negative condition. It could be so when the political system was largely governed by a fake or bad aristocracy—like the Irish Protestant or that of the Southern states. Austerely seen, aristocracy was politically defunct; nostalgically reconceived, it became for Tocqueville a condition that had become historically unavailable, most especially to modern democracy and its leveling tendencies. All of Tocqueville’s versions of America are seen against an aristocratic European background, almost always French, and almost always rich in the virtues that democracy lacks, other than the capacity to survive.13 Precisely because there were several Americas in Tocqueville’s analysis, and because of the increasing intensity of the battle between federal and state government on the issue of slavery, he could foresee that the Union itself might not survive, even though it did not seem to him that the idea of democracy would fade with it. In his eyes, this structural tension duplicated the very French dispute that had been at the heart of the crisis of the ancien régime and remained unresolved, although Napoleonic centralization had immensely intensified the centralizing and despotic power that had been briefly challenged in 1789. It is clear that readers of Tocqueville, among them Lord Acton, adopted this potentially tragic vision of a battle for liberty fought out between local or intermediate and federal or centralizing energies. In Acton’s case, this gave him a way of understanding and participating in the disputes between the Vatican and national churches, between authoritarian fiat and the rights of the individual conscience. It is clear, too, that Acton interpreted the American Civil War in terms Tocqueville had supplied; hence, he regarded the victory of the North as a triumph of centralizing and equalizing forces over liberty. Thus, in one version at least, the United States became for Tocqueville a possible democratic future for Europe, the more purely realized because it had not had aristocratic Europe as its past.14 Such a future would 13. See Sheldon Wolin, Tocqueville between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 229–40. 14. Tocqueville’s point that America had no feudal past to repudiate is important for the socalled Atlantic thesis about the French Revolution, in which it is seen as part of a general revolution of the Western World in the late eighteenth century. See Jacques Godechot, Les révolutions (1770–1799) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963); and R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800, 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1959). According to this interpretation, the French Revolution had an American moment—up to the Constituent

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be brought about or characterized by the inescapable ‘‘equality of conditions,’’ with democracy as the companion political system. His democracy had two modalities: one is the American democracy of the first volume, analyzed in detail; the other is the type of democracy itself, the description of which belongs to the second volume. ‘‘I confess that in America, I saw more than America; I sought there the image of democracy itself, with its inclinations, its character, its prejudices, and its passions, in order to learn what we have to hope or fear from its progress’’ (DA, introduction, 14). Here Tocqueville’s acknowledged debt to Montesquieu, especially to his Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734), is heavy indeed. Also, between the traveler’s report on an existing system and the political philosopher’s typology of the political form of which that system is an instance there is often a vexed relationship. Is the report the basis for the type, or is the type the structuring principle of the report? It is a question that could be asked of Voltaire’s Lettres philosophiques ou Lettres sur les Anglais (1734), Mme. de Staël’s De L’Allemagne (1810), or Democracy in America (1835–40). In each case, another country and culture—England, Germany, America—is offered as an example or model of what France had failed to become, or of what it should acquaint itself with to supply its own defects. The descriptions of these cultures are clearly politically determined by a program or a vision of reform or renovation for France. This does not necessarily weaken them as surveys or analyses. Indeed, the analysis of and sympathy for the foreign culture are often enhanced by the implied or explicit critique of the archaic France with which they are being compared. So even those who claimed that their countries were misrepresented by these travelers or visitors were in part missing the point.15 In every case, the author was attempting to describe what seemed to him or her a new and admirable social and political phenomenon that prefigured for all who understood it the future of the world. Assembly—which was then followed by the ‘‘dérapage’’ into the Terror and protosocialism. This ‘‘true’’ revolution was resumed in July 1830. Tocqueville is certainly the most influential source for this view, although it was not, of course, unique to him. See also R. R. Palmer, ed., The Two Tocquevilles, Father and Son: Hervé and Alexis de Tocqueville and the Coming of the French Revolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987); and Alan Kahan, ‘‘Tocqueville’s Two Revolutions,’’ Journal of the History of Ideas 5, no. 46 (October 1985): 585–96. 15. Heine went so far as to give his refutation of de Staël’s book the same title; see De L’Allemagne (Paris: Calman Lévy, 1835), 7, where he calls her ‘‘this grandmother of doctrinaires’’ who has ‘‘spread abroad in France so many erroneous ideas’’ about ‘‘the intellectual revolution in my country.’’

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Letter writing, naturally given to intimacy, had been adapted to several literary variations—the public letter, the epistolary novel, the memoir, diaries, the publication of a selected or collected correspondence, or the letter(s) of real or fictive travelers whose adopted personae meditated on issues of general import, sometimes reporting on foreign cultures or indirectly or directly on their own. There was also the literary form that varied from the descriptive sketch to the tour, a form of writing that could record contemporary change, sometimes set off against a supposedly unchanging landscape, and that could claim to be ‘‘scientific,’’ by which it usually meant it had tabulated and quantified the changes it recorded, or could more modestly indicate its anecdotal or impressionistic status. Even the more political forms of commentary did not entirely abandon the personal protocols that inevitably dominated letter writing or autobiographical ventures. They obviously persist in Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, in which the new France is taken to be the foreign country under analysis, and they play an important role in Democracy in America, which is a traveler’s report on a new country and on a condition that could possibly be Europe’s future. But such writing looks for ways by which the subjective element might be taken by its readers as the basis for a profound wisdom rather than for an impressionistic observation. Mme. de Staël claimed that for such commentary there must be an effective combination of closeness and distance; this was critical for the writing of history. As she put it in her Considérations sur les Principaux Événements de la Révolution (1818), ‘‘Mon ambition serait de parler du temps dans lequel nous avons vécu, comme s’il était déjà loin de nous (I would want to discuss the period we lived through as though it were already distant from us).’’ 16 She often attempted to see what the present would look like in the eyes of posterity, and for her, the position of a foreign observer was as approximate and as available a substitute for posterity as could be found. Such distance allowed her to see the English and French Revolutions of the preceding 130 years as the third epoch in the advance of the human spirit toward its (somewhat Hegelian) fulfillment—the epoch of representative government. For Tocqueville, the enchanted phrase was ‘‘equality of conditions,’’ and for him, too, the rhetorical as well as the imaginative requirement was to see the phenomena of which he wrote in close and intense detail, as well as in the larger perspective of a movement that was embodied in the detail and that the detail embodied. The ensemble of immediacy with distance was much sought in historical writing in both 16. de Staël, Oeuvres, 2:258.

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England and France in the wake of the French Revolution, and Burke’s mode of evoking an immemorial past to ratify a present political system was widely influential in that regard.17 It is not surprising that the mid-twentieth century’s revival of interest in both Burke and Tocqueville was governed for the most part by a political agenda that saw them as counterbalances to Marx, especially in relation to the idea of global revolution. They were both, in different but comparable ways, incorporated into the West’s defense of its democratic traditions during the Cold War. Each provided a contrast between the American and French Revolutions; each provided a critique of that kind of revolution that was based on theory as opposed to one allegedly derived from history; and each claimed that those who acted from theoretic principle were liable to become fierce ideologues who would destroy the whole Christian Western tradition. The more clamantly right-wing Cold Warriors tended to draw on Burke; the more liberal or neoliberal theorists, whose chief pretense was and is not to be theoretically inclined at all, drew on Tocqueville. The central point in the middle decades of the twentieth century was to make a distinction between the French and Russian Revolutions, by claiming the first for the West and assigning the second to the East; or to say that the violence attendant on both was of the essence of revolution and that no revolution ever had achieved as much as reformism. This mode of interpretation persists, even after 1989 and the ‘‘triumph’’ of global capitalism.18 The American system, as Tocqueville understood it, produces a particular kind of citizen. The dynamic interplay between political and civil asso17. See J. W. Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Mark Salber Phillips, ‘‘Historical Distance and the Historiography of Eighteenth-Century Britain,’’ in History, Religion, and Culture: British Intellectual History, 1750–1950, ed. Stefan Collini, Richard Whatmore, and Brian Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 31–47; and on France, see Ann Rigney, The Rhetoric of Historical Representation: Three Narrative Histories of the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 18. One of the classic statements of Cold War liberalism in France is that of Raymond Aron; see especially ‘‘Alexis de Tocqueville,’’ in Main Currents in Sociological Thought, trans. Richard Howard and Helen Weaver, 2 vols. (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1965), 1:183–231; for more recent versions, see François Furet, Penser la Révolution Française (Paris: Gallimard, 1978); Pierre Manent, Tocqueville et la nature de la démocratie (Paris: Julliard, 1982), An Intellectual History of Liberalism, trans. Rebecca Balinski (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), 103–13, and Modern Liberty and Its Discontents, ed. and trans. Daniel J. Mahoney and Paul Seaton (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1988), 65–77.

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ciations and the peculiarly pragmatic and unheroic American understanding of the principle of self-interest produce a citizen who is virtuous in a new and specific way. Midway between ‘‘extraordinary virtues’’ and ‘‘gross depravity,’’ able to reconcile material prosperity and ‘‘eternal felicity,’’ skilled in organization and appreciative of public tranquility and physical well-being, this is a citizenry that is as far above the general level of mankind as it is below the extraordinary levels that can be achieved by individuals from an aristocratic society.19 There is a risk that the ‘‘virtuous materialism’’ of the American democracy might ‘‘enervate the soul and noiselessly unbend the springs of action’’ (DA, 2:2:7–11:115–33); but this is a possible defect of a very real virtue, although such virtue is not to be found in Montesquieu’s version of the republican form of government. There is no element of abnegation of the self here. Tocqueville’s new political democratic citizen is as moderate and peace loving as the new being of the French Revolution is extreme and violent. This is the icon of the new democratic system of equality; a private citizen who at one time ‘‘seems animated by the most selfish cupidity; at another by the most lively patriotism.’’ The ‘‘passion for their own welfare and for their freedom’’ is unique to the American character (DA, 2:2:14:142). Although Tocqueville regards uniformity as—alas—one of the constitutive features of democracy, it has at least the advantage of making generalizations about its citizens easier. Another way of putting it is that democratic debates appeal to humankind in general, rather than to particular nationalities or systems; ‘‘the political debates of a democratic people . . . have a degree of breadth that frequently renders them attractive to mankind. All men are interested by them because they treat of man who is everywhere the same’’ (DA, 2:1:21:93). Indeed, this is for Tocqueville one of the advantages of modern civilization; it seems to herald the emergence of a social and political type that is in accord with a general view of human nature. Such a type has outgrown the eccentricities and glamours of the aristocratic (or other) eras. ‘‘Among aristocratic nations every man is pretty nearly stationary in his own sphere, but men are astonishingly unlike each other; . . . nothing changes, but everything differs. In democracies, on the contrary, all men are alike. . . . The aspect of American society is animated because men and things are always changing, but it is monotonous because all these changes are alike’’ (DA, 2:3:17:228). It is therefore a historical inevitability 19. The great ‘‘liberal’’ narrative of glamorous individuality is Jacob Burckhardt’s Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860).

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that variety should disappear ‘‘as the men of each country relinquish more and more the peculiar opinions and feelings of a caste, a profession, or a family’’ and thereby ‘‘arrive at something nearer to the constitution of man, which is everywhere the same’’ (DA, 2:3:17:229). Even uniformity has for him its variations. American uniformity is produced within a system that allows for a variety of civic and political organizations that deflect the full force of centralized government. For the American system sponsors local politics to bring people together who might otherwise fall into the excessive isolation that individualism can create; and the connection between the general affairs of the nation and the local politics of its constituent parts is maintained. In France, centralization produced the uniformity of a political system in which individual selfishness was encouraged in order to make concerted action unlikely. The consequent forms of individualism or eccentricity might achieve exotic growth, but they remained politically neutered, private achievements. Tocqueville modified the relatively recent belief that commercial societies were necessarily freer than their less flexible and more statuesque predecessors. He goes so far as to say that when the commercial arts are cultivated in a society, the possibility of tyranny is at least as strong as the possibility of freedom. He shared with Adam Ferguson the suspicion of those who sought from the state above all else the tranquility that would allow them to enrich themselves, and he lived to see that tyrannical possibility become a reality as the despotism of Napoleon III replaced the dull and greedy régime of Guizot and Louis-Phillipe.20 The tyrannical risk also existed in a commercial culture such as America but was alleviated by the voluntary and official institutions that promoted participation in the political process. Social uniformity was distinct from political conformity. To keep that distinction alive, a particular kind of citizenry had to be created, neither glamorously eccentric nor politically obeisant. Therefore the modern individual of the American and democratic type is a generic model of the human: the more satisfactorily generic, the more modern; the more uniform, the more universalizable. The premonitions of Max Weber’s analysis of religion, bureaucracy, the rationalization of society, and the loss of charisma are unmistakable here. Weber’s visit to America in 1904 provides an even more pointed comparison, since for him, as for Tocqueville, America was the exemplary instance of the forms of organization and distress—especially ennui or melancholy—that characterized mass industrial democracy.21 20. See Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977), 122–25. 21. See John Patrick Diggins, Politics and the Spirit of Tragedy (New York: Basic Books,

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Burke had already developed extensively the argument against uniformity and the tyranny, as well as the dullness, that it heralded. But with him it had been reinforced by something more than a defense of aristocratic society as aesthetically attractive. This he certainly emphasized but added to it the appeal of such doomed and tragic figures as the French king and queen, in whom an ethical and an aesthetic tradition were dazzlingly embodied. The pathos of that disappearing civilization in Burke is the greater because of the ruinous and selfish dullness that is to succeed it. Tocqueville’s ostensibly more objective analysis of the conformity and uniformity of the commercial-democratic society reduces this Burkean appeal, but it also incorporates something of its note of regret for such an inevitable and disenchanting transition. Sainte-Beuve said that Tocqueville ‘‘a le style triste.’’ This is certainly enhanced by his rueful estimate of political possibility in ‘‘evaporating aristocratic time and expanding democratic space.’’ 22 3. Inexorable Processes Thus Tocqueville often surrenders to the belief that history is governed by inexorable processes, among which the growth of equality of conditions in the modern era is a dominant instance. It is a more ‘‘professional’’ approach than that of those historians of the Revolution who gave prominence to individuals such as Georges Danton or Robespierre and made the division between history and fiction even more insecure than it had been.23 It breeds sententiousness of a new kind, neither that of proverbial wisdom (traditional) nor that of commonplace wisdom (modern), but something that partakes of both. Yet this belief at times appears to diminish to little more than a rhetorical stratagem designed to lend to his narrative the prestige of a revelation. For he seems also to be given to the belief that every culture, most particularly the French and the Anglo-American, has characteristics 1996), 1–16. On Weber and melancholy, ennui, and anxiety, see Fredric Jameson, ‘‘The Vanishing Mediator; or, Max Weber as Storyteller,’’ in The Ideologies of Theory: Essays, 1971–1986, vol. 2, The Syntax of History (London: Routledge, 1988), 4–12; see also Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism (1919) (Cleveland: World Publishing Co., 1955), chap. 9, 236–67. 22. George Armstrong Kelly, The Humane Comedy: Constant, Tocqueville, and French Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 227. 23. The novel in the nineteenth century also changed to include this belief in the inexorable processes of law, destiny, economics, et cetera, and the loss of ‘‘individuality.’’ See Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (London: Verso, 1987), 102–3.

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that may either contravene or realize the goals of the inexorable processes he describes. As a consequence, they lose their inexorable character and become merely contingent. The historical status of the French Revolution is a case in point. If it arose from particular conditions within that country, and nevertheless spoke to humankind in general when preaching its basic doctrines, did that make it, or revolution in general, a necessary feature of the passage (or of one of the passages) to modernity? Modernity, after all, is the (quasi-American) condition in which provincial and local characteristics are subsumed into a universal nature. Tocqueville vacillates at times between seeing the Revolution as an especially vivid moment in a continuous and inevitable process or as a rupture within it. Did the centralizing tendency in French political life culminate in the Revolution (or in Napoleon), and was that part of its peculiarly French or of its specifically universal character? 24 The desire for equality had been so strong in France, he claims, that the need for liberty was ignored. But then it was, in those terms, a revolution specific to France and not necessary to the development of any universal idea of society.25 Especially after 1848 and Napoleon III’s coup d’état of 1851, Tocqueville was not inclined to look charitably on his fellow countrymen and their failure to escape the rhythmic variation from revolution to dictatorship. In effect, he sought to analyze a peculiarly French disease that had inhibited the nation from achieving the kind of liberty that had been created in Britain, a country in which he was predictably popular, not least because of his readiness to accuse the French people of infamy in their ready submission to tyranny.26 This was the obverse of their spirit of radical innovation, the will to begin history all over again—as represented by the new revolutionary calendar or by the shooting at the church clocks during even the 1830 Revolution. Having in part prophesied the February Revolution, and supported the 24. On the question of the process of centralization and Tocqueville’s dislike for what seemed an inevitable but particularly French phenomenon, see The Recollections of Alexis de Tocqueville, trans. Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, ed. J. P. Mayer (London: Harvill Press, 1948), 202: ‘‘In France, there is only one thing we can’t set up: that is, a free government; and only one institution we can’t destroy: that is, centralization.’’ See also Hugh Brogan, Tocqueville (London: Fontana, 1973), 72–76. 25. This was a question asked in these very terms in the first decade of the Revolution. See, for example, the writings of Burke’s German translator and disciple, Friedrich von Gentz, translated in Mercure Britannique 17 (April 23, 1799): 3–34, esp. 28, and Mercure Britannique 20 (June 10, 1799): 197–217. 26. See Hedva Ben-Israel, English Historians in the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 219–21.

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assault of General Cavaignac’s army on the workers, Tocqueville returned to ask anew the questions that had dominated his career. The first concerned liberty. Could it be reconciled with equality? If France achieved the latter (or was on the way to doing so), why did it repeatedly abandon the former in its revolutionary (and now socialistic) fury? Was the system of administrative centralization peculiarly inimical to liberty, and why was it so peculiarly advanced in and attractive to France? His bitterness toward his countrymen found memorable expression in his memoir, Souvenirs, written at this time; it was there also that his diagnosis and fear of centralization began to predominate over his previously assured faith in the irresistible progress of equality. These were ingredients central to his proposed work on the Revolution, but he completed only the section on the ancien régime. In Souvenirs, Tocqueville retrospectively lamented the final dismissal of the aristocracy from the French political scene in the Revolution of 1830 and the triumph of a bourgeoisie for which he had the traditional aristocrat’s contempt. In the ensuing confrontation between the bourgeoisie and the workers he saw the rights of property threatened by democratic envy and socialist theories, while the chances of the survival of liberty were sadly reduced by the bourgeoisie’s anxiety to be given, above all else, the public order and peace they needed in order to enrich themselves further.27 However, Tocqueville’s France had at least two faces; it was fatally inclined to despotism or extremism, and this made it unique; yet it was also ‘‘the democratic country par excellence,’’ and this made it universal.28 The relationships between the genius of a people, the forms or types of government, and the universal laws that history exhibited are never entirely clarified in his writings; any one of these can play a dominant role at a given time. Yet whatever the local contingencies or the peculiar characteristics of a culture or of a situation, there is no doubt that Tocqueville constantly sought and often announced what seemed to him to be universal truths or, at the least, the existence of universal laws that gave form and meaning to the diversity of human affairs. Such laws and their accompanying processes are implacable. To believe in these and to discern their development in human history is also to provide an explanation for the destruction or disappearance of those societies, cultures, or classes that stand in the way of the spirit of 27. Recollections of Alexis de Tocqueville, 3; for an extension of this reading of 1830 to that of 1848, see 86–88. 28. From the 1843 essay ‘‘The Emancipation of Slaves,’’ in Alexis de Tocqueville: Writings on Empire and Slavery, ed. and trans. Jennifer Pitts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 207. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as WES.

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progress. The ancien régime is the most famous of Tocqueville’s victims in this regard. But there were others. 4. Ireland Britain (or, more properly, the United Kingdom) clearly provided an alternative, especially after the various reforms of 1828–32 abolished (at least in principle) the confessional basis of the ancien régime state, extended the franchise (influenced in doing so by the July Revolution of 1830 in France), and therefore seemed to have taken another notable step toward the achievement of American-style equality of conditions. It seemed to Tocqueville that the reluctant granting of Catholic Emancipation in 1829 was an example of the manner in which an ‘‘archaic’’ element of the British polity—Ireland—enforced a much-needed modernization.29 It was, as I have said, inevitable that his belief in the irresistible but uneven progress toward equality should determine that he would discover in all societies a mix of modern and archaic elements. This was less the case with America, more the case with Ireland. For as Burke (and many others) had pointed out, Ireland suffered from the most bigoted and destructive of all aristocracies. The joint venture of Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont to Ireland in 1835 produced both Tocqueville’s Journey in Ireland and Beaumont’s Ireland: Social, Political, and Religious (1839), in which they both agreed that, in Beaumont’s words, ‘‘the Protestant aristocracy which in England is the very heart of all political powers, seems in Ireland to be their cancer.’’ 30 Tocqueville’s version was that the aristocracy in England ‘‘has for centuries given the English one of the best governments that exists in the world, the other, to the Irish, one of the most detestable that ever could be imagined.’’ 31 However, under Daniel O’Connell, the immiserated Catholics had formed into a political nation; this phenomenon attracted a great deal of attention in France, particularly among French liberal Catholics such as Félicité Lamennais and Charles de Montalembert. In fact, Montalembert’s essay in the 29. This is Beaumont’s view even more than it is Tocqueville’s. See Seymour Drescher, Tocqueville and England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964), 116–17. According to Beaumont, ‘‘Britain might still, through Ireland, be concretely fitted into the world-wide democratic movement.’’ 30. Gustave de Beaumont, Ireland: Social, Political, and Religious, 2 vols. (London: R. Bentley, 1839), 1:316. On Tocqueville, see J. P. Mayer, ed. and trans., Journeys to England and Ireland (London: Faber and Faber, 1958); and Emmet Larkin, ed. and trans., Alexis de Tocqueville’s Journey in Ireland (Dublin: Wolfhound, 1990). 31. Larkin, Tocqueville’s Journey in Ireland, 83.

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journal L’Avenir, ‘‘Du Catholicisme en Irlande,’’ in January 1831, clearly signaled that the alliance between Catholicism and democracy in Ireland was a lesson to France, most especially, since the Catholic faith present there was of a strength and steadfastness long lost to the French. Tocqueville and Beaumont agreed; like Montalembert, they admired the Irish Catholic combination of a political commitment to democratic change with loyalty to religious belief. This was where the French had gone wrong; in abandoning all religious belief and practices, they had abandoned restraint. It was this Catholicism that made the O’Connellite movement so formidable. It was a force for and a principle of cohesion, made more effective by a clergy that had the support of their flock and was further consolidated by the hatred and contempt shown them by the members of the Protestant establishment, whose powers were fading but whose persisting animus latterly exhibited itself in the Orange Order and its provocative marches.32 Disavowing the standard accusation of Catholicism’s affinities with despotism, Tocqueville saw the Irish Catholics, both at home and as emigrants in America, as inclined by their faith and by their experience to support the cause of democracy. About fifty years ago Ireland began to pour a Catholic population into the United States. . . . These Catholics are faithful to the observances of their religion. . . . Yet they constitute the most republican and the most democratic class in the United States. . . . I think that the Catholic religion has erroneously been regarded as the natural enemy of democracy. Among the various sects of Christians, Catholicism seems to me, on the contrary, to be one of the most favorable to equality of condition among men. . . . On doctrinal points the Catholic faith places all human capacities upon the same level; it subjects the wise and ignorant . . . it confounds all the distinctions of society at the foot of the same altar, even as they are confounded in the sight of God. If Catholicism predisposes the faithful to obedience, it certainly does not prepare them for inequality; but the contrary may be said 32. See Beaumont, Ireland: Social, Political, and Religious, 1:276–83; 2:55, 312–13; Larkin, Tocqueville’s Journey in Ireland, introduction, 7–12. The commentary on Orange provocation is extensive; see, for instance, John O’Driscol, Views of Ireland, Moral, Political, and Religious, 2 vols. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1823), 2:127–35; John Gamble, Sketches of History, Politics, and Manners, in Dublin, and the North of Ireland in 1810 (London: Baldwin, Cradock and Joy, 1826), 269–71; and Francis Plowden, An Historical Disquisition Concerning the Rise, Progress, Nature, and Effects of the Orange Societies in Ireland (Dublin: Coyne, 1810).

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of Protestantism, which generally tends to make men independent more than to render them equal. Catholicism is like an absolute monarchy; if the sovereign be removed, all the other classes of society are more equal than in republics. (DA, 1:17:300–301) The Catholic religion had, then, this particularly strong cohesive force that lent stability to a political community otherwise dispossessed. The various attempts to revive French Catholicism as a political and a religious counter to the secular radicalism of the Revolution drew heavily on the notion that a traditional, communal religious faith would help preserve the culture of the old world and at the same time greet (or at least accept) the political forms of the new. Irish Catholics, especially in their most recent political reincarnation of 1823 as the Catholic Association, and the achievement of Catholic Emancipation in 1829, seemed to offer an example of how this could be done. In Tocqueville’s account, Catholicism favored equality, Protestantism (although not in its Irish mutation) favored liberty. The heart of his and of Beaumont’s inquiry into the United Kingdom’s system was to see if it could make the transition to democracy without undergoing revolution. Catholic Emancipation and the Reform Act of 1832 seemed to indicate that it would. Those seriously disaffected and previously excluded from the political system had been given the first installment of a promise that they would be integrated. National solidarity could thereby be sustained. The French Liberal Catholic attempt to understand Ireland’s role in the modernization and democratization of the British State was a serious effort to save both religion and the revolution—to show that traditional attachments were necessary for the preservation of liberty and the extension of equality. Some twenty years later, a similar attempt was made by Cardinal Newman through the promotion of the idea of a Catholic University that would save the British Empire, or perhaps all English-speaking peoples, from the alienating and secularizing effects of a militant liberalism of the kind associated with the British Whigs, the Edinburgh Review, and utilitarianism.33 These views on the Irish Catholic question and on the wider issue of liberal democracy could be said to owe something to Burke’s complicated arguments about the necessity of retaining the integrity of local cultures within an imperial framework. He had deployed these arguments with increasing ranges of intensity in relation to America (or to the thirteen colonies), Ireland, and India. But the preservation of a culture’s integrity is per33. See my essay, ‘‘Newman, Ireland, and the Conversion of the Empire,’’ in Foreign Affections: Edmund Burke, Europe, and Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 2004).

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haps only as persuasive as is the notion of the ‘‘culture’’ that is operative within or through it. Further, there is not—at least there is not in Burke— any accompanying or consequent threat to the imperial framework. As is regularly the case with apologias for imperialism, the ‘‘local’’ must be either nurtured or supplanted by the dominant culture, in the belief or under the pretense that the imperial culture represents ‘‘universal’’ values. This is a position Burke does not wholly occupy, but neither does he ever desert it entirely. The violence and rapacity of the Irish Protestant Ascendancy and of the East India Company’s employees stained (he believed) the reputation of Britain, although quite how the imperial venture could be sustained without these unlovely qualities seemed beyond the range of his consideration. Perhaps what he wanted was a system of softening and disguise, one whereby initial violence would ultimately be forgotten in the afterglow of imperial consummation. But insofar as Burke thought of imperialism as an improving or modernizing project, he thought that it, as much as the process of nation building, needed to learn the arts of reverence toward ancestry, antiquity, historical survival. The deep time of Irish or Indian civilization should have been an educative influence on the British colonial system, eliciting reverential awe rather than stimulating hatred or contempt; such ancient civilizations and their laws and practices constituted versions of the Political Sublime.34 5. Algeria In response to revolutionary fears or threats, and in pursuance of national stability, European states in the nineteenth century extended the suffrage and reformulated national identity. Such identities were, as before, defined in relation to others within the European system. But the French Revolution and the reaction against it, especially the Burkean version of reaction, had created the not entirely commensurable notions of a universal language of rights and of a specific European civilization of Christian nations, economically powerful and culturally sovereign. As Tzvetan Todorov has argued, it therefore became possible for those who, like Tocqueville or John Stuart Mill, regarded themselves as liberals to hold to ethical positions on relationships between individual persons, but to abandon these 34. See Saree Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 100–106; and Immanuel Wallerstein, After Liberalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 93–102.

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or to regard them as inapplicable or quixotic if extended to relationships between nations.35 So it was possible for Tocqueville to write eloquently about the institution of slavery and to call for its abolition, partly on the grounds that France, of all nations, should be in the vanguard of such a crusade; yet, at the same time, and without showing any awareness of contradiction, he could support French policies in Algeria that were of a piece with those of all European imperial powers—murderous, rapacious, and pursued in the name of the extension of civilization to a barbarous people. In this case, the unfortunate barbarians were the Algerians. The July Revolution and the occupation of Algeria belonged to the same year. For the remainder of his life, Tocqueville believed and argued that colonial possessions would help give to France the sentiment of pride and unity it required, reducing the prospect of internal revolution by providing the nation with a universal mission that would knit all classes together in a common enterprise. The development of liberty in France would be stimulated by the arrival of colonialism in Algeria. State violence, deployed at home in the interests of stability, could be exported in the name of progress—often by the same generals, particularly Bugeaud, Cavaignac, and Lamoricière.36 Tocqueville’s various recipes for the French colonization of Algeria were devised to make the successful exploitation of the country politically advantageous to France, first by increasing her prestige, and, second, by making the place economically advantageous to the colonists. In his 1841 ‘‘Essay on Algeria,’’ he distinguishes between domination (like the English in India) and colonization, recommending that France should begin with the first and use that as a means to partial colonization (WES, 92). Domination is the less attractive, because it leaves everything in the hands of military men. Bugeaud, he admits in the debate in the Chambre des Députés in 1846, has ‘‘rendered a great service to his country on the soil of Africa. . . . He is the first to have applied, everywhere at once, the type of war that in my eyes, as in his, is the only type of war practicable in Africa. He has practiced 35. Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 198–201. 36. See Todorov, On Human Diversity, 191–206. Soldiers under Bugeaud’s command killed all the occupants of a house in the Rue Transnonian on April 15, 1834, in the course of quelling a republican insurrection in the Marais district of Paris. Daumier commemorated the event in a lithograph. See also Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 699– 700, 717. Lamoricière, a relative of Tocqueville, makes an unflattering appearance in the Recollections, 256.

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this system of war with an unequaled energy and vigor’’ (WES, 122). It is a system Tocqueville initially distinguishes from the ‘‘Turkish manner, that is to say, by killing everything we meet.’’ On the other hand, he finds that there are men in France, whom he respects, who ‘‘find it wrong that we burn harvests, that we empty silos, and finally that we seize unarmed men, women and children.’’ These are unfortunate necessities, not required in Europe because there ‘‘we wage war on governments and not on peoples’’ (WES, 70). Still, Bugeaud’s savage methods were ineffective because he resisted the establishment in Algeria of civil government, preferring only a military domination. Tocqueville saw the risk that military exploits prosecuted abroad in the name of the nation, and its civilizing mission to the world could win glamorous reputations for successful officers and glorify the military profession—a legitimate anxiety, given what almost immediately happened in France and what was to happen in the same decade in Britain after the brutal suppression of the Indian Mutiny (1857–58). He feared that a French general who had made a reputation in Africa might return ‘‘on the stage of public affairs. God save France from ever being led by officers from the African army!’’ (WES, 78; see also 244–45n). Yet Tocqueville supported precisely such a person, General Cavaignac, particularly during the June days of the 1848 Revolution, when he displayed in Paris a ‘‘system of war’’ that could have been called unimpeachably ‘‘African’’ (WES, 122). Thus, Tocqueville’s policy is to develop a system of colonization and war together; to teach the indigenous population that it will eventually gain advantages from this colonization; to abolish slavery in the French colonies; and to avoid beginning the ‘‘history of the conquest of America all over again.’’ For the bloodshed that accompanied that conquest would now ‘‘be a thousand times less excusable,’’ since now, ‘‘in the middle of the nineteenth century,’’ the French ‘‘are far less fanatical, and we have the principles and the enlightenment the French Revolution spread throughout the world’’ (WES, 146). The blend of nationalist and colonial, enlightened and barbarous elements in his attitudes are classically those of European liberalism. Tocqueville’s distress at the genocide of the Indians in America and the slavery of the Africans imported into the New World sits oddly with his support for such exterminatory policies in Algeria. Yet the contradiction helps the more to isolate the problem he raised in relation to America and refused to consider in relation to France: Was there an inevitable connection between modernity and crimes on this scale? Were these peoples victims of the inexorable forces of progress, and was it therefore right to join with history and side with modernity in erasing such barriers to its final expan-

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sion? It seems that his answer had to be yes, but he could not give it directly, at least not where France was concerned. Like Burke, he sensed that the alliance between modernity and colonialism was atrocious in its consequences, but he refused to consider if these were constitutive of modernity, implying instead that they were one of its mysteries or one of its by-products. Alternatively, the process could be assigned to the ‘‘nationalism of the statenation, which created the imperial state,’’ as Philip Bobbitt puts it; in order to aggrandize the State, ‘‘which was the deliverer of national identity and political liberty, other nations were subjugated and alien institutions imposed upon them.’’ 37 There is no gainsaying Habermas’s argument that the broadening of the ‘‘public sphere’’ into ‘‘public opinion,’’ effected by the extension of the franchise, undermined the liberal conception of what an enlightened public discourse might be. Once the plebeian element entered, or, in Tocqueville’s earlier and prescient terms in relation to America, once the ‘‘tyranny of the majority’’ became a reality, the liberal support for democracy transmuted into a support for an aristocracy of talent that tried to disguise itself as democracy.38 This was also true in colonial terms, although in a much more brutal sense. Colonies and empire were politically useful because they provided a national and nationalist solidarity that class division threatened. In place of class, an ideology of race was formed. This ideology was crucial to, not antithetical to, European liberalism. Their true opponents were socialists and Marxists, although even they had difficulty in disengaging themselves from the appeal of a racial ideology that supported the idea of universal progress and the fantasy of local superiority.39 Tocqueville was an aristocrat who envisioned the New World; Burke was a new man who reenvisioned the aristocratic world. Burke successfully provided an ideology of tradition for the new imperial power when it faced its most critical challenge; he defined the British system as the alternative to revolutionary doctrine and violence, but was consistent enough to find that it 37. Philip Bobbitt, The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History (New York: Knopf, 2002), 153. 38. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), pt. 4, chap. 15, 129–40. 39. See Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, Publishers, 2001), 88–100, 293–307. The most powerful analysis of the contradictions of the British liberal position and its relation to Burke’s writings, particularly on India, is Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

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was at best difficult to reconcile it with colonial or imperial violence. Tocqueville reread Burke’s analysis of the Revolution. In effect, he demoted it from the bad eminence Burke assigned to it in world history and absorbed it into a process or movement that had found one mode of realization in the United States and was implacably pursuing other modes in France and in Britain and Ireland. Yet it seemed to him, as to many other liberals, that it was possible to identify the national spirit of France or of Britain (or of Europe) with that inexorable process that could be aided in its realization abroad by the development of colonial systems and at home by the arrival of a democratic polity that would somehow preserve for intelligence the senior role formerly accorded to blood. There were indeed ‘‘new beings’’ in the world; revolutionaries indeed but also the soldiers of the imperial autocracies of the European nation states. For him, opposition to the first group led, by a logic that might be thought to be inexorable, to support for the second.

Ireland, America, and Gothic Memory: Transatlantic Terror in the Early Republic

Luke Gibbons

For a people who made much of their ‘‘newness’’—their potential, freedom, and innocence—it is striking how dour, how troubled, how frightened and haunted our early and founding literature truly is. —Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark Much has been written about the influence of the frontier and the ‘‘native other’’ on the making of American culture. What is not so often acknowledged is the impact of another frontier, that of the Atlantic and the immigrant, or ‘‘alien’’ other, on the foundational fictions of modern America. It is true that, in terms of historical grievances and political trajectories, both frontiers represent very different presences on the political landscape: the Native American is territorially defined and seeks to retain—or regain— tribal land; the immigrant, by contrast, has forsaken the homeland and has chosen to reinvent himself or herself in the New World.1 Moreover, both 1. The Atlantic and the notorious Middle Passage also carried millions of involuntary ‘‘immigrants’’ in the form of African slaves. In what follows, I hope to show that in a number of crucial ways, the ‘‘alien,’’ and more specifically the Irish émigré, acted as a crucial destabilizing medium, contravening clear boundaries between white civility and the savagery of the Native American or African American other. boundary 2 31:1, 2004. Copyright © 2004 by Duke University Press.

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make very different claims on the body politic: multiculturalism has emerged as the rubric under which immigrant populations have sought inclusion in civil society, but it hardly suffices to address the enormous injustices, ranging from dispossession and racial discrimination to genocide, that have been committed against indigenous peoples.2 It is this latter consideration that weighed heavily on the conscience of the emergent republic and lay behind the myth of innocence, the determination not only to break with European prehistories but to wipe out the very notion of ‘‘the sins of the past’’ that informed the American Enlightenment. It is not that the past is denied: what is questioned is its relevance for the present. As Leslie Fiedler has put it, there is ‘‘no attempt to deny our outrage as fact’’: rather, the stance toward the ‘‘coloured man,’’ whether African American or Native American, is ‘‘as if our offence against him were long ago remitted, were never truly real. And yet we cannot ever really forget our guilt; the stories that embody the myth dramatize as if compulsively the role of the coloured man as victim. . . . The immense gulf of guilt must not be mitigated any more than the disparity of colour.’’ 3 The myth of primordial innocence in the New World was counterposed to the cost of civilization and progress in the Old World, costs that were felt to be too high in terms of human suffering for the architects of the American dream, not least Frederick Jackson Turner, the great ideologist of the Frontier. As a young scholar, pondering on the narrative genres that made sense of historical experience, Turner had little difficulty in assigning tragedy to the annals of the European past, for all its glories and splendors: ‘‘The history of humanity has been a romance and a tragedy! In it we read the brilliant annals of the few who seemed born to reap the fruits of the earth. . . . But the tragedy of humanity! Millions groaning that one might laugh.’’ 4 It is striking that in his depiction of European 2. Jon Stratton and Ian Ang, ‘‘Multicultural Imagined Communities: Cultural Difference and National Identity in the USA and Australia,’’ in Multicultural States: Rethinking Difference and Identity, ed. David Bennett (London: Routledge, 1998), 159. Their comments indicate that the contestation of territory and culture also shows how race may extend beyond color or epidermal schemas—a factor crucial to discussions of race and colonialism in an Irish context. 3. Leslie A. Fiedler, ‘‘Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!’’ in An End to Innocence: Essays on Culture and Politics (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962), 150–51. Fiedler’s seminal essay was first published in 1948, and it is difficult not to suspect that, as a Jewish intellectual who was also a white American, the notion of collective genocidal guilt at this date took on a searching political ambiguity that Fiedler, more than any other critic, brought to cultural debates during the Cold War era. 4. Frederick Jackson Turner, ‘‘The Poet of the Future’’ (1883), cited in Kerwin Lee Klein, Frontiers of Historical Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 82–83.

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achievements, civilization appears to have stopped in the Middle Ages: ‘‘the intrigues of courts, knightly valour . . . the loves of ladies, the songs of minstrels, and the chants from Cathedrals’’—all took their toll in terms of human tragedy: ‘‘But history has its tragedy as well, which tells of the degraded tillers of the soil, toiling that others might dream, the slavery that rendered possible ‘the Glory that was Greece,’ the serfdom into which decayed the ‘grandeur that was Rome’—these as well demand their annals.’’ 5 If the American project was to establish itself as an advance on this flawed version of civility, it was vital that as much fresh air as possible—three thousand miles of it, preferably—be placed between the New and the Old World. Tragedy did not sit well with the energy and optimism of the American Enlightenment, and for this reason, as Kerwin Klein has suggested, comedy—in the more somber, Dantean sense of The Divine Comedy—stepped in as a genre to fill the breach. In this generic transformation, particularly as transmuted in the crucible of American pragmatism, tragedy was not rendered totally obsolete but was tempered by the redeeming features of comedy. Such power as remained with the tragic vision lay in its association with destiny, or Manifest Destiny, the belief that it was not human agency but fate and the inexorability of progress that was hurtling ‘‘doomed races’’ toward their extinction. This was indeed tragedy without tears, for, as Sidney Hook describes it, ‘‘[pragmatism] is an attempt to make it possible for men to live in a world of inescapable tragedy—a tragedy that flows from the conflict of moral ideals—without lamentation, defiance, or make-believe.’’ 6 In Klein’s summation, ‘‘Americans like a tragedy with a happy ending’’: disaster and catastrophe are subsumed through a blend of pragmatism and providentialism into a manifestation of the American spirit and the conquest of successive frontiers. According to Klein, this all-too-hasty embrace of the cathartic powers of tragedy, and the optimistic drive toward resolution and indeed reconciliation in the future, veers more toward melodrama than either comedy or tragedy. But there is another genre that lends itself to the purging of a discredited European past, that displaces the injustices of history onto the feudal and Catholic remnants of a bygone era. This is, of course, the gothic romance—for Fiedler, the source of the dark and often sinister double-plot that shadows the more strident, affirmative surges of the frontier imagina5. Frederick Jackson Turner, ‘‘The Significance of History’’ (1891), in Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner (New York: H. Holt, 1994), 15. 6. Sidney Hook, Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense of Life (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 22, cited in Klein, Frontiers of Historical Imagination, 203.

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tion in the United States. ‘‘Of all the fiction of the west,’’ writes Fiedler, ‘‘our own is most deeply influenced by the gothic, is almost essentially a gothic one.’’ 7 There is, however, a basic difficulty at the outset in looking to the gothic as one of the foundational, framing genres of American fiction. While the gothic in Europe operated as a means of ostracizing what was left of feudal obscurantism, such was its narrative instability and ambivalence that the violence of the past was not always safely interred within its labyrinthine architecture of evil. That ‘‘the sins of the fathers’’ may be inflicted on subsequent generations, despite their determination to walk away from the scene of the crime, is endemic to this genealogy of guilt. ‘‘I could wish,’’ wrote Horace Walpole under the cloak of anonymity in the Castle of Otranto, that the author ‘‘had grounded his plan on a more useful moral than this: that the sins of the fathers are visited on the children to the third and fourth generation.’’ 8 Yet, by contrast, the American dream, as we have seen, was founded on a myth of innocence, the belief that it was possible to leave behind the corruption of Europe to begin afresh, cleansed, as it were, of the historical taints of original sin. America was born, wrote an editorial of 1839, with ‘‘a clear conscience unsullied by the past.’’ 9 For Thomas Jefferson, anticipating the radical amnesia advocated by Tom Paine in his attack on Burke, this was to free the living from the deadweight of previous generations: to the question ‘‘whether one generation of men has the right to bind another . . . I set out this ground which I suppose to be self-evident, ‘that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living’; that the dead have neither power nor rights over it.’’ 10 The clearing away of historical claims on territory conveniently removed Native American rights to their native lands, and it is not surprising that under this new dispensation, the Indian should replace the feudal/Catholic other as the demon of American gothic. ‘‘The gothic,’’ as Fiedler suggests, ‘‘had been invented to deal with the past and with history from a typically Protestant and enlightened point of view, but what could one do with the form in a country which, however Protestant and enlightened, had (certainly at the end of the eighteenth century!) neither a proper past nor a history?’’ This posed a particular problem for the kind of rogue’s gallery of hero-villains that was appro7. Leslie A. Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (London: Paladin, 1970), 133. 8. Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1765), in Three Gothic Novels, ed. Peter Fairclough (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), 41. 9. R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: Phoenix, 1975), 7. 10. Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, Paris, 1789, cited in Lewis, American Adam, 16.

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priate to an American environment: ‘‘What was to be done about the social status of such hero-villains? With what native classes or groups could they be identified? Traditionally aristocrats, monks, servants of the Inquisition, members of secret societies like the Illuminati [were central to gothic fiction], how could they be convincingly introduced on the American scene?’’ 11 For Charles Brockden Brown, the pioneer of American horror fiction, the terrors presented by the errand into the wilderness generated a new, anachronistic other in the form of the Native American. Warning his contemporaries against slavish imitations of Walpole, Radcliffe, and Scott, he introduced an ominous gothic note into the frontier imagination at its very inception: ‘‘Puerile superstitions and exploded manners; Gothic castles and chimeras, are the materials usually employed for this end. The incidents of Indian hostility, and the perils of the western wilderness, are far more suitable; and, for a native of America to overlook these, would admit of no apology.’’ 12 It is against this primitivist backdrop that the Indian emerged as the ‘‘enemy within,’’ against which the civility of the new republic defined itself. The Indian, moreover, had a decided rhetorical advantage for the purposes of legitimating the nation, for, unlike his European counterparts, his primitive condition severed him from tradition and history, thus releasing the fledgling republic from the burden of memory, gothic or otherwise. It was not just that the Indian was considered obsolete, for so were aristocrats, monks, and the trappings of ‘‘papist superstition’’: his primitivism, rather, attested to a primordial state of nature, in keeping with the recasting of the wilderness as the setting for a new ordeal of innocence. Fiedler was, however, somewhat precipitate in arguing that by the late eighteenth century, Americans had succeeded in drawing a veil over the European past, as if the introduction of feudal/Catholic remnants, or ‘‘members of secret societies like the Illuminati,’’ was entirely out of place on ‘‘the American scene.’’ In Brown’s novels, so central to Fiedler’s study, the internal menace 11. Fiedler, Love and Death, 135–36. 12. Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker, ed. Norman S. Grabo (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), 3. Subsequent references are cited parenthetically as EH. Such displacements of gothic terror became formulaic in preparing the groundwork for American historical fiction. In his 1833 address entitled ‘‘The Importance of illustrating New England History by a Series of Romances like the Waverly Novels,’’ Rufus Choate suggested that King Philip would provide an excellent tragic hero for the American national drama (cited in Susan Scheckel, The Insistence of the Indian: Race and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century American Culture [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998], 8).

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of the Native American is set against precisely this threat from an encroaching European other, in the form of exiled or outcast Irish hero-villains. The publication by Brown of the first two classics of American gothic, Wieland (1798) and Edgar Huntly (1799), both featuring destructive Irish interlopers on American soil, coincided with the moral panic over foreign subversion by French and Irish revolutionaries, which led to the passing of the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798. During a congressional debate on naturalization, it was made clear that ‘‘hordes of wild Irishmen,’’ with their incendiary political ideas, were not welcome in the land of the free.13 It was not, moreover, as if the Irish, with their European background, were part of the parasitic ruling class of aristocrats and clergy execrated in conventional gothic narratives: more problematically, in view of their history of dispossession and rebellion, they were closer to the position of the American Indian, thus bringing about a fearful convergence between the native and alien other. Philadelphia, Here I Come Just in proportion as some have been placed in outward circumstances above the savage, others have been degraded below him. . . . I could refer you to Ireland which is marked as one of the white or enlightened spots on the map. Contrast the physical condition of the Irish with that of the North American Indian. . . . Their condition only proves that squalidness may consist with civilization. —Henry David Thoreau, Walden The early chapters of Brown’s Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleepwalker open onto a tableau that goes to the heart of gothic anxiety: in the vicinity of Philadelphia, the eponymous hero feels compelled under cover of darkness to return to the scene of a crime, the murder of his friend Waldegrave, only to discover that a half-naked figure has beaten him to it and is digging furiously into the earth amid sighs and lamentations. The mystery is heightened when the figure turns out to be a sleepwalker, who disappears into a cave when he is tracked to his lair in the wild landscape. Huntly’s suspicions are raised, for sleepwalking points to a profound moral as well as psychological disturbance: ‘‘What was the cause of this morbid activity? What was the mournful vision that dissolved him into tears, and extorted from him tokens of inconsolable distress? What did he seek, or what endeavour to conceal in this fatal spot? The incapacity of sound 13. Rex Syndergaard, ‘‘‘Wild Irishmen’ and the Alien and Sedition Acts,’’ Eire-Ireland 9, no. 1 (Spring 1974): 19–20.

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sleep denotes a mind sorely wounded’’ (EH, 12). As if acting out of a cultural defense mechanism, Huntly’s immediate response is to attribute such strange behavior to an outsider, and, on conducting his inquiries, he ‘‘perceived that the only foreigner among us was Clithero,’’ an Irish servant who had recently taken up work on a nearby farm: ‘‘Clithero was a stranger, whose adventures and character, previously to his coming hither, were unknown to us. . . . The more I revolved the pensive and reserved deportment of this man, the ignorance in which we were placed respecting his former situation, his possible motives for abandoning his country and chusing a station so much below the standard of his intellectual attainments, the stronger my suspicions became’’ (EH, 14–15). On being challenged to account for his strange behavior, Clithero informs his interlocutor of his Irish background, stating that he hailed originally from a peasant background—‘‘of the better sort’’ (EH, 36)—in Armagh, before being taken under the wing of the lady of the manor, the widowed Mrs. Lorimer, at her Dublin abode. (Armagh, it might be noted, was the cockpit for some of the most bitter sectarian disturbances in Ireland in the 1790s, leading to the emergence of the insurgent Catholic Defender movement and the Orange Order.) Mrs. Lorimer has a twin brother, Arthur Wiatte, with whom she shares a sympathy so deep as to verge on fusion. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), this is not reciprocated, and the profligate brother breaks up her relationship with her previous suitor Sarsefield (a name with its own powerful resonances in Irish history 14), forcing her to marry the debauched Lorimer. Arthur is then transported for his evil deeds and is presumed to have died in a mutiny. Clithero’s own fortunes take a turn for the worse when the sinister Arthur inexplicably turns up in Dublin intent on killing his sister, and Clithero kills him in self-defense. Filled with remorse over the impact this might have on the victim’s doting sister, Clithero then resolves to kill Mrs. Lorimer, reasoning that as she is virtually dead through her sympathetic fusion with her brother, murder is only lending nature a helping hand. It transpires, though, that on the night of his murderous designs, unbeknownst to him, his own betrothed Clarice (Mrs. Lorimer’s niece and Arthur’s daughter), whom he had left three days before ‘‘at a solitary mansion in the mountains of Donnegal [sic]’’ (EH, 80), sleeps in Mrs. Lorimer’s bed. As he is about to plunge the knife, Mrs. Lorimer enters the room and faints with shock, but not before foil14. Patrick Sarsfield (1655–1693), the Earl of Lucan, was the most successful Irish Jacobite military leader, before his exile as one of the famous ‘‘Wild Geese’’ to France, where he fought in the French army against the British. Brown’s character Sarsefield also appears in his novel Ormond.

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ing the dirty deed. In his trancelike confusion, Clithero mistakes her swoon for death and makes his escape. Disguised as a beggar, he heads for Belfast, the center of revolutionary ferment in Ireland, before eventually catching a ship that brings him, guilt-ridden and grief-stricken, to Philadelphia. It is not clear whether Philadelphia and its environs are part of the solution or the problem for the Irish fugitive, as the narrative proceeds to take on a series of bizarre twists that entangle Huntly as well as Clithero in its nightmarish proceedings. Clithero, having his own cross to carry, is no longer a suspect in the killing of Waldegrave, but he remains so racked with guilt for his crime in Ireland that he flees to the wilderness, and when Huntly finally discovers him, it is as if he has reverted from culture to nature— or perhaps to his true Irish national character. Coming across ‘‘an human creature’’ (EH, 99) with ‘‘shaggy and tangled locks, and an air of melancholy wildness’’ (EH, 100) perched on an inaccessible rocky fastness, Huntly describes the depths to which human nature can sink: ‘‘His scanty and coarse garb had been nearly rent away by brambles and thorns, his arms, bosom and cheek were overgrown and half concealed by hair. There was somewhat in his attitude and looks denoting more than anarchy of thought and passions. His rueful, ghastly and immoveable eyes, testified not only that his mind was ravaged by despair, but that he was pinched with famine’’ (EH, 100). It is at this point, as if infected by the kind of sympathetic contagion which leads Mrs. Lorimer to share the fate of her twin brother, that Huntly’s behavior begins to resemble that of his quarry, and we suspect that he is also carrying a buried secret. In one of the many radical narrative disjunctions in the novel, Huntly then awakens to find himself inexplicably in a pitch-black cave, as if following in Clithero’s footsteps. The mystery is (partially) cleared up when it emerges that he has also taken to sleepwalking—the perfect alibi for committing a crime devoid of moral responsibility—and has fallen through a hole in the ground on one of his rambles, a hole symbolically dug for him, perhaps, by Clithero.15 Overcome by hunger and panic, he attempts to escape but comes face-to-face with a fierce panther, whom he kills with a tomahawk, found conveniently at his side. This episode signals the beginning of Huntly’s descent into depravity: having killed the panther, Indian-style, he proceeds to devour it raw, but then vomits: ‘‘If this appetite has sometimes subdued the sentiments of nature, and compelled the mother to feed on the flesh of its offspring, it will not excite amaze15. As Fiedler suggests, ‘‘As Huntly at this stage has almost blurred into his alter ego Clithero, so the hole dug by the obsessed Irishman has mysteriously become the vast trap in which Huntly finds himself’’ (Love and Death, 147).

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ment that I did not turn from the yet warm blood and reeking fibres of a brute’’ (EH, 160). The full transition to savagery is effected when, at the mouth of the cave, Huntly stumbles on a scene from a classic captivity narrative: a ‘‘swarthy band’’ of ‘‘naked . . . uncouth figures’’ are encountered guarding a fair maiden whimpering in a dark corner. With undimmed ferocity, Huntly buries the tomahawk in the head of one of the Indian sentries and elopes with the girl, but not before clarifying his newly acquired blood-lust: it transpires that Huntly’s parents and an infant sibling were murdered by Indians in his youth. The reactivation of this trauma itself attests to the manner in which the sins of the past throw a long shadow into the future: Most men are haunted by some species of terror and antipathy, which they are, for the most part, able to trace to some incident which befel them in their early years. . . . I never looked upon, or called up the image of a savage without shuddering. . . . Let the fate of my parents be, likewise, remembered. I was not certain but that these very men were the assassins of my family, and were those who had reduced me and my sisters to the condition of orphans and dependants. No words can describe the torments of my thirst. (EH, 166, 171) Though the white settler population is deemed to be born again, free from inherited guilt, such a privilege is not extended to Native Americans, and all are held accountable for transgressions committed in the past. As the story progresses—or regresses—Huntly embarks on a killing spree, dispatching four more Indians when they approach the remote cabin in which he sought refuge with the captive girl. This time round, his quest for vengeance is driven by a conviction—mistaken, as it turns out—that these Indians had killed his adopted family, consisting of his uncle and remaining sisters. The cabin in which Huntly seeks refuge is another indication of his relapse into savagery, for it belongs to the warlike Queen Mab, the elusive leader of Indian resistance to white encroachments in the area, whose name (conferred on her by Huntly) establishes another tangential affinity with Irish superstition and mythology. (In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Queen Mab is invoked as the ‘‘fairies’ midwife,’’ the inspiration of nightmares and nightwalkers, but in her original Irish incarnation, she is Queen Maeve [Medbh], the formidable warrior Queen of Connacht.)16 16. See L. M. McCraith, The Romance of Irish Heroines (Dublin: Talbot Press, n.d.), 17, on Mab, Queen Maeve, and Spenser’s Fairy Queen. Queen Mab was also the subject of poems by Shelley and Thomas Hood, and of a painting by J. M. W. Turner.

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When Huntly spots from a secure hiding place the last surviving Indian of the party, he momentarily considers sparing him, since he poses no immediate danger, but such scruples are quickly dispelled: ‘‘Why should he be suffered to live? He came hither to murder and despoil my friends’’— and even if he did not, ‘‘he will live only to pursue the same sanguinary trade’’ on other settlers (EH, 191). Huntly discharges his rifle but succeeds only in wounding his adversary, at which point the question of showing him mercy comes up again. But again he rationalizes killing him in cold blood, before finishing him off with his bayonet: ‘‘Why should his miseries be uselessly prolonged? There was but one way to end them. To kill him outright was the dictate of passion and duty . . . to assault and to mangle the body of an enemy, already powerless, was an act of abhorrence; yet it was, in this case, prescribed by pity’’ (EH, 191–93). This flint-hearted indifference to suffering helps eventually to bring Clithero within the ambit of the Indian, for it is precisely the same rationale that is used by (the now Americanized) Dr. Sarsefield to prevent the surgical treatment of Clithero’s wounds at the end: ‘‘What would you have me do? To prolong his life would be merely to protract his misery’’ (EH, 267). As several critics have suggested, Huntly’s entering the cave can be seen in many respects as a return to the womb, but if he is born again, it is through a baptism of fire as a natural-born killer. Not least of the ironies in this recovery of a lost innocence, as Turner avers, is that to remove the vestiges of a decadent European past, the settler had to revert to the savage state of the Indians through a sandblasting of the self in the wilderness: The frontier is the line of the most effective and rapid Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress, industries, tolls, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin. It puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade around him. Before long he has taken to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick; he shouts the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion.17 One hundred years earlier, however, Constantin François Volney was not so impressed with a deadly conflation of innocence and savagery, remarking—in the words of Charles Brockden Brown, his English translator—that this amounted more to infection and degeneration than regeneration: ‘‘The 17. Turner, ‘‘The Significance of the Frontier,’’ in Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner, 33.

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American hunter, who had daily occasion to kill and eat the slain . . . has imbibed, of course, an errant, wasteful, and cruel disposition. He is akin to the wolf and the tyger. He unites with his fellows in troops, but not in fraternities. . . . Dependent on his own powers, he must always keep them on the stretch: and hence a turbulent, harsh, and fickle character; a haughty and intractable spirit, hostile to all men.’’ 18 The recourse to nature, however, absolves the colonist from responsibility for his actions, as the reduction of human conduct to its elementary conditions removes the controls of reason and civility. ‘‘Such are the deeds which perverse nature compels thousands of rational beings to perform and to witness’’ (EH, 193)—a form of compulsion also recalling the frenzy in which Clithero attacks Mrs. Lorimer: ‘‘My limbs were guided to the bloody office by a power foreign and superior to mine’’ (EH, 79). ‘‘A Tribe of Ugly Phantoms’’ [Gothic dramatis personae were] traditionally aristocrats, monks, servants of the Inquisition, members of secret societies like the Illuminati; how could they be convincingly introduced on the American scene? —Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel Though the ‘‘power foreign’’ in Huntly’s case is undoubtedly meant to be interpreted in mental or even metaphysical terms, Fiedler’s observation that American gothic tends to psychologize social and natural disturbances taking place in the external world acts as a reminder that the malign influence of more tangible ‘‘foreign powers’’ may also be at stake. It is largely as a result of his coming into contact with an unhinged Irish immigrant, and indeed his subsequent identification with him, that Huntly begins his descent into darkness. The implication of this is clear: the fears expressed by proponents of the Alien and Sedition Acts—that the immigrant other, particularly of Irish or French origins, threatened to pollute the American body politic— were well founded, and among the most prominent pamphleteers against alien influences was Charles Brockden Brown. Much of the awakening of 18. Constantin François Volney, A View of the Soil and Climate of the United States of America, trans. Charles Brockden Brown (Philadelphia: J. Conrad and Company, 1804), 395, cited in Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 383. As Slotkin comments, the very ambivalence of the term the American hunter, and the difficulty in deciding whether it refers to Native or white Americans, is part of the problem itself.

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critical interest in Brown in the 1950s was based on his powerful explorations of key Freudian themes, such as the Oedipal quest, in which, as Fiedler describes it, the investigator ‘‘who begins by looking for guilt in others . . . ends up finding it in himself.’’ 19 In keeping with this universalist approach, other commentators, pursuing the debate about the frontier popularized by Turner, saw the Edgar Huntly/Indian struggle as a pioneering fictional exploration of the conflict between ‘‘savagism’’ and ‘‘civilization,’’ as if the novel was primarily concerned with definitions of what it meant to be human, where culture ends and nature begins. But as Jared Gardner contends in his pathbreaking account of culture wars in the early republic, the intervention of a third rogue element in the savagery/civility binary, that of the alien/Irish other, indicates that what was at stake was not so much the definition of what it meant to be human as what it meant to be American.20 For Brown, the difficulty for American identity in this vulnerable phase of nation building was that the machinations of foreign powers—and their fellow travelers—threatened to unleash unstable, destructive elements within American society. In a notorious piece of black propaganda that took the form of a forged letter from a French minister of state, Brown wrote in 1803 that the French invasion of San Domingo was a pretext to stir up a revolt among slaves, and even more dangerous enemies, in the United States: ‘‘With what prudence can this nation attack a neighbour, who can fan at pleasure, the discontents of this intestine enemy; who can give union, design and arms to its destructive efforts at revenge. . . . [But] the only aliens and enemies within their borders, are not blacks. . . . The INDIANS are, in many respects, more dangerous inmates.’’ 21 The source of this moral panic—one of the key moments in institutionalizing ‘‘the paranoid style’’ in American politics 22—was the conservative turn in the early republic under the Federalists in the 1790s, which took place against an international backdrop of an increase in French expansionism and Jacobin fervor in Europe and the Atlantic. As a result of the so-called XYZ Affair, in which unknown French agents (hence ‘‘X,’’ ‘‘Y,’’ and ‘‘Z’’) under 19. Fiedler, Love and Death, 148. 20. Jared Gardner, Master Plots: Race and the Founding of American Literature, 1787– 1845 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). 21. Charles Brockden Brown, An Address to the Government of the United States on the Cession of Louisiana to the French (Philadelphia: John Conrad and Co., 1803), cited in Gardner, Master Plots, 55. 22. For the classic discussion, see Richard Hofstader, ‘‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics,’’ in The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (New York: Knopf, 1966).

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foreign minister Charles Maurice Talleyrand allegedly held up for ransom the Federalist government by threatening American navigation and its Atlantic seaboard, the administration in 1798 rushed to introduce the Alien and Sedition Acts, and also to increase drastically the time required for naturalization as an American citizen from two to fifteen years. Central to Federalist alarms was a belief that Jefferson and his republican opposition were Jacobin sympathizers, and that immigrants—most notably United Irishmen émigrés—who flocked to his cause were secret French emissaries. ‘‘Why does every ship vomit United Irishmen upon us?’’ asked the Salem Gazette, and in keeping with this metaphor, the first prominent victim of the legislation was the voluble Irish congressman Matthew Lyon, who drew the wrath of Federalist members of Congress for spitting into the face of an opponent. Lyon was immediately linked to the United Irishmen, on account of a toast he had drunk to the success of the rebellion of 1798—the source, perhaps, of some of his excess salivary discharges. Lyon’s journalism, and particularly the publication of his magazine, Lyon’s Republican Magazine, led to his conviction for sedition and to a sentence of four months in jail.23 It was mainly on account of their versatility as journalists, adding their eloquence to their activism on behalf of the Republican Party, that United Irish émigrés were singled out for special treatment by the authorities.24 One of the most prominent to be put on trial was the journalist and playwright John Daly Burk, dismissed from Trinity College, Dublin, for heresy and blasphemy while a student. Burk was a member of the more militant, underground strata of the United Irishmen. As editor of the New York periodical the Time Piece, he was charged with libeling President Adams and was obliged to entreat Aaron Burr to intercede on his behalf. Burk’s trial was followed by a more sustained campaign against another Irish émigré, William Duane, editor of the Aurora magazine, which was, perhaps, the primary target of the Sedition Act. Charged, but found not guilty, for sedition in 1798, Duane was again prosecuted in 1799, at the direct behest of President Adams, but, as the trial was still pending when Jefferson assumed office in 1800, charges against him were dropped. The hostility directed toward the United Irish émigrés was not motivated solely by their pronounced anti-British sentiments or their suspected role as Jacobin agents: it was also fueled by paranoid fears that their efficacy as revolutionaries would forge bonds between immigrant and native others, inciting rebellions among slaves and Native Americans. 23. Syndergaard, ‘‘‘Wild Irishmen’ and the Alien and Sedition Acts,’’ 19–20. 24. Michael Durey, Transatlantic Radicals and the Early Republic (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997), 231–57.

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In his scurrilous pamphlet Detection of a Conspiracy Formed by the United Irishmen with the Evident Intention of Aiding the Tyrants of France in Subverting the Government of the United States (1799), William Cobbett, a.k.a. ‘‘Peter Porcupine,’’ claimed that the inclusion of ‘‘Liberty and Equality for all mankind’’ as part of the manifesto of the reconstituted United Irishmen in the United States ensured that membership was not restricted to Irishmen and that it embraced ‘‘free negroes’’ and encouraged slave insurrections.25 Cobbett claimed that no fewer than fifteen hundred members had joined in Philadelphia and its vicinity, the setting of Edgar Huntly. Matthew Lyon’s action of spitting ‘‘upon the face of an American’’ did not help Irish claims to civility either and, as if bearing out Brown’s fears of elective affinities between the Irish and the Indians, provoked the response that it was an act of ‘‘savagery unparalleled by the Indians themselves’’—with the rider that he ‘‘be sent to Kamchatka where he would be at home ‘among the furred tribes.’’’ 26 For Cobbett, as the title of his violent anti-Jacobin tract, The Cannibal’s Progress; or, The Dreadful Horrors of French Invasion (1798), shows, the French and their fellow travelers threatened to unleash an unprecedented, savage ferocity on the world. The association of Jacobin terror with savagery and even cannibalism was not of the Federalists’ own making: like much else in counterrevolutionary rhetoric in the 1790s, it owed its origins to Edmund Burke’s notorious comparison of the march to Versailles to the blood-lust of the Iroquois, and to his later vilification of ‘‘the cannibal republic’’ of the Jacobins.27 Burke was also responsible for imparting a true gothic element to the ‘‘paranoid style’’ of counterrevolutionary politics by raising the specter of the Bavarian Illuminati, the last refuge of conspiracy theorists: ‘‘Many parts of Europe are in open disorder. In many others, there is a hollow murmuring under ground; a confused movement is felt, that threatens a general earthquake in the political world. Already confederacies and correspondences of the most extraordinary nature are forming, in several 25. Durey, Transatlantic Radicals, 249–50. 26. Gardner, Master Plots, 61. 27. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J. C. D. Clark (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001), 226–27; ‘‘Letter 1. On the Overtures of Peace’’ (1796), in Works (London: Bell, 1899), 5:212. Burke’s trope was quickly adopted by conservative elements in America. See Arthur G. Kimball, ‘‘Savages and Savagism: Brockden Brown’s Dramatic Irony,’’ Studies in Romanticism 6 (1967): 219. For an extended discussion of Burke’s original rhetorical intervention, see my ‘‘‘Subtiliz’d into Savagery’: Edmund Burke, Progress, and Primitivism,’’ in ‘‘Atlantic Genealogies,’’ ed. Ian Baucom, special issue, South Atlantic Quarterly 100, no.1 (Winter 2001): 83–109.

Gibbons / Ireland, America, and Gothic Memory 39

countries.’’ 28 Conveniently for gothic fantasies, the shadowy sect of the Illuminati was founded by a Jesuit-trained professor of canon law, Adam Weishaupt, in 1776, with the alleged aim of establishing a world republican state. Organized along Masonic lines (and often alleged to be part of an international Masonic conspiracy), it purportedly included Goethe, Mozart, Herder, and the poet Wieland among its luminaries. The society met with disaster in 1784, when sensational revelations about its plans for world takeover led to its suppression by the Elector of Bavaria. This did not allay the suspicions of conspiracy theorists, however, and in 1797, Burke’s original, tentative suggestion of Illuminati intrigue was the subject of a multivolume exposé by the former Jesuit Royalist, the Abbé Barruel, outlining the Masons’/Illuminati’s clandestine role in fomenting the French Revolution—and, more to the point, in spreading the French disease through Irish carriers on a world scale:29 As the plague flies on the wings of the wind, so do [the Illuminati’s] triumphant legions infect America. Their apostles have infused their principles into the submissive and laborious negroes; and St. Domingo and Guadaloupe have been converted into vast charnel houses for their inhabitants. [T]hey are sufficiently numerous to raise collections and transmit them to the insurgents of Ireland; thus contributing toward that species of revolution which is the object of their ardent wishes in America.30 The sympathetic contagion between ‘‘the insurgents of Ireland’’ and the sinister Illuminati came closer to home with John Robison’s Proofs of a Conspiracy Against all the Religions and Governments of Europe, carried on in the Secret meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies, published in Edinburgh and London in 1797, and in Philadelphia in 1798. As early as May 1797, the specter of the Illuminati was conjured up in 28. Burke, Reflections, 327. For an extended discussion of Burke’s paranoid style, see Seamus Deane, ‘‘Philosophes and Regicides: The Great Conspiracy,’’ in Foreign Affections: Edmund Burke, Europe, and Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 2004). 29. Abbé Barruel, Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism, trans. Robert Clifford (London: E. Booker, 1798). See also Seamus Deane, The French Revolution and Enlightenment in England, 1789–1832 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 11, 22–24, 112–13; Darrin M. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French CounterEnlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 110– 15; and Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 115–17. 30. Barruel, Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism, cited in Gardner, Master Plots, 61.

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Dublin by Alexander Knox—‘‘a conservative publicist of considerable intellectual ability’’ 31—who, drawing on Robison’s work, professed to see direct links between the United Irishmen’s (referred to as ‘‘the Irish Union’’) mode of organization and Weishaupt’s Bavarian conspiracy: ‘‘The resemblance between this plan for the Irish Union and Weishaupt’s project of the German Union is so close as almost to preclude the possibility of its arising from mere coincidence.’’ 32 Notwithstanding the ostensible Enlightenment credentials of the United Irish movement, Knox detected in its ‘‘gloomy, impenetrable secrecy’’ and hermetic rituals the gothic residues of priestcraft and Catholic superstition: The additional provision, that this fraternity should not only act as an engine for spreading terror and confusion over the public without, but should itself, by means of a high-raised enthusiasm, the effect of excited passions and ‘‘affected ceremonies,’’ be kept in a state of devotedness, at once the most implicit and the most active, to its own leaders within, implied such a refinement of despotism, over mind as well as body, over friend as well as enemy, such an exquisite conjunction of the worst features of priestcraft, with the worst weapons of tyranny, as can be instanced. . . .33 It was left to the Abbé Barruel’s translator, the Honorable Robert Clifford, to give a systematic account of the putative direct links with the United Irishmen in his pamphlet Application of Barruel’s Memoirs of Jacobinism to the Secret Societies of Ireland and Great Britain, published in both London and Dublin in 1798. Recent scholarship has confirmed the pervasive connections and overlap of membership between the Freemasons and the United Irishmen, but Clifford went one stage further, demonstrating, to his own satisfaction at least, that the underlying structures of the United Irishmen were based on the more inscrutable, devious modes of the Illuminati: ‘‘The proposals for it are couched in the style and exact terms of the Hiero31. R. B. McDowell, Ireland in the Age of Imperialism and Revolution, 1760–1801 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 361. 32. Alexander Knox, Essays on the Political Circumstances of Ireland (Dublin: Graisberry and Campbell, 1798), 139, essay 7, May 28, 1797. 33. Knox, Essays on the Political Circumstances of Ireland, 142–43. Knox is careful to avoid the further conspiratorial claim that Catholics and Jesuits were actually organizing the United Irish conspiracy—this he clearly imputes to atheistical leaders of the classic Illuminati stamp. Others, as we shall see below, were not as reluctant to take this further step, discerning shadowy Catholic designs behind the Illuminati in their gothic, Irish manifestations.

