Border Crossings
Border Crossings:
Narration, Nation and Imagination in Scots
and Irish Literature and Culture
Edited by
Colin Younger
Border Crossings:
Narration, Nation and Imagination in Scots and Irish Literature and Culture,
Edited by Colin Younger
This book first published 2013
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2013 by Colin Younger and contributors
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
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ISBN (10): 1-4438-5229-5, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5229-6
For Mam and Dad
Joan and Norman Younger
Now singing with choirs of angels
TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Illustrations ...................................................................................... x
Acknowledgements .................................................................................... xi
Introduction ................................................................................................. 1
Colin Younger
PART I: BORDERLINES
Chapter One ............................................................................................... 18
Mist Across Celtic Waters
Mike Adamson
Chapter Two ............................................................................................. 29
Exile and Suffering in the Construction of Identity: Narratives
of Banishment, Exile and Return in 17th and 18th Century Britain
and Ireland
Peter Rushton
Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 55
Voices from the Prairie: Immigrant Identities in Opposition
Nick Serra
Chapter Four ............................................................................................. 72
“Man Mai Ther-Of Et Inogh”: Agricultural Crisis and BL MS Harley 913
Michael W. George
PART II: BORDERLANDS
Chapter Five ............................................................................................. 90
In Praise of Uncertainty: The Liminal Authenticity of the Border Ballads
Colin Younger
viii
Table of Contents
Chapter Six ............................................................................................. 110
Borders: Lord Ernest Hamilton (1858-1939), Race, Religion and UlsterScots Identity in the Last Decades of the Anglo-Irish Union
Patrick Maume
Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 127
The Fantasy of the Celtic Revival: Lord Dunsany, Fiona Macleod
and W.B. Yeats
Tania Scott
Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 142
Martin McDonagh’s Celtic Tiger Feet: Trading on the Twisted Legacies
of Irish Drama
Willy Maley
PART III: BORDER CROSSINGS
Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 166
The “Roaring Irishman”: William Maginn, Ireland and Blackwood's
Edinburgh Magazine
Alison O’Malley Younger and John Strachan
Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 186
Morbid Anatomy: De’crypt’ing the Monstrous: Burke and Hare
Alison O’Malley Younger
Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 215
Two Sides of the Same Dark Coin: Gothic Cityscapes and Masculinities
in William Mcilvanney’s Laidlaw and Eoin Mcnamee’s Resurrection Man
Martyn Colebrook
Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 228
When Scottish Eyes are Irishised
Mark Corcoran
Chapter Thirteen ..................................................................................... 249
“The Place You Don’t Belong”: Border-Crossings and Ambivalence
in the Northern Irish Noir-Thriller
Thomas Rudman
Border Crossings
ix
Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 270
Learning to Thole: The Unconscious Connections between Ireland
and Scotland in the Thought of Seamus Heaney
Eugene O’Brien
Contributors ............................................................................................ 288
Index ....................................................................................................... 292
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Fig 2-1: An Abstract of the Suffering of the people call’d Quakers .......... 33
Fig 9-1: William Maginn, from ‘Don Juan Unread’ ................................ 171
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Many of the papers collected here originated in the North East Irish
Culture Network (NEICN) ‘Barriers and Borderlands’ (November 2011)
and ‘Ireland and Scotland: Conflicts and Crosscurrents’ (November 2012)
conferences held at the University of Sunderland. I would like to thank all
those who participated in these events, and I would particularly like to
thank the contributors to this volume, and also colleagues at the
Department of Culture at the University of Sunderland, for their support.
Special thanks go to Steve Watts for his unfailing encouragement and
enthusiasm, and to Robert Finnigan for his assistance with the indexing. I
would also like to thank Lauren Clark for her tremendous help in the early
part of the compilation and Carol Koulikourdi at Cambridge Scholars
Publishing for her patience and guidance. I would like to thank the Culture
Research Beacon at the University of Sunderland for their financial
support towards the project. Finally I would like to extend my very special
thanks to Dr Alison O’Malley Younger without whose valuable advice and
extraordinary enthusiasm this collection would not have been possible.
INTRODUCTION
COLIN YOUNGER
There can be no absolutes: no absolute good or evil; no absolute way of
living. No absolute truth. All truths are mediated and tempered by the fact
of living. Being alive tempers all things. (Ben Okri: 1997: 54)
In their 2013 collection: Celtic Connections: Irish Scottish Relations and
the Politics of Culture, Willy Maley and Alison O’Malley Younger cite
Marilyn Reizbaum to ask the question: “Why Scotland and Ireland?” What
makes these two cultures marginal, and if they can be defined thus, is it
legitimate to make a case for Celtic connectedness without running the
risk of essentialism? They answer their self-posed question using
Reizbaum’s pioneering essay (Maley and O’Malley-Younger, 2013: 10) as
an exemplar and basis for theoretical discussion thus:
I feel I can talk about Scotland and Ireland together in this context, without
homogenizing them and thereby further marginalizing them (all Celts are
alike), because they have comparable ‘colonial’ histories with respect to
England (unlike Wales) and because their status as minority cultures,
which has more or less continued in psychic and/or political ways, has had
a similar impact not only on the dissemination of their respective
literatures but on the nature and means of the writing (Maley and
O’Malley-Younger, 2013: 12).
Reizbaum’s unequivocal assertion that the connectedness of Ireland and
Scotland is due to their “comparable ‘colonial’ histories with respect to
England” (though this, in itself needs unpicking) is equally germane to the
current collection which brings together essays from Ireland, Scotland, and
Ireland and Scotland under the variegated umbrella of their colonial
histories, and the responses of the Irish and Scots to the same. What
differentiates this collection however is its focus on borderlands: these
liminal areas which according to the anthropologist Victor Turner:
...are open to the play of thought, feeling, and will; in them are generated
new models, often fantastic, some of which may have sufficient power and
2
Introduction
plausibility to replace eventually the force-backed political and jural
models that control the centers of a society‘s ongoing life” (Turner, 1969:
vii).
Following Turner, the essays in this collection examine identities betwixt
and between their categorical, ideological or national definitions, and
focus on the contingent, constructed, contradictory, contestatory and
changing natures of borderland identities as spaces of representation which
become crucibles for multiple agendas and ideologies.
It is a truism that concepts of nation (and its corollary, nationalism)
presuppose and rely on categorical certainties, absolutes, binarisms and
boundaries in order to bolster the nation state. The defence of these
borders and a belief in their absoluteness has resulted in warfare and
violent dispute. As Kapuscinksi observes:
How many victims, how much blood and suffering, are connected with this
business of borders? There is no end to the cemeteries of those who have
been killed in the world over the defence of borders. Equally boundless are
the cemeteries of the audacious who attempted to expand their borders. It
is safe to assume that half of those who have ever walked upon our planet
and lost their lives in the field of glory gave up the ghost in battles begun
over a question of borders (Kapuscinski, 1995: 20).
As is the case with Ireland and Scotland such violence resulted from
repeated risings against British domination. Violence thus became part of
colonial contact and the breaching and broaching of borders which had
been set up to perpetuate and reinforce difference. These uprisings and
revolutions were as much about cultural identity as they were about
geographical terrain. Borders in this sense, then can be seen as an us/them
binarism which is exclusive of others and inclusive of national selves, as
Gloria Anzaldúa has rightly pointed out:
Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe to
distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a
steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the
emotional reside of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of
transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants (Anzaldúa,
1987: 25).
Anzaldúa’s theories on interstitiality mirror and parallel those of Turner’s
notions of the liminal as “betwixt and between all the recognized fixed
points in space-time of structural classification” (Turner, 1967:97). What
is important for Turner is not the beginning nor the end, but the process of
Border Crossings
3
transition itself, which is transformative; a qualitative change of state
which is analogous for him to the transformation of water to steam, or the
final ecdysis from caterpillar to butterfly. For Turner, then the liminal is a
process, a becoming, and the “liminal persona" (those within the
transitional phase) considered “structurally invisible”... “they are at once
no longer classified and not yet classified” (Turner, 1967: 96). The liminal
persona is therefore “neither here nor there, betwixt and between all fixed
points of classification” (Turner, 1974: 232).
Homi Bhabha, also strategically deploys the notion of cultural
liminality and interstitial space as sites of contestation of “narrative
authority between the pedagogical and the performative” (Bhabha, 1994:
148). In other words, there is contestation between the status of the
colonised as “historical objects of a nationalist pedagogy” and their ability
to perform themselves as “subjects of a process of signification that must
erase any prior or originary (national) presence” (Bhabha, 1994: 145)..
Bhabha’s argument here clearly goes beyond the polarised polemic of
master/slave identities or simple inversions of colonial relations. His focus
rather is on the borders or thresholds between the binarisms endemic to the
narratives of colonialism. These are the interstices where identities are
performed and contested; where no transcendent authority holds sway.
Instead, as he suggests:
Liminal space, in-between the designations of identity, becomes the
process of symbolic interaction, the connective tissue that constructs the
difference between upper and lower, black and white [...] the temporal
movement and passage that it allows, prevents identities at either end of it
from settling into primordial polarities. The interstitial passage between
fixed identifications opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that
entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy (Bhabha,
1994: 1).
In sum, he suggests we should move beyond facile binarisms and onto the
fault lines; onto border situations and thresholds as the sites where
identities are performed and contested.
Glenda Norquay and Gerry Smyth make a similar point in their 2002
collection, Across the Margins: Cultural Identity and Change in the
Atlantic Archipelago, wherein they suggest that “any identification of
boundaries is in itself an act of construction, a special practice that
recognises its mutability” (Norquay and Smyth, 2002: 2). This paradox as
they describe it results in a need for:
4
Introduction
...a way of understanding movement and migration, of what it means to be
in between, but also of recognising how important the sense of belonging
to a place has been (Norquay and Smyth, 2002: 2).
The current collection responds to this need by addressing the
instability of such terms as boundaries, borderlands and frontiers as
concepts, either in accord with, or a challenge to what Norquay and Smith
describe as “centralising power structures” (Norquay and Smyth, 2002: 2).
Underlying many of the ideas herein is an implicit recognition of what
Anzaldúa describes as a ‘mestiza’ consciousness; that is, an interstitial or
liminal consciousness, always in flux, syncretic and antithetical to fixity.
Implicitly or explicitly, the contributors to this volume, in one way or
another acknowledge that the term ‘borderland’ is imprecise, ambiguous
and inhabited, and due to its liminal status, a crucible for multiple and
competing identities. As the essays in this collection show, these borders
don’t have to be geographical, but can extend to any cultural, psychic or
social terrain which exists beyond or between accepted categories, power
structures, nations or states (the theory can, of course be extended to any
category outwith of which people choose, or are assigned to reside). In
fact, as Anzaldúa argues:
...the borderlands are physically present wherever two or more cultures
edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory,
where the lower, middle and upper classes touch (Anzaldúa, 1987:
Preface).
What unifies this collection is an approach to the phenomena of borders as
liminal spaces, that is to say, following Turner: “Realm[s] of pure
possibility whence novel configurations of ideas and relations may arise";
an arena where "we are not dealing with structural contradictions ... but
with the essentially unstructured (which is at once de structured and
prestructured)" and that it is a time often associated with "the unbounded,
the infinite, the limitless” (Turner, 1967: 97-8).
Paradoxically, for a collection which concerns itself with the
permeability of borders and the space ‘in between’, this collection is
structured around three sub-sections: Borderlines, Borderlands and Border
Crossings. As these titles indicate these barriers are porous and many of
the essays, in true liminal style could be as applicable to either, both or all
of these categories. When this has been the case the editor has positioned
them on the grounds of which section is most appropriate by virtue of
chronology, theoretical stance or theme. Part 1 (Borderlines) for example,
is broadly historiographical in approach and examines barriers built and
Border Crossings
5
broken, resulting from the colonial context of England with Ireland and/or
Scotland. The primary focus herein is the crossing of thresholds, either in
terms of national, or international borders, and the way in which the
passage across these borderlines exerts a strong influence both on the
immigrant communities (or individuals) in terms of culture, mythology,
politics, history and language.
Borderlines
In our first essay in this section, Mike Adamson focuses on the prehistoric fusion of Celtic cultures into Ireland and Scotland and the
commonalities and syntheses between these two nations. Adamson’s
emphasis is on the permeable border between history and legend in Celtic
societies, and how these common myths are made manifest in monsters,
hags and warrior women on both sides of the Irish Sea suggesting a social
and cultural kinship between Irish and Scottish ‘Celts’ as symbolised by
the Giants’ Causeway.
While fusion characterises Adamson’s essay, our second essay by
Peter Rushton begins with fission and the forced emigration of the
seditious Irish and Scots during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
due, in part to the flash points of Kinsale in Ireland and the risings of 1715
and ’45 in Scotland. Using Benedict Anderson’s notion of imagined
communities, Rushton concentrates on the exilic condition and the liminal
aspects of this by emphasising the textualisation of collective experiences
and a common past as joint foci for national identities.
Emigration and immigration similarly provide the thematic focus for
Nick Serra’s essay wherein he discusses his own cultural ethnic selfidentification as a hybrid and creolized mix of Welsh, Irish, Scottish,
Italian and Native American. Citing W.B Yeats, Serra examines the
cultural identifiers and markers, and barriers and borderlands between
immigrant identities in the host community of Des Moines, Iowa, circa
1922. He continues by offering a sustained close reading, contextualized
with historical data, of a letter sent in 1917 from his maternal great-great
grandfather, Thomas Burke to a son in training at Camp Dodge, Iowa,
prior to his deployment overseas as part of the American Expeditionary
Forces of World War I. Written in the aftermath of the Easter Rising the
letter offers a patriotic flavour du jour in its discussion of the “relentless”
and “savage” “England, the oppressor of all the weaker nations of the
earth”. The letter, like the journal or diary is, as Barbara Myerhoff argues:
6
Introduction
...a liminal genre, without conventions, limits or boundaries used to travel
into liminality where the unknown parts of the self and the environment are
glimpsed (Myerhoff: 103).
Thomas Burke’s letter does exactly that. As Homi K.Bhabha has argued:
...it is from those who have suffered the sentence of history—subjugation,
domination, diaspora, displacement that we learn our most enduring
lessons for living and thinking (Bhabha: 2004: 246).
In this unofficial and personal history ‘from below’ Thomas Burke wields
the power of the storyteller to traverse the boundaries between conjecture,
opinion and fact. This, in turn becomes a map for his readers, and he a
guide for those who encounter the borders themselves. In such ways,
argues Serra, are borderlands internalized and diasporic ethnic identities
forged.
In another found document which gives us a glimpse beyond the
borders of official histories, Michael George examines BL MS Harley 913,
c1335, the oldest extant collection of Anglo-Irish literature and thought to
have been written in the Kildare/New Ross/Waterford area of Ireland. He
reveals in the literature evidence of the extreme weather patterns in Ireland
at the time which affected what were already marginal harvests and poor
agricultural yields. Combined with the added pressures of English
colonisation, and demands for supplies to fuel England’s campaigns,
George suggests that the Irish people became marginalised and reduced to
living on the edge of hunger and famine including the great famine of
1315-17 which, George suggests was the worst famine that Europe has
ever experienced, lasting seven years in some regions, affecting over
400,000 square miles and up to thirty million people.
Viewing the manuscript from this historical context, George examines
the military strife in Medieval Ireland using two poems ‘The Walling of
New Ross’ and ‘Piers of Bermingham’. He then focuses on the scarcity of
food resulting from the prevailing conditions and evidences this by
exploring ‘The Land of Cokaygne’ and supports his findings by analysis
of ‘Missa potatorum’, (or The ‘Drinkers’ Mass’) and other poems included
in the manuscript.
George argues that if, as most scholars agree, BL MS Harley 913 was a
well-used Franciscan preaching manual, then the Franciscans, aware of the
concerns of the people to whom they were preaching, used the works to
provide imaginative comfort during hard times.
Border Crossings
7
Borderlands
In a 2002 essay entitled ‘Gender and Nation: debatable lands and passable
boundaries’, Aileen Christianson draws a parallel between the “ambivalent
margins” characterized by Homi Bhabha and the “Scottish metaphor of the
Debatable Land” (Norquay and Smyth, 2002: 67). Citing Maggie Humm
she suggests that:
The border is not only a question of place which assumes some one
dimensional literary plane without hierarchy or class but of difference,
since in looking at literary borders we find asymmetry, absence and
marginalisation …the border is a trope of difference and potential conflict,
between races, between cultures and between sexual preferences (Norquay
and Smyth, 2002 : 67).
While acknowledging that the border as a state is indeterminate,
contingent and contrapuntal, Humm’s prognosis, (and Christianson’s also)
perhaps unsurprisingly relates to gender and the internal hierarchies within
borders where the question of national authenticity is raised. She continues
to articulate the representational boundaries through which women must
pass in order to be acknowledged as representative of the Scottish nation.
The same boundary exists between the Highlander and the Border Reiver,
the latter being elided from discourses of nation (and nationalism) by his
liminal attributes. As Turner points out:
The attributes of liminality or of liminal personae (threshold people) are
necessarily ambiguous, since this condition and these persons elude or slip
through the network of classifications that normally locate states and
positions in cultural space. Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they
are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law,
custom, convention, and ceremonial (Turner, 1967: 95).
As figured by Colin Younger the Reivers of the Anglo-Scots borders
collectively embody this state of in-betweenness. They are neither English
nor Scots, neither slave nor master, and their national status vacillates
depending where they choose to be on any given day. In his essay on the
authenticity of the Border Ballads, Younger interrogates debates over the
putative authenticity of the Border Ballads corpus, and suggests that the
perceived barbarity and lawlessness of the Borderers resulted precisely
from their existing on a buffer zone between two warring countries. He
concludes that the ballads which emerged from this buffer zone came also
from collective experiences and a common past and are therefore
exemplars of the underlying connectedness which Turner defines as
8
Introduction
communitas. To this end he concludes that the debate over authenticity is
an expression, not of the provenance of the ballads, but of the Romantic
zeitgeist in which it is expressed.
Patrick Maume’s essay also locates itself on the Anglo-Scottish
borders as viewed through the eyes of an Anglo-Irish aristocrat, and Ulster
Unionist, Lord Ernest Hamilton (1858—939) in his novels The Outlaws of
the Marsh (1897), and The Mawken [i.e. Maiden] of the Flow. Maume also
draws our attention to Hamilton’s book The Soul of Ulster (1917) which
argues that Ulster Protestants were essentially Scottish Borderers who
preserved their ancestral qualities by refusing to intermarry with the
natives.
Maume’s chapter offers the first overview of Hamilton’s writings, and
discusses how Scottish and Irish aspects of his identity relate to his
membership of the United Kingdom aristocracy and his reaction against
his Victorian upbringing.
He argues that Hamilton stands at the transition between the Victorian
view of history drawing on Sir Walter Scott’s depiction of the history of
the Scots Borders to present the development of civilisation as an
inevitably progressive and on the whole benevolent process underpinned
by a British Protestant Providence, and a fin de siècle questioning of
whether history was not more chaotic, less progressive, and certainly less
Christian than had been assumed.
Maume questions whether Hamilton’s career and writings demonstrate
the defence of civilisation from barbarism he claims or could itself be a
great deal more barbaric than his parents’ High Victorian generation were
prepared to admit.
If the first two essays in this section discuss what Turner describes as
liminal personae, the third by Tania Scott takes us into a palimpsest of
border crossing identities and themes in her discussions of Fiona MacLeod
and Lord Dunsany. As Maley and O’Malley-Younger colourfully suggest
that:
In the history of twice-told tales, doppelgangers, double-dealers and
divided selves attributed to the Scots, Fiona MacLeod/William Sharp stand
as a monument to Caledonian antisyzygy. An ambiguous twofold beacon
of fusion and confusion filtered through a double-life, a persona and a
pseudonym, William Sharp instigated the second identity of the Gaelicspeaking Highlander Fiona MacLeod as part of his passionate Celticism,
and proceeded through his mystical renderings and multiple letters to exert
a profound influence on writers such as AE and Yeats (Maley and
O’Malley-Younger, 2013: 30).
Border Crossings
9
To simplify, Caledonian antisyzygy relates to the essential duality
attributed to Scottish identity in 1919 by C. Gregory Smith. This
combination of opposites is, according to Smith “the polar twins of the
Scottish muse”, which has, he continues:
Loved reality, sometimes to maudlin affection for the commonplace, [but]
she has loved not less the airier pleasures to be found in the confusion of
the senses, in the fun of things thrown topsy-turvy, in the horns of elf-land
and the voices of the mountain (Smith, 1919: 19).
As the former quote from Maley and O’Malley-Younger summarises the
border-crossing duality of MacLeod, so does the latter by Smith capture
the practice of Lord Dunsany.
In Scott’s essay we are taken to the fringe of Celtic Revivalism and
introduced to formulations of the Celt purported and made famous by
Matthew Arnold and W.B Yeats. In her discussion of MacLeod’s works
and Dunsany’s King Argimēnēs and the Unknown Warrior Scott
interrogates narratives of nationalism and comes to the conclusion that
both writers are marginalised from the canon of Revivalist literature
despite their desires to engage with the Celtic Revival. For MacLeod, she
suggests this internal conflict actually splits the author in two, her creation
taking literally Matthew Arnold’s phrasing of the Celt/Teutonic dichotomy
in gender terms:
...no doubt the sensibility of the Celtic nature, its nervous exaltation, have
something feminine in them, and the Celt is thus peculiarly disposed to feel
the spell of the feminine idiosyncrasy” (Arnold, 1867: 108).
Gender, according to Scott, also figures prominently in Dunsany’s
engagement with Celticism where the heroic masculine ideal is the subject
of parody. This parody extends to Irish nationalism itself, and indeed the
story of the Revivals in Scotland and Ireland cannot be separated from the
narrative of nationalism; it is partly this conjunction of ideologies that has
exiled both MacLeod and Dunsany to the literary margins, where they
remain.
Much of the criticism on Martin McDonagh to date has focussed on
either, the playwright’s ‘Irishness’ (and, therefore his right to write on
things Irish), or on the level of violence and profanity depicted in his
plays. This has not affected the popularity of his works which Patrick
Lonergan puts down to:
10
Introduction
...their delinquent humour, their rootedness in (but distance from) the Irish
dramatic tradition, their wilfully transgressive attitude—and, in particular,
their disorientating blend of the past with the present (Lonergan, 2012: v).
