. . . in the mass, are almost uncivilized. Like children, they require governing with the hand of power. They require authority and will bear it. (Cited in Hazel Waters, 99)From the 1840s to the 1880s, this ideological stance also found visual form in illustrations by Sir John Tenniel and others for the British magazine Punch.
Britain is depicted in its feminine aspect as the Athena-like Britannia (Figs. 1 and 4), and in its masculine aspect as the sometimes stern, sometimes avuncular John Bull (Figs. 2 and 3). The feminine aspect of Ireland is the delicate Hibernia, who needs the protection of her older, stronger sister (Fig. 1) or the medical advice of Dr. Bull (Fig. 3).[3] A revolting Land League ‘anarchist’ (Fig. 1) supplies one version of the masculine aspect of Ireland.[4] In two Tenniel cartoons from the 1860s, the masculinized emblematization of Ireland is infantilized (Figs. 3 and 4).[5] Rather than having (like Britain) two adult representatives, Ireland is here personified as both an adult woman and an unruly son. The child Ireland sometimes appears without his mother, as in a (non-Tenniel) 1851 cartoon that indirectly alludes to the Great Hunger and the Maynooth grants (Fig. 2).
They are like children still listening to old fairy stories while their bread has to be earned, they are like children who are afraid to walk alone, who play with fire, who are helpless; like children who will not grow up.In 1914, Walter Long described the Irish as being ‘like naughty children’, who think ‘it is amusing to give way to their inclinations’, while in 1915, the Countess of Leitrim argued for compulsory recruitment of the Irish for the Great War, because in ‘so many ways they are like children & they don’t understand an invitation where they would quietly obey an order’ (both cited in Curtis, 1968, 54).But, like children too, they have a strange ancient wisdom and an innate purity, and they appeal to the love and the pity of all who come in contact with them.
What would I not give . . . to help them? But the task is very difficult, and if you give children complete freedom they will certainly stray. (Cited in Curtis, 1968, 53)
Half regretfully he stared at the silty water. He could see his father rising from the table to reach for the belt which hung behind the door. The outlook was frightening; but it was better to walk in your bare feet. It was better to walk without shoes and barefooted than to walk without dignity. He took off his stockings and stuffed them into his pocket. His heart sank as he felt the cold wet mud of the path on his bare feet. (56)
‘The Irish’, he [Dillon] added sagaciously, ‘are an unfortunate bloody race. The father often says so.’The free indirect discourse of the final two sentences blends the perspectives of Peter and the narrator, underlining the boy’s possible status as a nation-child. Through the story’s prominent use of Davis’s poem, the defeat of a seventeenth-century hero is refracted through the idealizing lens of nineteenth-century patriotism only to illuminate the operation of new forms of internalized oppression in the twentieth century. What Eoghan Roe suffered at the hands of the British, Peter now suffers at the hands of his own people. ‘Oliver Cromwell read his Bible while he quartered infants at their mother’s breasts’, claimed the teacher, but this imputed religious hypocrisy is recapitulated when O’Rourke pauses to lead the class in the Angelus prior to strapping Peter excessively. Brother Quinlan is infuriated by Swaine’s ‘battered’ face, but can’t recognize that ‘deep inside him Peter felt battered too’ (54). Peter’s shame, the violence he suffers, the violence he inflicts, and his subsequent attempt to regain dignity by rejecting his ill-fitting paternal inheritance, allude in part to the political and psychological difficulties of finding one’s own feet in a newly independent country.‘Don’t tell me’, Peter said with feeling.
‘I mean, look at us. First Cromwell knocks hell out of us for being too Irish and then Rorky slaughters us for not being Irish enough.’
