On Tuesday afternoon outside the indoor marketplace
a beggar boy was beating on his drum;
he weaved a dance about the legs that walked into his space
just like a pigeon dancing round a crumb.
His blind old father slouched beside him, head bowed down and grey,
His ribs like hollow furrows in the sand.
The old man said, "My boy, you will make nothing good today:
I hear they've put no nickel in your hand."
The boy danced round and round and sought a merchant's passing grace
and grasped upon a tail of purple gown.
The merchant spun around and kicked the poor boy in the face,
The hollow drum resounding, dropping down
upon the marble floor. A tear escaped the poor boy's pride:
The blind man nodded: Sound described it all:
"My boy, you must adventure now and seek your fortune wide;
I drag you down. Leave now, and learn your Call."
The boy looked through the market doors and saw the stalls of gold,
The silken drapes, bright chains, great pots and jars;
He smelt the oils, the herbs asmoke, the fortunes yet untold
to his young life: of business and bazaars.
He heard another boy laugh loudly through the noise inside
and heard his stomach grumble in his ear.
He looked down at his father and knelt to him as he cried,
"How could you think I'd really leave you here?"
Surge, river, roll out from the bend
A whisper'd roar of lives, a start of light,
Bright bodies, starlight stipples; lend
a cry to wordless thoughts between each thought
here, within an instant. Here I lay
gazing at a bank between the breaths
I make, drinking those eyes within the play
of sunkissed rivergleams and little deaths
of light renewed by births, here, for all time.
A wind!, a dream blown down to kiss a brow,
a shimmering between the willows. Name
the moment? Yes! The oxlip open so.
I hear her name! The windkissed rushes bow:
a light I've lived to breathe breathes in me now.
On Tuesday afternoon outside the indoor marketplace
a beggar boy was beating on his drum;
he weaved a dance about the legs that walked into his space
just like a pigeon dancing round a crumb.
His blind old father slouched beside him, head bowed down and grey,
His ribs like hollow furrows in the sand.
The old man said, "My boy, you will make nothing good today:
I hear they've put no nickel in your hand."
The boy danced round and round and sought a merchant's passing grace
and grasped upon a tail of purple gown.
The merchant spun around and kicked the poor boy in the face,
The hollow drum resounding, dropping down
upon the marble floor. A tear escaped the poor boy's pride:
The blind man nodded: Sound described it all:
"My boy, you must adventure now and seek your fortune wide;
I drag you down. Leave now, and learn your Call."
The boy looked through the market doors and saw the stalls of gold,
The silken drapes, bright chains, great pots and jars;
He smelt the oils, the herbs asmoke, the fortunes yet untold
to his young life: of business and bazaars.
He heard another boy laugh loudly through the noise inside
and heard his stomach grumble in his ear.
He looked down at his father and knelt to him as he cried,
"How could you think I'd really leave you here?"
wow I shed a tear on this one! Very Very nice fins!
If being sane is thinking there's something wrong with being different....I'd rather be completely fucking mental.
(Angelina Jolie)
Originally posted by FinsburyParkCarrots On Tuesday afternoon outside the indoor marketplace
a beggar boy was beating on his drum;
he weaved a dance about the legs that walked into his space
just like a pigeon dancing round a crumb.
His blind old father slouched beside him, head bowed down and grey,
His ribs like hollow furrows in the sand.
The old man said, "My boy, you will make nothing good today:
I hear they've put no nickel in your hand."
The boy danced round and round and sought a merchant's passing grace
and grasped upon a tail of purple gown.
The merchant spun around and kicked the poor boy in the face,
The hollow drum resounding, dropping down
upon the marble floor. A tear escaped the poor boy's pride:
The blind man nodded: Sound described it all:
"My boy, you must adventure now and seek your fortune wide;
I drag you down. Leave now, and learn your Call."
The boy looked through the market doors and saw the stalls of gold,
The silken drapes, bright chains, great pots and jars;
He smelt the oils, the herbs asmoke, the fortunes yet untold
to his young life: of business and bazaars.
He heard another boy laugh loudly through the noise inside
and heard his stomach grumble in his ear.
He looked down at his father and knelt to him as he cried,
"How could you think I'd really leave you here?"
took my breath away.
lovely written
~~dont mind yer make up, just make up yer mind~~
~~its better to be hated for who you are than be loved for who you are not~~
Lonely Night
No noise in a room that knows too much
Have to get out, escape
Have to head to D's Bar
Only You
Only Me
Even though it's wrong my needs have to be met
Make me a drink my head is reeling
Only when I'm drunk, the animal comes out.
We give into the feelings that stir deep inside
Only you can fill the need.
You can act like theres no feelings involved
Easy for you
Hard for me
Knowing I will never step foot again in D's Bar.
This poem shows great control of language and economy of form, and behind its gaps and silences is a suggestion of a whole life you can imagine. It is in the silences between well placed words in poetry that human experience lies, and you achieve the objective of suggesting the unsayable: a whole lifetime's pre- linguistic feeling of human desire, appetite, repression, frustration, dependency and regret.
Irelands of the Mind
A combinative approach to post-colonial readings and interpretations of Yeats’s early writings on the Irish peasantry, and Kavanagh’s “The Great Hunger”
INTRODUCTION
"Formally, we are fated to be in the poststructuralist world of Repetition with Difference; the same allegory, the nationalist one, rewritten, over and over again, until the end of time: ‘all third-world texts are necessarily….’"
(Aijaz Ahmad [1987], in Marxist Literary Theory – A Reader, eds.
Eagleton and Milne, Oxford: Blackwell 1996: 382)
" …. (H)ybridity encompasses a history, a politics, an aesthetics and a critical history of decolonisation. Strategically deployed, it reveals both the doubleness at the heart of Western culture and the collusive nature of reverse discourses such as Western-inspired colonial nationalism. Theory has opened up a space between signifier and signified, and it is precisely this Third Space … which allows for the emergence of effective resistance."
(Gerry Smyth on Homi K. Bhabha, in Decolonisation and Criticism – The
Construction of Irish Literature, London: Pluto 1998: 23)
This introduction to my essay has two aims. Firstly I shall discuss how the above epigrams display a growing split between Marxist-based and post-structuralist approaches to post-colonial studies of literature. I shall develop my point by showing how this divide affects literary criticism in Ireland. Secondly I shall aim to suggest a valid way of combining these approaches in discussing works by two writers who are thought to be key figures in the decolonizing process of Irish literatures in English: W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) and Patrick Kavanagh (1904-67).
The first epigram is taken from Ahmad’s essay “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory’” (1987), which criticises Fredric Jameson for labelling all post-colonial writings - whatever their historical, geographical or cultural contexts - national allegories of ‘Third World’ literature. Ahmad, as a committed Marxist, questions Jameson’s essentialist “reductionism” (in Ahmad, ibid: 377) and believes in studying post-colonial literatures in their specific historical, social contexts. He is wary about receptions of authors such as Salman Rushdie (a writer he sees as a bourgeois, migrant-metropolitan intellectual conforming to the anti-Islamic ideologies of the West but wrongly cast, as a typical ‘Indian’ author and national allegory of the Third World (ibid)). The critic Diana Brydon ([1989] cited in Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory – Contexts, Practices, Politics, London: Verso 1997), seconds Ahmad’s view: she also argues against using “Western” literary theory to read post-colonial works. Brydon writes that the problem with using post-structuralist academic discourses to discuss post-colonial literatures is that non-Western writings become absorbed into the Western hegemony and deprived of their subversive potentiality: “Deconstructing imperialism keeps us within imperialism’s orbit”(20).
The second epigram represents Bhabha’s view that Ahmad et al are unwittingly collusive in maintaining the psychological and ideological structures of colonialism (particularly the binaries Self/Other) when they advocate discourses of difference steadfastly in opposition to dominant forms. Bhabha proposes as an alternative the Derridean, punning concept of différance, to forward that post-colonial texts that imitate constructions of nationhood, identity and imagined community subversively decentralise the presumed monologic authority of ‘original’ colonial narratives (cf. Bhabha [1988] in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, eds. Ashcroft et al, London: Routledge 1995: 207-8). Such a proposition encourages a combinative critical approach to post-colonial literatures that observes historical and social specificities without maintaining a colonial dualism of Self and Other (see ibid: 207).
I shall now show how the study of Irish literature is currently affected by the schism in post-colonial critical and theoretical developments: I shall illustrate my point by discussing criticism of the text I shall be discussing for the greater part of this essay, Patrick Kavanagh’s “The Great Hunger” ([1942] in Patrick Kavanagh – The Complete Poems, ed. Peter Kavanagh, Newbridge: Goldsmith Press 1984, 79-104). Gerry Smyth (1998) discusses that there is a tendency in Irish literary criticism among politically committed readers and critics to construct a school of “Irish studies” that is not only historicist but also “ethno-nationalist”. Paraphrasing the anthropologist Anthony Smith, Smyth explains ethno-nationalism accordingly:
It is intent to ‘vernacularize’ (Smith: 140) the masses… (and) to provide the ethnie with a historical rationale and to create a language capable of disclosing ‘to the community its true nature, its authentic experience and hidden destiny’ (ibid).
(Smyth, 1998: 12)
The Irish critic Antoinette Quinn (in Patrick Kavanagh – Born-Again Romantic, Dublin: Gill and Macmillan 1991) tends toward an ethno-nationalist approach, when she appraises Kavanagh’s “The Great Hunger” as “of the people” and advocating a “sectarian and class-conscious”, rural Catholic Ireland (1991: 123, 169). She emphasizes the resistance-polemic of the poem’s challenge to “the fanciful establishment view of rural Ireland as a primitivist Eden” (154). I shall in my discussion of “The Great Hunger” below adhere to her interest in the historical and contexts of the poem (referring, as does she, to its historically near-contemporary and intertextual relationship to Eamon de Valera’s St Patrick’s Day radio broadcast of 1943 (ibid.154-6)). But I shall also try to incorporate into my analysis a theoretical approach, to suggest that the poem’s capacity for resistance is not in the assertion of a sectarian or class-conscious voice constructing Irish Catholic identity (polarized against Protest middle class revivalist models) but rather in its hybridized, dialogic discourse that interrogates of notions of an essential ‘Irish’ identity: we see both colonial and nationalist discourses of Irish peasant essence divested of authority in Kavanagh’s decolonizing poem.
Declan Kiberd distances himself from the ethno-nationalist discourses of post-Independence Irish critics, since he, echoing Bhabha, sees their ideas of a sectarian, Catholic Irish nationhood, identity and community as a complicit continuation of “a fiction created by the rulers of England in response to specific needs at a precise moment in British history” (cited in Smyth, 1998: 57). Gerry Smyth historicizes Kiberd as a key player in the “decolonization” of Irish criticism, who makes full use of the benefit of developments in literary theory and methodology in order to re- place the study of Irish literatures within broader post-colonial and cultural debates (in ibid: 2) and transcend the ideological and psychological limitations of anti-colonialism. Yet Kiberd tends to “World” Irish literature when he argues that “The Great Hunger” is a national allegory for a universal debate about the oppression of the peasant classes (“Kavanagh saw that what appeared to be essential traits of the Irish peasantry were to be found in most societies with little economic development”, in Irish Classics, London: Granta 2000: 600). In my discussion of Kavanagh below, I shall argue against Kiberd that although Kavanagh questions ideas of peasant “essence”, he shows that the plight of the rural Irish poor is the result of specific cultural, ideological and agricultural-economic conditions in Éire.
My intention in this essay is to construct a combinative approach to looking at literatures in English from Ireland that makes use of both historicism and post-structuralism. For example, I shall firstly undertake a short discussion (pp. 3-6) of Yeats’s early writings on the Irish peasantry, arguing how a historicist analysis of the contexts of ideological conflicts informing these works can be understood better, by scrutinizing the ways these conflicts work dialogically in the texts to undercut colonial constructions of the peasantry. I shall show how in the 1890s Yeats imitated Spenserian constructions of the peasantry; his pastoral objectification of the poor reflected his uncertainties about a subjectified, sectarian Catholic will to nationalist power supplanting the Protestant ascendancy. Yet I shall demonstrate that though his work is complicit with colonial discourses, his mimicry of dominant forms - regardless of authorial intention - hybridizes and fractures the ‘original’ master narratives of the peasant Other and effects a hybrid space in which the notions of ‘Irish’ peasant identity and community can resist the colonial model.
Secondly, for the greater part of this essay (pp.6ff) I shall consider the post-Independence context in which Kavanagh was engaging with constructions of the peasantry in his time, whilst showing how he consciously uses parodic mimicry in “the Great Hunger” to deconstruct the lingering legacy of colonial ideas about the peasantry. Towards the end of my analysis of “The Great Hunger” I shall conduct a contrastive reading of Section XIII of the poem and Yeats’s essay “The Golden Age” ([1893] in ed. Robert Welch, W.B. Yeats – Writings on Irish Folklore, Legend and Myth, Harmondsworth: Penguin 1993: 133-4. In order to be able to argue that Kavanagh’s is “a step on from” Yeats in a decolonizing process in Irish literatures, one needs not only to discuss their differing historical and political contexts but also to consider using often quite complex theory the way Kavanagh’s parody of colonial narratives extends the process of hybridizing a space for the representation of peasant identity and community, pulling away from the imperial centre as the next major stage on from Yeats’s imitative pastoral mode.
