Musing on the Irish Literary Revival

This Posting is rated AR+ for severe academic rambling.  

From the writings of Yeats and Gregory, it seems that they both knew full well that they were functioning outside a cultural identity that they wanted to recreate to include themselves. There was a basic, indefinable Irishness that they gleaned from the people who lived closer to the land and in a different cultural tradition than they did, and from this context Yeats and Gregory felt a romantic sensibility that they wanted to be part of. As Anglo-Irish landowners who collected and lived on the rents from these people, they were also aware of their distance and yet, in their distance from rural Irish Catholic culture they may have had the outsiders meta-cognitive awareness necessary to begin to adapt it to their personal visions of an Irish cultural identity that could be more inclusive. Lady Gregory went so far as to learn Irish, but Yeats did not have time for that. This new identity had to be in English so that it could more naturally include the Anglo-Irish. The Conradh na Gaeilge did not agree with this perspective, and insisted that this identity could only be created in returning to Irish, but that’s what it would be: ‘returning’ to Irish as English had already outrun Irish in the world of economics and politics.

In contrast, O’Connell was working for basic emancipation and political rights with a political notion of what Ireland should be a sovereign nation. He was an Irish Catholic who spoke Irish and felt no identity crisis at all. As an upwardly mobile political person, he did not value Gaeilge as a an identity tag because in the political arena, it was worse than useless. It was a burden to be overcome.

The Irish Literary Revival ended up challenging the Irish people about what Irishness was, rather than confirming what people wished it was. Ultimately it was not a Utopian effort, as some of the early pieces might have seemed. This was an intellectual effort trying to educate as well as express. It’s rather like having modern blockbuster action films trying to challenge the cultural assumptions of the people who attend them. Clint Eastwood did exactly this when he made Unforgiven which at once challenged the assumptions of the Spaghetti Westerns but also confirmed them in the last cathartic hell-bent-for-justice ending. It’s no wonder O’Casey and Synge incited people to rampage. On the other hand, Unforgiven merely didn’t sell as well as The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Therein lies the power of the Abbey: it got the word out to people who might not have wanted to hear it, whereas, in modern culture, people will just not go see it since the fantasy choices are so easily accessible. The power of the Abbey theatre was not only in the content of the plays, but the timing of the plays in the social and political development of Ireland in the early 20th century.

Yeats played up the heroic idea, but he did not invent any of these ideas. What one finds in Cuchulainn, one also finds in as far back as Beowulf and then further back in Gilgamesh. It’s all about immortality through renown. One gains immortality because one’s story is told after and about one’s glorious death. These stories emphasize the self-sacrifice of fighting for some kind of ‘greater good’. A modern critique of Gilgamesh is his apparent selfishness in his choices of fights, but the end of the poem is clear: it’s all about leaving a legacy which grants a person immortality. Shakespeare’s sonnets are all about this, too: If I write a poem about you, you will be young forever in the minds of readers. Now, this seems like a really Western, materialistic preoccupation, I mean, getting to keep this body forever. Thich Nhat Hanh says you already have immortality in each moment that you are alive. I wonder how often the concept of immortality comes up on Japanese and Vietnamese folklore? I know that in Chinese folklore, this is a whole set of Taoist stories about how you get to keep this body forever if you can just learn to breathe right.