Post-Traditional English Literature: A Polemic (Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing)

THE FIELD DAY ANTHOLOGY

OF IRISH WRITING

VOLUME III

General Editor: Seamus Deane

Associate Editors: Andrew Carpenter, Jonathan Williams

Derry Field Day Publications

Distributed by Faber & Faber Limited

viii CONTENTS

CHALLENGING THE CANON: REVISIONISM AND CULTURAL CRITICISM

LUKE GIBBONS, Faculty of Communications, Dublin City University, Dublin

Introduction 561

I. The Revisionist Turn Sean O'Faolain (1900- )

from: The Bell (1944) 569 T.W. Moody (1907-84)

from: Hermathena (1978) 574 F.S.L. Lyons (1923-83)

The Burden of Our History (1978) 580 Roy Foster (1949- )

from: The Irish Review (1986) 583 Desmond Fennell (1929- )

from: The Irish Review (1988) 586

II. Aspects of Revisionism Father Francis Shaw (1908-70)

from: Studies (1972) 590 Conor Cruise O'Brien (1917- )

Passion and Cunning (1988) 595 Marianne Elliott (1948- )

from: Watchmen in Zion: The Protestant Idea of Liberty ( 1985) 603

Seamus Deane ( 1940- ) from: Celtic Revivals (1985) 608

Terence Brown (1944- ) from: Ireland's Literature: Selected

Essays (1988) 614

III. Tradition and Discontinuity Oliver MacDonagh (1925- )

from: States of Mind: A Study in Anglo-Irish Conflict 1780-1980 (1983) 619

Thomas Kinsella ( 1929- ) from: The Irish Writer (1966) 625

Richard Kearney ( 1954- ) from: Transitions (1987) 630

David Lloyd (1955- ) from: The Irish Review (1988) 634

IV. Culture and Conflict Declan Kiberd ( 1951- )

from: Anglo-Irish Attitudes (1984) 637 Denis Donoghue ( 1928- )

from: We Irish (1986) 642 Edna Longley ( 1940- )

from: Poetry in the Wars (1986) 648

V. Modernization and Modernism Fintan O'Toole (1958- )

from: The Crane Bag (1985) 654 Liam de Paor ( 1926- )

from: The Crane Bag ( 1979) 659 W. J. Mc Cormack (1947- )

from: Ascendancy and Tradition in Anglo-Irish Literary History from 1789 to 1939 ( 1985) 664

Sean Golden (1948- ) from: The Crane Bag (1979) 669

Biographies/Bibliographies 676

CONTENTS lX

CHALLENGING THE CANON: REVISIONISM AND CULTURAL CRITICISM 669

SEAN GOLDEN (1948-

from: THE CRANE BAG (1979)

[In Sean Golden's article, the absence of an.overpowering tradition is again cited as a positive asset, except that in this case it is the distance between Irish writers and the 'great tradition' of English literature which is considered to have brought about the modernist breakthrough in twentieth-century Irish literature. The displacement of creative energies from the metropolitan centre to the periphery was not necessarily an extension of colonial domination, but represented a genuine weakness, a crisis in an English literary tradition collapsing under its own complacency. So far from being an expression of a residual or anachronistic ideology (e.g. traditional nationalism), anti-colonial currents in Irish literature

)

were the cutting edge of modernism. As against the Enlightenment view that cosmopolitanism is a precondition of progress, Golden contends that it is now resistance to absorption by the metropolitan centre that brings peripheral cultures into the modem world.

The article was first published in The Crane Bag, Vol. 3, No. 2.)

POST-TRADITIONAL ENGLISH LITERATURE: A POLEMIC

In his discussion of Hugh Selwyn Mauberly as Ezra Pound'i; epitaph for the English literary tradition, Donald Davie, referring to the poem's 'Envoi' writes that

It is impossible to read this, if one is an Englishman, without real distress. Only

670 FIELD DAY ANTHOLOGY OF IRISH WRITING

Lawrence, in letters written about this time, registers the death of England as a live cultural tradition with such sorrow and with the added poignancy of being English.•