It was true. It was a pity they couldn’t make up their minds.’ (50)
He had started with a pure loving simple ideal but it had gone foul on him, turned inevitably into something evil. It had been like this all his life, with the Brothers, with the very country he came from. (152)This observation on the last page of the novel harks back to its opening pages: discussing the Provisional IRA campaign with Brother Benedict (the vicious, supercilious head of the reform school), Brother Sebastian had argued that anger and hatred ‘spoil the purity of the [IRA’s] vision and the result is evil’ (9). In Mac Laverty’s fable, Owen Kane may to some degree stand in for the Northern Irish catholics, salvaged from one set of evil circumstances only to fall victim to another.[9]
See we’re like a child that’s been batteredIn Fools of Fortune, Imelda was not battered, but she was driven out of her head by the painful feelings suffered when she made contact with the memory of her parents’ experiences. In O’Connor’s scenario, on the other hand, the child has had to shield herself psychologically from her own battering. In several interviews, O’Connor has acknowledged personal reasons for being drawn to this analogy, specifically the various forms of abuse she suffered as a child from her mother.[13] The ultimate blame for her mother’s actions she lays at the feet of the Roman Catholic Church, as she obliquely indicated in a controversial appearance on Saturday Night Live in 1992, when she tore up a photograph of Pope John Paul II (see Cullingford, 1994, 57-61).
Has to drive itself out of its head because it’s frightened
Still feels all the painful feelings
But they lose contact with the memory
And if there ever is gonna be healingIn O’Connor’s conception, the nineteenth-century infantilizing trope has been reworked: the Irish ‘race’ is still like a child, but a child who has been abused, by the Roman Catholic Church, by the British, and then by Irish authority figures. The actors are virtually the same as in Fig. 4 (although the figure of Pope John Paul II would need to be added behind Britannia), but our sympathy is now requested for the child rather than the adults. Whereas some Irish feminist critics have tended to criticize the woman-nation equation, O’Connor reclaims the stereotype:
There has to be remembering
And then grieving
So that there then can be FORGIVING
There has to be KNOWLEDGE and UNDERSTANDING
[her capitals]
I have a friend who I argue about with this. And I say to him, ‘I am Ireland’. I was born and live here. I’ve seeped in all these feelings that come from generations and generations. I watch what’s going on and I see how it mirrors what’s going on in my own life. I grew up in that house, which was Ireland. There were four children there. I feel a connection with the story of the Children of Lir, which also represent the four provinces of Ireland. (Waters, 1995, 1)Connor thus reads her personal history as an allegory of Ireland over the centuries, and vice-versa. Whereas the speaker in Eavan Boland’s poem ‘Mise Eire [I am Ireland]’ declares that she ‘won’t go back / My roots are brutal…’ (1995a, 102), O’Connor does go back, to Patrick Pearse’s poem ‘I am Ireland’ (anthologized in Deane, 1991, II, 558), and to the sovereignty goddess tradition that lies behind it. She represents herself as both mother Ireland and battered child Ireland. According to O’Connor, this is why the album that contains the song ‘Famine’ is called Universal Mother: ‘…I wanted to mother people. But essentially it’s about mothering myself’ (Waters, 1995a, 2). Ireland could thus be said to be her ‘inner child’.[15]
the ideology of colonialism is rooted in the Western concept of the child…who…needs to be guided, protected and educated as a ward. This metaphor is what drives the ideology of colonialism and modernity, a presumptuous paternalism which depicts the world of the colonised advancing dynamically towards the model of the coloniser as the human being ‘develops’ from childhood to adulthood. There is no other way it can achieve ‘progress’. In a colonised society, the warped colonial view is transmitted through the warped relationship between parents and children. (Waters, 1994a, 195)[17]In a series of opinion pieces published in The Irish Times between 1995 and 1997, and in his book An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Ireland, Waters went on to assail what he termed ‘the post-colonial mindset’, which urges its bearer ‘to give voice to the coloniser’s version of history’ (1995e, 12).[18] He found a paradigm of this mind-set in revisionism, which, instead of ‘detailing a value-free, non-tribal version of Irish history’, supplied ‘the historiographical needs of a new tribe of amnesiac neurotics’ (1995b, 14).[19]