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phants of Illuminism. They recommend the formation of an association or, as it’s styled, ‘a beneficent conspiracy to serve the people,’ assuming the secrecy and somewhat of the ceremonial attached to Freemasonry.’’ 34 Theobald Wolfe Tone and Napper Tandy are mentioned (without supporting evidence) as adepts and are taken to task for declaring war, in their own words, on ‘‘those puerile antipathies, so unworthy of the manhood of nations, which insulate men as well as countries, and drive the citizen back to the savage.’’ 35 Clifford pays particular attention to the state trial of the schoolmaster Lawrence O’Connor in 1795, which convinced him that the nets of the Illuminati had spread to the Catholic agrarian secret society, the Defenders.36 Though it is tempting to dismiss this entirely as a farrago of Clifford’s own invention, reports did reach the authorities at Dublin Castle in 1797 that the Dublin Illuminati ‘‘intended to organize Connacht,’’ one of the Defender strongholds, by indoctrinating shopkeepers from the province when they visited the city: ‘‘The moment a gentle man from this Country [County Mayo] goes to Dublin he is invited by some of the Dublin Illuminati to Dinner there . . . he meets with Illuminators who make more of their eloquence to work on his mind by proving that the Country is ill Governed . . . that the Catholics are persecuted (of which class the invited generally belongs) . . . that a Revolution is certain, that property would be held sacred except in case of resistance to the General Will in which case it would be confiscated.’’ Allegedly based in the inns of the Thomas Street area, the most striking aspect of the intelligence reports is their association with Catholic subversion, the procurer for the Illuminati, Thomas Dillon, acting at the behest of Dr. William James McNevin and Father James Coigley— ‘‘Quigly the priest from Dundalk.’’ 37 Whatever about the associations, imagined or otherwise, between the Illuminati and the United Irishmen, it is true that as leading republican activists were driven underground in the mid-1790s, they regrouped under the cover of various clandestine clubs and societies: the Telegraphic Society, the Philanthropic Society, the Athenian, the Friendly Club, the Committee, the Originals, the Spread Club, the Druid Lodges, the States Club, 34. Robert Clifford, Application of Barruel’s Memoirs of Jacobinism to the Secret Societies of Ireland and Great Britain (London: E. Booker, 1798), 2. 35. Clifford, Application of Barruel’s Memoirs of Jacobinism, 8. 36. O’Connor’s hapless defense—that ‘‘it would be a cruel verdict indeed that would convict a man of high treason, merely for using a few cabalistical words and symbols’’—is taken to be the strongest evidence against him (Clifford, Application of Barruel’s Memoirs of Jacobinism, 25). 37. Report of 24 March 1797, National Archives of Ireland, 620/18/71.

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the Strugglers, the Huguenots, and—perhaps—the Illuminati.38 John Daly Burk and Dr. James Reynolds were key figures in organizing the Telegraphic and Philanthropic Societies, and the attention these clubs attracted in Defender trials in 1795–96 prompted their hasty flights to the United States (Burk escaped arrest in Dublin by wearing the petticoats of a Miss Daly, hence his adopted middle name). As Jim Smyth relates of Reynolds, it was perhaps this penchant for clandestine politics that gave the particular cast to the Irish presence in Philadelphia which drew the opprobrium of the Alien and Sedition Acts: ‘‘In Philadelphia he was a leading member of the shadowy society of United Irishmen in America, which was internationalist in the Jacobin (and Masonic) style, and which, as the local Federalist paper pointed out, used Masonic idioms in its oaths and tests. Initiates were sworn to secrecy in the name not of God but of the Supreme Being.’’ 39 Following the publication in Philadelphia of Robison’s exposure of the Illuminati conspiracy, Brown’s friend, the Calvinist preacher Jedidiah Morse, gave a Fast Day sermon in May 1798, warning that the end was nigh if agents of alien terror were allowed to infiltrate America at will. It was in this alarmist milieu that Brown, writing the gothic romance Wieland (and its preamble, Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist) that first brought him to public attention, felt compelled to introduce the machinations of another Irish villain into the American public sphere: Ludloe, an Irish utopian visionary, whose indoctrination of the beguiling ventriloquist (‘‘biloquist’’) Carwin unleashes havoc on an American pastoral idyll. Voices from the Underground To walk unarmed in the neighbourhood of Dublin, especially at night, has always been accounted dangerous. —Charles Brockden Brown, Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist (1803) The plot of Wieland; or, The Transformation: An American Tale (1798) turns on a voyage of transformation in which the sea change effected by 38. Jim Smyth, The Men of No Property: Irish Radicals and Popular Politics in the Late Eighteenth Century (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1992), 147–56; Kevin Whelan, ‘‘The United Irishmen, The Enlightenment, and Popular Culture,’’ in The United Irishmen: Republicanism, Radicalism, and Rebellion, ed. David Dickson, Dáire Keogh, and Kevin Whelan (Dublin: Lilliput, 1993), 286–88; and Kevin Whelan, The Tree of Liberty: Radicalism, Catholicism, and the Construction of Irish Identity, 1760–1830 (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), 77–80. 39. Jim Smyth, ‘‘Freemasonry and the United Irishmen,’’ in The United Irishmen, 172.

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the passage to the New World is not necessarily for the better. The elder Wieland leaves the gothic gloom of the Black Forest in Bavaria (home of the Illuminati) to embark on an evangelical mission to convert Indians in the American wilderness.40 But while one version of the gothic is left behind, another emerges when Wieland senior is vaporized through (it would seem) spontaneous combustion in a temple built on their estate at the edge of the wilderness in Pennsylvania. Haunted by his father’s death, his son Theodore espouses religious fanaticism and, taking the Puritan search for ‘‘inner light’’ to a pathological conclusion, answers the call of seemingly divinely inspired voices to slaughter his wife Catherine, their children, and their servant. The voices inspiring Theodore turn out to be far from otherworldly and are, in fact, the creation of Carwin, a mysterious visitor who disrupts the tranquility of the Wieland family circle. Carwin, we learn, in Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist, is the dissolute son of a farmer who, with a ventriloquist’s gift for throwing his voice, travels to Philadelphia and falls under the spell of the charismatic Ludloe from Ireland.41 Reversing the trajectory of American gothic, Ludloe persuades the destitute Carwin to accompany him on his return to Dublin and, placing his vast library at his disposal, initiates him into his subversive Godwinian principles. When Carwin proves restless and ill at ease, Ludloe suggests, ‘‘Either stay here, or retire to a house I have on the banks of Killarney, where you find all the conveniences of study’’ (Memoirs, 251)—the Irish equivalent, Carwin surmises, of the romantic solitude of the wilderness. Retracing the genealogy of the gothic, and the whiff of the Jesuits that emanated from the Illuminati, Ludloe then suggests that his neophyte’s initiation would be best served by a sojourn in Spain: ‘‘I had been accustomed to regard as unquestionable, the fallacy of the Roman faith [reflects Carwin]. The persuasion was habitual and the child of prejudice, and was easily shaken by the artifices of this logician. I was at first led to bestow a kind of assent of the doctrines on the Roman church’’ (Memoirs, 252). But then, in keeping with Jesuit practice, dissemblance took over, and external conformity masked internal convictions. Ludloe is a utopian schemer, not just a dreamer, and in coloniza40. Wieland, we are told, had ‘‘sprung from the same family’’ as the famous German poet Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813), who, as noted above, was associated with the Illuminati (Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland; or, The Transformation; and Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist, ed. Emory Elliott [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994], 6). Subsequent references are cited parenthetically in the text as Memoirs. 41. It is possible to discern in Ludloe traces of the United Irishmen leaders, Dr. Reynolds (also a utopian thinker), Theobald Wolfe Tone, and Archibald Hamilton Rowan, all of whom were in Philadelphia around this time.

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tion he sees an opportunity for humanity to begin again ‘‘in some region of the southern hemisphere,’’ taking care to avoid the mistake of the Jesuits in building their heaven on earth in Paraguay, ‘‘within reach of the injustice and ambition of an European tyrant’’ (Memoirs, 258). Carwin is then presented with one of the paradoxes of the Enlightenment, at least in an Irish context: that reason, knowledge, and candor can be attained only by joining a movement dedicated to silence, cunning, and—perhaps—exile, if Irish aliens in the United States and elsewhere are anything to go by. Such is the hermetic secrecy of the utopian movement that Ludloe proposes to initiate Carwin into ‘‘an association that might have existed for ages in the heart of Europe’’ (Memoirs, 258). Its members are prevented from knowing its name, aims, or even other members: We are now arrived at a point in which . . . [a] number of persons are leagued together for an end of some moment. . . . Among the conditions of their alliance are mutual fidelity and secrecy. Their existence depends upon this: their existence is known only to themselves. This secrecy must be obtained by all the means which are possible. When I have said this much, I have informed you in some degree, of their existence, but you are still ignorant of the purpose contemplated by this association, and of all the members, except myself. (Memoirs, 269) Though reminiscent of Groucho Marx’s business card when he played a secret agent—so secret there was nothing written on it—such perceptions of secret societies in Ireland persisted into the twentieth century, informing the attitudes of even official authorities. As Captain Hugh B. C. Pollard, a member of the staff of the Chief of Police at Dublin Castle, expressed it in the 1920s, the Enlightenment principles of the United Irishmen ‘‘in the Presbyterian north’’ may have seemed, on the face of it, incompatible with the ‘‘inherent Catholicism of the southern secret societies,’’ characterized by agrarian movements such as the Defenders, but this was changed through the intervention of the Illuminati, which fused Jacobinism and Jesuitry: The tenets of a true Jacobin of the French Revolution were utterly subversive of all existing institutions and approximated to those scheduled by the revolutionary secret society of the Illuminati of Bavaria, which was founded by Weisshaupt in 1776 and had penetrated both France and Italy by 1782. . . . Just as the Jesuits had adopted much of the outward form of Freemasonry, so Illuminism in its turn adopted the mechanism of unquestioning obedience of the

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Jesuits and its doubtful doctrine that evil may be wrought in the cause of good.42 It is, ironically, in Pollard’s determination to find telltale signs of the Illuminati and their secret sharers in Irish underground movements that we begin to understand why the figure of the Irish alien should have such a disruptive impact on the formation of the American gothic imagination. In his brilliant analysis of the dark side of the American dream, Fiedler attributes a failure of political nerve on the part of American gothic to the fact that, unlike its European counterparts, it reneged on a radical Enlightenment project of challenging the powerful, the entrenched bases of authority and control in society: In the American gothic, that is to say, the heathen, unredeemed wilderness and not the decaying monuments of a dying class, nature and not society becomes a symbol of evil. . . . Our novel of terror . . . is well on the way to becoming a Calvinist exposé of natural human corruption rather than an enlightened attack on a debased ruling class or entrenched superstition. The European gothic identified blackness with the super-ego and was therefore revolutionary in its implications; the American gothic (at least as it followed the example of Brown) identified evil with the id and was therefore conservative at its deepest level of implication, whatever the intent of it authors.43 But Fiedler himself perpetuates this focus on ‘‘nature and not society’’ by psychologizing the other as the id rather than the Indian—or, for that matter, the Irish, whose menacing alien status does not feature at all. It is not, moreover, as if the occlusion of the Irish is simply an oversight and all that remains is to include the missing element, for the difficulty here is that the integration of this anomalous other calls into question the very terms of the argument— in particular, the clear-cut distinction between culture and nature, civility and savagery. As Pollard’s unwitting exercise in gothic fantasy reveals, the Irish 42. Hugh B. C. Pollard, The Secret Societies of Ireland: Their Rise and Progress (1922; repr., Kilkenny: Irish Historical Press, 1998), 12–13. For all its paranoia, Pollard’s linking of the Jacobins with the Jesuits is not entirely fanciful: Mirabeau advocated a scheme for an ‘‘intimate association,’’ modeled on the Jesuits, differing only in its aims: ‘‘We have quite contrary views, those of enlightening men, of making them free and happy, but who . . . should prevent us from doing for good what the Jesuits have done for evil’’ (cited in Mervyn Jones, ‘‘Freemasonry,’’ in Secret Societies, ed. Norman MacKenzie [London: Aldus Books, 1967], 170). 43. Fiedler, ‘‘Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!’’ 151.

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belonged to a demonized, European Catholic past, ‘‘entrenched [in] superstition,’’ but they did not belong to a ruling class, debased or otherwise. On the contrary, at one crucial level, they shared a common fate with that of the Indians in that they were also victims of expropriation and dispossession, aliens in their own land. In both Brown’s and Pollard’s anxious ruminations, the invocation of the Illuminati allows a gothic suturing of this gap, converting the plight of the Catholic Defender underclass into the privilege of the ruling caste of Jesuit/‘‘Papist’’ power—in effect, translating the just grievances of both the dispossessed Catholic Irish and the Indians into the predatory designs of a ‘‘dying’’ (or ‘‘debased’’) ruling class. But if the Irish served to graft the privilege and power of a feudal ancien régime onto Native Americans, thus discrediting the nobility of the ‘‘noble savage,’’ the symmetry can also work the other way by bringing the long duration of European memory, and the accountability for the sins of the past, into the Arcadian amnesia of the New World. It is striking that as Carwin’s initiation into Ludloe’s occult underworld draws to a close, his final rite of passage is to agree to an arranged marriage with a rich widow, Mrs. Benington, who resides in County Meath. This is not a matter of marrying into a fortune but into an antiquarian past, for the estate built up by her father consists mainly of ‘‘monuments in brass, marble, and parchment, of the remotest antiquity’’: He was wholly indifferent [Ludloe informs Carwin in Dublin] to the character or conduct of our present sovereign and his ministers, but was extremely solicitous about the name and exploits of a king of Ireland before the flood. He felt no curiosity to know who was the father of his wife’s child but would travel a thousand miles, and consume months, investigating which son of Noah it was that first landed on the coast of Munster. . . . The whole stock of a great bookseller was, in his eyes, a cheap exchange for a shred of parchment, containing half a homily written by St. Patrick. (Memoirs, 273) This is certainly a sensibility that would not be welcome in the historical void of the New World, but it is one to which Carwin is more than amenable, given ‘‘that I was infected with somewhat of the antiquarian mania myself’’ (Memoirs, 275). Steeped in guile and secrecy, cultivating a gift of speaking with a forked tongue and multiple voices, all that Carwin needs to complete his honorary Irish status is an apprenticeship to the past. Carrying the cultural freight of his impoverished Irish upbringing with him to Philadelphia, the Irish figure in the landscape is sufficient to keep memory itself alive in the New World. Shared through ‘‘sympathetic contagion’’ with the Indian, moreover,

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this version of memory has the capacity to rescue American gothic from the conservative captivity narratives identified by Fiedler, as well as releasing European gothic from its own Celtic chamber of horrors. The underlying anxiety about the Atlantic frontier, and the liminal role of the Irish as the ‘‘excluded other’’ in American gothic, has its residues in the field of American studies today. While the revision of the canon under the New Americanists has belatedly addressed questions of gender, the suppressed histories of Native Americans, and—more problematically—African Americans,44 there is still an isolationist tendency to construe these as interior histories whose range of reference stops at the checkpoints of various borders or at the Atlantic and Pacific seaboards. The systematic neglect of the Irish dimension in Brown’s work, for example, by all but a few critics,45 points to an underlying anxiety about ‘‘the alien’’ that extends to the present day, for a grasp of the wider significance of these aspects of their work demands an engagement with Irish literature and history, and Irish cultural debates, that does not come easily to practitioners within Americanist studies. Such elements require expertise in the Irish archive, but they are not just of interest from the Irish studies angle; their valency derives from their capacity to act as critical ‘‘shatter-zones,’’ contesting many of the received binaries in contemporary debates: insider versus outsider, white versus native, civility versus savagery, innocence versus inheritance, modernity versus tradition. As the pioneering efforts of Paul Gilroy, Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, and Ian Baucom have shown in relation to the new ‘‘Atlantic studies,’’ 46 it is no longer possible to sequester questions of race, class, and gender within conventional national boundaries, Irish, American, or otherwise. If the Atlantic is a frontier, it traverses time as well as space, as if oceans have memories of their own. Part of the Irish contribution to the negotiation of ‘‘the other’’ in the early republic was to reinstate memory in the public sphere, even if it materialized after its passage across the Atlantic in the form of American gothic. 44. More problematically for isolationist impulses in that the African heritage of slaves required moving outside the parameters of the United States, as Paul Gilroy so eloquently charts in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993). Carwin’s biloquism might well be the perfect vocal means of expressing this ‘‘double consciousness.’’ 45. In addition to Gardner’s pioneering work on the Irish in Brown, see also Diana Loercher Pazicky, Cultural Orphans in America (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997). 46. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic; Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000); and Ian Baucom, ed., ‘‘Atlantic Genealogies.’’

Terrific Register: The Gothicization of Atrocity in Irish Romanticism

Siobhán Kilfeather

Where there is leisure for fiction, there is little grief. —Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets General Lake . . . had ordered the heads of Mr. Grogan, Captain Keogh, Mr. Bagenal Harvey, and Mr. Colclough, to be placed on very low spikes, over the courthouse door of Wexford. A faithful servant of Mr. Grogan had taken away his head; but the other three remained there when I visited the town. The mutilated countenances of friends and relatives, in such a situation, would, it may be imagined, give any man most horrifying sensations! —Jonah Barrington, Personal Sketches of His Own Time I am dying of a fright. —Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer: A Tale Of the approximately twelve hundred curious incidents gathered in The Terrific Register; or, Record of Crimes, Judgments, Providences and Calamities, thirty-one stories are Irish. These include four stories of ghosts boundary 2 31:1, 2004. Copyright © 2004 by Duke University Press.

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or apparitions; six cases of medical freaks, monstrosities, miracles, or apparent resurrections; one heiress abduction; six anecdotes from the 1798 rebellion and one from 1642; and a further miscellany whose content is well indicated by the following titles: ‘‘Female Infatuation for a Murderer,’’ ‘‘A Son Condemned to Death by His Own Father,’’ ‘‘The Piracies and Murders of Philip Roche,’’ ‘‘The Melancholy Fate of an Innocent Dupe of an Artful Villain,’’ ‘‘Resurrection of a Highwayman,’’ ‘‘Unfortunate Delay,’’ ‘‘Surprising Discovery of Murder,’’ ‘‘The Vaults of Saint Michan’s,’’ ‘‘Deaths by Lightning,’’ ‘‘Dreadful Accident in Ireland,’’ ‘‘The Staunch Friend,’’ ‘‘Military Despotism’’ (excerpted from Letters from the Irish Highlands), ‘‘Captain David Roche, the Tiger,’’ ‘‘The Victim of a Broken Heart,’’ and ‘‘An Instance of a Singular Dream and Corresponding Event.’’ The place of Ireland and the Irish in the register is suggested in the preface: ‘‘The greater portion of the misfortunes which it recounts, are by a happy union of circumstances far removed from us. Treading a highly cultivated soil; [sic] the incursions and depredations of wild animals and men still more ferocious than they are to us unknown and unregarded. Enjoying a full toleration in matters of conscience, the Inquisition has no horrors for us, and guarded by laws whose letter and spirit secure liberty we are under no apprehension of being reduced to dust by the iron mace of a capricious tyrant.’’ 1 Elaine Freedgood’s study of Victorian writing about risk is an account of the work done by ephemeral texts that ‘‘tend to have the ‘forces and contradictions’ that they seek to master very close to the surface.’’ She does not include penny dreadfuls and other popular fiction, but she offers one of the most cogent descriptions of how fictions of English safety demanded that readers imagine the threat of Irish horrors as well as the dangers from Africa, India, and other colonial locations.2 From the first extract on the execution of the French regicide Damiens in 1757, to its conclusion in a Bedfordshire graveyard, The Terrific Register circumnavigates the globe and traverses history from classical antiquity to the nineteenth century. Among its most exploited sources are Mungo Parks’s travels in Africa, the adventures of Baron De Trenck, and anonymous sources on the plague and the Great 1. The Terrific Register; or, Record of Crimes, Judgments, Providences and Calamities, 2 vols. (London: Sherwood, Jones and Co., 1825), 1:iv. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text by volume and page numbers only. 2. See Elaine Freedgood, Victorian Writing about Risk: Imagining a Safe England in a Dangerous World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 9.

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Fire of London, as well as the baroque Italian atrocities collected in God’s Revenge against Murder.3 The preface to The Terrific Register states that the editors ‘‘have ransacked the various sources of information open to us’’ in order to collect anecdotes of calamities and atrocities from around the world (1:i). Some sources are heavily mined—heavily plagiarized, one might say. But one of the real curiosities of the anthology is the way in which the very act of excerpting and juxtaposing these sensational anecdotes seems to level the quality and tone of the writing, so that a sense of a single authorial voice emerges out of what is really an assembly of disparate voices. The Register exposes one of the characteristic features of writings about atrocities— the inevitable repetitions eventually create a sense of banality. Unadulterated sensationalism undoes its own effectiveness as a literature of terror. In the most ‘‘literary’’ of gothic novels, figures haunt the imagination for a long time after reading, and in some cases they escape their immediate contexts to haunt the wider culture—as do, for example, Radcliffe’s Schedoni, Lewis’s Monk, Byron’s Manfred, the creature in Frankenstein, Maturin’s Melmoth, and, much later, Count Dracula. Yet mere sensationalism is effective in engaging and maintaining a certain readership that becomes addicted to sensation. Charles Dickens describes the effects of such reading on the untutored imagination: ‘‘I used, when I was at school, to take in The Terrific 3. Travels in the interior districts of Africa: performed in the years 1795, 1796, and 1797, with an account of a subsequent mission to that country in 1805 by Mungo Park; to which is added an account of the life of Mr. Park (London: John Murray, 1815–1816); The life of Baron Frederic Trenck; containing his adventures; his cruel and excessive sufferings, during ten years imprisonment, at the fortress of Magdeburg, by command of the late King of Prussia; also, anecdotes, historical, political, and personal, trans. from the German by Thomas Holcroft (London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1788–93); John Reynolds, The triumphs of Gods revenge against the crying and execrable sinne of (wilful and premeditated) murther with his miraculous discoveries, and severe punishment thereof, in thirty several tragical histories (digested into six books) committed in divers countreys beyond the seas, never published or imprinted in any other language: histories which contain great variety of mournful and memorable accidents, historical, moral, and divine, very necessary to restrain and deter us from the bloody sin, which in these our days makes so ample, and large a progression: with a table of all the several letters and challenges contained in the whole six books. The third edition: whereunto are added, the lively pourtraictures of the several persons, and resemblances of other passages mentioned therein engraven in copper plates (London: Printed by Sarah Griffin for William Lee . . . , 1657). Frances Browne mentions that Mungo Parks’s Travels was one of the very few books common in country villages such as the one where she grew up in Donegal at the start of the nineteenth century (preface to The Star of Atteghei [London: Longmans, 1844]).

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Register, making myself unspeakably miserable, and frightening my very wits out of my head, for the small charge of a penny weekly; which considering that there was an illustration to every number, in which there was always a pool of blood, and at least one body, was cheap.’’ 4 Dickens himself was later to explore the paradox that while much of lived experience is the experience of certain kinds of atrocity, yet the unframed and unmediated representation of atrocity tends to become a form of escapism from reality. Eighteenth-century gothic fiction was lightly illustrated, if illustrated at all, with the horrors left chiefly to the imagination. During the nineteenth century, however, not only were pictures increasingly employed within books but the stock-in-trade figures of the gothic migrated to newspaper and magazine illustrations, as well as to the penny dreadfuls, and such well-known figures as the ‘‘Irish Frankenstein,’’ the ‘‘Irish Maniac,’’ and the ‘‘Irish Vampire’’ were frequently sighted in political cartoons and satire.5 Only two of the Irish narratives in The Terrific Register are accompanied by woodcuts. ‘‘Dreadful Cruelty of the Irish Rebels’’ shows a priest blessing Wexford rebels who, under the banner ‘‘MWS’’ (Murder without Sin), are piking to death Protestant prisoners (2:65). The other illustrated tale is ‘‘The Midnight Assassination’’ (2:17–23) (fig. 1): ‘‘The guilty couple felt the silent awe of the moment, and as they stole quietly along with their lifeless burden hanging on their arms, listened with renewed affright to each passing whisper of the breeze. They had now reached the extremity of the garden, and with paralysed hearts cast the corpse into the burial place. It sunk with a heavy sound into the grave, the face was turned upwards, and a sudden flash of lightning, as it shone full on the dead body, revealed the features of their daughter, of that child for whose sake the murder had been committed’’ (2:22). This particular twist of fate, in which a parent unwittingly murders a child, makes two more notable appearances in Irish romantic writings. In Charlotte Brooke’s Reliques of Irish Poetry, the mythic origins of this trope are explored in the story of Conloch, who is murdered by his father, Cú Chullainn; and James Clarence Mangan’s translation The Twenty-Fourth of February brings out the gothic possibilities in the story of a prodigal son who returns to the Alpine cabin of his youth and is murdered by his desper4. John Foster, The Life of Charles Dickens, ed. and annotated by J. W. T. Ley (London: Cecil Palmer, 1928), 43–44n. 5. These migrations are discussed in Luke Gibbons, ‘‘The Mirror and the Vamp: Reflections on the Act of Union,’’ in Hearts and Minds: Irish Culture and Society under the Act of Union, ed. Bruce Stewart (Monaco: The Princess Grace Library, 2002), 21–39.

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Figure 1. From The Terrific Register, 2:17. ate parents before he can reveal his identity.6 These child-slaying narratives seem to be a reflection on the processes of Irish history. Although they might seem to lend themselves to a reading in which a preoccupation with the past lays a curse on posterity—Ireland as the sow that eats her farrow—in fact, each story ends in tragedy because the parents do not reflect on the past sufficiently. All three stories are resonant with dramatic irony—the reader can only too easily decode the clues as to the children’s identities from a knowledge of past events, but all the parents are living too resolutely in the present. It is silence, sleep, and forgetfulness that produce disaster. At first glance, the tensions and contradictions in ‘‘The Midnight Assassination’’ are very close to the surface, and the story declares its apparent moral in the conclusion, where the murderer is executed after confessing not only to this crime but to his share in Emmet’s Rebellion: ‘‘he 6. Charlotte Brooke, Reliques of Irish Poetry: Consisting of Heroic Poems, Odes, Elegies and Songs, Translated into English Verse, With Notes Explanatory and Historical; to which will be subjoined A Legendary Tale (Dublin: W. Sleater, 1789); James Clarence Mangan, The Twenty-Fourth of February. This translation of Zacharias Werner’s Der Vierundzwanzigste Februar, first published in the Dublin University Magazine in 1837, is reprinted in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, ed. Seamus Deane (Derry: Field Day, 1991), 1:1212–30.

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solemnly persisted in affirming that he was driven to rebellion and murder by the miseries of his country, and the unexampled indigence of his own family. . . . [L]iberal-minded people when they shudder at the crimes of him who sleeps below, curse in the bitterness of their hearts the apostates who caused such guilt by the miseries they have entailed on their country’’ (2:23). In the case of ‘‘The Midnight Assassination,’’ the illustrator has made a mistake, which further exposes the contradictions of the story and of the register as a whole. Between the guilty parents lies the body of their murdered child, and in the distance is the figure who has followed them to the graveside, drawn as if he were pierced by the lightning that exposes the crime. In the story, the parents are followed to the grave by a woman in white—their intended victim, whom they mistake for a ghost. The illustrator has replaced the woman in white with a real ghost—that of Robert Emmet, who had once appeared at their home in disguise, requested their help, and thus set the plot in motion. ‘‘The Midnight Assassination’’ replays Emmet’s Rebellion as a gothic novella. Emmet himself first appears as an ambiguous figure—a veiled and gloomy stranger who is both menacing and seductive. His message of embryonic rebellion breaks up the domestic peace of the innocent peasants, but there are many indications in the story that rebellion is the consequence rather than the cause of Irish discontents. When Emmet first arrives at their door, the members of the family ‘‘were sitting around their little fire-side, gloomily awaiting an increase of poverty and misery’’ (2:17). Several ingredients of the nineteenth-century Emmet legend are present in the story, and these are effectively mapped onto gothic tropes: the cave in the Wicklow mountains, the uses of passwords and codes, Emmet’s speech from the dock, Sarah Curran’s visit to Emmet on the eve of his execution, Emmet’s scanning of the crowd just before his death. The deployment of these elements in the story suggests an awareness that Irish folk narrative and oral traditions are susceptible of being recast in gothic form. Although there are apparent mistakes in both local knowledge and in the use of language—for example, when two of the protagonists walk from Galway to Wicklow in a night, or when Emmet’s individual execution is described as a massacre—these are part of the gothic novel’s conventional recourse to poetic emphasis. ‘‘The Midnight Assassination’’ goes further than most gothic tales in emphasizing that the originating violence of the narrative is the violence of the state and its militia, and that all other violence, including the domestic violence with which the story concludes, is a reaction against that state violence. The role of the unnamed Sarah Curran in the tale is that of a figure whose desire for Emmet represents the reader’s desire for

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the romance of individuals in history, not simply to make historical narratives easier to comprehend but also to restore a belief in individual agency. One might then ask what this sympathetic account of rebellion is doing in a collection such as The Terrific Register, whose overall ethos is antirevolutionary. One could illustrate a parallel set of contradictions around representations of Lord Edward Fitzgerald and the 1798 rebellion, around the Scottish Jacobite rebels and Culloden, and around representations of the slave rebellion in St. Domingo. In most of these stories, the barbarities of the rebels are run out for condemnation, but by far the more eloquent accounts are those describing the nobility of the fallen rebels and the sufferings they subsequently endure. The Terrific Register exposes the ways that stories such as that of Emmet survive not only in Irish nationalist memory but also within the discourse of popular English nationalism, where their presentation as gothic tales exposes their uncanny affiliation to notions of English toleration and liberty. The project of The Terrific Register—to conjure with fears which may then be managed by the suggestion that they are a feature of life abroad rather than at home—is partly undone by the apparent contradiction emerging from the late 1790s within the gothic as a genre that, on the one hand, affected a lack of interest in character development in favor of an aesthetics of surfaces, tropes, and conventions, and, on the other hand, was becoming increasingly bewitched by the figure of the romantic hero and, inspired by James MacPherson’s Ossian, by the romance of lost causes. And if one thinks of the romantic fragment as a piece of writing that characteristically ends on an interruption—as, for example, does the autobiography of James Clarence Mangan—then one might think of The Terrific Register as enacting another kind of fragmentation, one in which the narratives of history and geography are interrupted with interpolated narratives, and in the process are leveled out, with events and characters atomized. Fatal Revenge Some critics of the gothic have suggested that Charles Robert Maturin came to the genre too late, when the fashion for it had passed its peak of popularity and its capacity to comment on things as they are had been exhausted. The female-centered gothic fiction of Catholic persecution, some hundreds of years past, in a sublime setting, as practiced most elegantly by Regina Maria Roche and Ann Radcliffe, may indeed have passed its peak, but the Faustian gothic of Godwin, Byron, Shelley, and

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Hogg is more or less contemporaneous with Maturin’s work. Something rather improbable happens to the gothic after 1800. A genre whose narrative drive, like that of pornography, depends on the conceit that characters learn nothing from experience becomes entwined in the emerging field of confessional writing, whose raison d’être would seem to be self-reflection, interiority, and character development. Laura Marcus has pointed out that early nineteenth-century autobiographical criticism repeatedly represents the self as a haunted entity, for which memory is elusive, deceptive, uncanny.7 At the same time, novels such as Confessions of a Justified Sinner and Frankenstein increasingly adopt the conventions of first-person confessional narrative. One could describe this interface as one in which autobiography ponders whether the writing self is indeed coincident with the self who lived through the events narrated, while the gothic challenges the autonomy of the self by excavating internal mental processes and letting loose phantoms into the external world through such mechanisms as creating doubles, unsettling histories, and fracturing temporality. In both genres, modes of death and remembrance are central. Maturin’s claim that the title of his first novel, Fatal Revenge, was a publisher’s imposition on his own preferred title, ‘‘The History of the Montorio Family,’’ has been accepted apparently without question, but the various prefatorial statements about authorship and intent that frame Maturin’s work need to be read with the same skepticism that has been brought to the truth-statements, autobiographical or otherwise, of his great devotee, James Clarence Mangan. Melmoth the Wanderer begins with a preface, in which Maturin claims that no one would sell his immortal soul for immediate worldly gain; he then goes on to tell the story of someone who did just that. The title of The Wild Irish Boy suggests that Maturin is responding to Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl, when in fact he is presenting a systematic revision of Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda. In the preface to Fatal Revenge, Maturin predicts a certain kind of literary failure for himself: ‘‘If youth, inacquaintance with literary habits, and the ‘original sin’ of national dulness, be any mitigation of severity, critical or eclectic, or of the cold and bitter blasts of the north, let this serve to inform my Readers, that I am fourand-twenty, that I never had literary friend or counsellor, and that I am an Irishman of the name of Dennis Jasper Murphy. Dublin Dec. 15th 1806.’’ 8 7. Laura Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994). 8. [Charles Robert Maturin], preface to Fatal Revenge; or, The Family of Montorio. A Romance, by ‘‘Dennis Jasper Murphy’’ (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1807).

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The deployment of the emphasis in these lines draws attention to Maturin’s histrionic posturing. There is no need for Maturin to adopt this pseudonym in an era when approximately half the novels in any given year were published anonymously. In choosing such a determinedly Irish Catholic name, Maturin is striking a pose and marking out the terrain of perversity and selfdivision that he was to make particularly his own. The evocation of ‘‘national dulness,’’ ‘‘eclectic severity,’’ and the ‘‘cold and bitter blasts of the north’’ are poses rather than arguments, and it is as a poseur that Maturin can be brilliant. One of the effects of foregrounding the Irish authorship of this Italian gothic story is that the opening scenes at the siege of Barcelona in 1690 summon up images of the siege of Derry. ‘‘Fatal revenge’’ becomes a more general statement than a comment on the fate of the Montorio family. Fatal Revenge sits squarely in line with texts such as ‘‘The Maniac,’’ ‘‘Conloch,’’ ‘‘The Midnight Assassination,’’ and The Twenty-Fourth of February in depicting a family tearing itself apart under the pressure of outside forces. The false autobiographical pose struck here and in the preface to Melmoth the Wanderer signals Maturin’s recognition that confession, which had been used as a narrative device in earlier gothic, could be pushed further into an incorporation of the soul-searching strategies of romantic autobiography within the representation of terror. Maturin has usually been read in terms of his own avowed anti-Catholicism, but it has also been observed that in Melmoth the Wanderer, in particular, he cannot deliver the Christian solace promised by the preface. ‘‘The Tale of the Guzman Family,’’ with its wholly domestic horror, is arguably the most terrifying in the novel, and central to that terror is the proposal that the faith of the individual Protestant collapses under pressure. ‘‘The Midnight Assassination’’ locates the primary guilt for the corruption of Irish society in the figure of the apostate; Maturin makes the more frightening proposal that everyone is an apostate. He precisely rejects the argument that the rebellions of 1798 and 1803 were the product of sectarian hostilities. With what may seem like uncanny prescience of the Great Famine of the 1840s, but is rather a close reading of recent Irish experience, Maturin makes hunger central to personal and social dissolution. Moreover, in the powerful scenes set in the lunatic asylum, with inhabitants driven as mad by the extremities of Puritanism as of royalism, there is a striking example of the emerging Puritan gothic. Luke Gibbons credits Edmund Burke with reversing the prevailing demonology: ‘‘Terror henceforth could not be simply dismissed as an aberration of a bygone era, but was a sinister force secreted by modernity itself.’’ 9 Katie Trumpener has noted that 9. Gibbons, ‘‘The Mirror and the Vamp: Reflections on the Act of Union,’’ 24.

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the lunatic asylum in Melmoth the Wanderer is populated by ‘‘men driven into alternative forms of schizophrenia by different aspects of the English civil war . . . tormented, bifurcated characters who wage a perennial civil war within themselves.’’ 10 The histories of the rebellion produced after 1798 are notoriously partial and prejudiced. To begin with, access to print was largely in the hands of the loyalists, who demonized the rebels as barbaric and animalistic. Loyalist historians, most notably Sir Richard Musgrave, recruited witness statements that focused on rebel atrocities against women, children, the elderly, and the saintly. The other side of the case was probably first put in Irish and in oral poetry, stories, and ballads. When histories more sympathetic to the rebels began to appear in English, they were in many ways caught within the rhetoric of accusation and counteraccusation, though it would be a mistake to suggest that they were working in a completely symmetrical fashion. Kevin Whelan has described the paper war among historians that followed the events of 1798.11 In a period of intelligence gathering, witness coercion, and state trials, such a paper war was capable of enacting as well as representing violence, atrocity, and revenge. Less attention has been given to the impact of the rebellion on other forms of writing and to the generic disruption and cross-fertilization produced by the disruption in public narratives of the nation. In the twentieth century, filmmakers repeatedly turned to the gothic as one of the most usable genres in which to explore the emotional affect on individuals and on audiences of witnessing atrocities. In The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu, for example, one can trace the impact of the traumas suffered by soldiers in World War I.12 The dream logic of the gothic is particularly capable of evoking the visual characteristics of shock. In parading so obviously its strategies of encodement, the gothic has been a magnet for those who practice criticism as a form of decoding. Critical writing on Irish gothic in the romantic period has worried over certain problems around which no consensus has formed. If one decides to read the gothic as an alle10. Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), 146–47. 11. Kevin Whelan, ‘‘’98 after ’98: The Politics of Memory,’’ in The Tree of Liberty: Radicalism, Catholicism, and the Construction of Irish Identity, 1760–1830 (Cork: Cork University Press / Field Day, 1996), 133–75. 12. An international filmography might also include Day of Wrath, directed by Carl Dreyer (Denmark, 1943); Rashomon, directed by Akira Kurosawa (Japan, 1951); and Apocalypse Now, directed by Francis Ford Coppola (United States, 1979).

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gory of the state of the nation, how far does one let the particular situation of the author—where she or he is coming from—determine the intention, if not the full meaning, of the allegory? Or is the allegorical dimension something provided by the reader? Is it inevitable that the kind of readerly subjectivity formed in a colonial regime will inevitably allegorize any fictional work into a national tale? In an Irish context, is it possible to imagine a variety of implied readerships, using fiction as part of the process for forming individual subjectivities as well as group identities? W. J. McCormack suggests that ‘‘[a]t the risk of a paradox, it has to be said that while Irish gothic writing does not amount to a tradition, it is a distinctly Protestant tradition.’’ 13 If Mangan, whom Seamus Deane credits with inaugurating the new genre of Catholic gothic, is an anomaly in such a tradition, then so is William Carleton, whose Wildgoose Lodge, originally titled ‘‘Confessions of a Reformed Ribbonman,’’ is generally identified as a gothic novella.14 Carleton reformed himself from Catholicism into the established church, and for many commentators, it is this separation from his past and from the Irish-speaking Catholic community of his childhood that provides the springboard for his fiction. But to place Wildgoose Lodge in a Protestant tradition requires some unhinging of the usual implication that the gothic is most effective when it expresses unconscious anxieties breaking into the world of representation through a form of dream logic.15 Carleton explains in his autobiography that when he was a young man just embarking on adult life, he had a dream that changed his life—a dream that he was being chased by a bull.16 When he comes to describe his road to conversion in his ‘‘Autobiography,’’ Carleton’s memory seems frequently to fail him, and the account of the dream of the mad bull could be understood as what Freud describes as a ‘‘screen memory,’’ in which an indifferent memory is substi13. W. J. McCormack, ‘‘Introduction to ‘Irish Gothic and After, 1820–1945,’’ in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 2:831–53, 837. 14. Seamus Deane, Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing Since 1790 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 126; William Carleton, Wildgoose Lodge (first published as ‘‘Confessions of a Reformed Ribbonman,’’ in Dublin Literary Gazette, 1830); rep. in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 2:873–83. 15. Declan Kiberd has characterized Carleton as someone who ‘‘believed in progress, or at least thought he did,’’ and the general tenor of Carleton criticism has been to qualify the ascription of intentionality to his procedures. Declan Kiberd, Irish Classics (London: Granta Books, 2000), 273; see also Julian Moynahan, Anglo-Irish: The Literary Imagination in a Hyphenated Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994). 16. William Carleton, ‘‘Autobiography,’’ in The Life of William Carleton, by D. J. O’Donoghue (London: Downey and Co., 1896).

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tuted for another impression that is significant. Moreover, Freud explicitly associates the mechanism of screen memory with that of paramnesia, the forgetting of proper names. Julian Moynahan ingeniously reads the dream in terms of a fear of the Papal Bull, and Carleton’s own explicit interest in the Irish Bull would seem to offer another route for possible associative analysis. Whether Mangan should be considered as an honorary Protestant, or Carleton as a dishonorable one, a certain amount of care is necessary when we move from a consideration of the gothic as a vehicle for representing individual guilt into an assumption that it is an allegory of class guilt.17 Much of the writing that appears in the fifty years after 1798 is much more akin to what in the twentieth century was identified as survivor guilt—a form of trauma experienced by people who have escaped life-threatening situations and whose experience of the existence of their consciousness in time is fractured by repeated intrusive memories of the time of danger, memories in which visual images of horror predominate. While it can be very difficult to trace the impact of individual works on the reading public, autobiographies, memoirs, letters, and personal diaries offer some insight into the ways in which many Irish people in the romantic period felt they were living gothic lives. Irish Maniacs The major program to build institutions to house the mentally ill in Ireland in the first half of the nineteenth century cannot be directly attributed to the effects of 1798, but one of the most frequently recorded reasons for admissions to lunatic asylums in this period was trauma related to war. Post-traumatic stress could kill people or render them insensible, as several observers noted after 1798. ‘‘Peggy a beautiful girl died unmarried of fright in the late rebellion,’’ Dorothea Herbert records in her Retrospections for 1799.18 Maria Edgeworth manages to keep fright more or less out of her first overtly Irish novel, Castle Rackrent (1800), only for it to erupt the following year in Belinda (1801), in which both Juba and Lady Delacour are in turn almost frightened to death by Harriot Freke. The freak as a capricious 17. Terry Eagleton asks how it is that the Anglo-Irish register so much paranoia in the allegorical dimension of the gothic, since they are, from the viewpoint of the masses, the persecutors. Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture (London: Verso, 1995), 191. Their paranoid fiction is the evidence of their guilt, but might it be useful to think of this guilt as having more characteristics than those of bad conscience? 18. Dorothea Herbert, Retrospections, 2 vols. (London: Gerald Howe, 1929), 1:69.

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prank is a typical fairy gesture, and Harriot’s pranks, which are some of her most characteristic activities, are often connected with the supernatural. In Belinda, there is a set of connections between fairies, slaves, servants, and freaks, and Harriot Freke, who often acts at night and in disguise, moves between these worlds in the novel. She is, among other things, the great orchestrator of servants as spies on their masters and mistresses. What gives a frightening edge to the portrait of Harriot Freke is the recollection of how Irish secret societies often used fairy lore as part of their disguise. Maturin makes fright central to Melmoth the Wanderer. In the first few chapters set in Wicklow there are several examples, including this description of the elderly healer who tends John Melmoth’s uncle: ‘‘No one . . . knew better how to torment or terrify her victims into a belief of that power which may and has reduced the strongest minds to the level of the weakest; and under the influence of which the cultivated sceptic, Lord Lyttleton, yelled and gnashed and writhed in his last hours, like the poor girl who, in the belief of the horrible visitation of the vampire, shrieked aloud, that her grandfather was sucking her vital blood while she slept, and expired under the influence of imaginary horror.’’ 19 Later on, Maturin returns the interest of the novel directly to Ireland in the frequently cited footnote describing the death of Lord Kilwarden, nailed to the door with pikes by a Dublin mob in 1803. An observer ‘‘stood at the window, gasping with horror, his wife attempting vainly to drag him away. He saw the last blow struck—he heard the last groan uttered, as the sufferer cried, ‘put me out of pain,’ while sixty pikes were thrusting at him. The man stood at his window as if nailed to it; and when dragged from it, became—an idiot for life.’’ 20 Following 1798, a number of writers, chiefly loyalists, attempted to represent the impact of the rising not only in terms of things seen and experienced but in terms of the fears that had been activated and that continued to haunt Ireland for a number of years. Amelia Bristow’s narrative poem ‘‘The Maniac’’ (published by subscription in 1810) begins with a description of a lunatic asylum and goes on to explain how one of the inmates is a victim of the horrors of the rising.21 The poem retrospectively narrates the history of Bernardo and Albert, northern Protestants and childhood friends who 19. Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer: A Tale (1820; repr., London: Richard Bently, 1892), 1:8–9. 20. Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer, 2:148–49. 21. Amelia Bristow, The Maniac, A Tale; or, A View of Bethlem Hospital: and The Merits of Women, A Poem from the French: With Poetical Pieces on Various Subjects, Original and Translated (London: J. Hatchard, 1810).

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become even more closely related when Bernardo marries Albert’s sister. They seem fixed in a happy, prosperous existence until . . . Sedition, with her horrid brand, Spread wide her baleful influence through the land: and the idealist Bernardo becomes a United Irishman. During the rebellion, Albert, a loyalist soldier, witnesses his friend’s execution and then returns to his own home to discover that his wife has been raped and his children murdered by rebels, at which point he loses his mind. At the end of the poem, Bristow has a coda in prose: ‘‘Unfortunately, there is not much of exaggeration in this melancholy tale. Instances of insanity, from distress of mind, occurred during the late unhappy rebellion in Ireland: and scenes similar to that here represented, as having occasioned that catastrophe, were, alas, but too frequent, where activity opposed the popular ferment. The writer has only blended circumstances; scarcely heightened any.’’ While it is commonplace for loyalist women in the southern counties to describe their alienation from and fear of their servants and neighbors, it is the internecine aspect of the conflict that most agitates Bristow. The employment of gothic names and modes of presentation only partially diverts attention from her obvious anxiety that the rebellion has fractured the fiction of an organic relationship between family and nation. Why, then, does she employ this gothic accent? Unlike the names commonly used by Radcliffe and Roche, the names Albert, Bernardo, Emma, and Matilda are not so foreign as to be incompatible with real life (after all, one of the book’s subscribers is Narcissus Batt), but they do separate ‘‘The Maniac’’ from the conventions of literary realism as established in the eighteenth-century Irish novel. In deploying these gothic tropes, Bristow’s work resembles that of the almost contemporary anonymous novel The Cavern in the Wicklow Mountains; or, The Fate of the O’Brien Family (also published as The United Irishmen), whose devices are straight out of the school of Edmund Burke and Ann Radcliffe: the location in a cave and a ruined abbey, the confession to a suspect French monk, the set of family relations featuring incest and betrayal, and the imprisonment in Dublin Castle by the agents of an apparently arbitrary power.22 Moreover, The Cavern responds to Richard Musgrave and the collection of loyalist witness statements by presenting itself as a pseudo-autobiographical narrative. It ends, like ‘‘The Maniac,’’ with the protagonist’s insanity as the reality of the atrocities around him becomes 22. The Cavern in the Wicklow Mountains; or, The Fate of the O’Brien Family; A Tale Founded on Facts (Dublin: James Charles for the author, 1821).

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too much for his mind to bear. An even more significant intertext for Bristow is the ballad, or series of ballads, variously called ‘‘The Maniac.’’ ‘‘The Irish Maniac,’’ or ‘‘Mary le More,’’ a form of debased ‘‘Aisling,’’ in which the poet meets on the moors somewhere on the Cork/Kerry border a young woman who has witnessed the murder of her father and lover by the yeomen who raped her and now wanders the countryside deranged, telling her story to passing strangers.23 Cathy Davidson discusses some of the ways in which early American fiction allegorized the struggles for ideological dominance in the colonies and the emerging nation. One of the most popular novels in nineteenthcentury America was Isaac Mitchell’s The Asylum, or, Alonzo and Melissa (serialized in 1804; issued in book form in 1811), a costume gothic.24 Reflecting on its title, Davidson suggests that ‘‘isolation itself necessarily turns the asylum as pastoral retreat into the asylum as prison.’’ 25 America was to provide an asylum for many of Ireland’s political refugees, as is acknowledged in The Plea of Erin.26 One of the propositions in Irish gothic fiction after 1798 was that it was becoming impossible to find the asylum as pastoral retreat within Ireland. The title of Sarah Isdell’s The Irish Recluse; or, Breakfast at the Rotunda might promise a misanthropic tale or suggest a satire on romantic alienation, but it is primarily concerned with the destruction of private space and private sorrows by the invasion of political rhetoric.27 The novel moves between the female recluse living in the nearly ruined O’Donoghue’s Castle, some twenty miles from Tralee, and a group of United Irishmen plotting sedition in Dublin and choosing to do so in a public space associated with women and reproduction—the public rooms at the 23. There was some consensus after the rebellion, even among moderate loyalists, that the majority of atrocities, and particularly the deliberate use of rape as a strategy of domination, had been committed by the yeomanry. See Mary Helen Thuente, ‘‘Liberty, Hibernia, and Mary Le More: United Irish Images of Women,’’ in The Women of ’98, ed. Dáire Keogh and Nicholas Furlong (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1998), 9–25. 24. Isaac Mitchell, The Asylum, or, Alonzo and Melissa: an American tale, founded on fact (Poughkeepsie, N.Y.: Joseph Nelson, 1811). 25. Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 220. 26. The Plea of Erin, or The case of the natives of Ireland in the United States, fairly displayed, in the fraternal address of the First Congress in the year 1775; and in the respectful memorial of the republican Irish, who had, consequently, sought ‘‘an asylum’’ in America, addressed by them to the Congress in the year 1798 (Philadelphia: Printed at the office of the Freeman’s Journal, no. 21, Walnut-Street, Philadelphia, 1798), 4 pages. 27. Sarah Isdell, The Irish Recluse; or, Breakfast at the Rotunda by the ‘Author of The Vale of Louisiana’ (London: J. Booth, 1809).

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Figure 2. Frontispiece of The Irish Recluse, vol. 2. Courtesy of The Board of Trinity College Dublin. Rotunda Lying-In Hospital in Dublin. The clamor of voices at the Rotunda is linked metonymically with the violent invasion of Lady Elizabeth’s asylum by French pirates. The frontispiece of the novel’s second volume recalls Edmund Burke’s description of the attack on Marie Antoinette by showing a woman almost decapitated by her attackers (fig. 2). Dorothea Herbert’s Retrospections, like Melmoth the Wanderer, narrates the breaking down of the barrier between public world and private self as Herbert is driven slowly insane by what might at first seem essentially personal misfortunes. In Herbert’s early years, the gothic appears in minor details—the ruin where illicit lovers meet, and a new and exciting but essentially safe way of thinking about domestic space. By the 1790s, however, violence and terror have begun to invade Herbert’s home, coloring her relations with family and servants, and coming to dominate the progress of the courtship she largely imagines between herself and the man she eventually calls her husband (once he has married someone else), John Roe. Herbert narrates her life story as if she were writing a novel. She incidentally reveals some of the mechanisms and conventions of contemporary fiction. Among the most striking of these conventions is her failure to extrapolate from her experience as an individual into any systematic analysis of how her society functions. She describes domestic tyranny and social unrest as they impinge on her own life but asks no questions as to why women in general

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are oppressed or why the Irish population is generally unsettled. Herbert’s repeated turning away from public to private worlds is indicated in an entry concerning her sister’s illness: ‘‘The Rebels were now shewing themselves to the great Terror of all honest People, but we had a more domestic cause of alarm—My sister Sophy was seized with the same fever that carried off such numbers all over the world the preceding Year—It was highly infectious and none of our friends would venture near the house—The Servant Boy took it and we were in hourly dread of it spreading through the Family.’’ 28 The house under quarantine/siege, the ambivalent position of the servant, and the fear of contagion are characteristic of the narratives of ’98 produced by Protestant women after the rebellion.29 The duty to family and property becomes increasingly central to Herbert’s identity just at the point when her romantic expectations fail and her family begins to abuse her in order to deprive her of her own limited property rights. This is a reality she cannot bear, and she ends the diary under the shadow of insanity in the home that should have been her asylum but that has become, in fact, her prison. Dead and Alive Tá uaimh mhór fhada faoi thalamh ag Baile na Síg, dhá mhíle siar ó Challainn, ar a nglaoid Poll na Ropairí. Is cosúil go mbíodh siad dá bhfolchadh féin ann d’éis aimsir Chromaill agus Rí Uilliam. Is iomdha fear breá álainn maith macánta do chuir an dís Sasanaigh se le ropaireacht nó le déirc nó le deoraíocht i dtíorthaibh thar lear, noch do tógadh go macnasúil meidhreach.30 In another part of rural Ireland in the 1820s, in Callan, County Kilkenny, Amhlaoibh Ó Súilleabháin, schoolmaster and linen draper, was keep28. Herbert, Retrospections, 269. 29. Some of these are collected in John D. Beatty, ed., Protestant Women’s Narratives of the Irish Rebellion of 1798 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001). 30. ‘‘Two miles west of Callan, there is a great long cave under ground at Ballynasheeg, which they call Powl-na-Roparee. It is probable that, after the time of Cromwell and King William, they [the outlawed Irish] used to hide there. Many a fine strapping good honest man these two Englishmen drove to outlawry, or to beggary, or to exile in foreign lands, who had been reared in luxury and festivity.’’ Irish Texts Society Volume XXXI: Cinnlae Amhlaoibh Uí Shúileabháin / The Diary of Humphrey O’Sullivan, Part II, ed. with an Introduction, Translation and Notes by Rev. Michael McGrath (London: Irish Texts Society, 1936); Cín Lae Amhlaoibh, ed. Tomás De Bhaldraithe (Baile Átha Cliath: An Clóchomhar Tta, 1970). The Irish text is taken from De Bhaldraithe’s edition (66); the translation is from McGrath (275).

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ing a private diary in Irish. Ó Súilleabháin was an amateur naturalist, particularly interested in bird-watching, and he seems at first to be creating an almost elegiac record of the diminishment and even disappearance of species of birds and flora in the area. He records livestock and crop prices, and uses the newspapers to compare agricultural practices in Kilkenny with those in England. He also compares the weather. He follows the activities of the repeal movement in Finn’s Leinster Journal, and he worries about sectarian violence and about land abuse. His wife is dying, and his four children will be left motherless. He has servant problems. He may well have commenced the journal because he is worried about the disappearance of the Irish language. He is certainly as interested in etymology as in entomology and ornithology. None of these is an overtly gothic concern, but Ó Súilleabháin has internalized certain tropes that critics associate with the gothic, including pathetic fallacy, pervasive melancholy, associative poetics, dislocation, the unspeakable, and the thematics of revenge and disinterment. On the surface, the most radical difference between Ó Súilleabháin and gothic writers has to do with surface effects—he writes in old school books and in accounting ledgers. The dynamic between the text and the material space of its inscription is particularly interesting in Ó Súilleabháin’s manuscript, because the ledger is specifically a desk ‘‘diary’’ printed in English, with columns set out to collect and process information on excise duties. One of the pleasures of Ó Súilleabháin’s writing is that it assaults this essentially colonial imposition of calendar, structure, commerce, and ‘‘duties’’ with a counternarrative. Ó Súilleabháin writes both across the columns of the ledger and in the margins. He replaces the English calendar with entries that recognize a different system of ordering the year— saints’ days, pattern days, local market days, days mentioned in Gaelic poetry, anniversaries of private events—and his own way of tracking the years through bird migrations and the blooming of wild flowers. An interest in etymologies, even or perhaps especially false etymologies, is one of the features that links the gothic with antiquarianism. That connection is made most explicit in Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl (1806). I began this essay with a quotation from Samuel Johnson’s critique of pastoral elegy in the shape of Milton’s Lycidas: ‘‘Where there is leisure for fiction, there is little grief.’’ While other Irish writers refute Johnson by channeling grief through fiction, Ó Súilleabháin makes the leisure for another kind of pastoral, closer to the poetry of John Clare, in which a very slow and contemplative series of observations become a way of living with death. In the entry for March 6, 1829, the Irish name for the fieldfare, siocán,

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is related to death through a possibly false etymology, sacán, sacklike, but also inert, dead and alive. The entry is then interrupted by an account of the sudden death of a neighbor. A proverb on affliction leads to heavenly thoughts, represented by further etymological consideration of fuiseog, the lark.31 Ó Súilleabháin’s diary performs a personal elegiac function when it allows him to compare in minute detail the landscape, flora, and bird life of Callan with that of his native Kerry. It is partly because the whole diary is such a powerful meditation on loss that the passages of overtly political writing, such as the incorporation of Peig Nic Seafradh’s complaint about her eviction, escape the rhetorical banality that characterizes so much writing about atrocity. Although Ó Súilleabháin’s writing is elegiac, it is neither passive nor fatalistic. It demonstrates that Irish can be the language of business, sex, and fun, as well as the language of loss. Ó Súilleabháin’s gothic tropes, like the gothicism of Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater, suggest that nostalgia may be a future, rather than a past, mode of being in the world. Skinning a Black Child In 1798, after the defeat of the rebels, the loyalist Irish barrister Jonah Barrington visited Wexford town, where he viewed the heads of three of his former friends displayed on spikes over the courthouse. Recollecting that moment in his autobiography, thirty years later, he observes that ‘‘[t]he mutilated countenances of friends and relatives, in such a situation, would, it may be imagined, give any man most horrifying sensations!’’ 32 Much of the literature that emerges from Ireland in the fifty years after the rebellion is a literature of atrocity, an attempt to come to terms with things that had been seen and that could be neither fully remembered nor completely forgotten within the various genres available for narrating experience. The Irish were not, of course, unique in having to remember the mutilated countenances 31. ‘‘I see two flocks of fieldfares. It is sack-like and slow they fly. It is from the word ‘sacán,’ that is, anything slow, inert, dead-and-alive, that they are so named. This morning Richard Lynch, a prosperous merchant, died suddenly. He had been but three days ailing, that is, on last Tuesday he was seized with a mortal illness. ‘Woe to one who talks big considering the speed with which affliction overtakes one.’ He was a mild easy-going man, but given to drink. It is from the word uás (that is uaois, aloft above) that uiseog or fuiseog [lark] comes, for it is aloft in the clouds of heaven that it sings its superior music’’ (Cinnlae Amhlaoibh Uí Shúileabháin, trans. McGrath, 119–21). 32. Jonah Barrington, Personal Sketches of His Own Time (New York: Redfield, 1858), 173.

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of friends and relatives. Barrington’s Personal Sketches of His Own Times (1827–32) was written and published in Paris, the capital of decapitation, and it may have been his exile in Paris that helped Barrington to orchestrate his memories of Ireland before the Act of Union into a remarkable symphony on the theme of lost heads. Like Swift, Barrington is an extremist in his representation of the body in pain, and his comic presentation of physical violence, particularly of decapitation and dismemberment, mobilizes and articulates suffering in a way that can be usefully contrasted with the expropriation and exploitation of witness statements by polemicists in the post-1798 writings of the rebellion. Moreover, Barrington is driven by the events of the rebellion and the union to develop a critique of the conservative exploitation of family as a sentimental trope. Barrington’s Sketches is particularly interesting in contrast to the testimonies of loyalist women such as Jane Barber, Jane Adams, Dinah Goff, Elizabeth Richards, and even with the account of 1798 in Maria Edgeworth’s memoir of her father.33 Faced with the violence of the rebellion, these women tend, perhaps unwittingly, to follow Burke’s Reflections into celebrating a calcification of family affections and normative family values, evoking tropes of rape and chivalry to demand an emotive, anti-intellectual response to the whole network of issues that might be at stake in 1798. That reverence for family is then projected onto the union, leading to the type of sentiment ridiculed by Barrington in the person of his great comic ‘‘invention,’’ Sir Boyle Roche, who is quoted as having said on one occasion in the Irish House of Commons, ‘‘Sir, there is no Levitical degree between nations, and on this occasion I can see no shame in marrying our own sister.’’ 34 In the introduction to Sketches, Barrington claims that in contemplating his probable imminent death, he set out to burn his personal papers, and that having made considerable progress, he found himself rescuing from the flames fragments that amused him. That introductory device becomes thematized within the text as a preoccupation with incidents from the past that cannot find closure, specifically with people who will not stay dead and buried. There is the terrifying apparition of the murderer, Lanegan, who turns up at Barrington’s lodgings in London one night, several months after having been seen by a large crowd to have been hung, drawn, and quartered in Dublin. This is very much the kind of incident that appears in The 33. Richard Lovell Edgeworth and Maria Edgeworth, Memoirs of Richard Lovell Edgeworth Esq. Begun By Himself and Concluded by his Daughter Maria Edgeworth (London: R. Hunter, 1820). 34. Barrington, Personal Sketches, 139.

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Terrific Register, but what makes Barrington’s anecdotes much more resonant than those comparable atrocities is that Barrington situates them within a narrative and analytical framework, assembling them as evidence of the failure of British administration in Ireland. Betrayal, corruption, and deceit are registered here, as much as in his companion work, Rise and Fall of the Irish Nation, which concludes with two registers, a red list and a black list, of those members of Irish Parliament who voted for and against the Act of Union.35 It is a commonplace in the representation of atrocity to describe the effect of a murder in terms of its impact on the victim’s family. Repeatedly in loyalist women’s memoirs of 1798, the rebellion is seen as a revolution in happy family lives, while the union offers a promise of restoration figured as a marriage between England and Ireland. Barrington does not attack this version of events directly, but his text is run through with accounts of disastrous marriages—adulterous, deceitful, murderous. And while R. R. Madden, for example, writes of the loss the families of Grogan, Keogh, and Colclough suffer upon their deaths, Barrington talks of the loss their friends endured.36 Barrington’s interest in interrogating the experience of living in the body during a time when other bodies are being assaulted and destroyed is evident in his own version of the judgment of Solomon—the history of the black baby born to Irish parents, who suppose his blackness to be a form of lusus, the imprint of a shock to the mother during pregnancy, and decide to have him flayed by surgeons in the hope that a ‘‘natural’’ white skin will grow to replace the deformed black skin.37 In this chapter, Barrington takes the opportunity to compare the relative barbarities of rural women healers with newly professionalized physicians, to take a swipe at the necessary fictions involved in paternity and ancestry, and to suggest the very different perspectives that the family servants would bring to the truth of the story. The names of the characters resonate further, toward Irish links with America. The child’s mother is the sister of a Lieutenant Palmer, who vigorously defends her honor. (Palmer is a name that links this story to Barrington’s other stories of decapitation, since it was a Lieutenant Palmer who failed to protect the young Irishwoman Jane McCrea from murder and scalping by ‘‘savages’’ in a notorious incident during the American Revolution.) 35. Jonah Barrington, Rise and Fall of the Irish Nation (Paris: G. G. Bennis, 1833), 480–94. 36. R. R. Madden, The United Irishmen, Their Lives and Times (London: J. Madden and Co., 1842–46). 37. Jonah Barrington, Personal Sketches of His Own Time (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1832), 3:51–66.

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The baby’s father is a George Washington, who, imagining a potentially profitable relationship to the American president, passes on that name to the baby, in an uncannily prescient comment on the disguised links between paternity and enslavement at the foundation of the American nation. The black servant brought from America recalls Edward Fitzgerald’s companion, Tony Small. The horror that the family feels on first hearing of the black child recalls Edmund Burke’s chapter on ‘‘Darkness terrible in its own nature,’’ in A Philosophical Enquiry.38 It is characteristic of Barrington, and perhaps of the postrevolutionary time from which he was writing, to reject such a claim and to prefer to examine how the body is marked by histories and disputes. Hypochondriosis The writer who most clearly identifies the difficulties of including the aftermath of 1798 in autobiography, and therefore perhaps most successfully evokes the experience of terror, is James Clarence Mangan. ‘‘In my boyhood I was haunted by an indescribable feeling of something terrible.’’ 39 Mangan lived the atomized life, and in his fragment of an autobiography, he writes about feeling and dreaming terror dissociated from its causes. Seamus Deane has proposed that Mangan’s ‘‘Autobiography is clearly one of the most obvious gothic fictions of the century in Ireland,’’ 40 and it demands comparison with De Quincey’s Confessions, Goethe’s Sorrows of Werther, the tales of Hoffman and Kleist, and gothic novels, particularly the work of Beckford and of Mangan’s idol, Charles Robert Maturin. In his Autobiography, Mangan plucks out an odd analogy to his own suffering state in childhood: ‘‘Like Bonnet, whose life was embittered by the strange notion that he saw an honest man continually robbing his house, I suffered as much from my inability to harmonise my thoughts and feelings as from the very evil itself that I dreaded.’’ 41 Like the later extraordinary passage in which Mangan claims to have contracted hypochondriosis through being forced to share a bed with a leprous child in the convalescent ward of a hospital, Bonnet’s ‘‘notion’’ makes no sense literally but is deeply suggestive of the 38. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968), 144–45. 39. James Clarence Mangan, Autobiography, edited from the manuscript by James Kilroy (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1968), 9. 40. Deane, Strange Country, 126. 41. Mangan, Autobiography, 10.

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psychic impacts of trauma. There is an affliction invisible to others, characterized by the incessant repetition of a visual image—the robber, the child— and an experience of anxiety and powerlessness on the part of the subject that is not susceptible to intervention or remedy, because the moment at which an intervention might have occurred is irredeemably past.42 Mangan states that his ‘‘nervous and hypochondrial feelings almost verged on insanity.’’ 43 While Herbert and Ó Súilleabháin, diarists working with no immediate prospect of printed publication, offer an insight into the ways in which many Irish people after 1798 were haunted by the memory of the dead and the sense that private life itself might be on the verge of dissolution, Barrington and Mangan harness the conventions of both comic fiction and the gothic into narratives that examine the textuality of lived experience and see in autobiography the possibility of presenting that lived experience as a form of critique. In Irish romantic writing, the lists, registers, calendars, and diaries provide one way of describing, enumerating, and commemorating acts of atrocity, but the inflection of those modes of expression with a gothic accent confronts the irreducible realities of facts and figures with the powerful unreality of poetic language, which tells a different story.

42. I have been so far unable to trace the allusion to Bonnet, and it is possible that Mangan invented this incident (other allusions in the text have proved equally difficult to trace). If this anecdote is connected to what is known of Bonnet, however, it certainly suggests some interesting associations. One of Bonnet’s achievements was the identification of a particular visual delusion, in which the onset of blindness is marked by hallucinations. These hallucinations, which the sufferers recognize as hallucinations, produce not anxiety but an unusual feeling of happiness. 43. Mangan, Autobiography, 26.

Newman, Ireland, and Universality

Thomas Docherty

. . . dazzled by phenomena, instead of perceiving things . . . Non judicavi me scire aliquid inter vos, nisi Jesum Christum, et hunc crucifixum.1 1. Irish Souls On November 12, 1851, John Henry Newman, a doctor of divinity but not yet a cardinal, was formally appointed rector of the Catholic University of Ireland, the institution that would open formally almost exactly three years later, on November 3, 1854. In Dublin, almost immediately, he began what he called his ‘‘campaign in Ireland’’ with a series of ‘‘Discourses’’—lectures 1. The epigraphs for this piece come from John Henry Newman, Discourses on University Education, in Newman, Prose and Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Tillotson (London: Rupert HartDavis, 1957), 360 and 357, respectively. Those whom Newman describes as ‘‘dazzled by phenomena, instead of perceiving things’’ are the immature, who are immature precisely because they have had an inadequate education. In the second epigraph, he cites St. Paul. Hereafter, Prose and Poetry is cited parenthetically as PP. boundary 2 31:1, 2004. Copyright © 2004 by Duke University Press.

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‘‘On the Scope and Nature of University Education’’—that would eventually become the first part of the completed text of The Idea of the University. Published initially in fortnightly installments during 1852, more or less exactly contemporaneously with their oral delivery, the Discourses caused some small stir in their immediate audience and more widely abroad. Central to these texts is Newman’s view that, in a fundamental sense, the phrase ‘‘Catholic University’’ is a tautology. What is often taken in Newman’s writings after 1851 simply as the ecumenism that one might expect from a convert is, in fact, more precisely his militant alignment of Catholicism with a totalizing Universalism.2 For Newman, globalization—had he ever had the opportunity to comment on the term—would have described the process by which the world would come to accept and to practice Catholicism. In some respects, Catholicism is to Newman what the neoliberal market economy is to the contemporary globalist: something that ostensibly diminishes the importance of local laws and allegiances in the interest of some immanent and transcendent condition. However, the strict opposition that is implied in this— between Catholic and Protestant, or between ‘‘universalizing global’’ and ‘‘localist’’ (with all that this latter implies: historically located, geographically located, geopolitically located, individualizing, and so on)—is not, in fact, quite so clear-cut as the rhetoric of the opposition might imply. Newman, on occasions, resembles a pragmatist thinker such as Richard Rorty, who once explained his ‘‘postmodern bourgeois liberal’’ stance by arguing that the sociopolitical arrangements of the ‘‘western democracies’’ were ‘‘right’’ in the sense that those arrangements allowed us to live in the way that we were choosing to live: they were right because, in effect, they were suitable and adequate to our concerns. Rorty then argued for a kind of ‘‘frank ethnocentrism,’’ in which ‘‘we await . . . the time when the Cashinahua, the Chinese and (if it should prove that there are any) the Martians will take part in the same social democratic community.’’ 3 In some ways, Newman, too, 2. I use the term militant here to describe Newman’s stance. This is unusual. Roy Foster, in Modern Ireland, 1600–1972 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989), 395, describes Newman, with some validity, as an ‘‘armchair nationalist,’’ even though Newman did see his term and mission in Ireland in the quasi-military terms of a campaign. Further, however, the sense I have in mind when I use the term militant here is given more fully by Alain Badiou in his Saint Paul—la fondation de l’universalisme (Paris: Presses Universitares de France, 1997), 2. Hereafter, Saint Paul is cited parenthetically as SP. 3. Richard Rorty, ‘‘Le cosmopolitanisme sans émancipation: en réponse à Jean-François Lyotard,’’ Critique 41 (May 1985): 570. See my comments on this position in After Theory, 2d ed. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), 63–64; see also Jacques Derrida,

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expects that insofar as humans will fulfill themselves, then they will emerge as Catholics on a global stage.4 A more direct comparison of Newman’s thinking might be made with that of George Soros, who is unapologetically a ‘‘globalist’’ but who sees that there are at least two orders of globalization always in question: the economic and the political.5 Soros is at pains to distinguish between what he calls the economic triumph of global capitalism, on the one hand, and the failures of global political emancipation, on the other. In what for many outside of the business audience he addresses would be an obvious truism, Soros writes, ‘‘Capitalism and democracy do not necessarily go hand in hand.’’ 6 Indeed, he points out that one of the major threats to freedom and democracy in our time is precisely the overintimate relation between business and government, the relation that (in other times and places) has been a major characteristic of fascism. The key to the position adopted by Soros is one that would not be entirely anathema to Newman. Newman is also well aware of these two distinct realms, noting that the business realm in his time is effectively dominated by Protestants and Protestantism; but in his case, the question of government is primarily an issue concerning the ‘‘government of the self’’ and, as such, is for him primarily a theological and not merely a political one, though no less universal for that. Soros states unequivocally that ‘‘business is conducted for private gain,’’ and so it follows that ‘‘if we care about universal principles such as freedom, democracy, and the rule of law, we cannot leave them to the care of market forces; we must establish some other institutions to safeguard them.’’ 7 Rorty effectively follows a logic of competing discourses as ‘‘market Cosmopolites de tous les pays, encore un effort! (Paris: Galilée, 1997), trans. as ‘‘On Cosmopolitanism,’’ in On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (London: Routledge, 2001). 4. This notion of self-fulfillment has its contemporary counterpart in Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998). 5. In this respect, Soros’s position is one that is tacitly accepted even by left-leaning or liberal Irish thought. See, for example, Mary Robinson’s ‘‘Opinion’’ piece, ‘‘Globalization Has to Take Human Rights into Account,’’ Irish Times, January 22, 2002. There, she argues, ‘‘What is emerging is the need for globalization as an economic process to be subject to moral and ethical considerations and to respect international legal standards and principles.’’ Robinson, unlike Soros, in this respect, argues for the necessity of linking the realms of global business with those of morality; Soros, as we shall see here, takes a more austere line, separating the two realms. 6. George Soros, Open Society: Reforming Global Capitalism (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2000), xi. 7. Soros, Open Society, xii.