In other words, their popularity lies in their refusal to be bound by barriers
and borders. This theme of border crossing underpins Willy Maley’s essay
which attributes McDonagh with crossing borders of time and space, genre
and themes, which Maley lists as:
...black pastoral, cartoon violence, fairytale, folklore, gargoyles,
globalization, gothic, Grand Guignol, grotesque, hybridity, melodrama,
mimicry, nativism, parochialism, parody, pastiche, postmodernism,
provincialism, primitivism, pulp fiction, revivalism, ‘satanic kailyard’,
‘Tiger Trash.
Dancing from Shakespeare to Synge and back again, Maley focuses on
boundaries and bodies crossed and broken to answer the question of how
far expatriate Irish writers, as part of the Irish diaspora, can claim to speak
for the old country. He concludes that:
In grasping the complexities of McDonagh’s theatre, Bakhtin is as relevant
as Behan. Above all, McDonagh is a dramatist who crosses borders and
pushes boundaries. He belongs both to a tradition stretching back to Synge,
and to a new generation of Irish writers as such of twilights disguised as
false dawns as they are of riding stuffed tigers.
As Anzaldúa rightly asserts in relation to borderlands:
...the dominant culture has created its version of reality and my work
counters that version with another version, the version of coming from this
place of in-betweenness, nepantla, the Borderlands. There is another way
of looking at reality. There are other ways of writing. There are other ways
of thinking’. (Anzaldúa and Keating, 2000: 229).
As Maley’s essay makes clear, McDonagh’s anarchic and polytrophic
practice displays these other, dialogic ways of thinking and highlights the
fact that borders, with all their complex connotations, exist to be broken.
Border Crossings
Anzaldúa’s endorsement of the ‘nepantla’ state of in-betweenness
challenges the authority of rigid identities and monolithic ideologies. In
their place she advocates cultural accommodation, acceptance, dialogue,
Border Crossings
11
and cross-border pursuits. Such a boundary-crossing scenario allows for
the development of what Turner defines as ‘communitas’: that is a
productive social grouping based on mutual understanding and a sense of
shared experience. As David Newman suggests:
Borders also establish groups and where a person belongs. [B]orders
determine the nature of group […] belonging, affiliation and membership,
and the way in which the processes of inclusion and exclusion are
institutionalized (Newman, 2007: 33).
The first essay in this section by John Strachan and Alison O’MalleyYounger examines this idea of belonging, affiliation and membership, and,
indeed, it can be argued communitas in relation to the cadre of gay, young
Tory wits who composed the satirical dialogues of Noctes Ambrosianae,
published for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine between 1822 and 1835.
Their focus is on “the roaring Irishman”, William Maginn “a parodist and
satirist who joined the ranks of Maga’s radicals and cockney-bashers” in
1819. There are several borders crossed within Maginn’s adventures in
Scotland, The trip from Cork to Edinburgh, Ireland to Scotland marks
Maginn’s moving from one side of a border to another. He repeatedly
crosses borders in his writings on Ireland; moving between mocking
squibs to venomous invective, but for Maginn, as the essay indicates,
perhaps the most important border he crossed was into the inner-circle;
into the symposium of unruly but brilliant Bacchanalians who made up the
staple imaginary guests of Ambrose’s fictional hostelry for it was here that
his career began in earnest, and it is in his career trajectory in
Blackwood’s’ that we learn of the manner in which that brilliant, troubling
and complex magazine shifted its tone and manner in its cross-border
relationship with Ireland.
In the same year in which Maginn arrived in Edinburgh, two other
Irishmen crossed the border from Ireland to Scotland to make their mark
on the Scottish Capital. Their names were William Burke and William
Hare; the subjects of Alison O’Malley-Younger’s essay which examines
their border crossing transformation from men, to murderers to monsters at
the start of the nineteenth-century. Focusing on the monster, that most
amorphous of border-crossing classifications, O’Malley-Younger
examines the ways in which monsters are socially constructed, contested
and contingent upon the period in which they appear. Taking us from the
dissecting rooms of the Edinburgh anatomists, to the squalid slums of
Auld Reekie, O’Malley-Younger draws on a variety of contemporary
resources, including Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine to illuminate how
a tale of two murderers (and essentially two cities) was sensationalised and
12
Introduction
Gothicised, and the murderers themselves abjected and made monstrous as
symptomatic representations of a web of contemporary fears surrounding
race, class and the commoditisation and anatomisation of the body (both
living and dead).
O’Malley-Younger argues that the urban milieu of Edinburgh’s Old
Town is one significant factor in the ‘monsterisation’ of Burke and Hare.
The suggestion is that the West Port with its ambience of ever-present
danger in its dark wynds allowed criminals such as Burke and Hare to
operate without fear of reprisals. The city of Edinburgh can thus be seen as
a setting for a story that could equally fit into the genre of Gothic, and also
that of Crime Fiction.
The city features heavily in Martyn Colebrook’s essay wherein he
examines the representation of post-industrial masculinities and violence
in the working class communities of Glasgow and Belfast, as expressed in
the novels of William McIlvanney and Eoin McNamee. He discusses how
the Gothic is unavoidably intertwined with crime fiction, a major linking
characteristic being the theme of hidden secrets awaiting detection.
Colebrook suggests that crime fiction shares with the Gothic novel, a
concern with secret or hidden knowledge concurring with Fred Botting’s
statement that this hidden knowledge includes the narrative and thematic
spectre of social disintegration. Further to this Colebrook suggests that it is
within this knowledge that resides the eventual solution to the crime.
By comparing McIlvanney’s Glasgow and McNamee’s Belfast,
Colebrook draws parallels between the Cities through their respective
position as predominantly working class, post-industrial cities. Finally he
looks at how the fictions of both cities through the media of the Troubles
thriller and contemporary crime fiction allow the authors to mobilise these
different generic vehicles in order to interrogate the status of the
significant thematic and philosophical questions being asked within the
respective communities portrayed.
Mark Corcoran identifies interrelated themes crossing the Irish sea by
considering James Joyce’s Dubliners and Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting.
Using Foucault’s notions regarding the production of truth he introduces
the term ‘enforced truth’ which he describes as a narrative at work in
society which employs peer pressure to create an accepted societal belief.
Corcoran argues that enforced truth is involved with both inebriation and
political figures in narratives of fiction and illustrates his argument by
reference to the chosen works.
He concludes that the “legacy of Joyce has become inescapable ...for
the likes of Welsh; a Joyce handed down throughout the generations just
like the Irishness handed down by the Scottish-Irish in Trainspotting”.
Border Crossings
13
Thomas Rudman examines the metaphor of border-crossings in ‘postTroubles’ Northern Irish noir fiction. He examines the entrenchment of
inter-community separation in an era of official cross-community powersharing which he sees as a central ambiguity of the peace-process era of
today. Rudman continues by exploring how Stuart Neville’s recent noirthriller, The Twelve (Neville, 2009), negotiates this contradictory state of
affairs. Utilising Louis Althusser’s theory of articulation and Walter
Benjamin’s notion of redemption, Rudman demonstrates how the novel
can be seen to blur the borders of the normative two-traditions narrative
through which Northern Irish politics has traditionally been viewed. He
suggests that despite the changes of the past few decades which have been
viewed as an opening for different forms of identity and social
development, the impact of many years of conflict remains. Rudman
points to the continued existence of peace-walls separating the loyalist and
nationalist residential areas of Northern Ireland and contends that the
physical and political boundaries of the conflict are still in evidence. He
presents a reading of The Twelve which demonstrates how the metaphors
of border-crossings traverse the noir-thriller form to produce a series of
destabilising contradictions and ambiguities which in turn give rise to a
number of ambivalent messages.
In an essay entitled ‘Ireland, verses, Scotland: crossing the (English)
language barrier’, Willy Maley argues that:
...the language barrier is ...a double bind that ties the tongue, forks and
forges it. Across the margins, language is always political, especially when
it is poetic (Maley, 2002: 30).
A recognition of liminality and politics of language similarly inflects
Eugene O’Brien’s psychoanalytic reading of the poetry of Seamus
Heaney. Following Lacan, Derrida and Heidegger, O’Brien illuminates the
role of the unconscious as a way of challenging the classificatory systems
of Enlightenment thought. The unconscious is defined as the locus of the
repressed linguistic dispossession which occurs in both Ireland and
Scotland—coterminous with the Plantation of Ulster and the linguistic
colonisation of the people. Using Heaney and Hugh MacDiarmid as his
examples, O’Brien promotes an awareness of how this linguistic
colonisation translates into several, sometimes contradictory realities
which suggest that truth is somehow fictional. In this language of
intersection and dialectical interaction, argues O’Brien, Heaney’s work is
driven by an intellectual desire to probe the interstices of politics, ethics
and aesthetics in an attempt to come to a more complete understanding of
what it means to be fully human. He concludes that Heaney has come
14
Introduction
through the postcolonial sense of language as oppressive and instead has
created a corpus of work which is predicated on an ownership of language
which now becomes expressive of its different constituents.
It is hoped that this collection will equally give rise to a number of
ambivalent messages. The aim is to present a crossing of borders and to
introduce readers to the same hybrid and interactive cross-border pursuits
and politics as those who have departed from the static binarisms of the
colonial contract. As Anzaldúa argues:
...from this racial, ideological, cultural and biological crosspollinization, an
alien consciousness is presently in the making a new mestiza
consciousness, una conciencia de mujer. It is a consciousness of the
Borderlands (Anzaldúa, 1987: 77).
Works Cited
Anzaldúa, Gloria and Keating, AnaLouise. (2000), Interviews/Entrevistas.
Routledge, New York.
Anzaldúa, Gloria. (1987), Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza.
Spinsters/Aunt Lute, San Francisco.
Bhabha, Homi K. (1994), The Location of Culture. Routledge, London.
Kapuscinski, Ryszard. (1995), Imperium. Granta Books, London.
Lonergan, Patrick. (2012) ‘The Beauty Queen of Leenane’ Rev. of The
Beauty Queen of Leenane, dir. Joe Hill-Gibbins. Irish Theatre
Magazine, (4 August)
www.irishtheatremagazine.ie/reviews/current/the-beauty-queen-ofleenane accessed 06/08/2013.
Maley, Willy and O’Malley-Younger, Alison. (eds.). (2013), Celtic
Connections: Irish-Scottish Relations and the Politics of Culture. Peter
Lang, Bern.
Myerhoff, Barbara, and Deena Metzger. (1980), ‘The Journal as Activity
and Genre: On Listening to the Silent Laughter of Mozart’, Semiotica
30 pp.97-114.
Newman, David. (2007), “The Lines that Continue to Separate Us:
Borders in Our ‘Borderless’ World”, Border Poetics De-limited. Johan
Schimanski and Stephen Wolfe (eds.). Wehrhahn Verlag, Hannover,
pp. 27-57.
Norquay, Glenda and Smyth, Gerry. (eds.). (2002), Across the Margins:
Cultural Identity and Change in the Atlantic Archipelago. Manchester
University Press, Manchester.
Okri, Ben. (1997), A Way of Being Free. Phoenix. London.
Border Crossings
15
Smith, G. Gregory. (1919), Scottish Literature: Character and Influence.
London.
Turner, Victor. (1967). Betwixt and Between: The forest of symbols:
aspects of the Ndembu ritual. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New
York.
—. (1969). The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Cornell
University Press, New York.
—. (1974), Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human
Society. Cornell University Press, New York.
—. (1997), The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Cornell
University Press, Aldine Transaction, New Brunswick and London,
and Ithaca, New York.
PART I
BORDERLINES
CHAPTER ONE
MIST ACROSS CELTIC WATERS
MIKE ADAMSON
Introduction
It has been postulated that the oral heritage of the Gaelic-speaking
peoples formed a corpus of guiding knowledge as powerful and influential
as their complex law tracts. That history and legend became fused in a preliterate society is no surprise, and the bardic tradition which permeated
Celtic society, allied with Druidry and the clientage of the vates and filidh
to the ruling elites, provides a well-documented mechanism for the
retention and transmission of culture (Mac Cana, 1983: 12), as surely as do
the feats of memory required of the druids themselves, according to Caesar
(1974: 32).
The transition from oral to literate society was neither swift nor
deliberate and it would seem that the Gaelic-speaking peoples had only
moderate use for the symbols on which the Mediterranean peoples
depended for communication. A few examples are known from Classical
times, such as the Greek inscription on the sword found at the oppidum of
Manching, on the lower Danube in Bavaria (Cunliffe, 1999: 227), or the
Roman-era census of the Helvetii being taken in Greek. Such cases
illustrate the fact that the collective peoples—whom we have for
convenience termed ‘Celts’—used written script opportunistically but saw
little need to incorporate it into their society or character. Caesar (1974:
32) tells us the Gauls of the 1st century BC commonly used written Greek
for their daily needs, though it must have been on some medium not
archaeologically durable, as no troves of mundane documentation, akin to
those of the Medieval Russian city of Novgorod (Brisbane and Reynolds,
2004: 47-58) or the village of Deir el Medina, above Egypt’s Valley of the
Kings (Wimmer, 1998: 355), so illuminating to modern scholars, have
come down to us. Indeed, as Moffatt (2001: 72) illustrated, the limitations
of the Latin and Greek mindsets resulted in a vocabulary inadequate to do
Mist Across Celtic Waters
19
justice to the depth and richness of Gaelic expression. Why would Celts,
Gaels, or any other people to whom the Gaelic language group was native,
feel drawn to adopt any mode of expression which, realistically, was but a
shadow of their own?
Nevertheless, this transition did occur, along with many other changes
in a history characterised by migration. When or even if, “Celtic” culture
crossed from Europe into the British Isles remains contentious (Cunliffe,
1999: 19; James, 1999: 17). But the commonality of tribal names, place
names, language groups, artistic and military traditions and general
technologies of metalworking, textiles etc., has commonly been taken to
indicate a confluence of culture across the English Channel by the mid-tolate centuries BC, and indeed that the western extremities of the British
Isles formed the last bastion of the “Celts” against the inexorable forces of
other European peoples pushing against them. While Collis (2003: 11) and
James (1999: 137-138)—neither of whom, to be fair, is a specialist linguist
—maintained that linguistic studies linking surviving spoken Gaelic to the
languages of Iron Age Europe are at best inconclusive, others are more
generous, and see ample reason for the preservation of some sort of crosschannel model of acculturative spread, denoted by the language carried by
peoples in motion.
In this general model, a non-literate pagan culture, arising by whatever
route out of a European progenitor, endured in Ireland and Scotland as late
as the 6th century, before the coming of the monkish era. St Columba’s
monastery on Iona, founded in AD 563, served as a springboard for the
expansion of Christianity into the lands around the northern channel, and
into the territories of the Picts and Scoti. Inevitably, writing, as a
competitor to the mental discipline of an oral heritage, spread with the
literate monks, and from the modern perspective we can be thankful for
this as the early monks transcribed, and thus transmitted to us, annals from
very early times. Among them are Ireland’s Brehon Laws, taken by
modern scholars to be a fairly accurate transcription of the late pagan oral
law tracts (Cunliffe, 1999: 27; Thompson, 1996: 16), whose complexities
speak eloquently of the sophisticated minds behind such labyrinthine
reasoning.
Likewise, the Cain Adamnan of AD 697 (Thompson, 1996: 71)
chronicles the early church’s successful influencing of the Irish kings to
bring an end to obligatory military service for women. This factor speaks
volumes about the gender relations of its contemporary society, which, on
the showing of the law tracts, far more resembled our own than anything
which has held sway since the rise of church authority.
20
Chapter One
The inherent conflict in society surrounding the conversion of the
Gaels is the operative question. If the oral heritage informed and guided
Irish society at a deep, almost intuitive level, with the sagas providing the
moral tapestry, framed in heroic, often tragic, deeds, how long did this
influence compete with the foreign rhetoric of the Bible as the steering
consciousness of society?
The spread of Irish society into Scotland occurred simultaneously with
the nominal Christianisation of the Irish, thus it is to be expected that the
ingrained corpus of pagan lore crossed the sea with the Dal Riata and
played a similar role in the new kingdom to that in the old. But was this
role expressed in the new land in a positive or negative way? An
examination and comparison of the folkloric traditions of Ireland and
Scotland would be an endeavour worthy of an entire volume, but it may be
productively touched upon here, sufficient to answer the question, did the
ancient sagas of Ireland linger in the Scottish memory, and did the new
religion demonise the old ways?
Origins of the Scots
Kenneth MacAlpin is popularly considered the first king of the Dal
Riata in Scotland, his reign beginning around AD 841, but the story of the
Scoti in Scotland does not begin there. This was a time of the attempted
recovery of lost glories; the oath of Charlemagne upon his coronation in
AD 800 had been to restore the Western Roman Empire, an impossible
aspiration but a noble one. On the Atlantic Façade of Europe, peoples had
been in turmoil for many centuries, with folk migration mingled with
raiding. The Irish Sea was a crossroads for traders, raiders, missionaries
and explorers, and the galleys of the Celtic peoples plied this seaway
connecting Ireland and the mainland of Britain as they had since Roman
times, and probably earlier. It was a time and place ripe for expansion.
The Dal Riata was a tribal amalgam in the Antrim region of Northern
Ireland, peoples known as early as Roman times as the Scoti. Powerful,
needing to expand, they had long eyed green, misty Argylleshire across
the sea. The first expeditions were centuries before MacAlpin’s time,
Fergus Mor mac Eirc founding a colony in Argyll around AD 500, in the
region which was, long after, to become the Kingdom of Dalriata, part of a
wave of expansion that saw Irish settlements founded on the British coast
as far south as Cornwall and Devon (Foster, 1996: 13). Indeed, the Middle
Irish manuscripts known as the Irish Synchronisms (Anderson, 1980: 4445) list Fergus as first king of the Dal Riata in Scotland, and MacAlpin
falls more than thirty ruler’s names later. This Irish fiefdom on the
Mist Across Celtic Waters
21
mainland would provide the power base for the general absorption of the
ancient Pictish tribes within a century of MacAlpin’s arrival.
The early history of modern Scotland falls within the Dark Ages, a
period which, as Foster outlines, based on the most recent generation of
scholarship, is in fact far less “dark” than was thought. With the translation
of a number of Pictish inscriptions it has been posited forcefully by
Katherine Forsyth (1997: 10-11) that their language was a derivative of qceltic, the family of dialects common to Wales and Brittany, thus implying
that the once mysterious Picts were related in some sense, culturally even
if not genetically, to the Gaelic-speaking peoples to the west and south.
Nothing in this suggestion is in any way new, but Pictish scholarship had
to come around to accepting the possibility.
Perhaps this distant relationship eased the passage of the Dal Riata into
Scotland, for when MacAlpin’s galleys at last carried the makings of a
permanent colony from the ancient seat of the Scoti into Argyll, the Picts
were in no position to repulse them, their martial ferocity, spoken of since
antiquity, notwithstanding.
Indeed, it is thought that the Scoti more or less absorbed the Pictish
culture into their own before the year 1000, leaving almost no tangible
remainders of their language, art and history. Only a single Pictish
document, a king-list, remains, and so thorough was their subsumption
into early Gaelic Scotland that they were popularly considered a “lost”
people as late as the 1950s. In fairness, ‘Pict’ (Latin picti, ‘painted ones’, a
reference to tribal tattoos) is as much a name of convenience as is ‘Celt’,
the second-hand attributions of literate observers, as there is no
unimpeachable evidence for the indigenous names of these peoples
(assuming they represented any national, racial or other unified state-level
identity, which itself is highly doubtful). But from an archaeological
standpoint, as well as a historical one, they are far from unknown, as
Forsyth and others ably document.
The late Iron Age/Early Medieval period in Scotland is characterised
by the consolidation of the power of the kings and church alike. When the
church returned to Scotland with the Dal Riata, there was no importation
of conflict with long-established ecclesiastical centres on Iona and
elsewhere, and the reach of bishops was limited only by the domain of the
kings they served. Anderson (1980), Foster (1996), Mitchison (2002),
Moffat (2001) and Smyth (1984) extensively review the centuries of
shifting power, when kings and pretenders fought back and forth over the
landscape of Britain, extending their territory and establishing short-lived
dynasties. Ritchie and Ritchie (1981) examine the epoch of Scottish
prehistory from an archaeological standpoint, and though the overall
22
Chapter One
picture has changed since then their catalogue of artefacts and sites
remains highly relevant.
To this turbulent mix was added the Vikings who settled in the north
and west following their first raid into Britain (at Lindisfarne in 793), and
the establishment of their settlement at Yorvik (Roman Eboracum, modern
York) on the river Ouse, in 866. Initially hostile to the Gaels, Picts, Angles
and Britons, the Vikings and later Danes became neighbours in due
course, with the Hebrides largely Scandinavian and owing fealty to a far
away ruler in Norway. The Vikings were not converted until the 11th
century, but their prior pagan status enhanced their adversarial nature to
the Christianised Celts, Gaels, Picts, Saxons and Angles.
The Role of Legend: Gaelic Whispers
Each of these peoples had their own corpus of legend and mythology,
which though it may have been in conflict with the new cosmic outlook
attendant on conversion, was unlikely to fade quickly in the public
consciousness. The moral lessons taught by the cycles of Irish legend rival
those of the Greek tradition with their window on all of life’s vices,
travails and motivations, forming a metaphoric grammar for existence. It is
postulated that while the early church took formal control of the day to day
outlook of the people, its edicts would be filtered and understood through
their pre-existing belief system, rooted in the sagas as the history of a nonliterate culture, kept alive by the retelling of the bards.
If this held good over just a few generations, pending the submergence
of the ancient heritage in the overburden of Christianity, then by the time
the Gaels settled Scotland once and for all in the 9th century there would
be no remaining trace of pagan mythology advising, much less
commanding, the outlook of the people. Even the briefest consultation of
the mythology of Scotland reveals this not to be the case, therefore it is a
safe assumption that the Irish sagas were carried into Scotland as the
common heritage of the Dal Riata, perhaps joining with a similar body of
oral heritage in the culture of the Picts and others.