The literary tradition native to England to which I will refer in this essay is Davie's; it is that which many contemporary English writers (e.g. contributors to PN Review) wish to canonize as the only legitimate English literary tradition. Their attempts to rewrite modern literary history are symptomatic of the post-imperial condition of contemporary English culture. They are highbrow Little Englanders. The term 'native', once condescendingly assigned to the colonized, is now clung to and honoured by English writers in their steeply declining present circumstances. There is also, of course, another tradition of English literature, or of literature written in English. This second tradition has come to dominate twentieth-century writing in the English language. Its exponents are colonial or, at least, not English. I would suggest that the inv~ation of the native English tradition, so loudly vmced today, is essentially nostalgic, is an antiModernism disguised as traditionalism and consti~utes a reactionary trend. Nowadays English wnters face the same problems of insular selfdefinition in the face of developed and formerly colonial literatures which English imperialism and cultural oppression formerly imposed on much of the rest of the world.

Thus it is not coincidental that the demise of the native tradition as a live cultural tradition occurs contemporaneously with what literary critics have been calling Modernism, nor that the great Modernist masters do not in fact belong, as natives, to the native tradition. The great prose masters were James Joyce, a native Catholic Irishman, Joseph Conrad, natively Polish, and D. H. Lawrence, a coalminer's son, and if not totally proletarian, certainly non-U, or at least nonBloomsbury. Ford Madox Ford modelled his prose on French masters (John Rodker called The Good Soldier the best French novel in the English language). This pattern holds true in poetry as well. W. B. Yeats was Irish, Pound and T. S. Eliot American. Oscar Wilde, G. B. Shaw, J.M. Synge, and Sean O'Casey were Irish masters of modern

a. Donald Davie, 'Ezra Pound's Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,' The Modem Age, ed. Boris Ford. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1961, p. 326.

'British' drama. Historically, the advent of Modernism as a literary trend characterized by radical formal innovation coincides with the beginning of the end of the British Empire. This i~ not insignificant. The non-English, or formerly colonial, Modernists consistently lacked the vested emotional interest in a native English literary tradition which hamstrung (and hamstrings) native English writers, for that tradition represents fat more than literary conventions or styles, and a vested interest in its conventions and styles reflects a vested interest in its more extensive and pervasive cultural and socioeconomic connotations.

The English literary tradition developed contemporaneously with England's establishment, first of nationhood, then of empire, and is necessarily implicated in the ramifications of this historical process. Non-native literature in the English language developed under different historical circumstances in the colonies, and reflects those facts. Colonials and former colonials had (and have) a different stance, a more detached, objective one, toward the native English tradition than native English writers. With this detached stance comes a different perspective, and freedom in handling the tradition not available to native ·English writers. The .development of twentieth century writing in English and the shift of its creative centres away from England proper to America and the Celtic countries are symptoms of this process.

I will interweave descriptions of the native English tradition and colonial reactions to it in order to develop a portrait of the issue. Stanislaus Joyce indicated what being Irish meant in terms of his brother's art.

In A Portrait of the Artist, Dedalus speaks of a certain disadvantage at which Irish writers find themselves in using the English language. The very slight differences in the shades of meaning which English words may have for Englishmen can give pause, I fancy, only to Irishmen like Yeats or my brother, whose sensibility to words applies extreme tests ... . In Ireland, a country which has seen revolutions in every generation, there is properly speaking no national tradition. Nothing is stable in the country; nothing is stable in the minds of the people. When the Irish writer begins to write, h~ has to creat~ his moral world from chaos by himself, for himself. Yet, though this is an


enormous disadvantage for a host of writers of average talent, it proves to be an enormous advantage for men of original genius, such as Shaw, Yeats or my brother. ... When an English writer - Wells or Galsworthy or Huxley or Aldington - deals with social, religious, or intellectual problems, one has the impression that even though the problems are real and the writer is striving to be sincere, the life that produced him is in general stable and balanced. It has been lived for centuries against a Constable background. And if he poses as an extremist, it is merely a picturesque attitude like Count Tolstoy's donning of his Russian smock-frock, over trousers cut by the most expensive tailor in Petersburg, to play at being a peasant saint. The characters whom these writers create to voice conflicts of opinion are people of ease and culture .... Their brilliant chatter gives the impression of purely academic after-dinner discussions. In Ireland, on the other hand, the dinner itself is often lacking, and in consequence the discussions assume a different tone. The bread and butter test is not irrelevant. For my brother life was not an interesting subject for discussion; it was a passion.b

I would extend Stanislaus Joyce's depiction of particular English writers and a particular tone in their work to the native English tradition in general: its literature is an extension of the generally stable and balanced life lived against a Constable background which represents in some way the English ideal. Not they but the wind that blows through them. This is natural enough. Cultures reflect and are informed by hegemonies of social ideas and ideals,

· though the concrete particulars which constitute cultural expression vary according to time and place. The instability of the Modern period disrupted and displaced that generally stable and balanced life permanently.