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forces,’’ subscribing to those that ‘‘work’’ or that triumph over the others (the question being ‘‘work for whom?’’ and the answer being ‘‘for Americans’’). Newman would have taken a position closer to that of Soros, in which there exists the world of business, on the one hand (economics), and, on the other, a world that underpins and shadows this business realm but that is regulated differently from it, a world of ‘‘universal principles’’ (politics, or, for Newman, theology). In short, while the world of business in Newman’s day is a world controlled and regulated by educated Protestants, for educated Protestants, to the detriment of Catholics who are systematically denied the opportunities of education, Newman also sees that this world is properly underpinned by a more universalizing set of forces, the force of Catholicism, that currently lies latent. The purpose of the University will be, among other things, to set these conditions right, so that the latent Catholic realm gradually is revealed and comes to be seen as a universal—global—condition for our social, political, cultural, and, above all for Newman, spiritual well-being, survival, ‘‘resurrection.’’ Soros criticizes what he calls ‘‘market fundamentalists,’’ those who ask that the logic of the so-called free market determine all social and political being. Newman, far from being such a market fundamentalist, sits close to the opposite end of Soros’s spectrum, as a kind of political fundamentalist, holding the view that a politics of emancipation (determined essentially in terms of theological salvation) underpins all else, including the business markets that are currently controlled by Protestants. Yet he is not what Terry Eagleton once identified as ‘‘prematurely utopian’’ regarding this. In his Field Day pamphlet Nationalism: Irony and Commitment, Eagleton advances a simple deconstruction of the opposition of Catholic to Protestant: . . . the claim of the Roman Catholic church to universality is in any case only necessary once that status has been challenged by Protestantism, and so is no sooner raised than refuted, denying itself in the very act of assertion. . . . Catholicism itself already contains a certain Protestantism—ecclesia semper reformanda—without which constant deviating from itself it would not be truly itself; and Protestantism cannot exist as such without its historical antagonist. All that remains now is to explain this on the Falls and Shankill roads.8 8. Terry Eagleton, Nationalism: Irony and Commitment, Field Day Pamphlet, no. 13 (Derry: Field Day Theatre Company, 1988), repr. in Seamus Deane, ed., Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 24–25.

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Such a simplistic view is what Eagleton describes as typical of a premature utopianism that ‘‘grabs instantly for a future, projecting itself by an act of will or imagination beyond the compromised political structures of the present.’’ 9 Newman does not simply assume that by arguing theoretically for this universal or global validity of Catholicism that it will inevitably come about, much less that it somehow has come about just by proving its logical inevitability. Rather, Newman sees the real and material conditions of Catholics in the two islands that most concern him in his Discourses,10 and he is well aware that there is work to be done if the equation of Catholicism with Universalism is to be established as a self-evident truth. The site for this work is precisely the institution of the University. Newman is at pains to establish the singularity, or, better, specificity, of the Catholic as well. In lines that show he is alert to political history, he writes, ‘‘Insulted, robbed, oppressed, and thrust aside, Catholics in these islands have not been in a condition for centuries to attempt the sort of education, which is necessary for the man of the world, the statesman, the great proprietor, or the opulent gentleman’’ (PP, 359). While Protestants have enjoyed the benefits of such education, Catholics have not; and, for Newman, the convert of some six years’ standing, the time has come to change this iniquitous and unjust state of affairs. So much, so uncontroversial, we might think: Catholics have been deprived; it is time to redistribute power more equitably. Yet Newman’s position is, in fact, profoundly controversial. It is controversial not just because the nineteenth century—perhaps especially so in Ireland—is not yet ready to acquiesce comfortably in notions of egalitarian democracy that are ostensibly axiomatic to the formation of the most contemporary ‘‘developed’’ societies. More than this, it is controversial because it explicitly attacks the Protestant universities (Berlin, and, closer to home, those in England, but most particularly Oxford, Newman’s own former institution) on the grounds that, fundamentally, they are not really universities at all; rather, they are like self-sustaining factories for the production of ‘‘gentlemen’’ who will always be in social and political power. There is nothing wrong with being a gentleman, argues Newman, except that if that is the limit of one’s aspirations, then one is failing in a duty to educate. For education implies the fulfillment or achievement of the self, and such an achievement of the self is properly measured, for Newman, not before the market 9. Eagleton, Nationalism: Irony and Commitment, 25. 10. Newman occasionally identifies one of these islands as ‘‘England,’’ which is not, of course, an island at all.

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(the bourgeois and mercantile realm dominated by the rule of the gentleman) but before God. Thus, when the church founds a University in Ireland, as it now, in 1851, intends to do, the project is not concerned with wisdom for its own sake but rather concerns itself with the spiritual welfare of the student. The proper task of the University, in this view, is the salvation— indeed the resurrection—of souls, and as such it has a properly metaphysical dimension. Being a gentleman, with all the material benefits that this implies, is but incidental to this larger project, focused on the soul. This gesture—in which Newman (like Marx, in fact) reasserts the rights of the oppressed or of society’s victims as being the most basic and fundamentally shared rights of all (in short, as universal rights)—is one that is replayed in more recent populist Irish culture, by Roddy Doyle, in The Commitments, the novel that was turned into an internationally successful film by the English director Alan Parker.11 The Commitments asserts the rights of the impoverished youth of Dublin to ‘‘soul.’’ Trying to give his newly formed band a model of the kind of music that they should be playing, Jimmy Rabbitte, the entrepreneurial manager, shows them a video of James Brown. As Brown falls to his knees, overwhelmed by soul, Deco, the abrasive singer in the band, says, ‘‘I’m not doin’ that. I’ll knee-cap meself.’’ He gets support from the rest of the band, who comment hesitantly (and intrinsically racist in this) on the fact that Brown is, well, brownish, even black, and that they are ‘‘a bit white’’ for that kind of thing. The implication is that soul is the property of the American black, to which Jimmy replies, ‘‘Don’t you lads see? That’s exactly it. The Irish are the blacks of Europe; the Dubliners are the blacks of Ireland; the Northside Dubliners are the blacks of Dublin. So say it once and say it loud, ‘I’m black and I’m proud.’’’ Those that are systematically excluded thus become included in a comic (and essentially irrational) act of identification with victimhood, a gesture that effectively universalizes humanity as victims, but essentially as helpless victims, for if we 11. The provenance of this film, and its production, is important here. Doyle is a former Dublin schoolteacher who had worked in the less privileged parts of the city. Parker is an English director who is shy of any forms of intellectualism in his films or in the discussion of cinema generally. Although Doyle wrote the novel as sole author, the screenplay of the film was written by Doyle and by two other writers (Dick Clements and Ian La Fresnais) whose reputation rested on their long collaborations in writing populist television comedy, most often in the sitcom genre. In all of this, the question of education is set against populism, and this opposition is one that is frequently used to legitimize global capitalism in our times, when ‘‘opinion’’ (as seen most forcefully in market choices, supposedly freely made) is held to be more valid than abstract ‘‘knowledge’’ (which becomes a specialist matter for intellectuals only, allegedly divorced from the real or material world).

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are all victims, then where are the victors against whom we might struggle? The thinking here is either desperate or paranoid, or both. A much more serious parallel gesture might be found in Erich Auerbach’s extraordinarily poignant analysis of Virginia Woolf. In this analysis, Auerbach claims that the style of writing shows that ‘‘below the surface conflicts [of the contemporary world] . . . the differences between men’s ways of life and forms of thought have already lessened.’’ 12 This, in the face of Nazism. This more recent gesture in Doyle’s novel, though, is more complex. At one level, it is simply a supposed exemplification of the cliché that music—especially a music that derives from the soul—is a universal and quasi-Levinasian language of suffering (‘‘they had nothing; but they were willing to sacrifice it all,’’ as the publicity material for the film stated). At the same time, more complexly, the Irish are identified here not with the Asian (as in the metaphor of the Celtic Tiger) but with the American black, such that the Irish person can become, effectively, a black person.13 Following Nicholas Canny, Seamus Deane critiques the early modern English view of Ireland in which the Irish were going to be ‘‘compelled to be free’’ by the good governance (after a victorious war) by the English: ‘‘To become free and prosperous the Irish were evidently going to have to become English.’’ 14 If that is the early modern (and even modern) view, the more recent view (one that we have already seen exemplified in Rorty) is that to become free and prosperous, the Irish will evidently have to become American, and their impoverished and deprived youth will evidently have to take the position of the American black. This latter position is emphatically not endorsed by Rortean philosophy, which is based essentially on the optimism associated with the expectation of success or achievement, and not shaped by the more pessimistic facts of suffering.15 12. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968), 552. This passage is extraordinarily poignant and relevant here, given the circumstances of its composition. It was written while Auerbach was in exile, fleeing persecution from Nazism, a set of beliefs that prejudicially argued for precisely those essential racial differences that are the most extreme form of ‘‘surface conflicts.’’ Auerbach pleads here for an argument from literature that will defeat Nazism. See my more detailed comments on this in After Theory, 144. 13. For an interesting exploration of this link in a different context, see Lyn Innes, The Devil’s Own Mirror: The Irishman and the African in Modern Literature (Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1990). 14. Seamus Deane, ‘‘Civilians and Barbarians,’’ in Deane et al., Ireland’s Field Day (London: Hutchinson, 1985), 33. 15. It is important to be fair to Rorty in this. Rorty’s politics are profoundly aware of the dis-

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Here, then, is a version of globalization in which difference, while certainly being maintained, is also paradoxically being erased at the same moment: difference is maintained (the Irish are different from the Americans) as a marketing ploy or commercial and economic gesture (in the thinking of both the fictional Jimmy Rabbitte and the real Alan Parker), yet difference is simultaneously erased in a political gesture claiming equality of worth (the Irish, like James Brown, have soul, identified in the film with ‘‘authentic being’’). It is interesting to note here that the film constantly contrasts the ‘‘Dublin Soul’’ with Elvis Presley. Rabbitte Sr. is a great admirer of Elvis (his picture hangs above that of the Pope in the Rabbitte household). Yet Elvis whitens the black music he takes over, making it more acceptable to the white American and European audience. Authenticity, thus, is aligned with victimhood or suffering, but with a suffering that is authentic precisely to the extent that it is fundamental and thus potentially universal or global. There is an important distinction to be made between globalization, represented in the figure of James Brown as authentic universal suffering, on the one hand, and, on the other, ‘‘Americanization,’’ represented in the figure of Elvis. As Bill Readings indicates, Americanization is virtually a synonym for globalization, but one that draws attention to the fact that ‘‘globalization is not a neutral process in which Washington and Dakar participate equally.’’ 16 In a particular sense, globalization is not happening at all as yet; what is happening is Americanization, the triumph of those already in power. Soros also takes the view that globalization is being obstructed (and for him this is a bad thing), and it is being obstructed by market fundamentalism. In my terms here, America is just another name for such market fundamentalism, in which the world is seen simply as a potential market for American interests, a market in which every High Street eventually has its McDonald’s and its Starbucks, where American popular music, punctuated only by the ringing of mobile phones playing tunes from populist Hollywood movies, is the aural backdrop. In what follows in the rest of the present essay, my view of the question of globalization will no doubt be regarded as ‘‘theoretical,’’ on the advantaged in society, and, in Achieving Our Country, he rightly takes to task that criticism that believes it can simply change the world from within the discourses of the academy. An earlier generation of leftist intellectuals, he points out, were more genuinely politically engaged. It is an error (and here I am in total agreement with Rorty) to read one’s politics— and more especially one’s political efficacy—straight off from one’s philosophy. 16. Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 2.

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grounds that (for the most part) I do not directly address questions concerning economics or global capital. As I am not a specialist in these matters, let me give my position here insofar as I am able to describe it in directly economic terms. Globalization is, in some senses, not a new phenomenon. The world of the European Renaissance, say, saw similar untrammeled movements of goods and services, and globalization was then not even an issue. In an age of fledgling mercantile empire building, it is not at all controversial for writers to present the world as an entity that can somehow be experienced all at once, here, now. This is what lies behind that gloriously ambivalent moment in Milton when Adam and Eve, freed from Paradise, step out into their ambiguous freedom, where ‘‘The World was all before them.’’ It also lies behind that so typical metaphor adopted by another thinker whose writing (perhaps like that of Newman) is shaped by apostasy: Donne, who celebrates the unification of the world in the shape of a female body under his own guiding and shaping hands, where ‘‘both th’ Indias of spice and mine’’ are to be found at once, the world contracting into the here, now, of a woman’s body, a body whose ‘‘availability’’ is exactly the metaphor for mercantile—bourgeois—globalized power.17 Globalization becomes an issue when politics and economics diverge. That is to say, it is an issue if and only if the world is organized around the existence of sovereign nation-states that are seen to determine their own political and economic conditions of local living, culture, or identity. Thus, globalization requires the existence of national political boundaries precisely in order to transgress them economically. A global economy can be identified only because it operates at a level beyond that of the more usual national economies that have shaped a modern world organized around the nation-state. Therefore, Ireland is in a rather odd position here. In brief, it is widely accepted that Ireland has been a net beneficiary in economic terms of the globalizing tendencies that have brought much inward investment. However, the crux of the matter for Ireland is that there are contradictory forces at play here. Globalization in these terms assumes the transgression of or the ignoring of national boundaries. The free traffic in goods and services, and, most especially in capital itself, has established a state of affairs in which the fiscal powers of the state are weakened: if the state taxes highly, business will move its capital elsewhere, to a state that 17. See John Milton, ‘‘Paradise Lost,’’ bk. 12, line 646, in Milton, Poems, ed. B. A. Wright (London: Dent, 1956), 388; and John Donne, ‘‘The Sun Rising,’’ in Donne, The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 80.

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taxes less. That movement across borders presupposes the already stable existence of such borders around established nations. However, Ireland’s self-identity, precisely during this period of globalization, has been given to it precisely in terms of the struggle to establish such national borders in the first place: it is an incomplete nation so long as the fraught question of the North remains unresolved.18 Ireland’s identity thus is fractured around this issue, in that there is a contradiction between its reemergence as a nationstate (its historical identity since the start of the twentieth century, say) and its newfound economic power as an economy attracting significant numbers of foreign nationals (if such a term as foreign is even permissible in a genuinely global economy), establishing its identity not in relation to a local history but precisely in relation not even to a European but rather to an Asian identity or affiliation, as a quasi-mythic Celtic Tiger (pulling Ireland’s identity eastward, and thus contradicting the earlier typically westering movement of a Yeatsian revival of the nation-state). I will claim here merely that the position I take is philosophical, and that it addresses primarily what Pierre Bourdieu long ago identified as ‘‘cultural capital.’’ This is important for a consideration of the question insofar as it impinges on a certain ‘‘Ireland,’’ not just because the Irish economy is one that has never simply industrialized, moving instead from what might be identified as a premodern agricultural economy to a so-called postmodern knowledge or technology or virtual-economy, but also because the question of the identity of ‘‘Ireland’’ is still, of course, a matter of disputed boundaries. Here, the nation-state that global capital would ostensibly swallow up has not yet fully established itself as a single entity, a simple nation. 2. Celtic Memories Yet globalization is, most certainly, a question of ‘‘where we are’’ or ‘‘where we’re from.’’ It might better be regarded as one available means of regulating the potential conflict between a local habitation (the ‘‘where’’) and an identity (the ‘‘we’’), or the proper boundaries of a place and its proper inhabitants. Depending on how we might construe these things—as Ireland, 18. In this respect, a comparison is available with John of Gaunt’s idea of England. As I indicated above, Gaunt erroneously takes England for an island. To claim Ireland as an island is, of necessity at the time of my writing this, a political gesture akin to that made by Auerbach in his analysis of Woolf. An island is precisely what Ireland is still struggling to become—but to become again, for it once was. When Newman was writing, long before Partition, its boundaries were clearer, paradoxically, than now.

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as the UK, as Britain, as the North or Northern Ireland, as a global village, and so on—we give a local habitation and a name to the self. This was the starting point of Proust’s lengthy meditation so formative of modernity, A la recherche du temps perdu. The narrator, pondering that mysterious time between sleep and waking, offers a praise of habit but does so in a way that relates habit to habitation, or to the feeling that we have of being-at-home in the place where we are: ‘‘L’habitude! aménageuse habile mais bien lente et qui commence par laisser souffrir notre esprit pendant des semaines dans une installation provisoire; mais que malgré tout il est bien heureux de trouver, car sans l’habitude et réduit à ses seuls moyens il serait impuissant à nous rendre un logis habitable.’’ 19 This text also relates this question of the ‘‘habit of inhabiting’’—the habitual as that which makes a place habitable—to the question of the past itself, and, in what is the first proper invocation of the workings of memory in the novel as a whole, it relates memory to a ‘‘Celtic’’ belief: Je trouve très raisonnable la croyance celtique que les âmes de ceux que nous avons perdus sont captives dans quelque être inférieur, dans une bête, un vegétal, une chose inanimée, perdues en effet pour nous jusqua’au jour, qui pour beaucoup ne vient jamais, où nous nous trouvons passer près de l’arbre, entrer en possession de l’objet, qui est leur prison. Alors elles tresaillent, nous appellent, et sitôt que nous les avons reconnues, l’enchantement est brisé. Delivrées par nous, elles ont vaincu la mort et reviennent vivre avec nous.20 Habit, in allowing us to forget, allows us also to inhabit a particular place. Memory is precisely the emancipation from such located identity—but the price of such memory is the death and resurrection of the self, in an identity that is constituted as a constant changing or continual self-differing, selftransformation. This, in fact, is rather like Newman’s approach to a Catholic University, whose teaching will bring the dead Protestants—like the ‘‘être inférieur’’—back to life, back among ‘‘us,’’ the ‘‘Catholic’’ present or the we who are ‘‘here, now’’ and whose here/now is thus effectively potentially of global reach: ‘‘Trieste–Zurich–Paris,’’ say. When Joyce famously signs off Ulysses with that byline, he omits— or perhaps forgets temporarily or conveniently—its starting point, which, 19. Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu, ed. Jean-Yves Tadié et al., 4 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 1:8. 20. Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu, 1:43–44.

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according to the correspondence, was either his school days in Ireland, where he studied the Trojan Wars, or Rome, where he came up with the title (if little else) in September 1906. What interested Joyce at this time—1906— was the position of the ‘‘outsider’’ in Europe, most especially in the figure Lyotard would later call ‘‘the jews.’’ For Joyce, of course, the Jews were specific individuals, such as Italo Svevo (to whom Joyce taught English), but, as Ulysses itself makes clear, Joyce would have been sympathetic to the more generalized position of Lyotard, for whom ‘‘the jews’’ is a term that comes to have a much wider range of reference.21 For Lyotard, ‘‘the jews’’ is a name given to the structure of a necessary amnesia. There are events to which no memorial words or memory can ever be adequate, and which yet demand to be recalled and recounted. The Holocaust is the most extreme form of this, but it is not the only such event, even if it is singular and specific. Here, I want to discuss the relation of such amnesia—in which victims can be forgotten, passed over in a silence that is at once entirely necessary and entirely unacceptable—in a globalizing institution such as Newman’s University. Newman is clear that his University is a teaching institution, and, in this, he explicitly separates teaching from research and argues that research is the activity proper to academies but not to the University. The University is ‘‘a place of teaching universal knowledge,’’ concerned thus with ‘‘the diffusion and extension of knowledge, rather than [its] advancement’’ (PP, 355). In this respect, the University becomes rather like the archive of the best that has been thought and said: its orientation is toward the past, toward that which has already been established as knowledge. Teaching, accordingly, is akin to that Platonic view of all knowledge as outlined in Meno: the recovery of a memory. As Augustine (another great convert, whose philosophy of conversion is key to an understanding of Newman and of Lyotard) knew, however, memory is an eminently deconstructible concept. He asks himself if it is possible to remember forgetting: I can mention forgetfulness and recognize what the word means, but how can I recognize the thing itself unless I remember it? I am not speaking of the sound of the word but of the thing which it signifies. If I had forgotten the thing itself, I should be utterly unable to recog21. For the relations of Joyce to Svevo at this time, see Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 271. See also Jean-François Lyotard, Heidegger and ‘‘the jews,’’ trans. Andreas Michael and Mark Roberts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990).

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nize what the sound implied. When I remember memory, my memory is present to itself by its own power; but when I remember forgetfulness, two things are present, memory, by which I remember it, and forgetfulness, which is what I remember. Yet what is forgetfulness but absence of memory? When it is present, I cannot remember it. . . . It follows that the very thing which by its presence causes us to forget must be present if we are to remember it.22 In a peculiar sense, forgetting itself requires memory, and the structure of memory is characterized exactly by this impossibility of forgetting. Yet it is, of course, precisely this fact that we must forget if we are to be able to think at all, for as Jorge Luis Borges writes, in his great story ‘‘Funes the Memorius,’’ ‘‘To think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions.’’ 23 Such generalization is, in linguistic terms, analogous to globalization in economies. The problem is that, in a peculiar sense, we are all Funes the Memorius. Funes has a fall from his horse that paralyzes him but leaves him cursed or blessed with an archival memory. The effect is akin to certain types of schizophrenia. His perceptions are extraordinarily intense, for he is unable to ignore or forget the slightest detail. The consequence is that everything is always intensely present. He is, as it were, a convert to memory itself: a library. Yet the memory is disabling, for although it allows him the facility for learning Latin, say, more or less overnight, it deprives him of the capacity for thought or abstraction. He is, to put this into the terms we have taken from Newman, a ‘‘Protestant’’ in his education. He has the means of knowledge (and in this he is like the globalist who has business acumen, who is acquisitive, individualistic, ever expanding his knowledge base), but not the substance of knowledge (such as universal principles, catholic in their universalism). The parentage of Funes is slightly uncertain, but the text suggests that his father was an Englishman, though an Englishman with what looks like an Irish name: ‘‘O’Connor.’’ Borges had an evident interest in Ireland and its memorial history. We see it, for instance, in ‘‘Theme of the Traitor and Hero,’’ a meditation on ‘‘the impassioned memory of Ireland.’’ 24 The ‘‘story’’ is not a story at all but rather the basic structure of a plot, and ‘‘the action takes 22. Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), 222. 23. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘‘Funes the Memorius,’’ in Labyrinths (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 94. 24. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘‘Theme of the Traitor and the Hero,’’ in Labyrinths, 105.

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place in an oppressed and tenacious country: Poland, Ireland, the Venetian Republic, some South American or Balkan state. . . . Or rather it has taken place. . . . Let us say (for narrative convenience) Ireland; let us say in 1824.’’ 25 This story, of potentially global reach, therefore, is nonetheless situated (for narrative convenience) in Ireland. The tenor of the text is that the facts of history, though remembered with passion, belief, and commitment, are themselves not really facts at all but are rather the enactment of literary plots. It is precisely when we recall a national history (such as that of Ireland) that we are most in thrall to stories, to literature. For everything that seems to be spontaneous, autonomously lived, in the narrative that is told (the narrative of an act of betrayal conflated with that of heroism) is, in fact, scripted in advance. Memory, here, turns out to be an act of forgetting: the facts are forgotten, the story is remembered; and it is the story that gives the present its identity.26 In ‘‘The Shape of the Sword,’’ the story of an act of treachery in Ireland, this time in 1922–23, Borges introduces another important Irish figure. This is the story of ‘‘the Englishman from La Colorada,’’ an Englishman who is not English but Irish. He tells the tale of how he got his facial scar to one ‘‘Borges,’’ a stranger, in a Spanish that is rudimentary, cluttered with Brazilian and Portuguese phrases, and interrupted at one point by French: a near globalized language, therefore. It is a tale of betrayal. The ‘‘Englishman’’ tells ‘‘Borges’’ of his history as a republican in the fight for Irish independence. His group is joined by one John Vincent Moon, who seems to be something of a Marxist, but he is a Marxist theorist, seemingly afraid of action and of fighting. One evening, the Irishman sees an example of Moon’s cowardice when Moon is confronted by a British soldier. At this point, we are told, ‘‘This frightened man mortified me, as if I were the coward, not Vincent Moon.’’ The Irishman offers ‘‘Borges’’ a gloss on the tale: ‘‘Whatever one man does, it is as if all men did it. For that reason it is not unfair that one disobedience in a garden should contaminate all humanity; for that reason it is not unjust that the crucifixion of a single Jew should be sufficient to save it. Perhaps Schopenhauer was right: I am all other men, any man is all men, Shake25. Borges, ‘‘Theme of the Traitor and the Hero,’’ 102. The first ellipsis in the passage here appears also in the original. Free trade in manufactured items between Britain and Ireland was established in 1824. I have not yet been able to ascertain that Borges knew of that, though it would be important and significant if he did. 26. Compare Lyotard, Heidegger and ‘‘the jews,’’ 5, on this phenomenon in relation to the ‘‘French’’ and the French literary tradition.

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speare is in some manner the miserable John Vincent Moon.’’ 27 The reference to Schopenhauer is, in some ways, a red herring here (though one that is relevant to our argument, in that Schopenhauer’s task, set against that of Hegel, was to unify or globalize Western philosophy with Eastern). Actually, the intertext is biblical and can be found in Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians: ‘‘For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.’’ 28 This chapter in Paul is all about death and resurrection, and, importantly, Paul prefaces what he has to say here by pointing out that ‘‘ye are saved, if ye keep in memory what I preached unto you.’’ 29 Paul, like Newman, like Augustine, was a convert. Yet the biblical figure to whom Newman appeals is not Paul but rather Peter. Against all those who will detract from his proposals for the University as somehow being impractical, he says he offers the one-word reply: ‘‘Peter.’’ In that word, however, is contained an entire narrative—the narrative of a movement of globalization, explicitly: ‘‘What do I know of the state of things in Ireland that I should presume to put ideas of mine, which could not be right except by accident, by the side of theirs, who speak in the country of their birth and their home? . . . Why then should I be so rash and perverse as to involve myself in trouble not properly mine? Why go out of my own place?’’ (PP, 378). In this, Newman is profoundly aware of his position as an outsider, yet this is so in what are for him merely technical or geopolitical terms, the terms that are those of the business world and so not the terms relating to the globalizing project of the Catholic University. His response to the predictable criticisms is, ‘‘After all, Peter has spoken.’’ This Peter is not a single historical individual but whoever sits in the ‘‘Chair of the Apostles’’: that is, the Pope. The truth of Peter is one that lives through the ages, claims Newman, and he also claims it as an empirical truth that ‘‘all who take part with Peter are on the winning side’’ (PP, 379). The passage that follows this is remarkable as a kind of history of the globalizing—and militant—tendency of the Catholic Church, which figures here in a synecdoche that takes the name of Peter for the church in its entirety. Peter has defeated, among others, the ‘‘savage hordes’’ who ‘‘came down from the north . . . Lawless kings . . . sagacious as the Roman, passionate as the Hun.’’ Importantly, ‘‘the gates of the earth were opened to the east and west, and men poured out to take possession; 27. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘‘The Shape of the Sword,’’ in Labyrinths, 99. 28. Paul, 1 Cor., 15:21–22. 29. Paul, 1 Cor., 15:2.

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and he and his went with them, swept along by zeal and charity as far as they by enterprise, covetousness, or ambition’’ (PP, 379). And, against this business world, Peter still prevails. Catholicism, unlike other religions that offer mere spectacle and myth, argues Newman, ‘‘addresses itself directly to the heart and conscience of the individual’’ (PP, 380).30 Moreover, the education associated with Peter in this way has already overcome ‘‘the schools of Antioch and Alexandria, Athens and Edessa, Saracenic Seville, and Protestant Berlin’’ (PP, 380).31 Newman claims that ‘‘it was the See of Peter’’ that brought faith to ‘‘Celt and Saxon alike,’’ civilizing them from their savagery, that it was from Rome that Patrick was sent to Ireland and Augustine to England. Eventually, from this, when Charlemagne wanted to establish proper scholarship and knowledge in France, it was to England that he ‘‘sent for masters,’’ with Alcuin ‘‘the scholar both of the Saxon and the Celt . . . [as] the chief of those who went forth to supply the need of the Great Emperor’’ (PP, 382–83), and it was from this that the University of Paris was founded. Newman then makes his great claim: ‘‘The past never returns; the course of things, old in its texture, is ever new in its colouring and fashion. Ireland and England are not what they once were, but Rome is where it was; Peter is the same; his zeal, his charity, his mission, his gifts, are the same. He, of old time, made us one by making us joint teachers of the nations; and now, surely, he is giving us a like mission, and we shall become one again, while we zealously and lovingly fulfill it’’ (PP, 383). Here, then, is the mission statement of the University: to bear witness to the authority of ‘‘Peter,’’ and to see to it that this is a global mission, a mission that stands for all time, unchanging. The real Peter, however, was challenged in AD 50 by the more militant Paul. Peter saw his task at this time as one that allowed some of the old ways to continue, such that the new truth of Christ would conserve and continue, in highly modified forms, the old ways; and this way lies sectarianism, of course.32 Peter’s case, in the argument in Jerusalem in AD 50, was that the new religion of Christianity would effectively be grafted on to the already existing dominant religion. Paul—and in this he is more radical than Peter— saw Christianity instead as the opening of an entirely new era. Peter’s way 30. See also Auerbach, Mimesis, chap. 3 (esp. 68–76), on the relations of parataxis to figural style and to modernity in Augustine. 31. The reference to ‘‘Protestant Berlin’’ is to Humboldt’s University of Berlin. 32. For an illuminating explanation of the stakes of the confrontation between Peter and Paul, see Badiou, Saint Paul, 23–24.

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explains—and to some extent legitimizes—not only sectarianism but religious and fundamentalist imperialism; Paul’s, rather, stresses the ways of grace. Thus, Paul becomes the real model for Newman, for Paul sees the ‘‘Christ-event’’ as much more radical, exploding all ideas of the privilege of Judaism and the Jewish community.33 This, in fact, is closer to Newman’s sense that the Catholic Church speaks to the heart directly and individually. Paul, like Joyce, is neither Jew nor Greek but both. This makes him, for a thinker such as Badiou, not a prophet or philosopher but an apostle, and, more importantly for present purposes, it brings him into a specific relation with memory, memory that— we will remember—is the foundation of Newman’s University. Badiou writes that an apostle is neither a witness to the facts as they happened nor is she or he a ‘‘memory’’ or remembrancer. There are at least two important things to bear in mind when discussing memory. First, in our own time, acts of memoration have become a kind of substitute for politics, as if it is enough simply to try to remember (for example) the victims of the Holocaust or, in Lyotard’s terms, ‘‘the jews,’’ or, in the terms proper to this essay, the victims on whom globalization is structured (such as those in The Commitments). Secondly, memory is neutral in that it decides no questions and engages no actions. Badiou is unhappy with this: ‘‘‘memory’ decides no questions. There is always a moment when what is important is to declare, in one’s own name, that what has happened has happened, and to do so because what one envisages of the present possibilities demands it’’ (SP, 47). This, argues Badiou, is the position of Paul. There is, for him, a present or actual demand that he declare the resurrection, and the debate over it is not a matter for either witnesses or for historians. To which must also be added that, for Paul, the resurrection is not of the same order of historical fact as most happenings, being rather a ‘‘pure event,’’ the ‘‘opening of an epoch.’’ In other words, the resurrection is an event that is actually ‘‘the changing of the relations between the possible and the impossible’’ (SP, 47). The consequence of this, in Badiou’s reading of Paul, is extremely significant. The resurrection of Christ is of no intrinsic interest in and of itself, as would be the case for what we might consider as ‘‘normal’’ historical occurrences. Rather, its proper significance is that it marks the possibility of overcoming death itself. From this it would follow that we must always link the resurrection to our resurrection: that is to say, we must go ‘‘from singu33. For an explanation of this idea of Christ as a revolutionary and radical event or irruption into history, see Badiou, Saint Paul, esp. chaps. 4 and 5.

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larity to universality’’ (SP, 48). Thus, as Badiou writes, ‘‘Contrairement au fait, l’événement n’est mésurable que selon la multiplicité universelle dont il préscrit la possibilité. C’est en ce sens qu’il est grâce, et non histoire’’ (SP, 48). Grace is that which ignores the economy of debt, and debt, of course, is the great unspoken question of globalization. For Newman, it is important to see that the University is not a mechanism for redressing some kind of economic imbalance between Catholics and Protestants, as if the Protestants who had benefited from education now owed it to the dispossessed Catholics. Much more fundamental than this, education in Newman’s University is a matter precisely of this grace. It bypasses the economics of debt by the assertion of a universal singularity, in which souls are to be resurrected, brought back to Catholicism. The singularity of his own case, his own conversion, is a model of universal applicability. He moves, thus, from singularity to universality. Globalization in these terms becomes neither simply an economic issue nor a political issue, nor even some dialectic aiming to regulate the relations obtaining between the economic and the political. What Newman helps us to see is that globalization might be a cultural issue. In describing it thus, I mean to indicate that globalization might be considered in terms of what I have called here, following Badiou, ‘‘grace.’’ 3. Of Grace and Nation Joyce’s great story ‘‘Grace’’ tells of yet another convert, Tom Kernan, who finds himself at the center of a plot organized by Martin Cunningham to come to a retreat where he can ‘‘wash the pot.’’ Tom, whose tongue has been ‘‘shortened’’ in the incident with which the story begins—a ‘‘fall’’ akin to various other literary and biblical falls, including that of Funes the Memorius— has ‘‘inexplicable debts,’’ out of which Mr. Power has occasionally helped him with ‘‘many small, but opportune, loans.’’ The plot works, and Kernan accompanies his friends to the retreat, given by Father Purdon. The service for the retreat is full of businessmen, moneylenders, pawnbrokers, registration agents, journalists, and the like. The priest’s text is one that allows him to make a metaphorical slippage between the everyday work of capital (economics) and the religious life, and the metaphor used is that of accounting: ‘‘He told his hearers that he was there that evening for no terrifying, no extravagant purpose; but as a man of the world speaking to his fellowmen. He came to speak to business men and he would speak to them in a businesslike way. If he might use the metaphor, he said, he was their spiri-

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tual accountant; and he wished each and every one of his hearers to open his books, the books of his spiritual life, and see if they tallied accurately with conscience.’’ If it transpires that there be some discrepancy in these accounts, the priest recommends that the men ask that ‘‘with God’s grace, I will rectify this and this. I will set right my accounts.’’ 34 However, the entire point here is that the slippage between these two realms—the economic and the religious—is merely metaphorical: that is to say, it has no more reality than as a linguistic trope or figure. ‘‘Grace,’’ by definition, is not a matter of accounting. As Badiou puts it, ‘‘la grace est le contraire de la loi, pour autant qu’elle est ce qui vient sans être du ’’ (SP, 81). The priest here resembles, in at least one respect, Newman facing his own audiences in Dublin some half a century before this text was written. Newman, too, addressed businessmen and men of the world. His arguments for a Catholic University, fundamentally, were also arguments that set the world of business (run by Protestants, such as was Kernan, in Joyce’s story, before he married) up against a different order of things, a religious order. For Newman, the University was, effectively, the site of a particular kind of grace or diseconomy. In this regard, he was making something new and distinctive in the formation of the idea of a University. The more dominant European version of the University as an institution at this time was one that was essentially tied to the establishment of the modern nation-states. Thus, to give a paradigmatic example, Humboldt’s idea for the University in Berlin was that it should be the institution that would, in one dialectical stroke, offer to its people a governing or presiding model idea of the nation-state to which they could subscribe while, at the same time, it would also give to the newly emergent nation-state of Germany a people who, in having been taught in Berlin, would be capable of living up to this model idea.35 It is in the face of this Humboldtian idea of the University that Newman was working. The Humboldtian idea is, of course, what Newman describes specifically as a ‘‘Protestant’’ kind of University. The thinking here is one that aligns the Protestant not only with the business world but also with the narrowly nationalistic. That is to say, for Newman, the ‘‘university of culture’’ (as 34. James Joyce, ‘‘Grace,’’ in The Essential James Joyce, ed. Harry Levin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), 476. 35. See Readings, The University in Ruins, 65. For a fuller account of the relation of the University in Europe to the emerging modern nation-states, see my Criticism and Modernity: Aesthetics, Literature, and Nations in Europe and Its Academies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), esp. chap. 7, 205–45.

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Readings terms it) is one that serves what are fundamentally and merely economic purposes: the task of such an institution is the production of the citizen whose function it is to play a role in a national economy. In this regard, this kind of University is, for Newman, precisely the contrary of a ‘‘global’’ University. Newman’s Catholic University is one that wishes to circumvent the economics of business and to place before us the possibility of a different kind of social order, one based on a universalism that he equates with Catholicism. In the end, we would have to say that we have failed to fulfill Newman’s idea of a University. The University, in most contemporary instances, is ‘‘Protestant’’ through and through, in that its universalizing idea, its capacity for a globalization based on the diseconomy of grace, has been entirely and thoroughly betrayed by national governments of every political hue. Those governments see the University simply as an arm of national capital and thus use the institution precisely as a weapon in the further Americanization of the world’s economy. In this state of affairs, the only possible outcome is further global inequality, both political and economic. Perhaps it is time to reconsider the possibility of an ethical globalization, such as that called for by Mary Robinson, in terms of the establishment of a University whose scope and ambit will be, genuinely, universal.

‘‘Imperialism’’ and ‘‘Democracy’’ in Modern Ireland, 1898–2002

Richard Bourke

‘‘Violence in Ireland is the result of British Imperialism, of the British connection and the British presence.’’ 1 So argued Gerry Adams in September 1976. He was writing from Long Kesh Prison, near Lisburn, in County Antrim, as pressure mounted on the Irish Republican Army to end its campaign of terror. The campaign was then in its seventh year. While pressure to call off the war came from a variety of sources, it came most immediately from the Peace Movement, which had been established to challenge the growth of militancy in Northern Ireland and the methods of the Provisional IRA in particular. Throughout the month of August, peace rallies were held in Belfast, and soon there were marches in London and Dublin, as well. In response, Adams set about providing a defense of the Republican position. Responsibility for the war, he insisted, lay with the I thank Paul Bew, Beatrice Collier, Seamus Deane, David Dwan, Ultán Gillen, Matthew Kelly, Ian McBride, and Emer Nolan for their comments and advice on earlier versions of this article. Responsibility for the resulting argument, and any remaining errors, lies with me. 1. Gerry Adams, Peace in Ireland: A Broad Analysis of the Present Situation (Belfast: Republican Press Centre, 1976), 1. boundary 2 31:1, 2004. Copyright © 2004 by Duke University Press.

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British government. More specifically, it lay with the government’s policy of imperialism. Imperialism, however, has meant many things over the course of modern history, and it requires some investigation to discover what significance it carried for Gerry Adams in 1976. Republicanism, we are led to believe, endeavored to secure the defeat of imperialism in Ireland. It had set about ending the ‘‘British connection’’ and removing the ‘‘British presence.’’ But what in more specific terms did Republicans such as Adams imagine they were replacing, and what in the wake of victory did they think they would achieve? 1 The war in Northern Ireland lasted nearly thirty years. In the late summer of 1969, when British troops had just arrived in the province, the dominant feeling among the Catholic population was one of palpable relief. The situation in Ulster had been coming to a head for over a year. Then, on August 12–14, Catholics in the Bogside of Derry became involved in a desperate battle with police for two and a half harrowing days. Fearing a final assault on their enclave by an armed militia of the Stormont regime, the residents of the Bogside welcomed the British army as a kind of deliverance. But gradually relations began to deteriorate as soldiers came into conflict with rioting youths in the city. ‘‘Life was very bleak,’’ as James Callaghan, the British home secretary, confided to Richard Crossman on September 11: ‘‘there was no prospect of a solution.’’ Callaghan apparently anticipated that ‘‘the honeymoon wouldn’t last very long and it hadn’t. The British troops were tired and were no longer popular.’’ 2 Events moved very rapidly, indeed. In the space of less than a month, sectarianism worsened, the military presence was interpreted as exacerbating tensions, and dissidence was spreading among the disaffected, the young, and the unemployed across the province. Eamonn McCann, a radical activist in Derry at the time, later captured that attitude of dissent: ‘‘British imperialism,’’ he recalled, ‘‘took a lot of stick.’’ 3 The specific nature of this imperialism remained shrouded and obscure. Ireland in the 1920s was frequently invoked as a way of somehow proving the point. Aden was similarly mentioned, and the example of Cyprus was confidently cited. However, as McCann put it, ‘‘We never got down to 2. Richard Crossman, The Diaries of a Cabinet Minister: Volume Three, 1968–1970 (London: Cape, 1977), 636. 3. Eamonn McCann, War and an Irish Town (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), 67.

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defining with any precision what British imperialism was . . . it was the thing the Bogside had been fighting against.’’ 4 Nonetheless, tales of imperial perfidy steadily proliferated. Attitudes were formed and re-formed as arguments intensified. Clarity, however, was slow to emerge. Another prominent activist in those early days, Bernadette Devlin, presented her own version of what the radical youth of Northern Ireland ought to be ‘‘fighting against.’’ She was, she admitted, ‘‘generally opposed to the system,’’ and so it was ‘‘the system’’ that would have to be replaced.5 But months passed, the crisis deepened, and positions became more finely honed. By December 28, 1969, the Republican response to developments supplied the specter of imperialism with more definite characteristics. On that day, the Irish Republican Army split into its Provisional and Official wings. The Officials hoped to assimilate the conflict to the language of class struggle, the Provisionals sought to ‘‘reaffirm the fundamental Republican position.’’ 6 In a retrospective account of the first period of the Northern Ireland Troubles, Adams, once again, provided his own analysis of what the fundamental Republican position had been.7 The civil rights movement, which took off in the province in the late sixties, succeeded in highlighting what he called the ‘‘reactionary and colonial nature’’ of Northern Ireland, together with ‘‘the responsibility of the British government for this situation.’’ 8 In his view, the Official IRA endeavored to reform the irreformable, but the Provisionals would bring the system to its knees. That system now had a definite content. It comprised a ‘‘colonial’’ 4. McCann, War and an Irish Town, 67. Conor Cruise O’Brien’s remarks in States of Ireland (London: Panther, 1973) are worth quoting in this context: ‘‘The Catholic-Protestant relationship and the relation of both communities in Britain have . . . been distorted or analysed out of existence, by various ‘Marxist’ or post-Marxist interpretations adopted by some leftwing activists . . . and diffused by journalists and others in contact with those activists. These interpretations vary rather widely, but a common feature is the effort to trace the evils of Northern Ireland and the Republic, to a source in British imperialism’’ (15–16). 5. Bernadette Devlin, The Price of My Soul (London: Deutsch in association with Pan Books, 1969), 89. 6. Irish Republican Publicity Bureau Statement from January 1970, reported in An Phoblacht, February 1970. 7. Adams himself occupied an uncertain position after the IRA split in January 1970, moving decisively over to the Provisionals only in March of that year. See Ciarán De Baróid, Ballymurphy and the Irish War (London: Pluto, 1990), 38–39; and David Sharrock and Mark Devenport, Man of War, Man of Peace: The Unauthorized Biography of Gerry Adams (London: Macmillan, 1997), 68–71. 8. Gerry Adams, ‘‘A Republican in the Civil Rights Campaign,’’ in Twenty Years On, ed. Michael Farrell (Dingle: Brandon, 1988), 47.

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government manned by ‘‘reactionary’’ Unionists, and the occupying forces of the British Crown kept it in existence. But the further reaches of the Provisionals’ analysis exposed an additional lurking menace: in the background, behind the outward signs of oppression—behind the colonial prop, on the one hand, and the military establishment, on the other—lay the historic ambitions of the British Empire. This, then, was imperialism, in case no one had noticed. It had been introduced into Ireland in the sixteenth century—by some accounts, in the eleventh.9 It survived as a result of the partition of the island into North and South in 1920, and it had been maintained since then at the behest of British political and economic interests.10 Imperialism, therefore, had both a political and an economic dimension, and it was embodied in a colonial administration. Most importantly, however, what imperialism denied, as Adams saw it, was ‘‘democracy’’—and democracy, in turn, could be secured only by a ‘‘campaign for national self-determination.’’ 11 It was the task of Provisional Republicanism to spearhead that campaign. In the face of these Republican formulations, it is worth recalling that much of what Adams set down in the name of popular insurgency had its original source within the tradition of British liberal thought.12 The essentials 9. See, for example, Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, ‘‘What Is Irish Republicanism?’’ Irish Independent, December 9, 1970: ‘‘a Republican in 1970 . . . stands in a line of succession going back beyond Wolfe Tone to the Gaelic leaders of resistance to the Norman invasion.’’ 10. Such claims were integral to the analyses offered in the late 1960s in the United Irishman and, from 1970, in An Phoblacht. For the developed thesis, see Gerry Adams, The Politics of Irish Freedom (Dingle: Brandon, 1986): ‘‘The British connection has lasted through several stages for many centuries . . . whether economic, political, territorial or cultural in substance. . . . In recent decades [Britain’s] strategic interest has been . . . for the maintenance of stability and social order in capitalist Europe’’ (89–99). 11. Adams, ‘‘A Republican in the Civil Rights Campaign,’’ 53. 12. Adams himself cites the works of James Connolly and Liam Mellows’s Jail Notes as sources. In his The Politics of Irish Freedom, he writes that ‘‘Mellows, like Connolly, possessed great clarity of political vision, and he spelt out what was happening [in 1922]: ‘Free State equals capitalism and industrialism equals empire. . . . A political revolution in Ireland without a coincident economic revolution merely means a change of masters’’’ (40). Mellows was indebted to an assortment of anticapitalist arguments advanced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Fintan Lalor and Michael Davitt, but the specific claims advanced by Adams to the effect that Ireland was a victim of ‘‘neo-colonialism’’ are traceable through the Sinn Féin propagandist of the 1960s, Roy Johnston, to the strains of European Marxist analysis, which had drawn on the work of the liberal advocate, J. A. Hobson. In September 1967, Johnston declared that imperialism was ‘‘finding it increasingly difficult to maintain the huge profits it has been drawing from the neo-colonial exploitation of its former empire.’’ Britain, in consequence, had grown ‘‘increasingly anxious to weld Ireland more tightly to her side as a secure neo-colony’’ (Sinn Féin, The Les-

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of that tradition deserve examination still, not least because the difficulties that afflicted what had originally been a radical liberal case against imperialism were to return to haunt the mainstream of Provisional doctrine. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the advanced English liberal J. A. Hobson openly declared that the ‘‘antagonism with democracy drives to the very roots of Imperialism.’’ 13 He made this statement in 1902, at the close of the Boer War, when Britain’s confidence in its imperial mission was on the wane. Having been a focus of national pride for close on thirty years, imperialism was now presented by a growing band of critics as a sign of civic corruption and political decline.14 As public morals degenerated, democracy—in Hobson’s mind—would be the first to suffer. In this account, the threat to democracy came from the pursuit of an aggressive foreign policy that aimed at territorial annexation. By the progress of expansion, the proper functioning of national government was thought to have been disabled. The British Cabinet, Hobson observed, had grown to absorb the powers of the House of Commons in direct proportion to the extension of imperial control over diverse parts of the globe. In specific terms, the burden of expansion required increasing specialization throughout the organs of government. As a result, the business of empire exceeded at once ‘‘popular knowledge and popular control.’’ The foreign secretary, the colonial secretaries, and governors in the dependencies were no longer sons of History [Dublin: Sinn Féin, 1970]). By 1986, Adams was offering the analysis that in ‘‘the 6 counties we have a colonial situation. In the 26 counties we have a neo-colonial state in which the imperial foreign government was exchanged for a native one based on business interests’’ (The Politics of Irish Freedom, 39). 13. J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), 145. 14. Criticism of British foreign policy in the name of anti-imperialism had been mounting since 1898. The desire to stem the tide of negative publicity was already evident in J. Lawson Walton’s article ‘‘Imperialism,’’ which appeared in Contemporary Review 75 (March 1899): 305–10. Nonetheless, ongoing disaffection with British ‘‘imperialism’’ was made particularly explicit in the collaborative volume by F. W. Hirst, Gilbert Murray, and J. L. Hammond, Liberalism and the Empire (London: R. B. Johnson, 1900): imperialism’s ‘‘most poisonous’’ exemplification was now apparent, as Hirst put it, in ‘‘the financial or speculative imperialism of Mr. Rhodes’’ (4). By 1902, the activities of ‘‘financial or speculative imperialism’’ had similarly incurred the wrath of the Irish Fenian Michael Davitt, in response—once again—to developments in the southern African republics. See Michael Davitt, The Boer Fight for Freedom (London: Funk and Wagnalls, 1902): ‘‘England, by her money markets and press and commerce; by her howling hypocrisy in pulpit and Parliament; has successfully mammonized the world . . . she has enthroned the creed of human cupidity in the Temple out of which the gentle saviour of Nazareth . . . once banished the money changers’’ (588–89).

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answerable ‘‘directly or effectively’’ to the ‘‘will of the people.’’ 15 Accountability declined, autocracy emerged, and the means of popular resistance were— in consequence—imperiled. In Ireland, within two years of the appearance of Hobson’s book, Michael Davitt—already a committed Irish separatist and by now an advocate of Boer autonomy—presented what in essence had been the main Hobsonian line: ‘‘In Great Britain, parliamentarism or imperialism must die. They cannot live together.’’ 16 But in Hobson’s further estimation, it was the murky world of finance capital and entrepreneurial interests that undermined Parliament by stealth.17 He advanced his claim with the sturdy support of recent historical developments: between 1870 and 1884, 3.75 million square miles were added to the British Empire. After the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, Germany and France had begun to pursue an active policy of foreign annexation. Britain in due course followed suit, in defense of the balance of power in Europe. Benjamin Disraeli, notoriously, supplied this project with its ideological gloss. Speaking at Crystal Palace in June 1872, he advertised the virtues of ‘‘Imperial consolidation’’ with a view to making the country ‘‘great’’ again.18 The speech was intended as a challenge to liberalism and to laissez-faire. It was a self-conscious departure from the world of Cobden and Mill, and, in local strategic terms, it was a political assault on the principles of Gladstone. Soon the government committed the energies of the British nation to foreign war and political subjugation. Italy in due course joined the race, and Portugal and Belgium followed fast on her heels. The partition of the African continent had begun. 15. Hobson, Imperialism, 145. 16. Michael Davitt, The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland (London: Harper and Bros., 1904), 723. Davitt continued: ‘‘The growth of military power, increasing armaments, aggressive politics which provoke international disputes, expeditions for the subjugation of socalled savage races, all mean a constant danger to social peace and true progress. . . . I contend that Ireland independent of all English control and interference would be of far greater advantage to the working classes of Great Britain than an Ireland ruled and ruined under Dublin Castle on the principles of imperialism—that is, for landlords, aristocrats and money-lenders.’’ 17. The point had already been made, but in more general terms, by Hirst et al., Liberalism and the Empire: ‘‘it is time to counterwork the busy, though unseen, agencies of international finance’’ (63). 18. W. F. Monypenny and G. E. Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, 6 vols. (London: J. Murray, 1910–1920), 5:195. Criticism of Disraeli’s departure, however, had been sounded almost since the beginning. See Robert Lowe, ‘‘Imperialism,’’ Fortnightly Review 24 (1878): 453–65: ‘‘What does Imperialism mean? It means the assertion of absolute power over others’’ (458).

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This was the era of the Zulu War, the conquest of Egypt, and the annexation of the Transvaal. It was the period of the Afghanistan adventure, and the time when Victoria became Empress of India. In the context of these developments, imperialism acquired a positive political resonance in British public life. The term, as is well known, started life in the middle of the century as a synonym for despotism. The personal rule of Napoleon III at that time was the target.19 Now, in the early 1870s, it stood for national glory and righteous expedition. According to Hobson, however, behind the trappings and the pageantry, behind the militarism and the patriotic fervor, lay the problem of domestic underconsumption and the search for foreign profitable investment: ‘‘The economic root of Imperialism,’’ he declared, ‘‘is the desire of strong organised industrial and financial interests to secure and develop at the public expense and by public force private markets for their surplus goods and their surplus capital.’’ 20 Imperialism, by 1901, had come to mean war and conquest; it was sustained by jingoism and popular pride, but it was driven by the acquisitive zeal of organized economic interests. The exporters of surplus financial and entrepreneurial capital appeared to have succeeded in harnessing the resources of the state to their own imperial impulse. According to Hobson, then, it was through the subordination of national politics to the ‘‘clear-sighted calculation’’ of industrial and financial interests that the appropriation of new territories had been effected on a massive scale, that protectorates and Crown colonies had been established across the southern hemisphere, and that an attempt had been made to exploit all regions 19. Richard Koebner and Helmut D. Schmidt, Imperialism: The Story and Significance of a Political Word, 1840–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 324. Imperialismus already carried this significance for Karl Marx by 1852: see his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1984), 104–19. Ironically, by 1923, Carl Schmitt was identifying the imperialism of Napoleon III with the many manifestations of ‘‘democracy’’ observable in the world since 1848—‘‘all political tendencies could make use of democracy’’: see The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Ellen Kennedy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), 24. Schmitt’s point here was developed from Max Weber’s account of plebiscitary Caesarism, fully elaborated in Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 2:1125–30. 20. Hobson, Imperialism, 106. The historical viability of Hobson’s account of continental partition in Africa has been questioned many times, most vigorously (and controversially) by Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher, with Alice Denny, Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism (London: Macmillan, 1981): ‘‘John Atkinson Hobson . . . transposed the early Victorian account of colonies of settlement anachronistically into an explanation of the late Victorians’ tropical acquisitions’’ (xiii).

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of the earth.21 Responsible government was left to the old empire of colonial settlement, while autocratic rule became the norm for a new emerging empire of commercial and military aggrandizement. Imperialism in the developed world spelled the decline of parliamentary democracy, but it also entailed for less developed regions the creation of primitive forms of despotism. In this context, every pretense on the part of the metropolitan establishment to be advancing the cause of civilization amounted, in Hobson’s judgment, to ‘‘wanton exhibitions of hypocrisy.’’ 22 It signaled that English perfidy had been effectively transformed: the national reputation for treacherous self-regard was no longer just imputed to Britain’s European diplomacy—instead, dissimulating selfishness was now ascribed to its global policy.23 Hobson’s analysis quickly gained recognition, and its currency survived for another eighty years. Marxists around the time of the First World War, then Fabians between 1920 and 1945, and ultimately an array of nationalist movements during the period of European decolonization seized on the equation of economics with empire as a welcome explanatory tool.24 21. Hobson, Imperialism, 59. This assumption on Hobson’s part, however, has long been a subject of intense dispute. For a comparatively recent critical account, see D. K. Fieldhouse, ‘‘‘Imperialism’: An Historiographical Revision,’’ Economic History Review 14 (1962): 187–209: ‘‘Hobson’s sinister capitalists . . . were nothing more than a hypothesis, a deus ex machina, to balance an equation between the assumed rationality of mankind and the unreasonableness of imperial policies’’ (209). 22. Hobson, Imperialism: ‘‘The phrases about teaching ‘the dignity of labour’ and raising races of ‘children’ to manhood, whether used by directors of mining companies or by statesmen in the House of Commons, are little better than wanton exhibitions of hypocrisy. They are based on a falsification of the facts, and a perversion of the motives which actually direct the policy’’ (280). 23. The reputation of the conduite perfide des Anglais, within a more narrowly European context, had been revived by Frederick the Great at the close of the Seven Years’ War and resuscitated once again by Robespierre and then Napoleon. See H. D. Schmidt, ‘‘The Idea and Slogan of ‘Perfidious Albion,’’’ Journal of the History of Ideas 14, no. 4 (1953): 604–16. 24. The equation is made diffusely in Gamal Abdul Nasser, Egypt’s Liberation: The Philosophy of Revolution (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1957), but more deliberately in Kwame Nkrumah, Africa Must Unite (London: Heinemann, 1963): ‘‘Colonial powers were guided primarily by economic, political and military considerations, probably in that order’’ (7). It also appears, confusedly, in Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990): here, ‘‘capitalism and imperialism’’ appear at once as conscious and concerted agents (63). But, from early on, the Hobsonian thesis naturally had its prominent and vocal opponents. See, for example, Norman Angell, The Great Illu-

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If that equation was vague in terms of specifying with precision a chain of cause and effect, it was nonetheless versatile. By 1918, campaigning during the months before the Anglo-Irish War, Eamon de Valera could pose the question to an American audience: ‘‘Does the Trotzky phrase ‘most cynical imperialism’ not immediately occur to us as the best and truest description of England’s attitude?’’ 25 The association of imperialism with cynicism, and cynicism with capitalism, still retained the power to persuade well into the 1970s. And for the IRA, it had obvious attractions. For its Official wing in 1969, economic interests guided the political will of empire. Those interests, however, were understood to serve established social privilege. Social discontent in Northern Ireland would therefore have to be politically harnessed before economic progress could be made: unity across the Catholic and Protestant working classes in the province would help to precipitate the reform of the Northern Ireland government, and ‘‘Stormont could then be used against imperialism.’’ 26 Reform would have to be engineered in advance of revolution, and revolution would then terminate imperial control. For the Provisionals, on the other hand, the political will of Unionism would have to be broken first before economic justice could be adequately addressed. Since Unionism in the Six Counties was seen as little more than sion: A Study of the Relation of Military Power in Nations to Their Economic and Social Advantage (London: W. Heinemann, 1910): ‘‘conquest would ensure to the conqueror no profit’’ (36), from which he concluded that international trade ought properly to be seen as a means of civilizing politics. The advance of Hobson’s argument nonetheless proceeded undaunted. Henry Noel Brailsford tackled Angell’s objections in The War of Steel and Gold: A Study of the Armed Peace (London: G. Bell and Sons Ltd., 1914): ‘‘The potent pressure of economic expansion is the motive force in an international struggle’’ (42). By 1920, it had won the approval of Fabians such as Leonard Woolf, who was to argue in his Economic Imperialism (London: Allen and Unwin, 1920) that ‘‘economic imperialism is only the logical application of capitalism and its principles to internationalism’’ (101). In a more academic context, Hannah Arendt resuscitated the Hobsonian line, with some modifications, after World War II in ‘‘Imperialism,’’ part 3 of her The Origins of Totalitarianism (London: Deutsch, 1951). 25. Eamon de Valera, Eamon de Valera States His Case (Dublin: Sinn Féin, 1918), 2. The pamphlet is a transcript of a speech delivered in the United States, reprinted from the Christian Science Monitor, May 15, 1918. 26. The argument was expressed in this form by C. D. Greaves in Reminiscences of the Connolly Association (London: Connolly Association, 1978), quoted in Henry Patterson, The Politics of Illusion: A Political History of the IRA (London: Serif, 1997), 160. But the perspective was common within the ranks of the Wolfe Tone Society and the Connolly Association in the late 1960s.

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a malleable creature of British policy, Republicanism would have to launch itself against the designs of British power. As Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, president of Provisional Sinn Féin between 1970 and 1983, came to elaborate the position within a few years of the break with the Officials, the escape from ‘‘economic imperialism,’’ and so the transition to publicly administered socialism, had to begin with Irish revolutionary secession.27 The order of precedence here was defended by resort to a time-worn apologia. Ó Brádaigh insisted that Britain’s purpose was to advance its own domestic interest by ‘‘dividing and ruling the people’’ of Ireland.28 The remote cause of that endeavor was an abstract ‘‘Imperial system.’’ 29 But that system could be practically engaged only by attacking its more immediate manifestation: by a direct assault, in other words, on the commercial and military capacity at the disposal of the British government. If the ambition to terminate imperialism in Ireland could impose such stark political choices on the main Republican organization, carving up the IRA into militarists and politicians, then the attempt to identify the cause of imperialism proved a more desperate undertaking. As late as 2002, it remained the stated objective of Provisional Sinn Féin to remove the funda27. The reference to ‘‘economic imperialism’’ appears in Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, Our People, Our Future: What Éire Nua Means (Dublin: Sinn Féin, 1973), 18. Such forms of economic dependence as would survive the achievement of national independence were to be overcome, as Ó Brádaigh explained in ‘‘What Social and Economic System Would Serve Ireland Best?’’ printed in the Irish Press, December 3, 1970, by effecting the ‘‘restoration of the means of production, distribution and exchange in Ireland to the Irish people.’’ 28. Ó Brádaigh, Our People, Our Future, 17. The idea that British policy had sought to advance itself by the method of ‘‘divide and rule’’ had steadily gained ground within the ranks of Irish nationalism since the 1890s, but it became a theme within anti-imperialist polemic internationally in the 1950s and early 1960s. See, for example, Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (London: Nelson, 1965): ‘‘Thus far, all the methods of neo-colonialists have pointed in one direction, the ancient, accepted one of all minority ruling classes throughout history—divide and rule’’ (253). But a whole raft of elaborations on this theme appeared throughout the Troubles. In the mid-1970s, the Revolutionary Communist Group could argue in their Ireland: British Labour and British Imperialism (London: RCG Publications Ltd., 1976) that ‘‘bitter sectarianism’’ and ‘‘discrimination’’ arose in Northern Ireland ‘‘because the British ruling class needed an agent in Ireland to support its political domination of the whole island’’ (11). Four years later, the analysis was back again: the Irish Militant Peter Hadden argued in his ‘‘Divide and Rule’’—Labour and the Partition of Ireland (Dublin: MIM Publications, 1980) that the ‘‘partition of Ireland was a conscious act on the part of British Imperialism chiefly intended to divide the working class along sectarian lines’’ (1). 29. Ó Brádaigh refers to this generalized and undefined ‘‘Imperial system’’ in his ‘‘What Is Irish Republicanism?’’

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mental ‘‘cause of conflict’’ in Northern Ireland. Since that ‘‘cause’’ was deliberately identified—from the beginning—with the designs of British imperialism, it would seem a matter of overwhelming concern to discover the true identity of this responsible, moving agent. But by 1970, the endeavor to characterize the inner workings of imperialism, in general terms, acquired a complicated history. Immediately in the wake of Hobson’s diagnosis, the confused medley of economic and political forces ostensibly shaping the world of imperialism entered the canon of socialist thought. The Austrian Rudolf Hilferding contributed to the debate; so too did the wayward Otto Bauer.30 Then, in 1916, came Lenin’s infamous response. Imperialism, in his account, was the ‘‘highest stage of capitalism.’’ That stage, the final stage of crisis, was characterized by the decline of free competition and the emergence at once of big banks and industrial monopolies: the replacement of private business and banking by high finance, cartels, syndicates, and trusts.31 These were the motors of domination compelling the European powers of the day toward rivalry and conquest. With the translation of Lenin’s Imperialism into French and German in 1920, the argument spawned disciples and proliferated. At the same time, a string of Fabian publicists between the two World Wars reclaimed the more narrowly Hobsonian thesis: ‘‘The white man,’’ as Leonard Woolf put it, in 1920, ‘‘must cease to seek his own economic interests in Africa.’’ 32 By the end of the 1950s, influential figures within the British Labour Party were declaring that the end of imperialism was definitely in sight. John Strachey revealed their thinking in 1959: ‘‘An end of the imperialist epoch,’’ he felt able to affirm, ‘‘is both possible and a precondition of our survival.’’ 33 That expec30. Rudolf Hilferding, Das Finanzkapital (Vienna: I. Brand, 1910); Otto Bauer, Grosskapital und Militarismus (Vienna: I. Brand, 1911). Albert O. Hirschman, in Essays in Trespassing: Economics to Politics and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), argues powerfully for the Hegelian provenance of the assumptions that they, and later Lenin, made: ‘‘Hegel had an economic theory of imperialism when Marx did not’’ (167). 31. V. I. Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916; repr., London: Junius Publications Ltd., 1996), 127–28. 32. Leonard Woolf, Empire and Commerce in Africa: A Study in Economic Imperialism (London: Allen and Unwin, 1920), 364. By 1945, Woolf was calling for colonial disengagement. See his ‘‘The Political Advance of Backward Peoples,’’ in Fabian Colonial Essays, ed. Rita Hinden (London: Allen and Unwin, 1945): ‘‘Is it our intention to keep them permanently in a state of complete political tutelage or eventually to give them self-government?’’ (85). 33. John Strachey, The End of Empire (London: Gollanz, 1959), 309. In the preface, Strachey acknowledges the influence of James Callaghan and Richard Crossman on his thinking before he developed the argument that the ‘‘end of empire,’’ foreshadowed in the Durham Report, had been accelerated in the fifteen years since 1944: ‘‘today, in 1959, little

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tation burgeoned among the devotees of Labour, leaving debate about ‘‘economic imperialism’’ to the heirs of Lenin. While Leninism is hardly a major player on the ideological battleground of our new century, in the late sixties, particles of the doctrine still had the power to seduce.34 Snippets even survived into the early 1980s. The experience of European decolonization within the former African colonies themselves is the occasion for this sudden recrudescence in anti-imperialist rumination. The opinion prospered that imperialism had in fact survived, although disguised in ‘‘neo-colonialist’’ apparel.35 In 1965, Kwame Nkrumah, president of the newly independent Ghana, offered the view that ‘‘world capitalism has postponed its crisis but only at the cost of transforming it into an international crisis.’’ 36 The immediate arm of conquest had been withdrawn to base, but solely with a view to reequipping its ambition. In the future, the direction of operations would be conducted by altogether subtler means, through more insidious machinations: ‘‘neo-colonialism,’’ as Nkrumah declared, ‘‘acts covertly, manoeuvring men and governments.’’ 37 Its agents remains of the structure of world colonialism. In fifteen short years the whole edifice has almost disappeared’’ (145). 34. Notably through the influence of two North American neo-Marxist economists, Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, on the New Left in Britain. Baran’s The Political Economy of Growth (London: Calder, 1957) could point to recent global politics as a ‘‘modern, more subtle and less transparent form of imperialism’’: imperialism, in this guise, no longer ‘‘needed’’ colonial possessions to advance itself but could maintain its strength by more indirect methods pursued on the part of multinational corporations (15). See Baran and Sweezy’s joint assessment, presented in ‘‘Notes on the Theory of Imperialism,’’ reprinted from the Monthly Review (March 1966) in Economic Imperialism: A Book of Readings, ed. Kenneth E. Boulding and Tapan Mukerjee (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972): ‘‘All the major struggles going on in the world today can be traced to this hunger of the multinational corporations for maximum Lebensraum ’’ (170). James O’Connor reviewed the work of Baran and Sweezy in New Left Review 40 (November–December 1966): 38– 50. But their influence was already in evidence in Michael Barratt Brown, ‘‘Imperialism Yesterday and Today,’’ New Left Review 5 (September–October 1960): 42–49. 35. ‘‘Neo-colonialism’’ was the subject of a resolution at the All-African People’s Conference held in Cairo in 1961, which denounced ‘‘the survival of the colonial system in spite of formal recognition of political independence in emerging countries which became the victims of an indirect and subtle form of domination by political, economic, social, military or technical means’’ (quoted in Colin Leys, Underdevelopment in Kenya: The Political Economy of Neo-Colonialism, 1964–1971 [London: Heinemann, 1975], 26). 36. Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism, 256. For Gerry Adams’s comments on Nkrumah, see his Before the Dawn: An Autobiography (London: Mandarin, 1996): ‘‘Nkrumah had become the first of a generation of African anti-colonialists . . .’’ (54). 37. Nkrumah, Africa Must Unite, 174.

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were still Lenin’s ailing monopolists, regrouped in multinational corporations: by their actions, they effectively guaranteed pan-African underdevelopment, while they comfortably assured the ascendancy of the developed world. But the original inspiration for Nkrumah’s reassessment derived from the developed world: the theory of neo-colonialism had originally been formulated in Europe and the United States. Yet, unhappily for Nkrumah, the partisans of the theory construed the current leaderships in Africa as themselves a band of hapless stooges managed by the world-capitalist system.38 The developed world has changed since then: scarcely anyone would declare themselves in open adherence to Lenin’s prognoses today. The image of sinister monopolies and cartels channeling competition into savage conflict hasn’t quite disappeared, however. Yet how cartels actually emerge and how, once established, they succeed in controlling the policy decisions of their respective governments rarely receive such full and sustained attention. It was a standard Marxist assumption in the earlier part of the last century that the advance of capitalism led to large-scale production, and that large-scale production tended toward the unlimited concentration of industries into monopolistic combines and trusts. From this perspective, monopolies ultimately swamp markets, and monopolies in turn seek protection from tariffs. But an effective monopoly behind a protective tariff encourages sale above the market price. This, according to the standard Marxist view, inevitably leads to dumping on poorer countries as home consumption fails to keep pace with monopoly production. Faced with rival cartel interests in foreign markets, competition can lead to ineliminable friction, to the need for diplomacy, even for war, and the search for colonial markets. Such was the argument Hilferding and Bauer sought to mount, and these were the conclusions Lenin sought to develop and exploit. The argu38. Brown, ‘‘Imperialism Yesterday and Today,’’ 46n, presents postcolonial states as ‘‘comprador’’ agents, in deference to the arguments of Baran and Sweezy. See also, on this, Ernest Mandel, ‘‘After Imperialism,’’ New Left Review 25 (May–June 1964): 17–25. On Ghana after the fall of Nkrumah, but with the composition of the Convention People’s Party in mind, see Jack Woddis, Introduction to Neo-Colonialism (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1967): ‘‘With the emergence of new states, the imperialists still utilise their old connections with feudalism and with tribal chiefs, as the experience of Nigeria, Ghana, Malaya, Indonesia and the Sudan indicate only too well’’ (56). More explicitly, see Roger Murray, ‘‘Some Thoughts on Ghana,’’ New Left Review 42 (March–April 1967): ‘‘The CPP leadership and cadres came preponderantly . . . from the petty bourgeois salariat . . . a mixed stratum which concentrated many of the political and cultural tensions of colonial society’’ (29).

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ment was always open to powerful objections, however: for one thing, monopoly is not a necessary product of capitalist competition. Neither does its operation plunge the whole world into escalating crisis. By any historical reckoning, conflict is uneven and unpredictable, but never total. Equally, if monopolies flourish only under the supervision of a protective tariff, tariffs are hardly the inevitable outcome of capitalist development. Moreover, the political clout of cartel industries continually meets with substantial opposition from competing economic interests within each capitalist democracy. They too have votes, publicists, and lobbyists, with the result that monopoly and merger scrutiny and antitrust legislation have become familiar features of twentieth-century economic policy. Faced with this situation, Austrian political economist Joseph Schumpeter advanced the claim that ‘‘it is a basic fallacy to describe imperialism as a necessary phase of capitalism, or even to speak of the development of capitalism into imperialism.’’ 39 Nevertheless, the association of capitalism with imperialism persisted, and their mutual hostility to democracy became an enduringly popular refrain. 2 This brisk narrative of the fortunes of imperialism is presented with a particular point in view: the evolving status of imperialism as everyone’s political nightmare was accompanied by its progressive obfuscation as an identifiable actor in the world of mundane circumstance. As imperialism rose in the minds of its various critics to the heights of omnicompetence, it disappeared from the field of reality as a definite plan of action associated with a specific set of agents. Each time it was invoked, its campaigning zeal could only ever be construed at the back of discernible actions and outcomes, never actually showing its hand. ‘‘With England’s designing hand removed,’’ de Valera could confidently predict, ‘‘religious differences would not figure in Ireland more prominently than in other countries.’’ 40 That prediction has been shared across the range of separatist opinion in Ireland: James Connolly made the point before the Rebellion of 1916, and P. S. 39. Joseph A. Schumpeter, ‘‘The Sociology of Imperialisms’’ (1918), in The Economics and Sociology of Capitalism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), 206. The organizing principles of Schumpeter’s analysis can be traced to Benjamin Constant, ‘‘The Spirit of Conquest and Usurpation and Their Relation to European Civilisation’’ (1814), in Political Writings, ed. Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988): ‘‘War then comes before commerce. The former is all savage impulse, the latter civilized calculation’’ (53). 40. De Valera, Eamon de Valera States His Case, 3.