YEATS’S EARLY WRITINGS ON THE IRISH PEASANTRY
Analysis of Yeats’s role in the Irish literary revival from the 1880s qualifies to a large extent Ahmad’s argument against national allegories of Third World literatures. One could say, in fact, that Yeats was a “First World” poet and intellectual. R.F. Foster’s W.B. Yeats – A Life I. The Apprentice Mage (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1997) shows that Yeats spent thirteen of his first fifteen years in the imperial metropolis of London; on returning to Dublin, he in time furthered his education by enrolling at the city’s Metropolitan School of Art. Yeats was, in many respects, afforded a “British” rather than colonial education, and even in Dublin his society was characterised “by small-scale metropolitan pretensions, and mingled contempt and envy for the attractions of London”. In spite of this, Yeats was somewhat excluded from the higher echelons of Protestant Dublin society and its “assured places in the worlds of business, the Church of Ireland” on account of his father’s genteel poverty (ibid: 28-9). Yeats moved back and forth from Dublin to London in the 1880s and in that time developed an interest in “Celticism”, perhaps as a way of expressing his déclassé Otherness. He hybridized a poetic voice in his early writings, which enabled him to distance himself from a society increasingly isolated in the rise of Fenianism yet maintain links with a Protestant ascendancy ambitious for power in a post- Independence Ireland: he fused the popular nationalist ascendancy discourse celebrating the hero-cult of the legendary Cuchulain, an aristocratic prototype for the Celtic Twilight, with his own interests in the otherness of the peasantry (cf. ibid: 28-56).
Although an Ahmadian emphasis on historical or ethno-national specificities proves efficacious in pinpointing the sorts of experiences Yeats’s writing encompasses and represents, this does not mean that one should necessarily produce an Ahmadian commentary of Yeats in the manner of that critic’s attack on Rushdie. Historicist contextualization points to the contradictions and ambiguities in Yeats’s relationship to and identification with a Catholic peasant base. Also, Bhabhalian readings of Yeats’s early writings about the peasantry of Ireland are instructive in showing how even when Yeats is seemingly copying colonial-pastoral discourses - objectifying the happy rustic contended with his material poverty in pursuit of spiritual ideals - his mimicry of colonial master narratives functions “with a (nationalist) difference”. Through interrogating the construction of the peasantry as the Other, Yeats’s literature resists (perhaps unconsciously) the authority of the colonial or complicit anti-colonial “Self”, is “hybridized” and performs as part of a decolonizing process in literatures of Ireland.
In his essay “Irish Fairies” ([1890] in ed. Welch, 1993: 60-64), Yeats argues,
The world is, I believe, more full of significance to the Irish peasant than to the English. The fairy populace of hill and lake and woodland have helped keep it so. It gives a fanciful life to the dead hillsides, and surrounds the peasant as he ploughs and digs with tender shadows of poetry. No wonder that he is gay, and can take man and his destiny without gloom, and make up proverbs like this from the old Gaelic – “the lake is not burdened by its swan, the steed by its bridle, or a man by the soul that is in him”.
(63-4)
These lines when scrutinized epitomise the ideological conflicts of Yeats’s period of emergent nationalism, and illustrate Yeats’s ambivalent consideration of whether the peasantry will be empowered in the event of a nationalist uprising. Yeats wishes to propose an ethno-nationalist concept of difference between the Irish and the English peasantry (“The world is, I believe, more full of significance to the Irish peasant than to the English”). But if he is attempting sincerely to represent a political model of the self-cognizant Irish peasant, as an existential and socio-economic subject rather than as a rhetorical vehicle for his own romantic conceits, it would be necessary to construct ‘him’ accordingly with a tangible consciousness, in order to demonstrate his heightened capacity for reflective thought and responsible self-government. Why Yeats does not pursue this objective might have much to do with the fact that although in 1890, he was a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and a supporter of Fenianism, he secretly suspected that by subjectifying the peasantry he was playing into the hands of a militant Catholic elite desperate to use the rhetoric of peasant self-definition so as to displace the landed Protestant classes and force the emergence of a national Catholic hierarchy. Yeats later admitted vociferously these fears (when writing about the regressive tendencies in Catholic ideology that had caused the riot at a performance of Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World [1907]), in his later construction, of:
A zealous Irishman … (who) spends his time in a never-ending argument about Oliver Cromwell, the Danes, the penal laws, the rebellion of 1798, the famine, the Irish peasant, and ends by substituting a traditional casuistry for a country.
([1910] in ed. Foster, 1997: 419)
Yeats seems to compromise, effectively, if not altogether intentionally, by constructing the peasantry around a pastoral ideal that, though romantic rather than realist and unavoidably echoing the poet and coloniser Spenser’s ideal of docile (Irish?) peasant subservience in The Shepheardes Calender , his conceit is dialogically displaced enough from that ‘original’ colonial objectification of the Irish peasantry to suggest a new space, neither colonial nor ethno-nationalist, through which to express rural Irish identity and experience. However, Yeats’s construction of the peasant happy with a frugal life and ascetic concerns would, ironically, be a weapon in Catholic, post-Independence ideology to objectify the poor, to the concern of Kavanagh’s “The Great Hunger”.
One can further illustrate the multi- dialogic, contradictory and hybrid nature of Yeats’s conception of Irish identity by discussing the Druid’s first-person lament in Yeats’s mythological poem Fergus and the Druid ([1892] in Yeats’s Poems, ed. A. Norman Jeffares 1991),
Look on my thin grey hair and hollow cheeks
And on these hands that may not lift the sword,
This body trembling like a wind-blown reed.
No woman’s loved me, no man’s sought my help.
(1991: 67)
These lines seem displacedly –most likely unintentionally - to voice the plight of contemporary rural Irish males in his – and Kavanagh’s – generations. In the wake of the Famine of 1845-9, decreasing populations and emigration had led to “signs that marriages were becoming fewer and later, as falling agricultural prices and pressure of numbers reduced economic opportunity”(in The Oxford Companion to Irish History, ed. Connolly, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1997: 350). Arranged marriages or “matches” between old husbands and young wives resulted in prosperous widows living often into extreme old age and exacting such emotional and economical control over their male children that the latter were obliged to sacrifice socio-economic and sexual ambition in order to maintain out of duty the family small-holding and dwindle away as middle aged, thin-haired and impotent virgins. Post-Independence conditions in rural Irish society, which continued to maintain the oppression and misrepresentation of the poor, would in time determine the poetic explication of this experience of the peasant base in an urgent, contemporary context that exposed the fallacy at the heart of romantic-colonial/ anti-colonial constructions of the Irish peasantry, via Kavanagh’s “The Great Hunger”.
(On page 9, I shall resume my analysis of Yeats, comparing his essay “The Golden Age” [in ed. Welch 1993: 133-4] with Section XIII of Kavanagh’s epic poem.)
KAVANAGH’S “THE GREAT HUNGER”
In this section I shall firstly use a historicist approach to consider the specific social and historical contexts in which Patrick Kavanagh was writing. Secondly, I shall analyse representations of identity and community in “The Great Hunger”, combine an Ahmadian discussion of the specific conflicting discourses informing the poem with a deconstructive reading of how they dialogically intervene throughout the text, undercutting colonial master narratives of the Irish peasantry and even narratives of nationhood itself, in favour of a parochial, local vision of rural experience.
Kavanagh was born in Mucker, Inniskeen, Co. Monaghan in 1904, the son of a smallholding farmer and cobbler. He left school at the age of twelve and worked the family land until, in 1929, his poetry was ‘discovered’ by AE. In the following decade Kavanagh lived in both London and Dublin as a fledgling poet and critic. Kavanagh, though of a markedly less affluent background than Yeats was not the stridently “sectarian and class-conscious” Irish Catholic “tribal spokesman” that Quinn might suggest (1991: 161,169). His native Monaghan, though in the old nine-county province of Ulster, was incorporated in 1922 into the Irish Free State; its Orange contingent was small and mostly peaceable when he left it for Dublin. Kavanagh’s writings do not address issues of sectarianism in partitioned Éire as such but rather expose the ironic complicity between the post-partition insularism of de Valera’s Catholic Ireland and Cromwellian Puritanism, in the literal chastisement of the working people. Kavanagh despised anyway what he called the nationalist or “buckleppin’” propensities of Irish writings (cf. Smyth, 1998:108-9). His interest was not to propose a post-colonial, sectarian Catholic Irish consciousness but to reveal the repressed Irelands of the mind, via exploring with inexorable intent the ignored aspects of the everyday life of the “old peasant”: his work, boredom, lust, and despair.
Kavanagh would live for most of his adult life in and form a love-hate relationship with his adopted Dublin, but the city and its literary forms gave him a plurality of vision necessary for him to re-imagine rural Ireland without recourse to the complicity in romantic stereotyping that might be pointed out in his earliest verse, written in Monaghan and rather patronized by AE et al as “the work of an unlettered countryman with a natural lyrical gift” (Anthony Cronin, Arena - Three Irish Writers, BBC-TV 1991). By the late 1930s Kavanagh had developed a hybrid, parodic voice that interrogated the colonial and revivalist stereotypes of the peasantry. Kavanagh recognized that the construction “Irish Catholic” had up to his day become synonymous with “pre-colonial” and “peasant” in the discourses of both the colonialists and the nationalists; he saw such constructions as “provincial” and derivative; he preferred to focus on the local, or what he called the “parochial” aspects of mundane, everyday life in Ireland. (Cf. Kavanagh [1952], cited in Smyth, 1998: 107-8). In avoiding what he saw as the grandiosity of revivalist literature, he aimed to eschew poetic notions of Irishness as bogus (“Irishness is a form of anti-art. A way of posing as a poet without actually being one”, in Quinn, 1991: 391). In my view he sought in “The Great Hunger” to mock the ideal of peasant essence with sly references to prevailing political and literary rhetoric of his period, in order to show the falsity of any attempt to ‘write’ the Catholic rural classes, or “put the tank/ On a race”, as he put it in his poem Yeats ([1966] 1984: 348).
“The Great Hunger” spans generic modes from socio-realism to mock-romantic satire. The poem deals with the apocalyptic effect on rural Irish lives of the state-endorsed policy of familism . Its protagonist Patrick Maguire is a sexagenarian virgin, his senses rendered clay-numb by a life of sexual and intellectual hunger; his soul is “Lost” by subservience to Eamon de Valera’s proposition (noted also by Quinn, 1991: 154-5 and 2001: 168-173) that men choosing not to emigrate from rural Ireland should maintain a duty to improving a post-colonial agricultural economy, remaining at work on the family farm “in the passion that never needs a wife” (line 34). He is bound almost incestuously to his widowed mother, the aged dictator of his household (“She stayed too long, wife and mother in one”, lines 97-8). The mother’s “venomous drawl/ And a wizened face like moth-eaten leatherette” (132-3), is described in a tone suggestive of fetishistic fascination, near-incestuous intimacy and repulsion: she is so seared into Maguire’s consciousness through claustrophobic over-familiarity that, “When she died/ The knuckle-bones were cutting the skin of her son’s backside/ And he was sixty-five” (99-101). Vegetated by a life of fourteen-hour days on his fields and by submission to his mother’s de Valeran adage “ ‘Now go to mass and pray and confess your sins/ And you’ll have all the luck’ ”(279-280), Maguire’s lusts inevitably dwindle: he becomes an impotent “wet sack flapping about the knees” of the very “time” (60) or Irish state protocol that so incapacitated the peasant of Yeats’s “The Lamentation of the Old Pensioner” ([1890] 1991: 81) and exists through to the Irish Free State.
Éire in 1942 was neutral in the Second World War (known as “The Emergency”); de Valera espoused an insularist agrarian ideal of Irish rural self-sufficiency (within which the policies of familism were aggressively pursued) as an ethno-nationalist statement of otherness and defiance against Churchill, who wanted to seize back by force Irish ports for British use during the conflict (cf. Churchill, The Second World War I: The Gathering Storm From War to War 1919-1939, London: Cassell 1948: 248-9). Éire, however, suffered from heavy trading sanctions and threats, from Whitehall, and, from 1942, Washington (cf. Fitzpatrick, in ed. Foster 1989:265-6). Although neutrality was popular among the broad population in that it spared Ireland pretty much from bombing raids, it was considered, by many as politically disadvantageous, if not tragic. Neutrality and familism as expressed in Kavanagh’s poem are, implicitly, the causes of Ireland’s “Great Hunger” in the 1940s. Kavanagh uses a parodic construction of the hysterically desperate, impotent Maguire to engage intertextually and dialogically with colonial/ revivalist pastoralizations of the blithe, fecund “Irish peasant” perpetuated by Yeats and then de Valera whilst distorting these modes grotesquely to the verge of their dissolution.
The poem engages in a systematic, post-Yeatsian deconstruction of “the categories devised by colonialist and anti-colonialist alike” (Kiberd, 2000: 599), by sending up the lyrical mode in bawdy or sophisticated mock- doggerel. The complicit signifiers of colonialism and anti-colonialism are still ‘in’ the text of “The Great Hunger” but, because these discourses are so fractured by parody, a Third Space widens out between colonial/nationalist codes and their presumed approximation of a signified social ‘reality’:
O he loved his ploughs
And he loved his cows
And his happiest dream
Was to clean his arse
With perennial grass
On the bank of some summer stream;
To smoke his pipe
In a sheltered gripe
In the middle of July –
His face in a mist
And two stones in his fist
And an impotent worm on his thigh.
(Lines 105-115)
The most subversive element in this passage is not its reference to masturbation but the symbolic, implicit statement that the proverbial myth of the rustic fecundity of the good shepherd is in fact a useless thing, an “impotent worm”. The lines imply: Supposedly post-colonial discourses by de Valera, borrowed from Yeats who borrowed in turn from the English coloniser Spenser, have systematically misrepresented and conditioned peasant-farmers as a national symbol or stereotype, rendering them sterile and powerless. By sending these regressive discourses up as ridiculous, the poem implies radically that one can further a decolonizing process in Irish literatures, towards a time when poetry has effectively exposed and transcended such thinking.