Perhaps Scottish mythology has too often been seen as subsidiary to
that of Ireland, as expressions of the wider corpus of ‘Celtic Myth’. Mac
Cana mentions Scotland on only a handful of occasions, incidental to Irish
myth, implying that the two streams are closely allied. With reference to
the Gaulish Cernunos, he says “That the horned god was no stranger to the
insular Celts, of the Christian as well as the pre-Christian period, is
evidenced by iconographic items from Ireland and Scotland, and one
might therefore have reasonably expected him in the literary traditions
Mist Across Celtic Waters
23
also” (Mac Cana, 1983: 40). Elsewhere Mac Cana speaks of “age old,
uninterrupted belief” in the rightness of kingship to which poets turned, in
desperation, in the 18th century when Gaelic sovereignty and the functional
reality of her noble lineages had been dispersed and destroyed: a harking
back to the ancient and the ingrained, however unrealistic it may have
been in the context of the times (Mac Cana, 1983: 114).
Here we may see the comfort of the old, certainties that were attractive
in an age of change and injustice. The very church that had taken
dominion by the 7th century was itself fractured, laying the foundation for
the chronic schism that was to characterise the Gaelic lands. A trickle of
settlers into Ireland had begun as early as the 12th century, but the process
accelerated with the confiscation of clannish territories by the English and
the importation of Protestant settlers to Ireland from the time of Henry
VIII, continuing through the time of James I/VI and ending with Oliver
Cromwell. This may be seen to have constituted a divide-and-conquer
strategy, especially after the dissolution of the Lordship of the Isles in
1493, which was the last truly widespread unifying force of the Gaelic
peoples.
In an age when security was fading into serfdom to the English, for
Ireland and Scotland alike, what would be more natural than that the
surviving echoes of their ancient and characteristically Gaelic past should
retain a reality that set the Irish and Scots apart from the invaders? It may
not be very Christian to acknowledge Banshee and Selkie, Black Dogs and
Hags as part of the living, breathing world, but it was Gaelic.
How do the Irish and Scottish mythological canons compare? All
mythologies absorb and modify elements from elsewhere, so the transition
from Ireland to Scotland can only have incorporated fresh influences. The
monstrous Orcadian beast known as the Nuckelavee is a case in point, a
grotesque concoction of cyclops and centaur, drawn perhaps from contact
with Classical myth via monkish writings, but embellished with peculiarly
Celtic elements, such as a single blazing red eye (echoing Balor of the Evil
Eye, leader of the Sea Demons in the Tain) and being described as
hideless, an animated mass of muscle, sinew and bone, echoing the
hideous morphing of Cu Chulainn during ‘wasp spasm’ when he became a
grotesque travesty of a human being. That this creature belongs in the
myth of the Orkney Islands places it just as firmly within the sphere of
Nordic influence and it is thematically related to the Icelandic Nykur.
Kelpies, the waterhorses that entice the unwary to watery death, or
Selchies, the mer-folk in the form of seals, are common to both canons,
indeed are found as far afield as the Faroe Islands and Iceland. Irish myth
recognises mer-folk under the names Merrow and Muirruhgach, recorded
24
Chapter One
as able to foretell coming storms, and the Selchies of Scotland became the
Roane in Ireland. They may be seen as a likely extemporisation to the
canon of people dwelling among rivers and lakes, and the endless arms of
the sea lochs in the west, but the tradition may well be of Norse origin,
centred on the Orkneys and Shetlands.
Also in common we find the Banshee (Ban Sidhe), personalised in
Scotland as physical women, spirits who mourn for the dead and foretell
the end for kings and chiefs, sometimes as benevolent spirits, less often as
wild and primal as the howling Irish psychopomp which, it is said, comes
for the dead, no matter how humble, to this day. Other elements of the
Irish canon which crossed the Sea of the Hebrides and took root despite
Christianity’s best attempts to suppress the pagan heritage were the Fianna
and the Fomorians (Mackenzie, 1912: 336).
Fionn the giant is perhaps most famous for crossing the Irish Sea
unaided, whether by wading or building the Giant’s Causeway, thus
unifying Ireland and Scotland in the same cycle of myth, and the bard
Ossian is gifted an almost-classical neo-divine lineage in the tale of his
birth to a fairy, mistress of Fionn, bedded when the hero hunted through
Inverness, the bard entering the world in Arisaig. Also concerning Fionn, a
tale of Loch Ashie in Inverness records he fought a battle on those moors,
and a silent apparition of the clashing armies is reputed to have manifested
at dawn on the 1st of May on a number of occasions, even in the 20th
century (Readers Digest Association 1977: 439, 443).
The act of crossing that stretch of water is in itself bonded inextricably
to the cosmological canon of the region and the times. A tale of Islay, in
the Hebrides, speaks of a princess of the Danes making a magical crossing,
walking upon islands that formed in her path, while upon Islay a hill was
said to be the court of the Fairy Queen, whose magical cup gave forth
wisdom, but only to women. These latter points echo the Cauldron of
Plenty, one of the four Treasures of Ireland (Mac Cana, 1983: 58) in its
role of cornucopia, whilst also reflecting the Holy Grail; the matrifocal
transmission of knowledge harks perhaps to the rights and privileges of
women in late pagan Ireland, as discussed by Thompson, itself likely an
echo of earlier Gaulish custom (Cunliffe, 1999: 109).
Another of the four Treasures, the Lia Fail, the Stone of Destiny, on
which the kings of ancient Ireland were crowned, is said to have been
taken to Scotland by Kenneth MacAlpin, in 843 and was subsequently
used in the coronation of Scottish monarchs as the Stone of Scone. It was
removed in 1296 by Edward I in a bid to unify the English and Scottish
royal traditions, a theft unlikely to bring about much filial feeling. The
stone lies today in Westminster Abbey, an ironic destination for one of the
Mist Across Celtic Waters
25
most sacred icons of the pagan Gaels (Readers Digest Association, 1977:
448).
Again it was women who passed on the tales of heroes and gods of old
on Barra, and kept alive the spirit of the ancient Celtic goddess Brigid as a
household presence after the fashion of Classical Vesta, though
personified through the acceptable form of Christianised Saint Brigid. An
echo of the ancient world’s headhunting habits is found in the skull of a
slain McLeod soldier, fallen in 1601 in battle with the MacDonalds,
preserved as a trophy at Trinity Temple on North Uist (Readers Digest
Association 1977: 436). More historical than mythological, these
anecdotes underscore how close the streams of consciousness can become.
Perhaps the clearest evidence of demonisation of the old ways, despite
their persistence in the racial consciousness, can be found in the casual use
of terminology. In 1912 the great Gaelic folklorist and scholar Donald
MacKenzie used the accepted folkloric terminology, in which goddesses,
spirits and other female figures from the mythological canon were
collectively termed hags. Malicious spirits, giantesses that flung boulders
and dropped fire on forests, though they may be likened to elements of
Norse influence (MacKenzie, 1912: 339), are grouped as the Cailleachan
Mor, female counterparts of the gods, which are categorised as the
Fomorians. The extent to which this pejorative is applied can be judged
from the inclusion of Scathach, the warrior-woman who trained the young
Hound of Ulster (Rolleston, 1985: 187-8; Squire, 1975: 163-4), in the
same category. MacKenzie’s home town of Cromarty, one hundred years
ago, preserved a strong folkloric tradition of a hag ironically named Gentle
Annie (MacKenzie, 1912: 340-3), who controlled the wind from the sea
and was responsible for the drowning of fishermen in the springtime.
MacKenzie collects various legends and myths of the west of Scotland
and compares them to Irish traditions, including the above-mentioned
derivative of the Fomorians (a harsh and terrible form, without the
beneficence of a Dagda among them), and concludes that only martial,
savage traditions crossed the sea with the Dalriata in the 9th century, which
may have become comingled with Pictish traditions which survived the
absorption of their culture. If, as Foster reports, the Picts were in fact a
kindred people to the Gaelic races, such a blending is less surprising than
it otherwise may have been, but the question of the savageness of
traditions bears closer scrutiny. Ireland and Scotland alike were lands born
in the age of the sword and the power of kings, in turmoil, ambition and
revenge, and the inherently martial nature of the sagas, glorying in the
physical and military prowess of their heroes, lends itself comfortably to
raw new kingdoms seeking the legitimacy of both the church in the here
26
Chapter One
and now and the respectability of the ancient. The Scottish kings may no
longer have needed descent from the gods for their authority, or even to
instill awe in others, but they stood in the shadow of Cormac, Fionn and
Cu Chulainn, and woe to any who would doubt their willingness to
emulate the giants of old.
Shaping Influences
Comparison of the medieval development of Ireland and Scotland
reveals similar patterns of militarism, power struggles and the hegemony
of the church (Kee, 1980: 24-30). In the Middle Ages the Hebridean power
base exported mercenaries—gallowglasses—to Ireland, a source of fresh,
hardened troops for the Irish kings to withstand the encroachment of
distant London in the later Middle Ages (Moffatt, 2001: 156-8), while
Wallace’s campaign and martyrdom at the end of the 13th century have
become synonymous with Scottish nationalism.
Did the heritage of the ancient stories have any impact on the
development of the two countries? If Mackenzie (1912: 337-8) is right in
that Scotland inherited only the harshest of Irish tradition, then was the
warrior ethos of the Middle Ages, right down to modern times, nurtured,
even unknowingly, by the heroic tradition of the Dal Riata? There seems
no objective way to measure this, but the following comparisons can be
made.
Both societies were based upon warrior sodalities, both were oppressed
by England from the Middle Ages onward; they were of common origin,
insofar as their Gaelic background can confidently be traced by virtue of
immediately related languages; they were converted to Christianity around
the same time; they were once culturally united by the Lordship of the
Isles; they shared a heroic tradition, ingrained in the public consciousness
from pre-literate times; a clan or tribal system was extant in both lands at
various times; kingdoms hierarchically superior to the clan system were
built by the sword; and they share related mythologies that have
perpetuated with remarkable intensity for well over a thousand years, in
one guise or another, despite conversion and the extremes of church rule.
Clearly, Ireland and Scotland are close kin, historically, culturally and
socially. There are far greater similarities than differences, certainly to the
perspective of a foreigner.
In conclusion, it may be said that, in this, it seems no matter how
strongly the church took control of outward appearances, the old ways
were indeed reluctant to die. Mackenzie records that the custodians of the
Mist Across Celtic Waters
27
traditions, as late as the 20th century, were typically women, the part of the
community usually cast as witches in the last thousand years:
Folk-beliefs and folk-tales would, of course, survive all else. These, in our
own day even, are perpetuated chiefly by women (Mackenzie, 1912: 345).
Mackenzie likens this to the archaic tradition that Pictish society featured
matrilineal succession, and that this facilitated acceptance in the evolving
society of early Scotland of traditions of goddesses and female
supernatural influences. In the times of brutal suppression of competing
arcane knowledge, a reluctance to write down damning things is
understandable, and in this singular element it may be that a perpetuation
of the oral heritage, characteristic of the Celts of old, can be glimpsed nigh
to modern times.
Works Cited
Anderson, M. O. (1980), Kings and Kingship in Early Scotland, Scottish
Academic Press. Edinburgh and London.
Brisbane, M and Reynolds, (2004), A “Novgorod: The Archaeology of a
Medieval Timber City,” Current World Archaeology, 7, pp. 47-58.
Caesar, J. (1974), The Conquest of Gaul, Penguin, Harmondsworth.
Collis, J. (2003), Celts, Origins and Re-Inventions, Tempus, Chalford.
Cunliffe, B. (1999), The Ancient Celts, Penguin, London.
Readers Digest Association (1977) Folklore, Myths and Legends of
Britain, London.
Forsyth, K. (1997), Language in Pictland: The Case Against Non-IndoEuropean Pictish, De Keltiche Draak, Utrecht.
Foster, S. M. (1996), Picts, Gaels and Scots, B. T. Batsford Ltd. London.
James, S. (1999), The Atlantic Celts, British Museum Press, London.
Kee, R. (1980), Ireland, A History, Abacus, London.
Mac Cana, P. (1983), Celtic Mythology, The Hamlyn Publishing Group
Ltd., Feltham, Newnes.
Mackenzie, D. A. (1912), “A Highland Goddess,” in The Celtic Review
vol 7, Macleod, Edinburgh, pp. 336-45.
Mitchison, R. (2002), A History of Scotland, Routledge, London.
Moffatt, A. (2001), The Sea Kingdoms, Harper Collins, London.
—. (2005), Before Scotland, Thames and Hudson, London.
Ritchie, G. and Ritchie, A. (1981) Scotland, Archaeology and Early
History, Thames and Hudson, London.
28
Chapter One
Rolleston, T. W. (1985) Myths and Legends of the Celtic Race, Guild
Publishing. London.
Smyth, A. P. (1984), Warlords and Holy Men, Scotland AD 80-1000,
Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd., London.
Squire, C. (1975), Celtic Myth and Legend, Newcastle Publishing Ltd.
Van Nuys.
Thompson, J. G. (1996), Women in Celtic Law and Custom, The Edwin
Mellen Press, New York.
Wimmer, S. (1998), “Heiroglyphs – Writing and Literature” Egypt, the
World of the Pharaohs, Könemann Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, Cologne,
pp. 342-355.
CHAPTER TWO
EXILE AND SUFFERING
IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF IDENTITY:
NARRATIVES OF BANISHMENT, EXILE
TH
TH
AND RETURN IN 17 AND 18 CENTURY
BRITAIN AND IRELAND
PETER RUSHTON
In June 1665, 37 men and women were with some difficulty carried down
the Thames from Newgate jail in central London, and put on board a ship
for the West Indies. They were Quakers, condemned for repeatedly
attending their meetings, deemed “seditious conventicles” by a 1664 law.
Matters had become urgent, as plague had struck the city and the jails were
filling up with Quakers sentenced to transportation to the colonies. The
consequences for this group were terrible:
Being on Board, all the Men were thronged together between Decks, where
they could not stand upright; and the Pestilence coming into the Ship,
which was long retarded in the River, Fudge the Captain being arrested and
imprisoned for Debt, so that it was about seven Months before they got to
the Land's End, in which Time twenty seven of the Prisoners on Board
died.
As the vessel finally entered the Atlantic from Plymouth, it was seized by
a Dutch Privateer, and carried to Holland, but the Dutch, realising that
Quaker civilians could not be exchanged as prisoners of war, sent them
home again (Besse, 1753: 406). Less than a century later, in 1746, there
were many ships in the Thames crammed with a very different kind of
prisoner, the captured rebels of the 1745 Jacobite rising, brought down
from Scotland and the North of England to be kept in the South for trial
30
Chapter Two
and execution. In the words of a government official sent to report on the
conditions in which they were being kept:
On my looking down into the hold, where the prisoners then were, [I] was
saluted with such an Intollerable [over: smell] that it was like to Overcome
Me, tho' I was provided with proper herbs and my nostrilles stopped
therewith. After seating ourselves on the Quarter Deck the prisoners were
called up one by one; such as were able came and on being asked, told
their names, in what Regiment or corps they served, of what age they were,
and where born; The Number of those who came on deck were 54, many of
whom were very ill, as appeared by their countenance and their snail creeppace in ascending the ladder, being only just able to crawl up; 18 who were
left below were said to be utterly incapable of coming on the Deck unless
by help of a sling . . .
Some were suffering from an “another odious distemper peculiar to
Scotchmen” (Macbeth Forbes, 1903: 34-35). 1 Characteristically, like so
many of the poorest Jacobites swept up in the rising, the prisoners
themselves left few records of their experiences. Only in their petitions for
mercy, and those submitted by their relatives and friends, did they reveal
their motives and experiences in the rebellion (often providing the excuse
that, being poor victims of Highland feudalism, they had been “forced out”
into armed rebellion). In prison after the surrender or capture, they had
been subject to selection by lot, with one in twenty destined for trial on
charges of treason and almost certain execution. The remainder, like these,
were kept awaiting shipment to the colonies. They were instructed to sign
a confession and admit their guilt, and accept the King’s mercy. The
mixture of terror and mercy, with the added horror of the randomness of
the selection process, combined the basic elements that Douglas Hay has
highlighted as fundamental to the criminal law in the eighteenth century.
With these accused, however, mass executions were a real possibility, in
contrast to the situation with more ordinary criminals (Hay, 1975: 17-63).2
These are just two examples of a common process in the early modern
British Empire. The experience of banishment was shared by many ruled
by the British state in many different contexts. In Britain, gypsies, paupers,
rebels and criminals were transported to the colonies in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. In the colonies themselves, native peoples were
removed or swept away to make way for British settlers, a process that
was at its greatest in Cromwell's rule in Ireland in the 1650s. In addition,
political and religious conflicts from the sixteenth to the end of the
eighteenth centuries created many exiled communities within Europe and
across the Atlantic, and memoirs of exile were therefore a common basis
for the construction of collective identities. 3 In Ireland and Scotland in
Exile and Suffering in the Construction of Identity
31
particular, exile became a formative experience for many of the gentry and
aristocracy after 1600, and their repeated attempts at return provided one
of the vital sources of fighters in various rebellions. For the poor, too,
banishment was increasingly common, not only in the Cromwellian
‘settlement’ of Ireland but in the subsequent rebellions of the eighteenth
century in both Ireland and Scotland. Other groups also suffered, such as
Irish Catholic priests throughout the seventeenth century, and English
Quakers and the Presbyterian Scottish Covenanters in the shorter but
equally intense repression under Charles II and his brother James II. These
experiences form part of the memories of these religious groups and
nationalities, preserved in popular histories and literary representations
alike. Indeed, such narratives have been identified by Benedict Anderson
as fundamental to the “imagined communities” of nationhood: by
extension, stories of the past have also been essential to communities of all
kinds, including occupational communities such as those in mining or
fishing (characterized by disasters and shared struggles), ethnic and
religious groups and others such as those sharing heterodox sexualities,
who have suffered marginalization or repression (Anderson, 1985).
It is important to stress that the idea of textualization informs this
analysis: the concept encourages concentration on how common experiences
and identities become embodied in physical and communicable forms,
particularly in printed texts. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, for example,
underwrote English Protestant identities and provided them with a history
of their sixteenth-century (and later) struggles (Foxe, 1641). 4 The
production of texts as expressions of distinct identities has been regarded
as one of the most important features of early modern society as it
developed after 1500. We need to recognise though, that this was multifacetted, involving both individuals, whose personal statements, memoirs
and diaries became part of the printed products, and groups, in that key
books or other publications acquired collective significance. One element
was also the rise in literacy that enabled a wider audience for these
productions. Texts, in effect, became part of people's collective memories
of themselves, and formed what might be called an archive of their
identity. Endorsement or adoption of this archive and its viewpoint may be
a requirement of membership of some groups.
From the first, problems of access to the necessary production facilities
and distribution networks meant that some groups found this process
easier than others. In many cases the standards of literacy meant that there
was limited audience for the printed works. Some groups also had to work
in secret and under difficult conditions of political repression. Only when
they achieved some kind of legitimacy could the underground emerge into
32
Chapter Two
an overground process of widespread distribution. Power and legitimacy
therefore were required to ensure the systematic distribution of the texts.
This is not just a matter of the emergence in print of the individual self, as
Mascuch has proposed, but the intervention of texts at all levels into social
relations and identities.5 The stories of banishment and exile have therefore
come down to us in radically different forms, depending on the processes
and timing of their collection, publication and dissemination. Transatlantic
narratives involving both the voyage across the ‘middle passage’ of
slavery, for example, are comparatively rare, and their authors, or the
actors at the core of the stories, are unlikely to be typical, though their
accounts may encapsulate some of the shared experiences of exile and
settlement in the colonies. There was a distinctive development, almost a
genre, of standardised ways of telling ‘the conventional circum-Atlantic
adventure story’ by the mid-eighteenth century which framed many
exciting tales of exile, capture, escape and redemption, though there were
also stories involving journeys of another kind, from poverty to wealth and
power, which were possible in the colonies (Tavor Bannet, 2011: 98, 99,
139). The best organised and most comprehensive accounts are those left
by the Quakers and Covenanters, whose huge publication effort in the
eighteenth century enshrined their history as one of suffering and eventual
redemption. Both used the language of ‘sufferings’, which defined a
‘suffering people’. The Quakers in particular recorded the personal
memoirs and copied the official documents to produce an integrated
account of the repression that began in the Cromwellian Interregnum of
the 1650s and continued with equal or even greater intensity after the
Restoration.
This was a massive effort in research and documentation, and provided
Quaker communities everywhere with a record of their past misfortunes,
justifying their sense of virtue and survival. The authenticity asserted, and
the claims of using ‘original accounts’ were not unusual features of many
eighteenth-century prints, from travel accounts, and novels by writers such
as Daniel Defoe and Henry Fielding. However, where the official sources
survive, they seem to have been scrupulously copied by the Quaker
writers. Reports were collected within Britain by the ‘meeting for
sufferings’ founded in 1676, and supplemented later by official records
such as those of the Privy Council. The sweep of the collection was
enormous, including accounts of Quaker sufferings everywhere on both
sides of the Atlantic—a means of unifying their scattered communities in a
cross-border international membership (Miller: 2005: 73). 6 Knowledge of
each other’s experiences of repression bound the local community to the
others, reinforced by a remarkable pattern of travelling and visiting—
Exile and Suffering in the Construction of Identity
33
‘travelling in the light’, as they called it. This internationalism, essential
both to their early wandering spirit and later business networking, aroused
the suspicions of those demanding local patriotism, as when, for example,
Quakers came under suspicion of being pro-British (because not
sufficiently pro-American) in the American Revolution. 7
Fig. 2-1
34
Chapter Two
Scottish Covenanters
A similar effort at publishing records and memoirs of collective
sufferings was carried out by the Scottish Presbyterians, the Covenanters,
again in the eighteenth century when their membership was spread
throughout the empire. The texts included memoirs of key figures, and
stories of exile and return. The major author was Reverend Robert
Wodrow, whose publications were loyally presented to the king in the
1720s. 8 Other individual biographies, such as that of Alexander Peden,
were less sober, the narrative involving the repeated theme of the severe
judgement of God against any who opposed or oppressed him and the
providential character of his life is revealed by his ability to predict these
judgements. His personal exile was in the 1670s on the Bass Rock in the
Firth of Forth for several years, and in 1678 was nearly banished again,
this time to Virginia. He fled to Ulster, but returned from his preaching
there with 26 armed Scots to take part in the 1685 Argyll rising.