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O’Hegarty repeated it at intervals in the ensuing years.41 By the spring of 1969, the presumption had returned with a vengeance as the organizing principle of Republican propaganda: ‘‘English imperialist rule . . . has used religious sectarianism to delude generations of Protestant workers that in some way Irish democracy is the enemy.’’ 42 Partition, and then sectarianism, seemed to answer to the needs of modern conquest, in conformity with the method of the ancients: they bore the hallmarks of the tried and tested strategy, divide et impera. The policy of ‘‘divide and rule’’ can never actually be produced: no person ever proposed it, no government ever tried to bring it about. Instead, it lingers, like a perpetual insinuation, or a Republican hunch, which aims to close the distance between the fact of Northern Irish dissensions and the assumption of a British imperial contrivance. So the policy of imperialism is demoted to a rumor—an intention endlessly imputed but never actually owned. In the run-up to the peace negotiations in 1998, the Northern chairperson for Sinn Féin, Mitchel McLaughlin, referred to the British orchestration of ‘‘religious and cultural differences’’ in 1920 as part of a larger purpose ‘‘to create a form of social and political apartheid’’ in Ireland. Even if no such purpose had in fact been entertained, confirmation could still be found in the immediate results: ‘‘British interference meant that a healthy democracy failed to develop and religious differences were exploited as a means of maintaining control.’’ 43 And then again, with reference to the end of the 41. James Connolly, ‘‘Labour in Irish History’’ (1910), in Labour in Ireland (Dublin: 1922): past politics has effected a division of the people, but now, through the activities of social revolutionaries, ‘‘North and South will again clasp hands’’ (168). However, it is worth noting that in ‘‘The Re-Conquest of Ireland’’ (1915), in Connolly, Labour in Ireland, divisions in the northeast of Ireland are being ascribed by Connolly to indigenous factors, including the spirit of Protestant labor: ‘‘If those poor sweated descendents of Protestant rebels against a king had to-day one-hundredth part of the spirit of their ancestors in question, the reconquest of Ireland by the working class would be a much easier task than it is likely to prove’’ (220). The assumption that Irish divisions are an externally imposed contrivance, however, is pervasive in P. S. O’Hegarty’s writings, although the idea is most explicit in his Ulster: A Brief Statement (Dublin: Maunsel, 1919): ‘‘Unionism means division and manipulation’’ (29). 42. United Irishman, May 1969. The quotation obviously represents a strand of Republican analysis that circulated in the period before the split. The Provisionals, for their part, accepted the basis of the argument while rejecting the mode of redress that was to become Official Sinn Féin policy. In the same month, an editorial in the New Left Review 55 (May–June 1969) declared, ‘‘British capitalism has long exported its violence to its imperial possessions: it does so in full measure to its nearest vassal territory’’ (1). 43. Mitchel McLaughlin, ‘‘The Irish Republican Ideal,’’ in The Republican Ideal: Current Perspectives, ed. Norman Porter (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1998), 71.

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twentieth century, McLaughlin alleged that the control of Northern Ireland remained an abiding British project, despite the fact that final control had actually been renounced.44 So imperialism lived on, as an implacable suspicion. Like the ghost of the old king on the battlements, having retreated from the mortal world, it dictated the course of events remotely, from beyond the grave. In fact, the drama of life does not replicate the drama of the stage: departed souls do not direct affairs within the terrestrial world. They can, of course, be conjured in imagination, but in pursuit of such bodiless images of the brain, even the most eager of seekers is obliged to fix their attention on real forces and ascertainable persons that might well be imagined to be the bearers of some spectral significance which lurks behind their actual presence, but which in truth can have no genuine meaning beyond the assemblage of motives and actions that gives them their existence. For Nkrumah, imperialism still maneuvered ‘‘men and governments.’’ The origins of this imperialism lay in the development of capitalism, but its result could be found in the political fragmentation that affected the African continent as a whole: ‘‘The greatest danger at present facing Africa,’’ Nkrumah argued, ‘‘is neocolonialism and its major instrument, balkanization.’’ 45 Imperialism, therefore, was again equated with the strategy of ‘‘divide and rule.’’ But the search for the contemporary agents of this wanton process of division was ultimately doomed to failure: the policy and the perpetrator just could not be aligned. In like manner, the first critics of imperialism found that the spirit of capitalism haunted modern war, but that spirit soon dissolved in the face of further investigation and left the fact of bellicosity in the wake of its dissolution. So also the Republican assault on British colonial government in 44. McLaughlin, ‘‘The Irish Republican Ideal’’: ‘‘In recent years it has become possible for British cabinet ministers to disclaim any selfish strategic or economic interest in Ireland. This is a most welcome statement, particularly if the present process of dialogue can be developed to the point where the British government also ends its political interest’’ (75). But, of course, as McLaughlin knew, the Downing Street Declaration of December 15, 1993, had conceded the final decision over Northern Ireland’s sovereignty to a majority within the Northern Irish populace. 45. Nkrumah, Africa Must Unite, 173. Jon Elster, in Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 101–3, provides this tendency to interpret intentions as a function of outcomes with an intellectual genealogy stretching back to the theodicy of Malebranche and Leibniz. However, he further comments that removing Providence from the picture leaves one postulating ‘‘a diabolical plan to which there corresponds no devilish planner’’ (105).

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Ulster: British policy was possessed by the phantom of imperialism, but when the ghostly remnant was allowed to bow out, a million Protestant unionists remained as a solid political reality. Curiously, the leaders of Provisional Sinn Féin seemed to know this. McLaughlin, after all, conceded the point in speculating that if ‘‘unionists were to find that they could become a minority within the North of Ireland it is difficult to believe that they would not resist . . . change violently.’’ 46 But the developed Republican taste for spirit raising always distracted from the problem at hand, displacing the immediate cause of contention onto a disembodied residue that could only ever be reached by presuming its survival in the flesh of the living: in this instance, the United Kingdom system of government as a seeming relic of an imagined British imperialism. Every such battle against intangible spirits, whose demonic purpose is misattributed to tangible persons in the world of politics, is bound to extend the moment of reckoning into a bloody struggle. With the progress of the twentieth century, the battle lines themselves grew steadily fainter. Since the specter of imperialism in fact was never supplied with any definite shape of its own, it has been easy to cast its formless features into a plurality of molds. The results of this process are clear to see: imperialism over the longer term came to cover a multitude of sins. It meant the social relations we do not like, or the authority we oppose. The example of Indonesia’s President Sukarno exemplifies the tendency. At the Bandung Conference of Afro-Asian powers in 1955, Sukarno warned his audience that imperialism did not exclusively appear in its ‘‘classic form’’ of old: ‘‘It has also its modern dress in the form of economic control, intellectual control, and actual physical control by a small but alien community within the nation.’’ 47 As conflict raged around the geopolitical upheavals that attended the aftermath of the Second World War, the traits of imperialism were progressively found to be subtle, disguised, or indeed invisible: Egypt’s Gamal Nasser described imperialism (again, in 1955), as ‘‘the great force that is imposing a murderous, invisible siege upon the whole region.’’ 48 Likewise for Nkrumah, in 1963, imperialism had ‘‘begun, and will continue, to assume new forms and subtler disguises.’’ 49 46. McLaughlin, ‘‘The Irish Republican Ideal,’’ 79. 47. Reported in the Times, May 27, 1955, and quoted in A. P. Thornton, Doctrines of Imperialism (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1965), 5–6. 48. Nasser, Egypt’s Liberation, 103. Curiously, Nasser’s anti-imperial solution was a new pan-African civilizing mission: ‘‘We will never in any circumstances be able to relinquish our responsibility to support, with all our might, the spread of enlightenment and civilization to the remotest depths of the jungle’’ (110). 49. Nkrumah, Africa Must Unite, xvi.

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It would be ridiculous to suggest that what is complained about in the name of imperialism disappears with every attempt at description. The injustices individuals do obviously encounter have a perfect reality all their own. In addressing the experience of injustice in abstruse and general terms, it is altogether more expedient, with a view to securing redress, if the general criticism is launched with the particular complaint in view. In the beginning, in the early part of the twentieth century, criticism of imperialism certainly had a definite purpose: to promote the spread of responsible government and raise the level of general prosperity. But that purpose was never going to be profitably advanced by elaborating the dynamics of global trade and politics in terms better suited to a world which had long passed. This belatedness was the basic problem with the repudiation of imperialism, beginning in 1898. However, the attempt at repudiation started off as part of a deliberate move to supplant an older orthodoxy. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a commonplace presumption emerged that belligerence would be reduced in the face of an expanding network of international trade and the modern institution of representative government: extensive commerce between rival states and public opinion within them would contribute to the promotion of peace and prosperity.50 But a century of war and carnage did little to enhance that argument’s appeal. After the Boer War, and in the middle of the Great War, the thesis began to wear thin. And so Hobson and Lenin, in their different ways, shifted the frame of reference: they claimed that commerce congeals into monopolistic control, that monopolies hijack public opinion, and that opinion grows to favor war. Imperialism, on this account, governs the international order. However, observable reality— such as it is—offers little encouragement to the concomitant view that conquest is the secret goal of modern European states. Britain, in this regard, is hardly an exception: despite some flights of national fantasy, it was never another Rome. The example of Rome inevitably haunts the history of modern European conquest, and so it pervades every charge of imperialism mounted in response to global conflict.51 While it might seem obvious, it is still important 50. See, for example, Constant, ‘‘The Spirit of Conquest and Usurpation’’: ‘‘Commerce has brought nations closer together . . . monarchs may still be enemies, but peoples are compatriots’’ (141). On the contrast with Machiavelli, see John Dunn, ‘‘Liberty as a Substantive Political Value,’’ in Interpreting Political Responsibility: Essays, 1981–1989 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990). 51. Gore Vidal, ‘‘The Enemy Within,’’ Observer, October 27, 2002, provides a recent example of the phenomenon, especially in vogue since September 11, 2001. He follows

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to emphasize that the dynamics of modern warfare were not conducted on the model of the ancients. That model received astute recapitulation in early modern Florence: in 1529, Niccolò Machiavelli made the point that states in the real world of perilous conflict are compelled to preserve their fortune. They do so, he observed, by defense or by expansion. Venice exemplified the former model, while Rome conformed to the latter. And since initiative is always preferable to indolent optimism, Rome was destined to reap the benefit of proactive self-assertion. A patriotic militia, he further argued, most productively served the necessity of conquest. The existence in a city of an armed citizen body required that power be placed in the people’s hands, and from political and military enfranchisement arises the supreme aptitude of martial republics for empire: ‘‘there never has been another republic so organised that she could gain as Rome did. The efficiency of her armies caused her to conquer her empire, and the order of her proceedings and method . . . caused her to keep it when conquered.’’ 52 Empire became a Roman raison d’être, the object of republican greatness. Now, the Republicanism of the Provisional IRA obviously falls far short of these pretensions, but so too did the orientation of British imperial policy. To refer to an imperial ‘‘policy,’’ in fact, is already to stretch the point. War, trade, and commercial advantage were certainly objects of national ambition. This is as true of the age of Pitt as it is of the age of Disraeli. However, at no stage was foreign conquest sought as a principal reason of state. This, moreover, was clearly the case with Britain in the 1960s. The ‘‘thing the Bogside was fighting against,’’ recalling Eamonn McCann’s phrase, was not an appetitive military machine. Neither was it a British will to despotic usurpation. Nor was it a sinister cabal of imperialistic capitalists. Apart from anything else, it is a little less than credible to suggest that organized private capital controlled the entire political agenda of successive postwar governments. Nevertheless, the legacy of former conquest continued to linger beneath the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone in 1969 and 1970.53 a host of others in citing Schumpeter as an authority on Roman policy: ‘‘There was no corner of the known world where some interest was not alleged to be in danger or under actual attack.’’ This, despite the fact that the whole point of Schumpeter’s analysis was to deny any coincidence between ancient policy and modern raison d’état. 52. Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius, in The Chief Works and Others, trans. Alan Gilbert, 3 vols. (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1989), 1:325. 53. The phrase here is Winston Churchill’s, speaking in the House of Commons in 1922:

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Three waves of political extirpation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, extensive settlement and resettlement in the same period, a penal code in the eighteenth century, sectarianism and famine in the nineteenth . . . they all combined to cast a long shadow over twentieth-century memory in Ireland. Moreover, a provincial government in Northern Ireland, subordinate to the Westminster Parliament since 1920 yet armed with an arsenal of emergency legislation and a sectarian paramilitary police force, was poorly calculated to diminish bitterness and suspicion. Similarly, petty Unionist local government, electoral gerrymandering, discrimination in housing and employment did little over the course of fifty years to enhance the prospects of Ulster’s political success. At the start of the Troubles, in 1968 and 1969, when the Stormont regime was confronted with resistance, Unionism responded with minimalist concessions, and then with partiality and violence.54 Britain was encouraged to intervene, but it did so with reluctance: ‘‘Jim Callaghan and I considered whether we should propose . . . intervention,’’ recalled the British premier, Harold Wilson. In the end, they both agreed that the measure ‘‘would be unwise.’’ 55 When the Stormont government finally made the request for military assistance, Wilson acceded, but with grim anticipation: ‘‘I remembered that in that remarkable maiden speech of Bernadette Devlin’s earlier in the year, she had said that one answer to Northern Ireland’s problems must be ruled out; a decision to introduce British troops, which would unite both sides against them . . . I was disposed to think that she might be right.’’ 56 As it turned out, she was wrong. Still the problems multiplied: ‘‘British troops and the British Government were bearing responsibility for an intoler‘‘. . . we see the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone emerging once again. The integrity of their quarrel is one of the few institutions that has been unaltered in the cataclysm that has swept the world.’’ The words are quoted in Richard Rose, Governing without Consensus: An Irish Perspective (London: Faber and Faber, 1971), 359. 54. The image of a regime, headed by Captain Terence O’Neill, struggling to achieve significant reforms, has long been discredited. On this, see most recently Henry Patterson, Ireland Since 1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002): ‘‘O’Neillism offered economic growth in exchange for collective amnesia on the part of the Catholic community about past and present grievances’’ (194). 55. Harold Wilson, The Labour Government, 1964–1970: A Personal Record (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), 693. 56. Wilson, The Labour Government, 693. The same alarm was registered by James Callaghan, A House Divided: The Dilemma of Northern Ireland (London: Collins, 1973): reflecting on the confused situation in August 1969, he reported his own uncertainty— ‘‘might both majority and minority communities turn on the British Army?’’ (23).

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able situation,’’ Wilson soon complained: ‘‘We were exercising responsibility without power.’’ 57 Into the vacuum, connecting British responsibility with the exercise of power, the specter of imperialism would ultimately be installed at the behest of Irish Republican propaganda. In the meantime, before Republicanism had become a significant player in the conflict, the British cabinet was already in serious trouble. Difficulties stemming from half-hearted intervention were compounded by extensive ignorance of the Ulster situation.58 The reality was that Britain wanted neither responsibility nor power. Having inherited responsibility, she would not act on her power, the extent of which was significant, although not decisive.59 Then the Southern Irish government, in the midst of the unfolding crisis, began to challenge the wisdom of partition. Expectations were raised among the Catholic minority without the slightest chance of being satisfied. It was, altogether, an explosive mix that fanned the flames of sectarian hatred and opened the way to civil war. Militant Republicanism was reborn, so British imperialism had to be reinvented. Behind the rhetoric of Republicanism and empire lay a recognizably modern dispute about the nature of democracy. Hostilities in Northern Ireland after 1968 derived from the most basic and elusive problem to have afflicted politics in the twentieth century. That problem once troubled the 57. Wilson, The Labour Government, 694. Eight years later, Joe Haines, in The Politics of Power (London: Cape, 1977), was still drawing the same conclusion: ‘‘we have responsibility without power, the prerogative of the eunuch throughout the ages’’ (121). 58. Callaghan, A House Divided: ‘‘we knew little enough at first hand about what was going on, and [had] few reliable means of finding out’’ (22). In reality, the British political establishment was happy not to know, or not to avail of the means of finding out. Paul Rose, parliamentary private secretary to Barbara Castle in 1967, recounts the story—reported in Peter Taylor, Provos: The IRA and Sinn Féin (London: Bloomsbury, 1997)—of being asked by his minister, ‘‘Why is a young man like you concerned about Northern Ireland. What about Vietnam? What about Rhodesia?’’(2). More revealingly, see C. E. B. Brett, Long Shadows Cast Before: Nine Lives in Ulster, 1625–1977 (Edinburgh: J. Bartholomew, 1978), 135–39. Meetings between Brett, together with Northern Ireland Labour Party colleagues Tom Boyd and Sam Napier, and Roy Jenkins in 1966, and correspondence with Harold Wilson in 1968, produced little by way of engagement. ‘‘A dozen times since [1969] I have been reproached by friends in the British Labour Party, one today a cabinet minister, with the words ‘Why ever did you not warn us of what was coming?’ I have never yet succeeded in finding words adequate to reply to that question’’ (139). 59. See the remarks of Cecil H. King, Without Fear or Favour (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1971): Wilson ‘‘was interested, not in Ireland, but in Irishmen in his constituency at Huyton in Liverpool’’ (91); Cecil H. King, On Ireland (London: Cape, 1973): ‘‘Mr Wilson’s administration came into office in 1964 but in the first five years only one minister, Sir Frank Soskice, visited Northern Ireland and that for only an afternoon’’ (139).

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Ottoman Empire, and it came to trouble the USSR. It has destabilized Quebec, disturbed Sri Lanka, and harassed Lebanon and Kashmir. In Northern Ireland, however, the problem has been more easily misapprehended, since here its features have all along been subtly distorted by the confused political heritage that defines the canonical values celebrated in the world today. Democracy is the name for a modern system of values, dominant across the globe; yet democracy itself has been endlessly subjected to misunderstandings so severe as to provoke fundamental crisis. On the one hand, democracy refers to an established form of government, but on the other, it refers to a form of state. In Northern Ireland, the distinction proved significant: while a democratic government administered the province after 1920, it was still obliged to function without a democratic state. In fact, the government operated as an instrument of division, exacerbating conflict between rival democracies: a Catholic minority, excluded by the majority, that ultimately aspired to form a democracy of its own; and a Protestant majority that tried to count as the whole democracy, while forming in reality only a major portion of the state. It is a basic precept of modern democracy that politics should cater to the common good. What that precept means is that a democratic state is supposed to serve not a majority but the totality of its population. A democratic state is a community of privilege, not the privilege of a partial, majoritarian interest.60 Yet the Northern Ireland polity after 1920 became the privilege of a majority within the total population, in defiance of the first principle of democracy. That principle was stated at the start of the French Revolution by an apologist for the Third Estate, the Abbé Sieyès: sectional privilege in a democracy creates a ‘‘state within the state’’—‘‘it is truly,’’ as he put it, imperium in imperio.61 In due course, he went on, ‘‘it is certain that a com60. The general point was made by James Madison in James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, The Federalist Papers (1788), ed. Isaac Kramnick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987): ‘‘When a majority is included in a faction, the form of popular government enables it to sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest both the public good and the rights of other citizens’’ (125). 61. Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, Qu’ est-ce que le Tiers-État (Paris: 1789): regarding the nobility, he writes that ‘‘ses droits civils en font déjà un Peuple à part dans la grande Nation. C’est véritablement imperium in imperio’’ (13). Sieyès’s designed much of his argument as a refutation of Rousseau’s notorious rejection of political representation as a means of realizing popular sovereignty. But Rousseau himself also insisted that any form of entrenched partiality was incompatible with even the most rudimentary political harmony. The idea of the greater number governing the lesser in their own interest was, he declared, contrary to the natural order of things. See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du Contrat

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munity of privilege is the best means of harmonizing social orders, and of advancing that most important of laws, that which converts distinct orders into a single nation.’’ 62 For fifty years since the establishment of Northern Ireland in 1920, the Protestant interest in the province was identified by its government as a privileged portion within the democracy, against which the Catholic minority became imperium in imperio—or, in strictly modern parlance, a democracy within the democracy. That arrangement defined the existing situation quite precisely as an undemocratic state: Northern Ireland was not the common concern of a united population, but instead it became the particular privilege of a portion of its people. Curiously, the absence of a comprehensive democracy became a point of Protestant pride in the first phase of the Troubles: Stormont, at that time, was happily extolled as a ‘‘Protestant parliament’’ servicing a ‘‘Protestant state.’’ 63 In the presence of a system of majority government, this arrangement was allowed to masquerade as a point of democratic principle. In an organ of loyalist propaganda, the Peoples’ Press, published in August 1969, a motto was emblazoned on the front page: ‘‘The People Chose Britain—We Are the People.’’ 64 Yet throughout the annals of democratic thinking, it has been an affront to the principle of democratic unity to convert a ‘‘majority’’ into a ‘‘people’’ by a spurious sleight of hand. Democracy, in fact, has always been defined by the principle of unanimity: everybody counts in a real democracy, although only a portion rules. While competing majorities determine the government—the composition and tenure of actual rulers— the obligation of the government still remains to the people as whole. However, it is precisely this inclusive obligation that perishes at the point where a majoritarian government is made an organ of a ‘‘majority state’’: majoritarian governments require democratic states. It is this last provision that Unionism in general, and the Peoples’ Press in particular, was happy to dispense with in 1969: ‘‘in a democracy the will of the majority establishes the government.’’ 65 On the contrary: in a democracy, the will of the totality estabSocial, in Oeuvres Complètes, ed. R. Derathé et al. (Paris: Gallimard, 1964): ‘‘Il est contre l’ordre naturel que le grand nombre gouverne et que le petit soit gouverné’’ (3:404). 62. Sieyès, Qu’ est-ce que le Tiers-État: ‘‘Il est sûr que la communauté des priviléges est le meilleur moyen de rapprocher les Ordres, & de préparer la plus importante des loix, celle qui convertira les Ordres en une Nation’’ (23–24n); English translation is mine. 63. The phrase ‘‘a Protestant parliament’’ for ‘‘a Protestant state’’ was James Craig’s, dating back to 1934, although it still enjoyed a certain currency in 1969. Craig’s remark is recorded in Northern Ireland Hansard, vol. 16 (1934), col. 1091. 64. Peoples’ Press, August 27, 1969. 65. Peoples’ Press, ‘‘British Justice Demands Law and Order,’’ October 1, 1969.

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lishes the government (it forms the state), while majorities then compete for the control of that establishment (they select governments), and the victor remains obligated to the demos as a whole. Reflecting on the first period of upheaval in the late 1960s in Northern Ireland, James Callaghan recognized that it was because ‘‘they were in a permanent minority that Catholic Opposition had no hope of ever forming a government.’’ 66 But he drew no sensible conclusion: conclusions invite action, which he was anxious to avoid.67 Similarly, the Cameron Commission of Inquiry, established to investigate the disturbances of 1968, had raised the alarm: ‘‘in Northern Ireland,’’ declared the commission’s report in September 1969, ‘‘the possibility of any organised Opposition becoming the alternative government has not so far been one which was in any sense a reality.’’ 68 The point was not addressed by the British government until 1972, and by then the opportunity for an overhaul had passed, and it did not reappear for a generation. However, in 1969, pressure for action imposed itself with urgency on the British cabinet. Two options were available: on the analysis supplied at once by Callaghan and Lord Cameron, it was necessary either to modify the institutions of government, so that Catholics could participate in the administration of their state, or to rearrange the democracy such that the Protestant majority would be outnumbered by their opponents. This last possibility was the preferred option of the Provisional IRA. But the vision of a fresh democracy built on the ashes of a crumbling ‘‘majority state’’ was never set to evolve into a practical reality. The balance of forces looked forward instead to the establishment of a new Republican majority that would reduce the Protestant population to an inflamed, dissenting rump. This would not entail the establishment of democracy. It would involve, instead, an attempt to forge a new, resurgent majority by revolutionary secession, the dissolution of two governments by armed insurrection, and the pervasive militarization of competing aspirants to power. It would require the most flamboyant demonology to justify the recourse to 66. Callaghan, A House Divided, 4. Peter Rose, in How the Troubles Came to Northern Ireland (Hampshire: Palgrave, 2001), 120, records the thoughts of a Home Office official, imagining in retrospect the advice that might have been given to Callaghan regarding Northern Ireland as far back as November 1968. They amount to the suggestion that there should be some form of coalition government for the Six Counties. 67. See Callaghan, A House Divided, where Callaghan comments on his trip to Northern Ireland in 1969: ‘‘At the back of my mind, of course, I still did not want Britain to get more embroiled in Northern Ireland’’ (71). 68. Disturbances in Northern Ireland: Report of the Commission Appointed by the Governor of Northern Ireland (Cameron Report) (Belfast: HMSO, 1969), Cmd. 532, 12.

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that particular course of action, and Republicanism tried to supply it with the specter of imperialism. By the end of the 1970s, however, anti-imperialist militancy had failed to achieve its object, and Sinn Féin was forced on a course of reappraisal. That course ultimately delivered Republicans into the arms of political calculation, but every advance was slow and arduous. Any reassessment had to be conducted in the context of a protracted military stalemate, sustained by the apparently unassailable pride of both the British and the Provisionals. When peace came in the 1990s, the combatants had come full circle, accepting the implications of the original assessment at once presented and ignored by the British establishment: they chose to reform the government instead of to destroy the state. However, it remains a fact that, since 1998, the commitment to that choice has been far less than determined, which is why the durability of the settlement is uncertain: Unionism remains unhappy with the new government; Sinn Féin remains unhappy with the survival of the old state. Last year, hailing an act of decommissioning on the part of the Provisional IRA, Adams could still describe partition as an ongoing ‘‘obscenity,’’ 69 despite the fact that both he and his party had voted for its continuance: the Good Friday Agreement, after all, established Northern Ireland as a legitimate entity. The point is, however, that Adams’s remark counts as more than idle rhetorical bluster, since, notwithstanding the current legitimacy pertaining to Northern Ireland, its status remains provisional under the terms of the 1998 agreement: the signatories to that agreement, it is vital to recall, recognized ‘‘the legitimacy of whatever choice is freely exercised by a majority of the people of Northern Ireland with regard to its status, whether they prefer to support the Union with Great Britain or a sovereign united Ireland.’’ 70 With that formula, peace was secured for the present, but at the price of future dissension. The difficulty remains that political dissension always looks both ways—toward eventual rapprochement, on the one hand, and toward deepening disaffection, on the other. The recognition of Northern Ireland as the long-term property of an exclusive majority ensures that bitter political contestation will survive for another generation in the province. Everyone but the most ardent zealot must hope that the contest will be concluded without resort to a violent conflagration, although there can be no certainty that the hope will be fulfilled. While Republicanism threatens Unionism with 69. Irish Times, October 24, 2001. 70. Agreement Reached in the Multi-Party Negotiations (Belfast: 1998; Dublin: Government Information Services, 1998), see under ‘‘Constitutional Issues,’’ 1, i.

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the dissolution of Northern Ireland, Unionists will be slow to embrace the newly established government; yet while Unionists threaten Republicans with capsizing the new government, Republicans will harry Unionists with the prospect of a new state. It is still a matter of profound urgency that this cycle should be broken. Ultimately, the advantage will go to the party that moves first.

The Aesthetics of Irish Neutrality during the Second World War

Clair Wills

The neutral island facing the Atlantic, The neutral island in the heart of man, Are bitterly soft reminders of the beginnings That ended before the end began. Look into your heart, you will find a County Sligo, A Knocknarea with for navel a cairn of stones, You will find the shadow and sheen of a moleskin mountain And a litter of chronicles and bones. Look into your heart, you will find fermenting rivers, Intricacies of gloom and glint, You will find such ducats of dream and great doubloons of ceremony As nobody today would mint. But then look eastward from your heart, there bulks A continent, close, dark, as archetypal sin, boundary 2 31:1, 2004. Copyright © 2004 by Duke University Press.

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While to the west off your own shores the mackerel Are fat—on the flesh of your kin.1 Louis MacNeice wrote ‘‘Neutrality’’ in September 1942, after the death of his friend Graham Sheppard, who drowned in the Atlantic following a German U-boat attack. MacNeice is sometimes regarded as having been straightforwardly hostile to Irish neutrality—but, as the poem suggests, the real picture was far more complicated. He often finds it hard to resist the spell of Ireland’s solipsism and self-romanticizing, even as he chides her for failing to come to terms with the demands of maturity and the modern world. In 1941, he writes, ‘‘I have no wish now to bring up the undying (though Chameleonic) Irish Question but I would ask you to remember that the feeling in Eire is now predominantly pro-British (though still opposed to participation in the War), that the pro-German minority is extremely small and de Valera’s position is agonizingly difficult. Those who propose the application of the strong hand to Eire are forgetting their history.’’ 2 The neutral island is isolationist, and MacNeice portrays Ireland’s isolation as a symptom of her folie de grandeur. (He puts it here in explicitly Yeatsian terms, not only in the swipe at Sligo but in the bankrupt coupling of ‘‘ceremony’’ and ‘‘dream.’’) Modern political and ethical universalism also requires a kind of neutrality, or at the least impartiality. Indeed, some thinkers have distinguished a ‘‘cosmopolitan’’ strain within the political tradition of neutrality itself, jostling uneasily with a tendency toward national egoism.3 Yet how do we distinguish impartiality—the ‘‘neutral island in the heart of man’’—from indifference? We could put that line together with a sentence by Elizabeth Bowen from the postscript to her wartime collection of stories, The Demon Lover, where she says, ‘‘Through the particular in wartime, I felt the high-voltage current of the general pass.’’ 4 The ambivalence of neutrality, the tension between the broader moral questions raised by the Second World War, and a sense of the uniqueness of Ireland’s situation, the tug between awareness of a particular location and general European, indeed global, issues, is central to the 1. Louis MacNeice, ‘‘Neutrality,’’ in Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), 202. 2. Louis MacNeice, ‘‘London Letter [3]: War Aims; The New Political Alignment,’’ in Selected Prose of Louis MacNeice, ed. Alan Heuser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 116. Under the 1937 Constitution, the term Free State was dropped, and the country became known simply as Ireland, or, in Irish, Éire. 3. See Patrick Keatinge, A Singular Stance: Irish Neutrality in the 1980s (Dublin: Institute of Public Administration, 1984), 7. 4. The Mulberry Tree: Writings of Elizabeth Bowen, selected and introduced by Hermione Lee (London: Vintage, 1999), 99.

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Irish writing of the period. As the possessive, blinkered Hannah Kernahan puts it in Kate O’Brien’s The Last of Summer, ‘‘Danzig’s a long way from Drumaninch, my son.’’ 5 Her son, Martin, however, ‘‘although his Eire citizenship would give him a just immunity,’’ 6 feels pledged to war nonetheless because of the moral issues at stake (though he decides to join the French army rather than fight alongside the British). This conflict between isolation and orientation toward Europe is played out not just in the writing but in the lives and identities of the writers themselves. A distinctive interplay takes place between the private sense of belonging and allegiance, and the compelling force of public issues that often results in a fracturing of the sense of self. To Ireland, I, the punning title of Paul Muldoon’s recent book of essays on Irish writing, nicely captures this intertwining. The shifting boundary between the public and the private or intimate sphere (condensed in the title of Muldoon’s book) is also, in another sense, the relation between national and global— or national and universal. To put this another way: far from being solely an act of isolationism, the declaration of neutrality led to a fundamental rethinking of Ireland’s relationship to European culture and politics and a new sense of national identity. As Bowen puts it, Irish neutrality during the Second World War was ‘‘Eire’s first free self-assertion.’’ 7 The issue of neutrality was intensified and took on something of the form of a personal crisis for many of the leading Irish writers of the time, however, by virtue of their wartime roles and location. Bowen was based in London during the Second World War but traveled frequently to Ireland to assess attitudes to neutrality in her work for the British Ministry of Information; MacNeice sailed for the United States in 1940 but returned to Britain within the year and worked for the BBC in London; O’Brien lived and traveled widely in Spain in the thirties; Francis Stuart went to Germany at the start of the war and broadcast propaganda from there; and Denis Johnston followed the North African campaign and the aftermath of the D-Day landings, and was one of the first civilians to enter Buchenwald in 1944 as a reporter for the BBC. Or one could instance other writers such as Samuel Beckett, who was in the French Resistance, and Hubert Butler, who traveled widely in Eastern and Central Europe in the immedi5. Kate O’Brien, The Last of Summer (London: Virago, 1990), 179. 6. O’Brien, The Last of Summer, 186. 7. Bowen, ‘‘Notes on Eire,’’ November 9, 1940 (PRO, London), F.O. 800/310 (251–66). Also published in Jack Lane and Brendan Clifford, Elizabeth Bowen: ‘‘Notes on Eire,’’ Espionage Reports to Winston Churchill, 1940–2: With a Review of Irish Neutrality in World War II (Millstreet, Co. Cork: Aubane Historical Society, 1999), 12.

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ate prewar and postwar periods. The wartime and postwar texts of these writers record the morally complex and sometimes traumatic exposure of an Irish sensibility to the violent politics of mid-twentieth-century Europe, an exposure that often has a disruptive impact on the sense of self. Why should an Irish sensibility be distinctive in this regard? Some reminder of the issues at stake in the choice of neutrality may be useful. From a sober political standpoint, it would have been impossible for Eire to be anything other than neutral, given the recent history of relations with Britain, culminating in the war of independence and the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1921. Neutrality was a declaration of publicly nonaligned independence that finally demonstrated the sovereignty of Eamon de Valera’s state and its break with empire. In effect, Ireland’s internal political divisions in the wake of the Civil War, and the continuing problem of partition, required neutrality. Undoubtedly, too, de Valera’s experience at the League of Nations played its part. It was, ironically, while Ireland had presidency of the council that the League of Nations conspicuously failed to deal with Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia, an event that irrevocably tainted de Valera’s faith in the politics of collective security and led him to rely on diplomacy as the only possible alternative to imperialist militarism. Assessment of Irish neutrality was complicated, however, by awareness of the proGerman feeling within certain sections of the society. Estimates of Irish support for Germany vary wildly, but certainly some republicans were in accord with Roger Casement’s 1914 formulation that ‘‘God Save Ireland is another form of God Save Germany,’’ 8 and there were fears that IRA leader Séan Russell might become an Irish quisling (fears that were heightened during the conscription crisis in 1939 and 1940). These tensions were made more acute by the fact that members of de Valera’s own cabinet, such as former IRA Chief of Staff Frank Aiken, thought Britain a more serious threat to Ireland than Germany during the war.9 In 1938, Ireland reclaimed the Treaty ports at Cobh, Berehaven, and Lough Swilly, and this made neutrality an economically viable option. It also had dire political consequences for Britain, however. The most difficult test for neutrality occurred during the second half of 1940, when England wanted to use the Treaty ports as a base to coordinate the sinking of German 8. Roger Casement, letter to his cousin, Gertrude Bannister, National Library of Ireland, 13074/9. 9. See Robert Fisk, In Time of War: Ireland, Ulster, and the Price of Neutrality, 1939–45 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1983), 81.

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U-boats attacking the North Atlantic convoys. It was during this period that Bowen was recruited to gather information on Irish attitudes to Ireland’s status as ‘‘friendly neutral.’’ (At around the same time, the poet John Betjeman, who was acting as British press attaché in Dublin, was recruited to plant rumors [or ‘‘sibs’’] among pro-British contacts in the Irish capital, having received the required instruction in ‘‘operational whispering.’’)10 Throughout the war, de Valera did try to bargain use of the ports against Irish unity, but he kept coming back to neutrality as the safer option. In effect, the border became more clearly defined during the war years, as both parts of Ireland sought to define their opposing territorial states within the context of the European conflict. Most histories of the period pay tribute to de Valera’s balancing act. He managed to appease republican elements for whom the war was a further stage in Britain’s imperialist warmongering rather than an antifascist crusade, while offering guarded assistance to the allies by, for example, repatriating allied planes or forwarding information about the presence of U-boats, and at the same time remaining outside the fighting. Nevertheless, Irish neutrality was possible only because the invasion of Ireland never became vital for either the Allies or the Axis powers (though Ireland continued to be haunted by the fear of invasion and by anxiety over possible aerial bombing). One of the most striking aspects of this history, and the most damaging in the long run, was de Valera’s refusal to acknowledge—publicly, at any rate—the moral dimensions of the war. He never appeared to see the war in broad terms of European morality but concentrated on Ireland’s destiny within a domestic framework far removed from the struggle against Nazi Germany. In this he was aided by the extremely strict censorship in operation throughout the war, which forbade publication of any story that could be deemed partial to one side or the other, thus in effect banning any news that might create anti-Nazi (or anti-British) sentiment. As Donal Ó Drisceoil has argued, ‘‘Aiken envisaged a snowball effect if any moral judgements about the belligerents were allowed, eventuating in a civil war on the question of who Ireland should go to war against.’’ 11 In effect, Aiken attempted to enforce a ‘‘moral neutrality’’ on Irish attitudes toward the war, an interpretation of neutrality that differed markedly from, for example, the Swiss 10. See Eunan O’Halpin, ‘‘‘Toys’ and ‘Whispers’ in ‘16–land’: SOE and Ireland, 1940–42,’’ Intelligence and National Security 15, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 12. 11. See Donal Ó Drisceoil, Censorship in Ireland, 1939–45: Neutrality, Politics, and Society (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996), 294.

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version, where freedom of expression on the war was allowed, if not encouraged.12 In fact, as Joe Lee has emphasized, censorship was vital for the sense of moral superiority that accrued distinctively to Irish neutrality—what he calls ‘‘the necessary sense of righteousness.’’ This self-deception with regard to the nature of Ireland’s stance could not be sustained ‘‘if the belligerents turned out to have been unevenly matched in the savagery stakes.’’ 13 The most ignominious moment in the history of Irish neutrality is also the most famous—de Valera’s visit to the German legation to offer condolences on the death of Hitler. We can understand this in part as born of his conviction that a rigorous adherence to diplomacy was the only way for small nations to survive, but it is fair to say it was not understood in this way at the time. Bad enough as it looked, this very public act coincided with the lifting of censorship and the sudden circulation in Ireland of stories of atrocity that had been suppressed for the duration of the war. This included pictures and newsreels of Buchenwald, which were shown in the weeks following his visit.14 As I have suggested, the moral politics of neutrality became the occasion for a particularly intense form of self-questioning, often amounting to a kind of fracturing of the self, on the part of the writers with whom I am concerned. In the following pages, I focus on Johnston, Stuart, and Bowen, all of whom accept the need for neutrality, given the historical context, and profess guarded support for it. At various points, their stance could be summarized in the following formula: Ireland should be neutral, but individuals don’t need to be, as though public and private aspects of the self can be neatly disentangled. As Bowen puts it in one of her intelligence reports, ‘‘Eire (and I think rightly) sees her neutrality as positive, not merely negative. She has invested her self-respect in it.’’ She goes on, ‘‘It is typical of her intense and narrow view of herself that she cannot see that her attitude must appear to England an affair of blindness, egotism, escapism, or sheer funk.’’ 15 Bowen’s particular sense of internal conflict, literally caught ‘‘between worlds,’’ is perhaps only the most extreme example of a more gen12. See Ó Drisceoil, Censorship in Ireland, 288. 13. See J. J. Lee, Ireland, 1912–1985: Politics and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 266, 267. 14. Buchenwald was liberated in April, and emergency censorship was lifted on May 11, 1945. See Ó Drisceoil, Censorship in Ireland, 123–29, on censorship of atrocity stories. 15. Bowen, ‘‘Notes on Eire,’’ November 9, 1940. Throughout her report on this date, Bowen pushes the argument that Ireland could (and should) lease the Treaty ports back to Britain for the duration of the war, while maintaining her neutrality.

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eral malaise. When Stuart emigrated to Berlin at the start of the war to take up an academic post, and subsequently began to broadcast propaganda to Ireland from the Nazi capital, he claimed his actions were in defense of Irish neutrality—to combat the overwhelming diet of British propaganda on the airwaves (propaganda for which MacNeice and Johnston were partly responsible). But in Stuart’s radio talks, one senses a disappointment with a country that can simply withdraw from the momentous political and military struggle unfolding in Europe, a disgust with what he calls, at one point, ‘‘an Ireland that has sat out the world conflict on bacon and tea.’’ 16 Bowen and Stuart are, in a sense, the two extremes. Bowen strongly identifies with the British war effort, whereas Stuart’s political stance shows clear affinities with European fascism. For the playwright Johnston, Irish neutrality offers a nonbelligerent status that seems to provide a platform for the writerly ideal of detachment. However, as we shall see, this detachment is put under extreme pressure and eventually breaks down. We could say that for each of these authors, the politically problematic question of Ireland’s status also poses the question of their status as writers. Is their allegiance to the private but ultimately generalizable truth of the independent, imaginative witness, or must this be overridden by a public, and putatively ethical, responsibility (which in fact may depend on idiosyncrasies of personal history and location)? Each writer seeks a solution to the problem of Ireland’s status, an overcoming of the dangers of parochialism, and an appropriate sense of ‘‘Europeanness,’’ or—at least—of Ireland’s relation to Europe. This whole issue is exacerbated in wartime texts by the types of writing undertaken—the mode of public address. The task of gathering and disseminating various types of ‘‘intelligence’’ during the war had a profound and lasting effect on these writers’ conceptions of the relationship of self to society. I am thinking here beyond the obvious examples of Bowen’s intelligence-gathering activities or Stuart’s wartime broadcasts, to writing that cannot simply be classified as propaganda—travel writing, reminiscence, journalism, eyewitness accounts. All complicate the relation between public and private roles, and compromise any aesthetic resolution. As MacNeice puts it in his defense of Auden’s decision to go to the States in 1939: Whether the intelligentsia at the moment can directly affect public affairs to any extent seems to me doubtful. What they ought to do is reassess their position as intellectuals; it is worthwhile remembering 16. Francis Stuart, afterword to Redemption (Dublin: New Island Books, 1994), 252.

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that there are more than the two alternatives of the Ivory Tower and the political tub. If you come to analyse it, public-mindedness itself can be a form of escapism. I don’t think for a moment we should all go private; what I do think is that we have been much too naive about politics. Perhaps we all need a dose of the desert, and perhaps that is just what we shall get, whether we want it or not.17 Neutrality as Detachment The desert stages the beginnings of the quest that lies at the heart of Denis Johnston’s wartime autobiography-cum-diary, Nine Rivers from Jordan. Johnston came from a liberal Protestant background (his father had supported Home Rule 18), and, despite (or because of) his education at Merchiston and Cambridge, he was well disposed to the independence of the Free State (indeed, of a united Ireland) and supportive of Ireland’s neutral position. This caused him some difficulties in the early part of the war, when he was employed by the BBC in London. In 1939, Johnston worked for the BBC’s fledgling television station, but this was closed down at the beginning of September, and he was moved to radio, where he feared he might become involved in anti-Irish propaganda or attacks on Ireland’s neutrality. In the event the BBC sent him back to Ireland in 1940, where for two years he was to be enlisted in the drive to win Eire’s support for the war or, if that was not possible, at least making its neutrality as pro-British as possible. His task was to investigate whether radio talks and other material could be provided from Dublin, for transmission on the BBC’s Overseas Service, which could reach the tens of thousands of Irish citizens who were already serving with the British forces abroad. The thinking was that supporting Irish soldiers in the field with news and reminders of home would be a first step towards winning hearts and minds in Eire.19 In addition, Johnston was to supply program ideas for the BBC in Northern Ireland aimed at encouraging Ireland to enter the war, in order to fulfill the policy objectives of the British Ministry of Information. He was involved in delicate dealings with officials in the North, for whom any negotiation with the southern state amounted to appeasement. As the Northern Ire17. MacNeice, ‘‘American Letter,’’ in Selected Prose, 76–77. 18. Bernard Adams, Denis Johnston: A Life (Dublin: Lilliput, 2002), 14–15. 19. Adams, Denis Johnston, 204.

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land prime minister, J. M. Andrews, puts it, in response to plans for a regular cross-border Irish magazine program, ‘‘This, in my view, would be an insidious form of propaganda which would entirely misrepresent the position of Northern Ireland in the United Kingdom and would slur over the neutral and most unhelpful attitude which Eire has taken up during the war.’’ 20 From the very beginning of the war, then, Johnston found himself having to compromise his belief in Ireland’s right to be neutral. In 1940, he joined the Local Security Force in Dublin, where his brief was the protection of Ireland from both sides in the war, and, at the same time, he was making programs designed to undermine Ireland’s nonpartisan status. In April 1942, the BBC sent Johnston to join the Middle East News Division as a correspondent. Bernard Adams notes a diary entry Johnston made at the time: ‘‘Before he said his goodbyes in Dublin he carefully explained to himself why he had chosen to go: ‘it is my belief in Ireland’s neutrality that has so largely sent me forth. Only those who are prepared to go into this horrible thing themselves have the right to say that Ireland must stay out.’’’ 21 Johnston maintains this reflection on the dilemmas of partisanship, neutrality, and detachment throughout the volumes of War Field Books, which he wrote during the next three years in three separate theaters of war and which form the basis of Nine Rivers from Jordan. He began reporting from Egypt with the Eighth Army; later he covered their advance through Italy. Later still he followed the advance of the Americans through Holland and Germany. Nine Rivers from Jordan, published in 1953, is a highly worked version of the diaries, filtered through several generic conventions such as the bildungsroman and the quest narrative, as well as parodic versions of the Catholic liturgy, Celtic myth, Faust, Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, and many other works besides.22 Two sections of the book appeared in the Bell in 1950 and 1951. But Johnston also deposited a three-volume typescript of the work in the British Library in 1946 or 1947. This typescript, entitled Dionysia, is anonymous (and undated). It is an extraordinary document—a mass of manuscript pages, sometimes double-, sometimes singlespaced, with numerous handwritten corrections, and with Johnston’s own photographs included, as well as staff directives, Eighth Army directives, 20. Rex Cathcart, The Most Contrary Region: The BBC in Northern Ireland, 1924–1984 (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1984), 117. See also Adams, Denis Johnston, 204–5, and 209–12. 21. Adams, Denis Johnston, 216. 22. See Vivian Mercier, ‘‘Perfection of the Life, or of the Work?’’ in Denis Johnston: A Retrospective, ed. Joseph Ronsley (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1981), 228–44.

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and German and British propaganda leaflets. A comparison of the typescript with the War Field Books and with Nine Rivers from Jordan reveals that it corresponds far more closely with the 1953 text, and suggests that Johnston worked on the diaries very soon after his return from Europe in 1945. What is striking, however, is the way that he seems to want us to understand the text as the unmediated presentation of his wartime experiences. His use of tense, and some odd jarring moments, sometimes gives the impression that the work is woven from raw diary material written from day to day. More often, it is clear that a considerable amount of artifice has gone into its construction—he uses composite characters, for example, and, rather bizarrely perhaps, the narrative structure of a novitiate in the Catholic Church, with bits of the mass and the catechism thrown in. These considerations are important, because to read the narrative as a relatively straightforward presentation of Johnston’s experiences requires us to believe in the naïveté of the detached observer character at the beginning of both Dionysia and Nine Rivers from Jordan.23 His naïveté stretches credulity: ‘‘Knowing what was wanted under our system of free and objective reporting, I was not going to concern myself with propaganda. I was going to describe soberly and sensibly exactly what I saw, and give the people at home the Truth, the whole Truth, and nothing but the Truth, whether unhappy or unfavourable.’’ 24 Johnston posits the very existence of the diary as a result of his frustration at being unable to be an impartial voice. As a spokesperson for the BBC, he wants to be neutral and objective, but he is caught in the snares of propaganda, and the journals are his response—the place he will be ‘‘truly neutral.’’ Here, he says, he will tell the stories of ‘‘good German soldiers’’ and of fraternization, which are supposed to be bad for morale, to endanger the war effort. He begins his work—he would have us believe— full of idealism: ‘‘I am not in this war as a belligerent, and so long as I remain firmly fixed in my own role and refuse to carry arms, the war can do no harm to me.’’ 25 To this end, Johnston peppers his narrative with anecdotes that belittle the earnestness of the propaganda merchants on both sides, who come off badly in relation to the soldiers themselves. He wants to believe in 23. Denis Johnston, Nine Rivers from Jordan (London: Derek Verschoyle, 1953). On this issue, see the contrasting views of Terry Boyle, ‘‘Denis Johnston: Neutrality and Buchenwald,’’ in Modern Irish Writers and the Wars, ed. Kathleen Devine (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1999), 205–18; and Mercier, ‘‘Perfection of the Life, or of the Work?’’ 24. Johnston, Nine Rivers, 8. 25. Denis Johnston, Dionysia (The Author, 1949), 138.

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an idea of war itself as heroic and decent, and this is certainly a stance he can keep up as he reports the encounters between Field Marshals Bernard Law Montgomery and Erwin Rommel in the western desert. But it is an idea that becomes increasingly strained when he comes back to Europe. With respect to his narrative of growth, Italy is the place where he loses the naïveté of youth, as he bemoans, ‘‘Too many liberated adolescents thinking of war in terms of the desert and excitement and pursuit and loot. But war isn’t really like that.’’ 26 Nonetheless, he continues to articulate his disgust with the way peace is being imposed, and this becomes his way of maintaining his moral neutrality, as he claims that one side is as bad as the other. I had just been given a lecture . . . on the evils of Irish neutrality— the text being that people who benefit from the blessings of justice and democracy ought to help in their preservation. Fair enough, if we really know that this is what we are fighting for. But do we know it? According to these papers, we are fighting for as vindictive and as horrible a peace as Hitler’s would ever have been. What that priest on the Sangro said was true. Evil is like a Vampire. When you take arms against it and destroy it, you find in the end that you are evil too—that it is living on your own actions.27 Paralleling these reflections on neutrality and the existence of evil is a quest narrative of sorts, which begins in the first part of the book, after Johnston finds a packet of letters from a German woman to a soldier who has been killed on the retreat from the Battle of Alamein. He becomes obsessed with the woman, and, in April 1945, finding himself in the region of Germany where she wrote the letters, decides to look for her. He is met with stony stares and realizes that for the ordinary villagers he is not a neutral—he wears the uniform of an invading army. He has attempted to maintain this distinction between looking British and being neutral throughout his three years—primarily through being unarmed—but it breaks down at this point, just as he is given other reasons to feel himself a belligerent. An American soldier advises him to go and look at the local camp, which turns out to be Buchenwald. Importantly, he has already seen a concentration camp in Alsace, which he regards primarily as a propaganda exercise—which he reads from a neutral standpoint, if you like; Buchenwald shatters his protective ‘‘nonbelligerent status’’: 26. Johnston, Dionysia, 235. 27. Johnston, Dionysia, 656.

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—Here’s the Block you want to see, said Quick. Don’t come in if you don’t want to. I went in. At one end lay a heap of smoking clothes amongst which a few ghouls picked and searched—for what, God only knows. As we entered the long hut the stench hit us in the face, and a queer wailing sound came to our ears. Along both sides of the shed was tier upon tier of what can only be described as shelves. And lying on these, packed tightly side by side, like knives and forks in a chest, were living creatures—some of them stirring, some of them stiff and silent, but all of them skeletons, with the skin drawn tight over their bones, with heads bulging and misshapen from emaciation, with burning eyes and sagging jaws. And as we came in, those with strength to do so turned their heads and gazed at us; and from their lips came that thin unearthly sound. Then I realized what it was. It was meant to be cheering. They were cheering the uniform that I wore. They were cheering for the hope that it brought them. We walked the length of the shed—and then through another one. From the shelves feeble arms rose and waved, like twigs in a breeze.28 Admittedly, this is a rather forced mechanism—he thinks he is looking for the woman, but the reality he needs to ‘‘find’’ is Buchenwald. Having found it, he picks up a gun; symbolically, he is no longer a nonbelligerent. Some weeks later, Johnston ends his journal—and ends it twice. In one version, he comes across a high-ranking Nazi official who has been trying to escape into Switzerland but has reached the border too late. He offers to shoot the Nazi, partly in atonement for his own neutrality, but then hands the gun to the German, who turns it on Johnston. Johnston is killed. In the other version, he passes a car with a dead German in it, obviously a Nazi official who has killed himself after failing to get across the border. This, too, is slightly forced perhaps, but it is a very clear representation of the nightmare of the split self—morally in two absolutely different places at the same time—one the murdered, another the murderer.29 28. Johnston, Nine Rivers, 395–96. 29. Significantly, the War Field Books make no mention of any encounter with an SS officer, though the entry of April 29, 1945, does record the attempted suicide of an officer. On the other hand, Johnston’s symbolic acceptance of belligerent status after his visit to Buchenwald is reflected in the Field Books, which mention his possession of a Luger.

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For all the intertextual allusions and antirealist conventions, Johnston’s wartime reflections are clearly intimately linked to his own experiences. Yet they can also be read as a sustained, cryptic, ironic reflection on de Valera’s neutral stance. Johnston’s actual diaries and wartime notebooks betray an increasing sense of irritation with the power of the Catholic hierarchy and a growing alienation from de Valera’s version of Ireland.30 Yet very little of this finds its way into Nine Rivers from Jordan. Instead, the Johnston character betrays certain patterns of behavior that echo de Valera’s public persona to a remarkable degree. There is, for example, the obsessive observation of ‘‘protocol’’ with regard to the Germans and the refusal to be swayed by anything that might be propaganda (which amounts to a form of censorship). More specifically, de Valera’s visit to the German legation to offer condolences on the death of Hitler is, I believe, echoed in Johnston’s fictional conversation with the SS officer over war guilt in the final pages of the journal. The discovery of Buchenwald overshadows both meetings, and Johnston’s death at the hands of the high-ranking Nazi official suggests a profound criticism not only of his own former idealistic championing of neutrality but of de Valera’s stance. Nine Rivers enacts a complex interrogation of the sense of moral superiority that accrued to Irish neutrality, as the tension between the political logic of Ireland’s position and its ethical obscurity finally tears the Johnston character apart. Neutrality as Immunity One could think of Francis Stuart as a kind of parodic mirror image of Johnston. Both came from middle-class Protestant backgrounds, both were moderately successful writers in the twenties and thirties, both left Ireland during the war because of disastrous marriages, and both engaged in radio propaganda—but for opposite sides. Stuart was completely out of sympathy with the liberal view of politics and human relations that propelled Johnston through the war. He put his faith in what might be called the anarchy of the imagination, a form of extreme, antisocial, mystical romanticism. In his fictionalized autobiography, Blacklist, Section H, he describes his brief involvement with the anti-Treaty side during the Civil War, through his motherin-law, Maud Gonne, and his imprisonment by the Free State government in the early twenties. Yet he presents his political commitment negatively, suggesting it has to do with revolutionary ambitions of a different sort: ‘‘He 30. See Adams, Denis Johnston, 238–44.

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was embarked on a private war which he hoped might cause a few cracks in the walls erected by generations of pious and patriotic Irishmen around the national consciousness. Then perhaps the dawn of the imaginative and undogmatic mood, that he saw as the prerequisite of true revolution, might set in.’’ 31 This vision of himself as a romantic outcast is not wholly retrospective. In an earlier autobiography, Things to Live For, published in 1934 and written while he was in his early thirties, Stuart presents himself as disillusioned with all available structures in Ireland—including marriage; in his self-dramatization, he lives the life of the gambler and political, social, and imaginative outcast.32 It was this impatience with ‘‘moral righteousness’’ (as well as a need to earn money) that impelled him to leave Ireland in January 1940 and journey to Berlin, where he remained for the duration of the war. The move, so he claimed in retrospect, put him on the side of the condemned, where the life of the imagination was sustained by the very intensity of defeat and humiliation (although it was of course not clear in 1940 that Germany would lose the war). The extent of Stuart’s collaboration with the Nazi regime has long been a source of controversy, a controversy recently fueled by publication of transcripts of the broadcasts he made to Ireland for Irland-Redaktion, between 1942 and 1944.33 Stuart himself insisted that his move to Germany indicated not a pro-Nazi stance but a neutral one, and that his broadcasts were in the main an attempt to combat the overwhelming stream of British propaganda on Irish airwaves. In what was possibly the first of Stuart’s talks, picked up by Irish and British monitors on St. Patrick’s Day 1942, Stuart declared that he was ‘‘not trying to make propaganda.’’ 34 It was an assertion he returned to repeatedly, and he argued in later years that his broadcasts were not political, except in that they supported Irish neutrality. However, as Brendan Barrington has argued, this was hardly an impartial position given Stuart’s Berlin location. The leaders of the Third Reich had no doubts that an Ireland which joined the war on the side of the Axis powers would instantly be invaded by Britain. Since neutrality forbade the use of the Treaty ports 31. Francis Stuart, Blacklist, Section H (Dublin: Lilliput, 1995), 80. Stuart wrote the book, first called We the Condemned, in 1961 and 1962. After revision, Southern Illinois University Press published it as Blacklist, Section H in 1971. 32. Francis Stuart, Things to Live For: Notes for an Autobiography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1934). 33. Brendan Barrington, ed., The Wartime Broadcasts of Francis Stuart, 1942–44 (Dublin: Lilliput, 2000). 34. Barrington, The Wartime Broadcasts of Francis Stuart, 69.

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to Britain, Irish neutrality was in Germany’s best interests—indeed Stuart admits as much in Blacklist, Section H. Here he reasons that the German authorities asked him to undertake weekly broadcasts to Ireland because they were ‘‘afraid that America’s entry into the conflict would influence Ireland to abandon her neutrality, though this seemed a very slight threat in the light of the powerful forces that the Germans had managed to line up against them.’’ 35 Stuart viewed the war as a conflict between the ‘‘liberal materialism’’ of Anglo-American civilization and the culture of Europe. He repeatedly asserted the need for Ireland to connect culturally with Europe rather than with Britain. As he states in his first broadcast, ‘‘We have had too little contact with countries that have something to give us. We have on the other hand been surrounded by communities whose life is [based] on money and the power of money. Whether we turn to England or the United States we see the god of money. . . . Ireland belongs to Europe and England does not belong to it. I believe that after this war our future should be linked with the future of Europe and no other.’’ 36 This stance generates a dilemma for Stuart, however. As the radio talks progress, defense of Irish neutrality starts to feel like a defense of Irish parochialism, and even the traditional goals of Irish republicanism begin to appear in this light: ‘‘There is no good of saying, we want our lost provinces back, we want freedom and security and then we want to be left alone. . . . No if we hope to find national fulfillment after this war, in the new world, as I believe we shall, then we must not be merely intent on taking, we must give too.’’ 37 The vague image of a new, spiritual European order that Stuart, in 1942, could still delude himself would arise from the conflagration reflects, of course, a perverse kind of internationalism. But it is one that sits uneasily with the isolationist stance he sees in Ireland. The ambivalence of Stuart’s attitude toward neutrality is vividly played out in his postwar fiction, particularly in the group of novels The Pillar of Cloud, Redemption, The Flowering Cross, and Victors and Vanquished, which were written while Stuart was living in Freiburg, Germany, and in Paris in the second half of the 1940s. The second of these novels imagines a return to Ireland. It is the story of the events that occur in a small Irish town 35. Stuart, Blacklist, Section H, 353. As Brendan Barrington has pointed out in The Wartime Broadcasts of Francis Stuart, for Stuart to describe himself as ‘‘a neutral,’’ as he did repeatedly, was a ‘‘largely meaningless formulation’’ (39). 36. Barrington, The Wartime Broadcasts of Francis Stuart, 70. 37. Barrington, The Wartime Broadcasts of Francis Stuart, 71.

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to which Ezra Arrigho has returned after the war. Ezra’s experience of the destructiveness of war is the basis for the ‘‘counter-civilization of the abyss,’’ as one contemporary critic called it, which he teaches to those he meets.38 The stories Ezra tells lead, by a complicated path, to a murder. At the same time, the characters Ezra meets learn an alternative moral code, a shared understanding that goes beyond the rectitude of small-town Ireland. They know the murderer is guilty, but they shelter him nonetheless, an experience that brings them outside the safe moral categories of the justice system. Admittedly, Stuart describes the plot in rather different terms in a 1994 postscript written for the re-publication of Redemption: ‘‘The narrator of the novel returns from Germany after the war to his native Ireland, an Ireland that has sat out the world conflict on bacon and tea—with the odd pint; and whom Ezra affects to despise and says so to his estranged wife, Nancy. He, as she and some others close to him realise, is the despicable one and the title of the book suggests that he is finally redeemed.’’ 39 Stuart wrote this account nearly forty years after writing the novel, but it offers a rather skewed interpretation, not least because Ezra is the main character and not the narrator of the story. There is also very little evidence that Ezra is meant to be understood as despicable. Nonetheless, Stuart’s account has the virtue of drawing attention to his ambivalent attitude to neutral Ireland (a place the central character ‘‘affects to despise’’). The conflicting connotations of neutrality are captured in his term ‘‘immunity.’’ ‘‘Immunity’’ is desired or rejected by nearly all the principal characters in Redemption, and indeed it is a term that appears in a surprising number of wartime and postwar Irish novels and stories. Part of its meaning, of course, is resistance to infection—the disease in this case being war. In 1942, Bowen reported back to the Dominions Office that the entry of the United States into the war, and in particular the presence of American troops in the north of Ireland, was causing a wave of war panic south of the border: ‘‘There is also a heightening of the fear that Eire is on the verge of ‘being dragged into the war.’ I believe that with many people there is a nebulous fear that war is infectious: the more belligerents accumulate in the Six Counties, the more likely it is that the ‘germ’ will spread. War, in fact, is not entered but ‘caught’— 38. Bernard d’Astorg, ‘‘Des Ruines, Le Sacré Renaîtra,’’ review of Redemption and Le Baptême de la Nuit, in Aspects de la Littérature Européenne depuis 1945, trans. Richard York and republished in A Festschrift for Francis Stuart, ed. W. J. McCormack (Dublin: Dolmen Editions, 1972), 29. 39. Stuart, Redemption, 252.

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or picked up—just as, passively and unwillingly, one catches or picks up measles.’’ 40 Immunity offers protection but may also act as a screen, closing one off from experience—it can become another version of insensitivity. In the end, it may harm the imagination. In Kate O’Brien’s The Last of Summer, Jo Kernahan explains to her visiting French cousin, in the summer of 1939, ‘‘Oh yes, Eire will be neutral, which is only the clearest sense politically. But that’s beside the point. Little patches of immunity like ours are going to be small consolation for what’s coming. Being neutral will be precious little help to the imagination, I should think.’’ 41 Creative insight, on this account, is a product of practical engagement with the world and with others, not the distillation of reflective detachment. It is precisely this closed-off, aloof aspect of immunity that irritates Ezra Arrigho. A passage early in the novel sets up a contrast between the desire to be ‘‘touched’’ or ‘‘untouched’’: Let the heart only open wide enough and all is given to it. There are two ways to go down a street of the big city at night. There are two ways that I know, as well as all the others that I don’t know. There is the way of the shut heart, gone into a glass core reflecting, registering, an exact instrument of precision like a camera, a cylinder, a vacuum-cleaner and all other small machines, carried out in highly polished glass. Then all is reflected in a blind precision, faces, stone, paper, gestures, grimaces. And there is the other way, with the heart open, dark, expanded and reflecting nothing. Being touched by what the street is and what is in it, the night in the street and the street in the night. Perhaps, predictably, Stuart images this openness in terms of women’s bodies. Ezra, for example, contrasts the perfect body of the priest’s sister, Romilly, ‘‘immured in its white immunity,’’ with the broken body of his German lover, who has been crippled in a bombing raid. Romilly’s progress beyond traditional moral categories is measured by her decision to submit herself to Ezra, thus ‘‘spoiling’’ herself for her marriage. Her later decision to marry the murderer, Kavanagh, so that he will not be alone on the eve of his execution, marks her journey beyond convention to acceptance of shame and refusal to condemn. She escapes the deadening effects of immunity, which is characterized as a place ‘‘where walls really were walls and fences 40. Bowen, ‘‘Notes on Eire,’’ February 9, 1942, D.O. 130/28. Also published in Lane and Clifford, Elizabeth Bowen: ‘‘Notes on Eire,’’ 20. 41. O’Brien, The Last of Summer, 81.

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were fences, protective, sheltering, shutting out.’’ 42 Interestingly, the isolation and detachment of immunity are also associated with Ezra, especially in his failures of duty and responsibility toward his wife. Here, it seems, neutrality is connected with moral failure, more or less conventionally understood. But for the most part, Stuart rejects such notions, suggesting that authentic response drives us beyond inherited morality. The loss of self, or emptying out of the self, achieved by Romilly in Redemption is related in other novels to the suffering of imprisonment. In The Pillar of Cloud, for example, ‘‘openness’’ is linked to the ability to forgive for the brutality of the concentration camps, and once more, it is imaged in terms of a woman’s body. The Pillar of Cloud is set in the immediate postwar period in Germany, when the main character, an Irishman called Dominic, is suspected of collaboration and imprisoned for a period. The woman he is in love with, Halka, has recently been released from a concentration camp, where she has been held for harboring a Jew. At one point, Halka is allowed to visit Dominic in prison and has sex with him, a few feet from the concentration camp guard who has previously tortured her and is locked up in the same cell. Halka then shows her compassion by refusing to testify against the guard. As Stuart makes clear, the scene is all about judgment and who has the right to judge another. ‘‘But, you know, I won’t testify,’’ she said. ‘‘No?’’ ‘‘Let them do what they like with him, but I don’t want to take part in it.’’ ‘‘Captain Renier will tell you that it is your duty to give evidence, your duty to all the other victims who can’t speak, who are dead,’’ Dominic said. ‘‘And not only to them, but to others whom, if he is not convicted and executed, might become his victims in some future war or revolution.’’ ‘‘All the same, I won’t testify,’’ she said. ‘‘Because I forgive him.’’ Dominic was silent. He was almost shocked at her words, as he had been almost shocked at how she had managed everything so simply and directly since she had come into the cellar. Nothing had weighed with her, neither the thought of Lisette in the sanatorium, nor the presence of Bergmann, nor the uncertain moment of the policeman’s return. Yet he knew that she was right, in all she was right, 42. Stuart, Redemption, 120.

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without false sentiment, false shame, and without one drop of vindictiveness or malice. Hers was the innocence of which he had spoken, the unfathomable innocence that was on the earth to set over against the monstrous evil.43 There is an obvious sense in which this passage seems to express Stuart’s need for the public to forgive him for his collaboration with the Nazi regime during the war. If the guard cannot be judged except by the truly innocent, those who have suffered blamelessly, then neither can Stuart. It is tempting to accuse Stuart of bad faith here, for there is an almost aggressively voyeuristic aspect to the sex scene in the prison. Halka’s orgasm is watched as much by Dominic as by the guard who turns his back, suggesting Dominic’s detachment and the vicarious nature of the suffering Dominic claims to undergo. But it is worth noting that there are other, perhaps more disingenuous ways to disclaim guilt, which Stuart conspicuously forgoes. He does not try to excuse himself, and he does not claim ignorance of the persecution of the Jews. Instead, he continues to insist on his belief in the redundancy of moral categories and moral judgments, a belief that brought him to Germany in the first place. An earlier passage in the novel gives voice to Dominic’s sense of the new order, new fraternity, and way of being that might arise from the war: For a moment he thought he even saw how the great cataclysm had to come, how all the old pretence and the faux sublime, the false idealism, had to be swept away in blood and tears. So much blood and tears had to flow until all that old civilization had been shaken and undermined, and he felt a bitter anger against Frau Arnheim as one of those who had played the old, insidious game, who had gone on marrying and giving in marriage, attending church services and listening to the words of the professional moralists about the idealistic God who from his secure heaven smiled down complacently on a more or less secure world.44 Neutrality as Dissolution We might put this refusal of the conventional moral categories of good and evil together with another passage, from Elizabeth Bowen’s short 43. Francis Stuart, The Pillar of Cloud (Dublin: New Island Books, 1994), 222–23. 44. Stuart, The Pillar of Cloud, 195–96.

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story, ‘‘Summer Night,’’ first published in 1941: ‘‘I’m torn, here, by every single pang of annihilation. But that’s what I look for; that’s what I want completed; that’s the whole of what I want to embrace. On the far side of the nothing— my new form. Scrap ‘me’; scrap my wretched identity and you’ll bring some new bud to life. I not ‘I’—I’d be the world . . .’’ 45 The central character in Bowen’s story, Justin Cavey, is spending the summer in the Irish country town of his birth, where his father was a doctor, since the war prevents his usual continental holiday. He spends much of his time with his deaf sister, Queenie, who lives in the town, making the social rounds. Here he tries to articulate his sense of how the pressure of world historical events has hollowed out his identity. In ‘‘Summer Night,’’ Bowen captures with supreme skill the sense of profound unease associated with the notion of Ireland’s immunity. This is a story of individuals locked in private worlds. One evening, Cavey and his sister make a casual visit to the home of a local industrialist, Robinson, with whom Justin has struck up an acquaintance. Robinson is preoccupied by the impending arrival of his mistress, but Justin holds forth nonetheless: Our faculties have slowed down without our knowing—they had stopped without our knowing! We know now. Now that there’s enough death to challenge being alive we’re facing it that, anyhow, we don’t live. We’re confronted by the impossibility of living—unless we can break through to something else. There’s been a stop in our senses and in our faculties that’s made everything round us so much dead matter—and dead matter we couldn’t even displace. We can no longer express ourselves: what we say doesn’t approximate to reality; it only approximates to what’s been said. I say, this war’s an awful illumination; it’s destroyed our dark; we have to see where we are. Immobilized, God help us, and each so far apart that we can’t even try to signal to each other. (CS, 590) Justin’s cri de coeur falls on deaf ears, not just those of his sister, who is present, but also those of Robinson (‘‘‘You don’t think thinking gets one a bit rattled?’’’ [CS, 590]). Later, in his hotel room, having realized that Robinson had an assignation, Justin dashes off a barbed and wounded letter severing ties and characterizing his host in terms of ‘‘imperviousness’’ and ‘‘indifference.’’ Queenie has responded to the evening’s events in an 45. Elizabeth Bowen, ‘‘Summer Night,’’ in Collected Stories (London: Vintage, 1999), 591. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as CS.

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entirely different way, reliving memories of a long-ago summer night with a lover, in which Robinson now plays the fantasy part. Bowen leaves us suspended between an immunity that (as in the case of Queenie) may bring quiet insight, even though it is a fantasy, and an exaggerated susceptibility that results in Justin’s over-the-top letter breaking off relations with Robinson. Part of the skill of the story lies in the element of irony in Bowen’s treatment of Justin, who comes off badly by comparison with his sister: ‘‘Her deafness broke down his only defence, talk. He was exposed to the odd, immune, plumbing looks she was forever passing over his face’’ (CS, 587). Justin’s longing to break through the general anesthesia may be genuine, but there is a hysterical edge to his talk that, as Bowen suggests, is itself another kind of barrier: ‘‘‘And our currency’s worthless—our ‘ideas’ and so on, so on. We’ve got to mint a new one. We’ve got to break through to a new form—it needs genius. We’re precipitated, this moment, through genius and death. I tell you, we must certainly have genius to live at all’’’ (CS, 590). The rhetoric of transformation through catastrophe is not all that far from the language of Stuart, even though we must assume that Justin’s political sympathies lie on the other side. There is a disturbing symmetry here. Stuart naively imagines he can be a ‘‘neutral’’ while broadcasting from the Nazi capital. Justin Cavey tries to break through the indifference of his fellow countrymen, citizens of a neutral state. Yet both end up suggesting that the horror and destruction of the war may somehow be the prelude to spiritual renewal. It is neutrality in one form or another, we might conclude, that makes this welcoming, if not glorification, of violence possible. And such glorification is itself a trait of fascist ideology—a form of collaboration, if you like. It is a well-established contention by now that Bowen’s concern with duplicity, betrayal, and double identity reflects her own sense of torn allegiances. Thus, as Bill McCormack has suggested, the fascism of the spy Kelway in Bowen’s wartime novel, The Heat of the Day, can be seen as ‘‘an Irish ‘trace’ in the novel.’’ 46 In other words, had Bowen remained in North Cork throughout the war, which was one of her options, she would have become to some extent complicit with the sympathy for fascism that she detected here and there in Ireland. Perhaps this is what interests her about her character Cavey. Justin is a ‘‘European’’ who feels powerless to stop the destruction of ‘‘what had been his own intensely’’ (CS, 588). But the story as 46. W. J. McCormack, Dissolute Characters: Irish Literary History through Balzac, Sheridan Le Fanu, Yeats, and Bowen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993).