Quinn (1991) argues that “In “The Great Hunger”…. Kavanagh is “acting as tribal spokesman, in taking advantage of his status as an insider in the Catholic community”(161). Yet a Bhabhalian approach to the poem will show that the discourse of the poem does not unequivocally represent the consciousness of “an oppressed and misrepresented Catholic underclass” (Quinn, in Patrick Kavanagh – A Biography, Dublin: Gill and Macmillan 2001: 180). It is, rather, hybridized, disallowing any one ‘representative’ voice a concrete subjectivity: Kavanagh’s speaker’s voice is internally contradictory in its treatment of an imagined community of Donaghmoyne small-farmers, switching from an almost socio-realist generic mode or anthropological, distanced perspective (“Their intellectual life consisted in reading / Reynolds News or the Sunday Dispatch”, 408-9) that suggests contact with metropolitan, academic discourses, to deep, modernistic focalization where the narrator explores Maguire’s consciousness to the extent that it seems that the experience of poet and peasant are one (cf. lines 395- 402). “The Great Hunger” code-switches between and hybridizes metropolitan and ‘rural’ discourses; Quinn’s assertion that the poem is polemic, with a strict focus “on the Irish Catholic consciousness” (1991:161) underestimates the text’s capacity to question stereotypes of the Irish peasantry (in refusing to commit to offering a centralized peasant-subject, either as protagonist or narrator).
Conversely, an Ahmadian approach to reading the historical specificities of the poem points us to a pitfall in Kiberd’s Jamesonian assertion that Kavanagh “saw that what appeared to be the essential traits of the Irish peasantry were to be found in most societies with little economic development” (2000:599). Kiberd’s statement ignores the fact that, although “The Great Hunger” exposes the colonial/Yeatsian/ de Valeran notions of Irish peasant “essence” as constructed by “a ruling class over its own interests”, the poem is keen to construct Patrick Maguire’s experience not as some allegory of a ‘Third World’ peasant experience but in the context of historical and socio-cultural specificities pertinent to Éire in the 1940s. There are episodes in the poem that, in dealing with small-farmers’ recreational activities such as their weekend pub-talk, make it clear that the experience of the sex-starved “old peasant” with his “cigarette to smoke and a pound to spend/ On drink next Saturday” (lines 317-8) is far removed from that of peasants under Stalin or affected by war in Europe in 1942. Neutrality in Ireland during the Emergency is represented in the poem as having rendered History – the reality of experience for the poor and dispossessed across wartime Europe - an “abstraction” (line 414) less important to Maguire’s needs than betting on horses, a staple of Irish popular culture when other cultures could not entertain such luxuries, or moaning about the quality of the beer (“‘A treble, full multiple odds…That’s flat porter’”, line 432). In such moments, “The Great Hunger” does not offer Ireland as a national allegory, or even, as Quinn proposes, construct a committed assertion of a subjectified “Irish” consciousness but attempts a representation of life, for better or worse, as it was experienced by small-farming people in the parish of Donaghmoyne (a synecdoche of other parishes “in every corner of this land”, line 756) during the war years.
In Section XIII the speaker mimics the Yeatsian/ de Valeran objectification of the Irish essence of peasantry, to nihilistic effect. The discriminating tendency of Spenserian constructions of the peasantry, mimicked and perhaps pluralized/ deconstructed somewhat by Yeats and de Valera, is confronted head-on by Kavanagh. The speaker uses the rhetorical device of hyperbole deliberately to protract and over-reach himself in constructing a Yeatsian conceit of the pre-lapsarian, happy rustic:
Originally posted by FinsburyParkCarrots On Tuesday afternoon outside the indoor marketplace
a beggar boy was beating on his drum;
he weaved a dance about the legs that walked into his space
just like a pigeon dancing round a crumb.
His blind old father slouched beside him, head bowed down and grey,
His ribs like hollow furrows in the sand.
The old man said, "My boy, you will make nothing good today:
I hear they've put no nickel in your hand."
The boy danced round and round and sought a merchant's passing grace
and grasped upon a tail of purple gown.
The merchant spun around and kicked the poor boy in the face,
The hollow drum resounding, dropping down
upon the marble floor. A tear escaped the poor boy's pride:
The blind man nodded: Sound described it all:
"My boy, you must adventure now and seek your fortune wide;
I drag you down. Leave now, and learn your Call."
The boy looked through the market doors and saw the stalls of gold,
The silken drapes, bright chains, great pots and jars;
He smelt the oils, the herbs asmoke, the fortunes yet untold
to his young life: of business and bazaars.
He heard another boy laugh loudly through the noise inside
and heard his stomach grumble in his ear.
He looked down at his father and knelt to him as he cried,
"How could you think I'd really leave you here?"
That deals with leaving one's home so well. It really captures the effects of a person's known environment on them.
Thanks.
Liberal Douchebags that Blame Bush for Everything are Useless Pieces of Trash. I Shit on You.
The peasant has no worries;
In his little lyrical fields
He ploughs and sows…
As it was in the Beginning
The simpleness of peasant life.
(lines 626-8; 632-3)
The substitution of the vernacular, naïve “simpleness” for “simplicity” or even “simple-mindedness” implies the speaker’s wariness of the patronizing attitudes of the settler-colonists and post-Independence rulers of Éire to an exploitable peasant base. In the historical and cultural moment of 1942, Kavanagh uses mocking humour to ironise nationalist imitations of colonialist models of social order; he widens the gulf or creates a space between colonial/nationalist stereotypes of the peasantry and any corresponding ‘reality’, to voice post-Independence experience in rural Ireland.
One can demonstrate a combinative approach to post-colonial study of Irish literatures by making an intertextual comparison between section thirteen and Yeats’s essay “The Golden Age” ([1893] in ed. Welch, 1993: 133-4), in order to see how the process of using a hybrid discourse to imitate, mock and worry ‘original’ colonial constructions of the peasantry has developed within the historical frame of between Yeats’s pre-revolutionary 1890s and Kavanagh’s post-Independence, neutral Éire in the 1940s. Yeats describes passing by train “near Sligo”, and fancies himself, on looking out from his vehicle at the landscape beyond him, as having a mystical vision. He recalls “a peasant belief in two faery dogs who go about representing day and night”, and muses on a pre-lapsarian age when “the world was once all perfect and kindly … (S)till the kindly and perfect world existed, but buried like a mass of roses under many spadefuls of earth” (133). Yeats suggests that the peasantry and their beliefs inspire poetic inspiration, or, as he romantically puts it, “bodiless moods… [that] inhabit the world of spirits” (ibid). Kavanagh’s speaker in “The Great Hunger” seems almost as if he could be mocking Yeats’s essay, as he turns his perspectival gaze upon the rich inhabitants of the city making their fleeting day-visits by car to a countryside in which they would not live. The ascendancy rather than the peasantry become the object of scrutiny, as they keep their view of Maguire on the land at a comfortable enough distance to maintain their illusions:
The travellers stop their cars to gape over the green bank into his fields:
There is the source from which all cultures rise,
And all religions,
There is the pool in which the poet dips
And the musician.
(Lines 640-4)
Bhabha has argued, “as discrimination turns into the assertion of the hybrid, the insignia becomes a mask, a mockery” (cited in Smyth, 1998: 22). The speaker’s conscious control of polemic, parody and irony further distances the text from the discriminating, colonial centre.
CONCLUSION
The process by which we have discussed how literatures in English from Ireland became, from Yeats’s early writings in the 1880s to Kavanagh’s “The Great Hunger” in 1942, more hybridized and distanced from the original colonial constructions of the Irish peasantry popular in Spenser’s time has been facilitated greatly by reference to historical movements. Yeats, a déclassé Protestant denied the perks of his society moved between Dublin and London in the 1880s and 1890s, synthesizing a poetic persona that allowed him to identify romantically with the Otherness of the peasantry and catch the eye of an Anglo-Irish ascendancy embracing Celticism as a means of claiming self-definition in cultural separateness from London. Yeats feared that by championing or stirring up the passions of the peasant nationalist community he was risking the ascendancy’s prerogatives in pre-revolutionary Ireland to lead the post-colonial Irish nation: so, he contained the peasantry ideologically via resorting to a colonial-pastoral stereotype. However, in spite of his intentions, his mimicry of a colonial model pluralizes it and robs it of authority: the peasantry are represented at a slight remove from the original discourse and thus they begin to find a new space to inhabit.
Patrick Kavanagh in Post-Independence Éire has seen Eamon de Valera, a veteran of the Irish Wars of 1916-22 maintain in the name of a new state the old colonial ideologies of social order via control of the peasant base, using the very singular methods developed during colonial rule of Ireland. However, Kavanagh hybridizes socio-realist, modernist, mock-lyrical and anti-pastoral modes to emphasize how historical and developments between 1922 and 1942 – partition, followed by mass emigration and population decline at home largely because of de Valera’s puritanical, agricultural work-ethic - render the supposedly post-colonial impersonation of Yeatsian rhetoric an absurd anachronism. “The Great Hunger” parodies de Valeran polemic to the extreme, so that the residual-colonial representation of the peasantry in Ireland will lose its ability to cause cultural famine and blight, a hundred years after the first “Great Hunger” of 1845-9.
A combinative approach to study of Irish literatures between 1880 and 1950 can prove extremely useful, if not essential. We can use an Ahmadian, historicist perspective, taking note of the specific contexts framing Yeats’s early writings and then we can discuss, using a Bhabhalian approach, how Yeats mimics the dominant colonial discourses of his era with a nationalist difference so as to dilute their authority and effect a space for voicing resistance. Reading “The Great Hunger”, we can see Kavanagh: daringly parochial, risking doggerel, and, as a decolonizing thinker, breaking away from the high tone of Yeats and “the importance-of-writing-and-thinking-and-feeling-like-an-Irishman” (Kavanagh [1959], cited in Quinn 1991: 380). Helen Tiffin ([1987] in eds. Ashcroft et al, 1995: 95) argues that “Post-colonial cultures are inevitably hybridised … Decolonisation is process, not arrival”. Kavanagh might not arrive at a post-colonial objective, but his “The Great Hunger” operates counter-discursively in what Tiffin calls “an ongoing dialectic between hegemonic centrist systems and peripheral subversion of them”: historically, the early Yeats mimics original colonial discourses still operative in his own era whereas Kavanagh in the 1940s responds to the nationalist imitations and subversions of colonialism by stretching the conceit of the peasant extremely via parody and tragedy rather than by a lyrical, pastoral idyll. A combinative approach to the post-colonial study of Irish literatures is essential for understanding how, in the frame of a decolonizing history and its correspondence with ‘text’, we see in Yeats and Kavanagh what Fanon (cited in Said [1988], ed. Walder 1990: 39) called “the transformation of social consciousness beyond national consciousness.”
Text (including quotations): 5610 words; endnotes: 237 words.
Total essay length: 5847 words (excluding bibliography and appendices).
Spenser has his characters Hobbinol and Thenott play flutes and dance in “honor and prayse of our most gracious souereigne, Queene Elizabeth”, as a means by which to naturalise a prescriptive discourse of social order against the possibility of discord (Spenser [1578], in The Complete Works of Edmund Spenser, Ware: Wordsworth 1995: 431-5)).
“(M)imicry produces subjects whose ‘not-quite-sameness’ acts like a distorting mirror which fractures the identity of the colonizing subject and – as in the regime of stereotype – rearticulates [its] presence in terms of its ‘otherness’, that which it disavows” (Moore-Gilbert, citing Bhabha [1994] 1997: 121).
Cf. Quinn on the exclusively Irish system of familism, in Patrick Kavanagh – A Biography, Dublin: Gill and Macmillan 2001: 176: “Familism was a system of farm inheritance whereby one son was selected as the heir but had both his inheritance and his permission to marry deferred until the elderly parents were willing to relinquish ownership of home and land.”
Cf. Eamon de Valera’s St Patrick’s day radio broadcast, 1943: “That Ireland that we dreamed of would be the home of a people who viewed material wealth only as the basis of right living, of a people who were satisfied with frugal comfort and devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit – a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry ….” (in ed. McLoughlin, 1996: 206).
Bibliography
Primary sources
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This is essay is my intellectual property but I'm happy to share it with people here.
seems like you are in the academic mood today, prof. Fins
Write. Wind each new thought upon the stream;
and in its contradiction of response,
Or seeming stagnance, see that rippled gleam
That might suggest true movement. If you sense
a hidden wave in what seems blanket still,
Write more, wind each desire, and you'll see
The willows nod and rustle, and you will
hear the rushing babble of the free
gush of water, brimming, charged with light
That is your reader's understanding heart.
Discuss, compare and illustrate the various conceptions of nationhood or other ideas of belonging reflected in the work of one Indian and one Irish twentieth-century poet.
I choose to begin this essay by stating my understanding of the above question heading. The rubric suggests that a comparison can be made, between Indian and Irish poetry, in that conceptions of nationhood, cultural identity and imagined community are, even in the works of individual poets, similarly complex, ambiguous and various. To base an essay’s argument on the idea of such comparability is not simply to repeat what Homi Bhabha (in Moore-Gilbert, 1997:125) calls the tendency (based on western ideas of “cultural relativism”), among (mainly Eurocentric) post-modern readers of post-colonial literature, to try to conflate the works of writers from different geographical/cultural locations into the dominant by divining their ‘translatability’. I regard the question heading as suggesting that the work of Irish and Indian poets - I choose to discuss examples by WB Yeats (1865- 1939) and Rabindranath Tagore (1861- 1941) – are comparable, in that their respective constructions of culture and identity are each internally various and dialogic. I shall compare Yeats and Tagore from a historicist view, in that their poetic and rhetorical constructions of their imagined communities are informed by their ambiguous (and in many ways similar) social positions in their respective “societies”. To illustrate my investigation, I shall engage with Yeats’s poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”(2000:12), and an excerpt from his “A general introduction to my work” (2003: Offprint 21:85), showing how these examples incorporate often conflicting conceptions of nationhood and belonging. I shall follow with a comparative analysis of ambivalent representations of these issues in Tagore’s “Recovery- 10” (1985: 121-3), and “Nationalism in India”(Offprint 22: 86-92).