Covenanting texts of this kind in the early eighteenth century were not
histories recalled in tranquillity, but campaigning documents designed to
reinforce the Presbyterian hegemony established after the Glorious
Revolution of 1688. But with a large Catholic and Protestant Episcopal
population, Scotland was not yet safe for the Covenanting tradition, and
Wodrow’s work, in particular, was produced after the 1715 rebellion in
order to reinforce the awareness of continued dangers of rebellion and a
return to the ‘killing time’ of the 1680s. This is history emphatically
written from the point of view of the winners.9
Both Quakers’ and Covenanters’ printed sources were fond of lists and
statistics with the first set of Quaker sufferings going in for almost modern
styles of numerical tables. Data were plastered on the front page of
Edward Burrough's account of New England sufferings, the first and most
serious denunciation of religious persecution in Massachusetts, which
provided the full statistics:
22 have been banished upon pain of death, 3 have been martyred, 3 have
had their right-ears cut, 1 have [sic] been burnt in the hand with the letter
H, 31 persons have received 650 stripes, 1 was beat while his body was
like a jelly (Burrough, 1661: cover page).
From the first, these groups drew on what has been called the ‘Protestant
theory of persecution’, which had developed since the start of the
Reformation. Providentialism and Protestantism had long been associated:
this meant that these groups could construct their histories in terms of both
Exile and Suffering in the Construction of Identity
35
their eventual triumph over their enemies and within a framework of
God’s will or intention for them.10
Jacobite Exiles
Whereas collective printed memories of suffering underpinned the
identities of Quakers and Scottish Presbyterians, no such constructions of
communal experiences were possible for the many Irish and Scottish
exiles expelled for involvement in resistance to, or rebellions against,
British rule. There were publications, but they could not be said to have
been comprehensive or generally representative, nor were they designed to
be so, as they were often the individual memoirs of famous characters
involved in the rebellions (Winchester, 1870). Some were suppressed
inside Britain when they were published, while others were published in
countries of exile such as France. That does not mean that no efforts were
made. The most impressive was the collection of memoirs collected by
Bishop Robert Forbes in the years immediately after the ’45. Released
from jail himself, where he had been locked up as a suspected sympathiser
with Bonny Prince Charlie, he spent a great deal of time interviewing
survivors and collecting letters and reports in a number of large
manuscript volumes. If Wodrow’s work was published after the 1715
Rising in a time, he claimed, of Jacobite threat, to justify the Presbyterian
and Lowland hegemony in Scotland, then Forbes’s efforts represent an
astonishing large-scale attempt to provide the alternative definition of
Scottish identity. He claimed in his manuscript that this work of narrative
was “as exactly made as the Iniquity of the Times would permit”. In fact,
parts read like the field-notes of a modern sociologist, with careful records
of when he interviewed people, how he had added material to make the
subsequent texts clearer, and how far he had been able to confirm the
account. The memoir of the returned Jacobite Alexander Stewart, for
example, transported to Maryland for his part in the ’45, provides one of
the few accounts of banishment to the colonies, and more importantly, of
return to Scotland. In the same period, criminals sent to the colonies gave
accounts of their return only when on the way to the gallows (Paton, 1895:
231-43).11 Though the text included letters from comparatively ordinary
people, the best documented misfortunes were those of landed gentry and
titled Scots. The purpose was to record for posterity the fate of Scotland’s
“exiled race of princes’” (Chambers R, 1834: x, xx).12
There were, however, other manifestations of Jacobite sentiments
throughout the eighteenth century, much of it in material rather than
printed form. Cups, drinking glasses, rings and other symbolic expressions
36
Chapter Two
of Jacobite sympathies created an underground world of secret signs. As
Murray Pittock has pointed out, this has not received serious historical
evaluation, though:
Jacobite material culture enjoys a fragmentary but widespread survival. It
fascinates visitors to museums and stately homes; auction houses
frequently sell it for high prices.
Largely the possessions of the wealthy, these “treacherous” objects made
“an accumulated fund of significant symbols”, in Clifford Geertz’s words,
whose very speechlessness could nevertheless produce a powerful
expression of common, if disguised, subversive feelings (Pittock, 2011:
45, 47 & 49). Robert Forbes had also begun the trade in memorabilia of
the Prince, shortly after the ’45, tying in a number of pieces of his clothing
and even his brogues, into the manuscript. “The bishop seems, indeed, to
have been devoted to relic gathering, and to have prosecuted his researches
with no small assiduity”, remarked his first editor. With the help of Flora
Macdonald, he acquired pieces of the shoes the Prince had worn when
disguised as a woman (Chambers, 1834: xiii-xiv). 13 There were also
Jacobite songs—collected and published later in the century. Collectors
were explicit in trying to preserve the underground Jacobite songs, and
hailed them as reflections of a dissident culture. James Hogg, in his
Jacobite Relics of Scotland grandly claimed that the songs were unique to
the Jacobite tradition, and had no relationship with other forms of Scottish
culture. Their origins as ‘pure’ folk, however, can always be subject to the
same scepticism that has been directed at other folk traditions (Hogg,
1819: vii).14
There was a kind of return, at least symbolically, for the Jacobite
movement, as a distinctive mixture of romanticism and rational whiggism
allowed a rehabilitation of the reputation of the Stuart monarchy and their
Scottish supporters. ‘Sentimental Jacobitism’, as Colin Kidd calls it,
developed under the shadow of Enlightenment thinking and by the 1780s,
with the help of the London-based Highland Society, had won the
restoration of the landed estates forfeited in 1746 to the old families.
Combined with romantic endorsement of the old symbols and clothing,
‘the losers’ came to occupy ‘a large part in the culture of the winners’. The
poorest in the Jacobite movement, though, were scarcely mentioned by
either the Jacobite writers, Hanoverian official historians, or later
sentimentalists. This is partly because the rehabilitation of Jacobitism
coincided with the Highland Clearances. As one author had noted, when
reporting on the executions following the 1715 Rising, there were many
Exile and Suffering in the Construction of Identity
37
executions in several places in northern England following the seizure of
the rebels. Also:
There were transported from Leverpool, to several Colonies in the West
Indies, together with those mentioned before to be sent thither from
Lancaster, to the number of 638 Persons; who being generally of the
common sort, makes it very little necessary to mention them farther...
Without trials and speeches, memoirs and landed families, they did not
count much to either side, and were not remembered (Kidd, 1998: 58 &
60).15
The Irish Experience of Exile
Exile and banishment figured throughout early modern Irish history—
from the flight of the Earls and others in the early seventeenth century, to
the 1790s United Irishmen. ‘The Irish experience is not unique . . . What is
remarkable is the sheer longevity and intensity of the exilic tradition.’ It
was also more complex even than the Scottish experience (Higgins &
Kiberd, 1997: 11). 16 Among those who fled or were banished within
Europe in the early modern period, there were signs of collective
organization in new networks and communities, particularly in France and
Spain where so many Irish men served in the armed forces, and Irish
women took an important part in religion and education. 17 But such
consciousness may have been about survival and finding a new place,
rather than fighting to return home. Certainly the organized presence of
Irish soldiers, priests and merchants can be traced in the seventeenth
century in a number of countries, reflecting the scattering of the ‘wild
geese’ of the gentry and nobility and their followers. Some of the evidence
consists of the mark made by notable individuals in their new careers,
while in other contexts the presence of large numbers of people helped to
construct an Irish community which set down deep roots in particular
places. 18 Texts of survival have themselves been subject to accidental
vagaries of loss and rediscovery. There was no early modern corpus of
Irish exiles’ memoirs or experiences to match those of Quakers or
Jacobites. Some were created at the time or soon after and later were found
and integrated into a modern view of Irish history. This was most notable
in the example of the account of the 1607 so-called ‘Flight of the Earls’,
whose experiences and travels were recorded a few years later by Tadhg Ó
Cianáin, but whose text was discovered in a Louvain monastery and only
fully published in the early twentieth century. Much of the popular feeling
seems to be reflected in the Gaelic poetic tradition which continually
38
Chapter Two
expressed the experiences of exile and loss, though this, too, had to be
recovered in retrospect. There is considerable ambiguity about the identity
of some of these exiles, a few of whom had multiple careers and
changeable loyalties and religious affiliations. Pinning them down is not
easy, even in the retrospective gaze of history.19
This flight to the Continent reveals the ambiguity in the distinction
between exile and banishment of voluntary or involuntary emigration, a
difficulty that also arises in trying to understand the later movements of
the Irish poor. Certainly many exiles from Ireland were apparently
voluntary rather than involuntary, as gentry, the famous ‘Wild Geese’,
with their followers, preferred service in Continental armies than staying
in seventeenth-century Ireland. However, as the poets noted, this left the
country without a leader apart from God (Miller, 1985: p 24). It is all too
easy to assert, as some historians have, that many Irish were driven abroad
purely because of multiple forms of oppression:
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries religious persecution and
intolerance, difficult economic conditions, and oppressive political
circumstances were foremost among the reasons that prompted emigrants
to move to distant places. Any one or any combination of those
circumstances could spark emigration from a particular region.
...says one historian of Irish migration to America in the eighteenth
century. Yet she has to admit that “the motivation that drove poor
Irishmen to relocate overseas remains largely uncertain (Wokeck, 1996:
106-7,113).
The waves of Irish emigration before 1700 however, can be clearly
related to the repeated struggles for control of the country, and the
repeated assaults by British governments on the Catholic landed classes
and their supporters. Techniques of removal, and their targets, varied from
time to time, but there was a recurrent pattern. Two major categories were
sent abroad, willingly or unwillingly—rebels and soldiers, with their
leaders; the poor and destitute who could not be removed easily to
Connacht or otherwise employed. Cromwell began with the remnants of
defeated armies in 1649, and his administrators in the 1650s followed up
with a more general attack on the unwanted Catholic poor. A great deal
can be blamed on Cromwell, but his initial policy of intimidation by
massacre at Drogheda was simultaneously backed up by one adopted
slightly earlier in Scotland, of banishment to the colonies of rebel
survivors (or those allowed to surrender). This mixture of massacre and
expulsion had already been established in the treatment of the Irish found
Exile and Suffering in the Construction of Identity
39
in England and Scotland before 1649.20 As one of the recent historians of
the period summarises it, Micheál Ó Siochrú:
While the government encouraged enemy soldiers to leave for the
Continent, a different fate awaited those civilians unsuitable for military
service. From the beginning of the seventeenth century, England had
acquired colonies in the Caribbean, and developed lucrative sugar
plantations. African slaves provided most of the field labour, but a demand
existed for indentured servants of European stock, who worked for a fixed
period of time ‘under yoke harsher even than that of the Turks’, before
eventually obtaining their freedom (Ó Siochrú, 2008: 232-3).
“Truly I believe this bitterness will save much effusion of blood, through
the goodness of God”, wrote Cromwell at the time of Drogheda, but if it
did not, he had to admit that then the killing would “work remorse and
regret” (Carlyle, 1845: 457-8, 461).21
Over the next six years, “unscrupulous merchants”, as Ó Siochrú calls
them, exported many of the poor and destitute, and also periodically
emptied the jails, largely to the West as indentured servants. The
destruction of so many records from this period makes it difficult to verify
exact numbers, but Ó Siochrú estimates that by the 1660s “as many as
12,000 Irish resided in the Caribbean, compared with 50,000 African
slaves” (ó Siochrú,2008: 232-3). One nineteenth-century historian, John
Prendergast, commented that in the 1650s “Ireland must have exhibited
scenes in every part like the slave hunts of Africa”, and calculated that
6,400 men women and children were exported up to 4 March 1655 when
“all orders were revoked”. The traders (mostly from Bristol), the British
government’s cancellation order ran, had employed men:
…to delude poor people by false pretences into by-places and thence they
forced them on board their ships. The persons employed had so much a
piece for all they so deluded, and for the money sake they were found to
have enticed and forced women from their children and husbands,—
children from their parents, who maintained them at school; and they had
not only dealt so with the Irish, but also with the English (Prendergast,
1868: 244, 246).
The inclusion of so many women may, however, have had an element of
vengeance for their part in several actions including the 1641 rising.22
The documentation for these people, often forcibly transported to the
colonies simply for being poor, is scarce and intermittent. The records can
best be called accidental narratives, where they survive at all. As with the
troublesome poor Irish in early seventeenth-century France, they were
40
Chapter Two
more often spoken about than allowed to speak for themselves (Ò Ciosáin,
1997: 32-42). Some myths arose around them—that of all the Caribbean
islands, Montserrat was the ‘Irish’ island. Some may have done rather well
in the end, as racial solidarity among whites, in the face of an
overwhelming number of African slaves, overrode any differences among
them. While some probably joined the ranks of the poor ‘redlegs’, others
became small landowners and property-owners. The authorities probably
preferred a degree of Irish integration to prevent an alliance between them
and rebellious slaves. 23 An accidental narrative of the voyage is the
petition found in the British government’s intelligence files from an Irish
woman stranded in Portugal:
The bearer hereof Finella Cullava is a poor Irish widdow, and a catholick,
which, in mere hatred to our holy faith, the Inglish heretycks sente her, in
company of many other catholicks, slaves for the islands of the Barbados;
and it pleased the Lord, that the ship, in which they were imbarked, was by
foul weather forced into the port of Lisbon, and could not proceed in her
intended voyage; for which reason this poor woman, and the rest of the
Catholicks, remaine in this Christian citty, where they undergoe many
necessities. Therefore it will be a charitable worke for every faithfull
Christian to helpe them with their almes. In testymony of the truth, I have
paste this certificate, written in the colledge of our lady of Oration, in the
street called the Faugus das Farinias in the citty of Lisbon, the 21st of
October, 1657. (State Papers, 1742: 797-810). 24
No record survives of any response.
Others turned up in difficulties in Massachusetts. In 1661 two Irish
servants in Essex County refused to serve their master (whose fields of
maize were standing unharvested) because, they claimed, they had already
served more than the four years they would have done in Barbados. They
said:
We were brought out of our owne Country, contrary to our owne wills &
minds, & sold here unto Mr Symonds, by ye master of the Ship, Mr Dill,
but what Agreement was made betweene Mr Symonds and ye Said master,
was never Acted by our Consent or knowledge.
The court’s verdict was to check the legality of the contract which in any
case should not have extended to beyond 1663, and in the meantime the
two men (both over 21) agreed to go back to their service (Records &
Fines, 1912: 293-5). More serious were the cases of Ann Glover and her
daughter in 1688: the latter was accused of theft by the thirteen-year old
daughter of one John Goodwin, and, when the child became ill, the mother
Exile and Suffering in the Construction of Identity
41
was accused of witchcraft. Almost unable—or unwilling—to speak
English, Glover, an Irishwoman, was tried, convicted and executed as a
witch. Cotton Mather, who wrote an account of the affair in his list of the
devil’s afflictions upon the people of Massachusetts, reports that surgeons
had been called to test whether she was mentally ill. One of Mather’s
critics called Glover “a despised, crazy ill-conceived old woman” who had
fallen victim to the “ensnaring questions” of the doctors who found her
sane. She is reported to have said that she and her husband had originally
been sold to servitude in Barbados in the time of Cromwell, though this is
uncertain. She has since been hailed as Massachusetts’s first Catholic
martyr, and has earned a memorial plaque and a day declared in her
honour by the City of Boston (Mather, 1820: 397-403).25
The Irish continued to be transported unwillingly in the 1700s, their
lives and deaths similarly recorded accidentally in reports of extreme or
unusual events. The newly developed transatlantic press and print culture
provided the basis for both public knowledge at the time and present day
historical data. Often, ships and their human cargos of ‘King’s Passengers’
(convicted criminals) were reported as arriving. Sometimes, they report
disaster, as in 1735 when a brigantine, the Baltimore from Dublin was
reported abandoned and empty on the shore of Nova Scotia. The only
survivor was a woman claiming to be the wife (in fact sorrowful widow)
of the captain, Andrew Buckler. Her tale won her sympathy and public
support for her journey home, and she made her escape before being
revealed as, in fact, one of the convicts and, it was rumoured, an actress
from Dublin. She was one of the few to write her own story. 26
Mixed with criminals were other servants from Ireland. After 1700,
apart from those sentenced to transportation, most emigrants were, in
theory voluntary. Once more, the emigrants were alleged to have been
enticed abroad with false promises, as ‘soul-drivers’ induced thousands to
leave Ulster for America. 27 Moreover, their religious backgrounds were
markedly different from the earlier exiles. At a time when Catholic
poverty and exclusion were at their worst, in the eighteenth century,
Catholic emigration was low—indeed, statistically speaking, “relatively
few emigrated”. The fact that the majority of Irish emigrants were
Protestant was one reason why the large minority they had formed in the
early 1700s, more than a quarter of the Irish population, declined steadily
over the following century. With shallow roots in Ireland, most having
only arrived in the 1690s, and shrinking civil rights for those Protestants
outside the Church of Ireland such as the Ulster Presbyterians, they moved
on into the Atlantic (Miller, 1985: 131).28 Perhaps because of their largely
Protestant education, and the fact that many were not absolutely poor,
42
Chapter Two
some Irish migrants to the Americas left letters for the historian. These
suggest that, despite some mixed fortunes, they were finding a place for
themselves in a strange country. For these, perhaps, exile was a kind of
escape, as Kerby Miller has suggested, commenting that:
…historians often claim that the Irish saw themselves as unhappy exiles in
the New World, but they do not sufficiently prove or explain that
phenomenon (Miller, 1980: 98).
One sign of discontent among the poorer Irish migrant servants,
however, is that, whether convict or free, they figure in many newspaper
advertisements about running away from their masters. Evidence from
runaway adverts has been essential to the study of slaves and servants’
attitudes to work (as well as their physical and sartorial appearances). The
Irish form a large minority both of indentured servants and soldiers fleeing
from their service.29 The runaway advertisements in the North American
colonies reveal a huge number of disgruntled indentured servants leaving
their masters: like slaves, they tended to flee the mid-Atlantic colonies of
Maryland and Virginia and go north to Philadelphia and New York. 30 The
advertisers drew both on their knowledge of their servants and on certain
pre-existing stereotypes of the ‘Irish’. Some could not speak English well:
husband and wife Michael and Margaret Kelly, for example, “both speak
Irish; but neither of them are known to speak English”. Mostly, the Irish
were revealed by their accent—“has the Brogue on his tongue” Virginia
Gazette, Parks, 1771) it was said of one Irish convict servant, Patrick
Carroll, who also “pretends too much honesty” (Virginia Gazette, Purdie
& Dixon, 1745).31 Another man in 1738, Patrick Flood, was described “as
an Irishman, but speaks pretty good English” (Virginia Gazette, Parks,
1738). The national stereotype was revealed in another description of
language, when William Quirk was said to have “a conniving way of
taking, a right Irish Pallaver, to delude the unwary” (Virginia Gazette,
Parks, 1745). Deceit and language were often associated, here: one
“impudent Irishman” in 1739, Thomas Macoun could “speak broad
Scotch” (Virginia Gazette, Parks, 1739) and professed dancing, fencing,
writing, arithmetic, and legerdemain. Another, it was said, pretended to be
a “Scotchman, but is an Irishman” (Virginia Gazette, Parks, 1738). The
probable confusion of Ulster and Scottish accents may have been a factor
here, but there were clearly some incentives to change not only names but
also nationalities on escape to avoid obvious identification as Irish. Some
denied it anyway— Sarah Willmore or Willmott, it was claimed, had “a
little of the Irish Brogue, but denies that Country” (Virginia Gazette,
Hunter, 1751). 32 The probable religious affinity of these servants is
Exile and Suffering in the Construction of Identity
43
perhaps demonstrated by the fact that there are only two Catholics in the
hundreds of Virginia servants described in the papers, and only one was
confidently described as “an Irish Papist”, who ran away in 1737 with a
mulatto (Virginia Gazette, Parks, 1737). Probably Maryland, more
favourable to Catholic immigrants in general, would have seen more
Catholic servants. A sign of the cultural confusion that could occur,
however, is convict servant John Coleman alias John Nabb, of whom it
was said he “pretends to be a Scotsman but is an Irishman”, but was,
technically, an English criminal. He had been transported from London in
the Forward in 1737 (Virginia Gazette, Parks, 1738).33
There are few signs of a coherent ‘Irish consciousness’ here, though
there is clear awareness of the denigratory image of the Irish held by
authorities of various kinds. This is not to say that exile and the bitterness
of loss of country and identity did not shape the formation of historical
memory of these Irish, who were mostly ‘voluntary’ exiles. Like the other
exiled poor, therefore, they rarely recorded themselves, and emerge as
accidentally-reported actors in official records and printed sources, the
product of a colonial society imbued with suspicion and equipped with the
mechanisms of constant surveillance.
Diasporas, Memory and the Textual Identity of Exiles
Martyrologies and myths have combined in these stories of different
experiences of banishment, exile and return in the British Atlantic before
1800. One crucial difference between the groups lies in the extent to which
they were able to mobilize their own narratives in their own defensive selfdefinition. Another is the way these textual productions flowed into the
formation of a wider consciousness, of a nation or a place in a national
framework. Of all the groups examined here the Irish exiles had the
greatest grievances and fewest chances to bring them together within a
coherent identity. Catholic or Protestant both knew they were Irish – the
perpetual ‘other’ of the British Empire, whether in England, Virginia, or
Ireland itself. Yet it is hard to speak of ‘national’ identities in this period,
and particularly not in terms of a politicised ‘nationalism’. A sense of
nationhood may not be nationalist in its consequences. 34 The theoretical
difficulty is made even harder if we try to place these collective identities
within a perspective that emphasises diaspora. Diaspora is not the same
thing as being dispersed, though the current usage has become so loose
that the concept may be losing sight of the original meaning. Exile was a
common experience, even in English history, and yet few would be brave
enough to talk of an ‘English diaspora’ in the early modern period. David
44
Chapter Two
Doyle has noted that major historians of the worldwide Irish such as
Patrick O’Sullivan have avoided the concept of diaspora for the period
before 1800. 35
The problem derives from the supposed centrality of ‘homeland’ and
its loss, together with the urge to return, to the formation of diasporic
identity. Such a feeling, strong after the Scottish rebellions in the
eighteenth century and the Irish famine in the nineteenth, is by no means
characteristic of all scattered exiles. Being scattered or dispersed (the
meaning of the original Greek work) is not sufficient, or, more likely, not a
sufficient condition for the sustaining of a long-term collective identity.
