|
(Continued from page 29)
the living): Beckett, Burke, Joyce, Flann O'Brien, O'Casey, Shaw, Sheridan, Swift, Synge, Wilde and Yeats, many of whose portraits grace the walls of the better class of Dublin pub. Would they receive the Catholic Bulletin imprimatur? Hardly. All, bar Joyce and O'Brien were Protestants, while Ulysses was on the Index, books which
Catholics were forbidden to read, for over forty years. Take a few more, perhaps more minor, figures, de Boucicault, Louis MacNeice, Bram Stoker, for example, and the picture is much the same. (And how, incidentally, does Count Dracula fit into the 'history of the Gael'?) Up to the near present, on any objective assessment, the Irish literature which anybody actually reads has very largely been written in English by
Protestants.
To get round this rather obvious fact, nationalists attempt to claim many of these writers for the cause by ascribing to them nationalist sympathies, overt or covert. Some, pre-eminently Yeats, were indeed avowed nationalists (although even he eventually fell foul of an ultramontane Dail).
Others, like Shaw were distinctly more sceptical, preferring a federal approach to the various national questions of these islands. Still others expressed little or no opinion, although that has not prevented the diligent from co-opting them. A rather good recent example of this literary pan-nationalism is Fintan O'Toole's biography of Sheridan. As a good progressive, O'Toole supplements Sheridan's hitherto unsuspected
nationalist leanings with equally unsuspected Republican sympathies - 1798 and all that. 'Republican' is another of Humpty's favourite words. Ireland is one of the less republican republics of this world. Such ideological shoe-horning is less than convincing. Worse, it demeans the works themselves. Irish literature is not a reaction to colonialism, obsessed with struggle against the imperial enemy. It ranges from the
arch-monarchist (and anti-republican) Burke to the marxist O'Casey, from the rationalist Shaw to the romantic Synge and Yeats, from the literary modernists Beckett and Joyce to the fantasist Stoker, and includes much else besides. In short it is a metropolitan literature, containing within itself the entire spectrum of ideas-literary, philosophical and political.
But where is its metropolis? Dublin? Not really, Joyce and Bloomsday notwithstanding. Many may have been born there; very few stayed. London actually has a better claim, but rather than looking for a geographical locus, it would be better to see Irish literature as one element - a distinct and vital element - an accent - of a wider literary
(Continued on page 31)
|
|