One of the many peculiarities of the English imperial adventure and its aftermath is Ireland's anomalous role. Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States are all English-speaking former colonies where English and other European settlers totally overwhelmed and replaced the

b. Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother's Keeper. New York: Viking Press, 1958, p. 185-186.

native population. Ireland/Eire, Rhodesia/ Zimbabwe, and South Africa are English-speaking former's colonies where the settlers did not replace the native population, and they remain a minority. This is less obvious in the case of Ireland, which was the only European country to undergo total colonization on the English model, but it is a fundamental fact of Irish life and culture. Literature written in English outside of the native English tradition falls into three categories as a result: the literature of settlers who took over completely (America for instance), literature of colonized natives (like Joyce), and the literature of minority control. Concrete particulars will change, but this fundamentally colonial relationship between native English literature and other literatures in English has a major structural impact on twentieth century writing in English.

Early critical reactions to Joyce's Portrait reveal how deeply the imperial/colonial element was felt on all sides. From the native Irish side John Eglinton (W. K. Magee) wrote:

Joyce is . . . a champion spirit in the new national situation. In him, for the first time, the mind of Catholic Ireland triumphs over the Anglicism of the English language, and expatiates freely in the element of a universal language: an important achievement, for what has driven Catholic Ireland back upon the Irish language is the ascendancy in the English language of English literature, which, as a Catholic clergyman once truly asserted, is 'saturated with Protestantism'. In Joyce, perhaps for the first time in an Irish writer, there is no faintest trace of Protestantism, that is, of the English spirit .... We are obliged to admit that in Joyce literature has reached for the first time in Ireland a complete emancipation from Anglo-Saxon ideals. c

H. G. Wells, on the otherhand(oropposite side), sounded the alarm:

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce ... is a book to buy and read and lock up ... of immense significance is the fact that everyone in this Dublin story, every

c. CT. Robert H. Deming, ed. James Joyce: The Critical Heritage. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1970, Vol. ii, p. 459.


human being, accepts as a matter of course, as a thing in nature like the sky and the sea, that the English are to be hated. There is no discrimination in that hatred, there is no gleam of recognition that a considerable number of Englishmen have displayed a very earnest disposition to put matters right with Ireland, there is an absolute absence of any idea of a discussed settlement, any notion of helping the slow-witted Englishman in his three-cornered puzzle between North and South. It is just hate, a cant cultivated to the pitch of monomania, an ungenerous violent direction of the mind. That is the political atmosphere in which Stephen Dedalus grows up, and in which his essentially responsive mind orients itself .... [The extreme Irish 'patriot'] will play into the hands of the Tories by threatening an outbreak and providing the excuse for a militarist reaction in England .... No reason in that why England should not do justice to Ireland, but excellent reason for bearing in mind that these bright-green young people across the Channel are something quite different from the liberal English in training and tradition, and absolutely set against helping them. No single book has ever shown how different they are .... ct

Wells also comments on the Catholicism of the book, and the poverty of the world it depicts, though from exactly those Protestant and stable perspectives noticed by Eglinton and Stanislaus Joyce. The horror and incomprehension of the English liberal evident in Wells's review is reproduced in Joyce's portrayal of the character Haines in Ulysses, whom Stephen rejects as totally as any Irishman he rejects in the course of eluding his nets.