Edward Said (1990: 36) proposes that the primary stage of decolonisation or reclaiming “the land” from an invading colonial power is only originally possible “through the imagination”. Subtextually, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” could be said to depict a centralized ‘I’ narrator, expressing determination to “go now” (either imaginatively or physically) to build a home (or nation?) in a pastoral-agrarian idyll of western Ireland for himself: this might seem to be a relatively committed assertion of Irish self-determination and nation building. Yet one should recall here Said’s theory, that:
At some stage in the anti-resistance phase of nationalism … many of the nationalist struggles
were led by bourgeoisies that were partly formed and to some degree produced by the
colonial power…These bourgeoisies in effect have often replaced the colonial force with a
new class-based and ultimately exploitative force; instead of liberation after decolonisation
one simply gets the old colonial structures replicated in new national terms (1990: 34-5).
In the light of Said’s remarks, and noting Yeats’s Anglo-Irish, landed/mercantile Protestant heritage (see below), the language of Yeats’s poem presents interesting (and perhaps unintended) interpretative possibilities; let us consider that Yeats’s narrator wishes to “go to Innisfree/ And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made/…And live alone in the bee-loud glade” (lines 1-2,4, my emphasis). One might say that there is what Pierre Macherey would call an involuntary, ideological “silence” here (1990:215-22): that the speaker wants to build an Irish nation for himself, and to his agrarian/pre-modern tastes, but there is no room for the broad-based Catholic Irish peasantry in his ideal, imagined community of one, to which he ‘belongs’: hence, these peoples simply do not exist in his poetic paradigm. Further interpretations surface accordingly, which are, perhaps, viable decodings of the poem. We could even argue, if we chose, that the Chiswick “pavements grey” (line 11) upon which the speaker (in spite of his imaginative flight to Innisfree) is actually grounded, constitute a synecdoche of the urbanity of a bourgeois-mercantile, Anglo-Irish class of inextricable associations with the imperial metropolis, who, although imagining themselves the cultural and socio-economic “heirs” of rural Ireland will always be distant from the peasant-based Catholic Irish, “self-imagined community” of western Connaught.
Yet I am disinclined merely to accept this theoretical basis alone, as a condition of discussing and illustrating my reading of the poem. The poem’s counter-urban pastoral idyll of a rural retreat anticipates Georgian poetry in its imaginative turning away from the city (cf. John Drinkwater’s poem “Of Greatham”, 1991:50-1); also, an intertextual reading of pre-colonial, pre-sectarian Irish verse shows that the ostensible theme of “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” - the solitary “exile’s” imaginative reconstruction of a rural Ireland affected only by wildlife and the elements - is, to use one of Heaney’s archaeological metaphors, parallel, in the stratigraphy of poetic “tradition”, with the deep bedrock of the oldest extant examples of Irish verse (cf. 1974:63). Here, in what we might romantically call the text’s “unconscious”, Yeats’s voice is in dialogic “play” with, rather than excluded from, an Irish poetic auditory imagination sounding deeply in the Irish heart’s core, that always spoke of the problematics of dislocation from, and belonging or returning to, an envisaged “Ireland” (ibid.).
Fraser (2003: 46) quotes Declan Kilberd’s (1996) observation about Yeats that he was “estranged from the community, yet anxious to identify… with the new national sentiment.” Nowhere in Yeats’s work do I see so apparent his problematical relationship to Irish nationhood, belonging and language as in Offprint 21. Fraser (2003:56) asks his readers to consider why, in the excerpt, Yeats confesses to be so angry about being asked why he does not write in Gaelic. To try to answer this question, one needs to identify some of the subtexts and assumptions directing Yeats’s statements.
Yeats criticises Wordsworth, for championing the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture whilst ignoring the Dublin (and, interestingly, Protestant) revolutionary Robert Emmet. Emmet, Wolfe Tone and other “rebels” of the 1790s and 1800s were responding to the Penal Laws, which were instituted in by the British in Ireland in 1792, to ensure the widespread destruction of the language, law and customs (including even music) of Irish-speaking communities ([1937] 1968:34-5). So, when Yeats says that “Gaelic is my national language, but it is not my mother tongue”, is he wearing the “mask” of the Irish nationalist born during British rule, denied his mother tongue by hegemonic imposition? He seems to imply so, when he compares himself to “those Indians” who were forced under colonial rule even to “learn everything, even their own Sanskrit, through the vehicle of English”. However, he does so, not only by conflating the difference between British linguistic imperialism in Ireland and India (1999: 56-62), but by wilfully ignoring the more disturbing implications of the reason why Gaelic could never be his “mother tongue”.
Contemporaneous with the Penal Laws, British-endorsed, ‘ruling’ Protestant garrisons were established all over Ireland. One of Yeats’s maternal ancestors, a “Reverend Thomas” of the Anglican Church of Ireland, was one such bastion of British rule who suppressed a nationalist rising in County Meath in 1793, and paid for his actions with his life (Foster, 1997:xx-xxi). Behind the mask of stated self-identification with the “Indian students, and foreign political refugees” who had been robbed of their “mother tongue”, Yeats the complex man was inextricable from the oppressive, imperial-linguistic legacy of an Ascendancy of extra- Celtic (largely Huguenot) origin : however, here we see what Empson in Seven Types of Ambiguity called Yeats’ “strength of vagueness”([1930] 1972: 219-222), of voicing equivocally the viewpoint of the oppressed Gael; the progressive, Protestant nationalist.
The “myriad-minded” Tagore shared with Yeats an ambiguous religious and class relationship to a broad-based peasant, agrarian imagined community. The Tagore family, like the Butlers and Pollexfens of Yeats’s ancestry, had developed a large store of their wealth on (in the Tagore case, international) trade; they had also enjoyed zamindar status in East Bengal and Orissa. Yet, given that the Tagore family had been ejected from the Brahmin caste for espousing a Vedantic, monotheist idea of Hinduism that was simultaneously purist and reformist, and critical of the current sectarian, even racist, caste system, my instinct is to emphasise that it is the Tagores’ long ancestral rootedness in Bengal, which informs Rabindranath’s ability to conceptualise a traditional, Hindu community pre-dating class and caste, that the monoglot Yeats, of non-Celtic and Protestant origin could not comfortably replicate in imagining an homogeneous Ireland.
William Radice’s translation of “Recovery- 10” belies the Eurocentric tendency to read Tagore’s work as espousing a vague universalism (Foster, 1997: 470). The centralised first person narrator in Tagore’s poem is presented, at least in Radice’s translation, as the soul of an imagined Hindu rather than universal community; it is a personal, then local, cross-regional, then trans-historical “I”, radiating in a series of concentric circles from “the home” to “the world”, in accordance with the model of spiritual identity discussed by Fraser (2003:49). In the first, thirty-line stanza or movement of the poem, Tagore’s “I” “Lazily” beholds, and litanises a history of ultimately ineffectual emperors: the Pathan and Moghuls’ “conquering chariots” and “webs of dust” are demonstrated as temporary, and the “sky” – a synecdoche of an Indian cultural/historical continuum “Through the ages” (l. 16) – clears again and again, unaffected, in their passing. The metaphor of the web is referred to again, with reference to the speaker’s prophecy of the inevitable collapse of the British Empire (“I know that time will flow along their road too, / Float off somewhere the land-encircling web of their empire”(ll.26-7).
Yet it is in lines 27-30 that I detect Tagore’s most deliberate decision to hybridise his voice across castes, races, and unjust hierarchies (2003:58), and wear the “mask” of his own peasant-based audience(s): the people with whom he, as a progressive zamindar, an out-caste adherent to Upanishad philosophy yet inextricably a Hindu, seeks to be identified. If we recall that the Tagores of the trading company Carr, Tagore & Co., and the Tagores as zamindars were facilitated by the very “merchandise-bearing soldiers” the poetic speaker dismisses as irrelevant to the spiritual core of Hindu society, we could read these lines as, radically, proposing a renunciation of the very class system that had created Tagore: i.e., Since mercantilism and empire are only artificial, passing trends, then all Hindus, from the zamindar baron to the sannyasi mendicant, should reach out to their God and realise a sense of a broad, Hindu “imagined community”, like radiating circles reaching outward towards a spiritual apprehension of “the world”, irrespective of imposed hierarchical structures.
Still, I have some reservations about emphasising the representative scope of Tagore’s “hybrid” voice. For example, I am tempted to ask, Does Tagore’s poetic speaker unambiguously belong, spiritually, with “a huge concourse/ Of ordinary people/ Led along many paths and in various groups/…Bengal, Bihar, Orissa” (lines 33-5, 52)? By switching to the third person plural (“They work-/ In cities and fields”, lines 42-3), is the speaker suggesting an ideological and socio-economic remove, from his imagined rural peasantry? Although “Recovery- 10” goes someway towards acknowledging the peasant peoples of his “earth” (31), the speaker is, as his choice of pronouns implies, nevertheless a distanced observer of them. Tagore’s speaker, unlike Yeats’s in “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”, considers the “people”, but he does so as a trans-historical, spiritual body and not as carefully illustrated individuals. A view of Tagore’s tendency perhaps to patronise his imagined peasantry as a collective body, compares with a charge commonly levelled at Yeats when the latter produced his writings on Irish folklore and myth (ed. Welch, 1993), that he “tended to regard peasants less as individuals than as living folklore archives, repositories of ‘ballad and story, rann and song’ (Quinn, 1991:68).
In his essay “Nationalism in India”, Tagore proposes, “India is too vast in its area and too diverse in its races (to be ruled by a central, state body)” (2003: 91); he asserts that India’s cultural unity is achievable not by the “great menace” of nationalism but by the spiritual force of Hinduism.
Fraser cites Bassnet and Trivedi’s “translation theory” (Fraser, 2003: 56) in arguing that the Western concept of nationalism was “not just ideologically alien, but linguistically unfamiliar” to Tagore, whose understanding of the State was as an external government, similar to the Mughals, nawabs and rajas (whose “rule”, he argued, had been irrelevant to the working lives and communities of regions across the subcontinent). There is a suggestion that Tagore was a man of his time, struggling to comprehend what was meant by a centralised, State run “nation”, when the term had not been conceptualised by a vast and internally disparate India of diverse cultures and races. However, comparison with Indian nationalist poetries in English of the early nineteenth century, such as those by the polyglottal, Bengali poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt (1996: 191-207), suggests that the concept of a centrally run, Indian nationalist (and some would argue, “chauvinist”) State was – albeit in complex form - part of the social being of some major (and near- aristocratic) writers prior to Tagore’s birth (1841). The Machereyan silence that speaks to me behind Tagore’s concept of nationalism is whether the writer, as a zamindar of the landed aristocracy, refuses to envisage an Indian central state, not because the concept does not translate ideologically or linguistically but because it represents for him the logical but unthinkable consequence of his Vedantic beliefs (a consequence that previous poets were arguably more prepared to address); the redistribution of his mercantile and landed riches to the broad-based, “vast” peasantry.
One can conclude that Yeats and Tagore are comparable in that the work of each poet constructs, deliberately or no, a “Third Space” or hybrid voice which is neither exclusively that of their landed, colonially-endorsed class, nor that of the peasant- based majority of their respective “communities”. Yeats’s speaker in “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” provokes Catholic-nationalist, aberrant decodings of his implicit, Anglo-Irish, Protestant refusal to include the Catholic peasantry within a model of a rural ideal of “home” or nation building. Yet the poem’s similarity, at least in its themes of exile and imaginative reconstructions of an “Ireland of the mind”, with pre-sectarian, Catholic Irish verse of the first centuries CE, suggests an unconscious continuity with an ancient Irish “auditory imagination”; elsewhere, his comments on the destruction of the Irish language are suitably equivocal to be “representative” of both Catholic and nationalist-Protestant/reformist attitudes to the preservation of Gaelic culture.
Tagore’s ambivalent relationship to his imagined peasant Hindu, imagined community of ‘workers’ in “Recovery- 10”, expressed silently via his refusal to modify his “I” narrator into an inclusive “we” when speaking of the soul of the Hindu “people” as a whole, perhaps illustrates his inability, like Yeats, to conceive himself as one with the people on whom his exploitative (whether or not progressive) programme of wealth-accumulation is based. His “mistranslation” of nationalism is arguably not shared by other, previous, Hindu nationalists and reformist poets and writers; perhaps he deliberately avoids an admission that to practice a truly Vedantic philosophy, he should transcend class and caste by sharing his riches with all. Yet Tagore, like Yeats, is a poet who maintains a necessarily relative autonomy from direct political commitment. Just like Yeats, who champions the vitality and infinite suggestiveness of his imagery of the wattle cabin and bee- loud glade as a basis for art, over the stone-immovability of polemic and overt nationalism, Tagore exploits his images of the webs of dust and a clearing sky to suggest a view of history and continuity of community that is equivocal enough to incorporate imagined Indias of the mind to which both the landed aristocrat, and the peasantry can belong in one homogeneous, imagined moment. Said argues that a truly liberatory phase of anti-imperialism succeeds the nationalist phase: it is, arguably, the poetry of Yeats and Tagore that transfigures their ambiguous conceptions of nationhood and belonging, and helps precipitate and facilitate the cultural processes of decolonisation.
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND REFERENCES
Adorno, Theodor W. “ ‘Commitment’ (1962)”, in Marxist Literary Theory- A
Reader, ed. Eagleton, Terry; Milne, Drew. Oxford:
Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1996; pp. 187-203.
Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich The Dialogic Imagination- four essays by MM
Bakhtin, ed. Holquist, Michael; trans. Emerson,
Caryl; Holquist, Michael. Austin:
University of Texas Press [1934-5] 1981.
Bhabha, Homi “ ‘The Location of Culture’ (1994)”, in Literary
Theory- An Anthology, ed. Rivkin, Julie; Ryan,
Michael. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd.,
1998; pp. 936-943.
ed. Brogan, T.V.F. entry on “Indian Poetry”, in The Princeton
Handbook of Multicultural Poetries. Princeton:
Princeton University Press 1996, pp.191-207.
Drinkwater, John “Of Greatham (To Those Who Live There)”, in
A319: The Poetry Anthology, prepared for the course
team by WR Owens. Milton Keynes: Open University
1991, pp. 50-1.
Empson, William in “Chapter VI: In the sixth type what is said is
contradictory or irrelevant and the reader is forced to
invent interpretations”, in Seven Types of Ambiguity.
