Irish Literature as Colonial Literature: Exploring Narratives of Transnational Identity
Much of Twentieth Century Irish Literature has to be understood as part of a colonial / postcolonial cultural context. This essay attempts to explore that idea.
Opening – Oppositions Create Cultures
In many cases, it’s only when a group of people have a common enemy to unite against that they begin to see themselves as having a common identity. African-Americans, Asian-Americans, and Native (Indigenous) American. had no unifying sense of identity until Euro-Americans started treating them as homogenous categories of people. A similar experience is true of the multitudes in Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East. Their respective legacies of rebellion and self-assertion in the face of oppression have left world literature with a wealth of material generally called “postcolonial literature”.
This constellation of non-western nationalisms is characterised by a blending of European methods – such as the Romance languages – with non-European subject matter, making their literature both specific to their nation, yet also connected to the external force that shaped them. Every culture forms their own identity through a mixture of endogenous and exogenous elements. When those exogenous elements come from a coloniser, it presents complexities for the forging process.
The same could be said of Irish nationalism. Being partly unique in having been effectively colonised by a nation (Britain) extremely close in physical proximity to it, Ireland developed a culture and social imaginary (1) which was at once its own, and also defined largely in its relation to Britain; its customs, government, and especially its language.
It’s thus ironic that authors such as James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, Iris Murdoch, Oscar Wilde, and Bram Stoker receive adulations as some of the finest writers in the English language – the tongue and script of Ireland’s imperial masters which many wars of liberation were waged against.
As with all cultures, there exists the impossibility of “recovering” an authentically Irish culture as there never was such a thing to begin with, though many Irish artists have tried, even writing in Irish and reconstructing ancient myths. Even the adoption of the nation-state model and parliamentary government is partially a British import, adapted to Irish needs.
Black American writers are often faced with a similar dilemma, having to carve out a non-colonised sense of self using the coloniser’s language, as the original language of one’s people has long since been lost or fallen into disuse.
However, this is not to say a one-to-one comparison between the Irish postcolonial narrative and those of other colonised peoples is just.
Both the Irish and African populations were victims of transatlantic slavery, (2) but the legacy of slavery does not impact on the contemporary Irish in any way remotely akin to the impact it has on the psychology, cultures, and economic status of contemporary Africans or African-Americans.
As Franz Fanon and other black theorists have claimed, the feelings of imposed inferiority linger in the African diaspora in ways that are often covert, and leave lasting scars on black people’s collective psychology; combined with the socio-economic disadvantages they and other non-white people face due to a history of European imperialism. (3) Struggles against ingrained inferiority are a common trope in first-person narratives within decolonial fiction.
The convenient advantage of being physically similar to (other) Europeans (4), speaking the same language as a global cultural-economic superpower, and gaining political independence and entering the world market at an opportune moment in planetary history makes Ireland distinct from other nations and peoples historically subjected to colonisation. The spread of Irish culture through migration around the world has also given Irish identity a cultural clout that black, indigenous American, or African-continental peoples do not have.
So while Irish and other postcolonial literary traditions are not directly comparable – and they certainly aren’t given the Irish people’s position of relative privilege on the world stage – I still hope to be able to tease out in this essay. elements in authors such as James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, and a few others which reflect the commonalities of broader colonial fiction. The principle focus, as follows, will mostly be on James Joyce, as evocative of most of the traits described, but with intervals focused on Elizabeth Bowen and other writers who display facets of Irish literary colonialism not found, or only alluded to, in Joyce’s corpus.
Throughout, I’ll be taking the general position of a social anarchist, opposed to the concept of national borders and ethno-national chauvinism on both ideological and practical grounds – combined with the methodology of decolonialism. Neither of these are currently widespread analytic methods for studying aesthetics, but are becoming more popular as more entries in the respective schools are published (5)
The Social Anarchist and Decolonial Approach to Literary Nationhood
Before getting into the meat of this analysis, it’s necessary to explain clearly what’s meant by a social anarchist and decolonial approach to the study of literature.