Kevin Kenny argues that we need to distinguish between transnational and
cross-national or comparative approaches, the first looking at exiled Irish
and their relationship with the country of origin, and the latter examining
the distinctive development of Irish communities in very different
countries (thus situating them in the countries of destination). Whereas a
single catastrophic event can produce a diasporic consciousness, it is more
likely that repeated waves of emigration and dispersal will produce some
moving in and out of diasporic self-identification depending on events in
the homeland. Others therefore point to the ‘victimhood’ essential to
diasporic emotions, and the way that, deriving from common experiences
of loss, particularly where the homeland does not yet exist, the diasporic
consciousness is a challenge to the nation-states concerned.36
The contrasts between the Irish, both Catholic and Protestant, the
Jacobites (also, in different waves of exiles, of different religious
denominations), and those exiled on purely religious grounds raises
questions about the different relationships with print culture before 1800,
and the extent to which identities depended on, or were created by,
textualization of collective experiences and a common past. It may depend
on continual communication, shared symbols and texts, and access to
independent forms of print. Perhaps a coherent productive effort was only
possible with groups able to reassert, after exile, their place in legitimate
society. In effect continuity and legitimacy combine to make a cohesive
and well-defined identity in which the experiences of exile are deployed to
underpin the self-justification. Quakers and Covenanters returned in
triumph to a central place in British society, with the latter dominating (or
trying to dominate) Scotland ever since. In the face of eighteenth-century
Jacobites and their later rehabilitation, and perhaps in the face also of
nineteenth-century Irish Catholic immigration, Covenanting stories were
told and re-told to establish both the victimhood and their exclusive
patriotic claims for Presbyterianism to be the true heartland of Scotland.
Quakers, too, established a central place in British society, despite local
Exile and Suffering in the Construction of Identity
45
suspicions which led to conflict over their involvement in food supplies,
and were central to many of the state’s imperial enterprises. Uniquely,
perhaps, Quakers have been a people without a nation, a faith without a
church, and attachment to place has always been less emphasized than the
work done there.37
Rehabilitation of the exiled Jacobite tradition did occur, but with
regard to Gaelic Scotland this was after the destruction of Highland
society, when Gaelic culture no longer posed a challenge or rival to
Lowland hegemony, and could therefore be subject to misrepresentation
and false nostalgia. The irony is how central the Gaelic past became to
Scottish identity. As Malcolm Chapman observed:
… when Scottish identity is sought, it is often by the invocation of
Highland ways and Highland virtues it is found. At the same time, both the
Gaelic language and the Highland way of life have suffered persecution at
the hands of their southern neighbours (Chapman, 1978: p9).
The gradual process of rehabilitating Jacobitism as a sentiment began,
as Colin Kidd has suggested, towards the end of the eighteenth century,
with both economic re-establishment of the great families and an
intellectual questioning of the regime that persecuted them. By the middle
of the nineteenth century the seventeenth-century Catholicism of Jacobites
had been forgotten and the Gaelic language nearly wiped out. Jacobitism
had become safe as well as sentimental (Kidd, 1998).
With the Irish, there was no such return, and their experiences were
never gathered together as a single coherent narrative until the nationalist
period of the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth, centuries.
“The Wild Geese never returned under the flag of France”, and they never
recovered their rightful place, as Kerby Miller has commented. In the
eighteenth century, the largely Protestant Irish continued their westward
drift into the British Atlantic. Their view of Ireland was not that which
shaped subsequent North American Irish communities, although a huge
proportion of Irish-Americans are Protestant. Only in the middle to late
nineteenth century, as the post-Famine Catholic Irish formed a network of
diasporic communities in North America and Australia, was the shared
sense of grievance reinforced by the consciousness of continuity with the
early modern period. But there are no core texts from the earlier
experiences which shaped these memories for them. This was partly
because the diaspora of post-Famine Irish was largely remembered in
English. Yet among later Irish Catholic emigrants, despite the decline of
Gaelic and its tradition of poetic regret for lost homeland, the sense of
exile remained strong, reproduced in a different setting in the largely urban
46
Chapter Two
communities of nineteenth-century North America (Miller, 1985:25,107).
Perhaps the most significant aspect of exile stories, and of the experience
of banishment, therefore, is not the process of exile, or even the creation of
exile narratives, but how and when those stories returned to play a decisive
part at home.
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Exile and Suffering in the Construction of Identity
49
Notes
1
The National Archive Public Record Office [henceforth TNA PRO] TS 20 /80/117 'Prisoners in Transports', piece 15 ‘The Report of Mr Minshaw who was sent to
Woolwich to Examine into the State of the Rebel Prisoners on board the Transport
there’, 20 August 1746, on the Pamela where he was to inspect them and take
down their names. J. Macbeth Forbes, Jacobite Gleanings from State Manuscripts:
Short Sketches of Jacobites. The Transportations in 1745 (Edinburgh, Oliphant,
Anderson and Ferrier, 1903), 34-5, for notice of this report.
2
TNA PRO TS 20/44/3, 23 July 1746, every twentieth man was to be put on trial,
the rest transported; Douglas Hay, ‘Property, Authority and the Criminal Law’ in
Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England, Douglas
Hay et al., eds (London: Allen Lane, 1975), 17-63.
3
For detailed case studies, see Gwenda Morgan and Peter Rushton, Banishment in
the Early Atlantic World: Convicts, Rebels and Slaves (Bloomsbury Academic,
2013), and Peter Marshall, ‘Religious Exiles and the Tudor State’, in Kate Cooper
and Jeremy Gregory eds, Discipline and Diversity: Studies in Church History
Vol.43 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2007), 263-84.
4
His text was continually being re-written, extracted, and added to with more
recent massacres and martyrdoms : John Foxe, Acts and Monuments of matters
most speciall and memorable . . . , with the bloody times, horrible troubles, and
great Persecutions against the true Martyrs . . . (London: The Stationers
Company, 1641) 3 vols, with the third volume bringing it up to date into the
seventeenth century; see Thomas Freeman, ‘Texts, Lies, and Microfilm: Reading
and Misreading Foxe’s “Book of Martyrs”’, The Sixteenth Century Journal 30 (1)
(1999), 23-46 .
5
See James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990); Dror Wahrman, The Making of the
Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 2006); Michael Mascuch, Origins of the Individualist
Self: Autobiography and Self-Identity in England 1591-1791 (Stanford CA:
Stanford University Press, 1996).
6
The Meeting for Sufferings collected past events as well as contemporary. The
texts are : An Abstract of the Sufferings of the People Called Quakers for the
Testimony of a Good Conscience, from the time of their being first distinguished by
that name, taken from original records and authentick accounts (3 vols, London:
printed by J. Sowle, 1733-8), Vol.I 1733, 'From the Year 1650 to 1660', Vol.II
1738, 'From the Year 1660 to 1666'; Vol.III 1738, ‘From the Year 1660 to 1666’,
and Joseph Besse, A Collection of the Sufferings of the People Called Quakers, for
the Testimony of a Good Conscience 3 vols (London: Luke Hinde, 1753). See
Barry Reay, ‘Popular Hostility Towards Quakers in Mid-Seventeenth-Century
England’, Social History 5 (3) (1980), pp. 387-407; John R. Knott ‘Joseph Besse
and the Quaker Culture of Suffering’ Prose Studies, 17 (3) (1994), 126-41.
7
For the experience and mythologies of New England, see Carla Gardina Pestana ,
‘The Quaker Executions as Myth and History’, The Journal of American History
80 (2) (1993), 441-469, and ‘The City upon a Hill under Siege: The Puritan
50
Chapter Two
Perception of the Quaker Threat to Massachusetts Bay, 1656-1661’, The New
England Quarterly 56 (3) (1983), 323-353. For travelling, see Sylvia Stevens,
‘Quakers in society in North-East Norfolk, 1690-1800’, unpublished Ph.D.,
University of Sunderland (2005), and forthcoming; Jabez Maud Fisher’s travel
diary, An American Quaker in the British Isles: The Travel Journals of Jabez
Maud Fisher, 1775-1779, edited by Kenneth Morgan (Oxford: Oxford Univeristy
Press/British Academy, 1992). Fisher was driven out of Philadelphia at the start of
the American Revolution.
8
He was not without his critics, and attempted to make some concessions to their
objections, particularly where he had omitted some experiences, or failed to give
them sufficient weight. See introduction and letters to later editions, Robert
Wodrow, History of the Sufferings of Church of Scotland from the Restoration to
the Revolution 4 vols (Glasgow: Blackie, Fullerton and Co, 1827, originally 1721
and 1722).
9
Some Remarkable Passages of the Life and Death of Mr Alexander Peden
(Glasgow: J. and J. Robertson, 1781), pp. 5, 12,13, and 19; Peter H. Denton, ‘At
the Banquet in Hell: Sir George Mackenzie and Narratives of Religious Conflict in
17th Century Scotland’, in his edited collection, Believers in the Battlespace:
Religion, Ideology and War (Kingston: Ontario: Canadian Defence Academy
Press, 2011), 3-21.
10
See John Coffey, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1558-1689
(Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 2000), 21ff, and Carla Gardina Pestana,
Protestant Empire: Religion and the Making of the British Atlantic World
(Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009) on the transatlantic
setting of this culture in the seventeenth century particularly.
11
See the Preface to The Lyon in Mourning, or a Collection of Speeches, Letters
Journals etc. Relative to the Affairs of Prince Charles Edward Stuart, by the Rev.
Robert Forbes MA, Bishop of Ross and Caithness, 1746-1775, edited with a
Preface by Henry Paton, 3 vols (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, for the
Scottish Historical Society, 1895 vol. 21), and vol.2, pp.231-43, for the Stewart
transportation narrative; Gwenda Morgan and Peter Rushton, Eighteenth-Century
Criminal Transportation: The Formation of the Criminal Atlantic (Houndmills,
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
12
This was the first selection from the Forbes manuscripts which Chambers had
purchased; the main collection The Lyon in Mourning in fact contained more
material about, and from, ordinary soldiers and Jacobites.
13
See also Brian J.R. Blench, ‘Symbol and Sentiment: Jacobite Glass’, in 1745:
Charles Edward Stuart and the Jacobites, ed. Robert C. Woosnam-Savage
(Edinburgh: HMSO, 1995, for Glasgow Museums), 87-102, and Murray G.H.
Pittock, ‘Jacobite Culture’, 72-86.
14
Dave Harker, Fakesong: The Manufacture of British Folk Song, 1700 to the
Present Day (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985) points out that so many folk
songs were by nineteenth-century professional writers, or backstreet balladeers,
even if collected from singers in pubs and bothies.
15
A Faithful Register of the Late Rebellion, or an Impartial Account of the
Impeachments, Trials, Attainders, Executions, Speeches etc of all who have
Exile and Suffering in the Construction of Identity
51
suffered for the Cause of the Pretender in Great Britain (London: T. Warner, 1718,
p.403.
16
Higgins was Minister for the Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht at the time of this
statement.
17
Andrea Knox, ‘Women of the Wild Geese: Irish Women, Exile and Identity,
1750-1775’, Immigrants and Minorities 23 (2-3) (2005), 143-59; Jerrold Casway,
‘Rose O’ Dogherty: A Gaelic Woman’, Journal of the Armagh Diocesan
Historical Society 10 (1) (1980/1981), 42-62 and ‘Heroines or Victims? The
Women of the Flight of the Earls’, New Hibernia Review/ Iris Éireannach Nua 7
(1) (2003), 56-74.
18
See John Brady, ‘Irish Scholars of the Sixteenth Century’, Studies: An Irish
Quarterly Review 37 (146) (1948), 226-231; Brendan Jennings, ‘The Career of
Hugh, son of Rory O’Donnell, Earl of Tirconnel, in the Low Countries, 16071742’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 30 (118) (1941), 219-234; Richard
Hayes, ‘Irish Associations with Nantes’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 28
(109) (1939), 115-126; Thomas O’Connor and Mary Ann Lyons eds, Irish
Communities in Early-Modern Europe (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2006); R.A.
Stradling, The Spanish Monarchy and Irish Mercenaries: The Wild Geese in Spain,
1618-68 (Blackrock: Irish Academic Press, 1994).
19
Tadhg Ó Cianáin’s text was published by Paul Walsh, ‘Flight of the Earls’,
Archivium Hibernicum 2 (1913), 1-80, and 4 (1915), iii-x, 161-268; a more recent
edition is by Nollaig Ó Muraíle, ed., Tadhg Ó Cianáin’s Contemporary Narrative
of the So-Called ‘Flight of the Earls’, 1607-8 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007).
For the debate on the causes of the 'Flight', see Nicholas P. Canny, ‘The Flight of
the Earls, 1607’, Irish Historical Studies 17 (67) (1971), 380-399 and John
McCavitt, ‘The Flight of the Earls, 1607’, Irish Historical Studies 29 (114) (1994),
159-73. On poetry, see the sources deployed by Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and
Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (NY and Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1985), poem quoted p.104, and T.J. Dunne, ‘The Gaelic
Response to Conquest and Colonisation: The Evidence of the Poetry’, Studia
Hibernica 20 (1980), 7-30. For one of the most complicated careers, that of
Nathaniel Hooke, see Thomas Byrne, ‘An Eighteenth-Century Version of
Diasporic Irish Identity’, in Liam Harle, Yvonne Whelan and Patrick Crotty eds,
Ireland: Space, Text, Time (Dublin: The Liffey Press, 2005), 178-85.
20
Sarah Covington, ‘Royalists, Covenanters and the Shooting of Servants in the
Scottish Civil War’, Journal of Scottish Historical Studies 27 (1) (2007), 1-23;
Barbara Donagan, War In England, 1642-1649 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2008), 204-211; Michael Braddick, God’s Fury, England’s Fire: A New History of
the English Civil Wars (London: Penguin, 2009), p.319, in 1644 it was declared
that no quarter should be given by Parliamentary forces to any Irish taken in arms.
21
16 September 1649 to John Bradshaw, Secretary to Council of State, and to
William Lenthall 17 September, in Thomas Carlyle ed., Oliver Cromwell's Letters
and Speeches, 5 vols (New York and London: The Continental Press/John Wiley,
1845), vol.1, pp. 457-8 and 461.
22
see also Richard Flatman, ‘Transported to Barbados, 1655’, Irish Family History
12 (1996), 46-8, whose most detailed data on one shipload out of Waterford
52
Chapter Two
contained 39 people 19 of them women, and three priests, and one married couple
with their daughter; John Blake, ‘Transportation from Ireland to America, 165360’, Irish Historical Studies 3 (11) (1943), 267-281; Aubrey Gwynn, ‘Documents
Relating to the Irish in the West Indies’, Analecta Hibernica 4 (1932), 139-286,
and ‘Cromwell’s Policy of Transportation’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 19
(76) (1930), 607-623, and ‘Cromwell’s Policy of Transportation: Part II’, Studies:
An Irish Quarterly Review 20 (78) (1931), 291-305; Andrea Knox, ‘Testimonies to
History: Reassessing Women’s Involvement in the 1641 Rising’, in Louise Ryan
and Margaret Ward, eds, Irish Women and Nationalism: Soldiers, New Women and
Wicked Hags (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2004), 14-29; Mark Williams,
‘History, the Interregnum and the Exiled Irish’, and R. Scott Purlock, ‘Cromwell
and the Catholics: Towards a Reassessment of Lay Catholic Experience in
Interregnum Ireland’, in Mark Williams and Stephen Paul Forrest eds,
Constructing the Past: Writing Irish History, 1600-1800 (Woodbridge: The
Boydell Press, 2010), 27-48 and 157-79.
23
Howard A. Fergus, ‘Montserrat “Colony of Ireland”: The Myth and the Reality’,
Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 70 (280) (1981), 325-340; Kristen Block and
Jenny Shaw, ‘Subjects without an Empire: The Irish in the Early Modern
Caribbean’, Past and Present 210 (2010), 33-60; Jill Sheppard, ‘A Historical
Sketch of the Poor Whites of Barbados: From Indentured Servants to “Redlegs”’,
Caribbean Studies 14 (3) (1974), 71-94; Nini Rodgers, ‘The Irish in the Caribbean,
1641-1837: An Overview’, and Thomas Byrne, ‘Banished by Cromwell? John
Hooke and the Caribbean’, Irish Migration Studies in Latin America 5 (3) (2007),
145-156 and 215-219; Hilary Beckles, ‘A “Riotous and Unruly Lot”: Irish
Indentures Servants and Freemen in the English West Indies’, William and Mary
Quarterly, 3rd ser. 47 (4) (1990), 503-22.
24
This was intercepted and translated by the Cromwellian spy network.
25
See Robert Calef, More Wonders of the Invisible World, or The Wonders of the
Invisible World Displayed (originally, London, 1700: Salem: MA: Cushing and
Appleton, 1823), p.299; George Francis O’Dwyer, ‘Ann Glover, First Martyr to
the Faith in New England’, Historical Records and Studies 17 (1921), 70-78;
http://www.goodyglovers.com/history.html accessed 07/06/2011, for the official
historical memorial.
26
The full story is recounted and analysed in Gwenda Morgan and Peter Rushton,
‘Fraud and Freedom: Gender, Identity and Narratives of Deception among Female
Convicts in Colonial America’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 34 (1)
(2011), 335-355. A Report from the Committee appointed to inspect and examine
the several returns (made to the house) of the felons and vagabonds ordered for
transportation these seven years last past, and to enquire how many persons were
actually transported, how many died or escaped before transportation, how much
money hath been raised for those purposes, and to whom paid, 9 February 1743,
House of Commons, Dublin, Samuel Fairbrother: note the Dublin shipper Andrew
Buckler of the Baltimore brigantine given 22 convict and vagabonds by the County
of Dublin, 5 September 1735, p.60.
27
Cumberland Pacquet, 19 October 1775, and Morgan and Rushton, EighteenthCentury Criminal Transportation, p.57.
Exile and Suffering in the Construction of Identity
28
53
Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, pp.131 (quotation), 22, and 103; 200,000 left
Ulster between 1700 and 1776, largely for a world of indentured servitude in the
mid-Atlantic colonies of Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania. Though under the
same pressures, Catholic emigrants were few, pp.152-156; T. W. Moody, ‘Irish
and Scotch-Irish in Eighteenth-Century America’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly
Review Vol. 35, No. 137 (Mar., 1946), pp. 85-90.
29
Thomas Agostini, ‘“Deserted his Majesty’s Service”: Military Runaways, the
British-American Press, and the Problem of Desertion during the Seven Years’
War’, Journal of Social History 40 (1) (2007), 957-985, pp.961-2, and Table 1
p.962. See also, ‘Running Away and Returning Home: the Fate of English
Convicts in the American Colonies’ Gwenda Morgan and Peter Rushton, Crime,
Histoire & Sociétés / Crime, History & Societies 7(2) (2003),61-80, and ‘Visible
Bodies: Power, Subordination and Identity in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic
World’, Journal of Social History 39 (1) (Fall 2005), 39-64.
30
Farley Grubb, Runaway Servants, Convicts and Apprentices advertized in the
Pennsylvania Gazette, 1728-1796 (Baltimore, MD.: Genealogical Publishing
Company, Inc., 1992); Jonathan Prude, ‘To Look upon the “Lower Sort”:
Runaway Ads and the Appearance of Unfree Laborers in America, 1750-1800’,
Journal of American History 78 (1991), 124-59; David Waldstreicher, David,
‘Reading the Runaways: Self-Fashioning, Print Culture, and Confidence in Slavery
in the Eighteenth-Century Mid-Atlantic’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. 56
(1999), 243-72
31
The cases here are not a full survey of Irish runaways, but seem to be typical of
the 200 or so examples (there are 169 advertisements with reference to Irish
servants in the Virginia Gazette, many with more than one individual; 27, about a
seventh, refer to Irish convicts).
32
A man pretending to be a Catholic.
33
The ship was named after the primary contractor for transporting London and
Home County felons, Jonathan Forward.
34
Colin Kidd, ‘North Britishness and the Nature of Eighteenth-Century British
Patriotisms’, The Historical Journal 39 (1996), 361-382; Kristen Post Walton,
‘Scottish Nationalism before 1789: An Ideology, a Sentiment, or a Creation?’
International Social Science Review 81 (3-4) (2006), 111-134.
35
Rogers Brubaker, ‘The “Diaspora” Diaspora’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 28 (1)
(2005), 1-19; David Noel Doyle, ‘Review Article: Cohesion and Diversity in the
Irish Diaspora’, Irish Historical Studies 31 (123) (1999), 411-434, notes p.413 that
Patrick O’Sullivan, in his huge, multi-volume work, does not apply his analysis of
the diaspora to ‘areas weak until now, for example to medieval and pre-1800 eras,
nor outwards to Continental Europe and elsewhere’; see The Irish World Wide:
History, Heritage, Identity, 6 vols, edited by Patrick O’Sullivan (London and
Leicester: Leicester University Press and Cassell, 1992-7). On the English, see
Philip Major and Lisa Jardine eds, Literatures of Exile in the English Revolution
and its Aftermath (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010).
36
See also Joanna Devlin Trew, ‘Reluctant Diasporas of Northern Ireland: Migrant
Narratives of Home, Conflict, Difference’ Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies
36 (4) (2010), 541-560, particularly her comments on the contested notion of
54
Chapter Two
‘homeland’; Patrick Fitzgerald, ‘The Scotch-Irish and the Eighteenth-Century Irish
Diaspora’, History Ireland 7 (3) (1999), 37-41; Cormac Ó Gráda, ‘Famine, Trauma
and Memory’, Béaloideas 69 (2001), 121-143; Patrick O’Sullivan, ‘Developing
Irish Diaspora Studies: A Personal View, New Hibernia Review 7 (1) (2003), 130 148; Andrew Bielenberg, The Irish Diaspora (London: Longman, 2000).