A nation, like an individual, has to be able to recount a reasonable story of itself, one without either despair or presumption. As long as it veers between idealization on the one hand and disavowal on the other, it will behave exactly like Freud’s neurotic patient, afflicted by reminiscences. It will be incapable of working through the traumatic moments of its history, which must then either be jettisoned from the narrative in a strategy akin to what Freud calls ‘secondary revision’, or remain as a stone to trouble the living stream. (ix)Eagleton later employs Freud’s revisionist disciple, Jacques Lacan, and his ‘discourse of the Other’ to analogize the relationship between the British and the Irish in the nineteenth century:
The British…may find themselves here in the situation of the Lacanian adult vis-à-vis the infant, who in catering to the child’s immediate needs fails to decipher the absolute demand for recognition obscurely coded within them, and so unwittingly crushes that demand in the very act of relieving the infant’s want. Since the infant can only express this impossibly general demand for recognition in narrowly specific terms, in gestures which at once reveal and conceal it, this misapprehension is built into its transactions with the parent. The infant may then, so to speak, shift ground and try again; but the same structural misprision is bound to occur; and in the rift between need and demand will germinate desire, that objectless, insatiable hankering which is born of the despair of one’s demand ever being fulfilled. (141-2)
We, you and I, must remember everything. We must especially remember those things we never knew.[27]The percolation of such RMT themes into the debate about historical revisionism can also be seen in Waters’s An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Ireland, in which he argues that ‘[d]ifferent "versions" of Irish history do not arise out of confusion about what happened, but out of a desire to explain different sets of feelings arising out of the same sets of events’ (88). According to Waters, the ‘facts’ of history ‘depend on context and circumstance, on point-of-view’, whereas the ‘truth’ of history ‘is about feelings that will not disperse, no matter how you try to explain them away’ (88). Revisionists wanted to ‘debunk as much as possible of the nationalist version of history’, maintains Waters, simply because ‘the continuing consequences of our history made them feel bad’ (88). For Waters, truth is a feeling that must be recovered mnemonically from within:
The guilt, pain, anger, fear and self-hatred which deeply infect society in the Republic, provided also the motivations of revisionists seeking to explain away their own pained experience and get on with living in the present. Revisionism is a form of forgetting. But our history lives within us. I do not mean metaphorically. Somewhere inside all Irish bodies is the pain of our history. If we could feel that pain, we would know the truth in a manner beyond versions or words. The only facts we really need is [sic] that the pain exists, and that there is a reason for it. We are the products of history, socially, politically, morally, psychologically. So a historiography that denies the validity of our feelings is not wholly trustworthy. (89)[28]In the last sentence of this quotation, Waters is making an argument similar to that previously advanced by Brendan Bradshaw in his pivotal anti-revisionist essay, ‘Nationalism and historical scholarship in modern Ireland’. Bradshaw criticizes the reliance of the supposedly ‘value-free’ school of historians on ‘a number of interpretative strategies which have the effect of filtering out the trauma’ (338; my italics). According to Bradshaw, whereas ‘the communal memory retains a keen sense of the tragic dimension of the national history’, revisionist historians have sought ‘to remove the pain…’ (341).[29] He argues that historians instead should display ‘empathy’ and ‘imagination’ when dealing with ‘the catastrophic dimension of Irish history’ (350).
‘Walking in certain areas in Ireland, there is an ache that is not part of consciousness. I cannot walk in some graveyards in this country, or in some parts of the country, without feeling this kind of liquid sense of being absolutely lost. And then of anger. And this aching for a people I don’t personally know, but whom I feel in my bones somehow. And that’s what I paint…What I’m talking about is being born with a sense of abuse. But a sense of being abused historically.’ [Graham]Graham’s testimony and Waters’s commentary are akin to Sinéad O’Connor’s description in ‘Famine’ of the nation-child who still ‘feels all the painful feelings’, but has lost ‘contact with the memory’. This prioritization of feeling reinforces Terry Eagleton’s claim that although nationalism is ‘a complex, contradictory social phenomenon, by no means reducible to the verities of the heart…it is the kind of politics for which, as with feminism, feeling bulks remarkably large’ (1998, 84).[31] According to Eagleton, the ‘cult of feeling in the eighteenth century was certainly to issue in one dissident movement in the subsequent century, that of nationalism’ (84). Which feelings, then, are most strongly evoked by nationalism? According to the editors of the volume Nationalisms and Sexualities, wherever ‘the power of the nation is invoked…we are more likely than not to find it couched as a love of country: an eroticized nationalism’ (Parker et al 1). However, the song ‘Famine’ and the quotations from Waters and Graham suggest that under certain historical circumstances pathos may be just as important as eros.