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a whole suggests the difficulty of ‘‘feeling’’ appropriately and of disentangling what is felt. Robinson is ‘‘immune’’ to Cavey. Is he therefore culpably indifferent to the war, too? Or is he simply less susceptible to a dubious apocalyptic rhetoric dressed up as feeling? If immunity is a key metaphor for the moral complexities of neutrality, the notions of immunity and the breakdown of immunity to the pressures of the surrounding world are also central to Bowen’s reflections of her practice as a writer during wartime. An important text here is the postscript, which she wrote in 1945, for the American edition of her collection of short stories, The Demon Lover. Here Bowen suggests that the extreme conditions of the war brought about a transformation of sensibility, in which the conscious intentions of the author as an experiencing individual ceased to be the decisive factor in artistic creation. Bowen writes, ‘‘It seems to me that during the war the overcharged subconsciousnesses of everybody overflowed and merged. It is because the general subconsciousness saturates these stories that they have an authority nothing to do with me.’’ She goes on to remark, ‘‘The stories had their own momentum, which I had to control. The acts in them had an authority which I could not question. Odd enough in their way—and now some seem very odd—they were flying particles of something enormous and inchoate that had been going on. They were sparks from experience—an experience not necessarily my own.’’ 47 Bowen portrays the collapse of internal reflective distance, an openness to external pressures that disempowers the individual, as the condition for a new form of creativity, a new way of registering the ‘‘high-voltage current of the general,’’ as she calls it. I want to suggest that there are strong conceptual, and possibly verbal, echoes here of Wallace Stevens’s famous essay ‘‘The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words.’’ In one sense, this would scarcely be surprising, since Stevens first read this essay as a lecture at Princeton in 1941—and published it soon after 48—and Bowen was writing for an American audience. Both Bowen and Stevens reflect explicitly on the unprecedented events of the world war and the impact of these events on our conception of the creative writer’s task. In his enormously complex and allusive essay, Stevens 47. Bowen, Mulberry Tree, 95. 48. Wallace Stevens, ‘‘The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,’’ in The Language of Poetry, ed. Allen Tate (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1942), 91–125. Republished in Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (London: Faber and Faber, 1960), 1–36. Hereafter, The Necessary Angel is cited parenthetically as NA.

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seeks to define nothing less than ‘‘the end of one era and the beginning of another’’ (NA, 21). What brings about these shifts, according to Stevens, is the ‘‘pressure of reality.’’ Formally, he defines this force as ‘‘the pressure of an external event or events on the consciousness to the exclusion of any power of contemplation’’ (NA, 20), a definition that clearly links up with Bowen’s account of her short story writing. Stevens seems to suggest that his contemporaries were living through a transition to a state in which social and global processes could no longer be ‘‘processed’’ and mastered imaginatively in the way that creative artists had mastered and shaped reality in the past. The noble rider of the title alludes to an outlook in which imagination could be given preponderance over reality, without any fear that this would lead to implausible illusions. However, Stevens stresses that ‘‘the imagination loses its vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real’’ (NA, 6). In the current situation of society, the traditional idea of aesthetic nobility exists only in ‘‘degenerate forms’’ (NA, 12–13). What has brought this change about, the ‘‘pressure of reality’’ that Stevens repeatedly evokes, consists of ‘‘life in a state of violence, not physically violent yet, for us in America, but physically violent for millions of our friends and for still more millions of our enemies and spiritually violent, it may be said, for everyone alive’’ (NA, 26–27). The overt violence of global conflict, on this account, is merely the most lurid symptom of a world historical shift that has collapsed existing notions of time and space, including the private, or at least internal, space of subjectivity. As Stevens writes, ‘‘It is not only that there are more and more of us and that we are actually closer together. We are close together in every way. We lie in bed and listen to a broadcast from Cairo, and so on. There is no distance. We are intimate with people we have never seen and, unhappily, they are intimate with us’’ (NA, 18). The ultimate aim of Stevens’s essay is to retrieve a new sense of the purpose of poetry in this situation, which is tantamount to a new sense of ‘‘nobility.’’ Devised in a world in which the traditions that situated individuals and shaped their inwardness are being eroded, Stevens’s new account of nobility—his term for the integrity of the aesthetic domain—is a striking and surprising one. ‘‘Nobility,’’ he concludes, ‘‘. . . is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without. It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality’’ (NA, 36). At the start of the preface to The Demon Lover, Bowen writes, ‘‘Each time I sat down to write a story I opened a door; and the pressure against the other side of the door must have been very great, for things—ideas, images, emotions—came through with force and rapidity, sometimes violence. . . .

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The stories had their own momentum, which I had to control.’’ 49 The verbal echoes of Stevens may be fortuitous, though this seems unlikely. What is clear is that Bowen, too, was seeking to define the changed nature of the creative process in a world where the bombardment of events resists the traditional acts of aesthetic shaping, and indeed reveals such shapings—as Stevens suggests—as forms of impotent, and even irresponsible, idealism. Such ‘‘immunity’’ as imaginative writing confers (which Stevens describes as a positive form of ‘‘escapism’’ 50) is achieved not by closing off oneself from events but rather by allowing an inner violence to respond to outer violence, in effect by allowing oneself to be contaminated. Bowen’s use of the conventions of gothic fiction and the ghost story allows her to explore this ambiguity of inner and outer irruptions. She is quite clear that her ghosts can be understood more or less subjectively, and indeed she may have had such gradations in mind when she wrote the stories. She writes, ‘‘The hallucinations in the stories are not a peril; nor are the stories studies of mental peril. The hallucinations are an unconscious, instinctive, saving resort on the part of the characters.’’ 51 In short, we would almost say that the stories represent ordinary people engaged in the same escapist mechanisms described by Stevens: You may say that these resistance-fantasies are in themselves frightening. I can only say that one counteracts fear by fear, stress by stress. In ‘‘The Happy Autumn Fields,’’ one finds a woman projected from flying-bombed London, with its day and night eeriness, into the key emotional crisis of Victorian girlhood. In ‘‘Ivy Gripped the Steps,’’ a man in the early ’40s peers through the rusted fortifications and down the dusty empty perspectives of a seaside town at the Edwardian episode that has crippled his faculty for love. In ‘‘The Inherited Clock,’’ a girl is led to find the key to her own neurosis inside a timepiece. The past, in all these cases, discharges its load of feeling into the anaesthetized and bewildered present. It is the ‘‘I’’ that is sought—and retrieved at the cost of no little pain. And the ghosts—definite in ‘‘Green Holly,’’ questionable (for are they subjective purely?) in ‘‘Pink May,’’ ‘‘The Cheery Soul’’ and ‘‘The Demon Lover’’—what part do they play? They are the certainties. The bodiless foolish wanton, the puritan other presence, the tipsy cook with 49. Bowen, Mulberry Tree, 94–95. 50. ‘‘The poetic process is psychologically an escapist process’’ (Stevens, NA, 30). 51. Bowen, Mulberry Tree, 97.

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her religion of English fare, the ruthless young soldier lover unheard of since 1916: hostile or not, they rally, they fill the vacuum for the uncertain ‘‘I.’’ 52 Bowen’s inversion, in which the specters of the past become the only ‘‘certainties,’’ while the self becomes ever more empty and elusive, is a striking one. The boundary between life and death, past and present, becomes permeable and insecure. And it is hard to resist the thought that the halfdead figures, the ‘‘ghouls,’’ whom Johnston encounters with such traumatic results in Buchenwald, may offer a more general image for the state of suspension and liminality which are so commonly evoked in wartime fiction. Their wailing is an expression of hope, but it sounds like despair. Ghosts appear when we are fundamentally disturbed, disoriented by the enormity of events. They mark the points where the buried, private sufferings of the past meet the unimaginable political horrors of the present. It is not only the relation between past and present that becomes dislocated under the ‘‘pressure of reality.’’ In a closely parallel way, the relation between public and private is reconfigured, too. I have already suggested that the violent conflicts of the period, the tensions between moral demands, political visions, and national interests are reflected in disruptions of the writer’s inwardness and sense of identity. One obvious consequence of this is that the private and the personal can no longer function as a place of refuge or exemption. An interesting contrast can be drawn here between Stuart and Bowen. Apologists for Stuart’s wartime activities have often suggested that his concern was with the suffering and destiny of individuals, that he did not think in essentially political terms. In his broadcast of March 29, 1942, Stuart himself remarks, ‘‘I do not know the various political currents, intrigues and secret alliances that went on between the last war and this. I am no politician and all that is quite beyond me. I’m interested in people, in individuals and their lives.’’ 53 Bowen’s assumptions are completely different, and a remarkable illustration of this fact is the family history, Bowen’s Court, which she wrote during the early years of the Second World War at the same time that she penned her intelligence reports for the Ministry of Information. To write the history of the North Cork mansion, of which she was the first female inheritor, when the world was caught up in unprecedented violence, might appear like a withdrawal into the private sphere. But Bowen, in her after52. Bowen, Mulberry Tree, 97–98. 53. Barrington, The Wartime Broadcasts of Francis Stuart, 72.

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word, written in 1963, does not portray it that way. Rather, she suggests that the private is no longer opposed to the domain of public events, just as the pressure of the present pervades the past. In a striking passage, she writes, ‘‘The war-time urgency of the present, its relentless daily challenge, seemed to communicate itself to one’s view of the past, until, to the most private act or decision, there attached one’s sense of its part in some campaign. Those days, either everything mattered or nothing mattered. The past—private as well as historic—seemed to me, therefore, to matter more than ever; it acquired meaning; it lost false mystery. In the savage and austere light of a burning world, details leaped out with significance.’’ 54 Bowen’s Court, then, is both a personal and a public document. It is an attempt by the writer to address, if not to resolve, some of her own deepest internal conflicts. On the one hand, it is a gentle assertion of the general significance of certain values of the Anglo-Irish gentry, and in particular of Bowen’s own family, values that the turmoil of the world has put in doubt. Bowen writes, ‘‘I was taking the attachment of people to places as being generic to human life, at a time when the attachment was to be dreaded as a possible source of too much pain.’’ 55 But at the same time, the book is an attempt to acknowledge the injustice of the past, from which, as she does not attempt to disguise, her own family benefited. ‘‘With the Treaty,’’ she writes, ‘‘with which I virtually close my book, a new hopeful phase started: I believe in its promise. But we cannot afford to have ghosts on this clearing scene. I wish not to drag up the past, but to help lay it.’’ 56 As the subsequent course of Irish history has shown, those ghosts have not been so easy to lay. Portrayed by Bowen as a world teeming with ghosts, you can read the Big House and Anglo-Irish tradition as a kind of negative or reverse image of Irish neutrality—an island within an island, but one, as Bowen keeps saying, informed by ‘‘the European idea.’’ It prides itself on its superiority, looking beyond the narrow nationalism of the Irish island, but at the same time, it is propped up and compromised by external configurations of power. Ambivalence continues to haunt the politics of Irish neutrality today. One plank of the opposition to the enlargement and transformation of the European Union envisaged by the Nice Treaty ostensibly focuses on the conflict between Irish neutrality and proposals for collective European secu54. Elizabeth Bowen, Bowen’s Court (Cork: Collins Press, 1998), 454. 55. Bowen, Bowen’s Court, 454. 56. Bowen, Bowen’s Court, 453.

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rity and defense, but may also be driven by regrets for the loss of Ireland’s privileged marginal status. In this debate, one transnational orientation is opposed to another: the idealistic vision of a neutral Ireland devoted to the promotion of peace and human rights around the globe, versus a conception of Ireland joined in the common pursuit of a European identity and, if necessary, the defense of a common heritage. The threat posed by EU membership to Ireland’s neutrality is, of course, an issue, usually dodged around, that has been simmering in Irish politics for decades. In the current world situation, however, the potential equivocations of neutrality, in the broadest sense, go much further. For, as Patrick Keatinge has pointed out, classical neutrality ‘‘depends on the existence of a clear, legally definable distinction between the condition of war and that of peace.’’ 57 Essentially a product of the nineteenth-century European diplomatic system, it presupposed that wars were formally declared armed conflicts between states and laid down quite strict and specific obligations on countries claiming neutral status. But since 1945, at least, wars of this kind have been less and less the norm. The simmering, inchoate conflicts that characterize the contemporary world, conflicts no longer focused on territorial disputes between nations but on claims for cultural and political recognition and the distribution of resources, make it ever more difficult to imagine an impermeable private sphere, safe from the psychic impact of global dislocation and violent disruption. Though immunity may be no more than a fantasy, as Bowen suggests, it can be a saving fantasy. That neutral island in the heart of man may connote indifference, but it can also harbor a stubborn aspiration to ethical universalism and impartial responsibility. In such a world, the images of the moral and psychological complexities of neutrality bequeathed by midcentury Irish writers are likely to continue resonating for a long time to come.

57. Keatinge, A Singular Stance, 3.

Irish Americans, Irish Nationalism, and the ‘‘Social’’ Question, 1916–1923

Bruce Nelson

By the end of the nineteenth century, Irish America had come a long way since the days when a Yankee Protestant could characterize its constituents as ‘‘a class of human beings, whose women do our housework, and whose men dig our railroads.’’ Although still disproportionately working class, Irish American males had penetrated the skilled trades and unionized sectors of the economy to a remarkable degree. They constituted only 7.5 percent of the labor force in 1900 but accounted for one-sixth of the teamsters, metalworkers, and masons, and nearly a third of plumbers, steamfitters, and boilermakers. Their position of dominance in the ranks of organized labor was even more remarkable. By the early twentieth century, Irish Catholics headed ‘‘more than fifty’’ of the 110 affiliated national unions of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and were a major component of the unions’ second-level and shop-floor leadership.1 Nonetheless, according to Thanks to Seamus Deane for inspiration, instruction, and editorial guidance, and to Kevin Whelan for all of that and more. Thanks, also, to Luke Gibbons, Kevin Kenny, Tim Meagher, Kevin O’Neill, and Victoria McGrane. 1. Dale T. Knobel, Paddy and the Republic: Ethnicity and Nationality in Antebellum Amerboundary 2 31:1, 2004. Copyright © 2004 by Duke University Press.

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the conventional wisdom, the Irish were—or had become—largely immune to the socialist currents that took root among other immigrant groups and even among segments of the native-born workforce.2 Thus, in Great Britain as well as the United States, the argument goes, the Irish presence at the heart of the industrial working class served as a drag on the radicalism of the labor movement and of labor-based political parties. There is, no doubt, some truth to this perception, but it can easily become ahistorical, and even ‘‘genetic,’’ in character, a latter-day reincarnation of the ‘‘Irishman by nature’’ who became an essential component of Anglo-American Protestant racial nationalism in the antebellum era.3 My goal is to understand how the convergence of a number of forces and personalities during the era of World War I opened segments of Irish America to radically democratic and even socialist perspectives on the struggle for Irish independence. The years from the Easter Rising of 1916 to the consolidation of the Irish Free State in 1923 constituted the heyday of ‘‘physicalforce’’ nationalism and insurgent republicanism in Ireland, but they were also years of working-class upheaval and anticolonial ferment throughout much ica (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1986), 76; David N. Doyle, ‘‘Unestablished Irishmen: New Immigrants and Industrial America, 1870–1910,’’ in American Labor and Immigration History, 1877–1920s: Recent European Research, ed. Dirk Hoerder (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 199; David Doyle, ‘‘The Irish and American Labour, 1880–1920,’’ Saothar 1 (1975): 43–44; Marc Karson, ‘‘Catholic Anti-Socialism,’’ in Failure of a Dream? Essays in the History of American Socialism, ed. John H. Laslett and Seymour Martin Lipset (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1974), 65. 2. It is important to acknowledge the shift in the historiography of Irish Americans’ relationship to the American working class, from the work of David Montgomery, Sean Wilentz, Eric Foner, and David Brundage (among others), which emphasized the deep involvement of the Irish in the labor reform movements of the 1870s and 1880s, to that of Kerby Miller and David Emmons, which has portrayed the Irish American ethos as largely incompatible with socialism and other forms of labor radicalism that flourished in the early twentieth century. See, especially, Eric Foner, ‘‘Class, Ethnicity, and Radicalism in the Gilded Age: The Land League and Irish-America,’’ in Foner, Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 150–200; Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); and David M. Emmons, The Butte Irish: Class and Ethnicity in an American Mining Town, 1875–1925 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987). For a recent overview of the history of Irish America, see Kevin Kenny, The American Irish: A History (Harlow: Longman/Pearson, 2000); and for the reflections of a distinguished Irish historian, see J. J. Lee, ‘‘Millennial Reflections on Irish American History,’’ Radharc 1 (November 2000): 5–64. 3. See Knobel, ‘‘An Irishman by Nature,’’ in Paddy and the Republic, 68–103; and Dale T. Knobel, ‘‘‘Celtic Exodus’: The Famine Irish, Ethnic Stereotypes, and the Cultivation of American Racial Nationalism,’’ Radharc 2 (November 2001): 3–25.

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of the world. This was a moment when a Jewish immigrant trade unionist in the United States could predict that ‘‘Messiah is arriving. . . . Labor will rule and the World will be free.’’ When even the president of the United States could acknowledge that ‘‘the question which stands at the front of all others in the midst of this great awakening is the question of labor.’’ When a leading American partisan of Irish nationalism could declare that ‘‘the Russian people stand today as the foremost champions of liberty, social justice and peace,’’ and could predict that ‘‘the Irish [will] become fit partners of the Russians in the regeneration of the world.’’ When a prominent voice from the African Diaspora could applaud ‘‘Heroic Ireland’’ and characterize ‘‘the Irish fight for liberty’’ as ‘‘the greatest Epic of Modern History.’’ 4 In recovering these voices, I seek to restore a sense of complexity and contingency to the historical record, and to respect the dreams, ideals, and sense of alternative possibilities that animated many men and women—on both sides of the Atlantic—who participated in the struggle for Irish independence.5 l l l l

Historians tend to attribute the ‘‘conservatism’’ of Irish Americans to their status as ‘‘Old Immigrants,’’ whose hard-won place within the working class and the larger society was threatened by new waves of immigration; to their extraordinary allegiance to a Catholic Church whose hierarchy propagated ‘‘the twin gospels of respectability and resignation’’ among the faithful; and to the long-lasting impact of the Great Famine and the traumatic experience of emigration on Irish men and women in the United States and throughout Ireland’s far-flung diaspora.6 Historians also tend to agree that one of the salient characteristics of the struggle for Irish independence was the determination of many of 4. Steven Fraser, Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor (New York: Free Press, 1991), quoted on 144; Woodrow Wilson quoted in John Milton Cooper Jr., The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press / Harvard University Press, 1983), 264; ‘‘All Hail Russia!’’ Irish World, June 9, 1917, 4; Cyril V. Briggs, ‘‘Heroic Ireland,’’ Crusader 4 (February 1921): 5. 5. Tommy Graham, ‘‘Interview [with Kevin Whelan]: The Colossus of Clonegal,’’ History Ireland 9 (Winter 2001): 42–45, especially 42 (Whelan’s critique of revisionist history for ‘‘championing the overdog’’). 6. Kerby A. Miller, ‘‘Class, Culture, and Immigrant Group Identity in the United States: The Case of Irish-American Ethnicity,’’ in Immigration Reconsidered, ed. Virginia YansMcLaughlin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 114; David Emmons, ‘‘Faction Fights: The Irish Worlds of Butte, Montana, 1875–1917,’’ in The Irish in the New Communities, ed. Patrick O’Sullivan (London: Leicester University Press, 1992), 87.

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its leaders to separate the ‘‘national’’ from the ‘‘social’’ question. In part, this was a strategic stance, based on the calculation that success in the national struggle required the allegiance of every possible sector of Irish society. By this reasoning, any policy that pitted ‘‘class against class’’ could only be counterproductive. In part, too, this stance may have reflected the class position and experience of many of Ireland’s nationalist leaders. Few of them came from the ranks of the labor movement or had any direct linkage with land agitation in the countryside. To be sure, Patrick Pearse, the leader of the Easter Rising, concluded that ‘‘separation from England would be valueless unless it put the people—the actual people and not merely certain rich men—in effectual ownership and possession of the soil of Ireland.’’ 7 But others were equally determined not to let labor insurgency and land seizures distract and destabilize the nationalist coalition. Thus, during the massive lockout and general strike that convulsed Dublin in 1913, a leader of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) warned that ‘‘Socialism and the Sympathetic Strike are dangerous[,] ruinous weapons at the present time.’’ Sean MacDiarmada, the secretary of the IRB, who would be executed by a British firing squad for his role in the Rising of 1916, was particularly concerned about the strike leadership’s efforts to win the active support of British workers. ‘‘All this talk about the friendliness of the English working man and of the Brotherhood of Man,’’ said MacDiarmada, ‘‘[has] a very bad unnational influence.’’ 8 Among the most relentless opponents of all things ‘‘unnational’’ was Arthur Griffith, the founder of Sinn Féin and a leading architect of the separatist movement. Early in his career, Griffith had expressed a broad sympathy for oppressed peoples, especially those under the thumb of British imperialism. Over time, however, he came to regard ‘‘Liberal universalism’’ and socialism as British imports that were threatening to undermine the foundations of the Irish nation. When his friend, the social reformer and anticolonial journalist Frederick Ryan, died in 1913, Griffith lamented his passing but took the opportunity to condemn Ryan and other Irishmen who had ‘‘drifted into the cosmopolitan heresy in our time.’’ Ryan’s great failing was that ‘‘Progress[,] the Brotherhood of Man, and all the other cants which English Radicalism exudes with a gurgle in its throat seemed real things’’ to him. His nation was a ‘‘body without a soul,’’ and Griffith’s final epitaph for 7. Pearse quoted in Peter Berresford Ellis, introduction to James Connolly: Selected Writings, ed. Ellis (1973; repr., London: Pluto Press, 1997), 27. 8. MacDiarmada quoted in Michael Laffan, The Resurrection of Ireland: The Sinn Féin Party, 1916–1923 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 254.

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Ryan was that ‘‘the man who . . . wanted National freedom to promote social reform did not understand the meaning of the nation.’’ 9 Griffith was among the most conservative leaders of the struggle for Irish independence, but the issues that separated him from uncompromising republicans were more strategic and tactical than ideological. The radicals were determined to achieve the Irish Republic whatever the cost, but the question of who owned the land, and how equitably wealth would be distributed in the Irish Republic, was of no more consequence for many of them than it was for Griffith. There were exceptions, to be sure: the great socialist and labor leader James Connolly, who was martyred with Pearse and MacDiarmada in 1916, and Liam Mellows, a republican stalwart who fell victim to the Civil War’s tit-for-tat bloodletting in 1922. But many—perhaps most—republicans were willfully class unconscious. Hence the latterday perception of Ireland’s war for independence as ‘‘the social revolution that never was’’; hence, too, the declaration by Kevin O’Higgins, one of the most important leaders of the new Free State government, that ‘‘we were probably the most conservative minded revolutionaries that ever put through a social revolution.’’ 10 Insofar as the war for Irish independence did have a revolutionary dimension, historian John Regan argues, it represented the triumph of an ‘‘emergent lower middle-class’’ of teachers, journalists, civil servants, clerks, and tradesmen over the ‘‘Catholic middle-class interest’’ that had evolved through the professions, politics, and business during the second half of the nineteenth century and had found its political voice in the Irish Parliamentary Party.11 But the question should be not only ‘‘whose revolution’’ but ‘‘which 9. Patrick Maume, The Long Gestation: Irish Nationalist Life, 1891–1918 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1999), 86–88; Arthur Griffith, ‘‘The Death of Frederick Ryan’’ and ‘‘Response to Sheehy Skeffington,’’ reprinted in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, ed. Seamus Deane (Derry: Field Day, 1991), 2:1002–4. For a spirited defense of Ryan and valuable recapitulation of his life and ideas, see Terry Eagleton, ‘‘The Ryan Line,’’ in Eagleton, Crazy John and the Bishop and Other Essays on Irish Culture (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998), 249–72. 10. Patrick Lynch, ‘‘The Social Revolution That Never Was,’’ in The Irish Struggle, 1916– 26, ed. T. D. Williams (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), 41–54; O’Higgins quoted in J. J. Lee, Ireland, 1912–1985: Politics and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 105, 124; JA [Joost Augusteijn], ‘‘O’Higgins, Kevin,’’ in The Oxford Companion to Irish History, ed. S. J. Connolly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 407–8. 11. John M. Regan, ‘‘Strangers in Our Midst: Middling People, Revolution, and CounterRevolution in Twentieth-Century Ireland,’’ Radharc 2 (November 2001): 35–50, quoted on 38. See also John M. Regan, The Irish Counter-Revolution: Treatyite Politics and Settlement in Independent Ireland, 1921–1936 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1999).

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revolution’’? Labor historian Emmet O’Connor has uncovered a twentiethcentury ‘‘hidden Ireland’’ in the class struggle and labor insurgency that engulfed many Irish towns and much of the countryside, especially during the years from 1917 to 1923. This social revolution paralleled the struggle for national freedom but was seldom, if ever, integrated with it. It is reflected in the extraordinary growth of the radical Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union—from a mere 12,000 members in thirty-two branches in mid-1917 to more than 102,000 members in 433 branches by late 1919; in the factory (and other workplace) occupations that often took the form of ‘‘soviets’’— more than a hundred of them in 1919 and 1920; in the explosion of organization and self-activity among agricultural workers that—in some rural counties, at least—eventually gave rise to a civil war within the larger Civil War. O’Connor argues that this upheaval owed far less to the ‘‘exploits of the IRA and the achievements of Sinn Féin’’ than to the ‘‘inspiration . . . provided by events in Europe; the Russian revolution, the factory occupations in Italy, the industrial unrest in Britain and Germany, and most of all by the way the victorious allies turned the old world upside down in 1919.’’ 12 This Irish Revolution was about much more than ‘‘ourselves.’’ It reminds us that for more than half a century leading up to 1916 and its aftermath, the character and direction of the struggle for Irish independence had been contested terrain. Indeed, there had always been tensions between the various strains within Irish nationalism—the conservative and the progressive, the parochial and the cosmopolitan, the generously inclusive and the narrowly insular. Some nationalists proclaimed Ireland’s uniqueness, focused obsessively on the ‘‘inherent’’ differences between Celt and Saxon, and imagined the Irish nation as a ‘‘Fortress Hibernia.’’ But the United Irishmen of the 1790s had drawn inspiration from the American and French Revolutions, while the Fenians not only imitated the revolutionary secret societies they had encountered on the European continent but, in their proclamation of the Fenian Provisional Government in 1867, declared war on ‘‘the aristocratic locusts[,] whether English or Irish, who have eaten the verdure of our fields.’’ Over time, Fenian leaders turned away from the revolutionary ideologies that had nourished their vision of a transformed Ireland and embraced the single goal of creating an Irish Republic. But on the ground 12. Emmet O’Connor, ‘‘Agrarian Unrest and the Labour Movement in County Waterford, 1917–1923,’’ Saothar 6 (1980): 46–55, quoted on 55 (emphasis added) and 54–55; O’Connor, Syndicalism in Ireland, 1917–1923 (Cork: Cork University Press, 1988), 51–53, 63. See also Conor Kostick, Revolution in Ireland: Popular Militancy, 1917–1923 (London: Pluto Press, 1997).

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in Ireland, many Fenian cadres recognized that such a stance would isolate them from the very people they aspired to lead. Thus, members of the IRB played an active, and leading, role in the Land War that convulsed the Irish countryside in the late 1870s and early 1880s, as they sought to harness the land question to the larger goal of achieving national independence.13 The theme of ‘‘land to the cultivator,’’ and the demand that ‘‘every man [should] have his own land,’’ resonated powerfully, not only with the small farmers of Mayo but with the displaced cottiers and laborers who were now concentrated in Britain’s industrial heartland and throughout the manufacturing and mining districts of industrial America. ‘‘Born under the dark shadow of landlordism,’’ these men and women had left the Irish countryside behind. As they experienced the bone-wearying regimen of factory, mine, and mill, the dream of secure tenure on the land took on mythic proportions as a signifier of the independence, autonomy, and dignity their lives so often lacked.14 At the symbolic heart of this diasporic yearning stood Michael Davitt, the son of evicted peasants who had emigrated from County Mayo to the Lancashire textile town of Haslingden during the Great Famine. Davitt went to work in a textile mill at the age of nine and lost his right arm in a factory accident two years later. As a teenager, he joined the Fenian movement and was sentenced to fifteen years’ penal servitude for gunrunning. After his release from Dartmoor Prison in December 1877, he returned to County Mayo, where he was ‘‘greeted as a returning hero with torch-light parades and cheering crowds.’’ His goal was to organize ‘‘a war against landlordism for a root settlement of the land question,’’ and he sought to internationalize the Mayo peasantry’s quest for land, declaring that the cause was the same ‘‘from the China towers of Pekin to the round towers of Ireland, from the cabins of Connemara to the kraals of Kaffirland, from the wattled homes of the isles of Polynesia to the wigwams of North America.’’ Ultimately, he concluded that only land nationalization could offer a just solution to the problem 13. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, quoted on 463; Joseph Lee, The Modernisation of Irish Society, 1848–1918 (1973; repr., Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1989), 53–59, 72, quoted on 54; Donald E. Jordan Jr., Land and Popular Politics in Ireland: County Mayo from the Plantation to the Land War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 199–229, quoted on 228; Stephen Ball, ‘‘Crowd Activity during the Irish Land War, 1879–90,’’ in Crowds in Ireland, c. 1720–1920, ed. Peter Jupp and Eoin Magennis (London: Macmillan, 2000), 212–48, especially 236. See also the essays by Pádraig Lane and Donal McCartney in Famine, Land, and Culture in Ireland, ed. Carla King (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2000). 14. Foner, ‘‘Class, Ethnicity, and Radicalism,’’ quoted on 160, 156; Emmons, Butte Irish, 54.

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of the land, which led his erstwhile Fenian comrade John O’Leary to declare that ‘‘I and others have long since held that Mr. Davitt was not a nationalist at all in any sense intelligible to us; but only some sort of an internationalist and socialist, in some sense, not intelligible even to himself.’’ 15 If Davitt—as involuntary emigrant, permanently scarred factory slave, Fenian prisoner, and agrarian radical—stood as a unique symbol of the forces that sought to merge the national and social questions in Ireland’s struggle for independence, Patrick Ford became their preeminent voice. Ford had emigrated from Galway in 1845 and settled with his family in Boston, where he came under the influence of the towering abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. After serving in the Ninth Massachusetts Regiment during the American Civil War, he founded the Irish World and American Industrial Liberator in 1870 and quickly made it one of the leading voices of a movement for social reform that aimed at creating a ‘‘cooperative commonwealth’’ in the United States.16 According to Eric Foner, Ford was ‘‘no socialist,’’ but he embraced a wide array of reform proposals such as the income tax and the eight-hour day, and he envisioned a society in which ‘‘the wage system, competition, profit-taking, and ‘distinctive classes’ would all disappear.’’ He was, moreover, a strong supporter of the Land League, in Ireland and America. Through a special ‘‘Spread the Light Fund,’’ he was able to distribute nearly half a million free copies of his newspaper in Ireland between 1879 and 1882. The effect was electric: ‘‘as if some vast Irish-American invasion was sweeping the country with new and irresistible principles of liberty and democracy.’’ Above all, Ford’s goal was to link the issues of land and labor in a transnational context. Thus, he declared that ‘‘the cause of the poor in Donegal is the cause of the factory slave in Fall River,’’ and he sought, also, to unite the ‘‘Irish serf’’ and the English wage slave in common struggle against a common foe.17 15. Carla King, Michael Davitt (Dundalk: Dundalgan Press, 1999); Terry Golway, Irish Rebel: John Devoy and America’s Fight for Ireland’s Freedom (New York: St. Martin’s, 1998), 101; Jordan, Land and Popular Politics, quoted on 214; ‘‘The West Awake!’’ (poster, April 1879); John O’Leary quoted in Thomas N. Brown, Irish-American Nationalism, 1870– 1890 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1966), 127. 16. Ford founded the paper as the Irish World and changed its name to the Irish World and American Industrial Liberator in 1878. 17. Foner, ‘‘Class, Ethnicity, and Radicalism,’’ 157–61; Timothy Walch, ‘‘Ford, Patrick (1837– 1913),’’ in The Encyclopedia of the Irish in America, ed. Michael Glazier (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999), 347; James Paul Rodechko, Patrick Ford and His Search for America: A Case Study of Irish-American Journalism, 1870–1913 (New York: Arno Press, 1976), 186.

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In important respects, Ford, Davitt, the renowned social reformer Henry George,18 and a few other stalwarts became the informal executive committee of a radically democratic and internationalist ‘‘Green Atlantic’’—focused, first and foremost, on Ireland, America, and Britain, but committed to ‘‘Universal Justice and the Rights of Humanity.’’ One of these stalwarts was Joseph Murray, an Irish emigrant whose family had settled in Manchester, where young Joseph worked in the mills and followed a welltraveled English path to Irish nationalism. While still a teenager, Murray also became a ‘‘soldier of liberty on the battlefields of two continents,’’ first with Garibaldi’s Redshirts in the battle for Italian independence and then with Thomas Francis Meagher’s famed Irish Brigade in the Union Army during the American Civil War. He later settled in Colorado, where he took up farming but also developed close ties to the state’s emerging labor movement. As the direction of the Land League became the focus of controversy in America as well as Ireland, Murray took issue with the standard nationalist position and argued that the struggle in Ireland was a ‘‘class war’’ that would soon become a struggle ‘‘for the equality of all mankind.’’ 19 All of this was anathema to ‘‘pure’’ nationalists, who declared it ‘‘pernicious . . . to put the claims of a class . . . above the claims of the nation.’’ Ford’s most articulate critic was the journalist John Devoy, who had entered New York Harbor as a much-heralded Fenian exile in 1871 and quickly emerged as the most compelling voice of physical-force nationalism in the United States. As early as 1878, Devoy had grasped the importance of land agitation for Irish nationalism and had characterized landlordism as the ‘‘greatest curse inflicted by England on Ireland.’’ ‘‘I don’t think it would be worthwhile to free Ireland,’’ he concluded then, ‘‘if that foreign landlord system were left standing.’’ By 1882, however, he was appalled by the direction of Ford’s politics. He now characterized his rival as a ‘‘raving lunatic’’ and expressed the belief that in his ‘‘tremendous plans of a universal social reform, Ireland has a very small place indeed.’’ ‘‘Are we men who have undertaken to effect a great and radical change in the tenure of land that will embrace the whole world?’’ Devoy asked. ‘‘Do we propose a great social 18. Although Henry George was neither Irish nor Irish American, his reform epic, Progress and Poverty (first published in 1879), had a major impact on Irish activists in the labor and land reform movements. 19. Rodechko, Patrick Ford, 187; David Brundage, ‘‘Irish Land and American Workers: Class and Ethnicity in Denver, Colorado,’’ in ‘‘Struggle a Hard Battle’’: Essays on WorkingClass Immigrants, ed. Dirk Hoerder (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986), 62–63.

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revolution that will alter the present constitution of human society? . . . Or are we Irishmen struggling for the welfare of our own people?’’ His answer was unequivocal: ‘‘We are fighting for the Irish people and for the Irish people alone.’’ 20 Like many of the radical reformers of his age, Ford infused his social criticism with a strain of Christian utopianism. He stated that a part of his mission was to ‘‘bear aloft . . . the standard of the cross.’’ He frequently quoted the Bible in support of the programs he advocated in the pages of the Irish World, and he declared, on at least one occasion, that his goal was to usher in ‘‘the Kingdom of God upon earth.’’ He was, at the same time, a harsh critic of the conservative and undemocratic stance of the Catholic Church in Ireland and America. Increasingly, Catholic publications responded in kind, charging that Ford’s ‘‘communistic’’ notions were incompatible with the basic teachings of the church. The torrent of criticism became so great that Ford felt compelled to reconsider his position, all the more so because publications such as Devoy’s Irish Nation charged that he was no longer a legitimate voice of Irish nationalism. Ford was keenly aware that the bulk of his subscribers came from the Irish American community and that persistent attacks by churchmen and Irish nationalists could erode the foundations of his enterprise.21 He found the sharp class conflict of the mid-1880s even more unsettling. In May 1886, a nationwide wave of strikes reached a bloody crescendo in the Haymarket Massacre, when someone threw a bomb into the ranks of policemen who were about to assault a crowd of protesting workers at Chicago’s Haymarket Square. The bomb killed eight police officers and an equal number of demonstrators, and led to the hanging of four leaders of the demonstration, all of them anarchists.22 In July, in the teeth of intense nativist and antiradical backlash, Ford called on the Knights of Labor to proceed along ‘‘conservative and intelligent lines’’ and to seek ‘‘elevation [only] by intellectual and constructive methods.’’ By 1889, he was warning that those who sought to ‘‘sow discord between capital and labor’’ were enemies of the workingman. To be sure, Ford never abandoned his commitment to reform 20. Foner, ‘‘Class, Ethnicity, and Radicalism,’’ 163, 191, 167; Golway, Irish Rebel, 1–12, 106– 7, 143, 208; Rodechko, Patrick Ford, 84, 188–89. 21. James P. Rodechko, ‘‘An Irish-American Journalist and Catholicism: Patrick Ford of the Irish World,’’ Church History 39 (December 1970): 524–40, quoted on 527, 531; Rodechko, Patrick Ford, 83–85, 188–89; Foner, ‘‘Class, Ethnicity, and Radicalism,’’ 170. 22. Bruce Laurie, Artisans into Workers: Labor in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), 170; Paul Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986).

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altogether, but the focus of his efforts changed dramatically, as he moved from Fenianism to support of the Irish Parliamentary Party, from Christian utopianism to mainstream Catholicism, and from extolling the ‘‘poor in Donegal’’ and the ‘‘factory slave in Fall River’’ to calling upon Irish immigrants to emulate wealthy leaders of the Irish American community.23 In important respects, Ford’s trajectory was very much his own. His turn to the Republican Party certainly went against the grain of Irish America, which constituted one of the most loyal constituencies of the Democratic Party. Moreover, he never embraced the AFL in the way he had supported its predecessor, the Knights of Labor, even though Irish Americans were a vital component of the leadership and rank and file of many AFL unions. But his turn away from the insurgent politics and radical social movements that had appealed to important segments of the Irish community in the 1870s and 1880s had much in common with political and ideological trends in Irish America (and Ireland) in the decades surrounding the turn of the century. Thus, historian Timothy Meagher concludes that by 1912, the year of the great Lawrence strike for ‘‘bread and roses,’’ ‘‘Irish suspicions of radicals and socialists had become articles of faith.’’ In nearby Worcester, Massachusetts, Father John McCoy boasted that Catholic schools ‘‘will not breed anarchists and socialists. From the beginning and through all their days at school our children are made to look to God standing back of the law.’’ For that very reason, he said, ‘‘the Catholic church will yet be hailed as the impregnable bulwark of law and order.’’ 24 Far more than any other institution or leadership elite, the Catholic Church was the foundation stone on which Irish America was constructed. Its Irish-born hierarchy imposed an ‘‘Irish Catholic style’’ on the American church, and Irish Americans constituted a majority of its communicants until the early twentieth century. According to Charles Morris, the ‘‘IrishAmerican prelates’’ who directed the church in the United States were ‘‘hardheaded businessmen and practical politicians rather than theologians.’’ Over time, they created ‘‘an outlook on the world that was definably ‘American Catholic’—disciplined, rule-bound, loyal to church and country, unrebellious, but upwardly mobile and achievement-oriented.’’ 25 23. Rodechko, Patrick Ford, 110–11, 113, 114, 151–55; Rodechko, ‘‘An Irish-American Journalist,’’ 531–35. 24. Timothy J. Meagher, Inventing Irish America: Generation, Class, and Ethnic Identity in a New England City, 1880–1928 (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), 324–25. 25. Charles R. Morris, American Catholic: The Saints and Sinners Who Built America’s Most Powerful Church (New York: Times Books, 1997), 89, 111, 116–17, 133.

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This worldview was not incompatible with support for organized labor. The church had belatedly lent its blessing to the Knights of Labor in the 1880s. Indeed, at a time when the Knights had more than seven hundred thousand members, about two-thirds of them Catholic, ‘‘to do otherwise would have been institutional suicide.’’ The church also counted many communicants among the leadership and rank and file of the AFL. At the same time, the hierarchy remained relentless in its opposition to socialism and to most visions of far-reaching social reform, especially those that encouraged state encroachment on the sacred terrain of faith and family. Thus, the argument goes, the church’s embrace of the ‘‘pure and simple’’ unionism of the AFL helped pull the American labor movement in a more conservative direction and helped inoculate American workers against the ‘‘virus’’ of socialism. Insofar as Irish immigrants and their children were located at the heart of both the church and the AFL’s membership, political radicalism became even more unthinkable, for the loyalty of Irish Catholics to America’s core institutions and values was ‘‘as unquestioned as it was unquestioning.’’ 26 Given the power and reach of this ‘‘conservative’’ ethos among Irish American Catholics, it is remarkable how many Irish immigrants and their children found their way into the ranks of the radical wing of the labor movement. The leading example is William Z. Foster, the architect of the Great Steel Strike of 1919 and, thereafter, a leader of the American Communist Party for the next forty years. Foster’s father, James, was born in County Carlow. He served in the British army, where he joined the Fenian movement and sought to organize an insurrection among his fellow Irishmen in the forces of the Crown. Betrayed by a coconspirator, James fled to the United States in 1868 and identified with the republican tradition for the rest of his life. (‘‘During my boyhood,’’ William later recalled, ‘‘my political meat 26. Jay Dolan, The American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present (1985; repr., Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), 329–36, quoted on 334; Morris, American Catholic, 92, 111 (quoted); David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865– 1925 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 306–10. In his study of Worcester, Massachusetts, Timothy Meagher argues persuasively that the persistent identification of Irish Catholics as conservative is an oversimplification. While highlighting the church’s hostility to socialism, Meagher notes the development of an Irish Catholic outlook that had crystallized into a prototype of ‘‘urban liberalism’’ by the second decade of the twentieth century. Mary Lethert Wingerd makes the same point in her study of St. Paul, Minnesota, another ‘‘Irish town.’’ Meagher, Inventing Irish America, 10–13, 324; Mary Lethert Wingerd, Claiming the City: Politics, Faith, and the Power of Place in St. Paul (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001), 101–6, 144–45.

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and drink at home was militant Irish nationalism.’’) Foster’s mother, Elizabeth McLaughlin, was born into a family of textile workers of English and Scottish origin in Carlisle, England. Unlike her husband, she was a devout Catholic, who allegedly bore twenty-three children, most of whom died in infancy. William was born in Taunton, Massachusetts, in 1881, and raised in Skittereen, an Irish neighborhood in Philadelphia. The harsh realities of life in Skittereen in the late nineteenth century complicate the prevailing image of Irish immigrants as upwardly mobile in status and middle class in outlook. Like many male residents of Skittereen, James Foster remained an unskilled, and irregularly employed, worker, whose meager income condemned his family to a life of grinding poverty.27 Thus, at age thirteen, the precocious William was compelled to quit school and seek full-time employment. Although he remained a voracious reader, he soon abandoned his mother’s Catholic faith, and even his father’s Irish nationalism, and developed a sense of alienation from, and contempt for, Skittereen and its ‘‘half-starved, diseased, [and] hopeless inhabitants.’’ By 1901, his parents were dead, his family had largely disintegrated, and the rootless William was well on his way toward developing a revolutionary modernist outlook that stood sharply over against the ‘‘complex ontology of faith [and] custom’’ that had undergirded James and Elizabeth Foster’s worldview. The sociologist Will Herberg once commented that the signifiers ‘‘Irish, Catholic, and American became almost identical in the Irish American mind.’’ But for William Z. Foster, Ireland had become irrelevant, Catholic had become synonymous with superstition, and America, in the words of a Foster biographer, remained ‘‘a set of conditions to be transcended.’’ 28 Foster may have lost interest in Ireland and its struggle for independence, but some Irish immigrants and Irish Americans nonetheless continued to follow in his footsteps as his politics evolved from socialism to syndicalism to communism. Among his most notable allies were 27. Edward P. Johanningsmeier, Forging American Communism: The Life of William Z. Foster (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), 10–19; Johanningsmeier, ‘‘Philadelphia ‘Skittereen’ and William Z. Foster: The Childhood of an American Communist,’’ Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 117 (October 1993): 287–308; James R. Barrett, William Z. Foster and the Tragedy of American Radicalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 9–14; William Z. Foster, From Bryan to Stalin (New York: International Publishers, 1937), 11; L. A. O’Donnell, Irish Voice and Organized Labor in America: A Biographical Study (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997), 124. 28. Barrett, William Z. Foster, 15–17; O’Donnell, Irish Voice, 126; Herberg quoted in Morris, American Catholic, 111; Johanningsmeier, Forging American Communism, 18–19, 22–26, 46, quoted on 19, 46.

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James P. Cannon, William F. Dunne, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Jay Fox, and Joe Manley.29 Flynn, the famed ‘‘Rebel Girl,’’ followed a trajectory that overlapped with that of her male comrades but was also different in important respects. Thanks in large measure to her parents, Thomas Flynn and Annie Gurley, her early life combined Irish nationalism, socialism, feminism, and a touch of the bohemian in ways that would have been unthinkable in Foster’s Skittereen. Her father was the son of a Famine-era emigrant from County Mayo; her mother emigrated from Galway in 1877. Although raised in a Presbyterian, landowning family, Annie Gurley taught her children the ‘‘religion of socialism.’’ When the Flynns moved to New York City, Elizabeth attended socialist meetings, argued the cause of women’s emancipation in school debates, and, increasingly, identified with the struggles of the working class. She joined the Industrial Workers of the World (the legendary ‘‘Wobblies’’) in 1906 and quickly became a renowned stump speaker and picket-line agitator. In 1908, before her eighteenth birthday, she married the itinerant Wobbly Jack Jones, whose reputation as an arsonist and dynamiter had cost him a ten-year prison sentence.30 Flynn’s marriage to Jones was a brief one. Soon after abandoning him, and turning their son over to her mother to raise, she embarked on a fourteen-year love affair with the flamboyant Italian anarchist Carlo Tresca. She also found an outlet for political and personal energies in the company of middle-class, and boldly unorthodox, women. She joined Heterodoxy, a 29. James Patrick Cannon, the son of English-born Irish nationalists, was born and raised in Rosedale, Kansas. He followed his father into the Socialist Party and eventually became a founding member of the Communist Labor Party (CLP) in 1919. Dunne, a Minnesota native, was the son of an unskilled Irish railroad worker and French Canadian mother. Like Cannon, he was a founding member of the CLP. Fox, the son of an Irish immigrant, grew up in Chicago’s famed Back of the Yards neighborhood and had a long history of trade union and anarcho-bohemian activism before joining the Communist Party. Manley, a Dublin-born ironworker who married Foster’s stepdaughter Sylvia, also came to communism from the anarchist movement. He and Fox became Foster’s close allies in the work and factional wars of the American Communist Party. Barrett, William Z. Foster, 60–62, 112–15; Johanningsmeier, Forging American Communism, 50–54, 71; Harvey O’Connor, Revolution in Seattle: A Memoir (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1964), 7. 30. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, The Rebel Girl, an Autobiography: My First Life (1906–1926) (New York: International Publishers, 1973), 23–44; O’Donnell, Irish Voice, 118–22, 136, 140–41n52; Rosalyn Fraad Baxendall, Words on Fire: The Life and Writings of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 1–32; Helen C. Camp, Iron in Her Soul: Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and the American Left (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1995); Johanningsmeier, Forging American Communism, 61, 70–71, 107–8; Barrett, William Z. Foster, 73.

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feminist discussion club headquartered in Greenwich Village, and remembered it as ‘‘an experience of unbroken delight . . . [in] a wonderful freemasonry of women.’’ On the West Coast, she lived for a time with Marie Equi, a well-to-do physician, birth-control advocate, and open lesbian. After suffering a nervous breakdown at the end of the 1920s, Flynn turned her back on the anarchist and bohemian dimensions of her life and eventually joined the Communist Party. Like Foster, she was buried in Moscow after her death.31 One of the most important characteristics that Foster’s Irish American comrades shared with him was their way of life as itinerant radicals and labor agitators who chose to live beyond the pale of Irish America and outside the institutional parameters of the Catholic Church. Flynn proudly recalled that she and her siblings had imbibed a ‘‘burning hatred of British rule with our mother’s milk,’’ and her family maintained close ties with James Connolly during his long sojourn in the United States.32 But Flynn’s labor activism and anarcho-bohemian lifestyle pulled her away from Irish nationalism, even at the height of the struggle for Irish independence. This appears to have been true of Cannon, Dunne, Fox, and Manley, as well, even though, in Dunne’s case, he was living in the copper mining bastion of Butte, Montana, ‘‘one of the most overwhelmingly Irish cities in the United States.’’ 33 Apparently, in the minds of these revolutionary modernists, events in Ireland paled in comparison to the earthshaking upheaval in Russia and the struggle of the international working class for emancipation. Apparently, the gulf between their cultural and intellectual iconoclasm and the ethos of Irish America was so vast that there could be no reconciling these antithetical worlds. But to concentrate unduly on two antithetical worlds, represented by the ‘‘conservative’’ Catholic majority on one side and Foster’s tiny ‘‘militant minority’’ on the other, is to obscure the breadth and depth of the ferment that crested in Irish America during the heyday of Ireland’s struggle for independence. This ferment opened sections of the Irish American community to a wide variety of progressive and radical political currents—from the struggle for Indian independence to the insurgent nationalism of the African Diaspora, from the antiwar politics of the American Socialist Party to the infatuation with Bolshevism that the Russian Revolution inspired in much 31. O’Donnell, Irish Voice, 136, 140–41n52; Baxendall, Words on Fire, 6, 14, 31–32; Margaret Ward, Hanna Sheehy Skeffington: A Life (Cork: Attic Press, 1997), 196. 32. Flynn, The Rebel Girl, 23. 33. Emmons, Butte Irish, 13.

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of the Left. Thus, under the genial but resolute guidance of Irish-born John Fitzpatrick, the left-leaning cadres of the Chicago Federation of Labor combined aggressive advocacy of Irish independence and support for the recognition of the Soviet Union with a commitment to interracial unionism and independent labor politics on the home front.34 l l l l

Soon after England declared war on Germany in August 1914, Irish Parliamentary Party leader John Redmond called on his fellow Irishmen to join the fray, not only in defense of Ireland but ‘‘wherever the firing line extends, in defence of right and freedom and religion.’’ Supporters of constitutional nationalism in the United States echoed Redmond’s loyalty to Britain’s embattled empire and even became, in some cases, ‘‘vehemently pro-British’’ themselves. But only five days after Britain’s declaration of war, thousands of German and Irish Americans turned out in New York’s Celtic Park to repudiate Redmond and his party. Marching units carried German flags, and the crowd cheered the Kaiser. By mid-September, Roger Casement was estimating, far too optimistically, that 80 percent of Irish Americans were ‘‘for Germany & against the Crown.’’ By Christmas 1914, Casement himself was in Germany, trying to persuade the government to support the cause of Irish independence. The Germans ‘‘are the true battlers for human freedom,’’ he concluded, ‘‘and please God they win right thro’.’’ 35 Given the Wilson administration’s clear tilt toward England and the animosity toward Germany that developed among broad segments of the American public, it was inevitable that anyone choosing to identify with ‘‘the Huns’’ would face severe condemnation. After war was formally declared on April 6, 1917, a series of laws—aimed at espionage, sedition, and trading with the enemy—led to draconian limitations on free expression and to more than fifteen hundred arrests. The Irish Americans did not face as much antagonism as their German American counterparts, but they were 34. On John Fitzpatrick and the Chicago Federation of Labor, see Elizabeth McKillen, Chicago Labor and the Quest for a Democratic Diplomacy, 1914–1924 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995). 35. Alvin Jackson, Ireland, 1798–1998: Politics and War (London: Blackwell, 1999), quoted on 197; Keith Jeffery, Ireland and the Great War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 5–36; Golway, Irish Rebel, 218; Francis M. Carroll, American Opinion and the Irish Question, 1910–23: A Study in Opinion and Policy (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1978), 46– 49, quoted on 48; B. L. Reid, The Man from New York: John Quinn and His Friends (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), quoted on 189.

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clearly placed on the defensive. The Irish World, the Gaelic American, the New York Freeman’s Journal, and even the Jesuit weekly America were all barred from the mails; several outspoken nationalists were indicted for conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act; and in New York City, demonstrators supporting the cause of Irish independence were roughed up and arrested by police, until ‘‘street meetings became virtually impossible.’’ 36 It was not all repression. There were hopeful signs as well. At first, the apparent failure—even folly—of the Easter Rising, and the devastation that accompanied it in the center of Dublin, caused confusion and dismay in much of Irish America. But Britain’s execution of the Rising’s leaders triggered a ‘‘wave of fury,’’ followed by a groundswell in the direction of separatism. Moreover, even in the harsh wartime climate, Wilson’s rhetoric of ‘‘selfdetermination’’ and his advocacy of the rights of small nations created an opening for Irish nationalists, who were quick to affirm that ‘‘if we . . . are out to free the small nations, let us show our good faith by liberating that small nation which has suffered the most, which has suffered the longest.’’ 37 Above all, the tremendous wave of labor insurgency and political ferment that peaked in the United States and many other nations during and immediately after the war helped to create new energies and hopes that augured the coming of a new and transformed world. Even President Wilson sensed the awesome power of these new energies. In May 1919, he declared that ‘‘the question which stands at the front of all others in the midst of this great awakening is the question of labor.’’ By the summer of 1919, it seemed increasingly certain to him that ‘‘some commodities will have to become the property of the state, the coal, the water power[,] and probably the railroads.’’ He was not a socialist, he insisted, but he believed that only ‘‘bold liberalism’’ could effectively meet the challenge of ‘‘Bolshevism.’’ 38 These contradictory currents helped give rise to the New York–based Irish Progressive League (IPL) in October 1917. For the next three years, its ‘‘core membership of about 150 people’’ would play a vital role in Irish America’s agitation on behalf of Ireland’s independence. League activists 36. John Morton Blum, Woodrow Wilson and the Politics of Morality (Boston: Little, Brown, 1956), 143–44; David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 68; Golway, Irish Rebel, 243–48; C. Desmond Greaves, Liam Mellows and the Irish Revolution (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), 129–30, quoted on 130. 37. Joseph McGarrity quoted in Patrick McCartan, With de Valera in America (New York: Brentano, 1932), 21–22. 38. Wilson quoted in Cooper, The Warrior and the Priest, 264.

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maintained close ties with a cadre of Carmelite Fathers, whose priory on East 29th Street became a headquarters for league-related activities. At the priory, priests named Magennis, O’Connor, Slattery, O’Flanagan, and O’Farrell were, in the words of Irish exile Patrick McCartan, ‘‘true representatives of the Church militant for the Faith and for the Irish Republic.’’ But what made the league most distinctive was not its links to the ‘‘Church militant,’’ not even its aggressive nationalism at a time when others were trimming their sails, but rather its commitment to build ties with the American socialist movement and its successful effort to involve socialists and other progressives in the struggle for Ireland’s emancipation. At the league’s first public meeting, its members voted to endorse Morris Hillquit’s candidacy for mayor of New York. Hillquit, a veteran Socialist Party leader, was running against not one but two Irish American candidates: the incumbent mayor, John Purroy Mitchel, grandson of the legendary Irish nationalist John Mitchel, and Brooklyn Judge John F. Hylan. Hillquit made his opposition to America’s participation in the world war a major element of his campaign. ‘‘If you want war to continue indefinitely,’’ he told the city’s voters, ‘‘if you want millions of your fellows slaughtered and butchered . . . then vote for the capitalist parties.’’ Otherwise, ‘‘vote for me.’’ That the league would support a Jewish socialist against two Irish American Catholics for mayor of one of the world’s most Irish cities speaks volumes about the forces that were coalescing on the left wing of the nationalist movement.39 The league also became the principal outlet for the political activity of Irish exiles of the 1916 generation such as Liam Mellows. A member of the IRB and the Irish Volunteers who had been the leader of the Rising in the West of Ireland, Mellows had escaped to Liverpool, where he secured forged seaman’s papers and a berth on a merchant vessel that arrived in New York Harbor in December 1916. He quickly emerged as the leader of the community of Irish exiles in New York and, with them, was drawn into the activities of the IPL. Although his politics at this time were conventionally 39. David Brundage, ‘‘American Labour and the Irish Question, 1916–23,’’ Saothar 24 (1999): quoted on 61; McCartan, With de Valera, 40–41; Carroll, American Opinion, 106–7; Francis M. Carroll, ‘‘Irish Progressive League,’’ in Irish American Voluntary Organizations, ed. Michael Funchion (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983), 207–10; Greaves, Liam Mellows, 131, 149–65; John F. McClymer, ‘‘Of ‘Mornin’ Glories’ and ‘Fine Old Oaks’: John Purroy Mitchell, Al Smith, and Reform as an Expression of Irish-American Aspiration,’’ in The New York Irish, ed. Ronald H. Bayor and Timothy J. Meagher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 374–94, Hillquit quoted on 390; Golway, Irish Rebel, 244–45; New York Times, November 7, 1917, 1, 5.

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republican, he soon began to evolve toward a social radicalism that would be given ample scope for expression in the councils of the IPL. By St. Patrick’s Day 1918, he was declaring that ‘‘we are not fighting to free Ireland from the foreign tyrant in order to place her under the thumb of domestic tyrants.’’ Borrowing from James Connolly’s claim that ancient Irish society had been founded upon the ‘‘communistic clan,’’ he acknowledged that ‘‘the present movement in Ireland . . . is not called socialism. . . . [B]ut call it what you will, Ireland wants to continue her old civilisation along the lines of socialism, communism or cooperation.’’ Here was a merging of the social and national questions in a way that was anathema to many of Mellows’s IRB comrades and, at best, premature to most of the rest. Tom Clarke, the senior Fenian among the martyred leaders of the Easter Rising, had told Connolly that ‘‘after Ireland is free I’ll be socialist.’’ Apparently, Mellows had decided that he couldn’t wait.40 Irish ambassadors such as Mellows, Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, and, later, Eamon de Valera himself played a vital role in revitalizing the cause of Irish nationalism in the United States. But Irish Americans such as Frank P. Walsh and Leonora O’Reilly played an equally important role in linking the nationalist movement with the forces of insurgency that were climaxing in the United States and throughout much of the world at this historic moment. Few were in a better position to play this role than Francis Patrick Walsh, an Irish American success story, but with a peculiar twist: Horatio Alger as self-proclaimed ‘‘poet and . . . revolutionist.’’ Walsh was born in 1863 to Irish immigrant parents in St. Louis’s ‘‘Kerry Patch.’’ According to a biographical portrait in Harper’s Weekly, ‘‘he fought poverty as a boy—really fought it; never liked it or accepted it. The iron entered his soul.’’ But he was no Social Darwinist. ‘‘Of thirty boys he remembered [from] his neighborhood, only three had come through to normal, useful manhood,’’ and Walsh concluded that ‘‘twenty-seven lives was too great a price to pay for three that were ‘fit to survive.’’’ When his own father died, he was compelled to leave school and seek employment as a messenger, factory worker, and railway clerk. After attending night school and learning shorthand, he landed a job as a legal stenographer, began reading law, and, in 1888, was admitted to the Missouri bar. Two years later, in Kansas City, he married Katie O’Flaherty, the organist at St. Aloysius Church. Together, they 40. Emmet Larkin, James Larkin: Irish Labour Leader, 1876–1947 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1965), 223; Greaves, Liam Mellows, 85–126, Mellows quoted on 154–55, Clarke on 52.

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would have eight children, and Walsh would remain a devout Catholic all his life.41 Walsh became a successful corporate lawyer and maintained close, and profitable, ties with Kansas City’s Democratic Party machine. But his ‘‘lace curtain’’ achievements did not sit well with him. In 1900, he ‘‘resigned from every corporation with which I was connected’’ and became, in effect, a ‘‘people’s lawyer.’’ As the progressive movement developed, his politics moved leftward—toward an active identification with the labor movement and even the hope that the ‘‘heart-destroying, soul-shriveling idea of production solely for . . . profits may give way to production for the good of all mankind.’’ In 1913, President Wilson named him chairman of the high-profile Commission on Industrial Relations, and in that capacity he developed an intimate knowledge of the plight, and struggles, of the nation’s workers. He also became a racial liberal, a strong supporter of women’s suffrage, and a friend of radical feminists and others whose lives and outlook were far removed from the ethos and institutional networks of Irish America.42 As historian Joseph McCartin points out, Walsh ‘‘would never completely break his ties to the legal profession, the Democratic party, or his Irish Catholic culture.’’ Indeed, even as he entered into an intense love affair with radical feminist Doris Stevens, he was repelled by ‘‘that awful mixture of beliefs, books, causes, and sex’’ that marked the lives of the cultural avantgarde. And yet it was precisely his active engagement with two disparate worlds, and the ease with which he negotiated the thorny path between the councils of the Democratic Party and the socialist meeting, and St. Aloysius and the Greenwich Village salon, that made him an extraordinarily valuable asset to the progressive wing of the Irish nationalist movement in the United States.43 Walsh recalled that ‘‘I was quite a ‘jiner’ of Irish societies in my very young manhood.’’ 44 But something—perhaps the demands of career and family, perhaps the corrosive factionalism that always characterized the 41. Joseph A. McCartin, Labor’s Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations, 1912–1921 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), quoted on 21; Dante Barton, ‘‘Frank P. Walsh,’’ Harper’s Weekly 88 (September 27, 1913): 24. 42. McCartin, Labor’s Great War, 21–23. 43. McCartin, Labor’s Great War, 22–23. 44. Frank P. Walsh to Leonora O’Reilly, October 11, 1920, reel 8, Leonora O’Reilly Papers, Microfilm Edition of the Papers of the Women’s Trade Union League and Its Principal Leaders, Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Mass.

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movement—propelled him out of this arena. When he returned, in the new and urgent circumstances engendered by the Easter Rising, he resolved to avoid institutional affiliation and the factional quarrels that continued unabated. This, in combination with the prestige he had earned as chair of the Commission on Industrial Relations, made him a unique—and uniquely admired—figure in the movement. Everyone, it seemed, wanted him to speak, to chair a meeting, to negotiate on their behalf, until he complained, ‘‘I have been so completely absorbed in the Irish effort that I was compelled to practically abandon my law business.’’ Through it all, he maintained his conviction that he ‘‘could render better service as a sort of free lance,’’ and he remained true to that conviction even when friends in the movement implored him to align himself with one faction or another.45 Walsh believed that ‘‘the ancient Irish spirit, as expressed by its poets and philosophers,’’ was ‘‘the soul of the Irish revolution.’’ When he finally visited Ireland, as a member of the American Commission on Irish Independence in 1919, this belief was reinforced by the bonfires and torch-light parades that greeted him and his fellow commissioners everywhere they went. To him the ‘‘fires on the hillside’’ were a sign that ‘‘the sacred fire was still burning in the hearts of the people after all these thousand years of darkness.’’ 46 But unlike many nationalists, he unhesitatingly linked this romantic vision to the struggle to transform Irish society. To him, Irish labor was ‘‘the backbone, lungs and heart’’ of the Irish Revolution, and the Irish Revolution represented the fusion of the social and national questions. He saw this fusion vividly revealed in the life and aspirations of an ‘‘intelligent working man, apparently about forty years of age,’’ who was employed on the loading dock at Dublin’s famed Guinness brewery. For the eleven months that led up to the truce that ended the Anglo-Irish War in July 1921, this ‘‘soldier-laborer’’ arose every day at five o’clock in the morning, went immediately to a munition factory operated by the Irish Republican [A]rmy, where he worked with his comrades manufacturing bombs until time to go to work in the brewery. . . . He worked all day in the brewery, took a hurried evening meal, 45. Frank P. Walsh to Patrick A. D’Arcy, August 4, 1920; Leonora O’R[eilly] to Frank Walsh, August 12, 1920; Frank P. Walsh to Leonora O’Reilly, August 13, 1920; Frank P. Walsh to Sean Conway, August 21, 1920, all in box 28, Frank P. Walsh Papers, 1896–1939, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library. 46. Frank P. Walsh, ‘‘The Irish Labor Movement,’’ n.d. [1921?], box 32, Walsh Papers; Frank P. Walsh, ‘‘Windows Alight in Connaught,’’ America, June 7, 1919, 225–26.

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and joined his company either to drill or to engage in the . . . warfare which was carried on in the streets of Dublin and the surrounding territory with such tremendous loss to the Crown forces. He was, he explained, the son of a farmer in County Wicklow, one of seven sons, three of whom were forced to emigrate, and three compelled to seek work as laborers in large cities of Ireland. . . . This soldier-laborer not only toiled hard all day, but risked his life night and day, with the vision ever before him of a Wicklow farm, and the right of Irish men and women to live their own lives on the land which they love.47 Skeptics will immediately point to the Wicklow-born laborer’s passionate devotion to the land as symptomatic of petit bourgeois ‘‘land hunger.’’ But while there may have been more of the young Patrick Ford’s ideas than James Connolly’s in Walsh’s imagined Ireland, his was a vision not only of land to the tiller but of cooperative production and distribution. While he clearly overestimated the degree to which the social and national questions were fused in the struggle for Irish independence, he was keenly aware of the fact that there was a social revolution taking place. Moreover, his vision of Ireland’s destiny was rooted in part in his experience in the United States, where he welcomed the ferment that was animating hundreds of thousands of insurgent workers and dared to hope that strategically placed friends and allies such as John Fitzpatrick of the Chicago Federation of Labor would be able to ‘‘swing the Irish Movement in this country to the radical movement.’’ 48 This was also the goal of the IPL, and although Walsh did not join the league—he was not, after all, a ‘‘jiner’’—he worked closely with many of its most active members, including Leonora O’Reilly. Unlike Walsh, O’Reilly had lived virtually her entire life outside the parameters of Irish America and, in her attitude toward the Catholic Church, was hostile toward its reigning institution. She was born in New York City in 1870, the daughter of Irish immigrants John and Winifred (Rooney) O’Reilly. Her father, who died within two years of her birth, was a printer by trade, a socialist by conviction, and a ‘‘good union man.’’ One of his closest friends was John Baptiste Hubert, a French immigrant and veteran of the Paris Commune, who was to become not only Leonora’s ‘‘Uncle Baptiste’’ but one of her political mentors as well. Winifred Rooney was born in County Sligo shortly before the Great Famine ravaged Ireland. Among her earliest memories was the sight of ‘‘people lying dead by the roadside—dead of sheer starvation.’’ Winifred’s father took sick 47. Walsh, ‘‘The Irish Labor Movement,’’ 6–7. 48. Walsh, ‘‘The Irish Labor Movement,’’ 2–3, 5, 7; McCartin, Labor’s Great War, 197.

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aboard ship during the family’s voyage to North America and succumbed to dysentery soon after he and his wife and daughter landed in New Brunswick in 1847. To help support her widowed mother, Winifred entered domestic service at a very young age, and later experienced and fought against the garment industry’s relentless ‘‘speeding-up system.’’ As an adult, she became a proud working woman with a ‘‘passion for trade unionism.’’ She also developed a love of learning and a remarkable openness to the intellectual ferment that characterized Manhattan’s labor and socialist communities, often taking young Leonora with her to Cooper Union and ‘‘other halls where radical lectures of all sorts were to be listened to.’’ Above all, she became mentor, friend, and lifelong companion to her only daughter.49 John and Winifred O’Reilly both came from staunchly Catholic families, and Leonora was baptized in a Catholic church. But gradually her parents abandoned their religious faith and became ‘‘free thinkers.’’ In this arena, as in many others, Leonora was deeply influenced by her parents’ (particularly her mother’s) stance. She grew up in the company of women and men whose faith was the ‘‘religion of humanity.’’ Thus, her formative intellectual and moral influences—socialist, humanist, and Protestant—all pulled her away from the faith into which she had been baptized. ‘‘Leonora used to say she did not believe in any organization being as strong as the Catholic church,’’ one of her cousins recalled. Its institutional power, its dogmatic certainty, its refusal to allow its communicants the ‘‘free use of their minds’’ made it the antithesis of her own faith, which she identified as ‘‘human sympathy’’ and ‘‘universal love.’’ 50 O’Reilly lived out her faith in the labor, socialist, women’s, and peace movements, through organizations such as the Knights of Labor, the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL), the Wage Earners’ Suffrage League, and the Socialist Party (SP). The passion and energy she brought 49. Alice Henry, ‘‘Mrs. Winifred O’Reilly: A Veteran Worker,’’ Life and Labor (May 1911): 132–36; Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, A Generation of Women: Education in the Lives of Progressive Reformers (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 89–112; Mary Dreier, ‘‘Fragmentary Notes on Leonora O’Reilly,’’ and ‘‘Chapter of Memories’’ (unpublished memoir of O’Reilly), in Margaret Dreier Robins Papers, Microfilm Edition of the Papers of the Women’s Trade Union League and Its Principal Leaders. My understanding of Leonora O’Reilly is deeply indebted to Victoria McGrane, for her indispensable research assistance, but above all for her own writing on O’Reilly. See Victoria Grace McGrane, ‘‘Definite Political Ideas: Irish American Women and the Politics of Identity, 1880–1930’’ (senior honors thesis, Dartmouth College, 2002). 50. Leonora O’Reilly, ‘‘Religious Conformity,’’ n.d., reel 1, O’Reilly Papers; Leonora O’Reilly, speech ‘‘From a Pulpit,’’ n.d., reel 10, O’Reilly Papers.

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to her activism in all of these spheres was one of her most memorable qualities and was all the more remarkable because she was diagnosed with a heart condition as a young child, suffered periodic bouts of ill health as an adult, and finally died of a heart attack at age fifty-seven. She was, nonetheless, intense—‘‘so intense,’’ recalled one observer, ‘‘that few dared contradict her.’’ Her reputation as a speaker, in public meeting halls and on crowded street corners, was legendary. Contemporaries called her the ‘‘Silver-Tongued Suffragist’’ and the ‘‘great stump orator.’’ When her health permitted, it was not uncommon for her to give a speech ‘‘almost every day’’ for months at a time on behalf of one cause or another.51 O’Reilly joined the Knights of Labor in 1886, at the age of sixteen, and was quickly drawn into the radical inner circle of the local assembly’s leadership. In the WTUL, she developed a close relationship with several of the affluent women who played a key role in shaping—and funding—the league. But she was also keenly aware of the class differences that separated her from these ‘‘allies.’’ Thus, it was natural that she would gravitate toward WTUL members Pauline Newman and Rose Schneiderman, both of whom were Jewish immigrants, garment union activists, and SP members. They became her cherished friends, as well as her collaborators in a ‘‘radical bloc’’ that fought against the ‘‘allies’’ when they sought to insulate the league from a socialist perspective on questions of class and gender. O’Reilly joined the SP in 1910, but because her politics were more ethical and intuitive than ideological, she soon grew weary of the factional quarrels and bitter theoretical disagreements that roiled the party’s inner life. Increasingly, her activism was grounded in a feminist perspective and the belief that women ‘‘recognize a call to duty, the duty to live for others—as only woman can.’’ 52 51. Edward T. James, ‘‘Leonora O’Reilly,’’ in Papers of the Women’s Trade Union League and Its Principal Leaders: Guide to the Microfilm Edition, ed. Edward T. James et al. (Woodbridge, Md.: Research Publications, 1981), 215; McGrane, ‘‘Definite Political Ideas,’’ 24; Charles Shively, ‘‘O’Reilly, Leonora,’’ Notable American Women, 1607–1950: A Biographical Dictionary, ed. Edward T. James et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press / Harvard University Press, 1971), 2:651–53, quoted on 652. 52. Annelise Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working-Class Politics in the United States, 1900–1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 43–44, 105–6; Meredith Tax, The Rising of the Women: Feminist Solidarity and Class Conflict, 1880–1917 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1980), 18, 170–79, 228–32; Mari Jo Buhle, Women and American Socialism, 1870–1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 189; James, ‘‘Leonora O’Reilly,’’ 215; Leonora O’Reilly, ‘‘Looking Over the Field,’’ American Suffragette (February 1911): quoted on 7–8.