To tackle social anarchist first, far from being synonymous with chaos or disorder, social anarchism as a praxis is merely a way of interpreting the world through an anti-authoritarian and pro-egalitarian lens. (6) This becomes more apparent when one considers the etymology of the word an-archy, which means “without rulership”, not “without rules” as most think.
So a social anarchist reading of a work simply entails teasing out its explicit or implicit hierarchies – of class, nation, race, gender, sexuality, etc – and subjecting them to critical scrutiny from the point-of-view of a non-hierarchical and liberatory ethics. (7)
Secondly, decolonialism is a recent development in scholarship – blending postcolonial, critical race studies, and indigenous studies – which attempts to dissolve the colonial underpinnings of cultural discourse while also trying to recover and rebuild a new sense of subjectivity for colonised people, combining elements of their unique ethnic heritage with a more universal humanity. (8) This was particularly salient, for example, of the Anglo-Irish literary revival, where writers and poets such as W.B. Yeats and Augusta Gregory attempted to craft a new English-language narrative of Irishness based on the fragments of the past and the aesthetic tools of the present. (9)
It’s through the use of these two hermeneutics that I hope to examine colonialism as it applies to Irish literature.
While reading contemporary works of Irish fiction from authors such as Roddy Doyle or Joseph O’Connor may present a literary narrative of Irishness which paints Irish identity as something concrete and almost eternal, a social anarchist lens and some historical context de-centres this image.
Take the image of the Irish nation-state as a starting point.
The nation-state is in fact a far more recent development in human history than conventional wisdom would lead one to believe. As late as the 1700s in France for example, many residents of the Kingdom apparently did not even know they were French, and spoke any number of local patois rather than a unified dialect of the French language. They felt more of a relation to their town, commune, or province than they did to “France” as a nation.
The same is true of the island of Ireland. Prior to British conquest, the Isle was divided into various distinct “Tuath” without much in the way of a centralised government. Celtic nationalism, in which Irishness became contrasted with (and in contradiction with) Britishness, is in fact fairly new, arising with many other nationalisms and republican ideologies in the 18th century.
In light of this knowledge of the basic artificiality of nation-States as constructs, anarchist Rudolf Rocker is of the view that artists, including writers, ought to be examined as being “of their time, not of their place”. (10) Period, not location, is a far bigger factor in defining an artist’s sensibility than their geographical location. So in a rough way, should we consider someone such as Joyce more illustrative of early 20th century literature than Irish literature specifically?
Every national culture is comprised of elements from many other nationalities. Such a preeminently German painter like Albrecht Dürer was, according to Rocker, far more inspired by Italian painters of his own time rather than painters (past or present) from his own land. This diversity of influences was the reason Rocker was keen to stress the international nature of the arts, as well as his extremely negative view of nation-states as reactionary and authoritarian institutions which would better be replaced with confederations of self-governing “communes” (municipalities, small towns, and rural parishes).
Though the concept of the nation can also be made to serve a liberatory purpose as well. Many indigenous Americans for example use the term “nation” to refer to their pre-Colombian tribal affiliation, claiming for themselves a unique collective identity apart from that of the colonial-settler state that lives on top of them. This is part of the decolonial method of reclaiming “western” concepts like nationhood for post-western ends.
Rocker’s own perspective ought to be viewed in light of its time: the rise of fascism and the ascendancy of a new kind of hyper-nationalism linked to overt race hatred and xenophobia. It’s not inconsistent, therefore, that the nationalisms of oppressed and colonised peoples should be viewed differently than the nationalisms of imperial and coloniser states – which have been used historically to justify fascistic and imperialistic practices.
So using the term nationalism very broadly, to imply a concern with nationhood rather than national chauvinism, in what way could James Joyce be said to present an anarchistic form of Irish nationhood in his prose?
Joyce – Part 1
James Joyce is probably the most famous Irish writer of all, with the exception perhaps of Oscar Wilde, many of whom don’t even realise was from Ireland, and if not the most famous then certainly the most renowned.
While his bibliography on the surface may look quite brief – just three novels, a collection of short stories, one play, and a few poems – the novels and short stories, collected in Dubliners, have had an impact on the literary landscape like no other writer before or since.