Harmondsworth: Pelican Books [1930] 1972, pp. 219- 222.
Foster, R.F. WB Yeats, A Life- I. The Apprentice Mage. Oxford:
Oxford University Press 1997.
Fraser, Robert “Case Study 2: Poetry and Nationhood, a
comparative study: India and Ireland”, in A430
Post-colonial literatures in English: readings and
Interpretations- Study Guide. Milton Keynes:
Open University 2003, pp. 43-80.
Heaney, Seamus (i) “Englands of the Mind”, in Literature in the
Modern World- Critical Essays and Documents, ed.
Walder, Dennis. Oxford: Oxford University Press/
Open University 1990, pp.250-7.
(ii) “Yeats as an example?”, reprinted as
Offprint 23, A430 Post-colonial literatures in
English: readings and interpretations- Offprints
Collection. Milton Keynes: Open University
2003, pp.93- 96.
(iii) “The Sense of Place”, reprinted as Offprint 27, pp.103- 106.
(iv) “excerpt from Introduction to translation of Beowulf”,
reprinted as Offprint 33, pp. 118-20.
Kavanagh, Patrick “Yeats”, in Patrick Kavanagh- The Complete
Poems. Newbridge: The Goldsmith Press 1972, pp.348-9.
Macardle, Dorothy The Irish Republic. London: Corgi [1937] 1968, pp. 34-5.
Macauley, Thomas Babington “Minute on Indian Education (February 2, 1835)”
in Imperialism & Orientalism- A Documentary
Sourcebook, ed. Harlow, Barbara; Carter, Mia.
Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999, pp.56- 62.
ed. Montague, John The Faber Book of Irish Verse, London: Faber and Faber 1974.
Moore- Gilbert, Bart Postcolonial Theory- Contexts, Practices, Politics. London/
New York: Verso 1997, pp. 129- 37.
ed. Pritchard, William H. Penguin Critical Anthologies- WB Yeats.
Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1972.
Quinn, Antoinette Patrick Kavanagh: Born- Again Romantic.
Dublin: Gill and Macmillan 1991.
Tagore, Rabindranath (i) Selected Poems, translated
with an introduction and notes by William Radice.
Harmondsworth: Penguin Twentieth-
Century Classics [1985] 1993.
(ii) ‘Nationalism in India’,
reprinted as Offprint 22, pp. 86- 92.
(iii) “from ‘Society and State’, reprinted
as Offprint 20, pp. 82- 4.
Yeats, WB (i) Poems selected by Seamus Heaney.
London: Faber and Faber Ltd 2000.
(ii) Yeats’s Poems, edited and annotated
by A. Norman Jeffares with an appendix by Warwick
Gould. London: Macmillan 1989.
(iii) “A General Introduction to my
Work” (complete version), in Yeats: Selected
Criticism and Prose, edited with an introduction
by Professor A.N. Jeffares. London: Pan Books 1980,
pp. 255- 270.
(iv) “excerpt from ‘A General Introduction
to my work”, reprinted as Offprint 21, p. 85.
(v) “Compulsory Gaelic: a dialogue (1924)”,
in Writings on Irish Folklore, Legend and Myth.
Harmondsworth: Penguin Twentieth- Century
Classics 1993. pp. 374- 383.
Originally posted by PastaNazi what's your favorite yeats piece?
The Second Coming -- W. B. Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
The unkinged King's dropped looking glass, mid-air
Glimpses Bolingbroke before it shatters,
Reflecting that usurpers will find care,
Care being cruel, when the tongue that flatters
Sweetest in the court spits at his rule.
Glass shards. Two kings. The motley of a fool.
Wiley paints two hearts, mother and daughter
Sunward striding, bright in summer laughter;
and I am humbled by this gentle vision:
Wiley's trust in Mommy's new decision.
Comments
Course Present Tense is my favorite song by PJ.
Saaaaaaaaweeeeeeeeeeeet!
(Angelina Jolie)
a beggar boy was beating on his drum;
he weaved a dance about the legs that walked into his space
just like a pigeon dancing round a crumb.
His blind old father slouched beside him, head bowed down and grey,
His ribs like hollow furrows in the sand.
The old man said, "My boy, you will make nothing good today:
I hear they've put no nickel in your hand."
The boy danced round and round and sought a merchant's passing grace
and grasped upon a tail of purple gown.
The merchant spun around and kicked the poor boy in the face,
The hollow drum resounding, dropping down
upon the marble floor. A tear escaped the poor boy's pride:
The blind man nodded: Sound described it all:
"My boy, you must adventure now and seek your fortune wide;
I drag you down. Leave now, and learn your Call."
The boy looked through the market doors and saw the stalls of gold,
The silken drapes, bright chains, great pots and jars;
He smelt the oils, the herbs asmoke, the fortunes yet untold
to his young life: of business and bazaars.
He heard another boy laugh loudly through the noise inside
and heard his stomach grumble in his ear.
He looked down at his father and knelt to him as he cried,
"How could you think I'd really leave you here?"
A whisper'd roar of lives, a start of light,
Bright bodies, starlight stipples; lend
a cry to wordless thoughts between each thought
here, within an instant. Here I lay
gazing at a bank between the breaths
I make, drinking those eyes within the play
of sunkissed rivergleams and little deaths
of light renewed by births, here, for all time.
A wind!, a dream blown down to kiss a brow,
a shimmering between the willows. Name
the moment? Yes! The oxlip open so.
I hear her name! The windkissed rushes bow:
a light I've lived to breathe breathes in me now.
a beggar boy was beating on his drum;
he weaved a dance about the legs that walked into his space
just like a pigeon dancing round a crumb.
His blind old father slouched beside him, head bowed down and grey,
His ribs like hollow furrows in the sand.
The old man said, "My boy, you will make nothing good today:
I hear they've put no nickel in your hand."
The boy danced round and round and sought a merchant's passing grace
and grasped upon a tail of purple gown.
The merchant spun around and kicked the poor boy in the face,
The hollow drum resounding, dropping down
upon the marble floor. A tear escaped the poor boy's pride:
The blind man nodded: Sound described it all:
"My boy, you must adventure now and seek your fortune wide;
I drag you down. Leave now, and learn your Call."
The boy looked through the market doors and saw the stalls of gold,
The silken drapes, bright chains, great pots and jars;
He smelt the oils, the herbs asmoke, the fortunes yet untold
to his young life: of business and bazaars.
He heard another boy laugh loudly through the noise inside
and heard his stomach grumble in his ear.
He looked down at his father and knelt to him as he cried,
"How could you think I'd really leave you here?"
wow I shed a tear on this one! Very Very nice fins!
(Angelina Jolie)
in that castle- shadowed farm
within twenty years
cursing the brute jaw
and the reticence of stone
with lovelight shadows
took my breath away.
lovely written
~~its better to be hated for who you are than be loved for who you are not~~
F.ZAPPA
Lonely Night
No noise in a room that knows too much
Have to get out, escape
Have to head to D's Bar
Only You
Only Me
Even though it's wrong my needs have to be met
Make me a drink my head is reeling
Only when I'm drunk, the animal comes out.
We give into the feelings that stir deep inside
Only you can fill the need.
You can act like theres no feelings involved
Easy for you
Hard for me
Knowing I will never step foot again in D's Bar.
(Angelina Jolie)
This poem shows great control of language and economy of form, and behind its gaps and silences is a suggestion of a whole life you can imagine. It is in the silences between well placed words in poetry that human experience lies, and you achieve the objective of suggesting the unsayable: a whole lifetime's pre- linguistic feeling of human desire, appetite, repression, frustration, dependency and regret.
Thank you.
Your way with words really take my breath away.
You are too kind my Irish friend.
(Angelina Jolie)
i like deez wan
do' no whi
i jess do
See below.
Irelands of the Mind
A combinative approach to post-colonial readings and interpretations of Yeats’s early writings on the Irish peasantry, and Kavanagh’s “The Great Hunger”
INTRODUCTION
"Formally, we are fated to be in the poststructuralist world of Repetition with Difference; the same allegory, the nationalist one, rewritten, over and over again, until the end of time: ‘all third-world texts are necessarily….’"
(Aijaz Ahmad [1987], in Marxist Literary Theory – A Reader, eds.
Eagleton and Milne, Oxford: Blackwell 1996: 382)
" …. (H)ybridity encompasses a history, a politics, an aesthetics and a critical history of decolonisation. Strategically deployed, it reveals both the doubleness at the heart of Western culture and the collusive nature of reverse discourses such as Western-inspired colonial nationalism. Theory has opened up a space between signifier and signified, and it is precisely this Third Space … which allows for the emergence of effective resistance."
(Gerry Smyth on Homi K. Bhabha, in Decolonisation and Criticism – The
Construction of Irish Literature, London: Pluto 1998: 23)
This introduction to my essay has two aims. Firstly I shall discuss how the above epigrams display a growing split between Marxist-based and post-structuralist approaches to post-colonial studies of literature. I shall develop my point by showing how this divide affects literary criticism in Ireland. Secondly I shall aim to suggest a valid way of combining these approaches in discussing works by two writers who are thought to be key figures in the decolonizing process of Irish literatures in English: W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) and Patrick Kavanagh (1904-67).
The first epigram is taken from Ahmad’s essay “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory’” (1987), which criticises Fredric Jameson for labelling all post-colonial writings - whatever their historical, geographical or cultural contexts - national allegories of ‘Third World’ literature. Ahmad, as a committed Marxist, questions Jameson’s essentialist “reductionism” (in Ahmad, ibid: 377) and believes in studying post-colonial literatures in their specific historical, social contexts. He is wary about receptions of authors such as Salman Rushdie (a writer he sees as a bourgeois, migrant-metropolitan intellectual conforming to the anti-Islamic ideologies of the West but wrongly cast, as a typical ‘Indian’ author and national allegory of the Third World (ibid)). The critic Diana Brydon ([1989] cited in Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory – Contexts, Practices, Politics, London: Verso 1997), seconds Ahmad’s view: she also argues against using “Western” literary theory to read post-colonial works. Brydon writes that the problem with using post-structuralist academic discourses to discuss post-colonial literatures is that non-Western writings become absorbed into the Western hegemony and deprived of their subversive potentiality: “Deconstructing imperialism keeps us within imperialism’s orbit”(20).
The second epigram represents Bhabha’s view that Ahmad et al are unwittingly collusive in maintaining the psychological and ideological structures of colonialism (particularly the binaries Self/Other) when they advocate discourses of difference steadfastly in opposition to dominant forms. Bhabha proposes as an alternative the Derridean, punning concept of différance, to forward that post-colonial texts that imitate constructions of nationhood, identity and imagined community subversively decentralise the presumed monologic authority of ‘original’ colonial narratives (cf. Bhabha [1988] in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, eds. Ashcroft et al, London: Routledge 1995: 207-8). Such a proposition encourages a combinative critical approach to post-colonial literatures that observes historical and social specificities without maintaining a colonial dualism of Self and Other (see ibid: 207).
I shall now show how the study of Irish literature is currently affected by the schism in post-colonial critical and theoretical developments: I shall illustrate my point by discussing criticism of the text I shall be discussing for the greater part of this essay, Patrick Kavanagh’s “The Great Hunger” ([1942] in Patrick Kavanagh – The Complete Poems, ed. Peter Kavanagh, Newbridge: Goldsmith Press 1984, 79-104). Gerry Smyth (1998) discusses that there is a tendency in Irish literary criticism among politically committed readers and critics to construct a school of “Irish studies” that is not only historicist but also “ethno-nationalist”. Paraphrasing the anthropologist Anthony Smith, Smyth explains ethno-nationalism accordingly:
It is intent to ‘vernacularize’ (Smith: 140) the masses… (and) to provide the ethnie with a historical rationale and to create a language capable of disclosing ‘to the community its true nature, its authentic experience and hidden destiny’ (ibid).
(Smyth, 1998: 12)
The Irish critic Antoinette Quinn (in Patrick Kavanagh – Born-Again Romantic, Dublin: Gill and Macmillan 1991) tends toward an ethno-nationalist approach, when she appraises Kavanagh’s “The Great Hunger” as “of the people” and advocating a “sectarian and class-conscious”, rural Catholic Ireland (1991: 123, 169). She emphasizes the resistance-polemic of the poem’s challenge to “the fanciful establishment view of rural Ireland as a primitivist Eden” (154). I shall in my discussion of “The Great Hunger” below adhere to her interest in the historical and contexts of the poem (referring, as does she, to its historically near-contemporary and intertextual relationship to Eamon de Valera’s St Patrick’s Day radio broadcast of 1943 (ibid.154-6)). But I shall also try to incorporate into my analysis a theoretical approach, to suggest that the poem’s capacity for resistance is not in the assertion of a sectarian or class-conscious voice constructing Irish Catholic identity (polarized against Protest middle class revivalist models) but rather in its hybridized, dialogic discourse that interrogates of notions of an essential ‘Irish’ identity: we see both colonial and nationalist discourses of Irish peasant essence divested of authority in Kavanagh’s decolonizing poem.
Declan Kiberd distances himself from the ethno-nationalist discourses of post-Independence Irish critics, since he, echoing Bhabha, sees their ideas of a sectarian, Catholic Irish nationhood, identity and community as a complicit continuation of “a fiction created by the rulers of England in response to specific needs at a precise moment in British history” (cited in Smyth, 1998: 57). Gerry Smyth historicizes Kiberd as a key player in the “decolonization” of Irish criticism, who makes full use of the benefit of developments in literary theory and methodology in order to re- place the study of Irish literatures within broader post-colonial and cultural debates (in ibid: 2) and transcend the ideological and psychological limitations of anti-colonialism. Yet Kiberd tends to “World” Irish literature when he argues that “The Great Hunger” is a national allegory for a universal debate about the oppression of the peasant classes (“Kavanagh saw that what appeared to be essential traits of the Irish peasantry were to be found in most societies with little economic development”, in Irish Classics, London: Granta 2000: 600). In my discussion of Kavanagh below, I shall argue against Kiberd that although Kavanagh questions ideas of peasant “essence”, he shows that the plight of the rural Irish poor is the result of specific cultural, ideological and agricultural-economic conditions in Éire.