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Throughout most of her life, O’Reilly interacted much more closely with free thinkers, Protestants, Jewish Socialists, and feminists than with Irish American Catholics. And yet she was Irish to the core by her own lights, and others regarded her as ‘‘Irish to her very finger tips with a passionate Irish temperament.’’ In 1915, while journeying to the Women’s Peace Conference at the Hague, she wrote to her mother that ‘‘with all my body[,] mind[,] and heart I am longing to get a look at that land from which our people were exiled long ago.’’ Rather suddenly, it appears, Ireland had claimed her attention and allegiance, and an expanding Irish nationalist movement would welcome her into its ranks.53 Given her commitment to socialism and the labor movement, it was natural that O’Reilly would find a home in the IPL and would become one of its more prominent street corner and platform speakers. She also joined forces with a remarkable group with an unwieldy name, the American Women Pickets for the Enforcement of America’s War Aims, which merged the tactics of militant suffragism with the outlook of Irish nationalism. To these women, most of whom were Irish American, ‘‘America’s war aims’’ meant the Wilsonian quest for self-determination and, practically speaking, support of the Irish republican movement’s increasingly violent quest for independence. The American Women Pickets adopted a strategy of ‘‘deliberate provocation’’—burning British flags on the steps of the Treasury Department in Washington, D.C., ‘‘bombing’’ the British Embassy from the air with leaflets denouncing Britain’s military aggression in Ireland, engaging in acts of civil disobedience and then refusing bail when they were arrested.54 But perhaps their most significant act of protest occurred in a distinctively male environment—the New York waterfront, more specifically, the Chelsea piers on Manhattan’s West Side, where most of the longshoremen were Irish immigrants. These men were members of a relatively conservative union, the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA), which was far more interested in collecting dues and upholding contracts than it was in engaging in strikes of any kind. Yet on August 27, 1920, about thirty members of the American Women Pickets appeared on the Chelsea piers and triggered what became known as the ‘‘Irish Patriotic Strike.’’ The strike, which disrupted shipping in New York Harbor for nearly three weeks, was actually a boycott of British shipping waged by rank-and53. Dreier, ‘‘Chapter of Memories,’’ 8; Leonora O’Reilly to Winifred O’Reilly, April 21, 1915, reel 3, O’Reilly Papers. 54. Joe Doyle, ‘‘Striking for Ireland on the New York Docks,’’ in The New York Irish, ed. Bayor and Meagher, 360–63, quoted on 361.

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file longshoremen and their allies with no support from the ILA. Its immediate cause was the fate of two Irish patriots who were very much in the headlines at this moment. The first was Daniel Mannix, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Melbourne, Australia; the second was Terence MacSwiney, the republican lord mayor of Cork, who two weeks earlier had begun a hunger strike to protest his arrest by British authorities.55 Although the drama of MacSwiney’s hunger strike was unsurpassed, Mannix played an even more direct role in triggering the Irish Patriotic Strike. A former president of Ireland’s National Seminary at Maynooth, he had emigrated to Australia in 1913 and almost immediately had become a towering, and fiercely controversial, figure. By 1920, he was, by reputation, a ‘‘rabid Sinn Féiner,’’ and he was attempting to return to Ireland, allegedly to visit his mother. On July 31, he sailed from New York’s Pier 60 on the White Star liner SS Baltic. A British destroyer intercepted the Baltic as it approached England; naval officers removed Mannix from the ship and brought him ashore at Penzance. It was, of course, a clumsy act of repression that only fed the fires of Irish nationalism. When the Baltic returned to New York and docked at Pier 59 on August 27, the American Women Pickets established a picket line and called on ‘‘coal passers’’ (members of the engine room crew) to walk off the ship to protest British policy in Ireland. According to the New York Tribune, about 150 of them answered the women’s call, and the strike was on. They were joined, immediately, by Irish longshoremen working on Pier 59 and other piers nearby.56 One of the most remarkable things about this remarkable moment is the fact that black longshoremen joined the strike. African Americans had ‘‘pa[id] with their blood’’ for whatever inroads they had made on the New York waterfront, and they could find employment on only a few of the Chelsea piers at this time. But when the picketers approached the docks where several hundred black longshoremen were working, they walked off the ships and fell in with the line of march. Thus, not only Irish American women and Irish longshoremen but ‘‘British’’ seamen (who were very likely Irish, in most cases), Italian coal heavers, and, now, black dockworkers were all 55. Doyle, ‘‘Striking for Ireland,’’ 357, 360, 365, 372. I have covered the strike in some detail in Bruce Nelson, Divided We Stand: American Workers and the Struggle for Black Equality (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 26–38. 56. David Brundage, ‘‘The 1920 New York Dockers’ Boycott: Class, Gender, Race and Irish-American Nationalism’’ (paper presented at the Organization of American Historians Annual Meeting, Chicago, April 1992); Doyle, ‘‘Striking for Ireland,’’ 357–73, 664n50; New York Times, August 28, 1920, 1, 3; New York World, August 29, 1920, sec. 2, 1; New York Tribune, August 28, 1920, 1.

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marching for the cause of Irish freedom.57 (According to the New York World, the blacks shouted ‘‘Free Africa’’ as they joined the procession.) When the boycott spread to the Brooklyn waterfront, rank-and-file spokesman Patrick McGovern told a mass meeting of strikers that ‘‘three thousand stalwart men have stopped work to force . . . British troops out of Ireland. It’s the Irish spirit—no use—England can’t kill it.’’ But McGovern went on to add, ‘‘it’s not simply an Irishman’s fight. It is the fight of labor all over the world.’’ Leonora O’Reilly also spoke at the meeting and made the same point. ‘‘They can no longer divide us on religious lines or on lines of nationality,’’ she declared. ‘‘Labor is labor, the same the world over.’’ 58 And so the struggle for Irish independence had become ‘‘the fight of labor,’’ if not ‘‘all over the world,’’ then certainly on the New York waterfront. This remarkable event, and the rhetoric that accompanied it, compels us to return to one of the Irish patriots whose actions triggered the strike, namely Terence MacSwiney, the republican lord mayor of Cork and a commandant in the Irish Republican Army, whose hunger strike had begun with his arrest by British authorities on August 12 and would last seventy-four days, until his death on October 25.59 MacSwiney represents, in a particularly clear and vivid form, a mystical republican faith that was steeped in the language of redemptive suffering, and that was entirely—if not uniquely—oblivious to the commitment to social transformation that animated Frank Walsh, Leonora O’Reilly, and other activists in the IPL. Upon becoming lord mayor of Cork, he had declared, ‘‘It is not those who can inflict the most, but those who can suffer the most, who will conquer.’’ Rooting his actions in the ‘‘spiritual liberty that comes to us dripping in the blood of Christ crucified,’’ MacSwiney told his captors, ‘‘The liberty for which we strive today is a sacred thing,’’ and ‘‘because it is sacred, . . . death for it is akin to the sacrifice on Calvary.’’ He characterized the British regime in Ireland as ‘‘evil incarnate. With it there can be no parley any more than there can be truce with the powers of Hell. We ask no mercy and we will accept no compromise.’’ 60 57. Nelson, Divided We Stand, 12–21, 24–25; Brundage, ‘‘The 1920 New York Dockers’ Boycott,’’ 10–11; Doyle, ‘‘Striking for Ireland,’’ 366–67, 370; New York World, August 29, 1920, sec. 2, 2, sec. 1, 4; New York Times, August 28, 1920, 3. 58. New York Tribune, August 28, 1920, 1; New York World, August 29, 1920, sec. 1, 4, sec. 2, 2; New York Times, September 3, 1920, 1; Doyle, ‘‘Striking for Ireland,’’ 371. 59. Peter Hart, The I.R.A. and Its Enemies: Violence and Community in Cork, 1916–1923 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 84–85; Francis J. Costello, Enduring the Most: The Life and Death of Terence MacSwiney (Dingle: Brandon, 1995). 60. ‘‘Mayor MacSwiney’s Speech at the Trial’’ (August 1920), in ‘‘American Commission on Conditions in Ireland[,] Second Report:—Hearings in Washington, D.C., December 8 and

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According to the republican historian, Dorothy Macardle, MacSwiney’s hunger strike was ‘‘more potent than all else combined [in drawing] the world’s attention and sympathy towards Ireland.’’ Even the then obscure Vietnamese revolutionary Ho Chi Minh was moved by MacSwiney’s heroic sacrifice to declare that ‘‘a nation which has such citizens will never surrender’’; while leaders of the African Diaspora saw his example as further vindication of their belief that Irish nationalism represented a model—indeed, the model—for their own struggles for the freedom and unity of ‘‘the African race.’’ 61 We must ask, now, what effect MacSwiney’s republicanism had on progressive Irish nationalists in the United States and throughout the diaspora. Did it pull them toward the embrace of a ‘‘pure and simple’’ republican faith? Did it pull them, also, toward a perception of Ireland as a place apart from the rest of the world, a place unrelated to other revolutionary and anticolonial struggles? The answers to these questions are complex and multidimensional. If Terence MacSwiney and his passionately articulate sister Mary represented one pole of republicanism, then Liam Mellows surely represented another. One of the most thoughtful and respected leaders of the anti-Treaty (or Republican) forces in the Civil War, Mellows was taken prisoner at the Four Courts in June 1922 and executed by the Free State leadership in December of that year in one of the Civil War’s cruelest and most illogical atrocities. During his confinement in Mountjoy Prison, he had begun to articulate a program for the regeneration of the besieged Republican movement, pointing, above all, to the need to link republicanism with the struggles of the ‘‘men of no property.’’ He declared that the famed Democratic Programme of January 1919 must ‘‘be translated into something definite. This is essential,’’ he said, ‘‘if the great body of workers are to be kept on the side of Independence.’’ In identifying the practical implications of the Democratic Programme, Mellows drew on a recent editorial in the Workers’ Republic, the organ of Ireland’s tiny Communist Party, which had recognized the need for a ‘‘second revolution to save the first.’’ At the heart of this ‘‘second revolution’’ was, of course, the question of land and the declaration that ‘‘the lands of the aristocracy . . . [must] be seized and divided 9, 1920[,] Testimony of Mrs. Terence MacSwiney and Miss Mary MacSwiney,’’ Nation 111 (December 22, 1920), sec. 2:753–54. 61. Dorothy Macardle, The Irish Republic, 4th ed. (Dublin: Irish Press, 1951), 382–83, 391– 92, quoted on 391; Ho Chi Minh quoted in Bill Rolston and Michael Shannon, Encounters: How Racism Came to Ireland (Belfast: Beyond the Pale, 2002), 92.

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among . . . the agricultural laborers . . . [and] small farmers.’’ ‘‘Such proposals were easier formulated than made good,’’ to be sure, but they represented a step toward the merging of the social and national questions in ways that would have resonated with Michael Davitt and the young Patrick Ford. Unlike the Communists, Mellows was not a marginal figure; he stood close to the center of the Republican movement and its leadership. But his execution, and the defeat and fragmentation of the anti-Treaty forces, served to marginalize the questions he had identified as critical to Ireland’s ‘‘Independence.’’ 62 I want to conclude by returning to the American connection, and to a consideration of the trajectory of another Republican activist—namely, Peter Golden, an actor, poet, and singer who left Ireland for the United States in 1901, served as secretary of the IPL from its inception in 1917 to its dissolution in 1920, and then became the national secretary of de Valera’s American Association for the Recognition of the Irish Republic. Golden was born in Macroom, County Cork, in 1877, the youngest of seven children. His mother died two weeks after his birth; his father passed away when his youngest son was only eight. At the age of twenty-four, Peter joined a brother and two sisters who were living in St. Louis. He graduated from the St. Louis School of Elocution and Dramatic Art, became a U.S. citizen, and, in addition to writing poetry, developed a successful career in the theater. But Golden was also a political activist. He founded the first Sinn Féin–affiliated organization in the United States and helped launch a pro– Sinn Féin newspaper in 1908. As secretary of the IPL and, even more so, as the key administrator in the American Association for the Recognition of the Irish Republic, he was at the very heart of the nationalist movement in the United States during the most critical stages of the struggle for Irish independence.63 Golden, a second cousin of Terence MacSwiney and strong supporter of the anti-Treaty forces, returned home for a few months in 1922 and soon thereafter recorded his observations in a book entitled Impressions of Ireland. For Golden, the conflict that divided the Irish nation was marked by a set of stark polarities: ‘‘simplicity’’ versus ‘‘subtlety,’’ ‘‘things of the mind and . . . spirit’’ versus a crass and narrow materialism; in the Civil War, an 62. Greaves, Liam Mellows, 357–92. 63. Jim Herlihy, Peter Golden: The Voice of Ireland (Cork: Peter Golden Commemoration Committee, 1994), 5–21; Peter Golden, Impressions of Ireland (New York: Irish Industries Depot, n.d. [1923]), 75.

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‘‘army of volunteers fighting for liberty’’ versus an ‘‘army of mercenaries fighting for money’’; and, in regard to the Treaty itself, ‘‘absolutely uncompromising . . . Republican principles’’ versus a fatally flawed ‘‘compromise . . . which left England supreme.’’ The heroes of his story were the MacSwiney sisters, Mary and Annie, Erskine Childers, Liam Lynch, and Eamon de Valera. ‘‘Mary Mac’’ was Terence MacSwiney’s sister but also a leading republican voice in her own right. During the debate over the Treaty in Dáil Éireann, she had reminded the delegates that among her brother’s last words to her was the statement, ‘‘Thank God there will be no more compromises now.’’ And she, at least, remained ‘‘absolutely uncompromising in her Republican principles.’’ Childers, the leading Republican publicist, was, in Golden’s rendering, a ‘‘gentle, childlike, almost Christlike soul.’’ Lynch, the chief of staff of the Republican military forces, was ‘‘very simple,’’ ‘‘quiet,’’ ‘‘almost shy,’’ but ‘‘simple with the simplicity . . . of Pearse and MacSwiney.’’ This was a quality Golden found in virtually all of the Republican soldiers he encountered. He marveled at their youth, at their eager faces, at the ‘‘great light shining from their eyes’’—above all, at ‘‘their simplicity and their utter freedom from what one might call ‘swank.’’’ The Free State soldiers, by way of contrast, were ‘‘mercenaries,’’ driven by material want, characterized by drunkenness, indiscipline, and, perhaps worst of all, ‘‘English accents and English ways.’’ 64 And then there was ‘‘Dev,’’ the embattled president of the Irish Republic who was now a fugitive in his own country. Golden had worked closely with de Valera during his mission to the United States and was struck by the contrast between his status in America—where ‘‘thousands clamor[ed] to see him, to hear him, to get near enough to touch his hand’’—and his reputation in the Free State, where he was reviled as a ‘‘wild-eyed . . . fanatic . . . eager for his fellow’s blood.’’ But Golden found him ‘‘a man heartsick and distraught at all the terrible things that have come to the nation and its people,’’ a man who preached not death but ‘‘life’’ and ‘‘forgiveness.’’ His description of his encounter with ‘‘the Chief,’’ at a ‘‘little house . . . on a lonely hillside,’’ resonates with the Christian and Gaelic mysticism that had become the hallmark of class-unconscious republicanism. As Golden entered the yard, he heard ‘‘borne to me on the night air what I think is the most beautifully musical sound I have ever listened to—the kind of sound one hears but once in a lifetime, and, having heard it, holds and hoards it in one’s memory for all time—it is the rise and fall of the voices of Irish peasants saying the rosary in 64. Golden, Impressions, 12, 14, 18, 38, 39, 44, 80, 89.

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Gaelic.’’ Among these peasants, kneeling and saying the rosary with them on the floor of their ‘‘neatly kept kitchen[,] . . . was Ireland’s hunted but faithful Chief, De Valera.’’ 65 In New York, especially during his three years as secretary of the IPL, Peter Golden had often shared the meeting hall, and the rostrum, with Socialists such as Morris Hillquit and Norman Thomas. As a member of the IPL, moreover, Golden had linked the struggles of Russia and Ireland, calling on one occasion for the withdrawal of ‘‘arm[ies] of occupation’’ from the two nations ‘‘so that the Irish and Russian peoples may be left to work out their own destiny,’’ hailing Russia on another occasion as ‘‘the first government to recognize Ireland in her struggle for self-determination.’’ In Impressions of Ireland, however, there is no sense of a wider solidarity, no hint of socialism, no reference to the social question in any form. True, the author alluded once to the ‘‘slum-bitten and impoverished’’ children he encountered in Cork city, but not to condemn slums or poverty or to suggest the possibility that such a condition could be altered by the conscious intervention of republican men and women. On the contrary, it was the distinctive ‘‘music’’ of the children’s voices that captured his attention and inspired the declaration that he would ‘‘gladly travel across the ocean any time to hear [this] music’’ as the children played on the streets. Insofar as Golden embraced a vision of a transformed Ireland, it had no socioeconomic dimension. Rather, he recalled ‘‘the light in [Liam Lynch’s] face as he unfolded all the things that were in store for Ireland—things of the mind and of the spirit.’’ According to Golden, Lynch was ‘‘fighting against terrible odds for the liberation of his country so that it might again be the centre of culture and learning even as it had been many centuries before’’; fighting, that is, to recover and regenerate the ancient island of saints and scholars.66 No doubt many forces converged to create the mood and vision that are so vividly evident in Golden’s Impressions of Ireland. By 1922, insurgents who had seemed invincible a few short years ago were now in retreat and disarray in many parts of the world. But Golden, who died in 1926, dared to believe that Ireland could—indeed, would—become the imagined community he saw embodied in de Valera’s prayerful posture on that lonely hillside during the Civil War. Perhaps he would have found belated vindication in his hero’s triumph in the 1930s, which reinforced a long-standing republican credo that Ireland’s ‘‘true destiny lay in cultivating her national distinc65. Golden, Impressions, 54–55. 66. Greaves, Liam Mellows, 198–99, 205; Golden, Impressions, 34, 39.

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tiveness as assiduously as possible.’’ 67 With the benefit—and constraints— of hindsight, many have viewed this outcome as foreordained. But in the lives of Liam Mellows, Frank Walsh, and Leonora O’Reilly, and in Ireland’s ‘‘hidden’’ social revolution that developed alongside the struggle for national independence, we can hear other voices and see another vision—a radically democratic and internationalist vision that brought the legacy of Patrick Ford and Michael Davitt forward into a new and auspicious historical era. That their vision remained unfulfilled does not make its adherents any less Irish than those whose vision and agenda triumphed. Indeed, the example of Mellows, Walsh, O’Reilly, and many others demonstrates the complexity and the multiple dimensions of the nationalist tradition and stands as a warning against the temptation to reinvent the ‘‘Irishman by nature.’’

67. Terence Brown, Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, 1922–1985 (London: Fontana, 1985), quoted on 146.

The Revisionist Debate in Ireland

Kevin Whelan

Introduction Over the last three decades in Ireland, a vigorous, and at times vicious, historiographical debate has proceeded alongside the Northern Troubles. In a country where current political divides were based as much on the past as on contemporary social divisions, and where that past was claimed as a mandate for political action, the appeal to history was ever present in public discourse. The pressure on the past to explain and justify the present intensified the historiographical debate, propelling the anxious search for a history that would liberate Irish people from their history. In the 1990s, there was an audible collective exhalation of the national breath: with the advent of the Celtic Tiger, the IRA cessation, the public disclosure of long-hidden abuses within the political system and the Catholic Church, there was a palpable sense that modern Ireland was at last shucking off a baleful historical inheritance. In turn, that 1990s moment also threw into sharper relief the project of historical revisionism that had dominated the writing of Irish history from the 1960s to the 1990s. This debate itself requires boundary 2 31:1, 2004. Copyright © 2004 by Duke University Press.

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historical contextualization, as historians have treated it as an internal disciplinary issue, a technical matter of historiography, properly divorced from broader political and cultural settings.1 The historians’ approach misses the point, as the challenges to this dominant revisionism have come from outside the orthodoxy of disciplinary history. In this respect, the Irish debate echoes the wider questioning that has occupied historians since the challenge of structuralism to their ontology first surfaced.2 This essay has three main sections: an initial framing of the Irish independence project and its loss of nerve; the identification of revisionism as part of this retreat and the tracing of its different manifestations; and a detailed analysis of historical writing on the Great Irish Famine to illustrate these more general points. 1. Setting the Political Stage The revisionist debate should be seen in a long-term perspective. There had been a spectacular efflorescence of cultural and political energies in the late nineteenth century—the period of the Irish Literary Revival. The generation born during or just after the Famine who came to maturity between 1880 and 1920—notably Michael Davitt,3 Michael Cusack,4 1. See Ciaran Brady, ed., Interpreting Irish History: The Debate on Historical Revisionism, 1938–1994 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1994). Other related collections of essays include Daltún O Ceallaigh, ed., Reconsiderations of Irish History and Culture (Dublin: Léirmheas, 1994); and D. G. Boyce and Alan O’Day, eds., The Making of Modern Irish History: Revisionism and the Revisionist Controversy (London: Routledge, 1996). For a broader narrative, see Luke Gibbons, ‘‘Constructing the Canon: Versions of National Identity,’’ in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, ed. Seamus Deane, 3 vols. (Derry: Field Day, 1991), 2:950–1020; and ‘‘Challenging the Canon: Revisionism and Cultural Criticism,’’ in Field Day Anthology, 3:561–680. 2. Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); and Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The ‘‘Objectivity Question’’ and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 3. The family of Michael Davitt (1846–1906) was evicted in 1850, at which time they emigrated to England. Davitt founded the Land League in 1879, which successfully agitated for ‘‘peasant proprietorship.’’ He wrote about the pogroms against Jews in Russia, the plight of the aborigines in Australia, and of the Kanakas in the South Sea Islands. 4. Michael Cusack (1847–1906) was founder of the Gaelic Athletic Association in 1884. He was a teacher, a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (the Fenians), and established the Civil Service Academy to prepare students for imperial examinations. He called himself ‘‘Citizen’’ Cusack and appears as the Cyclops in Joyce’s Ulysses.

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Douglas Hyde,5 Patrick Pearse,6 W. B. Yeats, and Daniel Corkery 7—pioneered a remarkably experimental culture, founding the Gaelic Athletic Association, the Gaelic League, the Irish Literary Revival, the Abbey Theatre, and a nationalist narrative of Irish history.8 It was also much admired outside Ireland.9 The creativity of that 1880–1920 generation rapidly shriveled as it was formalized in the new state into a reified command culture. This raises the key question: Why did the independent state so spectacularly lose its nerve? It is important to contextualize the choices open to it. While the conservatism of the Irish Free State and the failure of its social and cultural imagination are well known, the development of southern Irish society after independence demands also to be assessed against wider European and postcolonial contexts. It was born in blood with the enormous damage to national self-confidence inflicted by a bitter civil war. In many respects, the social revolution in Ireland had been accomplished in the Land War a generation earlier, and the enormous emigration following the Famine drained the constituency for sweeping social change. The Catholic Church, a powerful conservative influence within the society, had also remodeled itself in the post-Famine ‘‘Devotional Revolution’’ and was settling strongly into institutional rigidity. In 1922, the novelist James Stephens formulated the issues facing Ireland: ‘‘In my own country of Ireland, man is now in the making, and in a very few years our national action will tell us what it is we may hope for culturally, or what it is that we may be tempted to emigrate from. But Irish national action and culture can no longer be regarded as a thing growing cleanly from its own root. We have entered the world. 5. Douglas Hyde (1860–1949) was an Irish-language scholar and activist. He established the Gaelic League in 1893 to revive Irish-language use. He was the first president of Ireland, 1937–1945. 6. Patrick Pearse (1879–1916) was a poet and editor of the Gaelic League newspaper An Claidheamh Soluis (1903–1909). He was a visionary educationalist, was involved in the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and signed the 1916 proclamation. He was executed by the British in 1916. 7. Daniel Corkery (1878–1964) was a teacher and writer whose best-known works are The Hidden Ireland: A Study of Gaelic Munster in the Eighteenth Century (Dublin: Gill, 1925) and Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature (Dublin: Cork University Press, 1931). 8. I pursue this theme at length in ‘‘The Memories of the Dead,’’ Yale Journal of Criticism 15, no. 1 (2002): 59–97. 9. The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s was modeled on the Literary Revival’s experiment with Hiberno-English speech. See Tracy Mishkin, The Harlem and Irish Renaissances: Language, Identity, and Representation (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998).

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More, the world has entered us, and a double, an internal and an external, evolution is our destiny, as it is the destiny of every race in the world.’’ 10 One choice of the independent state was explicitly to embrace a revolutionary remodeling of Irish society and the Irish state, and to strive for an Ireland that was genuinely international, securely Irish, and nonprovincial. The other option was to strangle those transformative energies at birth and to collapse back into a gratefully provincial, pseudo-Gaelic, Catholic backwater, mirroring similar tendencies in the statelet of Northern Ireland, which was, in the words of its first prime minister, James Craig, ‘‘a Protestant state for a Protestant people.’’ In the Civil War of 1922–23, the second option eclipsed the first. In effect, the Civil War was a counterrevolution, designed to wipe out Sinn Féin, the party that had shattered the Irish Parliamentary Party at the polls in 1918 and whose Democratic Programme in 1919 was an imaginative statement of social justice.11 The Civil War facilitated a resurrection of the conservative nationalist position, through which the anglicized Irish middle class (backed by the Catholic Church) stifled the revolutionary impulse.12 In this sense, the 1916–1923 period was as much a coffin as a cradle of the revolution, and a period during which its most radical minds—including Roger Casement,13 Patrick Pearse, James Connolly,14 Michael Collins,15 Thomas MacDonagh,16 and 10. James Stephens, ‘‘The Outlook for Literature’’ (1922), in The Uncollected Prose of James Stephens, ed. P. McFate (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), 187–78. 11. Deane, Field Day Anthology, 3:734–35. 12. Eimar O’Duffy, The Wasted Island (1919), rev. ed. (London: Macmillan, 1929), was the earliest literary critique of the conservative turn after the revolution, predating Sean O’Casey’s much-better-known trilogy of plays, The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), Juno and the Paycock (1924), and The Plough and the Stars (1926). 13. Roger Casement (1864–1916) was a pioneer humanitarian in the Congo and the Amazon. He became a committed anti-imperialist, joined the Irish nationalist movement, and solicited German support for the movement. He was executed by the British in 1916, amid a furor over alleged homosexual diaries. 14. James Connolly (1868–1916) was born in Edinburgh. He was a Marxist and Union organizer and the author of the pioneering Labour in Irish History (1910) and The Reconquest of Ireland (1915). He set up the Irish Citizen Army, opposed the imperialist world war in 1914, joined the IRB in 1916, and was executed by the British in 1916. 15. Michael Collins (1890–1922) was a member of the IRB, fought in 1916, and later was involved in Sinn Féin. He was one of the principal architects of the War of Independence and later negotiated the Anglo-Irish Treaty and led the Pro-Treaty side in the Civil War that followed. He was killed by Irish Republicans in 1922 at the age of thirty-two. His death prevented any possibility of a negotiated settlement between Pro- and Anti-Treaty republicans. 16. Thomas MacDonagh (1878–1916), an educational pioneer, was involved in the lan-

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Liam Mellows 17—were all executed or killed. The 1920s also prompted the exodus of talented but embittered republicans, especially to the United States. The Free State then terminated revolutionary legal experiments such as the Dáil Courts, closed down the debate over the ending of English Common Law, killed off social experiments such as the Soviets, stifled the emerging feminist movement, introduced a prohibition on divorce in 1925, and espoused censorship in 1929. It reinstated anglicized, middleclass, Catholic values (the church’s anti-Britishness was a form of antiProtestantism). The Eucharistic Congress of June 1932 represented the triumphant public staging of this fusion of Catholicism and nationalism in Irish identity. It was presented as the culmination of Irish history, marking the fifteen hundredth anniversary of the introduction of Catholicism to Ireland by St. Patrick in 432 (his bell was taken from the National Museum and used at the Mass to signal the continuity). Over 1 million people (out of a state population of 3 million) attended Mass in the Phoenix Park to hear the great Irish tenor John McCormack sing the Panis Angelicus. The event also drew a line under civil war hostilities, helped by the peaceful democratic transition to a Fianna Fáil government composed of the group defeated in the Civil War. Its staging in Dublin signaled international recognition of the stability of the Free State, while the remarkably enthusiastic participation of the Dublin slum dwellers demonstrated that the state was strongly insulated from communism. The successor state in the twenty-six counties sponsored a nationalist project constructed around the hegemonic block of the national bourgeoisie (agrarian and small business) and intertwining the state with the Catholic Church. This had all the dangers of the inward turn, with the resultant postcolonial paralysis—the ossifying orthodoxy of the emergent state that retains the institutional and ideological apparatus of the prior colonial state. An artificially constructed Irish identity—Catholic, not Protestant; rural, not urban; Celtic, not Anglo-Saxon; agrarian, not industrial; religious, not secular—was imposed in the name of tradition. Culture had to act initially as the site of self-differentiation, and therefore of resistance; once that resistance became politically successful, the new state had then to redeem the national culture by cleansing it of its colonial impurities and retrieving that which had guage revival. He was a founding member of the Irish Theatre and author of Literature in Ireland: Studies Irish and Anglo-Irish (Dublin: Talbot Press, 1916). A member of the IRB, he signed the 1916 proclamation. He was executed by the British in 1916. 17. Liam Mellows (1892–1922) was a socialist republican and advocated an advanced social program. He was executed as a reprisal in the Civil War by the Pro-Treaty side.

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been blemished or repressed. Culture as the self-conscious construction and mobilization of difference was subordinated to the service of politics. The state-endorsed project promoted the retrieval of an authentic tradition whose continuity differentiated the primordial nation from those who colonized it. The cultural nationalism of the independent state anxiously sought the pure, the original, the authentic, the traditional, to recuperate a depleted wholeness. This nationalist project also contained a spatial imaginary that elevated landscape into a crucial component of national identity. The rural west was projected as the authentic Ireland, a materialization of an unsullied primordial past, a living core of indigenous society that embodied time as well as space. The Irish-speaking westerner, in the micro-worlds of the Aran and the Blasket Islands, was saturated in an uncontaminated national subjectivity, a prelapsarian state of plenitude. The west therefore became an outdoor therapy center for the recuperation of national authenticity. By contrast, the capital city, Dublin, was allowed to moulder, an unwanted architectural remnant of a discredited colonial dispensation. 2. Three Phases of Revisionism First-Phase Revisionism The first phase of revisionism conventionally dates back to 1938, when T. W. Moody and R. D. Edwards 18 founded Irish Historical Studies as a technical journal for historians dedicated to archivally based research and self-consciously opposed to nationalist myth in the name of scientific objectivity. From the beginning, it involved historians trained in British institutions—notably the Institute of Historical Research in London and, later, Cambridge, especially Peterhouse College. British history, with its enormous stress on the constitutional tradition and state stability, was accepted as the norm and the standard of comparison, although the distinctive English experience differentiated it dramatically from the varied forms of European experience. The great weight of emphasis on the evolutionary stability of the British state, with its long internal peace (conveniently cordoning off its more troubled imperial component, with its history of incessant war), contrasted with the more unsettled, frequently revolutionary history of 18. T. W. Moody (1907–1984) was professor of modern history at Trinity College Dublin, 1939–1977. Robert Dudley Edwards (1909–1988) was appointed lecturer in modern Irish history at University College Dublin in 1942.

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the European continent, exemplified by France, Germany, and Russia. By situating Irish history within a narrow British comparative frame, revisionism espoused a deeply ideological choice.19 Conservatism was the hallmark of the revisionist project, with its narrowly provincial focus on the intellectual life of London, Cambridge, and Oxford, and its pride in a philosophy of positivism and empiricism. While it paraded its up-to-dateness, Irish Historical Studies was already oldfashioned at its inception and remote from the cutting edge of contemporary European historiography. Its parochialism was demonstrated by its insulation from the intellectual revolt in historiography spearheaded by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre in France, and signaled by the advent in 1929 of the innovative journal Annales. From the beginning, revisionism was committed to an old-fashioned style of writing history with a resolutely political and administrative focus, and it was only in the 1970s that cultural, social, and economic history appeared on the agenda. From its inception, revisionism was also almost exclusively focused on the south: no effort was made to revise the north. This effect was exaggerated by its deliberate strategy of excluding twentieth-century history as inappropriate to its methodological procedures. One result was to attenuate the range and quality of public debate in Ireland, north and south. Another was to displace contemporary political issues with an obvious historical dimension into the past, so that the historiography became a carefully disguised intervention in politics. Similarly, it excluded oral history as irredeemably tainted by subjectivity. Presumably Moody and Edwards had in mind the recent establishment in 1935 of the Irish Folklore Commission, whose remit was to collect oral accounts. Despite the fact that its records constitute one of the earliest global archives of oral history and that it offered—especially in its wealth of Irish-language materials—a compelling counterpoint to the partisan official archives generated by a colonial administration, Irish historians were professionally trained to ignore them. This bias also had the effect of encouraging historians to confine their attention to the English language, excluding Irish (the majority language of the island for many centuries) as a necessary part of a historian’s training. The contrast to the historians’ approach can be vividly seen in two projects contemporaneous 19. A contrasting example was provided by the Irish historian D. B. Quinn (1909–2002). A pioneer of an Atlantic-oriented history that breached the bounds of national narrative, his Marxist approach to English imperial expansion in the Tudor and Stuart period did not appeal to Irish revisionists. See The Elizabethans and the Irish (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press for the Folger Shakespeare Library [Washington], 1966).

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with the founding of Irish Historical Studies. The Irish-language scholars Carl Marstrander, George Thompson, Robin Flower, and Kenneth Jackson succeeded in building a generous intellectual community with the Blasket islanders, eliciting a major literary flowering.20 Similarly, the anthropological section of the Harvard Irish Study, 1931–1936, conducted by Conrad Arensberg (1910–1997) and Solon Kimball (1909–1982), pioneered participant observation in their study of West Clare, thereby producing (with the help of astute local commentators) a classic ethnographic study of rural Irish life.21 The revisionist coterie believed that an enlightened elite could emancipate the country from nationalist tyranny. Revisionism also had a cultural wing, associated with Moody’s friend, Seán O’Faoláin (1900–1991). His popular biographies of Daniel O’Connell,22 Hugh O’Neill,23 and Theobald Wolfe Tone 24 presented all three nationalist icons—with Eamon de Valera very much in mind—as thwarted modernizers, trapped and ultimately betrayed by the atavism and moribund conservatism of traditional Gaelic society. For O’Faoláin, the Irish obsession with the past created a mummified society, haplessly marooned between an unattainable golden age from which they were irrevocably severed and a future which they were incapable of embracing because of their thralldom to historical myth: ‘‘We lived under the hypnosis of the past, our timidities about the future, our excessive reverence for old traditions, our endemic fear of new ways, of new thinking, the opiate of that absurd historical myth, and the horror of the feeling of solitude that comes on every man who dares push out his boat from the security of his old, cosy, familiar harbour into unknown seas.’’ Disputing the inflated claims of Corkery’s The Hidden Ireland, O’Faoláin asserted that there was nothing of value to be retrieved from the Gaelic period for a democratic project—its social and cultural system was ‘‘exclusive, despotic, aris20. Diarmuid Ó Giolláin, Locating Irish Folklore: Tradition, Modernity, Identity (Cork: Cork University Press, 2000), 125–28. 21. See the introduction by Anne Byrne, Ricca Edmundson, and Tony Varley to the third edition of Conrad Arensberg and Solon Kimball, Family and Community in Ireland (Ennis: Clasp Press, 2001), i-ci. The book appeared originally in 1940. See also Conrad Arensberg, The Irish Countryman: An Anthropological Study (London: Macmillan, 1937). 22. Seán O’Faoláin, King of the Beggars: A Life of Daniel O’Connell, the Irish Liberator, in a Study of the Rise of the Modern Irish Democracy (1775–1847) (London: Thomas Nelson, 1938). 23. Seán O’Faoláin, The Great O’Neill: A Biography of Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, 1550– 1616 (London: Longmans, 1942). 24. The Autobiography of Theobald Wolfe Tone (London: Thomas Nelson, 1937).

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tocratic.’’ 25 His modernizing crusade found expression in his new journal, the Bell, established in 1940. While the quality of this remarkable journal has been frequently and justly praised, it is less often noticed that it operated within a comforting set of binaries—modernization and tradition, the city and the country, the archive and tradition, text and orality, east and west, secular and religious, fact and myth. From its inception in the 1930s, the revisionist project was therefore closely linked to its literary equivalent, the Counter-revival. In reaction to the Literary Revival, this literary group claimed that Ireland occupied a secular, ordinary time, not a heroic saga time; its place was flat, provincial, not extraordinary or exotic (such as the Greece of James Joyce, the Asia of Yeats); its light was the plain light of day, not Yeats’s Celtic Twilight, or the Joycean crepuscular. In postrevolutionary tristesse, it sank back into a bored, bureaucratic, determinedly ordinary world—evoked by a pint of plain, fried eggs, bicycle clips, the world satirized by Flann O’Brien, in his Irishlanguage and English-language fiction.26 This deflated, disenchanted outlook mirrored the wider pessimism of 1930s’ capitalism after the Wall Street crash and the resulting global turn toward cultural introversion. Thus, Irish cultural production retreated from the epic preferences of Joyce and Yeats to the short stories of Frank O’Connor and O’Faoláin. Their argument was that the novel was the mature aesthetic form of a mature society; the corollary was that the short story was the appropriate genre for a society such as Ireland, prerevolutionary Russia, or New Zealand, subject to ‘‘incomplete modernization.’’ 27 Second-Phase Revisionism The second phase of revisionism appeared in the 1960s—a direct response to the dreadful 1950s and the resulting decision to open up the Irish economy to multinational industry from 1958 onward. In the face of consistently humiliating demographics and economic stagnation, and a deepening sense of the failure of the entire independence project, autarkic economic policies were abandoned as a modernizing Taoiseach (prime minister) replaced de Valera. A new policy, the First Programme of Economic Recovery, was instituted in 1958. Among its key components were 25. Seán O’Faoláin, The Irish, 2d ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 162. 26. Seamus Deane, Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing Since 1790 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). 27. Seán O’Faoláin, The Short Story (London: William Collins, 1948); Frank O’Connor, The Backward Look: A Survey of Irish Literature (London: Macmillan, 1967).

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joining the fiscal institutions of international capitalism, the World Bank and the IMF, applying to join the European Common Market, and inviting in multinational industry through a liberal taxation regime and access to cheap labor. These innovations seemed to bring instantaneous success—again predicated on wider changes, as the 1960s gave birth to the consumer society—and Ireland benefited from its renewed exposure to confident and expansive British and American economies. The economic upturn was also paralleled by striking social change in the 1960s, which posed a vigorous challenge to existing models of identity politics. The state nationalist paradigm seemed to be dissolving rapidly through the internationalization of capital, the impact of global communications, rapid transformations in attitudes to sexuality, and shifting gender roles. Inevitably, the sense of social ferment also had an effect on attitudes to the national question. Doubts about the received revolutionary ideology surfaced in the early 1960s within republican circles in response to the disastrous border campaign of 1956–1961 and the growing influence of Marxism in decolonization movements worldwide. Eventually these discussions precipitated a full-scale split between Marxist and nationalist factions. In the Republic, the Marxist group—mutating through the variants Official Sinn Féin, the Workers Party, and finally the Democratic Left—became the principal political vector of revisionism, both social and national. The revisionist impulse of the 1960s deepened and darkened in response to the reemergence of political violence in Northern Ireland in 1969. This second-phase revisionism, associated initially with the Jesuit Fr. F. X. Shaw,28 Garret Fitzgerald, and Conor Cruise O’Brien,29 more explicitly attacked the received national narrative, questioned the independence project, and pronounced the failure of the postimperial state. The statesponsored fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising in 1966 gave it impetus. Rather than identifying long-run historical explanations (notably colonialism) as the root cause of Irish difficulties, it sought instead to diagnose the difficulties within Irish society as self-generated, derived from the stifling narrowness of the combined effects of Catholicism and a Gaelic nationalism, allied to an entrenched Irish bourgeoisie’s grasp on economic power, and symbolized by the Fianna Fáil Party, and notably by Charles J. Haughey, 28. F. X. Shaw, ‘‘The Canon of Irish History: A Challenge,’’ in Studies 61 (1972): 113–52. Shaw’s attack on the men of 1916, notably Pearse, was originally written in 1966 as a critique of the state commemoration of the 1916 Rising. 29. Conor Cruise O’Brien, States of Ireland (London: Hutchinson, 1972). Cruise O’Brien had written anti-partition literature in the early phases of his career as a civil servant.

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its leading figure from the 1960s to the 1980s.30 A modernization theme was endorsed, entirely detached from any constructive or transformative alternative, and the consensus developed that ‘‘traditional’’ Ireland was itself alone the principal root of all Irish problems.31 In this model, anything distinctively Irish—the language, traditional music, Gaelic sports—was stigmatized as an example of a narrow parochialism. Irish nationalism was presented as a potent home brew of atavism, tradition, and Catholicism. Unionism in Ireland was Protestant, cosmopolitan, and directed from the top down; nationalism was Catholic, indigenous, and directed from the bottom up. In this perspective, nationalism’s sinister attraction was interpreted as an emotional compensation for enlightened rationalism: nationalism was the dark, introverted, bloody reaction to the triumph of the Enlightenment. This very mundane English analysis proved enormously seductive to Irish revisionists. It endorsed unionism as a superior political form to nationalism, a position also adopted on doctrinaire Marxist lines by sections of the Left. The corollary was that the northern Protestant working class belonged to an advanced industrial sector: therefore, unionism offered the only viable prospect for advancing class politics that in turn would eliminate the sectarianism endemic in northern society.32 This irenic judgment of the Protestant working class operated in tandem with a view of the Catholic working class as carriers of a backwards-looking, rurally rooted nationalism that negated any progress, political or otherwise, and that was inevitably doomed to obsolescence. Rural and nationalist Ireland was accordingly dismissed as a possible basis for class politics; instead, the state’s modernization project, predicated on imported industry, would generate an indus30. Haughey was a remarkable caricature of the postcolonial leader. His nouveau-riche lifestyle included the trappings of the Anglo-Irish gentry—horses, hunting, yachting, vintage wines, a gossip-column mistress, the Big House at Abbyville, a west-coast island retreat—and conspicuous consumption allied to personal boorishness. This was accompanied by a charade of attachment to the old pieties—language, anti-partition, the small farmers—and personal corruption on a heroic scale. In government, Haughey specialized in Grand Projets in the French presidential style—Ballymun towers, government buildings, the International Financial Services Centre, and Temple Bar. While revisionists try to assign him to traditional Ireland, Haughey in fact embodies the modernization project in twentieth-century Ireland. 31. Conor McCarthy, Modernisation, Crisis, and Culture in Ireland, 1969–1992 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2000). 32. The most egregious example is Tom Nairn’s Faces of Nationalism: Janus Revisited (London: Verso, 1997), 157–66.

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trial working class that would prove more fertile ground for class politics.33 The English Left also espoused this extraordinary analysis, which partially explains the remarkable failure of their theoretical Left (Eric Hobsbawm, Ernest Gellner, Benedict and Perry Anderson, Tom Nairn, Stuart Hall) to make any tangible contribution to understanding the Northern crisis.34 Many of those active earlier in espousing these allegedly left-wing views—Paul Bew, Conor Cruise O’Brien, Eoghan Harris—have finally followed the logical evolution of their arguments by ending up explicitly as unionists in the 1990s. Revisionism escalated in response to the Northern Troubles. The southern establishment was desperate to insulate itself from the north. It rapidly abandoned its rhetorical green nationalism and anti-Britishness, so rapidly that it moved ahead of southern public opinion. The state itself then realized that it needed to endorse a revisionism about which it had previously been hesitant, both as a means of reeducating southern opinion and as the necessary antidote to the use of the traditional nationalist narrative by the Provisional IRA (the so-called Provos) as a recruitment device. Conor Cruise O’Brien and Garret Fitzgerald 35 developed a critique of Irish nationalism as a toxic bearer of a virus of violence incubated in populist tradition. Both ended up in government in the 1970s, and as a government minister O’Brien consolidated political censorship in 1976. That propaganda effort was directed at the nationalist tradition. For the revisionists, the Irish nationalist tradition, exemplified by militant republicanism, suffered from an addiction to violence, derived not from an accurate analysis of Irish-British relations but from a flawed atavistic populism that worked as an evil catalyst for a psychopathic blood-lust. In the 1970s, revisionism also worked in tandem with British propaganda, which argued that these traits were endemic in the northern heartlands of support for the Provos, notably the Bogside, West Belfast, and South Armagh. The massive analogical leap here was to transfer psychoanalytic concepts from the level of the individual to that of the community. 33. This stance ignores the demonstrable radicalism of rural Ireland, from the Whiteboys of the 1760s to the Land War of the 1880s. Remarkably, in a still profoundly agrarian society, the Land War of the 1880s set in motion the legislative euthanasia of an entire landed class, predating the massive upheavals in Russia a few decades later. 34. Stuart Hall’s New Left classic on Thatcherism, The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left (London: Verso, 1988), simply excluded Northern Ireland, despite its seminal importance to Thatcher herself. 35. Garret Fitzgerald, Towards a New Ireland (London: C. Knight, 1972; Dublin: Torc, 1973). For his espousal of the ‘‘two nations’’ theory, see his Thoughts on Two Cultures: Learning to Live Together (London: Institute of International Studies, 1988).

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Drawing on motifs from films—notably American westerns and The Godfather trilogy—these areas were labeled ‘‘Bandit Country,’’ where the violence was fomented by Provo ‘‘godfathers’’ who preyed on their host communities. The effort was to drive a wedge between the IRA and their support base, and to marginalize solidly republican communities. The propaganda battle intensified after Bloody Sunday in 1972, the crucial year of the Northern Troubles. The intentionally depoliticizing effect of this rhetoric was to criminalize republican politics. It eventually caused political repercussions in the campaign for political status for prisoners that precipitated the Hunger Strikes of 1980 and 1981. The origins of northern violence were assigned to within the northern nationalist minority and their false historical consciousness. Revisionism thereby tacitly exonerated both the British state and its unionist satellite from any responsibility for the diseased state of northern society and normalized partition. This second-phase revisionism rhetorically deployed tropes related to hygiene—stripping, cleansing, disinfecting—to lay bare the toxicity of nationalist myth. Characteristic, too, was the strict insistence on chronological exactness: history privileged events, whereas myth was attached to sites; history was experienced as a product (preferably the monograph, archive, or museum), whereas nationalist myth existed as process. A series of binary oppositions were deployed—rational versus emotional, objective versus subjective, skeptical versus credulous. In a broader cultural sense, the 1970s and 1980s were dominated by efforts to discern mythic substrates to the Irish nationalist tradition. This was evident in the influential journal the Crane Bag (1977–1985) and in Seamus Heaney’s 1975 volume North. A. T. Q. Stewart’s The Narrow Ground offered an intellectually null and emotionally disturbed version of Northern Ireland based on racial stereotypes of the most egregiously offensive kind. The volume eulogizes pre-Troubles Ulster as ‘‘stable and peaceful,’’ and is suffused with nostalgia for the ‘‘tranquility’’ of one-party-rule Northern Ireland of 1923–1968.36 A more urbane version of this type of revisionism was developed by F. S. L. Lyons (1923– 1983) in his once much-praised Culture and Anarchy in Ireland, 1890–1939 of 1979. He counterposed stark binaries between British (modern, rational, cultured, Protestant) and Irish (traditional, mythic, anarchic, Catholic) values. Viewed in this perspective, Irish nationalism rather than British colonialism was the monolith, and the unionists—southern and northern—were 36. A. T. Q. Stewart, The Narrow Ground: The Roots of Conflict in Northern Ireland (London: Faber, 1988). The book was reprinted by the Pretani Press (promoters of racial historical fantasies about the origins of Scottish settlers in Ireland) in Belfast in 1987.

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a beleaguered and heroic minority. This Arnoldian approach was fashionable in the 1970s and 1980s with such commentators as Richard Kearney and Conor Cruise O’Brien. This stance also involved the displacement of political and economic issues into strictly cultural terms, whereby the issue of justice evaporated into a dehistoricized relativism. Third-Phase Revisionism By the 1980s, revisionism had become the academic orthodoxy within the discipline of history. Yet it still insisted on positioning itself as a radical alternative to a dominant nationalist consensus: thus it behaved as a government while insisting on its oppositional status. While revisionism in its earlier two phases had been predominantly confined to the academic and political elite, a third phase developed in the 1980s with a more explicitly populist dimension. It also infiltrated influential sections of the literary and media establishment, notably the state broadcaster, RTE, the Independent newspaper group, and the Irish Times. This phase of revisionism reproduced at a more strident level the analyses developed in the earlier phases and was accompanied by a notable coarsening of the rhetoric and few methodological developments. At this stage, the revisionist historians themselves were less influential or visible than their media counterparts, except in the many cases where their output appeared as journalism. In this sense, revisionism represented a strategy of containment, stressing the urgency of reformatting popular attitudes to the past in order to undermine the appeal of republicanism. Both a deluded southern Irish and Irish American opinion needed to be reeducated about the origins of nationalist violence. Southern opinion had been nauseated already by the carnage inflicted by the Provos on northern society in pursuit of a crudely militarist ‘‘Brits Out’’ policy, which all too often degenerated into an attack on the unionist population in general. The propaganda war accelerated after the 1981 Hunger Strikes, the subsequent rise of Sinn Féin, and the perceived need on the part of the establishment to shore up the more amenable ‘‘moderate’’ nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party in the North. This ushered in a third phase of revisionism, when its now congealed discourse sought a new niche in popular culture, most notably through influential media figures.37 Revisionism was deployed as a protective shield, involving censorship of the state 37. Among the most strident commentators were Gay Byrne, Eoghan Harris, Kevin Myers, Eamonn Dunphy, and, the most influential of them, Fintan O’Toole of the Irish Times.

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broadcasting service from 1976, both to prevent access for perceived republicans and to filter out such aspects of popular culture as the traditional ballads, which were seen as carriers of an unrevised attitude to Irish history. Once the debate exited the academy and entered the media, it acquired a bruising, nasty tone even as it promoted a liberal pluralism. The mind-set was captured in the popular term ‘‘Dublin 4’’—stressing the shared postal address of RTE and University College Dublin, as well as their location in the wealthiest suburb of Dublin. This phase climaxed in 1988 with the fawning media reception of Roy Foster’s Modern Ireland, the zenith as well as the obituary of the revisionist project in Ireland. The 1990s witnessed a further splintering of national narrative, evident in the vogue for autobiography and memoir. This genre represented a deliberate privatization of memory, a return to bourgeois interiorization. Earlier classics—such as Ernie O’Malley’s two volumes—contested the public/private distinctions of their metropolitan equivalents, thus keeping in play a constant negotiation between the individual and society. The 1990s memoirs staked their claims to authenticity precisely on the grounds that they were not national narratives, unlike earlier examples of the genre, such as Dan Breen’s, Tom Barry’s, and Todd Andrews’s autobiographies.38 The autobiographical genre characteristically sets the self against others who provide adversarial definition. A hostile other stings the self to consciousness, stimulating the presentation of an indomitable survival of the self against annihilative or absorptive external energies. The challenge becomes one of finding a pattern of explanation and therefore representation of individual subjectivity. Writing itself becomes a form of resistance, a way of overcoming these external pressures. Memoirists reproduced the self as a miniaturized facsimile of the national narrative. They displayed an obsessive concern for identity and legitimacy. The individual and the political fused against a fractured and oppressive external world. They emphasized the seamless relationship of individual to community so that a personal biography also functioned as a narrative of community. In the 1990s, the representation of Britain as the hostile ‘‘Other’’ presence, so evident in Gerry Adams’s autobiographical writings, was recomposed as an amalgam of the Irish state, Irish nationalism, and Irish Catholicism. The narratives retained 38. Ernie O’Malley, On Another Man’s Wound (Dublin: Three Candles, 1936) and The Singing Flame (Dublin: Tralee, 1978); Dan Breen, My Fight for Irish Freedom (Dublin: Talbot Press, 1924); Tom Barry, Guerrilla Days in Ireland (Dublin: Irish Press, 1949); and Todd Andrews, Dublin Made Me (Cork: Mercier, 1979) and Man of No Property (Cork: Mercier, 1982).

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similar structuring devices but deployed a new Other. They also moved to position the individual outside rather than inside the community that was shamefully complicit in his or her marginalization. There was, accordingly, a striking failure to develop new narrative strategies: rather, the old ones were endlessly reformatted.39 The two most commercially successful examples of the 1990s are Nuala O’Faolain’s Are You Somebody? 40 and Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes. O’Faolain’s book presents a woman’s voice, truthful in its intimacy, carefully pitched against the hypocrisy of the loud prevalent male public orthodoxy that surrounded it. McCourt’s volume is a clever captivity narrative in which Ireland kidnaps the child who eventually breaks free to America—a morality tale that dignifies emigration as a liberating escape. It was carefully pitched to the Irish Americans of the Reagan Revolution—the 1980s generation that broke the historic Irish compact with the Democrats. The book is an endorsement of bootstrap capitalism—failure is always individual, dictated by personal character. In this way, it perfectly met the needs of an Irish America rapidly in transition to the top echelons of corporate America, and its enormous commercial success is best seen in this light. 3. The Writing of the Great Irish Famine An example, the Great Irish Famine (1845–1852), can illustrate all these variants of Irish historiography. The Famine was the single most important event in Ireland in the modern period. Uniquely, a European country suffered a catastrophe that the Continent had not endured for centuries. Over 1 million people died, and 2 million more emigrated within a decade, sending the country into a spiral of demographic decline that it has only recently arrested. The Famine and post-Famine emigration also remade Irish America as urban, industrial, and Catholic. Its hard-bitten workingclass status, its militant Catholicism, its unflinching nationalism, its minority psychology, its racism, and its paradoxical radicalism were to survive relatively intact until the 1950s, aided by Irish group cohesion, labor affiliation, and attachment to the Democratic Party. The Famine emigration created 39. Gerry Adams, Before the Dawn: An Autobiography (Dingle: Brandon, 1996) and Falls Memories: A Belfast Life (Dingle: Brandon, 1982). Contrastingly, see Joseph O’Neill, Blood-dark Track: A Family History (London, Granta, 2000), which offers a paired narrative of his grandfathers—one Irish, one Turkish—both of whom fought in the Spanish Civil War. 40. Nuala O’Faolain, Are You Somebody? The Life and Times of Nuala O’Faolain (Dublin: New Island, 1996).

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four new features of Irish America. First, there was the quantum leap in numbers, as 2 million flooded in between 1846 and 1855: this sheer weight gave the Famine generation a defining role in the evolution of the ethnic self-image and social views of Irish America. Second, 90 percent of the new emigrants were Catholic. This created a higher visibility for Catholicism in America (where the percentage of Catholics tripled from 4 to 12 percent between 1840 and 1880). Third, the post-Famine Irish had a much greater nationalist sensibility, which facilitated an exceptionally strong group distinctiveness, cohering around the preexisting level of Irish American leadership. Finally, Irish America in the post-Famine period became more industrialized (as America itself industrialized) and more regionalized (as industry became concentrated in the Northeast). The Nationalist Version The Famine had been an awkward issue throughout the 1850s. Nationalist opinion had no coherent program for dealing with the acute issues it brought up. It split over prioritizing a United Kingdom or solely Irish response; it divided again over the issues of taxation, the Rate-in-Aid, public works, a ban on exports, tenant right, and physical force. In the absence of any agreed agenda, the internal Irish response was fractious and confused, and the Famine remained a disconcerting presence in Irish politics. The first post-Famine interpretation came in 1860, with John Mitchel’s The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps).41 Mitchel’s cohesive nationalist interpretation, soldered with the white heat of moral indignation, created a powerful narrative of the Famine. His unambiguous demonstration of British culpability provided an external focus around which nationalist opinion could unite, because his narrative carried sufficient authority to command nationalist assent. By laying the blame unequivocally on British shoulders, Mitchel absolved Irish politicians of any culpability for the debacle. His persuasive narrative and fearsome indignation carried rhetorical conviction, conferring coherence on what had hitherto been an uncertain and querulous nationalist response. His fury was in part a response to post-Famine British and Irish complacency about the Famine. In the key geography textbook of the National School system, which sold literally millions of copies, the Famine was described as a catalyst for ‘‘events of a desirable character, by means of which the condition of the people, socially and politically, had been 41. John Mitchel, The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps) (Dublin: Irishman Office, 1861). This originally appeared serially in Mitchel’s newspaper, the Southern Citizen, in 1858; it appeared in a U.S. edition in 1860, and in a Dublin edition in 1861.

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greatly ameliorated, and the nation enabled to participate in some extent, in the progress in wealth and enlightenment enjoyed by other portions of the British Empire.’’ 42 Mitchel’s famous aphorism claimed that ‘‘the Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the Famine.’’ 43 He also drew a further conclusion: that the inadequate state response marked the terminal political bankruptcy of the 1801 union between Ireland and Great Britain. As circumstances deteriorated, an increasingly impoverished Ireland was left to fend for itself fiscally and was treated as a separate state or cantankerous colony rather than as an integral part of the United Kingdom. This exposed the hypocritical hollowness of the imperial argument; the resulting ‘‘hatred and horror’’ would generate an unstoppable nationalist momentum.44 Mitchel also negotiated a successful response to the Irish dimension of what Foucault termed the blackmail of the Enlightenment. The problem of the Enlightenment model was its emphatic equation of rationality, morality, and progress in a highly concatenated teleology. For Irish nationalists, this created a paralyzing bind. If Enlightenment were endorsed, the only possible outcome for Ireland would be placid dissolution into the Union, a cozy cohabitation as junior partners in progress and empire. If Enlightenment were refused, Ireland was placed outside the pale of modern civilized society, thereby consigning it once more to the realm of the irrational, barbaric, and superstitious. Mitchel sought to cancel this blackmail by constructing Ireland as a moral dark sun, the occluded other face of enlightened progress. The angular abruptness of his narrative break in 1848 established the Famine as a recurring rupture, existing not in the past but in a living 42. R. Sullivan, Geography Generalised (Dublin: Kildare Place Society, 1884), 275. Originally published in the 1850s, this book had sold more than 8 million copies in sixty-eight editions by 1884. Despite its Irish author and publication and its use in Irish schools as a basic geography text, only ten pages (of over 512) are devoted to Ireland. 43. Mitchel, Last Conquest, 324: ‘‘[It was] an artificial Famine, a Famine which desolated a rich and fertile island, that produced every year abundance and super-abundance to sustain all her people and many more. The English, indeed, call that Famine a dispensation of providence and ascribe it entirely to the blight of the potatoes. But potatoes failed in like manner all over Europe, yet there was no Famine save in Ireland. . . . This interpretation is first, a fraud—second, a blasphemy. The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the Famine.’’ 44. Mitchel, Last Conquest, 325: ‘‘So long as this hatred and horror shall last—so long as our island refuses to become, like Scotland, a contented province of her enemy, Ireland is not finally subdued. The passionate aspiration for Irish nationhood will outlive the British Empire.’’

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present. His book shattered imperial teleology by fixing the Famine as an end to Irish history—that conditional and suspended state summoned by his title’s parenthetical ‘‘Perhaps.’’ From this chronological precipice, Mitchel then rewound the historical narrative, reverting to a civilized Irish past, anterior and superior to the brutish British present. The arrival of the British in Ireland was seen not as progress but as a squalid invasion that triggered a descent into colonial barbarism, ultimately and glaringly revealed in the Famine. He then concentrated his considerable polemical fire on the alleged agents of progress—the scientific and disciplinary state, political economy, Malthusianism—all revealed as partisan imperial instruments trained with lethal effect on Ireland. He claimed that ‘‘Ireland died of political economy’’ and that the poor had been ‘‘slaughtered by stationery,’’ by an uncaring bureaucracy, symbolized by Charles Trevelyan, the chief Famine administrator. At the stylistic level, his textual strategies enacted his ideological point: the angry, hot-fired prose, the narrative bricolage, the constant unraveling were all part of his peremptory refusal of the Enlightenment project. This potent nationalist construction dominated views of the Famine for almost a century. Mitchel’s lacerating prose was not just a cynical post-Famine nationalist exploitation of Famine suffering. In his classic Jail Journal of 1854, he had described himself as ‘‘the historiographer of defeat and humiliation.’’ 45 His popularity stemmed from his ability to take responsibility for defeat, suffering, and failure, and to show a transformative political project for dealing with despair. The volume was especially influential in Irish America, where it chimed with the lived experience of the post-Famine generation, many of whom had been direct victims of the Famine. An important reappraisal of the revisionist figure of evictions during the Famine years (70,000 families, or 350,000 individuals) demonstrates that the minimum figures between 1846 and 1854 were more in the order of 145,000 families, or 725,000 individuals.46 These evictees bulked large in the Irish American cohort; no wonder, then, that they proved a receptive audience for Mitchel, or that they produced one of the first explicitly diasporic political movements in the Fenians, noted for their Famine-fueled Anglophobic bitterness.47 Mitchel’s interpretive structure was augmented by the Catholic priest 45. John Mitchel, The Jail Journal, 1848–1853 (Dublin: Browne and Nolan, 1900), 1. 46. Timothy O’Neill, ‘‘Famine Evictions,’’ in Famine, Land, and Culture, ed. Carla King (Dublin: UCD Press, 2000), 29–70. The revisionist figure derived by William Vaughan (Landlords and Tenants in Mid-Victorian Ireland [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994], 24–26) was based on a misreading of the legal evidence. 47. The crudest revisionist text of all may well be R. V. Comerford, The Fenians in Context: Irish Politics and Society, 1848–1882 (Dublin: Wolfhound, 1998).

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John O’Rourke’s History of the Great Irish Famine (1875).48 He imposed a heavily Catholic reading on Mitchel’s secular argument. Not only was the Famine a genocidal onslaught by the British on the Irish; it was also a Protestant pogrom against Catholics. O’Rourke thus appropriated the Famine dead as Catholic martyrs, the latest victims in the long-standing struggle for faith and fatherland in Ireland. O’Rourke was able to extract an edifying, opportunistic moral from his narration of the Famine, in which the dead are recruited for the Catholic nationalist cause. His text was published during the formative phase in the emergence of an explicit and self-confident Catholicnationalist historiography. O’Rourke was one of a generation of Catholic clergy who systematically rewrote Irish history.49 A Christian Brothers’ teaching chart of the mid-twentieth century neatly encapsulates the Catholic-nationalist version of the Famine.50 It appears there as a moment in the progression of Irish history to its apotheosis—the Eucharistic Congress of 1932, which set the seal on the Catholic ethos of the Free State—and marks the unflinching devotion of the Irish nation to Catholicism since the arrival of St. Patrick in 432. The minor weight given to the Famine indicates the problem of encapsulating it within a heroic, uplifting narrative of the nation’s emergence. For that story, the succession of nationalist insurrections—1798, 1803, 1848, 1867, 1916—was far more significant and edifying. In the new state, Thomas Davis, the Young Irelanders, and the 1848 Rebellion dominated the story of the 1840s, not the Famine itself. Thus, when the Famine centenary was commemorated in 1948, it passed remarkably quietly. At the end of the rationing period of the Second World War, with reports of harvest shortages and Ireland on the brink of cutting its last ties to Great Britain, the Famine raised too many awkward issues. It was still too close. As late as 1925, Irish governments had to vehemently and angrily deny international media reports that famine was once more stalking the west of Ireland. Famine under a native government was 48. John O’Rourke, The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 with Notes of Earlier Irish Famines (Dublin: Boyce, 1875). A third Dublin edition appeared by 1902. 49. Ulick Bourke, Aryan Origin of the Gaelic Race and Language (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1873); Denis Murphy, Cromwell in Ireland: A History of Cromwell’s Irish Campaign (Dublin: M. H. Gill, 1885); Patrick Moran, Historical Sketch of the Persecutions Suffered by the Catholics of Ireland under the Rule of Cromwell and the Puritans (Dublin: Duffy, 1865); Patrick Kavanagh, Popular History of the Insurrection of 1798 (Dublin: M. H. Gill, 1874); Stephen Brown, Ireland in Fiction (Dublin: M. H. Gill, 1919). 50. Reproduced in Kevin Whelan, Fellowship of Freedom: The United Irishmen and the 1798 Rebellion (Cork: Cork University Press, 1998), 128–29.

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a category error, an unthinkable, unbearable slur. Thus, the Famine centenary passed with much more emphasis on the deaths of Thomas Davis and Daniel O’Connell than on the million others who died during it. The government did agree, however, to subvent a new scholarly study of the Famine. The Revisionist Version The chaotic story of that project, a book of essays edited by R. D. Edwards and T. D. Williams that appeared in 1956, almost a decade later, reflects rather poorly on the much-touted ‘‘professionalism’’ of the first generation of Irish revisionist historians.51 Nevertheless, The Great Irish Famine has since been hailed by its supporters as ‘‘the key revisionist contribution.’’ 52 It rehabilitated Trevelyan by excoriating Mitchel. The volume endorsed a neo-Malthusian version of the Famine, in which blame was attached to social and economic structures and conditions. Overpopulation and poverty—whose causes were never specified—were identified as the ‘‘causes’’ of the Famine, and all human agency in the creation of these was removed. The Famine was treated almost exclusively as an episode in Irish history, with the British appearing only as disinterested, usually benign, administrators. The volume by Edwards and Williams was quickly elevated to the status of a model revisionist text that had definitively exorcised the Mitchelite poltergeist from Famine historiography. The historian Patrick Farrell judged it to be ‘‘judicious, scholarly and pacificatory,’’ and considered that it ‘‘marked the beginning of a new and brilliant era in Irish historical scholarship in which the canons of modern research triumphed over the demands of traditional nationalism.’’ 53 This Malthusian, biological, and exclusively Irish Famine also dominated the perspective of Kenneth Connell, the pioneer social historian:54 for him, a vicious circle of the potato and poverty drove 51. See introduction to R. D. Edwards and T. D. Williams, eds., The Great Irish Famine: Studies in Irish History, 1845–52 (1956), with an introduction and new bibliography by Cormac Ó Gráda (Dublin: Lilliput, 1994). T. Desmond Williams (1921–1987) was educated at Peterhouse, Cambridge, and worked for the British intelligence during the Second World War. He was professor of modern Irish history at University College Dublin, 1949–1983. 52. Mary Daly, ‘‘Revisionism and Irish History: The Great Famine,’’ in The Making of Modern Irish History: Revisionism and the Revisionist Controversy, ed. D. George Boyce and Alan O’Day (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 75. 53. Patrick Farrell, ‘‘Lost in Transit: Australian Reaction to the Irish and Scots Famines, 1845–50,’’ in The Meaning of the Famine, ed. Patrick O’Sullivan (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1997), 137. 54. Kenneth Hugh Connell (1917–1973) was born of Irish ancestry in Southampton. Educated at the London School of Economics, he was appointed fellow of Nuffield College

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a disastrous demographic system that finally careered out of control. His judgment was that ‘‘the more it was delayed, the more malevolent it must be.’’ Its arrival in 1845 was therefore a blessing. The Great Irish Famine was contrasted with The Great Hunger, by the Englishwoman Cecil Woodham-Smith, published to popular acclaim and scholarly disdain in 1962.55 As opposed to the thematic approach of the volume by Edwards and Williams, Woodham-Smith’s narrative was written with considerable pace and verve, accompanied by a high moral tone of scandalized indignation. She returned Trevelyan to his Mitchelesque role as the villain of the piece. The book was ridiculed by professional historians, then and later, for what Foster called its emotionalism, for ignoring the Malthusian inevitability of the Famine, and for anachronistic expectations of government interventions in an era dominated by laissez-faire economics.56 Rehearsing a theme that was to dominate later revisionist versions of the Famine (it is the central interpretive thread of Foster’s chapter in Modern Ireland ), she was rebuked for elevating 1845 above 1815 as the crucial breaking point in Irish history.57 Revisionists consistently pointed to the fact that WoodhamSmith was not a professional historian. Her most glaring fault was to be popular, elevating her book to its position as the best-selling volume ever produced on Irish history. To be so celebrated simply smacked of populism, of a pandering to the masses that affronted the revisionists’ sense of being an elite mandarin group. While the revisionist orthodoxy reigned, the Famine was not a fashionable topic. Remarkably, after these volumes, it almost disappeared as a serious research topic. The conventional historian’s response to this lacuna is to point out that there was only a handful of professional historians during at Oxford. He published the technically sophisticated The Population of Ireland, 1750– 1845 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950). In 1952, he was appointed lecturer in economic and social history at Queen’s University, Belfast. In 1972, he was acrimoniously removed from his position as chair of the Department of Economic and Social History, and was physically and intellectually marginalized within the university. He committed suicide in 1973. 55. Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Great Hunger (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1962). 56. Review by Roy Foster of Woodham-Smith, in Times Literary Supplement, 13 February 1981, 165; and Roy Foster, Modern Ireland 1600–1972 (London: Allen Lane, 1988), 318–44. 57. This point received additional emphasis from Raymond Crotty’s pioneering statistical work, Irish Agricultural Production: Its Volume and Structure (Cork: Cork University Press, 1966), 35–65. Recent cliometric analysis restores the centrality of the Famine: Kevin O’Rourke, ‘‘Did the Great Irish Famine Matter?’’ in Journal of Economic History 51 (1991): 1–22.