37
In this description, they resemble Burke's view of the Jews, deprived of a
country and in need of protection: see Parliamentary Debates, 15th Parliament of
the United Kingdom, 1st session, 14 May 1781, debating their expulsion from St.
Eustatius by Admiral Rodney.
CHAPTER THREE
VOICES FROM THE PRAIRIE:
IMMIGRANT IDENTITIES IN OPPOSITION
NICK SERRA
In academe, it is almost impossible to discuss the concept of ethnicity and
ethnic experience without becoming hopelessly involved in a complex
introductory discussion that grounds all further discourse within the
confines of post-colonialism, or multiculturalism, or the jargon of
anthropology and the social sciences, Weberian theory, ad infinitum. Even
deciding on the broadest of markers or benchmarks of culture — an
arbitrary category imposed by outsiders, or a personal statement of ethnic
community as self-identified by an individual—is fraught with peril.
Relying on subjective criteria is uncertain, while imposing exterior criteria
is often both presumptuous and boorish.
In the United States, where the vast majority of people have fairly
recent immigrant ancestry, self-identification is particularly problematic.
The mix of cultures and national identities that frequently occur within
two or three generations in a single family, the reinforcements and
dilutions that occur upon marriage, the variety of connections individuals
retain with their forebears’ countries of origin and regional cultural
traditions, and the very criteria upon which one’s status within a group is
determined by others within that group, all vary widely for any number of
wholly personal reasons and dependant circumstances. The topic is always
hotly debated during after-hours sessions at Irish Studies conferences, as
native and diasporic Irish delegates attempt to find some common ground
for their own Irishnesses. Who are the Irish? The Scottish? The
Ascendency? Whose version of history is accepted? Whose literature and
style of nationalism is in or out of vogue? Who are the Celts? Who is
anyone? It just depends.
For example, the writer is, insofar as he is aware, 50% Italian
(paternally), and 25% Welsh, 20% Irish, and 5% Scottish (maternally) as
judged simply by the most recent countries of origins of his immediate
56
Chapter Three
ancestors. In terms of generations born in America, I am a secondgeneration Italian, a third-or-fourth generation Irishman (depending on
which maternal grandparent one considers), a third-generation Welshman,
and a fourth-generation Scot (although I am distinct from the Scotch-Irish
immigrants from the Plantation of Ulster). Of course, it gets even more
complicated when one considers that my Welsh grandfather died before
any of his grandchildren were born, and the man my maternal grandmother
later married—my grandfather—was English with a large proportion of
Native American blood. Further, my mother was the widow of a fourthgeneration Scot who strongly self-identified with his ancestral heritage, as
does my half-sister. However, I certainly don’t identify equally, or even
proportionally, with all of the cultural identities listed above for any
number of reasons.
Moreover, the community in which one is raised obviously plays a
major role in ethnic self-identification. Both of my paternal grandparents
emigrated from Italy to Des Moines, Iowa, circa 1922. As was common, I
grew up in a neighboring house, in a neighborhood largely populated by
similar immigrants from the hills and villages of rural southern Italy and
their children and grandchildren. Italian was the primary language in many
households. Italian cuisine and holiday traditions predominated. Yet the
degree of one’s Italian-ness was judged by a variety of other factors: Did
one cultivate at least a small garden? Did one prepare meals from scratch;
the worst insult among Italian women being, She gets her spaghetti sauce
out of a jar? The writer acknowledges that any readers of Italian descent
from the American eastern seaboard are now certainly thinking, Serra may
have an Italian name, but he’s clearly not a real Italian, or he’d call it
gravy instead of sauce. Did one display a strong connection with
Catholicism? Also, in a testament to the patriarchal nature of Italian
culture, an Italian surname was a prerequisite for admission into several of
the Italian social organizations where (male) immigrants gathered to play
scopa and briscola with carte Bergamasche, drink espresso and homemade
wine, and chat about the Old Country. Interestingly, however, there were
often no strong ties to Italy as a national, political entity except as a point
of common origin; the individual connections were usually to districts, and
especially still-living siblings and family members. Still, letters were
usually few and far between, and often something of a linguistic puzzle
since many Italian speakers were nevertheless illiterate in the language,
and out of touch with the standard Italian that has evolved over the last
century.
By comparison, my maternal Irish great-grandparents seemingly
retained a strong sense of their Irishness as a fundamental concept in se,
Voices from the Prairie: Immigrant Identities in Opposition
57
though they did not speak the language insofar as the family history
records. Irishness came not from any set of practices, but rather from a
firm belief in a shared (though often otherwise broadly defined) cultural
heritage; one that completely overshadowed all others. Indeed, although
my grandmother married a Welshman whose parents had immigrated to
America in the late nineteenth-century, no Welsh traditions whatsoever
were observed in her household. No mention was made of Wales, so I
have been told; they ate mulligan stew, not cawl. Furthermore, despite a
Scottish heritage inherited from her paternal grandmother, my maternal
grandmother recollected only that she frequently teased her father because
she was by birth more Irish than he was since he had married an Irish
émigré and distant cousin from Bundoran in what was surely an arranged
marriage.
Consequently, my mother’s sense of her own Irishness was sufficiently
strong to counterbalance the otherwise overwhelming Italian cultural
context in which I grew up. I habitually self-identified as Italian and Irish,
equally and only, during my childhood. Moreover, my own sense of ‘Irish’
heritage has been further influenced by a variety of external factors and
circumstances. I am a Yeatsian by profession. At the risk of sounding like
one of Yeats’s “harps and pepperpots” I will admit that my good crystal is
in the Yeats pattern cut-to-order by Sligo Crystal. I grew up watching ‘The
Irish Rovers’ television programs rebroadcast from Canada, and listening
to Johnny Cash (himself Scotch-Irish) singing, ‘Galway Bay’ and similar
sentimental ballads of the auld sod. I am a graduate of the University of
Notre Dame’s ‘Fighting Irish’ English program, where I specialized in
eighteenth-century ‘British’ literatures that were largely Anglo-Irish, at a
time when courses in the Irish language were not offered. My first
experiences in modern Ireland were pre-Celtic-Tiger excursions heavily
coloured by the design of CIÉ and the Irish Tourist Board. I witnessed
rioting in Dublin on the eve of Bobby Sand’s demise, and lost friends in
the 1987 Remembrance Day bombing.
I admit, without apology, to being a veritable train-wreck of
constructions of Irishness and Scottishness, though it took me decades to
realize it.
However, early in 2007 I was asked to participate in a round-table
keynote presentation on the topic of Ireland at war and peace for the North
East Irish Cultural Network’s annual conference at the University of
Sunderland. Specifically, I was required to speak about the Easter
Revolution of 1916, with or without reference to Yeats’s famous poem on
the subject.
58
Chapter Three
For a Yeatsian, such a task quickly takes on nightmarish proportions.
This particular poem is so heavily referenced, so extensively treated, so
often quoted that one risks drowning in the sea of secondary criticism
while trying to discover some new method of framing. My first thought
was to find a new context by examining the personal correspondence of
Irish Americans from the period, getting their unvarnished thoughts on the
issues. After all, although Yeats was often the supreme elitist, he
publically professed a reverence for the ideal of common Irishmen at least
those of his imaginings. For example, in Reveries over Childhood and
Youth he relates that:
Someone at the Young Ireland Society gave me a newspaper that I might
read some article or letter. I began idly reading verses describing the shore
of Ireland as seen by a returning, dying emigrant. My eyes filled with tears
and yet I knew the verses were badly written vague, abstract words such as
one finds in a newspaper [...] They had moved me because they contained
the actual thoughts of a man at a passionate moment of life (Yeats, 1916:
105).
Yeats goes on to describe how he concluded that:
We should write out our own thoughts in as nearly as possible the language
we thought them in, as though in a letter to an intimate friend. We should
not disguise them in any way […] Personal utterance, which had almost
ceased in English literature, could be as fine an escape from rhetoric and
abstraction as drama itself (Yeats, 1916: 105).
To be sure, these are laudable sentiments though Yeats was, in practice,
one of the most keenly self-aware, redactive and, at times, maddeningly
abstract writers of his generation. Despite his questionable popular ideals,
his characters are often less portraits than pastiches. By centrifuging his
subjects in an attempt to capture a pure voice for Irish Peasants, Young
Irishmen, Fenian Orators, and Hermetic Mystics, he thereby mythologizes,
creating emblems, synecdoches and trompe-l’œils. I have even found
myself sympathizing with Hugh O’Donnell’s scathing and contemporary
critique of Yeats’s pseudo-Celtic drama:
Mr. W.B Yeats seems to see nothing in the Ireland of old days, but an
unmanly, an impious and renegade people, crouched in degraded awe
before demons, and goblins and sprites (O’Donnell, 1904: 24).
Yet in the spirit of Yeats at his best-intentioned, I set out to discover, if
possible, these letters between intimate friends among the Irish in exile as
Voices from the Prairie: Immigrant Identities in Opposition
59
preserved in rural America by local historical societies. Happily, the
American Midwest is full of dense ethnic pockets with names such as De
Graff, Clontarf, Adrian, Avoca, Iona, Fulda, Graceville, and Ghent; which
particular textbook cases were established on railroad land in the bare
Minnesota prairies by Bishop John Ireland and the Irish Catholic
Colonization Association. These small-town archives often contain, in the
main, glass-cased collections of domestic and especially wood-working
instruments, bequeathed documents of local interest, quilts, bound
volumes of defunct local newspapers, grainy photographs and postcards,
agricultural implements, and frequently a scattering of Native American
artifacts unearthed by farmers.
However, whether because of low literacy rates, the slow transmission
speed of both news and personal correspondence, or simply the failure of
families to preserve or donate materials, sustained correspondence—either
with relatives in urban America or overseas—seems relatively hard to
come by, and the typical letter usually contains nothing explicit about the
individual’s constructions of ethnic identity or anything specifically
related to such. Many individuals preserved diaries, journals, and
daybooks (often unindexed or catalogued). However, these are often
minimalist, stop-and-start affairs detailing the state of the weather,
enumerating the quantity of vegetables canned, taxes or bills paid upon
(sometimes in produce or labour), or perhaps briefly outlining the
activities undertaken during a trip to town or visit from distant neighbours.
They are miscellanies, providing snapshots of harsh daily life rather than
extended commentaries on or reactions to the larger ‘Issues of the Day’.
Typical correspondence might include a bundle of letters occasioned
by the funeral of a child, all on the theme of ‘We’re so sorry to hear of
your loss’. Brief notes from distant relatives take on the quality of
voicemail messages: ‘We are all fine. Leddra has work. Peggy will make
her first communion this year’. Telegrams were, of course, expensive and
terse by design, and usually contain pointed and grim pronouncements that
could not be delayed: ‘GRANDMA DIED ELEVEN THIRTY TODAY’
or ‘COME AT ONCE GRANDPA IS DEAD’.
I was disappointed by my initial survey, and ultimately went in a
different direction with my research resulting in my writing The Blanding
and Blandishments of Yeats’s Heroic Ideal in Easter, 1916,’ (Serra, 2011:
90-101). Furthermore, what should have been obvious from the beginning
struck me only in retrospect: even had I found detailed, introspective
correspondence, any conclusions drawn from such were bound to be
extremely limited without a great deal more personal context with regard
to the writers’ backgrounds, histories, and ancestral heritages both real and
60
Chapter Three
claimed. Like the typical selection of Native American artifacts, the
correspondence I did discover had been removed from both its personal
and historical contexts, and analysis could rarely proceed further than the
text qua text.
Nevertheless, even failed research started me thinking about the issues
surrounding ethnic-identity, the tenuous nature of identity passed down by
immigrant parents, emblematic identity (as from Yeats himself) as
compared with passionate personal connections (lauded by Yeats) that
seemed so rarely documented in the first-person. Indeed, I was fascinated
by the stories I discovered along the way—often not in the archives
themselves, but rather in the small-town cafes and pubs—about ordinary
people whose histories often started at the Port of Boston and ended in a
windswept prairie cemetery, devoid of wider context. When it was
announced in 2008 that the Centre for Irish Studies at the National
University of Ireland, Galway, would be hosting a dual conference on the
nature of Irishness at home and abroad (Old Ireland, New Irish: ‘The same
people living in the same place’ and ‘Into the heartland of the ordinary’), I
returned to the idea of the ordinary Irishman living abroad, seized the
nettle, and went to the obvious place where I might locate both personal
correspondence combined with at least some personal history; my own uncatalogued family papers. What I found there, tucked between the leaves
of a massive 1889 catechism presented to my Great-Great Aunt in 1902
and camouflaged by the usual slew of baptismal certificates, holy cards,
pressed flowers, and the occasional clipped obituary, shocked me: a letter
from my maternal grandmother’s paternal grandfather that was everything
I had been looking for, and more. A selection from the text along with the
briefest of introductions and analyses formed the body of the paper I
subsequently presented, ‘Peasant Patriarch: Irish Epistles from Exile’.
This letter from Thomas Burke, my maternal great-great grandfather, is
a truly singular document, and is reproduced in full below. It would be
worthy to examine in-and-of itself, if only to analyze the opinions he
voices about the political climate among Irish-Americans as Woodrow
Wilson brought the country into the First World War. However, beyond
the text in se, Burke’s remarks speak louder and take on more depth as
further personal contexts are added. In the concluding remarks, I have
tried to contextualize it as much as possible using the three types of
information that is available to me as expositor: historical data that comes
from concrete sources such as parish records, immigration papers, land
abstracts and the like; inferential information from other documents and
sources that are relevant but not directly linked to Burke’s overt
expression of personal identity and unrecorded personal information that
Voices from the Prairie: Immigrant Identities in Opposition
61
has been passed down orally, and that might be as unverifiable as the
memory of a 1950s conversation about events of the 1920s recounted in
the 1980s.
Thomas Burke was born in 1827 in the village of Askill, North
Leitrim. He witnessed the catastrophic linen recession of the 1830s, and
the further depopulation of the area by 30% during the Great Famine. One
of eight children in a rural Catholic family (only three of whom eventually
emigrated), he was nevertheless well educated in Dublin according to the
family oral history, and earned a living in Ireland as a teacher and cattle
broker until his outspoken Republicanism brought him to the attention of
authorities. After this he travelled extensively throughout Western Europe,
eventually settling in Scotland for a number of years. In 1869 he married
Agnes Brown, a Presbyterian and native Glaswegian. Their daughter was
born in Glasgow in 1871.
Politics seems to have caught up with the family abruptly thereafter, as
T. Burke with age adjusted slightly downward on his papers (though he
was still nearly twice the age of the average Irish émigré) sailed for
America in April of 1873. Agnes Brown (travelling under her maiden
name and using her mother’s first name with age adjusted substantially
upward) and their daughter followed four months later. The family settled
in Scranton, Pennsylvania for the next five years, during which time
Thomas found work in the mills and the couple had two more children,
although all three succumbed to childhood illnesses.
In 1876 Burke was approached by Bishop John Ireland, and during the
following year he led a migration of fifty families on a 1,200 mile trek
from the urban East to what were then the largely unsettled wilds of
central Minnesota in the north-central Midwest. Once there, Thomas
farmed (ultimately on 240 acres), trapped, lived in a sod house for fifteen
years, was instrumental in organizing the first school district in Swift
County, and did his best to populate it as well, fathering a child, on
average, every 24 months. He was the patriarch of his diasporic
community. Both he and his wife died there in 1923.
The letter from Tomas Burke that follows is admittedly wholly
atypical. It is quite lengthy, extremely literate, oratorical, and almost
jingoistic. It was written in 1917 to a son in training at Camp Dodge, Iowa,
prior to deployment overseas as part of the American Expeditionary
Forces of World War I. It is one of only a handful of letters preserved by
the family, and none of the others contain any political or self-reflective
content. It is personal, undisguised, and intimate, though somewhat
discursive, and was obviously meant to be read aloud. The writer’s voice,
recounting the actual thoughts and opinions of a man at a passionate
Chapter Three
62
moment of life, reflecting upon the constructions of Irishness (and
Scottishness) that he undoubtedly passed on to his children and
neighbours, is so strong that it needs no further academic contextualization,
though I might note that the ink on the pages displays occasional blots that
are obviously tear stains.
My dear Son,
I have recently learned you were called to the service of your country. I am
not the least nervous or discouraged for hearing the news. Fifty years ago I
landed on this continent, one of seven hundred poor emonigrants [sic] of
one ship from different countries of Europe; a motley crowd we were. I
never will forget the hearty good welcome Columbia gave us to her free
soil—poor and penniless as we were—the calm, dignified attendants she
had waiting on us as servants at Castle Garden, New York, to direct us to
our destination. I said to a fellow passenger, “There is no other land on
God’s earth where there would be such attention paid to such a lot of poor,
moneyless creatures.” Again I said how I glory in your liberality and
kindness.
Since then I have done nothing I could boast of for my adopted mother,
only that I begot her a family of twelve Children and plowed up a piece of
the virgin soil of Minnesota to make a living for them. You are the
youngest of the boys. I am proud you are a Stalwart young Man, well
qualified mentally, and physically capable to draw the sword for the honor
of your Mother-land.
I suppose you are aware there are many conflicting ideas in the mind[s]
of the Citizens of this country about entering the war. It is not to be
wondered at. It would be rare to find mine on ten children of one Father’s
family, all of one mind on any particular subject. How then could we
expect one-hundred million or over to be all of one mind? There are
thousands of Germans by birth and descent on this continent who hate to
go back to the land of their Fathers to shed the blood of their Brothers.
There are millions of our own race, the Irish. Some of them are reluctant to
draw the sword; the sole reason is many of them are of the opinion they are
going to fight for the honour of England, the most savage nation of the
Globe.
England, savage England, the oppressor of all the weaker nations of the
earth. She carried on relentless war in my own native land, Ireland, for
three hundred years, never could conquer ‘till she formed her union with
the poor, benighted, clannish, immoral Scots: a fit companion for her in
savagery and ignorance. Her savage, inhuman war: her rapine, murder, and
robbery of that peaceful little republic, the Boers in South Africa, is still
fresh in the mind of the people of all civilized nations.
It would be entirely different if the invader was coming to our shores. I
am certain all nationalities on this continent would be ready to meet him,
Voices from the Prairie: Immigrant Identities in Opposition
give him a hot reception with fire and sword—except the English.
Columbia, the old Tyrant John Bull hates you in his heart. You were the
first who brought him to his knees and took the pride out of him. Poor old
John Bull, your horses are dropping off. You are now mighty glad to lean
on the powerful arm of young America for support in your old age.
England, sinking England, boast no more. Your day is done; your savage
race is run. John Bull, you are like the writer of these lines: scarcely able to
move about. I am happy I lived to see your decay.
Enough on this subject. My son there are many good reasons why
every young man on this continent capable of bearing arms should gird his
shield, buckle his armor, and go into the fight with the invincible spirit of
the men who fought and bled to leave their children a free inheritance, and
free homes to the poor and oppressed of all lands.
Every student of history knows Americans owe a debt of gratitude to
France. Now is the time we should willingly repay her. Only for the
liberty-loving sons of France, America would be an English dependency,
and might be for war. When the immortal Washington, Father of this
Country, sent the melancholy news to Franklin—then in Paris—that he
was at the end of his rope, that he could not hold out much longer:
Glorious, liberty-loving France fitted out a fleet of ships under the
command of the immortal heroes Laffeyet, Roshambeau, and Degrass
[sic.], with thousands of their co-patriots, to wrest this country from the
hand of its merciless oppressors. You liberty-loving sons of France, long
and lovingly may your memory be cherished in the hearts of Americans.
The warrior sons of France asked no pay from America, only to see her
free and unfettered. When the heroic sons of France were giving their
blood and their lives to America for her freedom, Germany had her hireling
hessians out here to help England cut the throats of the American people.
She was the same savage nation then she is today, and as things look at
present, always will be. Young men of America, go pay these countries as
they deserve. Give your mighty arm to France for her freedom. Give
Germany what she deserves; give her the flaming point of your sword to
the heart’s core.
One more cause why we should be in arms against the foe of
civilization: The Kaiser, the bitter, ignorant cur, he has insulted our flag—
I might say spat in our faces— as a challenge for war. Young men of
America, I hope you will give him enough. Is there a young man on this
continent who would be such a craven coward to tamely submit to such
indignities, such gross insults, hurlded [sic] in the fair face of his young
Mother Columbia by any petty tyrant? Columbia, thou art the loveliest, the
fairest of God’s creation and a shield for the oppressed of all nations. How
fondly I gazed on the folds of your mantle when I first saw it flying to the
breeze: the stars and stripes, the emblem of liberty copied from the
firmament of Heaven, the handwork of the great Jehovah! What mighty
men they were who drafted your ensign and hoisted it as a signal of
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welcome to the poor and oppressed of all lands, without discrimination of
race or creed.
Ninety-nine out of every hundred who came to this country from
Europe were compelled to fly from their homes on account of the brutality
of their rulers, some in the dark of night for no crime except love of liberty.
Young men of America, are you going to stand still with hands folded till
these tyrants come to our doors? Surely not.
My son I am proud you are one of the Boys who has been selected to
wipe the dishonour Germany has been trying to bestow on us. There are
many young men from Swift County, your birthplace, at Camp Dodge,
Iowa. Many of our own race. The majority are the sons of the hardy
pioneers from the land of the midnight sun. I am certain they will give a
good account of themselves; they will not shame their illustrious sires.
They will prove themselves worthy sons of Minnesota.
There is one young man you are acquainted with from childhood, John
O’Brien, the son of James O’Brien of Degraff. He is a scion of a noble
race, the O’Briens of Thommond [sic], who many times left the green
fields of Erin red with the blood of its invaders. He is a lineal descendant
of Brien Borou [sic] of immortal fame, coming down for centuries without
a stain or blemish on their name or fame in arms. He is a fine, calm young
fellow. I am sure he will be a model of virtue to his comrades in arms. If
you get in the rear ranks, there will be no danger of getting hit while he is
in front: he is six feet, six-inches in height. I would like you were with the
Swift County Boys.