James Joyce was quite clear about his personal stance toward the English tradition. 'And in spite of everything, Ireland remains the brain of the United Kingdom. The English, judiciously practical and ponderous, furnish the overstuffed stomach of humanity with a perfect gadget - the water closet. The Irish, condemned to express themselves in a language not their own, have stamped on it the mark of their genius and compete for glory with the civilized nations. This is then called English

d. a. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Text, Criticism, and Notes. New York: Viking Press, 1%8, pp. 329-333.

literature." He told Arthur Power, 'It is my revolt against the English conventions, literary and otherwise that is the main source of my talent.'r And he told Padraic and Mary Colum, 'I have great difficulty in coming to any understanding with the English. I don't understand them no more than they understand me.'g ('But I don't write in English,' he used to say.)h

I think Joyce represents the first great attempt by a colonized native culture to break through the cultural oppression and internalization of the oppressor's culture to produce a native statement free of the trappings and prevalent ideological assumptions of the colonizer, and that his Portrait illustrates vividly the problem a colonized writer faces when he seeks to express himself in the language and tradition which have supplanted his own. ('The advent of an overcoming power may be attested by the crippled diction, or by the complete disuse of the original tongue, save in solitary dear phrases, spontaneous in grief or gladness,' he wrote in an undergraduate essay, 'The Study of Languages.'); American writers also (and earlier) freed themselves from the yoke of the Mother Country's tongue and traditions, but as conquerors themselves, not as colonized natives. Joyce grew up amid the revolutionary ferment Wells singled out in his review (a prescient one as it turned out - the Easter Rising occurred the same year.) Writers like Wilde and Shaw (from the Protestant tradition of the settler minority) infiltrated the English tradition and made their careers in England. Douglas Hyde and others atavistically advocated the deAnglicization of Ireland and a return to the precolonial native culture. 1 Yeats was consciously attempting to fashion an Irish literary tradition in English ('Nor may I less be counted one/ With Davis, Mangan, Ferguson').2

e. Cf. Richard Ellmann, James Joyce. New York: Oxford University Press, 1959, p. 226.

f. Cf. Ulick O'Connor, ed. The James Joyce We Knew.-Cork: Mercier Press, 1967.

g. Padraic & Mary Colum, Our Friend James Joyce. New York: Doubleday, 1958, p. 18.

h. ibid. i. James Joyce, 'The Study of Languages', Critical Writings of James

Joyce, ed. Ellsworth Mason & Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking Press, 1959, p. 28.

I. See Douglas Hyde, 'The Necessity for De-anglicizing Ireland', in The Revival of Irish Literature (London: Fisher Unwin, 1894).

2. W. B. Yeats, 'To Ireland in the Coming Times' in Richard J. Finneran (ed.), W. B. Yeats: The Poems (London: Macmillan, 1983), p.50.


I could not endure . . . an international art, picking stories and symbols where it pleased. Might I not, with health and good luck to aid me, create some new Prometheus Unbound; Patrick or Columbkil, Oisin or Fion, in Prometheus' stead; and, instead of Caucasus, Cro-Patric or Ben Bulben.3 Have not all races had their first unity from a mythology that marries them to rock and hill? We had in Ireland imaginative stories, which the uneducated classes knew and even sang, and might we not make those stories current among the educated classes ... and at last, it might be, so deepen the political passion of the nation that all, artist and poet, craftsman and daylabourer would accept a common design?i

Joyce and his comperes had many alternatives to choose from. In the Portrait he puts Stephen through the full range, taking great pains to illustrate the difficulty which the English language and literary tradition represented for the Irish writerto-be. A proper understanding of this dilemma is crucial. It centres on Stephen's love of Elizabethan songs and literature, elements of the native English tradition associated historically with both the fulfilment of the English Renaissance (the Shakespearean apotheosis of the tradition) and the first successful imposition of the English language on Ireland (with a consequent perpetuation of Elizabethan terminology and pronunciation in Irish-English).

Stephen waits in an empty classroom, remembering a story told him by Davin, a native Irish speaker, a close friend, the only character who calls Dedalus by his christian name, whom Stephen admires for his quaint turns of Elizabethan speech, a story in response to Stephen's lyrical effusions which Davin cannot understand, which disturb him.

His nurse had taught him Irish and shaped his rude imagination by the broken lights of Irish myth. He stood towards this myth upon which no individual mind had ever drawn out a line of beauty and to its unwieldy tales that

j. W. B. Yeats, The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats. New York: Collier, 1965, p. 131.

3. In the original myth, Prometheus is chained to a rock in the Caucasus mountains in South-West Asia. Yeats is suggesting that famous Irish mountains, such as Ben Bulben in Sligo or Croagh Patrick in Mayo, may be equally suitable as mythological material.

divided themselves as they moved down the cycles in the same attitude as towards the Roman catholic religion, the attitude of a dullwitted loyal serf. Whatsoever of thought or feeling came to him from England or by way of English culture his mind stood armed against in obedience to a password ... (p. 181).