Throughout Joyce’s oeuvre, we find the best embodiment of the aesthetic features lauded by the decolonial tradition: work that is simultaneously very specific to its place and time, and yet also expressive of an international and universal sensibility. Joyce is at once an Irish “nationalist”, in the broadest sense of the word, and also a humanist internationalist.
While Joyce’s personal politics were in fact quite close to social anarchism and syndicalism, (11) they only come out through his work in a nebulous and understated fashion. In his novels and stories, anarchistic politics are present only in the form of a general anti-authoritarian “squint” than overt advocacy of a non-hierarchical and directly-democratic social order.
In Dubliners, this emerges through his critical view of women’s limited and unfulfilling roles within Irish society in stories like Araby and Eveline, in smug and superior middle-class attitudes through The Dead (especially as embodied in the character Gabriel), in the intersecting problems of working-class lack of aspiration and the violent patriarchal family in Counterparts, and in socially suffocating gender roles in The Boarding House.
All of the above are freedom-restricting hierarchies which the social anarchist tradition seeks to identify, critique, and eventually dismantle. Though while Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man do the job of identifying and critiquing hierarchical social relations, they don’t really offer any kind of vision of how things could be any different. Though this seems to be deliberate on Joyce’s part, as he appears to want his readership to come to their own conclusions about what to do about these negative aspects of the Irish societal milieu. Joyce gives us the ingredients, but asks us to bake the cake.
One hierarchy that sticks out in particular, especially in his semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, is the relation between the twinned ideological power of the Catholic religion and Irish nationhood on the identity-formation of our young protagonist Stephen Daedalus. Stephen’s developing psyche is set apart from his peer and superiors and prefigures a new kind of post-religious and internationalist conception of Irish nationhood, demonstrating through his many emotional trials the inevitable but necessary pain that was likely to come from transitioning from an Ireland rooted in Catholic conservatism and British colonialism to one founded on secularism and, hopefully, social justice. This was a theme explored more fully when we meet up with Stephen a few years later. (12)
Before delving into that topic, covered extensively in Joyce’s Ulysses, it may be enlightening to first cover an important aspect of Irish literary colonialism which Joyce doesn’t tackle extensively: the Anglo-Irish experience of being between the identities of coloniser and colonised. It is however tackled in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September.
Elizabeth Bowen – The Last September
Colonial-settler narratives are usually concerned with the psychologies and experiences of white people in lands originally populated by people of colour. So to put a story such as Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September under the same rubric may at first seem counterintuitive. However, when one considers the unique forms of socialisation the Anglo-Irish gentry underwent – being not quite Irish, and not quite English – as well as their relation to the rest of the Irish population, it makes sense to consider such stories as part of the same tradition as novels like Kim by Rudyard Kipling (India), or Empire of the Sun by J.G. Ballard (China under Japanese occupation).
What makes plots like Lois Farquar and the Naylor’s special in relation to the above is that the Anglo-Irish gentry at once seemed so similar to the “native” Irish, but we’re separated by a great many cultural abysses.
First of all religion, being Anglican rather than Catholic, class, being landed ruling-class rather than working-class heritage, having aristocratic bloodlines, and even accent, growing up so isolated from the Irish majority that speech-patterns were closer to. English Received Pronounciation than those of whatever county they grew up in.
As social anarchist Eliseé Reclus claimed, in his study of social-ecological evolution. “the rich may change countries but they don’t change surroundings” (13). In other words, Lois and her family’s allegiance could ultimately be seen as that of the transnational ruling class rather than any particular country. Though that doesn’t stop them from having identity crises as the Irish War of Independence rages around their plantation in County Cork.
The novel is replete with images of British colonialism and the colonial mentality. The first chapter describes the home as being filled with Indian and Oriental artefacts gained via British conquest, and the imperialist mentality is embodied in Lois’s love interest, the British solider Gerald, who flat-out declares “looking back in history … we do seem the only people” and derides the native Irish as “beggars”.
The only character in Joyce who seems to go through anything like Lois Farquar is Gabriel in The Dead, who is at one point jokingly derided as a “West Briton” by a relative for writing for a British newspaper instead of an Irish one.