My intention in this essay is to construct a combinative approach to looking at literatures in English from Ireland that makes use of both historicism and post-structuralism. For example, I shall firstly undertake a short discussion (pp. 3-6) of Yeats’s early writings on the Irish peasantry, arguing how a historicist analysis of the contexts of ideological conflicts informing these works can be understood better, by scrutinizing the ways these conflicts work dialogically in the texts to undercut colonial constructions of the peasantry. I shall show how in the 1890s Yeats imitated Spenserian constructions of the peasantry; his pastoral objectification of the poor reflected his uncertainties about a subjectified, sectarian Catholic will to nationalist power supplanting the Protestant ascendancy. Yet I shall demonstrate that though his work is complicit with colonial discourses, his mimicry of dominant forms - regardless of authorial intention - hybridizes and fractures the ‘original’ master narratives of the peasant Other and effects a hybrid space in which the notions of ‘Irish’ peasant identity and community can resist the colonial model.
Secondly, for the greater part of this essay (pp.6ff) I shall consider the post-Independence context in which Kavanagh was engaging with constructions of the peasantry in his time, whilst showing how he consciously uses parodic mimicry in “the Great Hunger” to deconstruct the lingering legacy of colonial ideas about the peasantry. Towards the end of my analysis of “The Great Hunger” I shall conduct a contrastive reading of Section XIII of the poem and Yeats’s essay “The Golden Age” ([1893] in ed. Robert Welch, W.B. Yeats – Writings on Irish Folklore, Legend and Myth, Harmondsworth: Penguin 1993: 133-4. In order to be able to argue that Kavanagh’s is “a step on from” Yeats in a decolonizing process in Irish literatures, one needs not only to discuss their differing historical and political contexts but also to consider using often quite complex theory the way Kavanagh’s parody of colonial narratives extends the process of hybridizing a space for the representation of peasant identity and community, pulling away from the imperial centre as the next major stage on from Yeats’s imitative pastoral mode.
Analysis of Yeats’s role in the Irish literary revival from the 1880s qualifies to a large extent Ahmad’s argument against national allegories of Third World literatures. One could say, in fact, that Yeats was a “First World” poet and intellectual. R.F. Foster’s W.B. Yeats – A Life I. The Apprentice Mage (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1997) shows that Yeats spent thirteen of his first fifteen years in the imperial metropolis of London; on returning to Dublin, he in time furthered his education by enrolling at the city’s Metropolitan School of Art. Yeats was, in many respects, afforded a “British” rather than colonial education, and even in Dublin his society was characterised “by small-scale metropolitan pretensions, and mingled contempt and envy for the attractions of London”. In spite of this, Yeats was somewhat excluded from the higher echelons of Protestant Dublin society and its “assured places in the worlds of business, the Church of Ireland” on account of his father’s genteel poverty (ibid: 28-9). Yeats moved back and forth from Dublin to London in the 1880s and in that time developed an interest in “Celticism”, perhaps as a way of expressing his déclassé Otherness. He hybridized a poetic voice in his early writings, which enabled him to distance himself from a society increasingly isolated in the rise of Fenianism yet maintain links with a Protestant ascendancy ambitious for power in a post- Independence Ireland: he fused the popular nationalist ascendancy discourse celebrating the hero-cult of the legendary Cuchulain, an aristocratic prototype for the Celtic Twilight, with his own interests in the otherness of the peasantry (cf. ibid: 28-56).
Although an Ahmadian emphasis on historical or ethno-national specificities proves efficacious in pinpointing the sorts of experiences Yeats’s writing encompasses and represents, this does not mean that one should necessarily produce an Ahmadian commentary of Yeats in the manner of that critic’s attack on Rushdie. Historicist contextualization points to the contradictions and ambiguities in Yeats’s relationship to and identification with a Catholic peasant base. Also, Bhabhalian readings of Yeats’s early writings about the peasantry of Ireland are instructive in showing how even when Yeats is seemingly copying colonial-pastoral discourses - objectifying the happy rustic contended with his material poverty in pursuit of spiritual ideals - his mimicry of colonial master narratives functions “with a (nationalist) difference”. Through interrogating the construction of the peasantry as the Other, Yeats’s literature resists (perhaps unconsciously) the authority of the colonial or complicit anti-colonial “Self”, is “hybridized” and performs as part of a decolonizing process in literatures of Ireland.
In his essay “Irish Fairies” ([1890] in ed. Welch, 1993: 60-64), Yeats argues,
The world is, I believe, more full of significance to the Irish peasant than to the English. The fairy populace of hill and lake and woodland have helped keep it so. It gives a fanciful life to the dead hillsides, and surrounds the peasant as he ploughs and digs with tender shadows of poetry. No wonder that he is gay, and can take man and his destiny without gloom, and make up proverbs like this from the old Gaelic – “the lake is not burdened by its swan, the steed by its bridle, or a man by the soul that is in him”.
(63-4)
These lines when scrutinized epitomise the ideological conflicts of Yeats’s period of emergent nationalism, and illustrate Yeats’s ambivalent consideration of whether the peasantry will be empowered in the event of a nationalist uprising. Yeats wishes to propose an ethno-nationalist concept of difference between the Irish and the English peasantry (“The world is, I believe, more full of significance to the Irish peasant than to the English”). But if he is attempting sincerely to represent a political model of the self-cognizant Irish peasant, as an existential and socio-economic subject rather than as a rhetorical vehicle for his own romantic conceits, it would be necessary to construct ‘him’ accordingly with a tangible consciousness, in order to demonstrate his heightened capacity for reflective thought and responsible self-government. Why Yeats does not pursue this objective might have much to do with the fact that although in 1890, he was a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and a supporter of Fenianism, he secretly suspected that by subjectifying the peasantry he was playing into the hands of a militant Catholic elite desperate to use the rhetoric of peasant self-definition so as to displace the landed Protestant classes and force the emergence of a national Catholic hierarchy. Yeats later admitted vociferously these fears (when writing about the regressive tendencies in Catholic ideology that had caused the riot at a performance of Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World [1907]), in his later construction, of:
A zealous Irishman … (who) spends his time in a never-ending argument about Oliver Cromwell, the Danes, the penal laws, the rebellion of 1798, the famine, the Irish peasant, and ends by substituting a traditional casuistry for a country.
([1910] in ed. Foster, 1997: 419)
Yeats seems to compromise, effectively, if not altogether intentionally, by constructing the peasantry around a pastoral ideal that, though romantic rather than realist and unavoidably echoing the poet and coloniser Spenser’s ideal of docile (Irish?) peasant subservience in The Shepheardes Calender , his conceit is dialogically displaced enough from that ‘original’ colonial objectification of the Irish peasantry to suggest a new space, neither colonial nor ethno-nationalist, through which to express rural Irish identity and experience. However, Yeats’s construction of the peasant happy with a frugal life and ascetic concerns would, ironically, be a weapon in Catholic, post-Independence ideology to objectify the poor, to the concern of Kavanagh’s “The Great Hunger”.
One can further illustrate the multi- dialogic, contradictory and hybrid nature of Yeats’s conception of Irish identity by discussing the Druid’s first-person lament in Yeats’s mythological poem Fergus and the Druid ([1892] in Yeats’s Poems, ed. A. Norman Jeffares 1991),
Look on my thin grey hair and hollow cheeks
And on these hands that may not lift the sword,
This body trembling like a wind-blown reed.
No woman’s loved me, no man’s sought my help.
(1991: 67)
These lines seem displacedly –most likely unintentionally - to voice the plight of contemporary rural Irish males in his – and Kavanagh’s – generations. In the wake of the Famine of 1845-9, decreasing populations and emigration had led to “signs that marriages were becoming fewer and later, as falling agricultural prices and pressure of numbers reduced economic opportunity”(in The Oxford Companion to Irish History, ed. Connolly, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1997: 350). Arranged marriages or “matches” between old husbands and young wives resulted in prosperous widows living often into extreme old age and exacting such emotional and economical control over their male children that the latter were obliged to sacrifice socio-economic and sexual ambition in order to maintain out of duty the family small-holding and dwindle away as middle aged, thin-haired and impotent virgins. Post-Independence conditions in rural Irish society, which continued to maintain the oppression and misrepresentation of the poor, would in time determine the poetic explication of this experience of the peasant base in an urgent, contemporary context that exposed the fallacy at the heart of romantic-colonial/ anti-colonial constructions of the Irish peasantry, via Kavanagh’s “The Great Hunger”.
(On page 9, I shall resume my analysis of Yeats, comparing his essay “The Golden Age” [in ed. Welch 1993: 133-4] with Section XIII of Kavanagh’s epic poem.)
In this section I shall firstly use a historicist approach to consider the specific social and historical contexts in which Patrick Kavanagh was writing. Secondly, I shall analyse representations of identity and community in “The Great Hunger”, combine an Ahmadian discussion of the specific conflicting discourses informing the poem with a deconstructive reading of how they dialogically intervene throughout the text, undercutting colonial master narratives of the Irish peasantry and even narratives of nationhood itself, in favour of a parochial, local vision of rural experience.
Kavanagh was born in Mucker, Inniskeen, Co. Monaghan in 1904, the son of a smallholding farmer and cobbler. He left school at the age of twelve and worked the family land until, in 1929, his poetry was ‘discovered’ by AE. In the following decade Kavanagh lived in both London and Dublin as a fledgling poet and critic. Kavanagh, though of a markedly less affluent background than Yeats was not the stridently “sectarian and class-conscious” Irish Catholic “tribal spokesman” that Quinn might suggest (1991: 161,169). His native Monaghan, though in the old nine-county province of Ulster, was incorporated in 1922 into the Irish Free State; its Orange contingent was small and mostly peaceable when he left it for Dublin. Kavanagh’s writings do not address issues of sectarianism in partitioned Éire as such but rather expose the ironic complicity between the post-partition insularism of de Valera’s Catholic Ireland and Cromwellian Puritanism, in the literal chastisement of the working people. Kavanagh despised anyway what he called the nationalist or “buckleppin’” propensities of Irish writings (cf. Smyth, 1998:108-9). His interest was not to propose a post-colonial, sectarian Catholic Irish consciousness but to reveal the repressed Irelands of the mind, via exploring with inexorable intent the ignored aspects of the everyday life of the “old peasant”: his work, boredom, lust, and despair.
Kavanagh would live for most of his adult life in and form a love-hate relationship with his adopted Dublin, but the city and its literary forms gave him a plurality of vision necessary for him to re-imagine rural Ireland without recourse to the complicity in romantic stereotyping that might be pointed out in his earliest verse, written in Monaghan and rather patronized by AE et al as “the work of an unlettered countryman with a natural lyrical gift” (Anthony Cronin, Arena - Three Irish Writers, BBC-TV 1991). By the late 1930s Kavanagh had developed a hybrid, parodic voice that interrogated the colonial and revivalist stereotypes of the peasantry. Kavanagh recognized that the construction “Irish Catholic” had up to his day become synonymous with “pre-colonial” and “peasant” in the discourses of both the colonialists and the nationalists; he saw such constructions as “provincial” and derivative; he preferred to focus on the local, or what he called the “parochial” aspects of mundane, everyday life in Ireland. (Cf. Kavanagh [1952], cited in Smyth, 1998: 107-8). In avoiding what he saw as the grandiosity of revivalist literature, he aimed to eschew poetic notions of Irishness as bogus (“Irishness is a form of anti-art. A way of posing as a poet without actually being one”, in Quinn, 1991: 391). In my view he sought in “The Great Hunger” to mock the ideal of peasant essence with sly references to prevailing political and literary rhetoric of his period, in order to show the falsity of any attempt to ‘write’ the Catholic rural classes, or “put the tank/ On a race”, as he put it in his poem Yeats ([1966] 1984: 348).
“The Great Hunger” spans generic modes from socio-realism to mock-romantic satire. The poem deals with the apocalyptic effect on rural Irish lives of the state-endorsed policy of familism . Its protagonist Patrick Maguire is a sexagenarian virgin, his senses rendered clay-numb by a life of sexual and intellectual hunger; his soul is “Lost” by subservience to Eamon de Valera’s proposition (noted also by Quinn, 1991: 154-5 and 2001: 168-173) that men choosing not to emigrate from rural Ireland should maintain a duty to improving a post-colonial agricultural economy, remaining at work on the family farm “in the passion that never needs a wife” (line 34). He is bound almost incestuously to his widowed mother, the aged dictator of his household (“She stayed too long, wife and mother in one”, lines 97-8). The mother’s “venomous drawl/ And a wizened face like moth-eaten leatherette” (132-3), is described in a tone suggestive of fetishistic fascination, near-incestuous intimacy and repulsion: she is so seared into Maguire’s consciousness through claustrophobic over-familiarity that, “When she died/ The knuckle-bones were cutting the skin of her son’s backside/ And he was sixty-five” (99-101). Vegetated by a life of fourteen-hour days on his fields and by submission to his mother’s de Valeran adage “ ‘Now go to mass and pray and confess your sins/ And you’ll have all the luck’ ”(279-280), Maguire’s lusts inevitably dwindle: he becomes an impotent “wet sack flapping about the knees” of the very “time” (60) or Irish state protocol that so incapacitated the peasant of Yeats’s “The Lamentation of the Old Pensioner” ([1890] 1991: 81) and exists through to the Irish Free State.