Yet Davin tells a story, a very Irish story, in J oyce's meticulously accurate Irish-English, which is more powerful for Stephen than his own quasiElizabethan lyrics. Stephen cannot share the older native culture and will not artificially cultivate it, a still unconscious culture. He turns toward English literary culture. Stephen has arrived at the classroom after a walk through Dublin in which he quotes to himself a line of Ben Jonson's and notes, in passing, the statue of Tom Moore, 'the droll statue of the national poet in Ireland', poised appropriately, between Trinity College and what had been Grattan's Parliament: twin bastions of Irish Ascendancy culture. He imagines the statue covered in symbolic vermin, characterizing it as 'a Firbolg in the borrowed cloak of a Milesian,'4 i.e., as a native adopting the manner of his conqueror. Moore diluted songs from the Irish language into English drawing room ditties, and made his bid for fame and fortune within the English tradition (though his English words for Irish airs introduced a new, non-English prosody), symbolizing part of the colonized writer's dilemma. Davin's story provides an authentic but unconscious instance of the native culture. Stephen then engages in a discussion with the dean of studies, an English convert to Catholicism, like John Henry Cardinal Newman, whom Stephen quotes to illustrate a point about language usage.

-One difficulty, said Stephen, in aesthetic discussion is to know whether words are being used according to the literary tradition or according to the tradition of the marketplace. I remember a sentence of Newman's in which he says of the Blessed Virgin that she was detained in the full company of the saints. The use of the word in the marketplace is quite different. I hope I am not detaining you. - Not in the least, said the dean politely. - No, no, said Stephen, smiling, I mean ...

4. The Firbolgs were the mythological race who were supplanted in Ireland by the Milesians or Celts.


-Yes, yes: I see, said the dean quickly, I quite catch the point: detain. He thrust forward his underjaw and uttered a dry short cough. (p. 188)

The dean attempts to regain his composure by instructing Stephen in the lighting of a lamp (Stephen had used the lamp metaphorically in his discussion, the dean literalized it).

-To return to the lamp, he said, the feeding of it is also a nice problem. You must choose the pure oil and you must be careful when you pour it in not to overflow it, not to pour in more than the funnel can hold. -What funnel? asked Stephen. - The funnel through which you pour the oil into the lamp. - That? said Stephen. Is that called a funnel? Is it not a tundish? -What is a tundish? - That. The ... the funnel. - Is that called a funnel in Ireland? asked the dean. I never heard the word in my life. - It is called a tundish in Lower Drumcondra, said Stephen laughing, where they speak the best English. -A tundish, said the dean reflectively. That is a most interesting word. I must look that word up. Upon my word I must. (p. 188)

This is a crucial passage in the Portrait. Besides illustrating Stephen's point about literary and marketplace word usage, it also brings to a head the mutual attitudes and relationships between the English language and literary tradition and the Irish use of them. Stephen, who prides himself on his literary knowledge, has been caught not knowing a common English word. The dean has never heard the word still commonly used in Ireland. (Later Stephen looks it up. '13 April: That tundish has been on my mind for a long time. I looked it up and find it English and good old blunt English too. Damn the dean of studies and his funnel. What did he come here for to teach us his own language or to learn it from us? Damn him one way or the other!' (p. 251) (When he looked it up, Stephen would have found a reference to Measure for Measure where an act of fornication is described as filling a bottle with a tundish). Funnel is a loan word from Old French (jounil) carrying overtones of the Norman invasion. Tundish is an Elizabethan word which illustrates the archaicism of some

aspects of the Irish-English language and recalls the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland. To complicate things further, tun derives from a Gaelic word, and tundish is a loan word in English from Irish. Stephen is forced to use the dean's vocabulary to define the Irish-English word. The quaint Elizabethan turns of phrase which Stephen admires in Davin's speech, and the Elizabethan literature he loves, are bound up in the Elizabethan conquest, a little emphasized sidelight of the English literary tradition. Stephen's affection for that tradition complicates his feelings about the historical relationship between colonized and colonizer. This episode begins to crystallize his understanding of that point.