[32] For example, the ‘young girl’ with ‘the walk of a queen’ is only described at the end of Yeats’s Cathleen Ni Houlihan, but the stage has been dominated by her principal avatar, the piteous Poor Old Woman, who grieves for her losses, and who ‘never set out the bed’ for any of her lovers (Deane, II, 602, 600).[33] In the feeling tones of Irish nationalism, pathos is usually filial, inspiring empathy with the mourning mother, but as Plunkett, Trevor, and O’Connor demonstrate, it can also be parental, inspiring empathy with the damaged child. Such pathos provides a style: as Benedict Anderson notes, communities ‘are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined’ (6).[34] It also modulates particular narrative forms: as Luke Gibbons notes, memory involves ‘not just a matter of retention or recollection but of finding the narrative forms that will do justice to this troubled inheritance [Irish history] without sanitising it, but also without succumbing to it’ (1997, 269).What he [Graham] was saying is that there is such a thing as societal feelings, societal pain, societal hurt, and that these feelings have an integrity of their own. He was also saying that we are stuck with our history, that we cannot escape it no matter how hard we try, and that sooner or later we must face the truth of it. (89)[30]
Mícheál O’Hehir’s voice is perhaps the last evocation truly capable of protecting those ‘pre-modern’ decades from the strange false memory syndrome afflicting social and political analysis in Ireland. His voice transcended history, fiction and propaganda, because it was full of life.We are blessed that it remains on tape for us to hear again, a truth capsule to use as an antidote to the cultural disinformation with which we are besieged. It is not what he said that matters, but the way he said it, which evokes in us all a truthful memory of what it was really like at the time.
That voice may remain the most useful commentary on those years because it was not possible to hear it and remember those times for anything other than what they were: less prosperous, certainly, less enlightened, possibly, but kinder, more ethical and far less brutalising than the age in which we now live. (1997c, 16; my italics)[35] Here, the language of FMS is utilized to support an inverted form of the RMT thesis, in which for once the past is better than the present. In this same article, Waters also shows how he envisions the difference between ‘truth’ and ‘facts’. He acknowledges that the labeling of what was known in neutral Ireland as ‘the Emergency’ (1939-45) ‘as a black and white existence in which the generality of people were lorded over by political and religious leaders’, of the Lemass era as ‘a time of prosperity and abandon’, and the FitzGerald years as ‘more enlightened than those that followed’ may ‘have a certain academic truth’ (1997c, 16). However, he claims that this ‘truth’ will be ‘unconnected to the meaning of such times for mere citizens, for whom the truth is vested in things like family, relationships, a stretch of road or street, a football pitch, a chip shop, a dancehall, a pub’ (16).
‘…[I]n conditions of acute stress’…the experience of the body politic ‘comes to be lived as part of the individual memory of each citizen, and its defeats resented as failures that touch them. One result of such personalization is that people will regard their nation—that is, themselves—as a single body in a more than metaphorical sense.’ [Hroch] This blurring of the boundaries between the personal and the political, inscribing the physicality of the body in public space, may not be at all to the detriment of feminist politics, or at least that project which calls for an entire transformation of the public sphere to allow women to participate in it as ‘real women’.This quotation from Hroch suggests that, despite citing Bakhtin, Gibbons is still drawn to the concept of a national ‘psyche’.[38] This can be seen not only in the above quotation, but also in the opening sentence of his book’s first chapter: ‘Ireland is a First World country, but with a Third World memory’ (3). In this deceptively simple sentence is encoded the child-nation motif: threaded through Transformations in Irish Culture is the implicit narrative that the Third World child Ireland has grown up into a First World adult, that its memories of Third World experiences have been repressed, and that they can only be recovered through the analysis of vernacular, popular, collective social practices.…The figuration of Ireland as a woman intensified under a system of cultural apartheid in which the entire native population, both male and female, shared the condition of women in the metropolitan centre. In these circumstances, the recourse to female imagery in poetry and popular protest turns the colonial stereotype against itself, positing an alternative ‘feminized’ public sphere (imagined as the nation) against the official patriarchal order of the state. (21)