Yet states of being between worlds hover over the entire narrative, with Lois’s inability to make up her romantic mind in choosing between two men, and her family’s inability to make up their political minds with regard to Ireland and Britain being the microcosms and macrocosms of each other. In both cases, the characters wind up in a condition of “analysis paralysis”, unable to fully commit to either yet not being able to escape the burden of the choice itself.
In the face of this double-bind of being caught between two worlds, Lois and the Naylors find themselves unable to “pick a side” and can only find some sense of release in detachment from the dilemma itself.
Bowen’s story is an interesting snapshot of what was then a dying aspect of Irish colonial culture, and is valuable for that reason, though the author ultimately fails to evoke a sense of common humanity away from the conservative particulars of her class and imperialistic nationhood.
Not so in Joyce.
Joyce – Part 2
Joyce described Ulysses as a narrative of two great cultures “the Irish and the Israeli (Jewish)”.
Negative attitudes towards Jewish people were not only common, but widespread in Europe leading up to World War II and the Nazi holocaust (Shoah in Hebrew). Even such a luminous and politically progressive literary figure as George Orwell expressed arguably racist views towards Jews in Down and Out in Paris and London. T.S. Elliot’s poetry is rife with anti-Jewish sentiments.
In weaving this story of a younger man – from an Irish Catholic background – with a tendency to overthink everything, and an older man with a more relaxed, even Zen-like, aura of contentment – from a Jewish/Protestant background, Joyce gives us a story that is both international and intergenerational. Stephen Daedalus finding a sort of spiritual fatherhood in Leopold Bloom can be read, in a decolonial way, as embodying a dialogue between a new kind of nationhood in the process of being born (postcolonial Ireland) and an older nationhood which had known so much pain but learned so much in the process (the assimilated Jewish diaspora).
In anarchist terms, Ulysses breaks down not only the social hierarchies of religion, race, nationality, class, and gender (especially in the final Penelope chapter, displaying female sexual desire as empowering and positive), but hierarchies of literary form such as traditional plot structure, theme, having a single overarching style, and just about every other literary convention which preceded Modernism (14)
The stream-of-consciousness technique – a hallmark of Joyce’s Modernist tradition – helps us, the readers, get inside the heads of many diverse characters to examine and reflect upon their own unique conception of the world. From the discussions on Irish nationalism, to the depictions of anti-Jewish bigotry, to Stephen’s sexual fantasies, to the drunken fantasies of the protagonists drawing upon intertextuality and myth, the Irish colonial social imaginary is toyed with so as to break it apart and reconstruct it upon non-hierarchical lines.
All the monologues have one special thing in common: by accessing private thought processes, they put us in touch with each other. Ironically, by taking an extreme individual focus, Joyce allows us to feel a greater sense of collectivity. The empathy we are made to feel for each character’s situation (and worldview) enables the reader to experience a shared commonality or humanitas.
As anarchist theorists like Paul Goodman point out, any literature which breaks down hierarchies between people(s), allows us to see each other as equals, and creates a feeling of free cooperation on the basis of mutual aid can be regarded as a triumph. (15)
Conclusion
As expressed above, while the Irish colonial experience is not entirely comparable with the experiences of colonised people of colour – due to the Irish position of relative privilege as white English-speakers, among other reasons – they can be said to be of the same cultural category and the literature across that that tradition bears a number of significant traits in common: feelings of cultural inferiority, nationhood growing in response to being treated as a homogenous group by the coloniser, and of course the hybrid identity that comes from only being able to live one’s pre-colonial culture through the lens of the coloniser, especially when it comes to language. (16)
Taking a social anarchist and decolonial look at the fiction of James Joyce and Elizabeth Bowen reveals them to have explored fascinating structures of social hierarchy and domination in their literary works, as well as the social imaginary of a country trying to find itself in terms of its relation to itself and to the coloniser culture which defined it for so long. Irish nationhood and the valorisation of Irishness against Britishness has been a defining trait of Irish literature ever since the early twentieth century. Though the nationalist impulse often takes on more reactionary and authoritarian forms than Joyce, or even the conservative Bowen, would have been comfortable with.