The little word seemed to have turned a rapier point of his sensitiveness against this courteous and vigilant foe. He felt with a smart of dejection that the man to whom he was speaking was a countryman of Ben Jonson. He thought:

- The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language. (p. 189)

... Stephen cannot divorce the literary tradition from its historical and cultural context, nor can he ignore his own context as an Irishman and its historical relationship to the historical context of English literature. If he is to be a writer he must forge a new way to write, and he wrestles symbolically at the end of the book, not with an angel, but with an old man from the west of Ireland: the recalcitrant, stubborn, stunted and maimed native tradition he has inherited.k And this is the dilemma of the colonized writer. Yeats and the other Ascendancy writers found themselves in the peculiar position of being neither native Irish nor native

k. The issue of Stephen's relationship to the English tradition is treated more complexly and at greater length in the 'Scylla and Charybdis' chapter of Ulysses, where Stephen sees himself steering a dangerous path between the 'Saxon smile' and the 'barbaric yawp' - i.e. between the English and American literary traditions.


English, but heirs to an Anglo-Irish experience and tradition (Congreve, Farquhar, Swift, Sterne, Burke, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Davis, Mangan, Ferguson). They came from minority settler stock and held sway over the native majority and found themselves caught somewhere in limbo between mother country and colony. The native Irish writer was traditionless in the English language, had to create his own tradition. The native Irish culture never developed those monuments of unageing intellect manifest in the English literary tradition precisely because that same English tradition destroyed the Irish cultural tradition before it had a chance to develop such monuments. There is inherent in this dilemma a painful alienation and disaffection which can also liberate: like Joyce or Beckett, the colonized or colonial writer is free of tradition, free to create as he pleases, choosing the language and form he pleases since he has none of his own (though contemporary Irish writers inherit the tradition of Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, et al.). One natural consequence of this will be freedom in handling the language and forms of the tradition of literature in English, a freedom far more manifest in the work of colonial writers than in the work of native English writers who manipulate their tradition subtly, sophisticatedly, but within its bonds.

Part of the pain of this dilemma is the realization that the English tradition has produced monuments of unageing intellect worthy of emulation, but not only have they been achieved at the expense of other cultures, their very authors have wrought the destruction of other cultures. Herein lies a key example of how the colonized views the colonizer. ...

England's Renaissance poets were mercenaries. The architecture runs with blood. The ruins of Boyle Abbey are another example. What remains indicates splendour and dignity. The Abbey had been given to Sir Henry King, who promptly destroyed it. King had a son named Edward, better known to the rest of the world as Lycidas, but in that part of Ireland the name King recalls Boyle Abbey, not Milton.5 Cromwell's name is still a

5. Boyle Abbey, one of the finest Cistercian abbeys in Ireland, was built in 1198. It was desecrated by Cromwellian troops in 1659. The family of Edward King, Milton's close friend and the subject of the elegy Lycidas, lived at Rockingham, near Boyle. King is buried in the grounds of Boyle Abbey.

curse in Ireland, whatever his role as a Republican hero in English eyes, and Milton was his propagandist. While Spenser wrote The Faerie Queene, an unageing monument, on a confiscated estate in Kilcolman, he also wrote A View of the Present State of Ireland, advocating genocide as official state policy to subdue the Irish, whose country he would depopulate more easily to appropriate 'his' landscape. Modern critics may question Pound's Fascism, treason, and antiSemitism, or the authoritarian tendencies of Yeats, Eliot or Lawrence, but the genocidal Spenser? Royalist Shakespeare? Milton's praise of Cromwell's Irish massacres? Pound at least remained a poet, not a politician. Yeats became an ineffectual Seanador.6 Spenser and Raleigh were the Queen's agents, actively subduing and colonizing Ireland. The native Irish look upon Spenser's work with a remnant of the reservations about his worth which may have smouldered in the eyes of Red Hugh's guerillas as they burned him out of Kilcolman, chasing him away from his spare time literary activities. 7 Raleigh crucified a priest and slaughtered five hundred Spaniards who surrendered to him at Dun an Oir.8 Examples accumulate. The Irish writer casts a cold eye on all the monuments of the English tradition or their remains. The point is that the colonized native cannot have the same relationship with the English tradition that the native Englishman has (without deluding himself into thinking he is English) .. The English tradition is more than its masterworks, it is also the context which produced them, a context which differs when you are on the receiving end of colonization, not one who benefits. If the colonized bear scars, the colonizer bears a burden of guilt.