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this period—essentially a tiny coterie, split into two factions (the EdwardsWilliams group at University College Dublin, and the Moody-Lyons group at Trinity College Dublin).58 As a result, there were very few graduate students, and these were expected to work on readily available sources (deemed not to exist for the Famine).59 Yet, even when the rank of historians and graduate students swelled appreciably from the mid-1960s onward, the Famine remained a languishing subject. L. M. Cullen’s 1972 Economic History of Ireland considered it to be merely a ‘‘regional crisis,’’ and the short textbook by Mary Daly (1986) combined strident strictures on nationalist bias with a remarkable sensitivity to the constraints on British decision making during the Famine.60 Daly subsequently shifted the focus of the Famine debate to internal Irish issues, in which villains ‘‘were closer to home than to Westminster or Whitehall.’’ 61 She substituted a social for a political interpretation: the struggle of farmers versus laborers, shopkeepers versus peasants, Mayo versus Dublin, dominated. When she looked at politics, it was to emphasize internal divisions within British high politics rather than any intrinsic IrishBritish dimension. The result was to systematically downplay the long-term effects as well as the catastrophic human dimensions of the Famine (her estimate of Famine deaths was as low as half a million). Her judgments were essentially endorsed and recycled in less leaden prose by Foster’s chapter in Modern Ireland. His central thrust was to marginalize the Famine as the major event in Irish history and to assign its elevation there as an effect of the insidious nationalist bias in Irish historiography. The Postrevisionist Version Then, just when it appeared that a definitive revisionist judgment on the Famine had been delivered ex cathedra by Foster, Famine studies took a surprising turn. Its new direction was signaled by non-Irish scholars, drawn to the topic by its obvious significance in wider nineteenth-century 58. L. M. Cullen, An Economic History of Ireland Since 1660 (London: Batsford, 1972), 132: ‘‘The Famine was less a national disaster than a social and regional one.’’ The subtext is that the Famine did not have an impact on Ulster, which therefore allows the Famine—so crucial in weighing the impact of the Act of Union on Ireland—to be ignored in any account of Unionism. 59. More recent scholars stress the sheer bulk of Famine records—seven tons of material from the Board of Works alone. Indeed, the counterargument could be made that the Irish Famine was the first ‘‘modern’’ famine in the sense that it was the subject of so much documentation by the state. 60. Mary Daly, The Famine in Ireland (Dundalk: Dublin Historical Association, 1986). 61. Daly, ‘‘Revisionism and the Irish Famine,’’ in The Making of Modern Ireland, 85.

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European history. The pathbreaking study here was by the Chicago-based Dutch-Israeli scholar Joel Mokyr. In his study, Mokyr lit up the subdued Famine historiography with cliometric pyrotechnics, delivered with considerable skill. His conclusion was stark: ‘‘When the chips were down in the frightful summer of 1847, the British simply abandoned the Irish and let them perish.’’ 62 Mokyr was soon joined outside the revisionist orthodoxy by the Madison-based New Yorker Jim Donnelly and by the painstaking economic history of the Belgian scholar Peter Solar.63 Mokyr’s work was fresh, authoritative, and technically sophisticated; it positioned itself outside the revisionist orthodoxy, now rapidly migrating into the media mainstream. The conclusions were resoundingly anti-Malthusian, stressing the unpredictability rather than the inevitability of Famine. The Famine was a major national event, with no region, neither Dublin nor Belfast, escaping its effects. The mortality rates were just over 1 million dead (strikingly close to the traditional nationalist figure). Political will rather than administrative incapacity dictated the inadequate relief response to Famine suffering. The version of Trevelyan as callous, calculating, and cold was not just nationalist demonizing but circulated widely in British opinion in the 1840s. This work was accomplished at a level of technical proficiency that left it immune to the standard revisionist ploy of decrying the inadequate professionalism of those outside its orthodoxy. Indeed, in its cliometric innovation, the work was a demonstration of just how stagnant and insular the revisionist project in Irish historiography had become. The crucial Irish exponent of this new material was Cormac Ó Gráda.64 Trained as a new economic historian (equally competent in both economics and history), he combined intelligence, cliometric training, and sensitivity to the human dimensions of history. Steeped in Irish-language sources, Ó Gráda was able to wield a distinctive brand of mathematical abstraction and cultural insight. He systematically demolished the principal tenets of the revisionist position without collapsing the Famine back into 62. Joel Mokyr, Why Ireland Starved: An Analytical and Quantitative History of the Irish Economy, 1800–1850 (Boston: George Allen and Unwin, 1985), 291. 63. James Donnelly, The Great Irish Potato Famine (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2001); and Peter Solar, ‘‘The Great Famine Was No Ordinary Subsistence Crisis,’’ in Famine: The Irish Experience, 900–1900, ed. E. Crawford (Edinburgh: J. Donald, 1989), 112–33. 64. See Cormac Ó Gráda’s four books: Ireland Before and After the Famine, 2d ed. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993); Ireland: A New Economic History, 1780– 1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); An Drochshaol: Béaloideas agus Amhráin (Dublin: Coiscéim, 1995); and Black ’47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy, and Memory (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999).

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the old nationalist orthodoxy. When the Famine commemoration started in 1995, Ó Gráda was the credible intellectual authority whose interpretation, for example, underpinned Christine Kinealy’s administrative history, This Great Calamity.65 The emergence of the peace process and the IRA cessations also helped open a space for historiographical debate, which until that time had been resolutely patrolled by revisionist gatekeepers. The presidency of Mary Robinson (1990–1997), with its ethical emphasis on the moral responsibility toward world hunger imposed on Ireland by its own Famine experience, also helped enormously in opening this public space, as did her emphasis on the hitherto occluded diasporic dimensions of Irish identity.66 She described the Famine as ‘‘the event which more than any other shaped us as a people. It defined our will to survive. It defined our sense of human vulnerability. It remains one of the strongest, most poignant links of memory and feeling that connects us to our diaspora. It involves us still in an act of remembrance which, increasingly, is neither tribal or narrow.’’ 67 This response to the Famine at the local community level was not just an elite affair. The outreach to other cultures was dramatically enacted in the annual Famine Walk at Doolough in County Mayo, which linked the Irish experience to the Native American ‘‘Trail of Tears’’ and explicitly celebrated the remarkable solidarity shown the Irish by the Choctaw Indians during the Famine.68 Other postrevisionist projects include Robert Scally’s sensitive evocation, The End of Hidden Ireland, and a series of carefully researched and more outspoken articles by James Donnelly on public opinion and popular memory of the Famine.69 Peter Gray’s rewriting of the high politics of the 65. Christine Kinealy, This Great Calamity: The Irish Famine, 1845–52 (Dublin: Gill and MacMillan, 1994). See also her ‘‘Beyond Revisionism: Reassessing the Great Famine,’’ History Ireland 3, no. 4 (1995): 28–34, and A Death-Dealing Famine: The Great Hunger in Ireland (London: Pluto, 1997). 66. Mary Robinson, A Voice for Somalia (Dublin: O’Brien Press, 1992). 67. Address at opening of Famine Conference, New York University, May 19, 1995. 68. See, for example, the children’s book by Marie-Louise Fitzpatrick, The Long March: The Choctaws’ Gift to Irish Famine Relief (Dublin: Wolfhound, 1998), which has a foreword by Gary WhiteDeer of the Choctaw Nation. 69. Robert Scally, The End of Hidden Ireland: Rebellion, Famine, and Emigration (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). James Donnelly, ‘‘The Great Famine: Its Interpreters, Old and New,’’ in History Ireland 1, no. 3 (1993): 27–33; ‘‘Mass Eviction and the Great Famine,’’ in The Great Irish Famine, ed. Cathal Póirtéir (Cork: Mercier and RTE, 1995), 155–73; and ‘‘‘Irish Property Must Pay for Irish Poverty’: British Public Opinion and the Great Irish Famine,’’ in Fearful Realities: New Perspectives on the Famine (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1996), 60–76.

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1840s reinstated the crucial British dimension to the politics of the Famine, notably through his foregrounding of the concept of providentialism.70 The European sensibility in the 1840s was still predominantly religious. The British response to the Famine was profoundly informed by its prevalent Protestant religious sensibility. The phenomenon of famine, with its biblical resonances, was understood in essentially religious terms as direct evidence of God’s personal intervention in the natural world. From within this providentialist perspective, the evangelical wing of British opinion stressed the consequent necessity to allow the unrestricted operation of the natural moral law, thereby encouraging a minimalist response to the Famine.71 This evangelical economics permitted the marriage of Malthusian pessimism and a strident eschatological emphasis, both of which stressed the inevitability of the Famine and its function as a retributive sign. This emerging postrevisionism was also aided by contributions from literary scholars, notably Terry Eagleton’s synthetic Heathcliff and the Great Hunger, the tersely elegant Writing the Irish Famine by the Nova Scotian Christopher Morash, and Margaret Kelleher’s innovative The Feminisation of Famine.72 The work of literary critics, in instructive contrast to that of the historians, shows a heightened awareness of the politics of representation that structured Famine narratives. In turn, this encouraged them to also broaden their field of evidence to include popular materials previously deemed unworthy of the historian’s attention. A further dimension of the 1990s approach to the Famine was the long-delayed rehabilitation of oral history.73 The emerging postrevisionist perspective also informed the National Famine Museum at Strokestown, County Roscommon, created and curated by Luke Dodd and opened in 1994. By careful use of sound and film, and by anchoring the museum in the unexpected context of the Big House that framed it, Dodd created a museum which, in its intellectual rigor, was also 70. Peter Gray, The Irish Famine (New York: Abrams, 1995), and Famine, Land, and Politics: British Government and Irish Society, 1843–50 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1999). 71. Gray draws on the work of Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1785–1865 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). 72. Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger (London: Verso, 1995); Christopher Morash, Writing the Irish Famine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); and Margaret Kelleher, The Feminisation of Famine: Expressing the Inexpressible (Cork: Cork University Press, 1997). 73. Ó Gráda, An Drochshaol: Béaloideas agus Amhráin [English-language version in Black ’47, 194–225]; and Cathal Póirtéir, Famine Echoes (Dublin: Gill and MacMillan, 1995), and Glórtha ón nGorta (Dublin: Coiscéim, 1996).

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a deliberate gesture against prevailing museum practices in Ireland. This was dictated by the Irish Tourist Board (Bord Fáilte), with its relentless pursuit of blandness in the name of the happiness industry. It is healthy to see the Famine finally rescued from that tourist blandness as well as from the closely related revisionist industry: both of them claimed that the only malevolence attached to the Famine adhered to those who regard it as something more than an unfortunate series of events over which no one had control. According to the revisionists, neither human agency nor unjust social and political systems should be held accountable for the most massive humanitarian disaster in nineteenth-century Europe.

Toward a Materialist-Formalist History of Twentieth-Century Irish Literature

Joe Cleary

1 Most accounts of contemporary Irish culture tend to be largely affirmative, even Whiggish, in cast. The contemporary cultural moment is recurrently described as one characterized by renaissance, experiment, and iconoclasm, a moment vitalized by the emergence of radical new voices, styles, media, forms, and energies. This upbeat view is clearly underpinned by a broader sociohistorical narrative, also of a decidedly Whiggish temper, in which contemporary Irish society is construed as one engaged over recent decades in an often laborious, but on the whole overwhelmingly successful, overcoming of a more repressive, provincial, censorious past. As Irish society leaves behind that past to become more liberal, secular, postnationalistic, multicultural, more confidently European in its outlook, contemporary Irish culture—the account runs—gives imaginative expression to this dynamic process of social change. The very concept of what I have been referring to as ‘‘the contemporary cultural moment’’ presupposes some kind of watershed that allows us to distinguish between ‘‘the way things are now’’ and ‘‘the way they were boundary 2 31:1, 2004. Copyright © 2004 by Duke University Press.

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before.’’ In most of the surveys that document the achievements of the present, however, it is precisely the absence of any serious attempt to establish what (if indeed anything) is decisively new about the present cultural moment that is most conspicuous. Every decade will produce its own cultural novelties (one recalls Walter Benjamin’s remark that ‘‘fashion is the eternal recurrence of the new’’), but in this restricted sense no decade can be considered qualitatively different from any other, and by such measure the 1980s and 1990s are no different, say, from the 1940s or 1950s. Yet when commentators discuss contemporary Irish culture, they generally appear to make some stronger claim for the present than the mere fact of novelty in this basic sense. The usual claim is that the emergence of new women writers, of the new urban writing, and the successes of the Irish film or music industries collectively amount to something more significant than the perennial turnover of personnel and seasonal fashion. The point I am arguing here is that any strong conception of ‘‘the contemporary moment’’ is always defined in terms of a break with or modification of the cultural system that preceded it. Such claims presuppose some kind of literary periodization, some implicit model of cultural history, but surveys of contemporary Irish culture have tended to evade explicit theoretical engagement with such tasks. One might even argue that the (now extended) Field Day Anthology has furnished Irish studies with something like a viable canon of Irish literature (one that is, to be sure, like all canons, gapped, tendentious, and contested), but that we still lack serious materialist attempts to historicize Irish literary and cultural production. Marxist critics have always had a special commitment to the historical analysis of culture, notably the ambitious models of cultural history developed by such leading figures as Georg Lukács and Fredric Jameson. It is no exaggeration to say that the historical schemata that underpin their works have become something like the assumed ‘‘common sense’’ of much leftist cultural criticism and thus will be broadly familiar. The difficulty with the historical schemas developed by Lukács and Jameson is that they cannot easily be transposed onto the Irish situation. Whatever their differences otherwise, these Marxist cultural histories are elaborated with a metropolitan European or Euro-American capitalist history in mind. Lukács’s work takes its bearings primarily from French and German (and to a lesser extent English and Russian) literary history; Jameson’s addresses itself to a continental Western European (England, France, Germany) and U.S. context (though his later work tries to extend the frame). From well before the modern period, however, Irish history had evolved in

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ways that did not conform in some decisive respects to developments in the metropolitan cultures that inform Lukács’s or Jameson’s works. To begin with, Ireland had escaped the conquest of Roman imperialism, in contrast to most of Western Europe, and was, in Brendan Bradshaw’s words, ‘‘no more than superficially touched by the cultural and institutional cargo’’ which that empire brought with it.1 It was out of that institutional cargo that medieval European feudalism emerged when the Roman Empire collapsed, but, with the exception of the areas controlled by the Anglo-Norman invaders in the south and east, the feudal system never substantially penetrated Ireland. Later, in the modern period, when other Western European countries such as Portugal, Spain, Holland, England, France, Belgium, and eventually Germany became, each for a time at least, successive centers of capitalist and imperial expansion, Ireland was the only country in that geographical area to be subjected to a sustained, thoroughgoing, and culturally traumatic experience of colonization. For its nearest neighbors, modernity was synonymous with the assumption of key structural positions in the emerging capitalist world system, with the accumulation of wealth, monopolization of the means of violence, national aggrandizement, and the sense of cultural distinction that attended this. For Ireland, in contrast, modernity meant dispossession, subordination, and the loss of sovereignty, the collapse of its indigenous social order, the gradual disintegration of the Gaelic cultural system, and successive waves of politically or economically enforced emigration. Capitalist modernity in Ireland, in other words, advanced within a colonial regime under which the country remained the most chronically unstable and rebellious location within the British archipelago from the early modern period until the late twentieth century. Whereas other Western European economies were dramatically transformed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by the first and second industrial revolutions, most of Ireland remained nonindustrialized, and its economy continued to be, until very recently, unusually dependent for a Western European region on export-oriented agricultural production. The colonial legacies of economic subordination and dependency, technological underdevelopment, massive emigration to the industrial centers of Britain and the United States, and sectarian violence inscribed in a postcolonial partitionist state order have conditioned much of the shape and texture of twentieth-century Irish history. 1. Brendan Bradshaw, ‘‘Irish Nationalism: An Historical Perspective,’’ Bullán: An Irish Studies Journal 5, no. 1 (Summer/Fall 2000): 5.

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Because Marxist models of history have assumed as normative the transition from feudalism via absolutism to mercantile and, later, industrial capitalism, or a series of structural modulations within capitalism of the kind described by Ernest Mandel, Irish history has always proved quite recalcitrant to conventional Marxist emplotment. To take a particularly vivid example, when mid-nineteenth-century English capitalist development issued in the Industrial Revolution that made Great Britain ‘‘the workshop of the world,’’ Ireland was devastated by the social catastrophe of the Great Famine. While one society, in other words, was being transformed by developments that would bring it to the apex of its industrial and imperial glory, the other was being transmogrified by what we might call an early Victorian holocaust.2 Nevertheless, while this massive discrepancy in national experience speaks for itself, the real challenge posed by these concurrent developments is to conceive of them not as two altogether alien and disjunctive histories but rather as two divergent vectors of the same modernization process. The particular theoretical challenge of the Irish situation, in other words, is to be able to deal with the ways in which the country has developed by capitalist modernizing processes quite different from those in the major metropolitan European and American countries, while simultaneously allowing for the fact that its distinct development has always been shaped and conditioned by capitalist developments in these core areas. The challenge, in other words, is to steer a course between a Scylla that would simply stress Ireland’s sameness to the metropolitan states, thereby effacing difference to press Ireland into a standard metropolitan template, and a Charybdis that would stress only its fundamental alterity (its exceptional or anomalous or aberrant elements) to the metropolitan centers. To say that Ireland’s condition has been one of ‘‘colonial peripherality’’ is not at all to suggest that it has developed somewhere entirely beyond the pale of metropolitan modernity. On the contrary, to be peripheral is precisely to be compelled to develop within constraints, sets of forces, and agendas— economic, political, cultural, intellectual—that have largely been prescribed or conditioned by developments in the metropolis. To think beyond current orthodoxy in Irish social and cultural history—which usually construes Ireland as only badly and belatedly catching up with a model of modernization immaculately completed much earlier in Europe—we need to work toward 2. The term alludes to Mike Davis’s remarkable Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2001), which suggests that the Irish Famine might be viewed as an early precursor to a wider global series of late Victorian modernizing catastrophes.

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a less linear and more global and conjunctural mode of analysis that starts from the assumptions that Irish modernity comprises a particular configuration of wider global processes, and that its modernity is therefore directly coeval with other modernities. But coeval here suggests a contemporaneity that recognizes the possibility of difference. In this essay, I want to take a long view of twentieth-century Irish literary and cultural history by situating that history in terms of a wider metropolitan European and Euro-American transition from modernism to postmodernism of the kind theorized by Marxist critics such as Jameson and Perry Anderson. Though Jameson’s work on modernism and postmodernism is the much better known of the two, Anderson’s will also be considered here because it has usefully ‘‘rewritten’’ Jameson in ways that attempt to reinsert social and political levels that Jameson’s work, focused overwhelmingly as it is on cultural developments as a response to changes in the economic base, generally overrides. To many Irish critics, a venture of this kind will seem quixotic and misconceived. For some, the value of such large-scale historical frameworks will seem unconvincing, tidying the interesting messiness of Irish cultural history into an overly orderly succession of cultural dominants. For others, the canonical bent of literary histories of this sort will, not unjustifiably, raise questions. For still others, what is really called for is an entirely new kind of cultural history less indebted to Eurocentric Marxian metanarratives. While the project envisaged here undoubtedly remains vulnerable to these criticisms, it is questionable whether it could ever be possible to elaborate an entirely new model of cultural history that would avoid all of these pitfalls. Of these various critiques, the most urgent one claims that the Eurocentrism of Marxist cultural criticism cannot but conscript Irish cultural history into an apparently metropolitan register that is really only a provincially Western European or Euro-American one, and in so doing simultaneously impedes the development of a genuinely global frame of reference capable of embracing locations beyond Europe. It is undoubtedly the case that while we have had many studies of, let us say, the Irish Revival that always implicitly compare it (usually negatively) with other contemporary Western European modernisms, that Revival might look very different indeed were we to think of it more in terms of other broadly contemporary cultural and intellectual ‘‘renaissances’’ elsewhere, such as, for example, those in Bengal, Harlem, or Mexico. For the moment, however, the research and resources that would make this kind of usefully estranging project possible are still underdeveloped. In any event, the issue is not whether we situ-

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ate Irish cultural history in a European context or a more broadly colonial and global one; the real question is how best to do both. My working assumption is that while the works of Western Marxists such as Jameson and Anderson are indeed problematically Eurocentric, and ought not, by any means, to be slavishly adapted to Irish circumstances, Ireland nonetheless does not exist somewhere entirely ‘‘outside’’ of the histories of capital and culture theorized by these Marxist cultural historians. The history of Euro-American capital and culture, in other words, is not the universal history Marxists have taken it to be, but that history has nonetheless impressed itself on developments in most parts of the world, and more heavily on Ireland, perhaps, because of its location, than on many other colonized regions. 2 In Mandel’s Late Capitalism, modern capitalism is deemed to have passed through three successive long economic cycles and systemic mutations, each characterized by its own distinct technologies, labor regimes, and sectoral dominants.3 Jameson’s work rests on the idea that these three phases can be correlated to three major aesthetic dominants or macrostructures he calls realism, modernism, and postmodernism. The idea of an aesthetic ‘‘dominant’’ here refers to a cultural ascendancy that will never exhaust the entire phase in question but that designates, rather, the most novel and salient aesthetic forms of any period. The dominant aesthetic mode of a particular period, therefore, will always coexist with residual, contrapuntal, and emergent modes, as well, though the cultural dominant will, as Michael Walsh puts it, occupy ‘‘the hegemonic high ground within a given society at a historical moment.’’ 4 Radical breaks between one period and the next are not conceived as involving complete changes of content but rather as the restructuring of a certain number of elements already given: features that in an earlier period or system were subordinate now become dominant, and features that had been dominant again become secondary.5 The function of any decisive cultural transformation, Jameson con3. Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1975). 4. Michael Walsh, ‘‘Jameson and ‘Global Aesthetics,’’’ in Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, ed. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 482. 5. Fredric Jameson, ‘‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society,’’ in Modernism/Postmodernism, ed. Peter Brooker (London and New York: Longman, 1992), 177.

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tends, ‘‘will be to invent the life habits of the new social world,’’ to ‘‘deprogram’’ subjects trained in an older formation, and to provide imaginary resolutions to the contradictions and antinomies that constitute specific social contexts. Viewed thus, nineteenth-century ‘‘realism’’ was not simply an artistic copy or passive reflection of nineteenth-century society; its praxis, rather, was to de-program the older providential and sacred narratives of the precapitalist period and to provide new cultural paradigms of the subject’s relations ‘‘to what now comes to be thought of as reality.’’ 6 To understand realism, therefore, we must grasp it as a component of the vaster historical project of the bourgeois cultural revolution, in which the whole economico-psychic structure of feudalism was dismantled and a new bourgeois economico-psychic subjectivity installed in its place. For Jameson, the essential task of the realist novel is twofold: on the one hand, to critique and corrode the sacred narratives of the older medieval world; on the other, to produce the new secular and disenchanted object world of the commodity system, the world of which it will then claim to be the ‘‘realistic’’ reflection.7 Modernism, for Jameson, is a cultural mode that emerges at a later moment, when capitalism dramatically extends its global reach (via imperialism), but when, nonetheless, ‘‘the technologically (or socially) modern was still little more than an enclave; in which the country still coexists with the city and still largely outweighs it.’’ 8 As Harry Harootunian puts it, glossing Jameson, it was the spectacle of lived unevenness in both the political, economic, and sociocultural domains that allowed modernism to develop, and it was the lived experience of this ‘‘simultaneous non-simultaneity’’ (Ernst Bloch) that modernism took as its predicate and problematic.9 Modernism, in sum, is a term that designates the matrix of possible aesthetic responses to a capitalist moment defined by this clash between old and new; it corresponds to the lived experience of the uneven temporalities of ‘‘simultaneous non-simultaneity.’’ In his earlier writings, Jameson stresses that both modernism and mass culture must be conceived as dialectical counterparts. Whereas mass culture succumbs to the logic of the commodity (though not 6. Fredric Jameson, Signatures of the Visible (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 164–66. 7. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981), 152. 8. Cited in Santiago Colas, ‘‘The Third World in Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,’’ Social Text 10 (1992): 261. 9. Harry Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), xxii–xxiii.

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without retaining some muted capacity to express dissatisfied desires and utopian longing), the formally difficult experiments of modernism represent a desperate attempt to outflank the commodification process—though the price for this was that modernism lost touch with (and indeed mostly wanted to escape) the wider publics to which the great realists still had access.10 For Jameson, the postmodern is ‘‘what you have when the capitalist modernization process is complete.’’ 11 This moment is reached when capitalism has finally attained global reach, either abolishing all remaining precapitalist modes of production or subsuming them within its compass, and when it has also penetrated the unconscious and hence become normalized to the extent that we find it increasingly difficult to imagine either pre- or postcapitalist forms of existence. Jameson accepts that there is considerable formal, stylistic, and even thematic continuity between modernist and postmodernist cultural practice. But he insists that, despite such similarities, what matters is that cultural production is positioned and functions differently in the modernist and postmodernist periods, since, with the extension of commodity logic, the older distinctions between high and mass culture have now largely collapsed. In the postmodern period, the disintegration of unified subject positions, already symptomatically beginning to come apart in modernism, is now completed. This condition is generated not only by the dissolution of the unified bourgeois subject of early capitalism, however, but also by the disarticulation of any unified class subject as well, and the consequent elaboration of dissent in more fragmented, localized, and identitarian forms. Jameson does allow for some remaining pockets of resistance within the postmodern moment—identified with the underclass ghettos of the advanced capitalist world and with peripheral ‘‘Third World’’ formations—but these are not seriously or systematically integrated into his larger theory. The relationship between the economic and cultural spheres is not conceived by Jameson as one of base-superstructure reflection; culture serves, rather, as a means of transcoding the dominant mode of production, so that the mediations between the two spheres become a central issue in his work. Nevertheless, even if Jameson allows for what Walsh calls ‘‘the complex semiautonomy of the cultural,’’ 12 because it is premised on track10. Fredric Jameson, ‘‘Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,’’ in Signatures of the Visible, 9–34. 11. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990), ix. 12. Walsh, ‘‘Jameson and ‘Global Aesthetics,’’’ 484.

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ing the relationship between cultural production and very large-scale economic changes, the absent intermediate level in his work tends to be the political. In this respect, at least, Anderson’s attempts to theorize modernism and postmodernism in terms of a complex conjuncture or intersection of diverse sociopolitical and economic forces represent a useful supplement to Jameson’s model. One of Anderson’s key concepts is that of the ‘‘conjuncture’’: a term that denotes the exact balance or configuration of forces, and the overdetermination of the contradictions that obtain within that balance, that can be said to constitute a particular historical moment. For Anderson, it is significant that the most extensive European modernist movements emerged in the early twentieth century not in the most industrially advanced or most ‘‘modern’’ country of the time—England—but rather where complex conjunctures allowed for ‘‘the intersection of different historical temporalities.’’ 13 Modernism, he argues, emerged in continental Europe within a cultural force field comprised and triangulated by three coordinates. The first was the codification of a highly formalized academicism in the visual and other arts that drilled students in the major styles and masterpieces of the classical or neoclassical past. These academies were the cultural gatekeepers of states still massively dominated by aristocratic or landowning classes, which, though economically in relative decline, were still setting the political and cultural tone in the European countries before and even after World War I. The second coordinate was the incipient, hence essentially novel, emergence within these still largely preindustrial societies of the key technologies or inventions of the second industrial revolution: the chemical and synthetic industries, electric power, turbines, internal combustion engines, the telephone, radio, cinema, the automobile, the aircraft. Mass consumption industries, Anderson contends, were not yet implanted anywhere in Europe, however. A third decisive coordinate was the imaginative proximity of social revolution. In no European country at the start of the twentieth century was bourgeois democracy completed in the sense that adult suffrage was extended to all (women and many workers did not have the vote), and the insurgent labor movement still remained largely outside of the political system and had yet to be co-opted as a political force. The extent of hope or apprehension about revolution varied widely across Europe, but it was everywhere ‘‘in the air’’ during the belle epoque and especially after the Russian Revolution. Across Europe, then, the Old Order still 13. Perry Anderson, ‘‘Modernity and Revolution,’’ in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1988), 324.

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clung on tenaciously in both the political and cultural spheres, but it was everywhere shadowed not only by the sweeping changes triggered by the still infant second industrial revolution but also by the specter of political revolution, and hence the moment was pervaded by a sense that the future was radically open-ended. What was the specific contribution of each coordinate to the wider force field defining modernism? For Anderson, the persistence of the ancien régimes and the concomitant academicism of the state cultural institutions provided a key range of cultural values against which the modernist movements could define themselves. Without this common adversary, the wide range of new modernist artistic practices had little unity: it is their common hostility to the consecrated neoclassical, romantic, and realist canons, and to the cultural mortmain of the ancien régime academies and conservatories, that constitutes their identity as such. But if they rejected official academicism, many different modernist movements also rejected the commodity market as the alternative organizing principle of culture and society. If nothing else, the Old Order offered a conception of art as a higher vocation (predicated on conceptions of value at odds with capital logic) that was still available to the modernist artist. Finally, the combined stimuli produced by the wave of technological advances that defined the second industrial revolution and by the prospect of revolution lent the period an electric atmosphere—oscillating between apocalyptic anxiety and utopian hope— in which it was possible to imagine a wholly transformed social order utterly unlike that which currently existed. 3 If, as Anderson suggests, modernist cultural currents were strongest not where industrialization and the new corporate capitalism were already most advanced but in situations of combined and uneven development, where relatively small industrial enclaves were hatched within an older aristocratic or predominantly agrarian and preindustrial order, then Ireland accords with this profile well enough. Late nineteenth-century Ireland possessed an unusually modernized state (itself a product of colonial rule), strong basic literacy levels in European terms, and Belfast was then the world’s fifth largest industrial city. Nevertheless, on the island as a whole, the economy and workforce were still overwhelmingly rural, artisanal, and preindustrial. For many, a direct link can be traced between this retarded industrial and technological development and the supposed conservatism of

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Irish cultural production in the Revival period. In ‘‘The Archaic Avant-Garde,’’ for instance, Terry Eagleton argues that Ireland in this period was every bit as much a capitalist formation as its British counterpart, but that the Irish variety ‘‘was a woefully inert form of rural capitalism, an old-fashioned form of modernity.’’ Moreover, he contends, the prime mover of modernization in Ireland was ‘‘the rural middle class’’ (‘‘one of the most conservative formations in Western Europe’’), and that class ‘‘lacked the challenge of an industrial working class to spur it into life.’’ 14 ‘‘There could be,’’ he concludes, ‘‘no exhilarating encounter between art and technology in such an industrially backward country.’’ 15 But Eagleton here seems to assume too automatic and unmediated a connection between economic base and culture. It is as though a largely rural society and rural middle class must inevitably produce a reactionary ruralist culture. Yet, as Anderson points out, it was precisely in the least industrially advanced European societies—namely, Italy and Russia—that the most militantly antitraditionalist modernist movements emerged, as exemplified by the Italian Futurists and the Russian Constructivists. But if these overwhelmingly rural countries produced militant avant-gardes that hymned technology and industrial transformation, this begs the question why something of this kind did not also occur in Ireland, where the industrial northeast might have functioned as crucible and stimulus in a manner not unlike, say, the industrialized north in agrarian Italy. The answer here surely has to do not just with a rural middle class per se but with the vagaries of Ireland’s colonial history, which had simultaneously transferred most of the Irish Catholic laboring classes abroad (by the 1860s, New York already had a larger Irish population than Dublin) and rendered the industrial northeast the most determinedly counterrevolutionary region in the entire island. Because of its fierce antipathy to Irish nationalism, and indeed to its supposed liberal allies in England, the northern Protestant industrial bourgeoisie and working classes had embraced the most conservative and chauvinistically imperialist versions of British identity and ideology.16 The industrialized northeastern economy centered on Belfast, moreover, was tied integrally to the British economy, and while Britain had been the heartland of the first industrial revolution, its global preeminence 14. Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture (London and New York: Verso, 1995), 277. 15. Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger, 299. 16. See Gillian McIntosh, The Force of Culture: Unionist Identities in Twentieth-Century Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 1999).

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was actually threatened by the second, which allowed rivals such as Germany and the United States to emerge as new superpowers on the international scene. Hence, while in what had earlier been industrially backward places, such as Germany, Russia, or Italy, the second industrial revolution might generate a heady welter of excitement as they began to ‘‘catch up’’ with Britain and with each other, in Britain itself, the same developments augured a sense of imperial crisis and national decline. Thus in an early twentieth-century context, when Britain was still the world’s leading industrial superpower, the Belfast shipyards could produce the mighty ocean liners that were one of the major icons of twentieth-century technological daring and ambition. But the sinking of the Titanic, the mass slaughter of the Ulster regiments on the Somme in 1916, and the shrinkage of the Union due to Irish nationalist separatism collectively helped to ensure that in Unionist-dominated northern Ireland, as in Britain more generally, early twentieth-century modernity was culturally conceived of in terms of catastrophe, collapse, and decline—in terms of the sense of an ending— rather than in rhapsodic or euphoric terms. In other words, in the industrialized northeast of Ireland, the advent of the twentieth century gave rise to a cultural posture of defensive siege largely inhospitable to the development of modernist art forms. Thus, in Ireland the most industrialized enclave and the most substantial industrial working class were peculiarly aligned with the forces of British imperial tradition and counterrevolution, and hence did not produce a cultural modernist efflorescence of the kind that issued from other European industrial enclaves also encased within largely agrarian societies. It is also true that the technological advances of the second industrial revolution only lightly affected the island of Ireland as a whole. In the Irish situation, the discombobulating force that Anderson ascribes to this technological revolution had already been effected instead by a very different route: that is, by the devastation of the Great Famine. The effect of the second industrial revolution in Europe, as Anderson and others have suggested, was to corrode the old social order, dissolving its precapitalist elements, imploding traditional forms of everyday life and installing in their place new work practices, new modes of transport and communication, new kinds of social space, new gender relations, and so on. Decades before the second industrial revolution and the Great War did their work in continental Europe, the Famine in Ireland had arguably represented a merciless and accelerated convulsion of this magnitude, decimating the subaltern classes, accelerating the exodus from the land to the core industrial centers of England and America, com-

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pelling a shift to very different new property regimes at home, and, not least, dealing a final death blow to Gaelic culture. In 1849, William Wilde, father of Oscar, wrote that the Famine represented a ‘‘great convulsion which society here of all grades has experienced, the failure of the potato crop, pestilence, famine, and a most unparalleled extent of emigration, together with bankrupt landlords, pauperizing poor-laws, grinding officials, and decimating workhouses, have broken up the very foundations of social discourse. . . . In some places, all the domestic usages of life have been outraged; the tenderest bonds of kindred have been severed, some of the noblest and holiest feelings of human nature have been blotted from the heart, and many of the finest, yet firmest links which united the various classes in the community have been burst asunder.’’ 17 In Wilde’s account, we find that same simultaneously dazed and amazed rhetoric, the same shocked sense of just how quickly the most sacrosanct bonds of a whole society can be shredded by an overwhelming force that is also registered in the famous ‘‘all that is solid melts into air’’ passage penned a year earlier by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto. An estimated four million people left post-Famine Ireland between 1855 and 1914; this ‘‘headlong exodus’’ has been described by one leading present-day historian as ‘‘the instinctive reaction of a panicstricken people to the spectacle of their traditional way of life breaking into pieces before their very eyes.’’ 18 But for good reason the actual cultural dynamics of that event played out differently in Ireland than in other peripheral European societies. For the Italian Futurists and Russian Constructivists, the new technology of the second industrial revolution incited a sense of radical right- or left-wing fervor because it promised to dynamite a pathway to the future for societies that felt themselves smothered under the sheer excess of ossified ancien régime tradition. Technology, it was thought, would liberate these second-rate European powers from the mortmain of the once-glorious pasts that by the early twentieth-century seemed merely to be excess baggage that retarded their progress into the future. In late nineteenth-century post-Famine Ireland, in stark contrast, the decisive preoccupation was not with how to discard the excess baggage of a once-splendid past but with the need to salvage something from the veritable wholesale decimation of tradition. Where for the Futurists mod17. William Robert Wilde, Irish Popular Superstitions (Dublin: J. McGlashan, 1852), 9– 11. Cited in George Denis Zimmerman, The Irish Storyteller (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001), 208. 18. F. S. L. Lyons, Ireland Since the Famine (London: Fontana, 1985), 44.

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ern Italy had to blast its way out from under the opulent rubble of imperial Rome and the Renaissance to enter modernity, in Ireland the whole drive was not to shake off a once-glorious-now-moribund past but to recover or to invent an indigenous culture almost totally obliterated by centuries of colonialism, anglicization, and famine. To put it very simply, the Futurists might have felt that Italy was smothering under the excessive encumbrance of their once-glorious heritage, but, for the Irish, the real dilemma was that so much of the native heritage had already disappeared. At the distance of but a single generation from the lived trauma of the Great Hunger, a collective drive was under way to salvage something from the last great decimation of Gaelic culture in order to rebuild Ireland anew in terms that would not simply be British. The massive building program undertaken by the Catholic Church in the post-Famine decades, the campaign for a Catholic university, the establishment of the Gaelic Athletic Association (1884), the National Literary Society (1892), the Gaelic League (1893), the cooperative movement (1894), and the Irish Literary Theatre (1899) all belong, in discrepant and often fiercely antagonistic ways, to this wider institution-building drive that would issue in the creation of a new Irish state and social order. The Revival, therefore, is best seen not as a singular phenomenon but as a matrix of cultural responses to this wider post-Famine institution-building drive to create hegemonic national institutions and a national public, and it was in turn both out of—and also in reaction to—the cultural ferment created by the intersection of these broad popular movements that the modernist strands of the Revival would emerge.19 Given the context, the whole drive of the Revival was not so much to assault the existing network of venerable national cultural institutions in the manner of the European avant-gardes as to create the stately institutions the country was felt to lack, and in so doing to transform Dublin from a British satellite into an Irish cultural capital. Whereas in the established European states the modernist avant-gardes rebelled against the stifling atmosphere of their own prestigious national academies, in Ireland the cultural revolution took on, rather, the character of a dispute between literary core and periphery. The Irish Revivalists challenged London’s cultural dominance in two ways: either by staying at home to establish Dublin as a rival cultural capital (Yeats, John Synge, and Augusta Gregory), or by bypassing London 19. For some pioneering attempts to connect the Revival to the Famine, see Luke Gibbons, ‘‘Montage, Modernism, and the City,’’ in Transformations in Irish Culture (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996), 165–69; and Kevin Whelan, ‘‘The Memories of ‘The Dead,’’’ Yale Journal of Criticism 15, no. 1 (2002): 59–97.

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altogether and migrating instead to Paris (Joyce, Beckett), thereby inserting Ireland into the mainstream of European culture from which centuries of British rule were felt to have had detached it. However much the Revivalist and the more vanguard wings of the ‘‘Irish Renaissance’’ may have differed otherwise, both were searching for an alternative to what they saw as the genteel philistinism of English Victorian culture. For many Irish scholars—whether liberal or leftist, republican or revisionist—the most embarrassing aspect of the Revival is its folk culture idiom, its nativist or romantic nationalist tones, its ‘‘backward look’’ to the western seaboard or to imagined worlds of the Irish peasantry or of Celtic epic and saga. All of this lends Revivalist literature an archaic coloration distinctly at odds with conventional ideas of modernism as the brashly iconoclastic and cosmopolitan art of new times, new cityscapes, new materials, new technologies. In other words, if we take the ‘‘shock of the new’’ as the defining signature of modernism, then the Revivalist neoromantic celebration of the peasantry, the countryside, the Big House, all seem to be distinctly at odds with the modernist currents of the time. But here again one has to assess the Revival in terms of the available cultural resources and longer cultural history out of which it emerged. European ancien régime ‘‘high culture’’—the cultural matrix out of which European modernism developed and against which it rebelled—had its origins in the court cultures of the Renaissance and thrived thereafter under the patronage of the churches and the big and small absolutist states. The ballet, the opera, architecture, sculpture, the visual and performing arts all flourished in Europe within the carapace of the great continental absolutist courts—Bourbon, Habsburg, Hohenzollern, Romanov—and a host of minor central European courts, such as, most famously, Weimar or Bayreuth. Ireland was geographically on the periphery of this continent: it had no indigenous feudal or court culture of its own, and from early modern times it was under the colonial rule of the one major European country (England) that had the shortest-lived absolutist state, a constitutional monarchy with little power, and hence perhaps a court culture that was, by continental standards, rather undistinguished. The English court or state never matched the achievements in classical music, ballet, opera, or the visual or fine arts that its European counterparts did. England’s major field of cultural achievement in the nineteenth century was in literature, and especially the novel; in nearly all of the other ‘‘high’’ arts (and the novel before its high modernist elevation was itself a ‘‘popular’’ rather than ‘‘high’’ art form) it trailed in the wake of its continental rivals. Anglo-Irish Dublin after the Union survived only as

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a declining satellite of this culturally unspectacular center, while Ireland’s indigenous ‘‘high’’ Gaelic culture was arrested in its development by successive waves of colonization that demolished the Gaelic-speaking aristocracy and led to the suppression of the majority Catholic Church, a possible alternative source of patronage, until the nineteenth century. Without major institutions of aristocratic or ecclesiastic patronage, a ‘‘high’’ Gaelic intelligentsia or culture could not thrive, and over the centuries all aspects of that indigenous culture were subsequently reduced, as is common in colonial situations, to the status of a ‘‘folk culture’’: a culture valued more for its ethnographic interest, and the access it supposedly afforded to the vanishing past, than for its capacity to speak to the present. Since this meant that the Irish Revivalists, unlike the European modernists, had very little indigenous or vernacular post-Renaissance ‘‘high culture’’ of their own with or against which to work, it was scarcely surprising that they turned to folk and peasant materials, or to the premodern saga and epic literature of the pre-Christian past. Nor was this turn to the countryside and the indigenous pagan or ‘‘deep’’ past for inspiration as utterly alien to other early European modernisms as some rather stereotyped conceptions of modernism would suggest. In France, for instance, the Impressionists conducted one of the earliest modernist rebellions against fossilized academic conventions, but Impressionist canvases were largely directed to the world of peasants, autumnal harvests, and the countryside rather than to that of cities and proletarians. When they did paint cityscapes, the Impressionists recorded artisanal markets and the boulevard cafés and leisure worlds of the Parisian petite bourgeoisie rather than the turbulent ultramodern landscape of the second industrial revolution. In Germany, Wagner’s Ring cycle (1876) broke with nineteenth-century German operatic convention and paved the way for the emergence of modernist music, but the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk looked to the world of pagan epic, medieval chivalry, and heroic emotion rather than to the contemporary industrial world for inspiration. In ballet, Stravinsky’s The Firebird (1910) and Le Sacre du Printemps (1912), produced for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, represented a shocking break with established conventions, but these works were deeply influenced by Russia’s contemporary revival of folk culture rather than the new world of the factory, technology, or metropolis. Even in advanced industrial England, several of the most modernist writers—Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, T. E. Lawrence—drew more heavily for inspiration on the exotic and ‘‘primitive’’ outposts of empire rather than on the modern metropolis. In ‘‘the colonial

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world,’’ too, as in Latin America, for instance, the first phase of modernism tried to reconcile the experimental advances of European vanguards with indigenous Aztec, Mayan, and peasant iconography. In a variety of ways, then, a fascination with ‘‘primitive’’ cultures serves as a fundamental modernist stimulus (as the classics were to the Renaissance) through which to assault the perceived deficiencies of the modern world.20 The point for our purposes is that the late nineteenth-, early twentieth-century turn by Standish O’Grady, Yeats, Gregory, Synge, Patrick Pearse, Douglas Hyde, and the other Revivalists to what they took to be the premodern world was not totally out of step with other contemporary forms of early modernism. In Ireland, however, as in Russia, instead of seeking renewal among ‘‘primitive’’ cultures at the outer perimeters of empire, writers and artists looked to their own ‘‘primitives’’ at the domestic perimeters to serve as a spiritual counterresource to what they took to be the defilements of industrial and commercial civilization. If this turn to precapitalist aristocrat and peasant cultures, in Ireland as elsewhere, was often shot through with a reactionary worldview, then a more militantly experimental modernism that embraced technology, the machine, and the city was no guarantee of a progressive art or politics, either. Italian Futurism, to cite the obvious example, embraced the brave new world of the twentieth century with a missionary zeal, but while the Futurists attacked the monarchy and the Vatican, they also denigrated parliament and socialism, and trusted extreme Italian nationalism, imperialism, and war to blast the way to the future, whatever the human cost. In other words, the embrace in modernist hands of the archaic premodern worlds of aristocracy, epic past, and rural countryside or that of the metropolis and technology can be equally reactionary. What is politically decisive is not whether a modernist writer embraces the archaic or the modern elements—the country or the city—on this spectrum but rather how the dialectic between the two is elaborated in his or her work. When Eagleton concludes, then, that ‘‘what is striking about Irish modernism is its overwhelmingly conservative tenor,’’ arguing that the country was too rural and too technologically backward to produce a radical avant-garde on the continental European model, since ‘‘[t]here could be no exhilarating encounter between art and technology in such an industrially backward nation,’’ the problem is not so much that this verdict is too harshly 20. See Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); and David Richards, Masks of Difference: Cultural Representations in Literature, Anthropology, and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

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negative (though it may be: when seen in a world-colonial context and not under exclusively Western eyes, the Irish Revival would prove tremendously inspiring—as the Harlem Renaissance and other episodes would suggest). The problem with the verdict, rather, is that it rests on a whole series of suppositions that need to be, but are not, critically tested. Working within a social formation that was neither continental European nor AngloAmerican in character, and thus lacking both the stimulus of the extensive ancien régime high cultures of the former fully as much as the economicotechnological dynamism of the latter, Ireland nonetheless produced several great modernist writers—first Synge and Yeats, then Joyce, later Beckett— who managed between them to span three successive phases or generations of European literary modernism. If in the works of the earliest of these modernists—Synge and Yeats—the dialectic between the archaic and the modern tended to be weighted toward the archaic, which was associated with value, and to denigrate the modern, equated with the loss of value, then this seems largely in keeping with a great deal of early or pre–World War I European modernism, when a strong sense of aristocratic disdain for the new society emerging out of the collapse of the old remained decisive. In Joyce’s Ulysses, the same tension between the archaic and the modern remains fundamental. It is no longer manifest, however, in terms of a rivalry between premodern and modern cultural formations as in Yeats or Synge, but is reconfigured instead in terms of the tension between the modern city’s complex geographic strata and multitemporalities and the mythic method designed to lend that landscape some sense of totalized form. But Joyce’s work has already shifted the weight decisively toward the ‘‘modern’’ rather than the ‘‘archaic’’ end of the spectrum by moving his art away from the rural landscapes of his precursors and into a wholly urban Irish milieu, and by embracing the encyclopedic but mock-epic and post-heroic forms typical of modernism at its post–World War I meridian. In the post– World War II work of Beckett, defined partly by his attempt to move beyond Joyce (as Joyce’s was to press beyond Yeats’s), the city in turn is abandoned for a null, devastated, shell-shocked, postapocalyptic, posthistorical wasteland, in which the whole project of modernity has already proleptically played itself out to a catastrophic denouement, and in which the detritus of the modern has consequently itself become archaic. Eagleton concludes that what unites these works is their common mandarinism and hence conservatism (there is, after all, no engagé such as Brecht on the Irish scene— though in this assumption, Eagleton, like everyone else, overlooks Mairtín Ó Cadhain, surely the most politically committed of the Irish modernist

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writers, his work regularly bypassed, however, because he wrote in Irish rather than in English). But what seems much more remarkable is the intellectual radicalism that drives the successive bearers of Irish modernism to work their way—with the relentlessness of a computer virus—through all of the major variations that the dialectic of the modern and the archaic (a dialectic constitutive of modernism tout court) will yield. In the works of the Irish modernists, that dialectic will continuously be extended and assaulted until, between them, the whole repertoire of ‘‘solutions’’ it will yield is exhausted or exploded. While these writers produced several of the most challenging modernist masterpieces in the English language, the country still produced no extended modernist culture. This was not because Ireland was a premodern or traditional rural backwater too isolated from the rapids of twentiethcentury modernity to do so, but because it was in one broad sociohistorical sense too modern, since it had been, via colonialism, catapulted directly into modernity without ever having passed through the feudal stage and hence had so little of the vernacular ‘‘high culture’’ that many of its European neighbors had to work on. To put this otherwise, while in Europe it would take two world wars decisively to liquidate the hoary but obdurate old universe of the ancien régime, in Ireland, the late nineteenth-century Land Acts (which issued from the class struggles of the Land Wars) consigned the local aristocracy to their doom several decades earlier than the power of their counterparts in England and much of Europe would be dissolved. The attainment of bourgeois nationalist independence in what is now the Republic, moreover, took most of the island out of the titanic wars of selfdestruction that devastated much of the rest of continental Europe until the 1950s. A less conservative, less isolationist, and more engaged twentiethcentury history might have produced the social convulsions which might in turn have stimulated a more extended modernist culture, but if the Free State established a conservative society, that very conservatism bought its own shelter from Europe’s successive plunges into self-destruction. In the end, what distinguishes Irish modernism above all else from its European counterparts was not perhaps that it was on the whole much more or less conservative than other modernisms in other national contexts but that its literary modernism began so early 21 and still managed to extend itself across several successive stages of modernist literary development, 21. See J. C. C. Mays’s introduction in Poems and Exiles, by James Joyce (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), xl–xli.

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yet without ever reaching much beyond literature. Except for a very modest modernism in painting—like literature, the most small-scale, individual, and artisanal of art forms—there were no substantive or extended modernist movements in Irish architecture, music, dance, sculpture, or municipal design. The experimental thrust of Irish modernism—in Wilde, Synge, Yeats, Sean O’Casey, Joyce, Beckett, and Ó Cadhain—was essentially linguistic in character, and it was in the carnival of language that the utopian dimensions of the Revival and the national struggle found sanctuary. While the fact that Irish modernism was so concentrated in literature may be explained partly as a response to a sense of linguistic alienation in English aggravated by the loss of Gaelic Irish culture, and partly due to the fact that literature is less immediately dependent on other large-scale political and economic institutional supports and constraints than other art forms— such as architecture, sculpture, or cinema, for example—this also ensures, however, that literature cannot so immediately translate its visions into the everyday lifeworld as these other media do. Because it was so confined to high literature, Irish modernism was inevitably, at a time when the bulk of the population had access only to primary education, largely divorced from the everyday lives of the broader Irish public. A modernism in cinema, music, architecture, public design, or the performing arts might have engaged public consciousness in more immediate ways than Ulysses or Yeats’s late poetry or Endgame could ever expect to do. Ireland, then, had an exuberant literary modernism that survived across several generations, but already by the late 1920s, when the Irish revolution had petered out in a conservative partitionist state order on the island, that modernism was increasingly achieved not only in the geographical distance of European self-exile but at an emotional distance from the social movements and stimuli that had provided its initial momentum in the first instance. 4 For Anderson, as indeed for Jameson, it is the gradual disintegration of the coordinates that had sustained the modernist cultural field that has prepared the ground for the contemporary (post-seventies) ascendance of postmodernism. As Anderson conceives it, modernism continued as a defining cultural force until World War II, which delivered the final deathblow to the old agrarian and aristocratic elites and their way of life all across Europe. World War I had already mortally maimed these classes, but their traditional rival, the haute bourgeoisie, struggled to maintain the distinc-

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tive social and cultural universe of the old order for another twenty years, until it also began to dissolve as a class. The suggestion is not that class divisions have diminished since World War II or that overall levels of class mobility have significantly increased; what has changed, however, Anderson asserts, is that the sense of cultural distinction that characterized the old elites has dissolved in the new conditions of mass consumerism that developed in Western Europe in the contemporary period. In this situation, the old split between high and popular culture that had rested on the separation between well-educated elites and illiterate or semiliterate majorities began to lose its force. High culture is now cultivated by fractions of the university-educated bourgeoisie and middle classes, while the majority of all classes, rich and poor, are now attached to the mass entertainments of the culture industry.22 For long, Anderson argues, sociologists have debated the embourgeoisment of the European working classes, but in ‘‘a monetary world that knows no social fixities or stable identities,’’ the encanaillement of the possessing classes represented the more significant phenomenon.23 In a context where the old academicist establishments and the narrow bourgeois mentalities against which it rebelled have both lost their force, modernism has lost much of its coherence and shock value, and can no longer maintain the oppositional stance it had once claimed (OP, 86). Secondly, whereas modernism had thrived on the excitements of the technological advances of the second industrial revolution, technological innovation acquired a more baleful cast by the second half of the century, with the invention of the atom bomb and the inauguration of the Cold War: in this climate, the malevolent specter of technological apocalypse had largely eclipsed the technological utopianism of the early twentieth century. Moreover, the most decisive technological advance of the postwar era, Anderson contends, was television, and especially color television, which only became generalized in the 1970s. TV and the new computer and digitalized communications technologies, he suggests, following Jameson, are essentially technologies of reproduction rather than production. Thus, the crucial difference between the wave of technological innovations released by the second industrial revolution and those of the late twentieth-century communications revolution was that the earlier innovations were themselves silent. 22. On this topic, see Néstor Garcia Canclini, ‘‘Latin American Contradictions: Modernism without Modernization?’’ in Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 58. 23. Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity (London and New York: Verso, 1998), 85. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text as OP.

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They had to be represented by other arts; they could not represent themselves. The new discourse- and image-producing technical environment of the postmodern is such, however, that all the arts are now increasingly cannibalized and mediated by these new communications technologies (OP, 87–89). Of the enabling conditions for modernism, the last to disappear was the specter of revolution. This, too, did not disappear overnight; it continued to haunt the post–World War II period, and, in the late sixties, the conjuncture of student and worker strikes across Western Europe, decolonization movements in the Third World, and the apparent prospect of a revitalized Communism after Stalin, together with the sexual revolution, created a revolutionary ferment not seen since the twenties. But this conjuncture proved a short Indian summer, and by the seventies the Right resumed control with Thatcher and Reagan. By the end of the eighties, Soviet Communism had collapsed, the Third World anticolonial revolutions had failed to deliver economic emancipation, the welfare state created by postwar social democracy in Western Europe was downsized, and the triumph of neoliberalism seemed assured. It is, Anderson argues, in this new conjuncture that the new postmodernist field emerges into view. ‘‘Postmodernism emerged from the combination of a declassé ruling order, a mediatized technology, and a monochrome politics’’ (OP, 92). Capitalism itself, he adds, entered a new phase after the postwar boom ended, characterized by the assault on organized industrial labor in the capitalist cores; by outsourcing to peripheries of the world system; by the dramatic rise of finance capital and exchange speculation relative to manufacturing; and by the vulgar nouveau riche consumerism and hedonism that has dominated the eighties and nineties. ‘‘The departure of aristocracy, the evanescence of the bourgeoisie, the erosion of workingclass confidence and identity, have altered the supports and targets of artistic practice in fundamental ways. It is not that alternative addressees have simply disappeared. New poles of oppositional identification have emerged in the postmodern period: gender, race, ecology, sexual orientation, regional or continental diversity. But these have to date constituted a weaker set of antagonisms’’ (OP, 104). The postmodern cultural moment, for Anderson, lacks both the towering individual geniuses or the intransigent collective vanguard movements of the modernist period. Where new avant-gardes do appear, they are incorporated into the commodity market with unprecedented rapidity. Whereas the modernists had tended, broadly speaking, to ally themselves

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either with the élan of the old aristocracy or with the egalitarian dreams of a still-emergent, still-radical labor movement, or even in some instances with both, in the altered conditions that constitute the postmodern, the possibilities of imaginative investment in either the upper atmosphere of titled leisure or the lower dreams of manual labor have receded. If these vectors of alterity are not available to postmodernism, which ones are? Here Anderson finds a model in Antonio Gramsci’s conception of the European Renaissance and Reformation. Intellectually and aesthetically, the Renaissance was far in advance of the Reformation, but the Reformation, culturally coarser, more philistine and obscurantist, was a conservative reaction that nonetheless yielded a historical advance. The Renaissance had been an elite affair, confined to wealthy educated minorities; the Reformation involved half the common population of Europe. So although the Reformation coarsened and simplified the High Renaissance assault on medievalism, the passage of intellectual advance through the ordeal of popularization ultimately put the advances made by the Renaissance on a stronger and freer social foundation. Can this Gramscian model of dilution and diffusion describe the relationship between modernism and postmodernism? Jameson’s early work on postmodernism, Anderson believes, had intimated something of this kind. Increased levels of educational access and higher literacy, new information technologies, a more universal dependence on wage labor had, Jameson suggested, created something of a leveling process: not democratization, but nevertheless a kind of ‘‘plebianization’’ of high culture that the Left could only welcome. Viewed thus, postmodernism could be regarded to some extent as a welcome popularization of modernist sensibility and techniques. Anderson considers this idea, but ultimately rejects it, since he believes that the analogy with the Reformation will not hold. The Reformation, he argues, was a political movement of convulsive energy, unleashing civil wars all across Europe; it was an ideological insurgency against the premodern ideological order of the universal church. The period since the seventies has seen enormous global change, but the triumph of neoliberal capitalism has only rarely been something won by bottom-up popular struggle; mostly it has been compelled by top-down economic pressure mediated through international agencies servicing the interests of global capital (OP, 112–14). Anderson does sketch, however, what he identifies as a constitutive tension within the postmodernist cultural field, between its citra and ultra tendencies. The citra includes all those tendencies that have tended to dis-

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pense with the more difficult and inassimilable parts of modernism to make it more accessible; the ultra includes those tendencies that have attempted to radicalize modernism’s negation of immediate gratification or sensuous intelligibility. The one attempts to adjust art to the ubiquity of commodification and the spectacle; the other attempts to elude this fate. In the postmodernist moment, however, the weight of the ultra to citra tendencies is clearly the inverse to that of the earlier modernist epoch, the seesaw has titled to the other end (OP, 105–6). While it is certainly the case that much of the ‘‘Third World’’ has far lower degrees of consumption and much less advanced levels of technological development than those associated with Western postmodernism, the development of global communications systems—especially television—has ensured, Anderson suggests, ‘‘an incomparably greater degree of cultural penetration of the former Second and Third Worlds’’ than had been the case even as late as the sixties. In these conditions, postmodern forms make themselves felt well beyond the rich Western metropolitan regions, so that today there is little reason to doubt that ‘‘even the damned of the earth too have entered the kingdom of the spectacle’’ (OP, 122). 5 To what extent, if any, might these relief maps of the postwar metropolitan landscape help to illuminate late twentieth-century Irish developments? Since 1958, when the Irish political elite finally abandoned economic autarchy, the southern Irish state’s single major project has been to integrate the country into the European Union and global capitalism. The same period witnessed the introduction of new communications technologies, especially television, which brought the country into closer contact with the wider international political scene and with British and North American consumer society. There was the early but delusive hope that economic modernization could be achieved while maintaining intact the conservative Catholic social order consolidated after independence. Confronted since the seventies on a series of fronts—by the women’s movement, the very different value system retailed in mass culture, and the top-down liberalization of state law required by EU membership—the Catholic Church initially rallied its forces to defeat successive attempts to loosen the bond between church and state and to liberalize sexual mores. By the nineties, that reactionary rally had ebbed considerably. The litany of clerical sex and child abuse scandals dredged to light during the last decade has massively

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dented the moral authority of the Catholic Church. This had been, in any event, weakening for some time, as more and more people simply ignored its teachings on sexual morality. This social process is best understood perhaps not so much in terms of ‘‘secularization’’ as in terms of a wholesale resocialization or reengineering of Irish bourgeois subjectivity and cultural hegemony. What has emerged in the wake of the old Catholic-nationalist order is not so much a more secular society as a new kind of social formation where subjectivity is decreasingly defined either in terms of citizenship or of adherence to communal church practices. Instead, it is increasingly articulated in terms of individual capacity to participate in various modes of consumer ‘‘lifestyle’’: a transformation in the technology of subject production as dramatic and far-reaching as that inaugurated in the nineteenth-century after the Famine. The mediatization of Irish culture has also proceeded apace. While colonial Ireland was only lightly touched by the first and second industrial revolutions, and while independent Ireland circumvented, because of its neutrality, the nuclear dimensions of what Mandel has called the third technological revolution, the country has found itself during the last two decades (punctually, this time, no long time lag involved) a significant supply center for what we might call, extending Mandel, the ‘‘fourth’’ (computer) technological revolution. Hence, it has been able to overcome the peripherality suffered in earlier phases of capitalism to become a world center in the software industry. Ireland is now the second largest exporter of software in the world after the United States (60 percent of PC-based software in Europe originates from Ireland) and is lauded by economists as one of the most fully ‘‘open’’ or globalized economies in the world.24 The third defining coordinate of the postmodernist conjuncture, according to Anderson, is the exorcism of the specter of revolution and a corresponding diminishment of any sense of alternative futures. In the late sixties, Northern Ireland did experience a surge of revolutionary upheaval in the form of the civil rights campaign, which challenged Unionist domination of the North and in so doing threatened to upset the whole basis of the post-partition state settlement. The deliberate injection of violence into that campaign in the early 1970s, especially on Bloody Sunday, set the scene, however, for a long ‘‘dirty war’’ that unfolded against the backdrop of the grim international horizon of the Second Cold War. This viciously 24. Cited in Michael Cronin, ‘‘Speed Limits: Ireland, Globalisation, and the War against Time,’’ in Reinventing Ireland: Culture, Society, and the Global Economy, ed. Peadar Kirby, Luke Gibbons, and Michael Cronin (London: Pluto Press, 2002), 56.

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conducted struggle mobilized and politicized the Northern Catholic working class and has impelled substantive reform of the Northern state, but republican insurgence was unable either to end partition or to overcome the divisions between the Protestant and Catholic working classes, which remain deeper than ever today. The period since the seventies, then, has witnessed major sociocultural change and massive economic transformation in the Southern state and some substantive administrative reform in the Northern one. In both states, however, these positive transformations have gone hand in hand with an increasing subordination of society on the island as a whole to the dictates of a neoliberal economic order that has actually aggravated social inequality and led to the normalization of an individualistic consumerist ethos at the expense of social solidarity. Some of the smaller left political parties and some religious organizations have helped to temper the worst excesses of the existing economic order. But, as is the case globally with the Left, none has been able to articulate what the economic-cultural basis for some alternative kind of society might be. While there is much in recent Irish history that would require us to reject or temper Anderson’s dejected conception of the post-seventies’ period as one characterized solely by an unbroken litany of defeats, the very constricted sense of available alternatives to the existing neoliberal economic regime is as decisive a feature of the current sociopolitical climate in Ireland as elsewhere. Indeed, in Ireland since the sixties—as in what was once Eastern Europe and in many places in the erstwhile ‘‘colonial world’’ today—the surest sign of the ascendancy of the new neoliberal regime is that the country’s ongoing integration into the world-economic system is so widely credited as a process of emancipation from a misguided revolutionary past.25 Nevertheless, while the coordinates of postmodernism delineated by Anderson and Jameson identify the wider context and constraints within which contemporary Irish cultural change can usefully be analyzed, the specific character of the Irish scene ought not to be effaced. For both of them, as we have seen, postmodernism emerges in a cultural climate determined primarily by the waning of an earlier efflorescence of modernism. However, while Ireland produced, as has been noted, an ambitious literary modernism, the country was in no position to support an extended modernist culture beyond the literary field. In fact, even in the literary field the cultural dominant 25. The best accounts of the cultural dynamics of Irish modernization since the sixties are Luke Gibbons’s Transformations in Irish Culture (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996), and Conor McCarthy’s Modernisation: Crisis and Culture in Ireland, 1969–1992 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000).

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in Ireland during the decades between independence and the end of the twentieth century was not modernism at all but rather naturalism. Born of the blighted dreams of the Irish revolution, this naturalism was, in essence, an aesthetic of diminished expectations that set out to deprogram the romantic utopian impulses of the literature of the Revival. Where Revivalist literature insisted on the possibility of a revitalized putatively archaic Irish culture heroically resistant to the defilements of metropolitan modernity, naturalism negated this utopian idealism by insisting on the dreary provincial squalor of Irish life. In the theater, this disillusioned naturalism was already installed as the dominant house style in the Abbey by midcentury: the reigning genres were political farces, peasant comedies, rural and kitchen dramas. Naturalism’s ascendancy in poetry was marked by Patrick Kavanagh’s The Great Hunger (1942); Kavanagh (and not Yeats) became the dominant model for most Irish poets right into the present. In narrative fiction, the early naturalistic Joyce of Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist (and not Ulysses) exerted the most decisive and extensive influence on the development of Irish writing in the postindependence period. In its French inception, the naturalist novel had provoked intense hostility because it imaginatively explored previously uncharted territories of lower-class urban experience—slums, back streets, brothels, prisons, asylums, and the modalities of petit bourgeois poverty and vice—and thus offended official morality and accepted definitions of novelistic good taste. But Irish naturalism has been concentrated (with important exceptions) overwhelmingly in small-town and rural Ireland, the fictional territory of writers such as Kate O’Brien, Liam O’Flaherty, Sean O’Faoláin, Edna O’Brien, John McGahern, Tom Murphy, and William Trevor. Like its French counterpart, Irish naturalism was also in its inception a dissident and reformist aesthetic: it measured the distance between the official state ideology of Irish Ireland and its tawdry reality. The naturalist writers probed—with an intimate knowledge of the local terrain conspicuously absent in much of the literature of the Revival—the social and sexual traumas that official Irish culture would not acknowledge, and in so doing many incurred the wrath not only of state censors but of the reading public for scandalizing their own society before an allegedly hostile Anglo-American audience. But while naturalism was undoubtedly a dissident and reformist aesthetic, it would be difficult to regard it in retrospect as a radical one. It protested against the sordid, hypocritical, petty corruption of small-town or rural Ireland, its cultural and libidinal immiseration. Yet, while it disclosed the cramped lives this society afforded, it also consistently reduced—in the manner habitual to naturalism—that society to the sordid conditions it pro-

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tested. Naturalism is a socially engaged form, but it is a literary mode usually focalized through the consciousness of characters so socially isolated and temperamentally alienated from their communities that any sense of social protest is typically smothered by a pervading climate of entropy and fatalism. In Irish naturalist fiction, protagonists usually survive their deathly social condition only if they can escape or emigrate; to remain within or committed to the local community is to atrophy with it. No one can doubt that the problems depicted in naturalism were actual and pressing; what can be questioned is the inference that the communities depicted were so helplessly paralyzed, so denuded of internal dissident forces and resources, as naturalism typically indicates. Stylistically speaking, moreover, naturalism’s formal and linguistic conservatism aesthetically reproduced that very sense of cramped ambition and narrow limitation which naturalism thematically denounced in society at large. Irish modernism might have detached itself from social engagement and in so doing displaced its utopian energies into linguistic and formal inventiveness; naturalism, by contrast, remained socially committed, but its arthritic aesthetic conservatism inadvertently replicated the dour social conservatism of Irish society against which it set itself.26 Thus, in many respects, the naturalists became a symbol of the very condition they protested. It remains today a critical commonplace to contrast Yeats’s imaginary romantic Ireland with the tougher-minded realism of a Kavanagh, O’Faoláin, or McGahern, but Yeats was no less scornful of the society that emerged after independence than they; indeed, he was perhaps even more intransigently critical and unreconciled. The real difference is that while Yeats conceived of this provincial and puritanical new Ireland as only too typical of the bourgeois-industrial modernity he detested, the naturalists were convinced that the ills of postindependence Ireland were to be explained, rather, by its lamentably archaic rural social order, and that their task, therefore, was to release it into modernity. Both were agreed that the new Ireland was a disappointment; where they differed was that while Yeats attributed its shortcomings to its embrace of the modern, the naturalists attributed the same defects to the supposedly archaic character of Irish society that impeded it from fully entering the modern. Once the economic modernization drive of the sixties got under way, 26. For a more extended discussion of Irish naturalism, see my ‘‘Modernization and Aesthetic Ideology in Contemporary Irish Culture,’’ in Writing in the Irish Republic: Literature, Culture, Politics, 1949–1999, ed. Ray Ryan (Houndmills: Macmillan Press Ltd., 2000), 105–29.

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an extensive academic and journalistic literature emerged in Ireland that sought to identify those cultural factors that were impeding the development of a modern industrial enterprise culture. Fianna Fáil’s version of nationalism, the rural ‘‘traditionalism’’ of the countryside, and the inordinate influence of the Catholic Church featured obsessively as mainstays of Irish backwardness in this literature. In this ideological climate, the bleak conception of postindependence Ireland fashioned in Irish naturalist literature was now pressed into the service of the wider cultural program of capitalist modernization. Since the naturalist aesthetic, like modernization discourse, insisted on the insular, static, monochromatic, and entropic quality of postindependence Irish life, and since mass culture offered a tantalizing vision of the unlimited bounty of metropolitan culture, it was all too easy to market the country’s insertion into international consumer capitalism as a veritable ticket out of the poorhouse of independence into a carnival of libidinal and cultural excitement. Thus, the real cultural dominant in postindependence Ireland was naturalism, not modernism. Hence the emergent cultural dominant of the present moment might be described not so much as ‘‘postmodernism’’ as a kind of neo- or postnaturalism. Some of the most internationally feted, commercially successful, and critically debated ‘‘new Irish’’ works of the last decade fall into a category of this sort. Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa, Martin McDonagh’s The Leenane Trilogy, Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats and On Raftery’s Hill, and Patrick McCabe’s 1992 novel The Butcher Boy, later filmed by Neil Jordan in 1997, can all be read as signposts to the emergence and consolidation of this new aesthetic trend. A parallel development may be observed in Northern Ireland, where the more familiar ‘‘Northern thriller,’’ romance-across-the-divide, and bildungsroman conventions consolidated since the seventies have been superseded in the nineties by more ludic versions of the same genres, a trend exemplified by works such as Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game, Colin Bateman’s Divorcing Jack, and Robert MacLiam Wilson’s Eureka Street.27 In these works, the old naturalism has, in recent decades, acquired the high voltage of new technical innovations, some new Viagra of hectic experiment or extravagance, to resuscitate it into some new life or half-life. Of these works, Friel’s anomic Ballybeg in Dancing at Lughnasa is closest in narrative method and milieu to the established norm of Irish 27. See Richard Kirkland’s incisive overview of contemporary developments in Northern Irish narrative fiction in his Identity Parades: Northern Irish Culture and Dissident Subjects (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2002).

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naturalist drama. But it was the all-woman Dionysian dance scene that lent the play that startling burst of manic energy (all the more striking for being so alien to its overarching naturalist ambience) that mesmerized audiences and critics alike. The Irish midland settings in Carr’s plays also ostensibly recall the old naturalist drama, but her characters display extremes of squalor, depravity, and psychotic behavior violently at odds with the more restrained politesse of the older naturalism. McDonagh’s Leenane Trilogy inhabits a similar territory, but his is a more self-consciously darkened-down but also camped-up and comic world comprised of collages of the older naturalist conventions, settings, and formulas. In fiction, McCabe’s Butcher Boy also pushes naturalism in the same comic-grotesque direction. In that novel, the conventional realistic depiction of a depressed small Irish town is transformed by filtering the narrative through the deranged Francie’s apocalyptic imagination, in which Irish Catholic and British and American forms of pop-culture millenarianism promiscuously commingle. By this means, the more familiar naturalistic renditions of the rickety end of de Valera’s Ireland intersect with and are aggravated and quickened by Cold War nightmares of nuclear catastrophe and Catholic fantasies of the end of the world. The result is an eclectic tragicomic vision of disintegration that inserts the national sense of an ending into a wider global one. It is difficult to know at this early stage how best to diagnose the significance of this emergent aesthetic trend. On the one hand, the new neonaturalism would seem to signal a decisive disintegration of a fundamental paradigm of postindependence culture: the once dominant naturalist aesthetic is not displaced by some new aesthetic agenda, however; instead, the old naturalism is denaturalized by pushing its typical content and conventions to violent or kitschy extremes. In other words, the works of Carr, McDonagh, McCabe, and (in the different context of the North) Bateman and MacLiam Wilson continue to exploit the same emotional territories charted by the earlier naturalists, but they do so with a kind of formal eclecticism and hectic bravura alien to the older forms. Their neonaturalism might, on the one hand, be read positively as an objective correlative of the contemporary condition: a period of exuberant social flux that cannot, however hectically it bids to do so, dispel the traumatic memory of the past from which it wishes to escape. Alternatively, it might just as plausibly be argued that these works represent an essentially superficial renovation of an old aesthetic—a naturalism on steroids is still naturalism—since the formal experiments remain shackled to the same dystopian, entropic, naturalist worldview. Where the thematic content of the once-dominant older naturalism

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was radical but its form and treatment conservative, the new neonaturalism might be said simply to reverse this ratio: the fundamental conception and diagnosis of Irish society rehearsed in the new neonaturalism is very familiar indeed, the formal experimentation a desperate last-ditch attempt, perhaps, to lend that inherited content a spurious radicalism. The contemporary Irish literary field, then, is structured by the intersection of a number of distinct aesthetic modes and agendas. An established literary naturalism, identified primarily with some of the now senior reputations in Irish fiction such as McGahern, O’Brien, Friel, Murphy, and the late Brian Moore, and with a host of lesser figures, remains a dominant though seemingly declining force. A newer neonaturalist narrative aesthetic, associated primarily with a younger generation of writers, has recently emerged to challenge, though also in some ways thematically to sustain and prolong that dominance by other means. The canonical figures of Irish modernism—Wilde, Synge, Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett—continue to tower like a literary Mount Rushmore over the contemporary scene. The belated legatees to this older modernism, such as Thomas Kinsella, Derek Mahon, Trevor Joyce, and Catherine Walsh, now operating in unseasonable conditions almost wholly inhospitable to modernism, have found themselves sidelined by a critical establishment more preoccupied with writers whose styles represent late-lyrical versions of naturalism—such as Seamus Heaney or Michael Longley—or with those whose works appear more easily accommodated to wider postmodernist international currents—such as John Banville, Paul Muldoon, and Medbh McGuckian. Distinctions between these belated modernist and postmodernist agendas seem increasingly hazardous and unstable, in any event, because in the period since World War II modernism generally has surrendered both its vanguardist faith in the transfigurative power of art and its ‘‘mandarin’’ commitment to encyclopedic and autotelic works of art that aspired to become hieratic texts to an entire culture.28 Even as the achievements of the major modernists recede in time, therefore, and even as their works lose some of their initial power to shock as they become embalmed and institutionalized by the university and heritage industries alike, they continue—because of the grand scale of their ambition, radical integrity of their vision, and scope of their erudition—to overshadow all subsequent achievements. However much contemporary Irish literature may aspire to outflank or leave modernism behind, therefore, it still 28. The major exception is Thomas Kinsella. While a veritable critical industry has emerged around Heaney, Kinsella’s work has received much less sustained attention and has even been excluded from some recent anthologies.