My Son, when you get in the ranks, be brave, calm, cool, and
determined, obedient to your commanders. Do your duty to your God, to
your soul, and your Country. Let your shield, your breastplate, be your
trust in God for your spiritual and temporal welfare. Go into the fight with
lion-hearted courage, with the invincible spirit of your forefathers, the
Clanricard Burkes [sic], who made my native land a burying place for their
invaders. Thousands of them fell by the sword of your Fathers.
I would be happy if you could get in the ranks with the hardy sons of
Minnesota. I know they will make a clean record. I have high hopes they
will be foremost on the field of fame, the bravest of the brave. I address
you with the words of the Spartan Mother to her son in ages long gone by:
“Go, my Boy; come home with your sword, or on it.” The God of Heaven
smiles down on the brave and bold who go forth to fight for justice. He
despises the coward heart. America, the eyes of the world will be anxiously
on you, eagerly watching to see your gallant sons close up the inhuman
slaughter in Europe.
Go into the fight, my fellow citizens. Make a record that will remain
forever on the annals of the world’s history, a record of fame that will
never go into oblivion. I wish to God I was young enough to be with you.
Sons of Minnesota, I address you in general: prove yourselves the
descendants of warrior sires, the sons of Christian parents. Be good, moral
young men. Let no immorality, no debauchery crawl into your camp,
Voices from the Prairie: Immigrant Identities in Opposition
65
where vice takes and manhood dies. The Lord of hosts will bless your arm
when you lead clean lives.
I am an old man, ninety years of age. I hope I will live to see you
returning safe to your homes from the field of your fame and your glory,
without a stain on your armor, with victory perc[h]ed on your banner. I
hope I will live to see some one of Minnesota’s heroic sons returning with
the blood of that infernal, inhuman monster—the Kaiser of Germany—
dripping from the point of his own sword. You, my Son, meet with some
big, burly German slave-driver. Give him his Coup De cong [sic]. The
young man who will not voluntarily giv[e] his service to his country in the
present crisis, let him never [lift] his eyes to his country’s flag, the star
spangled banner.
All hail Columbia! You are now as you always have been: blessed with
sons, statesmen, and Warriors who are able to steer you over the
tempestuous sea of war, land you in a Haven of peace. Great, glorious and
free first-flower of the Earth, first gem of the sea with a fresh wreath of
laurel on your brow!
All honour to you, President Wilson. You are the calm, noble
statesman standing at the helm of our ship of state. Long may you live!
Your name will be emblazoned in letters of gold on the pages of the
world’s history, to go down for all time to come like the heroes [of] Sparta,
and the immortal heroes of the American Revolution who died to leave us
a free land. Let us follow their example. Keep her as we got her: free and
unfettered.
Thos Burke
Benson, Minn.
All are well here—hoping you are in good health—my sight is getting very
weak.
Although it seems something of a shame not to allow Thomas Burke the
last word–a man who undoubtedly was used to making pronouncements
and rendering judgments, in having the final say in all things both within
in his family and his wider community—a few summary comments and
observations are clearly in order.
It must be reiterated that the bulk of Burke’s letter between salutation
and signature, the rising tide of rhetoric and patriotic fervor culminating in
extended laudatory ejaculations to Columbia and President Wilson, is
wholly atypical. The tone and content of the brief, appended tag following
the signature is the more usual fare of immigrant correspondence.
It goes without saying that the text evidences a clear and deep-seated
hatred of the English and, at the symbolic level, of “savage England,”
herself, “oppressor of all the weaker nations of the earth”. The writer
seemingly cannot stop himself from soliloquizing between his formal note
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of approval regarding his son’s induction and his actual commentary on
the opinion that Irishmen at home and abroad, as well as Americans of
Irish descent, might be wrong to fight for the “honour of England, the
most savage nation of the Globe.” His flood of poetic invective ends with
the ringing sentiment of the exiled patriarch, “I am happy I lived to see
your decay. Enough on this subject”.
One gets the sense that this might have been a frequently rehearsed
sermon, the knee jerk reaction of someone who had indeed been
compelled to fly from his home, “in the dark of night for no crime except
love of liberty.” In the Ireland of the early 1980s, I myself witnessed
similar spontaneous responses to long-standing ethnic hatreds firsthand. One minor example, even on a sanitized and largely commercial
tour, older guides on walking excursions would often spit after mentioning
Oliver Cromwell’s name in association with some local structure. The
ingrained and observable Republican hatreds that were passed down to
some of my own uncles lead me to believe that such behaviours were
probably no more affectations for tourists than the custom of making the
sign of the cross when passing a church or cemetery.
Furthermore it would be easy to read the extreme sense of patriotism in
Burke’s rolling phrases:
Columbia, thou art the loveliest, the fairest of God’s creation, a shield for
the oppressed of all nations. How fondly I gazed on the folds of your
mantle when I first saw it flying to the breeze: the stars and stripes, the
emblem of liberty copied from the firmament of Heaven, the handwork of
the great Jehovah!
…as simply hyperbole that echoes the spirit of the moment. Certainly the
newspapers of the time are full of such purple prose, especially in small
towns. There is no other family correspondence that either confirms or
denies that these sentiments were mere jingoism. However, it is worth
mentioning that Burke’s oldest granddaughter, Margaret, my grandmother,
grew up in the same household as the daughter of the eldest son who
inherited the family farm upon the retirement of his parents. Margaret
Burke, age ten, was winning blue ribbons at the Minnesota state fair for
large (60 x 76 cm) Irish crocheted-lace American flags by 1915.
Most interesting within this tirade—given his Glaswegian wife—
is Burke's reference to the Plantation of Ulster and England’s “union with
the poor, benighted, clannish, immoral Scots: a fit companion for her in
savagery and ignorance.” One must certainly wonder about the
circumstances that prompted him to marry a Scotswoman, and what his inlaws thought and said about having an Irish-Catholic-Republican for a
Voices from the Prairie: Immigrant Identities in Opposition
67
son-in-law. It is certain that in the aftermath ‘Scottishness’ was not
fostered in Thomas Burke’s American household. Among the children
of my mother’s generation, Scottish heritage was not only not a topic of
discussion, but something that was indeed not worthy of mention. My
uncles, when pressed, would grudgingly admit that yes, great-grandmother
Burke had come from Scotland; however, the discussion was always cut
short by the follow-up assertion, “But I'm Irish.”
Looked at from the other side, the present writer also acknowledges
any number of American colleagues who are technically of ‘Scotch-Irish’
descent (that is, descended from eighteenth-century immigrants from the
Plantation of Ulster) who refuse to acknowledge even that titular
connection to an ‘Irish’ heritage. In their estimation, the 150 years of
family histories in Ireland represents a mere sojourn, an extended layover
between ships; they are in their own estimation, wholly Scots.
Furthermore, Thomas Burke displays a profound knowledge of
American history of the Revolutionary Period that would put many
modern American undergraduate students to shame, but it is perhaps not to
be wondered at coming from a former schoolteacher, self-proclaimed
“student of history,” and outspoken Irish Republican of the period. It is
more interesting that, despite his somewhat frequent discursive oratorical
asides, he builds his arguments for his son's participation in the war strictly
upon an American foundation. He presents justifications for Americans to
repay the debt of honour to the French for their contributions to American
liberty instead of grounding his comments in Irish history—the Jacobite
Risings and the Williamite War, at the very least—which he was
undoubtedly capable of doing. He mentions nothing of supporting or
connecting with Irish family members who may or may not have been
fighting England’s War. By 1917, Thomas Burke had obviously
generalized the Irish from his own people to race. Ireland had become the
writer’s “native land” and the land of his forefathers. America, by
comparison, was his adopted mother and the motherland of his children.
Burke’s implicit differentiation between Ireland as either (semisymbolic) Homeland or (geographical) Home of non-émigré family
members clearly seems to have been passed down through his offspring.
Strong personal connection to Ireland through living family (as
documented particularly by visits to the auld sod) is recorded only by
individuals who married more recent émigrés whose parents and
siblings had been left behind. Thus, my maternal great-grandfather,
Thomas Burke’s oldest son married Mary Ellen Burke, who emigrated at
the turn of the century: surely an arranged affair, given the proximity of
their native villages and the fact that the rest of her people stopped in
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Chicago, while she otherwise inexplicably decided to pioneer on the stillwild Midwestern prairies. Her siblings, known in my family as the
Chicago Cousins and remembered for individuals with thick brogues and
names like Sheila O’Shay, certainly returned to Ireland in the 1950s to
visit family. This was prior to the start of transatlantic air service
by Aerlínte Éireann, but at at time when ‘The Quiet Man’ was playing in
American theatres and de Valera was actively seeking to promote Ireland
and Irishness as commodities to a postwar American market. These were
among the thousands of rich American cousins come home to visit, often
provoking radical home-improvement projects on the part of
hosts: replastering and painting, and perhaps updating the plumbing to
include an indoor toilet as well. Likewise in my grandmother’s generation
the only person to return to Ireland to visit family members in the 1950s
was my great-aunt Josephine, who had moved to Chicago and married a
1920s-vintage émigré and it was Mickey Leyden’s family whom they
visited, not the Burkes.
Otherwise, both my grandmother and one of her Minnesota sisters
visited Ireland in the 1970s, on the typical harp and pepperpot CIÉ
Connemara Marble Factory—Ring of Kerry—Blarney Castle—Waterford
Crystal Factory—Meeting of the Waters—Dublin package tours of the
day, and likewise my mother. In fact, making the pilgrimage back to
Ireland became something of a status symbol, as when my aunt
subsequently made the trip in the 1990s, and took along two of her
daughters and one of her grand-daughters, my mother responded with a
second trip in company with my half-sister, her husband and two (grown)
children, myself and my wife. However, there was no question of
contacting family members. My grandmother was certain that some of the
Burke ‘uncles’ were still alive in the 1970s, but she didn’t know their
names or addresses nor had ever corresponded with any of them. Indeed,
by the 1970's even in America the Chicago and Minnesota branches of the
family were brought together only for the funerals of the secondgeneration Burke matriarchs, and were clearly culturally differentiated.
Although some share a genetic lodge pin in a marked defect in the joint at
the base of the thumbs—what my grandmother called the Burke straight
thumb that seems to be transmitted down some of the common matrilineal
lines. Of the perhaps one hundred and fifty living descendants of my
grandmother, I am the only one who has lived in Ireland for any length of
time: while doing academic research and I will admit to having kissed the
Blarney Stone three times.
Yeats would probably have disdained Burke’s letter, as the power of
personal utterance did not save him from repeatedly falling into rhetoric,
Voices from the Prairie: Immigrant Identities in Opposition
69
yet one must nevertheless admire Thomas Burke’s sheer rhetorical
command. He mixes epic and biblical language and tropes in his overt
allusion to Ephesians 6:11, thereby implying that the war against The
Kaiser—“petty tyrant” and “the bitter, ignorant cur”—was in fact
operating on a higher spiritual level:
...not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers,
against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness
in high places.
And perhaps, though he speaks broadly of Christian virtues, it goes
without saying that this conflict clearly presented something of a moral
and historical obligation for Catholic Irishmen to come to the aid of
Catholic France. One can forgive that in the heat of the moment, in the
midst of repeated, sweeping references to swords—drawing the sword to
protect the honour of America, the new Motherland; giving Germany a
“hot reception with fire and sword”; stabbing the “flaming point of your
sword to the heart's core” and hoping some heroic son of Minnesota
returns “with the blood of that infernal, inhuman monster—the Kaiser of
Germany—dripping from the point of his own sword”—Burke somewhat
garbles the reference from Plutarch’s Sayings of Spartan Women (ἢ τὰν
ἢ ἐπὶ τᾶς: Moralia 241.16), mistakenly substituting “sword” for “shield”
from the Latin adaptation Aut cum scuto aut in scuto.
He displays a wry, rather eighteenth-century humour and wit worthy of
Pope, invoking what were perhaps oral family histories to elevate the sons
of poor, immigrant farmers from Minnesota to Homeric status, using the
forms and conventions of classical epics, linking past and present (and
perhaps fact and fiction) by no more authority than his own say-so as
family and community patriarch. Thus “John O'Brien, the son of James
O'Brien of Degraff,” “a fine, calm young fellow” whom the addressee had
been “acquainted with from childhood,” becomes here a “scion” of a
“noble race,” descended from High King Brian Boru and “the O'Briens
of Thommond [sic],” who have come down the centuries “without a stain
or blemish on their name or fame in arms” and “many times left the green
fields of Erin red with the blood of its invaders.” Like his ancestor ninehundred years before, he is a giant of a man, “six feet, six-inches in
height.” He is a leader, “a model of virtue to his comrades in
arms,” but perhaps his best attribute is that (bringing the tone down out of
its hyperbolic orbit) “there will be no danger of getting hit while he is in
front”.
Finally, it is not surprising that he could not exit without extolling the
historic virtues of his own patrilineal line, and making a broad connection
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to the Norman-Irish ascendency and the namesake of the Irish Burkes,
William de Burgh, the twelfth-century Norman knight who by dint of
conquest and land grants from Henry II, gained control of sizable estates
in Leinster and Munster, as well as the Kingdom of Connaught. He
claimed lineal descent from Charlemagne, and is the purported progenitor
of the nearly 20,000 Burkes, Bourkes, and de Burghs currently living in
Ireland, and tens of thousands more diasporic individuals with these and
some three-dozen other variant surnames.
Thomas Burke, however, chose not to link himself with Charlemagne,
or specifically with the original Irish de Burgh, or even less specifically
with the Norman aristocracy per se, and least of all to later individuals
such as Raymond Bourke, the peer of France who accompanied Wolfe
Tone to Ireland in 1798. Instead, he self-identifies specifically with the
powerful, Hibernicized southern branch of the family, the Clanricarde
Burkes of County Galway who claim descent from William de Burgh
through his illegitimate younger son Richard Óge de Burgh--whose greatgrandson Sir Ulick Burke of Annagheen became the 1st Clanricarde in the
aftermath of the Burke Civil War of the early fourteenth-century. This one
bit of previously undocumented oral ‘history’ such as it is, probably says
little even to my own family, other than weakly establishing a specific—
i.e. claimed—family connection with a given branch of the family in
Ireland that purportedly made “a burying place for [thousands of] their
invaders.” If true, however, it might explain the prevalence of
the praenomen Ulick that occurs repeatedly in both the Clanricarde and
my own matrilineal male line.
Of most interest to the present writer is that such a connection would
link him directly with the presences that stalk broodingly through Yeats’s
later poetry, as the Clanricardes were the builders of Thoor Ballylee, the
four-storey, thirteenth-century Norman tower house outside Gort that
Yeats purchased in 1917 and subsequently renovated as his summer home
and magical oratory. It is the spirits of the Clanricards upon whom he
meditated, and whom he summoned in the poems of The Tower and The
Winding Stair. It was their ancestral stair that Yeats trod, and which he
associated with the maddening spiritual journey captured in A Vision’s
metaphor of the gyres. It is their ghosts who walk on All Soul’s Night, and
whom Yeats evokes both figuratively and perhaps literally in poems such
as Byzantium, Symbols, Blood and the Moon, A Dialogue of Self and Soul,
and The Tower if the poet who wrote the suggestive introduction to W.T.
Horton’s Book of Images, and who steadfastly practiced ceremonial magic
for the better part of his life, can ever be said to have evoked anything
figuratively.
Voices from the Prairie: Immigrant Identities in Opposition
71
I claim the connection as by a soldier’s right. Indeed, I have little
choice, lacking irrefutable proof to the contrary. The mere suggestion of
such a lineage forever colours my conception of my own Irishness, and
indeed to whatever minor degree, my scholarship present and future. But
while the contention of my great-great grandfather may not be historically
valid, I certainly don't intend to backtrack through 750 years worth of
uncertain genealogical information to find out. It is enough that Thomas
Burke's intimate, passionate, and undoubtedly actual thoughts were
recorded in as nearly as possible the language in which he thought them.
His word is enough. Of such fine, often unsubstantiated and tenuous stufffanciful, coincidental, concocted, or real, are the personal tapestries of
ethnic identity woven.
Works Cited
O’Donnell, Frank Hugh. (1904), The Stage Irishman of the Pseudo-Celtic
Drama. Longmans, London.
Archibald, Douglas and O’Donnell, William H. (eds.). (1999), The
Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. III: Autobiographies. Scribner, New
York.
Regan, Ann. (2002), Irish in Minnesota. Minnesota Historical Society, St.
Paul, MN.
Serra, Nick. (2011), ‘The Blanding and Blandishments of Yeats’s Heroic
Ideal in ‘Easter, 1916,’’ in Ireland at War and Peace. Alison
O’Malley-Younger and John Strachan, (eds.). Cambridge Scholars
Publishing, Newcastle-upon Tyne, pp. 90-101.
Yeats, William Butler. (1916). Reveries over Childhood and Youth.
Macmillan, New York.
Notes
For more general information about Bishop Ireland and the Irish colonization of
Minnesota see: Johnston, P. C. (1984) Minnesota's Irish. Johnston Publishing,
Afton, MN.
CHAPTER FOUR
“MAN MAI THER-OF ET INOGH”:
AGRICULTURAL CRISIS
AND BL MS HARLEY 913
MICHAEL W. GEORGE
BL MS Harley 913, the oldest extant collection of Anglo-Irish
literature, is a true miscellany, containing works in not only Anglo-Irish
but also Latin and French. Scholars date the manuscript to the first quarter
of the fourteenth century, 1335 at the latest, and place the manuscript in
the Kildare/New Ross/Waterford area of Ireland because of an association
with Friar Michael of Kildare, because one work—‘The Walling of New
Ross’—is a localized poem, and because later owners of the manuscript
seem to have been in the Waterford area. Scholars have identified a strong
association between the manuscript and the Franciscan order, as well.
Because of the manuscript’s size (pages are only 140mm x 95mm) and its
worn appearance, most scholars agree that it was a well-used preaching
book. These details, when placed within the historical context of early
fourteenth-century Ireland, permit an interpretation of the manuscript as
not only utilitarian for spiritual purposes but also topically relevant for the
lives of the people in Ireland. In particular, the manuscript has a focus on
food—especially in some of the humorous works. The climate-induced
agricultural crises that occurred in the first quarter of the fourteenth
century, combined with the military strife characteristic of colonization
make the works in the manuscript ideally-suited for a population living in
these circumstances. The focus on food is directly relevant for a time of
scarcity, and the intense focus on topics related to food in a number of
poems—The Drinkers’ Mass and The Land of Cokaygne in particular—
makes the manuscript not only relevant but also an imaginative alternative
to the harsh realities of life in early fourteenth-century Ireland. I argue that
in this manuscript we find at least a strong correlation, if not a direct
reaction, to the weather and war-induced agricultural crises of early
Agricultural Crisis and BL MS Harley 913
73
fourteenth-century Ireland. I will first outline the agrarian difficulties that
Ireland experienced, followed by the military strife during this period, and
then connect those to selected works in the manuscript.
The beginning of the fourteenth century brought with it climactic
upheaval. Most paleoclimatologists and historical climatologists agree that
throughout the fourteenth century the climate was cooling.1 From about
950 Europe was in what has become known as The Medieval Warm
period. The climate was relatively warm, permitting—for instance—
grapes to be grown in Northern Europe and the Norse to colonize
Greenland in the 980s. This was arguably the warmest period in Europe
from 900 until the late twentieth century, definitely warmer than previous
centuries. By the beginning of the fourteenth century, The Medieval Warm
period was ending and had ended for many regions, initiating what has
become known as The Little Ice Age. Jean Grove argues convincingly that
this period—which technically refers to advancing glaciers—began around
the beginning of the fourteenth century, with average temperatures
dropping by as much as 2 degrees c. over time.2 Although this does not
seem extreme, fluctuations of this magnitude on average contribute to
extreme weather patterns.3
These extreme weather patterns manifested themselves periodically
throughout the end of the thirteenth and beginning of the fourteenth
centuries, with unusually wet and dry periods affecting what by many
standards were already marginal harvests. Throughout the end of the
thirteenth and beginning of the fourteenth centuries, Ireland experienced
periods of poor agricultural yields. The medieval agrarian lifestyle meant
living on the edge of hardship, for production methods were inefficient.
Ireland, just like all of Europe, had an economy based on agriculture, with
a heavy emphasis on cereals and husbandry. The vast majority of plant
matter in medieval diets came from grains and legumes. The result of this
was a dependency on these crops. Grain products such as bread, pottage,
and ale—as well as dairy products—tended to dominate medieval diets.4
However, grain production during the Middle Ages was inefficient.
Harvest yields during the Middle Ages were low, with yields varying
widely from region to region and from year to year. William Chester
Jordan presents data from Winchester in the thirteenth century, indicating
that harvest yields were low. Data from other parts of Europe reveal a
similar poor return on agriculture. According to Jordan, neither
Scandinavia nor Poland probably did much better than 2:1 (Jordan, 1996:
26).5 A 1:1 ratio meant that no food would result from the planting season,
since the amount harvested would become the next season's seed. In order
for sowing to result in food and not just seed, the farmer must have a yield
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Chapter Four
higher than 1:1, the higher the better. Medieval agriculture did not fare
much better than 1:1, with yields ranging from 2:1 to 5:1, depending on
the grain and conditions. To put this in better perspective, we can compare
these yields to ancient production. Jordan estimates that in the third
millennium BCE, yields of barley in the Fertile Crescent were between
20:1 and 76:1 (Jordan, 1996: 25).6 If the records for the Middle Ages are
even remotely accurate, we see a decline in agriculture from the ancient
period, and this decline could only mean a decline in the standard of
living.7 With a ratio of 2: or 3:1, one poor harvest could spell disaster. For
the Middle Ages, when people were dependent upon cereal products, the
line between a healthy diet and malnutrition (and even starvation) was
thin. As a result, any fluctuation in agricultural production could—and
probably would—produce anxiety over the availability of food. Any
number of factors could impact harvests, and during the late thirteenth and
early fourteenth centuries, Ireland experienced many.