When the colonized writer attempts to deal impartially with the colonizer's tradition, problems develop. Having no native culture left, he internalizes the culture of his oppressor. . Often the process goes no further. But once his consciousness is raised to see this process of internalization he

6. That is, a member of the Irish Senate. 7. After the battle of the Yellow Ford in 1598, the victorious army of the

Northern chieftains Hugh O'Neill and Red Hugh O'Donnell swept through Munster, evicting the poet Edmund Spenser from his castle at Kilcolman, Co. Cork, in the process.

8. At Dun-an-Oir (Fort of Gold), Smerwick, Co. Kerry in 1580, over 700 Spaniards and Italians, who had landed to aid the Munster rising against Elizabethan rule, were massacred by the forces of the lord deputy. Edmund Spenser was also present at the massacre.


cannot remain totally impartial. Stephen Dedalus has to learn this. So, in another time, in another part of the empire, in more obvious ways, but within the same structure, does Obi Okonkwo in Chinua Achebe's No Longer At Ease,9 which portrays the dilemma of the native African writer who has learned English, been schooled in English schools, trained in the English literary tradition, only to discover, when he tries to write himself, how inimical to his circumstances is the English tradition he has acquired ....

The emergence of non-native writers in English in the Modernist period of the first quarter century as the major literary figures of the period signals the end of the native English literary tradition as the major force in writing in English. Non-English writers used the native tradition and its forms in new ways and integrated them with cosmopolitan traditions precisely because it was an object to them, not a vested interest. Once the tradition was recognized as a 'tradition', once it was capable of definition, it became historical, not living, so that any 'return' to it is reactionary, deliberately atavistic, a conscious choice, not an unconscious working of the same vein but the reopening of a closed mine, a deliberate anti-Modernism. The key here is the idea of an historical period earlier in the century which is post traditional English literature. Modernism is one of its symptoms. The poetry of the trenches is another. The fundamental changes in English society which accompany the demise of the Empire and the working classes' acquisition of literacy and education fundamentally change the literature England produces. World War I changed things utterly. Mauberley registers the death of England as a live cultural tradition. What remains? Fossil? Skeleton? Wounded fisher king? The Irish, Americans, and others writing in English forge their own traditions, increasingly independent of England's. English writers are faced with developing a post-traditional English literature, no longer metropolitan and tolerant of provincial, i.e. colonial, upstart crows, but itself provincial, measuring and defining itself in light of American and other literatures. What now is the state of contemporary writing in English? The attempt to be contemporary versus the attempt to be traditional

9. Chinua Achebe, No Longer at Ease (London: Heinemann, 1960).

Is contemporary English wntmg rooted in a hoary tradition or stumped, sending out stray shoots? American writers are moving in many directions. Irish writers are increasingly turning to America for models (as in the cases of Tom Kinsella and John Montague), or creating their own personal tradition, like Richard Murphy, or liberating themselves and Irish verse from the English mode through ironic traditionalism, ironic Irish manipulations of the well made poem which turn that tradition inside out, and here Derek Mahon is paramount, or writing naturally and unselfconsciously as Irish poets, like Paul Muldoon or John Ennis or Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, or as novelists, like Dermot Healy, Neil Jordan, John Banville, John McGahern or Aidan Higgins, or saying farewell to English and writing in Irish, like Michael Hartnett, or reconstructing literary history and criticism like Seamus Deane. But Ireland now has the advantage of being small and unpretentious and, free of vested interests, free to choose without fear oflosing identity. Our traumas still lie in heaps about us but we no longer go into exile: as Kinsella has said, we only commute.

Biographies/Bibliographies


Sean Golden

LIFE. Born in London of Irish parents in 1948, Golden spent part of his childhoood in the West of Ireland before the family emigrated to the United States. He took his doctorate from the University of Connecticut where he also taught. He has also taught English at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, and at the Foreign Languages Institute and Beijing University in China. He now lives in Barcelona, although his home is in Ballaghderreen, Co. Mayo.

CHIEF WRITINGS. (ed., with Peter Fallon) Safe Day: A Miscellany of Concemporary Irish Wricing (Notre Dame and London: Notre Dame University Press, 1980).

Post-Traditional English Literature: A Polemic (Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing)

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