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languishes in modernism’s wake. Works of some merit continue to appear in all of the different aesthetic modes that intersect to constitute the current Irish literary field, but truly significant change perhaps will require work charged with ambition sufficient to disturb and reconfigure that whole literary field itself. While modernism and naturalism may be at opposite ends of the spectrum where the subject of verisimilitude or representational realism is concerned, in an Irish context they have both been institutionally processed in terms of their apparently shared antagonism to what is commonly characterized as the Revival’s romantic ‘‘flight from reality.’’ 29 In the overarching context of the country’s integration into Europe and global capital, that is, the social function served by each has proved largely complementary: naturalism is generally lauded as the necessary gritty realistic corrective to Revivalist romanticism and idealism; modernism is championed as the aesthetic that best expresses the country’s post-sixties’ disdain for cultural nativism and receptiveness to international modernity. For any new literature to emerge, a new cultural criticism capable of shattering this congealed critical consensus (the literary critical outrider of modernization theory) will also be indispensable. 6 The most decisive shift in contemporary Irish culture in recent decades, therefore, is not that comprised by recent mutations within the literary field itself but rather the apparent displacement of literature tout court from the central position it had occupied since the Revival. That Revival, as I remarked earlier, was an overwhelmingly literary phenomenon whose ‘‘giants’’ were all writers. Contemporary Irish writing, even at its very best, has produced no writers of comparable ambition, erudition, complexity, or international stature, and in fact the most internationally distinguished and consistently innovative figures of the contemporary Irish cultural scene at present are not its writers but its singers and musicians. Given its population and the size of its domestic market, Irish traditional, folk, and rock music forms have enjoyed a remarkable presence on the domestic and global music scene over the past several decades. Traditional music, once thought a residual western seaboard phenomenon on the verge of extinction, has witnessed a striking resurgence in recent decades—one that has secured 29. This description of the Revival is John Wilson Foster’s in Colonial Consequences: Essays in Irish Literature and Culture (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1991), 50.

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its popularity at both the urban and rural community level—and it is now the object of serious academic study as well. Irish folk music—drawing on both Irish traditional and folk and wider international influences—has also produced a whole series of figures, such as Luke Kelly, Donal Lunny, Andy Irvine, Paul Brady, Dolores Keane, Christy Moore, Mairéad and Tríona Ní Dhomhnaill, and many others, whose works have earned them a popular domestic and international audience. Meanwhile, in the more high-profile rock scene, Irish artists such as Van Morrison, Rory Gallagher, Bob Geldolf, U2, Sinéad O’Connor, and the Pogues appear to have secured for themselves a place in the history of international popular music that few of their literary peers could claim in the history of contemporary international literature. The vitality of the contemporary Irish music scene is not something that should be attributed to the Celtic Tiger boom period, which ought more properly to be associated with the lip-synced pap of ‘‘boy bands’’ such as Boyzone or Westlife. The roots of Irish music’s current success might be traced back, rather, to the international folk revival of the 1960s, which created an appreciative new international and domestic audience for Irish traditional and folk music, and to the concurrent abandonment by the state of its attempt to generate an indigenous Irish musical ‘‘high culture’’ or ‘‘art music’’ by means of an arranged marriage of Irish folk and European classical traditions.30 Internationally, this was also a period when, in Derek Scott’s phrase, postmodernism ‘‘ousted [modernist] notions of universalism, internationalism and ‘art for art’s sake,’ and replaced them with concerns for the values of specific cultures and their differences.’’ 31 For Scott, the belief in a universal aesthetic that transcends social and cultural context lay behind the internationalist aspirations of musical modernism; this aspiration has been displaced, he contends, since the sixties, by a postmodern cultural relativism, signaled both by a resurgent interest in ‘‘ethnic music’’ (and the rise of ethnomusicology) and the increasing similarity in the marketing techniques used for the classical and pop music repertoires. In the space opened by these developments, a whole series of Irish individuals and groups, practicing very diverse musical styles, emerged. These included traditional and folk groups such as Planxty, the Bothy Band, Ceoltóirí Cualann, the Chieftains, De Danann, and Altan, and bands such as 30. See Marie McCarthy, Passing It On: The Transmission of Music in Irish Culture (Cork: Cork University Press, 1999), chap. 6. 31. Derek Scott, ‘‘Postmodernism and Music,’’ in The Icon Critical Dictionary of Postmodern Thought, ed. Stuart Sim (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 135.

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Horslips, Moving Hearts, Scullion, Clannad, and the Pogues, who pioneered experimental syntheses of international rock and traditional Irish arrangements. In the works of early rock groups such as the Boomtown Rats and later bands and individuals such as U2, the Undertones, the Cranberries, and Sinéad O’Connor, the international rock element vastly outweighs any indigenous Irish sound or form. What is important here, however, is not the listing of individual artists and groups but the fact that a critical mass of musical talent, working domestically in a sustained manner over several decades, and in a variety of fields from traditional through classical to punk, has produced a music that has engaged and extended, rather than simply disowned, its indigenous heritage. In the Pogues’s sometimes raucous, sometimes lyrical, blending of London punk and Irish folk, in collaborations such as that between Van Morrison and the Chieftains, in Sinéad O’Connor’s haunting renditions of traditional ballads, in the heterogeneous versions of ‘‘Celtic rock’’ developed from Horslips to Clannad to Moving Hearts, as well as in the works of a host of individual composers, singersongwriters, and musicians, local and international forms have achieved creative interaction. In a country in which literary critics monopolize cultural debate and in which specialists in European classical music dominate the academic study of music at the university level, the sociocultural significance of this quite dramatic musical ‘‘renaissance,’’ which has now extended in multiple directions over several decades, has received astonishingly little critical analysis.32 It would be tempting to construe the phenomenon as a kind of latterday version of the earlier Revival period, as both moments have involved productive critical encounters between local materials and wider international experiments and styles (as well, inevitably, as producing a good deal of ‘‘cod celticism’’). Yet while the comparison is common, the analogy is ultimately misleading, since the differences between the two moments and phenomena are as significant as any similarities. The most successful Irish writers to emerge from the late nineteenth-century Revival were committed to a high modernism in which cultural production was directed, to use Pierre Bourdieu’s terms, toward the field of restricted production, where the accumulation of long-term symbolic capital was prized above short-term economic profit. Thus, while works such as Ulysses or Waiting for Godot may 32. See Patrick Zuk, ‘‘Music and Nationalism,’’ Journal of Music in Ireland 1 (January/ February 2002): 5–9. Irish feminist cultural criticism seems no less restrictively tied to the written word. Irish academic feminism has still to produce a single major study of contemporary Irish women musicians, singers, or composers.

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have freely drawn on mass culture, these were nonetheless formally innovative, oblique, vanguardist texts that resisted capitulation to ‘‘the culture industry,’’ though their formal difficulty also steered them toward a restricted highly educated elite audience. For the most part, however, the works produced by the most internationally feted artists to have emerged from the current Irish musical ferment are aimed at what Bourdieu calls the field of largescale cultural production: that is, at the more popular end of the market that literary modernism resisted.33 Indeed, those individuals and groups, such as U2 most notably, that attained the most spectacular success have become themselves microversions of multinational enterprises complete with their own extended staff, public relations and image development teams, not to mention multimillion turnovers and investment profiles. In the industrial structures of the music industry, business people play a more decisive role than any aesthetic mediators (fellow practitioners, critics, music historians) in key production decisions. Considerations about what or what not to produce are based less on personal feedback from artistic peers or audiences than on electronic techniques of market research, and considerations such as whether the musical product will accommodate the needs of other media outlets such as radio and television take precedence over the independent choices of the musicians. This capitalization of culture may not be entirely new (and it is much more extensive in rock than in the traditional, folk, or classical strands of the current ferment, which are often mediated to the public through quite different circuits), but when cultural production takes corporate form, the interplay between capital and culture is certainly intensified to entirely unprecedented levels. Thus, as the Irish cultural field has been expanded and reconfigured in the last two decades, so too has its weight undoubtedly shifted toward corporatized forms of cultural production and consumption, the operations and consequences of which Irish cultural critics, mesmerized by the ‘‘great leap forward’’ of the Celtic Tiger, have mostly ignored. But while this situation clearly calls for something more than the kind of dizzy Disneyfied excitement and self-congratulation that has characterized so much Irish cultural criticism of late, something more rigorous than bargain-basement-standard Adornean diatribes about commercialization or the culture industry is also required. The capacity to produce a radical Irish culture critically responsive to the demands of the new global conjuncture has by no means been eliminated, though the conditions, circuits, and modalities through which it might flourish need constantly to be reimagined, cultivated, and renovated. 33. See Pierre Bourdieu, ‘‘The Market of Symbolic Goods,’’ Poetics 14 (1985): 13–44.

Sighting an Irish Avant-Garde in the Intersection of Local and International Film Cultures

Maeve Connolly

Introduction Vivienne Dick is an Irish filmmaker who has yet to acquire a place within Irish film history, despite international critical recognition for films such as Guérillière Talks (1978), She Had Her Gun All Ready (1978), Beauty Becomes the Beast (1979), Liberty’s Booty (1980), and Visibility Moderate: A Tourist Film (1981). Born in Dublin, she moved to the United States on leaving university in the 1970s and first came to prominence as a member of New York’s ‘‘No Wave’’ or ‘‘Punk’’ movement. Since then, her work primarily This paper forms part of a more extensive research project, funded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences. I am grateful to Luke Gibbons and Stephanie McBride for their comments on an earlier draft of this text, and I also thank Vivienne Dick, Sunniva O’Flynn (of the Irish Film Archive), Maretta Dillon (of Access Cinema, formerly the Federation of Irish Film Societies), and Dennis McNulty for their assistance. I am indebted to Michael Dwyer for providing details on his work at Tralee Film Society (1972–77) and as administrator of the FIFS (1978–82), in an email interview, June 5, 2002. I am greatly indebted to Kevin Rockett for providing access to Project Cinema Club files from his time as director of film at Project (1976–79). He also provided further details on the Project Cinema Club in an email interview, September 5, 2001. boundary 2 31:1, 2004. Copyright © 2004 by Duke University Press.

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has been theorized within the American film avant-garde.1 It was the subject of two programs at the Pacific Cinemathèque, San Francisco (1981, 1988), and Visibility Moderate was included in the 1983 Whitney Biennial. Dick’s Super 8 films also featured in two major American film retrospectives, ‘‘No Wave Cinema 1978–87,’’ at the Whitney (1996), and ‘‘Big as Life: An American History of 8mm Films,’’ at the Museum of Modern Art (1999). Her films are characterized by a fascination with American culture and are defined by appropriation from Hollywood, television, and pop music. This exploration of ‘‘Americana’’ through myth and popular iconography is, however, structured by Dick’s perspective as an outsider, and the investigations of incest and prostitution in Beauty Becomes the Beast and Liberty’s Booty are informed by a critique of Irish society. The Irish subtext becomes overt in Liberty’s Booty, through direct references to the Irish economy and Catholicism. Visibility Moderate, the last of the New York films, is set partly in Ireland, and it parodies an American tourist’s home movie. Dick returned to Ireland in 1982 before relocating in 1985 to London, where she joined the London Filmmakers’ Co-operative. During this period, she completed Like Dawn to Dust (1983), Rothach (1985), and Images/Ireland (1988), which explore representations of the Irish landscape in greater complexity. Dick’s work parallels that of her Irish contemporaries, Joe Comerford, Thaddeus O’Sullivan, Bob Quinn, and Pat Murphy.2 Because of her status as an outsider, however, Dick is not usually discussed as an Irish filmmaker, and her films are largely absent from published histories of Irish film.3 The Irish Film Archive did not acquire copies of her films until, in 1999, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum co-funded the production of new prints from the deteriorating Super 8 originals. Within Irish cinema studies, the period from the late 1970s to the early 1980s has been historicized in terms of the emergence of an indigenous industry. This serves to reinforce the notion that avant-garde practice constitutes a transient pro1. J. Hoberman, ‘‘A Context for Vivienne Dick,’’ October 20 (Spring 1982): 102–6; ‘‘No Wavelength: The Para-punk Underground,’’ Village Voice, May 21, 1979, 42–43; ‘‘Notes on Three Films by Vivienne Dick,’’ Millennium Film Journal 6 (Spring 1980): 90–94. Hereafter, ‘‘A Context for Vivienne Dick’’ is cited parenthetically as CVD. 2. Luke Gibbons, ‘‘The Politics of Silence: Anne Devlin, Women, and Irish Cinema,’’ in Transformations in Irish Culture (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996), 107–16; and Jerry White, ‘‘The Films of Bob Quinn: Towards an Irish Third Cinema,’’ Cine Action: Radical Film Criticism and Theory 37 (1995): 3–10. 3. An exception to this is Christine Clear, ‘‘Vivienne Dick—Getting Stuck in . . . ,’’ Film Base News 14 (September–October 1989): 10–14.

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cess of ‘‘experimentation’’ 4 rather than a critique of the industrial apparatus and the institutions and structures of production and reception. This period was also marked by the emergence of a critical film culture 5 associated with developments in film policy. It also witnessed a ‘‘new wave’’ in independent Irish filmmaking, supported by the Production Board of the British Film Institute and, subsequently, by the workshop program developed by Channel Four Television. These developments in Irish film culture should be situated in relation to contemporary theories of avant-garde practice. The exploration of identity and landscape in Irish filmmaking was mirrored by a new concern, in film theory, with sociohistorical formations and questions of reception. Dick’s work, which transects the independent film cultures of New York, Dublin, and London, occupies this intersection between local and international avant-gardes. The Avant-Garde and No Wave Cinema In the late 1970s, New York–based filmmakers, including Vivienne Dick, Beth and Scott B, Eric Mitchell, and Kiki Smith, created low-budget film narratives, appropriating the iconography of Hollywood B-movies and incorporating the sound track of retro pop and contemporary punk music. Many of them worked exclusively in the inexpensive and accessible medium of Super 8, taking advantage of its new capacity to record sound. Dick’s first film, Guérillière Talks, emerged from this milieu. It is composed of a series of unedited monologues, each the length of a Super 8 roll, interspersed with frames of leader strip. In many respects, it recalls the ‘‘structural-materialist’’ aesthetic associated with filmmakers Peter Gidal and Malcolm Le Grice. But Guérillière Talks is less concerned with the material properties of film than with an exploration of performance and identity through the voices of its characters. This tension between performativity and the discourse of documentary is explored further in She Had Her Gun All Ready, a narrative of obsessive desire played out between two women, the androgynous Pat Place and the femme fatale Lydia Lunch, set within iconic New York settings, from 4. Lance Pettitt, Screening Ireland: Film and Television Representation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 95–113. 5. Contemporary accounts are more explicitly concerned with distribution and exhibition. Kevin Rockett, ‘‘Constructing a Film Culture: Ireland,’’ Screen Education 27 (Summer 1978): 23–33.

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East Village diners to Coney Island. She Had Her Gun is fascinated by the dark side of American culture and incorporates fleeting references to serial killers and stalkers, echoing contemporary film narratives such as Taxi Driver. Beauty Becomes the Beast, her next film, focuses on a teenagerunaway, again played by Lydia Lunch. It explores the theme of violence against women, introduced in She Had Her Gun All Ready, but it takes the form of a documentary, disrupted by elements of Hollywood melodrama. The film is interspersed with flashback sequences that suggest incest, but the passage of time is indicated through music and pop culture references rather than by elaborate costuming or period detail. Lunch’s on-screen performance as child and teenager, combined with the sound track (by her band Teenage Jesus and the Jerks), continually disrupts processes of narrative identification. Dick’s engagement with incest, violence, and exploitation, through Hollywood melodrama, pop songs, advertising, fashion, and trash television, identifies her work as a feminist exploration of popular culture.6 Her exploration of performance and the theme of ‘‘masquerade’’ offer parallels with feminist theory and practice. But her work has also been read as a critique of feminist orthodoxy, a ‘‘brilliant antidote to Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party, the almost religious canonization of the cultural stars of feminism.’’ 7 In April 1981, She Had Her Gun All Ready was screened, together with such feminist works as Film About a Woman Who . . . (Yvonne Rainer, 1974) and News from Home (Chantal Akerman, 1977), during a five-day symposium on issues on contemporary film organized by the Collective for Living Cinema in 1981. The collective promoted a more critical context for avant-garde film, informed by developments in British film theory, and the symposium included presentations on Third World and minority film practice and the representation of women. If the feminist film and art practices of the 1970s were informed by a critique of art institutions and canons, the No Wave movement revolutionized the institutions of American avant-garde film. The established circuit, associated with P. Adams Sitney and ‘‘structural film,’’ encompassed Anthology Archives, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum. No Wave filmmakers, however, initially addressed new audiences through screenings in clubs and bars, often showing their films between performances by punk bands. The movement was supported by the emergence 6. Amy Taubin, ‘‘The Other Cinema: Films by Vivienne Dick,’’ Soho Weekly News, June 7, 1979, 94. 7. Karen Kay, ‘‘New York Super-8: Edinburgh Event, 1980,’’ Idiolects 9–10 (Winter 1980/81): 9.

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of temporary exhibition venues, including the New Cinema (a storefront cinema in St. Mark’s Place, reminiscent of the Nickelodeon era) and new production cooperatives such as Millennium and the Collective for Living Cinema. The No Wave movement coincided with a new engagement with the politics of place among filmmakers, punk bands, and artists. By the late 1970s, rising property prices in New York’s Lower East Side had heightened awareness of the relationship between art practice and gentrification.8 Dick was influenced by the activist work of CoLab, who staged impromptu, and ephemeral, protest events and exhibitions throughout New York.9 No Wave film—Dick’s, in particular—generated considerable critical interest, despite its ‘‘unequivocal rejection of structural filmmaking and academic film discourse’’ (CVD, 104). The critic J. Hoberman located her work within the marginalized American 8mm avant-garde, which encompassed George and Mike Kuchar, Bob Branaman, and (briefly) Stan Brakhage. Hoberman theorized four traditions specific to narrow-gauge film, including the home movie or diary (explored by Brakhage and Ken Jacobs), the urban documentary (primarily associated with Bob Branaman), the ‘‘ironic spectacle’’ (the Kuchar brothers, Eric Mitchell, and Beth and Scott B), and ‘‘selfdramatization’’ (Vito Acconci) (CVD, 104). These traditions are by no means exclusive. Dick’s New York–based films explore elements of spectacle, documentary, self-dramatization, and the home movie. The ‘‘home movie’’ quality is suggested by the repeated appearance of a familiar cast of characters from the No Wave scene, most notably photographer Nan Goldin and performers Pat Place and Lydia Lunch. Hoberman describes Dick as the ‘‘quintessential narrow-gauge filmmaker of the second wave’’ (CVD, 104). But her exploration of American culture in Liberty’s Booty is marked by the perspective of an ‘‘outsider.’’ Like Beauty Becomes the Beast, Liberty’s Booty deals with various forms of exploitation. It interweaves interviews with women working in a New York brothel with a series of staged and animated sequences, and is resolutely focused on the everyday, calling attention to the domestic details of its characters’ lives despite the apparent sensationalism of its subject matter. The analysis of gender relations is informed by a broader critique of capitalism, which contrasts various forms of consumption and suggests an analogy between the brothel and McDonald’s restaurants. In order to make this point, 8. Rosalyn Deutsche and Cara Gendel Ryan, ‘‘The Fine Art of Gentrification,’’ October 31 (1984): 91–111. 9. Stephen Barth, ‘‘Not Your Ordinary Dick: An Afternoon with Vivienne Dick,’’ East Village Eye (March 1980): 10.

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Dick references a strike by McDonald’s workers in Ireland, which was broken by ‘‘heavies from America.’’ ‘‘Ireland’’ is initially represented simply by images of rolling fields, viewed from above, and by a tourist postcard of Irish dancing. In the closing shots, however, news coverage of Pope John Paul II, identified by the newscaster as ‘‘the superstar Pope,’’ complicates any easy parallel between Irish and American society. Liberty’s Booty inaugurates a concern with Irish society and with the representation of Irish landscape, which dominated Dick’s work throughout the 1980s. The investigation of gender relations in She Had Her Gun All Ready, Beauty Becomes the Beast, and Liberty’s Booty suggests an engagement with the specificity of gender in Irish society. The two earlier films are ostensibly concerned with interpersonal relationships and are initially set within domestic environments. But in each of these narratives, the action spills over into public spaces such as busy New York diners or the Coney Island fairground. Finally, in Liberty’s Booty, a private apartment is revealed as a brothel. Luke Gibbons has explored the ‘‘blurring of boundaries between the personal and the political’’ within Irish culture and history. He suggests that, while the experience of colonization conceptualizes the nation as a literal ‘‘body politic,’’ an ‘‘alternative ‘feminized’ public sphere (imagined as the nation)’’ can turn the colonial stereotype against itself and provide a critique of the patriarchal state.10 The various mythic tropes through which the nation has been imagined provide the focus of Dick’s later films. Before addressing this aspect of her work, however, the wider parallels between the American and Irish contexts of production and reception during the late 1970s should be explored. Irish Film and the Rise of Independent Production and Distribution No Wave emerged within an independent American film culture, which had thrived since the postwar period. By the late 1960s, the co-op model of production and distribution, associated with the American New Cinema, had also spread to Britain. Co-ops were part of a complex of independent practices, extending beyond abstraction or structuralism, that challenged Hollywood during this period of social and economic change.11 Mar10. Gibbons, Transformations, 21. 11. David James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989).

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garet Dickinson describes the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative, formed in 1966, as a ‘‘direct spin-off from the New York Film-Maker’s Co-operative’’ and notes that ‘‘most of its members were influenced by the American underground and American New Cinema.’’ 12 Within the Irish context, structures for independent production and distribution developed at a different pace. Ireland lacked an industrial infrastructure, and there was little support for indigenous production during the 1950s and 1960s, as state policy focused on promoting Ireland as a picturesque location for international productions.13 Ireland’s proximity to Britain limited indigenous filmmaking: Irish producers were ineligible for support from the Irish Film Finance Corporation unless they could guarantee international distribution, and Irish technicians were excluded from the statefunded Ardmore Studios, so that it could take advantage of Britain’s Eady Fund.14 Pressure from Irish filmmakers, however, combined with a new emphasis on film as a medium for cultural promotion, transformed these policies. The state funded promotional films through agencies such as Bord Fáilte (the Irish Tourist Board), Aer Lingus, and the Industrial Development Authority.15 Although they were intended to promote indigenous industry, these films had to be commissioned from foreign companies, because distributors such as Rank and Pathé dominated international markets.16 These policies prompted criticism from the Irish-language body Gael-Linn, who argued that the state should instead take its lead from the Griersonian model employed by the Film Board of Canada ‘‘by side-stepping the propaganda issue altogether.’’ 17 Filmmaker Louis Marcus also suggested that the state should support ‘‘prestige’’ documentaries, such as Patrick Carey’s Yeats Country (1965), which could be shown on nontheatrical circuits and 12. Margaret Dickinson, ‘‘Confrontation and Community (1966–74),’’ in Rogue Reels: Oppositional Film in Britain, 1945–90, ed. Margaret Dickinson (London: British Film Institute, 1999), 41; and Jim Pines, ‘‘Left Film Distribution,’’ Screen 13, no. 4 (Winter 1972/73): 116–26. 13. Kevin Rockett, ‘‘An Irish Film Studio,’’ in Cinema and Ireland, by Kevin Rockett, Luke Gibbons, and John Hill (London: Routledge, 1988), 95–126. 14. The Eady Fund was a statutory levy on cinema seats, distributed among British producers in proportion to their success at the box office. 15. Stephanie Rains, ‘‘Home from Home: Diasporic Images of Ireland in Film and Tourism,’’ in Tourism in Ireland: A Critical Study, ed. Michael Cronin and Barbara O’Connor (Clevedon, England: Channel View Publications, 2003), 196–241. 16. Kevin Rockett, ‘‘Documentaries,’’ in Cinema and Ireland, 84–85. 17. Gael-Linn, ‘‘Memorandum to the Department of External Affairs on the Production of a 35mm Film on Ireland for Distribution Mainly Abroad,’’ June 9, 1961, p. 6, Irish Film Archive Distribution files. For further details on Gael-Linn, see Rockett, ‘‘Documentaries,’’ in Cinema and Ireland, 86–91.

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foreign television stations.18 Carey’s film, a lyrical documentary combining spectacular landscape photography with music and poetry, won the Golden Bear Award at the Berlin Film Festival and was also nominated for an Oscar. It circulated widely in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Canada, and Japan, as well as in Britain and Ireland. It also featured prominently in the Toronto Film Festival in 1970, alongside such Irish-themed international avant-garde films as Mary Ellen Bute’s Passages from Finnegans Wake (1965). To support his call for a ‘‘quality’’ cinema, Marcus emphasized the boom in art-house exhibition, particularly in the United States, and he highlighted a ‘‘quality audience’’: ‘‘For among this audience will be found not only the foreign administrators and businessmen whose good opinion of us will be vital in the competitive years ahead, but also the men who run the mass-media of their various countries, and thus create the popular image which Ireland enjoys in most countries.’’ 19 This argument would appear to have influenced Irish cultural policy. The Arts Act of 1973 for the first time recognized cinema as an art form (at the behest of Mary Robinson, future president of Ireland). The Arts Council subsequently established a script award as a means of funding indigenous production and also began to support existing independent structures for the distribution and exhibition of arthouse and independent film. Critical Contexts: Irish Film Clubs In the United States, avant-garde filmmakers could address their films to local, national, and international audiences through a network of clubs formed during the postwar period. No Wave filmmakers could tour throughout the United States, supported by national organizations such as the American Federation of the Arts. While no comparable circuit existed in Ireland, film societies had been established intermittently from the 1930s on as an alternative to regional commercial cinemas, where there was ‘‘no opportunity whatsoever’’ to see foreign-language films or U.S. and UK independent productions.20 In 1976, the Federation of Irish Film Societies (FIFS) was formed, with funding from the Irish Arts Council, to provide a link to independent British distributors and to coordinate programming for a national 18. Louis Marcus, The Irish Film Industry (Dublin: Irish Film Society, 1967), 28. 19. Marcus, Irish Film Industry, 29. 20. There were twenty-three societies listed in ‘‘Film Diary,’’ Film Directions 1, no. 4 (1978): 23.

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network. The FIFS had an office in the Project Arts Centre, then the site of the most innovative theatrical and arts activity in Ireland, and it employed a full-time administrator, who organized bookings on behalf of each member society. There were no selection criteria with regard to distributors, but in practice, the FIFS dealt primarily with independent British distributors, such as Contemporary Cinema and The Other Cinema, which were established as a consequence of the politicization of British film culture in the late 1960s.21 Although its programming and policy objectives remained implicit rather than explicit, the federation supported the circulation of Irish-themed international work, such as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Joseph Strick, 1977) and Passages from Finnegans Wake. It also provided a platform for Irish filmmakers, distributing Carey’s Yeats Country and Errigal (1968), and, later, Bob Quinn’s Caoineadh Airt Ua Laoghaire (1975) and Joe Comerford’s Down the Corner (1978). The federation also organized national viewing sessions (weekend screenings with information meetings) in towns across the country. These contributed to the unexpected popularity of some explicitly political films, such as Harlan County USA (Barbara Kopple, 1976), a documentary on the Kentucky coal miners’ strike in 1973. There were no unions or workers’ groups within the FIFS, and the filmmaker Bob Quinn actually dismissed film society members as ‘‘aesthetes,’’ emphasizing the need to reach ‘‘people that might benefit from seeing independent films.’’ 22 Quinn’s critique echoed the position taken by journalist Ciaran Carty, who noted that many films (specifically foreign-language features) were ‘‘the exclusive pleasure of a small minority of privileged members of the Irish Film Theatre, Project and the Federation of Film Societies.’’ 23 There were significant differences between these clubs, however, in terms of programming. While the Irish Film Theatre, the first art-house cinema in Ireland (1977–84), and the FIFS focused on ‘‘mainstream arthouse film,’’ 24 the Project Cinema Club (1976–80), based in the Project Arts Centre, was informed by an explicitly political, and pedagogical, agenda. 21. Sylvia Harvey, ‘‘The Other Cinema—A History: Part 1, 1970–77,’’ Screen 26, no. 6 (Nov./Dec. 1985): 40–57; and ‘‘The Other Cinema: Part 2, 1978–1985,’’ Screen 27, no. 2 (Mar./Apr. 1986): 80–96. 22. Michael Open interviewed Bob Quinn, Joe Comerford, and Cathal Black in ‘‘Standard Deviations: Distribution for Independent Films,’’ Film Directions 2, no. 5 (Spring 1979): 14–16. 23. Ciaran Carty, ‘‘Public Barred from the Year’s Best Movies!’’ Sunday Independent, December 31, 1978, 31. 24. Michael Dwyer, email interview, June 5, 2002.

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From the start, its film policy, developed by Kevin Rockett in 1976, stressed a rigorous theoretical approach. It advocated a critical engagement with women’s cinema, documentary history, silent cinema, and an analysis of the interconnections among film, theater, and the visual arts. Project Arts Centre was a multipurpose arts space, incorporating visual art, theater, music, as well as film, and prefiguring the later involvement of arts centers and galleries in film exhibition. It brought together in one space figures who later played a prominent role in Irish theater and cinema, including the directors Jim Sheridan and Neil Jordan, and the actors Liam Neeson and Gabriel Byrne. The Project Cinema Club was just one element in Rockett’s highly ambitious plan to revolutionize Irish film culture. This plan initially encompassed the development of a 16mm production workshop, along the lines of the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative, but, given the level of available funding, the development of production facilities ultimately proved problematic. The Project Cinema Club programs for 1978–79 contained a high proportion of feminist work, including Riddles of the Sphinx (Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, 1977), Lives of Performers (Yvonne Rainer, 1972), and Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975), as well as such classics as Dance, Girl, Dance (Dorothy Arzner, 1940). It also introduced Irish audiences to structural-materialist work and European avant-garde traditions, screening films by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, and Jean-Luc Godard, as well as Peter Gidal, Malcolm le Grice, and Michael Snow. The Other Cinema supplied much of this material, but many films were also provided, free of charge, by embassies. The Project Cinema Club received little support from commercial distributors, however, and screenings of Hollywood films proved problematic. The exhibition program developed in response to debates in Screen, the leading film theory journal, and it encompassed thematic seasons, such as ‘‘Women and Film’’ (1977, 1978), ‘‘The Two Avant-Gardes’’ (1978), and ‘‘Versions of History’’ (April 1978), with lectures by Screen theorists such as Laura Mulvey.25 In addition to showcasing international theory and practice, the exhibition programs were also informed by developments in Irish filmmaking. The Project Cinema Club promoted the pioneering films of contemporary Irish cinema, such as Quinn’s Caoineadh Airt Ua Laoghaire and Going, Going, Gone (Sinn Féin—The Worker’s Party, 1976), scheduling them alongside such international oppositional and political films as The Miners’ Film (Cinema Action, 1975), Quemada! (Pontecorvo, 1969), and 25. Ray Comiskey, ‘‘The Female Eye,’’ Irish Times, May 22, 1978, 10.

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Kuhle Wampe (Stan Dudow/Bertolt Brecht, 1932). It hosted the ‘‘Film and Ireland’’ season in 1978, the first of its kind in Ireland, and it challenged the Cork Film Festival, which had largely ignored the work of Irish filmmakers.26 By the end of the 1970s, the Project Cinema Club was under pressure to maintain its audiences, both because of increased competition from the Irish Film Theatre and internal funding crises. Although a relatively short-lived venture, it served as a focal point for developments in Irish filmmaking. The ‘‘Film and Ireland’’ season, which focused on indigenous filmmaking and documentary, also formed the basis for many subsequent festivals of Irish film, in London, Barcelona, and San Francisco, under Rockett’s direction. Irish Film and the Production Board of the British Film Institute By the mid-1970s, Irish filmmakers looked beyond the state for funding opportunities. Bob Quinn established an independent production company (Cine Gael) following his departure from Irish television in the late 1960s in protest against restrictive policies. His first independent feature, Caoineadh Airt Ua Laoghaire (1975), was financed by the left-wing Sinn Féin—The Worker’s Party, during a period of ideological change.27 Other important Irish films, including On a Paving Stone Mounted (Thaddeus O’Sullivan, 1978), Maeve (Pat Murphy, 1982), and Down the Corner and Traveller (Joe Comerford, 1978 and 1981, respectively), received funding from the Production Board of the British Film Institute. The British Film Institute’s overt support for Irish filmmaking can be explained in various ways. Irish filmmaker Peter Lennon, director of The Rocky Road to Dublin (1968), became a member of the Production Board during the 1970s. His film, photographed by Raoul Coutard (Godard’s regular camera man), is a forceful indictment of Irish media and society, and, despite international critical acclaim, it was censored in Ireland. Irish politics also provided a focal point for British independent film culture of the early seventies: the board funded two documentaries on the civil rights protests in Derry, Ireland: Behind the Wire (Berwick Street Film Co-op, 1973) and People of Ireland! (Cinema Action, 1973). The Production Board had no 26. Michael Dwyer, ‘‘The Reel News,’’ In Dublin 158 (July 1982): 9. 27. Based around an eighteenth-century Irish lament, the story of a Catholic nobleman’s resistance to the Penal Laws, Caoineadh explores the role of narrative in the construction of history and nationalism. Martin McLoone, Irish Film: The Emergence of a Contemporary Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 2000): 131–33.

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explicit policy in relation to funding, and each film was simply assessed on its merits. Formerly known as the Experimental Film Fund, the board had been established to support filmmaking outside the dominant feature and documentary industries and to provide ‘‘a passport’’ into these same industries.28 By 1978, it was in receipt of £90,000 per year from the British Arts Council for the production and distribution of film, but this level of funding was regarded as ‘‘drastically inadequate.’’ 29 In 1976, BFI had supported a theatrical venture, a cinema in London’s West End to be run by independent distributors. In addition to providing an outlet for Production Board films, the cinema was intended to develop new audiences and generate press coverage for features prior to regional, nontheatrical release. The cinema collapsed after only fifteen months, partly due to insufficient capital. In 1976, John Ellis critiqued these policies in an article for Screen.30 He suggested that the Production Board was more at ease with ‘‘openly revolutionary content,’’ as exemplified by Ireland: Behind the Wire, than with a ‘‘politicization of form.’’ 31 The Production Board’s films were poorly distributed and were simply ‘‘abandoned, thrown onto the market.’’ 32 This critique sparked a wider debate concerning the role of state agencies and independent structures of distribution, reception, and production. In 1976, Ellis joined the Production Board, and, by 1978, its policies were marked by a fresh emphasis on theoretical debates, in relation to realism and the avantgarde.33 The new wave of Irish filmmaking coincided with these developments. Like the work of Yvonne Rainer (whose Journeys from Berlin was funded by the Board in 1979), Down the Corner, Traveller, Maeve, and On a Paving Stone Mounted are all defined by a politicization of form and content. They explore narrative genre and convention within specific sociohistorical formations, suggesting a departure from both the ‘‘realisms’’ of ‘‘classical’’ cinema and documentary, and the modernism of the structural-materialist tradition.

28. Julian Petley, BFI Distribution Catalogue (London: British Film Institute, 1978), 134. 29. This funding was supplemented by a grant of £30,000 from the Eady Fund. Peter Sainsbury, ‘‘Funding Bodies and Funding Procedures in Relation to Independent Filmmaking,’’ in BFI Production Board, ed. Alan Lovell (London: British Film Institute, 1976), 6. 30. John Ellis, ‘‘Production Board Policies,’’ Screen 17, no. 4 (Winter 1976/77): 9–23. 31. Ellis argues that these films received funds because they provided the board with an opportunity to demonstrate its ‘‘liberalism.’’ See Ellis, ‘‘Production Board Policies,’’ 18–19. 32. Ellis, ‘‘Production Board Policies,’’ 13. 33. Petley, BFI Distribution Catalogue.

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Irish Film and Theories of the Avant-Garde In their analysis of film theory, Robert Lapsley and Michael Westlake identify a theoretical shift away from an opposition between realism and modernism and toward the definition of a new avant-garde. After 1968, critical attention focused on the avant-garde movements of the interwar period and on the work of Brecht, in particular, ‘‘because of the political urgency of his work, and because of his conception of art as intervention.’’ 34 The alignment of Brechtian practice with French poststructuralism emphasized the revolutionary role of avant-garde art and the moment of the text’s reception. Peter Wollen’s ‘‘The Two Avant-Gardes,’’ 35 one of the key analyses of this period, distinguished between the North American Co-operative movement and a more political avant-garde, centered around the work of Godard and Straub and Huillet, and indebted to the work of Brecht and Sergei Eisenstein. Wollen subsequently redefined this model to distinguish between a modernism ‘‘concerned with reflexiveness’’ and an avant-garde ‘‘concerned with semiotic expansion.’’ 36 Paul Willemen reevaluated this distinction between modernism and the avant-garde, critiquing modernism’s appropriation of avant-garde techniques as medium-specificity. He theorized ‘‘an avant-garde for the 80s,’’ 37 in which the avant-garde was defined through reference to the sociohistorical conjuncture within which it was sited. This exploration of historical and social formations was already evident in the analyses of ‘‘Brechtian practice’’ in British independent film, developed by Willemen and by Claire Johnston and Sylvia Harvey.38 Willemen’s theorization was also directly informed by Johnston’s 1982 article on the landmark Irish film Maeve and the ‘‘new wave’’ 34. Robert Lapsley and Michael Westlake, ‘‘The Avant-Garde,’’ in Film Theory: An Introduction (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 186. 35. Peter Wollen, ‘‘The Two Avant-Gardes,’’ Studio International 190, no. 978 (Nov.–Dec. 1975): 171–75. 36. Lapsley and Westlake, ‘‘The Avant-Garde,’’ 191. 37. Paul Willemen draws heavily on Johnston’s work in ‘‘An Avant-Garde for the Eighties,’’ Framework 24 (1984): 53–73. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as AE. An extended version, ‘‘An Avant-Garde for the ’90s,’’ was included in Willemen, Looks and Frictions: Essays in Cultural Studies and Film Theory (London and Bloomington: BFI and Indiana University Press, 1994), 141–61. 38. Sylvia Harvey, ‘‘Whose Brecht? Memories for the Eighties,’’ Screen 23, no. 1 (May/June 1982): 45–59; Claire Johnston and Paul Willemen, ‘‘Brecht in Britain: The Independent Political Film in Britain,’’ Screen 16, no. 4 (Winter 1975–76): 101–18; and Claire Johnston, ‘‘So That You Can Live: Popular Memory,’’ Framework 19 (1982): 12–14.

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of Irish filmmaking represented by O’Sullivan and Quinn.39 In her analysis of Maeve, Johnston focuses on shifting conceptions of gender, class, and national identity, and highlights the radicalism of certain literary elements within Irish culture. Most significantly, for a theory of the avant-garde, she explores the representation of landscape in Maeve. In order to construct ‘‘an imaginary for women,’’ the film subverts the status of landscape as either ‘‘male domain . . . the central metaphor for generations of republican men’’ or as ‘‘the repository of a ‘Celtic’ truth which lies beyond history and politics.’’ 40 This process involved a reconfiguration of both narrative and setting. In ‘‘An Avant-Garde for the 80s,’’ Willemen argues that this contemporary avant-garde (encompassing films as diverse as Godard’s Passion, Chantal Akerman’s Toute une nuit, and Mulvey and Wollen’s Crystal Gazing) represents ‘‘subjectivity as one, and only one, not necessarily important process within a situation over-determined by the forces that shape social existence’’ (AE, 68). He foregrounds the mobilization of landscape ‘‘as a layered set of discourses, as a text in its own right,’’ in both Maeve and Cinema Action’s 1981 Welsh film So That You Can Live (AE, 53). This contrasts with conventional representations of landscape, where ‘‘a tourist’s point of view is adopted as opposed to the point of view of those whose history is traced in [the landscape], or for whom the land is a crucial element in the relations of production that govern their lives. The tourist sees in the landscape only mirrors or projections of his/her own phantasms’’ (AE, 69). The new avant-garde is characterized by a double strategy, in terms of diegetic setting (location, decor) and narrative. While the location is mobilized as a text, the narrative is split between story and ‘‘generic setting,’’ with genre understood in terms of ‘‘the inscription into the narration of a history of discursive practices’’ (AE, 70–71). Dick’s films, like those of Comerford or Murphy, are characterized by this investigation of generic setting; the landscape mobilized in Dick’s No Wave films incorporates elements of Ireland and America. Hollywood and the Irish Imaginary No Wave filmmaking borrows heavily from Hollywood as well as from advertising, television, and pop music, and is also characterized by a popu39. Claire Johnston, ‘‘Maeve,’’ Screen 22, no. 4 (Winter 1982): 54–71. 40. Johnston, ‘‘Maeve,’’ 59.

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list mode of address, recalling the American underground cinemas of the sixties. For this reason, J. Hoberman reads the No Wave movement as a postmodernist repetition, comparable to Hollywood genre pastiches such as American Graffiti, Star Wars, and Body Heat.41 Hoberman is primarily concerned to situate the No Wave in relation to a specifically American avantgarde tradition, encompassing both the ‘‘authentically modernist’’ work of structural filmmakers such as Michael Snow and Hollis Frampton 42 and the ‘‘postmodernism’’ of underground cinema. Despite Hoberman’s emphasis on a definitively national avant-garde tradition, however, Hollywood’s influence extended beyond the American avant-garde. Classical Hollywood, encountered in the cinema or in television reruns, served as a shared reference point in successive European and American No Waves since the 1960s.43 Miriam Hansen, in exploring the relationship between classical Hollywood and the avant-gardes of the 1920s and 1930s,44 theorizes classical cinema as a form of vernacular modernism, an aesthetic idiom encompassing elements of the American quotidian, which mediated competing cultural discourses on modernity and modernization (MPS, 333–34). She notes that Hollywood film appealed to both ‘‘avant-garde artists and intellectuals in the USA and the modernizing capitals of the world’’:45 Soviet cinema, in particular, was characterized by a fascination with Hollywood’s ‘‘lower genres,’’ such as the detective serial or slapstick comedy (MPS, 334). The ‘‘Americanism’’ of classical cinema intensified its appeal for European avant-gardes, but, equally, Mulvey’s account calls attention to the particular cultural associations of ‘‘Americanism’’ within different social and political formations. Within the Irish context, a familiarity with American modernity predated Hollywood. Mass emigration to America contributed to the ‘‘disin41. J. Hoberman, ‘‘After Avant-Garde Film,’’ in Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, ed. Brian Wallis (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), 68–69. 42. Hoberman, ‘‘After Avant-Garde Film,’’ 64. 43. Laura Mulvey, ‘‘New Wave Interchanges: Celine and Julie and Desperately Seeking Susan,’’ in Hollywood and Europe: Economics, Culture, and National Identity, 1945–95, ed. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and Steven Ricci (London: British Film Institute, 1998), 119–28. 44. Miriam Hansen, ‘‘The Mass Production of the Senses,’’ in Re-inventing Film Studies, ed. Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 332– 50. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as MPS. My reading of Hansen’s text is informed by Dudley Andrew’s ‘‘Dialects and Dialectics of Cinema in the World’’ (paper presented at the Keough–Notre Dame Centre’s Irish Seminar, Dublin, July 5, 2002). 45. Joyce’s appreciation for cinema extended to his involvement in the management of Dublin’s Volta, an episode chronicled in Pat Murphy’s film Nora (2000).

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tegration and fragmentation’’ of Irish society, accentuating the premature ‘‘shock of modernity’’ on Irish culture, even in its most remote rural outposts.46 While literature and music articulated the trauma of exile, the letters, remittances, and commodities sent home by Irish emigrants undoubtedly structured Irish perceptions of America.47 Hollywood’s subsequent incorporation, and mediation, of images of Ireland and Irishness added a new dimension to this complex relationship between Irish and American modernity.48 American popular culture retained a hold over the Irish imagination, through the twentieth century, despite opposition in the form of censure or overt censorship. Dick’s films explore this cultural landscape through the borrowed conventions and iconography of classical Hollywood. Genre and Landscape in the Films of Vivienne Dick Visibility Moderate: A Tourist Film (1981) charts Dick’s transition from New York’s No Wave film culture toward a film practice based in Ireland. It explores the difficulty of representing Ireland, and Irish experience, within a wider context, and it inaugurates a new concern, explored in her subsequent ‘‘Irish’’ films, with the intersection of narrative genre and landscape. The title is taken from a weather report, overheard at one point in the narrative, but the phrase visibility moderate also describes Dick’s own relation to filmmaking in Ireland. In its thematic focus on exile and emigration, and its exploration of performance, documentary modes of address, and Irish visual culture, it parallels O’Sullivan’s earlier On a Paving Stone Mounted (along with Murphy’s Maeve, the most influential of Irish avant-garde films).49 Visibility Moderate is a restless exploration of the perspective of ‘‘outsider,’’ encompassing the genres of the home movie, advertisement, documentary, and thriller. The precredit sequence, staged around the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, incorporates suggestive references to economic imperialism. The Twin Towers call attention to transnational economic flows structuring cultural and political relations. The first part of the 46. Gibbons, Transformations, 6. 47. Kerby Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 357–61. 48. Kevin Rockett, ‘‘The Irish Migrant and Film,’’ in The Creative Migrant, ed. Patrick O’Sullivan, vol. 3 of The Irish World Wide (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1994), 170–91. 49. Cheryl Herr, ‘‘Addressing the Eye in Ireland: Thaddeus O’Sullivan’s On a Paving Stone Mounted (1978),’’ Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 20, no. 3 (2000): 367–74.

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film traces the journey of an American tourist, dressed in fashionably ‘‘retro’’ clothes, around Irish landmarks familiar from postcards and films such as John Ford’s The Quiet Man (1952). The ‘‘tourist’’ poses in Irish monastic ruins, kisses the Blarney Stone, and travels on a horse-drawn cart. The ‘‘tour’’ is punctuated by a montage of TV and radio ads promoting wellknown Irish and international brands, and by an encounter with actors on the set of an Irish play. It culminates in a dreamlike sequence in which the tourist imagines herself as a ‘‘Celt’’ running through a mystical rural landscape. These interruptions to the narrative complicate any simple critique of the heritage industry. In the second part of the film, the exploration of ‘‘visibility’’ shifts the focus toward surveillance. The tourist embarks on an alternative tour, through the urban spaces of Dublin and Belfast, where she encounters a kitsch religious singer and a street protest against the H Block prisons. Again, the narrative is disrupted by a staged sequence, in which one of the tourist’s Irish friends is interrogated. The final section includes an interview with Maureen Gibson, a former political prisoner. Shot in an entirely different style, straight to a camera that is slowly pulling back, this sequence calls attention to the problem of representing Gibson’s experience and the political situation in the North. As if to acknowledge the conventions of the Hollywood thriller or film noir, which have dominated filmic representation of the North of Ireland, the film closes with ambiguous scenes of a city at night. In her next film, Like Dawn to Dust (1983), Dick produced a more selfconsciously ‘‘romantic’’ representation of the Irish landscape, exploring the convergence between Irish and American Gothic. The opening shots of a period house, bearing the scorch marks of a fire, are accompanied by an off-key piano, recalling the stage melodrama or early cinema. In particular, these scenes seem to reference the work of Dion Boucicault, which provided a focal point for silent film production in Ireland.50 The house, most likely a remnant of Anglo-Irish society, is abandoned but for Lydia Lunch, wearing her signature New York goth makeup and clothes. Lunch delivers a poetic monologue, on-screen and in voice-over, accompanied by sounds of traditional music and images of a rural landscape populated only by wild animals. The closing shots emphasize the circularity of Irish narratives: ‘‘the 50. Earlier, in the silent era, Sidney Olcott of the U.S.-based Kalem Company had also made films in Ireland, featuring well-known landmarks and adapting the Irish stage melodramas of Boucicault. See Kevin Rockett, ‘‘The Silent Period’’ and Luke Gibbons, ‘‘Romanticism, Realism, and Irish Cinema,’’ both in Cinema and Ireland, 7–12 and 221–23, respectively.

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past never dies, it just continually repeats itself.’’ Although unresolved in many respects, Like Dawn to Dust signaled a shift toward a more ‘‘poetic’’ form of filmmaking in place of montage and appropriation. It was Dick’s first ‘‘Irish’’ film, and it was shown at the grand opening of a new Irish film club, the Ha’penny, in October 1983. Instead of the rigorous theoretical framework associated with the Project Arts Centre, the Ha’penny Film Club adopted the informal approach associated with No Wave cinema. It screened several of Dick’s films, including Visibility Moderate and Liberty’s Booty ; international avant-garde films by Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, and Hollis Frampton; and Irish films, such as Quinn’s Cloch (1978), Comerford’s Emtigon (1972), and the Belfast Film Workshop’s Acceptable Levels (1983). An Irish Film Board had been established in 1981 to support indigenous industrial production. Super 8 filmmaking was largely unrecognized by state institutions, however, because of its peripheral status in relation to the film industry. Following her return to Ireland, Dick contributed to an influential Irish film production course, based at Rathmines College in Dublin. Given the absence of any established Irish cooperatives, however, facilities for lowbudget production remained limited. Dudley Andrew suggests that certain Irish films made during the 1980s, notably Peter Ormrod’s Eat the Peach (1986), can be read as an ‘‘allegory of the cottage industry,’’ of which they are a part.51 Dick’s practice, shifting between New York, Dublin, and London, also constitutes a commentary on institutional structures of production. In 1985, Dick relocated to London, where she became an active member of the London Film-makers’ Co-operative and continued to explore Irish themes and subjects. Rothach (1985), Dick’s next film, and her first on 16mm, was produced with the assistance of the British Arts Council and the Cinema Action collective. Filmed in the countryside of Clare and West Cork, it takes up the exploration of vision and surveillance instigated in Visibility Moderate. Although it is only eight minutes in length, Rothach recalls sections of Michael Snow’s La Region Centrale (1971) in terms of its structure, its use of sound, and its setting. Like Snow’s film, Rothach incorporates rhythmic pans, and its title means ‘‘cycle’’ or ‘‘wheel,’’ but unlike La Region Centrale, it features narration and ends with a recitation of Sean O’Riordáin’s Irish-language poem ‘‘An Roithleán.’’ The landscape of Rothach, in contrast with that of Like Dawn to Dust, is filled with evidence of activity. The pans across rolling fields include 51. Dudley Andrew, ‘‘The Theater of Irish Cinema,’’ Yale Journal of Criticism 15, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 34.

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scenes of a child playing the fiddle, farm machinery, and turf cutting on the bog. These scenes are strikingly picturesque and reminiscent of the iconic Irish color postcards produced by John Hinde since the 1950s.52 But the relentless movement of the camera also suggests surveillance, or a process of mapping. The serenity of the location is gradually undercut by the sound track, which changes from a melody into a series of shifting electronic pulses, and through the uncanny image of the child, reappearing as the camera moves from place to place, it becomes apparent that this landscape is highly constructed. While Visibility Moderate foregrounds the difficulty of finding a vocabulary adequate to the representation of the landscape and is explicitly concerned with the perspective of the outsider or tourist, Rothach focuses on the historical relationship between image, language, and landscape. The use of oral narration, in the Irish language, works against a ‘‘tourist’’ perspective. Perhaps more than any other of her films, Rothach literally mobilizes landscape as a text to be read. Both Rothach and Dick’s subsequent film, Images/Ireland (1988), were included in ‘‘A Sense of Ireland 1988,’’ a major festival of Irish culture in London. First held in 1980, ‘‘A Sense of Ireland’’ aimed to counter negative Irish stereotypes in the British media and to promote cultural and political relations between Ireland and Britain in the interests of tourism and commerce by providing an insight into Irish history and culture.53 The 1980 festival included a season of Irish and Irish-related films, selected by Kevin Rockett and based on the ‘‘Film and Ireland’’ season at the Project Cinema Club. It provided a critical context for Hollywood’s representations of Ireland and was intended to ‘‘serve as a reminder that ‘lost’ histories can be reconstructed.’’ 54 The second ‘‘Sense of Ireland’’ event in 1988, which featured Dick’s Ireland/Images, was less concerned with the reconstruction of cultural histories. Instead, critical emphasis had shifted toward a more openended exploration of Irish cultural identity. Dick’s films were included in a visual arts exhibition entitled ‘‘Selected Images’’ rather than in the film program. The exhibition, curated by Declan McGonagle and Irish artist James Coleman, focused on the intersection between image and narrative in Irish culture and foregrounded artists who had established a reputation outside Ireland. In particular, it highlighted ‘‘ideas/processes which . . . link the artists 52. Gibbons, Transformations, 37–43. 53. John Stephenson, introduction to festival catalog, A Sense of Ireland (Dublin: A Sense of Ireland Ltd, 1980), 13. 54. Kevin Rockett, ‘‘A Sense of Ireland: Irish Cinema,’’ BFI/National Film Theatre Programme (February 1980): 30.

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and their activity to a continuum from Armagh to America—beyond expectations of categorization or nationalistic identities.’’ 55 Images/Ireland touches on themes explored in Dick’s earlier work, albeit in a fragmentary way. It opens with scenes of children and family, followed by home movie images of sailing and the seafront, and interspersed by ambiguous staged sequences. Gradually, this domesticity is disrupted by images of violent political protest and by a distorted electronic pulse on the sound track. In the process, the images of children and family acquire more ominous associations, perhaps hinting at a relationship between political violence and the structure of the Irish family. ‘‘A Sense of Ireland,’’ in 1988, represented the first official recognition of Dick’s work as an Irish filmmaker. Through an exploration of conventions of representation specific to an expanded Irish landscape, both Rothach and Images/Ireland present a cultural identity that is Irish, postmodern, and, arguably, postnational. In this respect, Dick’s work parallels the contemporary emphasis on local and regional specificity in the work of cultural theorists and policy makers.56 The Avant-Garde of the Regions: Independent Film and Video at Channel Four Vivienne Dick’s work was also supported by developments in British television broadcasting during the 1980s. Channel Four, launched in 1982, was explicitly intended to serve ‘‘a variety of publics, particularly those which had been ignored by existing broadcasting—ethnic minorities, specialist sports fans, regional and linguistic minorities.’’ 57 As a ‘‘publisherbroadcaster,’’ the new channel prioritized the commissioning of independent and avant-garde film, and the first feature broadcast was Cinema Action’s So That You Can Live, one of a number of films acquired through independent distributors such as The Other Cinema. ‘‘Irish politics,’’ and media representations of the ‘‘Troubles,’’ also continued to serve as a focal point 55. Declan McGonagle and James Coleman, introduction to exhibition catalog, Selected Images: Vivienne Dick, Micky Donnelly, Paul Durcan, Brian Cronin, Joan Fowler, Paul Graham, Alanna O’Kelly, Victor Sloan (London: Riverside Studios, 1988), 1. 56. Richard Kearney, ed., Across the Frontiers: Ireland in the 1990s (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1988). 57. Geoff Mulgan and Ken Walpole, Saturday Night or Sunday Morning: From Arts to Industry—New Forms of Cultural Policy (London: Comedia, 1986), 46; John Ellis ‘‘The Independent Filmmakers Association and the Fourth Channel,’’ Screen 21, no. 4 (Winter 1980): 56–57; and Simon Blanchard and David Morley, eds., What’s This Channel Four? An Alternative Report (London: Comedia, 1982).

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within British independent film culture as a whole. Many independent distributors had shifted focus away from university film societies 58 and toward issue-based political campaigns by the early 1980s. The Other Cinema, for example, supplied film and video on subjects such as Ireland, the media, and antiracism 59 to various political organizations. Channel Four quickly dominated this independent sector, dwarfing other networks for distribution of political film and screening avant-garde works, such as Dick’s Like Dawn to Dust.60 Channel Four’s support for Irish filmmaking encouraged a degree of regional and local specificity, largely absent from Irish film policy until the 1990s. Channel Four was committed both to the coverage of Irish issues 61 and to community-based workshop production. A new union agreement, the Workshop Declaration,62 enabled the channel to fund a network of twelve to fifteen workshops each year, including two groups from Northern Ireland. This funding was relatively long term, especially by comparison with the short-term contracts issued to commercial producers. One Irish workshop supported by Channel Four, the Derry Film and Video Collective (DFVC), developed a feminist perspective on the political situation in the North and critiqued representations of Derry produced by visiting TV crews. DFVC members were skeptical of Channel Four’s engagement with Irish issues.63 They claimed to be subject to greater scrutiny than British workshops (even those making programs about the North) because of their location within Northern Ireland. One of its productions, Mother Ireland (1988), was not broadcast because it included footage of 58. Andi Engel of Politkino (and later Artificial Eye), interviewed by Pines, ‘‘Left Film Distribution,’’ 120. 59. Ben Gibson, quoted by Harvey, ‘‘The Other Cinema—A History: Part 2, 1978– 1985,’’ 89. 60. In 1936, Kino’s one thousand screenings reached an estimated 250,000 people. In 1983, The Cause of Ireland (Platform Films, 1983), a film critical of the British state in Northern Ireland and focusing on working-class people, reached 294,000 through one screening on Channel Four Television. See Sylvia Harvey, ‘‘The ‘Other Cinema’ in Britain: Unfinished Business in Oppositional and Independent Film, 1929–1984,’’ in All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema, ed. Charles Barr (London: British Film Institute, 1986), 235. 61. ‘‘Channel 4 and Ireland,’’ in Film Base News 10 (Dec./Jan. 1988/89): 12. 62. Established in 1980 and revised in 1984, the declaration represented formal recognition, by unions, filmmakers, and broadcasters, of the principles of workshop practice. See Dickinson, Rogue Reels, 163–67. 63. See Johnny Gogan’s interview with Margo Harkin and Anne Crilly, ‘‘Derry Film and Video Collective,’’ Film Base News (Sept./Oct. 1987): 10–11.

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members of proscribed Republican organizations.64 Other sources of production funding for the collective were limited, however, as the BFI Production Board did not recognize the Six Counties as qualifying for regional funding, and the DFVC’s other source of income, the European Social Fund, was exclusively earmarked for training. Channel Four did not maintain this commitment to Irish independent filmmaking, however. The late 1980s brought deregulation and a change in personnel, with Michael Grade replacing Jeremy Isaacs as chief executive. Isaacs had been closely associated with the channel’s initial support for Irish material. He had overseen the funding of Irish films, including Neil Jordan’s Angel (1981) and Comerford’s Reefer and the Model (1988), and the commissioning of the 1987 ‘‘Irish Reel’’ documentary season. With Grade’s arrival, the second ‘‘Irish Reel’’ series planned for 1989 was abruptly canceled.65 Channel Four’s involvement in workshop production did not survive into the 1990s. The Workshop Declaration was, in some respects, a means of implementing cutbacks 66 within the independent production sector, and the withdrawal of support for workshops can also be attributed to a new emphasis on ‘‘innovation’’ at the expense of continuity within the channel.67 Some British workshop organizations, such as the UK-based Worker’s Film Association and Amber Films, are still in existence, but few have maintained the engagement with a broader audience that Channel Four offered. In addition to the benefits it offered to individual filmmakers and local communities, Channel Four’s involvement in regional workshop practice and independent film production provided a model for Irish film policy. When the Irish Film Board was reactivated in 1993 (following its dissolution in 1987), it was defined by a new emphasis on regional specificity and headed by Rod Stoneman, Channel Four’s former commissioning editor for independent film and video. Conclusion: Sighting an Irish Avant-Garde Vivienne Dick’s film practice has yet to be fully theorized in relation to developments in Irish cinema, despite its evident concern with the specificity of Irish experience. Her work has entered the canon of Irish visual culture 64. See Belinda Loftus’s ‘‘Review of Mother Ireland,’’ CIRCA 44 (Mar./Apr. 1989): 33–34. 65. Paul Donovan and Johnny Gogan, ‘‘The Last Irish Reel,’’ Film Base News 13 (July/Aug. 1989): 8–9. 66. Dickinson, Rogue Reels, 59. 67. Rod Stoneman, ‘‘Sins of Commission,’’ Screen 33, no. 2 (Summer 1992): 133.

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only through events such as ‘‘A Sense of Ireland 1988’’ and through the intervention of the Irish Film Archive. The international networks for production and distribution that supported her work and that of other Irish filmmakers no longer exist, and a convergence between film, video, and art practice since the 1970s has seen the gallery emerge as the primary context for avantgarde film. Cultural festivals (like ‘‘A Sense of Ireland’’) and gallery exhibitions now provide an increasingly important platform for avant-garde film. But these international events do not necessarily support the development of local film cultures 68 or challenge the marginalization of avant-garde filmmaking within national contexts. The late 1970s and early 1980s were marked by an intersection of local and international film cultures that proved productive for both theorists and practitioners. As Hansen notes, the ‘‘postmodernist challenge to modernism and modernity’’ opened a space for the understanding of ‘‘alternative forms of modernism . . . that vary according to their social and geopolitical locations, often configured along the axis of post/coloniality, and according to the specific subcultural and indigenous traditions to which they responded’’ (MPS, 332). Dick’s work contributes to this wider critical project, through its exploration of American society and popular culture from the perspective of the immigrant outsider, and through its exploration of the particular place of Hollywood iconography within the Irish imaginary. This critical engagement with the forms and conventions of globalized modernity defines Dick’s work as avant-garde.

68. Manthia Diawara, ‘‘On Tracking World Cinema: African Cinema at Film Festivals,’’ Public Culture 6 (1994): 385–96.

Books Received

Arredondo, Gabriela F., Aída Huntado, Norman Klahn, Olga Nájera-Ramírez, and Patricia Zavella, eds. Chicana Feminisms: A Critical Reader. Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 2003. Arsic´, Branka. The Passive Eye: Gaze and Subjectivity in Berkeley (via Beckett). Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003. Barron, Patrick, and Anne Re, eds. Italian Environmental Literature. New York: Italica Press, 2003. Blanchot, Maurice. The Book to Come. Trans. Charlotte Mandell. Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003. Braester, Yomi. Literature, Film, and Public Discourse in Twentieth-Century China. Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003. Brannigan, John. Orwell to the Present: Literature in England, 1945–2000. Transitions. New York: Palgrave, 2003. Brogan, Jacqueline Vaught. The Violence Within/the Violence Without: Wallace Stevens and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Poetics. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003. Caillois, Roger. The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader. Ed. Claudine Frank. Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 2003. Chiu, Fred Y. L. Colours of Money, Shades of Pride: Historicities and Moral Politics in Industrial Conflicts in Hong Kong. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2003. Culler, Jonathan, and Kevin Lamb, eds. Just Being Difficult? Academic Writing in the Public Arena. Cultural Memory in the Present. Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003. Dauber, Kenneth, and Walter Jost, eds. Ordinary Language Criticism: Literary Thinking After Cavell After Wittgenstein. With an afterword by Stanley Cavell. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2003.

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de Courtivron, Isabelle. Lives in Translation: Bilingual Writers on Identity and Creativity. New York: Palgrave, 2003. Dubey, Madhu. Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Felski, Rita. Literature after Feminism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Fultz, Lucille P. Toni Morrison: Playing with Difference. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Gillespie, Michael Patrick. The Aesthetics of Chaos: Nonlinear Thinking and Contemporary Literary Criticism. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003. Gillman, Susan. Blood Talk: American Race, Melodrama, and the Culture of the Occult. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Gourgouris, Stathis. Does Literature Think? Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era. Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003. Grossman, Jay. Reconstituting the American Renaissance: Emerson, Whitman, and the Politics of Representation. Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 2003. Habib, M. A. R., ed. and trans. An Anthology of Modern Urdu Poetry. MLA Texts and Translations. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2003. Hamilton, Paul. Metaromanticism: Aesthetics, Literature, and Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Hauerwas, Stanley, and Frank Lentricchia, eds. Dissent from the Homeland: Essays After September 11. Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 2003. Hill, Errol G., and James V. Hatch. A History of African American Theater. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Houchin, John. Censorship of the American Theatre in the Twentieth Century. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Hungerford, Amy. The Holocaust of Texts: Genocide, Literature, and Personification. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Jacobs, Carol, and Henry Sussman, eds. Acts of Narrative. Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003. James, C. L. R. Letters from London. Ed. Nicholas Laughlin. Lebanon, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2003. Johnston, Anna. Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800–1860. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Kilgore, DeWitt Douglas. Astrofuturism: Science, Race, and Visions of Utopia in Space. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.

Books Received 269

Kipp, Julie. Romanticism, Maternity, and the Body Politic. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Leitch, Vincent B. Theory Matters. New York: Routledge, 2003. Lentricchia, Frank. Lucchesi and The Whale. First paperback ed. Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 2003. Mattessich, Stefan. Lines of Flight: Discursive Time and Countercultural Desire in the Work of Thomas Pynchon. Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 2003. McCarren, Felicia. Dancing Machines: Choreographies of the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003. Ng, Janet. The Experience of Modernity: Chinese Autobiography of the Early Twentieth Century. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003. Olson, Gary A., and Lynn Worsham, eds. Critical Intellectuals on Writing. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. Punday, Daniel. Narrative Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Narratology. New York: Palgrave, 2003. Rivers, Isabel, ed. Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England: New Essays. New York: Continuum, 2003. Salvatore, Ricardo D. Wandering Paysanos: State Order and Subaltern Experience in Buenos Aires during the Rozas Era. Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 2003. Shaw, Mary Lewis. The Cambridge Introduction to French Poetry. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Shumway, David R. Modern Love: Romance, Intimacy, and the Marriage Crisis. New York: New York University Press, 2003. Spillers, Hortense J. Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Strachey, Lytton. Eminent Victorians. New York: Continuum, 2003. Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 2003. Watten, Barrett. The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2003. Wolfe, Cary, ed. Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Wright, Crispin. Saving the Differences: Essays on Themes from ‘‘Truth and Objectivity.’’ Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003. Yuknavitch, Lidia. Real to Reel. Tallahassee, Fla.: FC2, 2003.

Contributors

Richard Bourke is lecturer in the History Department at Queen Mary, University of London. He has previously published on romanticism, the Enlightenment, and the political thought of Edmund Burke. His latest book is Peace in Ireland: The War of Ideas (2003). Joe Cleary is lecturer in English literature at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. He has published extensively on contemporary Irish literature and film, and on the topics of colonialism and modernity. His book Literature, Partition, and the NationState: Culture and Conflict in Ireland, Israel, and Palestine was published in 2002, and he is currently the coeditor (with Claire Connolly) of the Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture, which will be published in 2004. Maeve Connolly is assistant lecturer in animation and film at the Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Dun Laoghaire, in Dublin. She was awarded a Government of Ireland Scholarship to complete her Ph.D. on Irish and international avant-garde film at Dublin City University. She coedited The Glass Eye: Artists and Television (2000), a collection of texts and artists’ projects exploring televisual culture. She is a regular contributor to CIRCA: Contemporary Visual Culture in Ireland, and her forthcoming publications include an essay on the cinematic figure of the traveler in The Irish in Us: Irishness, Performativity, and Popular Culture (Duke University Press). Seamus Deane is Keough Professor of Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Among his publications are The French Enlightenment and Revolution in England, 1789–1832 (1988); Selected Poems (1988); Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing Since 1790 (1997), and the novel Reading in the Dark (1996). He is general editor of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 3 vols. (1991). A book on Edmund Burke’s political affiliations, titled Foreign Affections, is forthcoming in the spring of 2004. Thomas Docherty is professor of English and director of research at the University of Kent, having previously held the chair of English (1867) at Trinity College Dublin.

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In April 2004, he takes up a new position as Chair Professor of English and of Comparative Literature at the University of Warwick. He is the author of numerous books, including Postmodernism (1993), After Theory (1996), Alterities: Criticism, History, Representation (1996), Criticism and Modernity: Aesthetics, Literature, and Nations in Europe and Its Academies (1999). His new book, entitled Aesthetic Democracy, will appear in late 2004, and he is currently working on a book-length project titled Ideas of the University. Luke Gibbons is Keough Family Professor of Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He specializes in film and literature, the visual arts, questions of aesthetics, politics, and cultural history, and contemporary debates on postcolonialism. He is the author of several books, including Edmund Burke and Ireland: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Colonial Sublime (2003), The Quiet Man (2002), Transformations in Irish Culture (1996), and is coauthor of Cinema in Ireland (1987). He recently coedited two collections, Reinventing Ireland: Culture, Society, and the Global Economy (2002), and ‘‘The Theatre of Irish Cinema,’’ a special issue of the Yale Journal of Criticism (2002), and is a contributing editor of the landmark Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (1991). His Gaelic Gothic: Race, Colonialism, and Irish Culture will be published in 2004. Siobhán Kilfeather is lecturer in English at the University of Sussex. She has edited The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (2002) and the Pickering and Chatto edition of Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (2003), and has published widely on Irish women’s writing, particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She is writing a book on the rhetorics of atrocity in Romantic Ireland. Bruce Nelson is professor of history at Dartmouth College. He is the author of Workers on the Waterfront (1988) and Divided We Stand: American Workers and the Struggle for Black Equality (2001), and has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He is currently writing a book on Irish nationalism and the discourse of ‘‘race’’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Kevin Whelan is professor and Michael J. Smurfit Director of the University of Notre Dame’s Keough Centre in Dublin. Among his books are The Tree of Liberty (1996), Atlas of the Irish Rural Landscape (1997), and 1798: A Bicentenary Perspective (2003). Clair Wills is reader in modern poetry at Queen Mary, University of London. She has published widely on contemporary Irish poetry, including Improprieties: Politics and Sexuality in Northern Irish Poetry (1993) and Reading Paul Muldoon (1998). She is editor of the Contemporary Section of the Field Day Anthology of Women’s Writing and Traditions, vol. 5 (2002). She is currently working on a cultural history of Ireland during the Second World War.