Gerald Dawe

The Sound of the Shuttle


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however, entire tracks of historical and contemporary experience that are of vital significance in Ireland today – ‘loyalty’ and the question of ‘belonging’, such as that considered in Thomas Kilroy’s play Double Cross, or the force field of community and the individual’s own complicated place within it which John McGahern has explored to such telling effect in, for example, High Ground – to say nothing about the explosion of women’s writing in Ireland in recent times.

      These are issues that come readily to my own mind since I have an abiding interest in them as a writer, but they underpin the present and are bound to have serious implications for the kind of literature (and politics) that many want to see taking over from the current conventions and official dogmas. I think this is the point behind Seamus Deane’s close reading of Across a Roaring Hill when, in singling out Bridget O’Toole’s essay on Jennifer Johnston, Elizabeth Bowen and Molly Keane, he writes:

      a sentence from Elizabeth Bowen ... might have been this volume’s epigraph and ... has its application, economic and cultural, for Protestants and Catholics: ‘We have everything to dread from the dispossessed’. It is in dispossession that the hurt, Protestant and Catholic, lies.

      Material deprivation and cultural dispossession are indeed fundamental ‘themes’, since they are the common inheritance of so many Irish men and women. It would be a shame if this fact was lost sight of and turned, on the lathe of dogma, into an obligatory truth from which those who actually live it out can find no real imaginative release or critical yet sympathetic distance. As Terence Brown eloquently put it in his Field Day pamphlet, The Whole Protestant Community: The Making of a Historical Myth:

      A people who have known resistance as well as dissent, rebellion, dispute, religious enthusiasm in the midst of rural and urban deprivation, have an interesting story to tell themselves – one of essential homelessness, dependency, anxiety, obdurate fantasising, sacrifices in the name of liberty, villainous political opportunism, moments of idealistic aspiration. And in the telling of it they may come to realise at last where they are most at home and with whom they share that home.

      The colloquial ‘Tell us a story’ goes far beyond a child’s need for reassurance – it opens out the ground of imaginative possibility as well. What we are seeing in Ireland today is a clash between the traditional ways of perceiving these possibilities and the need to bypass the politics which stunts them. The writer is caught – appropriately enough – in the middle.

      1986

      Armies of the Night

      I

      When Mrs Thatcher, the then prime minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, met two Irish clerics, Cardinal Ó Fiaich and Bishop James Lennon, on 1 July 1981 at Downing Street, she was, according to David Beresford,

      waiting for them at the top of the stairs, on the first-floor landing, and gushed a welcome … They started with the usual pleasantries, but quickly moved onto the prison issue.

      ‘Will someone please tell me why they are on hunger strike?’ asked the Prime Minister. ‘I have asked so many people. Is it to prove their virility?’

      Two months earlier, following the death of Bobby Sands, Francis Hughes had died on hunger strike, and in the month of August Tom McIlwee was also to die. Hughes and McIlwee were cousins, in their mid-twenties, born within a year of each other (1956 and 1957), from Bellaghy, County Derry. They were buried together, ‘in a new section of the cemetery at St. Mary’s Church’:

      Their tombstone is inscribed in Irish which Tom – battling to learn the language even as he was dying – would have particularly appreciated. And Frank would have liked the wording: ‘Among the warriors of the Gael may his soul rest’.

      David Beresford’s Ten Men Dead is full of such chilling contrasts. How is it possible, one asks, for two islands so physically, economically, culturally and socially close as Britain and Ireland, to be so grotesquely divided. History and language?

      In his collection of essays, Less Than One, Joseph Brodsky often returns to the inextricable mesh of expression and experience. Discussing Andrei Platonov, he sees the Russian novelist as ‘a millenarian writer if only because he attacks the very carrier of millenarian sensibility in Russian society: the language itself – or, to put it in a more graspable fashion, the revolutionary eschatology embedded in the language’. Brodsky goes on to define the roots of Russian millenarianism in the following terms:

      On the mental horizon of every millenarian movement there is always a version of a New Jerusalem, the proximity to which is determined by the intensity of sentiment. The idea of God’s city being within reach is in direct proportion to the religious fervour in which the entire journey originates. The variations on this theme include also a change of the entire world order, and a vague, but all the more appealing because of that, notion of a new time, in terms of both chronology and quality. (Naturally, transgressions committed in the name of getting to a New Jerusalem fast are justified by the beauty of the destination.) When such a movement succeeds, it results in a new creed. If it fails, then, with the passage of time and the spread of literacy, it degenerates into utopias, to peter out completely in the dry sands of political science and the pages of science fiction. However, there are several things that may somewhat rekindle soot-covered embers. It’s either severe oppression of the population, a real, most likely military peril, a sweeping epidemic, or some substantial chronological event, like the end of a millennium or the beginning of a new century.

      Somewhat later in the same essay, ‘Catastrophes in the Air’, Brodsky remarks that the

      first casualty of any discourse about utopia – desired or attained – is grammar; for language, unable to keep with this line of thought, begins to gasp in the subjunctive mood and starts to gravitate toward categories and constructions of a rather timeless denomination. As a consequence of this, the ground starts to slip out from under even the simplest nouns, and they gradually get enveloped in an aura of arbitrariness.

      Platonov, according to Brodsky, ‘was able to reveal a self-destructive eschatological element within the language itself, and that, in turn, was of extremely revealing consequences to the revolutionary eschatology with which history supplied him as the subject matter’.

      The image of Platonov which Brodsky presents, in contrast to Kafka, Joyce or Beckett, ‘who narrate quite natural tragedies of their alter egos’, itself verges on the apocalyptic:

      Platonov speaks of a nation which in a sense has become the victim of its own language ... he tells a story about this very language, which turns out to be capable of generating a fictitious world, and then falls into grammatical dependence on it.

      The ten Republican paramilitaries who died on hunger strike in 1981 were mostly from old country families. Three were Belfast men and one was from Derry city. The oldest of them was born in 1951 and the youngest in 1957. With remission, nine of the ten would have been out of Long Kesh in 1987. Ten Men Dead moves with close and careful reconstruction through the awful months when the prisoners inside the prison fought off attempts at ‘criminalisation’. ‘Instead of pulling out, Britain dug in even deeper, reimposing direct rule after a brief experiment in power-sharing and devising the three-prong strategy: Ulsterisation, normalisation and criminalisation – which found one form of physical expression in the building of the H-Blocks.’ The criminalisation policy, according to Beresford, sought to deny

      a belief held dear by Republican Ireland – that husbands, wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, parents, grandparents and great-grandparents who had suffered and died for Irish independence had done so in the high cause of patriotism.

      As Terence MacSwiney, Lord Mayor of Cork, had put it in his inaugural speech (1920): ‘the contest on our side is not one of rivalry or vengeance, but of endurance. It is not those who can inflict the most, but those that can suffer the most who will conquer.’ And, in an essay, MacSwiney hailed ‘the day when the consciousness of the country will be electrified with a great deed or a great sacrifice and the multitude will break from lethargy or prejudice and march with a shout for freedom a true, a brave and a beautiful sense’.

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