Éire in 1942 was neutral in the Second World War (known as “The Emergency”); de Valera espoused an insularist agrarian ideal of Irish rural self-sufficiency (within which the policies of familism were aggressively pursued) as an ethno-nationalist statement of otherness and defiance against Churchill, who wanted to seize back by force Irish ports for British use during the conflict (cf. Churchill, The Second World War I: The Gathering Storm From War to War 1919-1939, London: Cassell 1948: 248-9). Éire, however, suffered from heavy trading sanctions and threats, from Whitehall, and, from 1942, Washington (cf. Fitzpatrick, in ed. Foster 1989:265-6). Although neutrality was popular among the broad population in that it spared Ireland pretty much from bombing raids, it was considered, by many as politically disadvantageous, if not tragic. Neutrality and familism as expressed in Kavanagh’s poem are, implicitly, the causes of Ireland’s “Great Hunger” in the 1940s. Kavanagh uses a parodic construction of the hysterically desperate, impotent Maguire to engage intertextually and dialogically with colonial/ revivalist pastoralizations of the blithe, fecund “Irish peasant” perpetuated by Yeats and then de Valera whilst distorting these modes grotesquely to the verge of their dissolution.
The poem engages in a systematic, post-Yeatsian deconstruction of “the categories devised by colonialist and anti-colonialist alike” (Kiberd, 2000: 599), by sending up the lyrical mode in bawdy or sophisticated mock- doggerel. The complicit signifiers of colonialism and anti-colonialism are still ‘in’ the text of “The Great Hunger” but, because these discourses are so fractured by parody, a Third Space widens out between colonial/nationalist codes and their presumed approximation of a signified social ‘reality’:
O he loved his ploughs
And he loved his cows
And his happiest dream
Was to clean his arse
With perennial grass
On the bank of some summer stream;
To smoke his pipe
In a sheltered gripe
In the middle of July –
His face in a mist
And two stones in his fist
And an impotent worm on his thigh.
(Lines 105-115)
The most subversive element in this passage is not its reference to masturbation but the symbolic, implicit statement that the proverbial myth of the rustic fecundity of the good shepherd is in fact a useless thing, an “impotent worm”. The lines imply: Supposedly post-colonial discourses by de Valera, borrowed from Yeats who borrowed in turn from the English coloniser Spenser, have systematically misrepresented and conditioned peasant-farmers as a national symbol or stereotype, rendering them sterile and powerless. By sending these regressive discourses up as ridiculous, the poem implies radically that one can further a decolonizing process in Irish literatures, towards a time when poetry has effectively exposed and transcended such thinking.
Quinn (1991) argues that “In “The Great Hunger”…. Kavanagh is “acting as tribal spokesman, in taking advantage of his status as an insider in the Catholic community”(161). Yet a Bhabhalian approach to the poem will show that the discourse of the poem does not unequivocally represent the consciousness of “an oppressed and misrepresented Catholic underclass” (Quinn, in Patrick Kavanagh – A Biography, Dublin: Gill and Macmillan 2001: 180). It is, rather, hybridized, disallowing any one ‘representative’ voice a concrete subjectivity: Kavanagh’s speaker’s voice is internally contradictory in its treatment of an imagined community of Donaghmoyne small-farmers, switching from an almost socio-realist generic mode or anthropological, distanced perspective (“Their intellectual life consisted in reading / Reynolds News or the Sunday Dispatch”, 408-9) that suggests contact with metropolitan, academic discourses, to deep, modernistic focalization where the narrator explores Maguire’s consciousness to the extent that it seems that the experience of poet and peasant are one (cf. lines 395- 402). “The Great Hunger” code-switches between and hybridizes metropolitan and ‘rural’ discourses; Quinn’s assertion that the poem is polemic, with a strict focus “on the Irish Catholic consciousness” (1991:161) underestimates the text’s capacity to question stereotypes of the Irish peasantry (in refusing to commit to offering a centralized peasant-subject, either as protagonist or narrator).
Conversely, an Ahmadian approach to reading the historical specificities of the poem points us to a pitfall in Kiberd’s Jamesonian assertion that Kavanagh “saw that what appeared to be the essential traits of the Irish peasantry were to be found in most societies with little economic development” (2000:599). Kiberd’s statement ignores the fact that, although “The Great Hunger” exposes the colonial/Yeatsian/ de Valeran notions of Irish peasant “essence” as constructed by “a ruling class over its own interests”, the poem is keen to construct Patrick Maguire’s experience not as some allegory of a ‘Third World’ peasant experience but in the context of historical and socio-cultural specificities pertinent to Éire in the 1940s. There are episodes in the poem that, in dealing with small-farmers’ recreational activities such as their weekend pub-talk, make it clear that the experience of the sex-starved “old peasant” with his “cigarette to smoke and a pound to spend/ On drink next Saturday” (lines 317-8) is far removed from that of peasants under Stalin or affected by war in Europe in 1942. Neutrality in Ireland during the Emergency is represented in the poem as having rendered History – the reality of experience for the poor and dispossessed across wartime Europe - an “abstraction” (line 414) less important to Maguire’s needs than betting on horses, a staple of Irish popular culture when other cultures could not entertain such luxuries, or moaning about the quality of the beer (“‘A treble, full multiple odds…That’s flat porter’”, line 432). In such moments, “The Great Hunger” does not offer Ireland as a national allegory, or even, as Quinn proposes, construct a committed assertion of a subjectified “Irish” consciousness but attempts a representation of life, for better or worse, as it was experienced by small-farming people in the parish of Donaghmoyne (a synecdoche of other parishes “in every corner of this land”, line 756) during the war years.
In Section XIII the speaker mimics the Yeatsian/ de Valeran objectification of the Irish essence of peasantry, to nihilistic effect. The discriminating tendency of Spenserian constructions of the peasantry, mimicked and perhaps pluralized/ deconstructed somewhat by Yeats and de Valera, is confronted head-on by Kavanagh. The speaker uses the rhetorical device of hyperbole deliberately to protract and over-reach himself in constructing a Yeatsian conceit of the pre-lapsarian, happy rustic:
That deals with leaving one's home so well. It really captures the effects of a person's known environment on them.
Thanks.
In his little lyrical fields
He ploughs and sows…
As it was in the Beginning
The simpleness of peasant life.
(lines 626-8; 632-3)
The substitution of the vernacular, naïve “simpleness” for “simplicity” or even “simple-mindedness” implies the speaker’s wariness of the patronizing attitudes of the settler-colonists and post-Independence rulers of Éire to an exploitable peasant base. In the historical and cultural moment of 1942, Kavanagh uses mocking humour to ironise nationalist imitations of colonialist models of social order; he widens the gulf or creates a space between colonial/nationalist stereotypes of the peasantry and any corresponding ‘reality’, to voice post-Independence experience in rural Ireland.
One can demonstrate a combinative approach to post-colonial study of Irish literatures by making an intertextual comparison between section thirteen and Yeats’s essay “The Golden Age” ([1893] in ed. Welch, 1993: 133-4), in order to see how the process of using a hybrid discourse to imitate, mock and worry ‘original’ colonial constructions of the peasantry has developed within the historical frame of between Yeats’s pre-revolutionary 1890s and Kavanagh’s post-Independence, neutral Éire in the 1940s. Yeats describes passing by train “near Sligo”, and fancies himself, on looking out from his vehicle at the landscape beyond him, as having a mystical vision. He recalls “a peasant belief in two faery dogs who go about representing day and night”, and muses on a pre-lapsarian age when “the world was once all perfect and kindly … (S)till the kindly and perfect world existed, but buried like a mass of roses under many spadefuls of earth” (133). Yeats suggests that the peasantry and their beliefs inspire poetic inspiration, or, as he romantically puts it, “bodiless moods… [that] inhabit the world of spirits” (ibid). Kavanagh’s speaker in “The Great Hunger” seems almost as if he could be mocking Yeats’s essay, as he turns his perspectival gaze upon the rich inhabitants of the city making their fleeting day-visits by car to a countryside in which they would not live. The ascendancy rather than the peasantry become the object of scrutiny, as they keep their view of Maguire on the land at a comfortable enough distance to maintain their illusions:
The travellers stop their cars to gape over the green bank into his fields:
There is the source from which all cultures rise,
And all religions,
There is the pool in which the poet dips
And the musician.
(Lines 640-4)
Bhabha has argued, “as discrimination turns into the assertion of the hybrid, the insignia becomes a mask, a mockery” (cited in Smyth, 1998: 22). The speaker’s conscious control of polemic, parody and irony further distances the text from the discriminating, colonial centre.
CONCLUSION
The process by which we have discussed how literatures in English from Ireland became, from Yeats’s early writings in the 1880s to Kavanagh’s “The Great Hunger” in 1942, more hybridized and distanced from the original colonial constructions of the Irish peasantry popular in Spenser’s time has been facilitated greatly by reference to historical movements. Yeats, a déclassé Protestant denied the perks of his society moved between Dublin and London in the 1880s and 1890s, synthesizing a poetic persona that allowed him to identify romantically with the Otherness of the peasantry and catch the eye of an Anglo-Irish ascendancy embracing Celticism as a means of claiming self-definition in cultural separateness from London. Yeats feared that by championing or stirring up the passions of the peasant nationalist community he was risking the ascendancy’s prerogatives in pre-revolutionary Ireland to lead the post-colonial Irish nation: so, he contained the peasantry ideologically via resorting to a colonial-pastoral stereotype. However, in spite of his intentions, his mimicry of a colonial model pluralizes it and robs it of authority: the peasantry are represented at a slight remove from the original discourse and thus they begin to find a new space to inhabit.
Patrick Kavanagh in Post-Independence Éire has seen Eamon de Valera, a veteran of the Irish Wars of 1916-22 maintain in the name of a new state the old colonial ideologies of social order via control of the peasant base, using the very singular methods developed during colonial rule of Ireland. However, Kavanagh hybridizes socio-realist, modernist, mock-lyrical and anti-pastoral modes to emphasize how historical and developments between 1922 and 1942 – partition, followed by mass emigration and population decline at home largely because of de Valera’s puritanical, agricultural work-ethic - render the supposedly post-colonial impersonation of Yeatsian rhetoric an absurd anachronism. “The Great Hunger” parodies de Valeran polemic to the extreme, so that the residual-colonial representation of the peasantry in Ireland will lose its ability to cause cultural famine and blight, a hundred years after the first “Great Hunger” of 1845-9.
A combinative approach to study of Irish literatures between 1880 and 1950 can prove extremely useful, if not essential. We can use an Ahmadian, historicist perspective, taking note of the specific contexts framing Yeats’s early writings and then we can discuss, using a Bhabhalian approach, how Yeats mimics the dominant colonial discourses of his era with a nationalist difference so as to dilute their authority and effect a space for voicing resistance. Reading “The Great Hunger”, we can see Kavanagh: daringly parochial, risking doggerel, and, as a decolonizing thinker, breaking away from the high tone of Yeats and “the importance-of-writing-and-thinking-and-feeling-like-an-Irishman” (Kavanagh [1959], cited in Quinn 1991: 380). Helen Tiffin ([1987] in eds. Ashcroft et al, 1995: 95) argues that “Post-colonial cultures are inevitably hybridised … Decolonisation is process, not arrival”. Kavanagh might not arrive at a post-colonial objective, but his “The Great Hunger” operates counter-discursively in what Tiffin calls “an ongoing dialectic between hegemonic centrist systems and peripheral subversion of them”: historically, the early Yeats mimics original colonial discourses still operative in his own era whereas Kavanagh in the 1940s responds to the nationalist imitations and subversions of colonialism by stretching the conceit of the peasant extremely via parody and tragedy rather than by a lyrical, pastoral idyll. A combinative approach to the post-colonial study of Irish literatures is essential for understanding how, in the frame of a decolonizing history and its correspondence with ‘text’, we see in Yeats and Kavanagh what Fanon (cited in Said [1988], ed. Walder 1990: 39) called “the transformation of social consciousness beyond national consciousness.”
Text (including quotations): 5610 words; endnotes: 237 words.
Total essay length: 5847 words (excluding bibliography and appendices).
Spenser has his characters Hobbinol and Thenott play flutes and dance in “honor and prayse of our most gracious souereigne, Queene Elizabeth”, as a means by which to naturalise a prescriptive discourse of social order against the possibility of discord (Spenser [1578], in The Complete Works of Edmund Spenser, Ware: Wordsworth 1995: 431-5)).
“(M)imicry produces subjects whose ‘not-quite-sameness’ acts like a distorting mirror which fractures the identity of the colonizing subject and – as in the regime of stereotype – rearticulates [its] presence in terms of its ‘otherness’, that which it disavows” (Moore-Gilbert, citing Bhabha [1994] 1997: 121).
Cf. Quinn on the exclusively Irish system of familism, in Patrick Kavanagh – A Biography, Dublin: Gill and Macmillan 2001: 176: “Familism was a system of farm inheritance whereby one son was selected as the heir but had both his inheritance and his permission to marry deferred until the elderly parents were willing to relinquish ownership of home and land.”
Cf. Eamon de Valera’s St Patrick’s day radio broadcast, 1943: “That Ireland that we dreamed of would be the home of a people who viewed material wealth only as the basis of right living, of a people who were satisfied with frugal comfort and devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit – a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry ….” (in ed. McLoughlin, 1996: 206).
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This is essay is my intellectual property but I'm happy to share it with people here.
and in its contradiction of response,
Or seeming stagnance, see that rippled gleam
That might suggest true movement. If you sense
a hidden wave in what seems blanket still,
Write more, wind each desire, and you'll see
The willows nod and rustle, and you will
hear the rushing babble of the free
gush of water, brimming, charged with light
That is your reader's understanding heart.
Tell you what: I'll answer that with another old essay on mine. Then it's back to the poetry for me! Wait there....