While it is natural, even inevitable, to feel a sense of belonging and communality in one’s birthplace, it becomes a danger when that birthplace is venerated above others. This is especially the case with countries that have imperial histories like Britain, Germany, France, and now the United States. However, when it comes to countries and peoples with the opposite kind of history – being victims of imperialism – this same feeling of belonging becomes a recovered sense of collective selfhood which the conquerer tries to stamp out as inferior. What is hierarchical and chauvinistic in one context can become anti-hierarchical and liberatory in another.
In the form of literature and other forms of aesthetic culture, it becomes a powerful form of self-assertion and autonomy in response to forced assimilation into another’s culture. Works like Joyce’s and Bowen’s therefore remain essential for any people created a renewed sense of collective identity.
Anti-Apartheid activist Steve Biko once said, “the most potent weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed”. While works of fiction are only a small part of shaking off this control of the mind, they are a vital part.
Notes and References
1. Social imaginary here refers to the shared consciousness and conceptions of the world unique to a given set of people. This is sense in which Cornelius Castoriadis used it. See his The Imaginary Institution of Society for a full elaboration.
2. It’s a little known fact that thousands of Irish people were victims of British transatlantic slavery in the 1600s. See here http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-irish-slave-trade-the-forgotten-white-slaves/31076
3. Though interestingly, this wasn’t always the case. Race was a far more fluid and incoherent concept until the late 19th century. When the concept of the White Race was first devised, it specifically included only those from European Protestant countries. It excluded Catholics such as Poles, Italians, and the Irish. The Irish and others only began to be considered white in the 19th century and were looked upon as being in the same league with black people before then. Caricatures of people from Ireland in British satirical magazines like Punch frequently too the same racist forms as caricatures of Africans: as violent and rowdy apes and monkeys. See Noel Ignatiev’s. How the Irish Became White for more information.
4. Fanon, Franz – Black Skin, White Masks, Grove Press, 1952
5. For a general introduction to anarchism as a subject, see http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/Anarchism
6. What most think of as “anarchy” (rulerlessness) would more accurately be described as “anomie” (orderlessness). Anarchism, in the specific sense anarchists use the term, implies non-hierarchical and cooperative order, rather than the absence of order – which, in fact, they view as leading to “archy” (rulership) due to a lack of structures which prevent individuals and groups from gaining hierarchical power over others.
7. For two excellent recent works which address literature and arts from a social anarchist perspective, see Jesse Cohn’s Anarchism and the Crisis of Representation, and Neala Schleuning’s Artpolitik: Social Anarchist Aesthetics in an Age of Fragmentation.
8. Decolonialism and decolonisation can be considered umbrella terms for postcolonialism, its associated theory and literature, and the broader discourses and practices of anti-colonial activism. The term has become especially prominent in recent struggles of indigenous peoples from North America, or Turtle Island as its reclaimed in decolonial discourse.
9. Gordon, Uri – Anarchism and Multiculturalism, http://news.infoshop.org/opinion/anarchism-and-multiculturalism
10. Rocker, Rudolf – Nationalism and Culture; (electronic edition on Libcom.org), 1937, https://libcom.org/library/nationalism-culture-rudolf-rocker
11. Jeff Shantz makes an interesting case for Joyce as a literary anarchist and political syndicalist in his Anarchism and the Literary Imagination (2014). A similar case is made for Albert Camus (another colonial writer from French Algeria), who overtly recommended syndicalism – an offshoot of anarchism focused on trade union organisation – is his nonfiction work The Rebel.
12. Kiberd, Declan – Ulysses and Us; W. W. Norton & Company, 2009
13. Reclus, Élisée – Anarchy, Geography, Modernity: Selected Writings of Élisée Reclus; PM Press, 2013
14. Eagleton, Terry – Ideology of the Aesthetic, Routledge, 1990
15. Murphy, Elliot – Unmaking Merlin: Anarchist Tendencies in English Literature; Zero Books, 2014
16. Goodman, Paul – Drawing the Line Once Again; PM Press, 2012
17. Boal, Augusto – Theatre of the Oppressed, Pluto Press, 1993