things is child’s play – political errors, adultery, murder, anti-Semitism – but who forgives, who understands the little things?’ Sticking to a vigorous and exacting sense of what one knows and experiences assumes a kind of austere radicalism but, as so often happens with personal experience, when it becomes representative through the prism of literature, it can slide imperceptibly from being treated objectively towards being seen as picturesque and – in due course – imperilled by easy nostalgia.
To give an extreme example of this process: the dwindling battalions of bowler-hatted Orangemen on 12 July are first seen strictly in their native setting but, once they are taken out of that context, they are invariably considered as quaint remnants of a formidably decayed tradition, which are then held up, no longer to ridicule, but to a patronising curiosity. The fate of the theme park. The danger in all this, and one to which I trust Across a Roaring Hill was keenly alert, is suggested most cogently by Salman Rushdie in his essay ‘Outside the Whale’ (1984):
there can be little doubt that in Britain today, the refurbishment of the Empire’s tarnished image is under way. The continuing decline, the growing poverty, and the meanness of spirit of much of Thatcherite Britain, encourages many Britons to turn their eyes nostalgically to the lost hour of their precedence.
It is, of course, the Protestants of ‘Northern Ireland’, ‘Ulster’, ‘the North’ and the ‘Six Counties’, who are so visibly trapped in the ‘lost hour of their precedence’, while unemployment grows under the Tory ministers who directly rule the North. This is, then, the immediate social world that Across a Roaring Hill came out of and, ironically, returned to when it was launched in Belfast at the International Association for the Study of Anglo-Irish Literature conference of 1985, which included a trip to Stormont – the delegates being greeted by a Yeatsian anecdote from the then Deputy Secretary of State, Rhodes Boyson.
Given such meshing of literature, culture and politics, it is hardly surprising that, as Brian Friel remarked, ‘everything is immediately perceived as political and the artist is burdened instantly with politicisation’. How to deal with politicisation is a question for the individual artist, but what kind of politics? is something we could all do with questioning. The trouble is that very often these two distinct, if not separate, issues get mixed up. For instance, in an insightful discussion of the Field Day Company, Joseph McMinn interprets the various critical responses to it as ‘concealed political objections’ to their ‘dissemination of nationalist views of culture’: ‘Arguing for an apolitical analysis of Irish culture which will be sensible, moderate, rational, unemotional, dispassionate, is to take up a political position without naming it. It is an extension of unionist political values into the cultural area.’
It is unclear precisely who is arguing for an apolitical analysis of Irish culture but of all the Heinz varieties of unionism, I have not met one that fits the bill here – sensible, moderate, detached and so on. The only political values that unionism has expressed are immoderation and an entrenched inability to be detached in any sense. (Nor, it should be said, is this the sole prerogative of unionism, as anyone will know who witnessed the moral debates in the Republic of Ireland on abortion and divorce.)
Confronting the historical impasse which a region called ‘the North’ is in, where unionism, whether it is liked or not, is the political voice of a substantial majority of the people who live there (and who do not want, and will probably violently resist, belonging to a nation called ‘Ireland’), there is an obvious imaginative and critical need to explore the experience of this people, their reasons for seeing life as they do and of placing this in the wider context (political, cultural and literary) of the whole country. In other words, to probe and possibly restore the shattered bonds of ‘region’ and ‘nation’ at an imaginative level which defines them both, bearing in mind the fact that the so-called question of ‘the North’ has no reality in isolation but is a part of, and a major critical influence upon, the ‘Irish/British’ question. It would be ironic, though, if such an aspiration was interpreted politically as propping up unionism, although what point there would be in such an exercise I cannot for the life of me imagine.
Considering this relationship of ‘region’ to be an acknowledgement of diversity and difference within the ambit of ‘nation’, Seamus Deane, in his Irish Times review of Across a Roaring Hill, wrote:
Ireland must give its deference to difference and defer its ‘unitary’ ambitions. I find this interesting, but would like to have it identified more precisely. Is it a defence of Unionism cast in cultural terms? Or is it a plea for the recognition of a diversity which is in danger of being ignored?
The answer is an emphatic Yes to the second question, as everyone engaged in these issues of ‘region’ and ‘nation’ must surely accept and support, or else we lurch towards some covert or doctrinaire concept of authoritarian statehood. But against this reason, Enoch Powell, in his review of the book in The Times (15 August 1985), saw Across a Roaring Hill as one in a line of work ‘much petted and encouraged by those, in Great Britain and elsewhere, who want to bully the Northern Ireland electorate out of their settled conviction to remain within the United Kingdom’. Rather than being a putative defence of unionism, the book is seen as attacking it.
One can see at this stage where the burden of politicisation, of which Brian Friel speaks, slides into gyres of rhetoric. The complex ways that human feeling is enmeshed with cultural affiliation evaporate and the actual manipulators of political identity (who, after all, control and embody power) get off the hook. What is more, it treats the experience of others (Northern Protestants, in this instance) to a further illustration of the kind of fashionable disdain they have come to expect and denies that very diversity in Irish life which demands recognition, if the relationship between ‘region’ and ‘nation’ is ever going to be unbloody.
To define and elucidate these different kinds of experience and ideas is, I think, an essential obligation if we are ever going to understand adequately the state Ireland is in, never mind realising the one that many of us hope it will become. This is one definite place where the writer has an important role to play, as André Brink suggests, ‘of fighting to assert the most positive and creative aspects of his heritage’. And we should not forget all those who, over the years, to quote Christopher Hitchens, have challenged ‘their own tribes with criticism, opposition and argument from within’. It is important to add here that this imaginative struggle is, as Brink says, also often against those who ‘can afford to clash with authority because they are basically protected by it’.
If there is, as I believe there to be, a world of difference between the experience of Protestant families in the North, their feelings, fears, hopes and ambitions (the stuff one hears so much pious talk about in the Republic) and the political use made of them, then the crucial discrimination must be made and maintained between the two sets of experiences and the various economic, social and cultural bonds that keep them bound together.
If this effort at understanding be dubbed ‘Unionist’, we will have missed another chance to expose the invidious forms of falsehood and violence which oppress people on the small island of Ireland; and have done so because of fashionable intellectual posturing, not out of serious political commitment and work. For it is an effort of knowing the past which requires us, as Peter Gay well knew on the truly horrendous scale of his native Germany, to ‘mobilize historical understanding and to make discriminations [which do] not mean to deny or to prettify what has happened’.
Across a Roaring Hill was just a small part of the process whereby prevailing mythologies and the ways they are, in turn, transformed into art, are opened up and brought into the light of day. It is a first step: exploratory and, within its limits, diverse and speculative. As this process comes under an imaginatively sustained criticism, everything is up for grabs – not just a monolithic ‘Irish’ literary tradition, but the very notion of ‘tradition’ itself, the language used to discuss these things and our working through the inherited ways of seeing them both. This is the truly radical challenge that the present offers; not painting ourselves back into a corner which so often seems to be the case in Ireland.
The relationship between a ‘Protestant’ or ‘Catholic’, ‘nationalist’ or ‘unionist’ experience is only one, if presently dominant, cultural and political