I choose to begin this essay by stating my understanding of the above question heading. The rubric suggests that a comparison can be made, between Indian and Irish poetry, in that conceptions of nationhood, cultural identity and imagined community are, even in the works of individual poets, similarly complex, ambiguous and various. To base an essay’s argument on the idea of such comparability is not simply to repeat what Homi Bhabha (in Moore-Gilbert, 1997:125) calls the tendency (based on western ideas of “cultural relativism”), among (mainly Eurocentric) post-modern readers of post-colonial literature, to try to conflate the works of writers from different geographical/cultural locations into the dominant by divining their ‘translatability’. I regard the question heading as suggesting that the work of Irish and Indian poets - I choose to discuss examples by WB Yeats (1865- 1939) and Rabindranath Tagore (1861- 1941) – are comparable, in that their respective constructions of culture and identity are each internally various and dialogic. I shall compare Yeats and Tagore from a historicist view, in that their poetic and rhetorical constructions of their imagined communities are informed by their ambiguous (and in many ways similar) social positions in their respective “societies”. To illustrate my investigation, I shall engage with Yeats’s poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”(2000:12), and an excerpt from his “A general introduction to my work” (2003: Offprint 21:85), showing how these examples incorporate often conflicting conceptions of nationhood and belonging. I shall follow with a comparative analysis of ambivalent representations of these issues in Tagore’s “Recovery- 10” (1985: 121-3), and “Nationalism in India”(Offprint 22: 86-92).
Edward Said (1990: 36) proposes that the primary stage of decolonisation or reclaiming “the land” from an invading colonial power is only originally possible “through the imagination”. Subtextually, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” could be said to depict a centralized ‘I’ narrator, expressing determination to “go now” (either imaginatively or physically) to build a home (or nation?) in a pastoral-agrarian idyll of western Ireland for himself: this might seem to be a relatively committed assertion of Irish self-determination and nation building. Yet one should recall here Said’s theory, that:
At some stage in the anti-resistance phase of nationalism … many of the nationalist struggles
were led by bourgeoisies that were partly formed and to some degree produced by the
colonial power…These bourgeoisies in effect have often replaced the colonial force with a
new class-based and ultimately exploitative force; instead of liberation after decolonisation
one simply gets the old colonial structures replicated in new national terms (1990: 34-5).
In the light of Said’s remarks, and noting Yeats’s Anglo-Irish, landed/mercantile Protestant heritage (see below), the language of Yeats’s poem presents interesting (and perhaps unintended) interpretative possibilities; let us consider that Yeats’s narrator wishes to “go to Innisfree/ And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made/…And live alone in the bee-loud glade” (lines 1-2,4, my emphasis). One might say that there is what Pierre Macherey would call an involuntary, ideological “silence” here (1990:215-22): that the speaker wants to build an Irish nation for himself, and to his agrarian/pre-modern tastes, but there is no room for the broad-based Catholic Irish peasantry in his ideal, imagined community of one, to which he ‘belongs’: hence, these peoples simply do not exist in his poetic paradigm. Further interpretations surface accordingly, which are, perhaps, viable decodings of the poem. We could even argue, if we chose, that the Chiswick “pavements grey” (line 11) upon which the speaker (in spite of his imaginative flight to Innisfree) is actually grounded, constitute a synecdoche of the urbanity of a bourgeois-mercantile, Anglo-Irish class of inextricable associations with the imperial metropolis, who, although imagining themselves the cultural and socio-economic “heirs” of rural Ireland will always be distant from the peasant-based Catholic Irish, “self-imagined community” of western Connaught.
Yet I am disinclined merely to accept this theoretical basis alone, as a condition of discussing and illustrating my reading of the poem. The poem’s counter-urban pastoral idyll of a rural retreat anticipates Georgian poetry in its imaginative turning away from the city (cf. John Drinkwater’s poem “Of Greatham”, 1991:50-1); also, an intertextual reading of pre-colonial, pre-sectarian Irish verse shows that the ostensible theme of “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” - the solitary “exile’s” imaginative reconstruction of a rural Ireland affected only by wildlife and the elements - is, to use one of Heaney’s archaeological metaphors, parallel, in the stratigraphy of poetic “tradition”, with the deep bedrock of the oldest extant examples of Irish verse (cf. 1974:63). Here, in what we might romantically call the text’s “unconscious”, Yeats’s voice is in dialogic “play” with, rather than excluded from, an Irish poetic auditory imagination sounding deeply in the Irish heart’s core, that always spoke of the problematics of dislocation from, and belonging or returning to, an envisaged “Ireland” (ibid.).
Fraser (2003: 46) quotes Declan Kilberd’s (1996) observation about Yeats that he was “estranged from the community, yet anxious to identify… with the new national sentiment.” Nowhere in Yeats’s work do I see so apparent his problematical relationship to Irish nationhood, belonging and language as in Offprint 21. Fraser (2003:56) asks his readers to consider why, in the excerpt, Yeats confesses to be so angry about being asked why he does not write in Gaelic. To try to answer this question, one needs to identify some of the subtexts and assumptions directing Yeats’s statements.
Yeats criticises Wordsworth, for championing the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture whilst ignoring the Dublin (and, interestingly, Protestant) revolutionary Robert Emmet. Emmet, Wolfe Tone and other “rebels” of the 1790s and 1800s were responding to the Penal Laws, which were instituted in by the British in Ireland in 1792, to ensure the widespread destruction of the language, law and customs (including even music) of Irish-speaking communities ([1937] 1968:34-5). So, when Yeats says that “Gaelic is my national language, but it is not my mother tongue”, is he wearing the “mask” of the Irish nationalist born during British rule, denied his mother tongue by hegemonic imposition? He seems to imply so, when he compares himself to “those Indians” who were forced under colonial rule even to “learn everything, even their own Sanskrit, through the vehicle of English”. However, he does so, not only by conflating the difference between British linguistic imperialism in Ireland and India (1999: 56-62), but by wilfully ignoring the more disturbing implications of the reason why Gaelic could never be his “mother tongue”.
Contemporaneous with the Penal Laws, British-endorsed, ‘ruling’ Protestant garrisons were established all over Ireland. One of Yeats’s maternal ancestors, a “Reverend Thomas” of the Anglican Church of Ireland, was one such bastion of British rule who suppressed a nationalist rising in County Meath in 1793, and paid for his actions with his life (Foster, 1997:xx-xxi). Behind the mask of stated self-identification with the “Indian students, and foreign political refugees” who had been robbed of their “mother tongue”, Yeats the complex man was inextricable from the oppressive, imperial-linguistic legacy of an Ascendancy of extra- Celtic (largely Huguenot) origin : however, here we see what Empson in Seven Types of Ambiguity called Yeats’ “strength of vagueness”([1930] 1972: 219-222), of voicing equivocally the viewpoint of the oppressed Gael; the progressive, Protestant nationalist.
The “myriad-minded” Tagore shared with Yeats an ambiguous religious and class relationship to a broad-based peasant, agrarian imagined community. The Tagore family, like the Butlers and Pollexfens of Yeats’s ancestry, had developed a large store of their wealth on (in the Tagore case, international) trade; they had also enjoyed zamindar status in East Bengal and Orissa. Yet, given that the Tagore family had been ejected from the Brahmin caste for espousing a Vedantic, monotheist idea of Hinduism that was simultaneously purist and reformist, and critical of the current sectarian, even racist, caste system, my instinct is to emphasise that it is the Tagores’ long ancestral rootedness in Bengal, which informs Rabindranath’s ability to conceptualise a traditional, Hindu community pre-dating class and caste, that the monoglot Yeats, of non-Celtic and Protestant origin could not comfortably replicate in imagining an homogeneous Ireland.
William Radice’s translation of “Recovery- 10” belies the Eurocentric tendency to read Tagore’s work as espousing a vague universalism (Foster, 1997: 470). The centralised first person narrator in Tagore’s poem is presented, at least in Radice’s translation, as the soul of an imagined Hindu rather than universal community; it is a personal, then local, cross-regional, then trans-historical “I”, radiating in a series of concentric circles from “the home” to “the world”, in accordance with the model of spiritual identity discussed by Fraser (2003:49). In the first, thirty-line stanza or movement of the poem, Tagore’s “I” “Lazily” beholds, and litanises a history of ultimately ineffectual emperors: the Pathan and Moghuls’ “conquering chariots” and “webs of dust” are demonstrated as temporary, and the “sky” – a synecdoche of an Indian cultural/historical continuum “Through the ages” (l. 16) – clears again and again, unaffected, in their passing. The metaphor of the web is referred to again, with reference to the speaker’s prophecy of the inevitable collapse of the British Empire (“I know that time will flow along their road too, / Float off somewhere the land-encircling web of their empire”(ll.26-7).
Yet it is in lines 27-30 that I detect Tagore’s most deliberate decision to hybridise his voice across castes, races, and unjust hierarchies (2003:58), and wear the “mask” of his own peasant-based audience(s): the people with whom he, as a progressive zamindar, an out-caste adherent to Upanishad philosophy yet inextricably a Hindu, seeks to be identified. If we recall that the Tagores of the trading company Carr, Tagore & Co., and the Tagores as zamindars were facilitated by the very “merchandise-bearing soldiers” the poetic speaker dismisses as irrelevant to the spiritual core of Hindu society, we could read these lines as, radically, proposing a renunciation of the very class system that had created Tagore: i.e., Since mercantilism and empire are only artificial, passing trends, then all Hindus, from the zamindar baron to the sannyasi mendicant, should reach out to their God and realise a sense of a broad, Hindu “imagined community”, like radiating circles reaching outward towards a spiritual apprehension of “the world”, irrespective of imposed hierarchical structures.
Still, I have some reservations about emphasising the representative scope of Tagore’s “hybrid” voice. For example, I am tempted to ask, Does Tagore’s poetic speaker unambiguously belong, spiritually, with “a huge concourse/ Of ordinary people/ Led along many paths and in various groups/…Bengal, Bihar, Orissa” (lines 33-5, 52)? By switching to the third person plural (“They work-/ In cities and fields”, lines 42-3), is the speaker suggesting an ideological and socio-economic remove, from his imagined rural peasantry? Although “Recovery- 10” goes someway towards acknowledging the peasant peoples of his “earth” (31), the speaker is, as his choice of pronouns implies, nevertheless a distanced observer of them. Tagore’s speaker, unlike Yeats’s in “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”, considers the “people”, but he does so as a trans-historical, spiritual body and not as carefully illustrated individuals. A view of Tagore’s tendency perhaps to patronise his imagined peasantry as a collective body, compares with a charge commonly levelled at Yeats when the latter produced his writings on Irish folklore and myth (ed. Welch, 1993), that he “tended to regard peasants less as individuals than as living folklore archives, repositories of ‘ballad and story, rann and song’ (Quinn, 1991:68).
In his essay “Nationalism in India”, Tagore proposes, “India is too vast in its area and too diverse in its races (to be ruled by a central, state body)” (2003: 91); he asserts that India’s cultural unity is achievable not by the “great menace” of nationalism but by the spiritual force of Hinduism.
Fraser cites Bassnet and Trivedi’s “translation theory” (Fraser, 2003: 56) in arguing that the Western concept of nationalism was “not just ideologically alien, but linguistically unfamiliar” to Tagore, whose understanding of the State was as an external government, similar to the Mughals, nawabs and rajas (whose “rule”, he argued, had been irrelevant to the working lives and communities of regions across the subcontinent). There is a suggestion that Tagore was a man of his time, struggling to comprehend what was meant by a centralised, State run “nation”, when the term had not been conceptualised by a vast and internally disparate India of diverse cultures and races. However, comparison with Indian nationalist poetries in English of the early nineteenth century, such as those by the polyglottal, Bengali poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt (1996: 191-207), suggests that the concept of a centrally run, Indian nationalist (and some would argue, “chauvinist”) State was – albeit in complex form - part of the social being of some major (and near- aristocratic) writers prior to Tagore’s birth (1841). The Machereyan silence that speaks to me behind Tagore’s concept of nationalism is whether the writer, as a zamindar of the landed aristocracy, refuses to envisage an Indian central state, not because the concept does not translate ideologically or linguistically but because it represents for him the logical but unthinkable consequence of his Vedantic beliefs (a consequence that previous poets were arguably more prepared to address); the redistribution of his mercantile and landed riches to the broad-based, “vast” peasantry.
Tagore’s ambivalent relationship to his imagined peasant Hindu, imagined community of ‘workers’ in “Recovery- 10”, expressed silently via his refusal to modify his “I” narrator into an inclusive “we” when speaking of the soul of the Hindu “people” as a whole, perhaps illustrates his inability, like Yeats, to conceive himself as one with the people on whom his exploitative (whether or not progressive) programme of wealth-accumulation is based. His “mistranslation” of nationalism is arguably not shared by other, previous, Hindu nationalists and reformist poets and writers; perhaps he deliberately avoids an admission that to practice a truly Vedantic philosophy, he should transcend class and caste by sharing his riches with all. Yet Tagore, like Yeats, is a poet who maintains a necessarily relative autonomy from direct political commitment. Just like Yeats, who champions the vitality and infinite suggestiveness of his imagery of the wattle cabin and bee- loud glade as a basis for art, over the stone-immovability of polemic and overt nationalism, Tagore exploits his images of the webs of dust and a clearing sky to suggest a view of history and continuity of community that is equivocal enough to incorporate imagined Indias of the mind to which both the landed aristocrat, and the peasantry can belong in one homogeneous, imagined moment. Said argues that a truly liberatory phase of anti-imperialism succeeds the nationalist phase: it is, arguably, the poetry of Yeats and Tagore that transfigures their ambiguous conceptions of nationhood and belonging, and helps precipitate and facilitate the cultural processes of decolonisation.
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND REFERENCES
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The Second Coming -- W. B. Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Glimpses Bolingbroke before it shatters,
Reflecting that usurpers will find care,
Care being cruel, when the tongue that flatters
Sweetest in the court spits at his rule.
Glass shards. Two kings. The motley of a fool.
Sunward striding, bright in summer laughter;
and I am humbled by this gentle vision:
Wiley's trust in Mommy's new decision.
she like
{{{{{{{{riverglimmerdancin seen thru cherry petals an wild honeysuckle}}}}}}}}}}
she like
quickquickquinkedy
quinkedywordflash
happyspringiness-imus
savoured in the fragrance
of good oxlip honey
and she the feelin' that come up through the toes
sayin' yass yass through the dancin' sass of a leggedyjigg
{{{{{{{astralised pogueness!}}}}}}}
Dat cass
she dyaogirl's best friend
Dat cass
she our honeybee
she the queen of squiggley tomato fields of heaven
and we love her