The first of these factors is colonization. Fourteenth-century Ireland
was a colonized land. Having invaded in 1169, the Anglo-Norman
English, controlled much of the island by 1297, with the Gaelic population
controlling parts of Ulster, Connacht, Cork, Kildare, and a small part of
Wexford (Nicholls, 1972: 13). One of the results, and perhaps primary
purposes, for this colonization was economic exploitation. To support the
English war with Scotland, in 1297 "the Dublin purveyors seized corn all
over Dublin, Kildare, Carlow, Tipperary, Kilkenny, Waterford, Cork, and
Limerick," and two years later, Edward I ordered from Ireland 8000
quarters of wheat, 10,000 quarters of oats, 2000 quarters of crushed malt,
1000 tuns of wine, 500 carcasses of beef, 1000 pigs, 20,000 dried fish, all
of which is estimated to have cost £4248 (Lydon, 1987c: 197-99). England
was clearly using the Irish colony to supply its war efforts. The crown’s
requests for supplies—as well as soldiers—stripped the land of important
surplus (and even subsistence) products, forcing the inhabitants to exploit
the soil, perhaps beyond its ability to recover. This factor alone had the
potential to depress the economy. When combined with two other factors
intimately tied to colonization, hardship seems to have been inevitable.
Related at least in part to colonization is the armed conflict
characteristic of Ireland during this period. English colonization was
neither smooth nor peaceful. The initial colonization, of course, was
military, and Irish resistance was sporadic if not steady.8 Lydon identifies
a number of possible reasons for resistance—grievances, oppression,
natural hostility to an invading people. He concludes, however, that
probably the most immediate reason was starvation, and he shows
correlations between poor weather, the resulting bad harvests, and
Agricultural Crisis and BL MS Harley 913
75
uprisings (Lydon, 1987b: 256-7, 260). He claims that “before the death of
Edward I in 1307 the permanent threat of Irish raiding parties was a fact of
life” (Lydon, 1987b: 262) in Anglo-Norman-controlled parts of the island.
This lengthy series of skirmishes had a negative effect on agriculture in the
English-controlled regions. During the late thirteenth and early fourteenth
centuries, Ireland was in a constant state of conflict, with the Gaelic Irish
hampering Anglo-Norman agricultural production. 9 Moreover, Lydon
shows that Ireland was in financial crisis during this period, with Dublin
revenues dropping from £6112 in 1301-2 to £2865 in 1315-16 (Lydon,
1987a: 275-76). Combined with unsteady agricultural yields and
England’s demands for supplies to fuel its campaigns, Irish agricultural
stores must have been stretched thin.
Perhaps more important than the internal conflict during the latethirteenth and early-fourteenth centuries was the Bruce invasion of 1315.10
Engaged in a war with England, Robert Bruce sent his brother Edward to
Ireland in 1315. Bruce marched his army throughout central and eastern
Ireland twice during the campaign of 1315-1317. Both Lydon and Mary C.
Lyons show that Bruce’s march was devastating. Lyons asserts that:
Edward Bruce followed a conscious policy of destruction in the lordship,”
referring to his campaign as a “scorched earth policy” (Lyons, 1989: 42).
Lydon indicates a reason for this policy: “the aim was to move rapidly,
destroy as much as possible, and probably try to rouse Gaelic Ireland into
rebellion” (Lydon, 1987b: 288). Regardless of the reasons, Bruce’s
campaign was devastating to the Irish landscape, and in the early weeks
the Scots “destroy[ed] everything in their path” (Lydon, 1987b: 286).11
The destruction seems to have been thorough wherever Bruce’s army
went, and the people suffered the consequences.12
An inevitable outcome of low agricultural efficiency combined with
colonial exploitation and warfare was scarcity, the third factor that
contributes to the historical circumstances of BL MS Harley 913. For a
society that lives on the edge of hunger, famine is always near. One or two
poor harvests, especially considering the poor returns on agriculture in the
Middle Ages, could and often did throw regions into scarcity. This period
of Irish history can be characterized by a series of crop failures, poor
weather, and bad harvests, resulting in a number of famines.
Regional famines are reported throughout the second half of the
thirteenth century.13 Records indicate that Ireland experienced scarcity or
famine in 1270, 1294-96, and 1308-1310, the latter of which was extreme
(Lyons, 1989: 42). Coinciding with the beginning of the Little Ice Age, the
period between 1271 and 1310 presents a series of agricultural crises, most
76
Chapter Four
prompted by poor weather and occurring concurrently with military
conflict, interspersed with some recovery. Although it is difficult to tell, by
the end of the 1310 famine, resources were probably depleted enough to
require several good harvests for recovery. 1315 initiated a string of
agricultural crises that would have immediately eradicated any surplus
accumulated after 1310.
By all accounts the great famine of 1315-17 was the worst famine that
Europe has ever experienced. William Chester Jordan estimates it lasted
seven years in some regions, affecting over 400,000 square miles and up to
thirty million people. Records of the famine’s impact are sporadic, but it is
safe to say that many people died, particularly from disease due to their
weakened conditions. 14 The famine began with a series of heavy rains
during the spring and summer of 1315, lasting from Pentecost through
October in England (Jordan, 1996: 18). This weather pattern seems to have
continued into 1316, with perhaps some relief in 1317, though the winter
of 1317-18 was extraordinarily bad (Jordan, 1996: 18). In such situations,
to have a harvest at all would be a miracle. Because normal harvest yields
were low, and because we see a pattern of poor harvests with brief periods
of recovery, stockpiles of surplus food were probably not available.
Compounding the situation, the Great Famine coincides precisely with
Robert Bruce's invasion of Ireland.15
The conflation of these factors meant for Ireland a period of extreme
hardship and famine. Already conflict-torn and taxed by the English
crown, the famines prior to that of 1315-17 certainly plummeted parts of
Ireland—if not the entire island—into scarcity. Since “there were few
reserves with which the crop failure of the autumn [of 1315] could have
been mitigated” because:
...purveyance for the Scottish war had absorbed the available surplus grain
in the years preceding the famine, and had actually continued into 1315
(Lyons, 1989: 42)
...relief from the poor harvests of 1315 and 1316 seems unlikely.
Moreover, because the famine affected nearly all of Europe (with the
exception of northern Scotland), purchasing provisions would have been at
best expensive. Indeed:
...the dislocation caused by the invasion [Bruce’s], coupled with local
Gaelic attempts to capitalize on the disturbed conditions, such as local
risings and raids on exposed manors, must have ensured that Ireland
experienced some of the most severe effects of the famine” (Lyons, 1989:
42).
Agricultural Crisis and BL MS Harley 913
77
In this context the works in BL MS Harley 913 were composed and, later,
compiled. These circumstances make passages dealing with food directly
relevant to the population of Ireland. While the works were perhaps not
composed in direct response to the situation in Ireland, the emphasis on
the these elements certainly offers an imaginative alternative to the
everyday world, a sort of immediate wish fulfillment directly relevant to
the people experiencing these conditions.
The historical context as I have presented it provides a perspective
from which to view the works in BL MS Harley 913. First, two occasional
poems in the manuscript speak directly to the military strife in Ireland. The
Walling of New Ross, a poem in Anglo-Norman commemorating the
building of a wall around the town of New Ross in 1265, attests to the
waves of hostility between the Irish and their Anglo-Norman colonizers.
The conflict prompting the wall was between Maurice Fitzgerald and
Walter de Burgh (Shields, 1975-76: 25), identified in the first lines of the
poem. Although this was a conflict between two Anglo-Norman barons, a
few lines late in the poem indicate that the wall also protected against Irish
raids. The poet says:
No one should blame them
For wanting to enclose their town;
When the town is securely closed
And the wall encircles it completely,
Not an Irishman in Ireland will be so bold
As to dare attack it, I guarantee. (Shields, 1975-76: 198-201)
Clearly, although the initial impulse to build the wall was the feuding
colonial barons, there was an definite fear of Irish attacks.
A second poem deals more directly with the Irish. Piers of
Bermingham, an Anglo-Irish poem of 132 lines, commemorates the death
of its eponymous hero on 13 April 1308. Piers’s claim to fame is his
hatred of the Irish and his slaughter of twenty-nine O’Connors who were
invited to a feast at his castle (Lucas, 1996: 207). The poet praises Piers
for being a “peruink” [paragon] (Lucas, 1996: 43) of knightly virtues
(Lucas, 1996: 37-48), and especially for his pursuit of the Irish. The poet
declares that:
To Yrismen he was fo,
That wel wide-whare,
Euer he rode aboute
With streinth to hunt ham vte,
As hunter doth the hare. (Lucas, 1996: 50-4)
78
Chapter Four
Four stanzas are devoted to this activity in general, with the next 9 stanzas
dedicated to circumstances surrounding the aforementioned slaughter.
Although Michael Benskin reads the poem as satiric, as implicitly
criticizing Piers for his relentless slaughter of the Irish, the text falls short
of criticizing the massacre. In fact, the poet provides ample motivation,
saying that:
Thos Yrismen of the lond,
Hi swor and tok an hond
The Englis-men too trai,
And seid hi wold quelle
As fale as Ich you telle,
Al apon o dai. (Lucas, 1996: 67-72).
The poet claims the Irish intended to kill the Earl of Ulster, Edmund de
Butler, John Fitzthomas, and Piers (Lucas, 1996: 73-75). Providing
motivation for the massacre, the poet refuses to address the event itself.
Although the idea of Piers being a paragon of knighthood could be read
satirically, the inclusion of motivation for the killings indicates that the
poet is serious about commemorating Piers of Bermingham.
The most obvious link to the situation in Ireland is the emphasis on
food in the manuscript. A number of works feature food prominently: the
Latin Abbot of Gloucester’s Feast, The Passion of Monks According to
Bacchus, Dositheus’s Response, The Drinkers’ Mass, and the Anglo-Irish
Land of Cokaygne. Other poems mention food, though do not focus
specifically on it. A common thread running through these works is over
or under abundance. The three longer works I have mentioned are all
satiric or parodic, and all feature an overabundance of food. The Abbot of
Gloucester’s Feast, as its title suggests, presents a sumptuous feast with
plenty to eat and drink at the expense of a visitor to the residence. A key
theme throughout is the narrator’s position as outsider, and hence his
inability to participate in the luxurious feast.
Missa potatorum, or The Drinkers’ Mass, contains an intense focus on
alcoholic drink. Wittily parodying the Latin mass, the writer replaces key
terms with drinking terms. From the beginning the parody is obvious; “I
confess to the all-drinking culprit Bacchus, and the accursed red wine, and
to all his dishes, and to you drinkers”16 replaces the Latin:
I confess to almighty God, to blessed Mary ever virgin, to blessed Michael
the archangel, to blessed John the Baptist, to the holy apostles Peter and
Paul, to all the saints, and to you, brethren, that I have sinned exceedingly
in thought, word and deed.17
Agricultural Crisis and BL MS Harley 913
79
Maintaining the same syntax and morphology, the writer typically
substitutes Bacchus for Deus and creates “exuberant puns” (Bayless, 1996:
102), calling Bacchus ciphipotens, cup-potent, or omnepotanti, all-drinking,
instead of the mass’s omnipotent. Maintaining the structure, syntax, and
often morphology of the Latin mass, the writer provides a humorous
parody focusing on overindulgence in drink. The focus on overabundance
is precisely the opposite of the historical situation, and it is telling that in
the opening the parodist calls Bacchus culprit and modifies “red wine”
with accursed, indicating some uneasiness associated with this
overindulgence, uneasiness perhaps prompted by the precarious situation
in Ireland.
The Land of Cokaygne, by far the best-known poem in the manuscript,
contains an intense focus on food. The poet devotes ninety-seven lines to
Cokaygne's environment, explaining first what Cokaygne does not
contain. In two lines the poet eradicates the ever-present armed conflict
characteristic of fourteenth-century Ireland: “Ther nis baret nother strif, /
Nis ther no deth ac euer lif” (Lucas, 1996: 27-8). MED defines baret as
“strife, conflict, contention; struggle, turmoil.” Later the word is used for
“combat, fighting, battle; (b) an attack.” However, in the late thirteenth
and early fourteenth centuries, the term seems to be a general term for
conflict, with perhaps shades of combat. We can certainly characterize the
political climate of early fourteenth-century Ireland as conflicted, with
Anglo-Norman barons struggling with each other and the Anglo-Normans
fighting with the Gaelic Irish and Scots. The poet neatly eliminates those
elements from Cokaygne. The next aspects that the poet omits are various
animals. These lines reveal elements of the environment that were
problematic during the first quarter of the fourteenth century. The poet
celebrates that "Ther nis serpent, wolf no fox" (Lucas, 1996: 31), animals
that present dangers to humanity and livestock. Continuing, the poet
proclaims “Nis ther flei, fle no lowse / In cloth, in toune, bed no house"
(Lucas, 1996: 37-8), and slightly later he omits snails, as well (Lucas,
1996: 40). Flies, fleas, and lice are common pests that make life
uncomfortable and, as we know now, spread disease. What is more, many
of these pests increase during wet weather. 18 By stipulating where the
absence is—clothing, town, beds, houses—the poet reveals the reason for
Cokaygne's omission: human concerns. Eliminating unsavory or
dangerous aspects of the ecosystem shapes that ecosystem into an
imaginative, idealized setting, one opposed to the real conditions in
Ireland, where the ecosystem surely seemed to have failed.
Cokaygne's weather reinforces this idealized ecosystem. In Cokaygne,
"Ther nis dunnir, slete no hawle" (Lucas, 1996: 39), and the poet continues
80
Chapter Four
after a short break: "No non storm, rein no winde" (Lucas, 1996: 41). In
omitting foul weather, the poet omits many of the impediments that in
Ireland of the time would have made human existence precarious. Many of
the agricultural crises during the first quarter of the fourteenth century
were caused by inclement weather—torrential storms and rains, harsh
winters. These are precisely the weather events the poet has omitted.
The final set of ecological traits that the poet extricates from the
ecosystem is related. The poet asserts that Cokaygne has “Nors no capil,
kowe no ox, / Ther nis schepe, no swin, no gote / Ne non horwgh, la, Got
it wote” (Lucas, 1996: 32-4). 19 In eliminating horses, geldings, cattle,
sheep, swine, and goats, the poet has eliminated livestock and the need to
feed and care for these animals. In these lines, the poet has moved from
the ecosystem at large—parts of the natural environment not directly
associated with humanity—to husbandry—part of the environment
directly linked to human occupations. By eliminating predators, pests, and
poor weather, the poet creates his view of an ecosystem ideal for human
habitation, an ecosystem that via these omissions serves human existence,
countering their contribution to hardship in the poet’s Ireland, and
omitting husbandry also omits the inevitable hardship caused when these
animals become ill, as many did in 1321 (Lyons, 1989: 63).
The ready availability of food in Cokaygne permits these omissions. In
Cokaygne food can be had "With-vte care, how and swink." (Lucas, 1996:
18), requiring no work or anxiety, two attributes of medieval life that must
have been persistent, especially during the first quarter of the fourteenth
century. These circumstances make The Land of Cokaygne passages
dealing with food directly relevant to the population of Ireland. While the
poem was perhaps not composed in direct response to the situation in
Ireland, the emphasis on the Land of Plenty elements certainly offers an
imaginative alternative to the everyday world, a sort of immediate wish
fulfillment. 20 The poet achieves this wish fulfillment by imaginatively
reversing the scarcity so prominent in early fourteenth-century Ireland.
The emphasis on food begins with the landscape and architecture.
Cokaygne has four rivers composed of oil, milk, honey, and wine (Lucas,
1996: 45-46).21 Because Cokaygne's rivers consist of fine drink, water's
purpose is reduced to aesthetics and washing (Lucas, 1996: 47-8). Not
only are Cokaygne’s inhabitants provided with fine drink within easy
reach, they are also not reliant on the natural patterns of rainfall, patterns
that seem to have been variable in the early fourteenth century. As is
characteristic of all literature within the Cokaygne/Land of Plenty
tradition, the poet presents the architecture and environment as composed
of food, focusing this part of the poem on what all too often was absent in
Agricultural Crisis and BL MS Harley 913
81
Ireland and providing an implicit explanation for the lack of domesticated
animals. 22 This aspect of the poem implies a particular, idealized
relationship between the environment (including both human habitation
and the ecosystem) and humans. In describing the abbey, the poet claims:
Al of pasteiis beth the walles,
Of fleis, of fisse and rich met,
The likfullist that man mai et.
Fluren cakes beth the schingles alle
Of cherche, cloister, boure and halle,
The pinnes beth fat podinges,
Rich met to princez and kinges. (Lucas, 1996: 54-60)
The architecture is composed of food, though the raw materials for these
foods are missing. The poet neglects to mention agriculture, which is
required of dough and flour cakes, and the absence of livestock removes
the raw materials for puddings and meat. The conclusion an audience must
draw is that food exists in Cokaygne without the typical production
processes, the very processes that suffered such difficulty during the early
fourteenth century. The horticultural elements of this landscape are
similar. In describing a tree in a meadow, the poet says that not only is the
tree beautiful, but:
The rote is gingeuir and galingale,
The siouns beth al sedwale,
Trie maces beth the flure,
The rind canel of swet odur,
The frute gilofre of gode smakke. (Lucas, 1996: 72-7)
Each part of this tree is made of spices: ginger, galingale, zedoary, mace,
cinnamon, and cloves. Dhuibhne rightly identifies these as "imported
exotic goods" (Dhuibhne, 1988: 50), certainly not items readily available
in Ireland, and certainly commodities that were far too expensive for many
to afford. 23 By removing the expense of spices, the poet contrasts
Cokaygne with Ireland. Further, the abbey contains four springs, each
composed of medicinal substances: “Of triacle and halwei, / Of baum and
ek piement” (Lucas, 1996: 84-5). “Triacle” cures poison, “halwei” is "a
sweet healing liquid”, “baum” a "curative ointment containing balm" or
any similar substance, and “piement” "a sweetened, spiced wine used for
refreshment and in medical recipes; a medicinal potion" (MED). The
springs that feed the abbey supply, rather than water, remedies for
ailments. The environment of Cokaygne, then, exists to sustain its human
82
Chapter Four
inhabitants, imaginatively countering the experience of the early
fourteenth-century Irish.
This attitude is most pronounced when the poet turns to birds. Besides
song birds (Lucas, 1996: 97), the birds here directly oppose the historical
circumstances in Ireland:
The gees irostid on the spitte
Fleez to that abbai, Got hit wot,
And gredith: 'Gees al hote, al hote
Hi bringeth garlek greet plente,
The best idight that man mai se. (Lucas, 1996: 102-6)
The geese are already roasted and fly in that state, bringing with them
spices to enhance their own flavor. Moreover, they market themselves,
serving as both food and food hawker, advertising themselves to let the
human inhabitants know that they are available. Likewise:
the leuerokes that beth cuth,
Lightith adun to man is muth
Idight in stu ful swithe wel,
Pudrid with gilofre and canel. (Lucas, 1996: 107-10)
The larks in Cokaygne also provide for the human inhabitants. They are
self-prepared in a stew with powdered clove and cinnamon, ready to be
eaten and enjoyed, serving themselves—even as far as landing in people’s
mouths—for human culinary pleasure.24 Food is not only readily available
but also miraculously prepared, eliminating the toil necessary in
fourteenth-century Ireland.
The result of this is an idealized view of Cokaygne’s environment.
Every aspect of the Cokaygne environment, from the ecosystem to the
architecture, offers itself for human needs and desires. None of the animals
that require work exist in Cokaygne, nor do any aspects of the
environment that would interfere with human life or sustenance. Directly
opposing the historical circumstances of Ireland, the poet creates an
idealized land in a humorous poem. Whether or not the poem was written
in direct response to the agrarian crises in Ireland, the poem is directly
relevant to the situation at the time.
Other poems in the manuscript mention food, often in passing or as
standard satire. “The Song of Michael Kildare” claims that a wealthy
person in hell “He sal sitte in helle flitte / With-oute wyn and miche”
(Lucas, 1996: 97-8). “Sarmun” asserts that in heaven “To met no drink
ther nis no need, / No for no hunger he ne sal kar” (Lucas, 1996: 205-6).
Agricultural Crisis and BL MS Harley 913
83
“Fall and Passion” mentions that after the fall Adam “His liuelod he most
swink sore” (Lucas, 1996: 74). Piers of Bermingham uses a telling food
metaphor to describe the plot on the Piers’s life: “Thro ham this lond is
ilor, / To spille ale and bred” (Lucas, 1996: 95-6). Several associate
poverty with hunger. “Song of the Times” laments, “What wol men for the
sowle del? / Corne no mel, wel thou wost, / Bot wel seld; at the mel / A
rowgh bare trencher other a crust” (Lucas, 1996: 173-6). Lamenting the
lack of giving to the poor, “The Song of Michael Kildare” says that the
unsuccessful beggar “Hungir-bitte he goth a-wai / With mani sorful tere”
(Lucas, 1996: 85-6), and later a poor man “gredith: ‘Louerd help me! /
Hunger me hauith ibund” (Lucas, 1996: 103-4). In fact, there are so many
references to food in the manuscript that Neil Cartlidge asserts that the
manuscript contains a “preoccupation with food, drink, and feasting”
(Cartlidge, 2003: 46).
The manuscript’s focus on food offers at least a direct correlation to
the situation in early fourteenth-century Ireland. The agricultural crises—
brought on by inclement weather and military strife and lasting roughly
from 1310 until the early 1320s—were certainly on the minds, if not a
preoccupation, of people living in Ireland. If, as most scholars agree, BL
MS Harley 913 was a well-used Franciscan preaching manual, then the
works within it were certainly in tune with the concerns of the people to
whom the Franciscans were preaching, enough for many of the works to
possibly provide imaginative comfort during hard times.
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Notes
1
Pribyl, et al. show a period of steady decline in mean temperatures from 12561431 in East Anglia, for instance.
2
Several studies confirm this cooling trend. See, for instance, Jean M. Grove’s
work on the topic as well as the substantial body of work produced by Michael
Mann.
3
Climatologists predict that just a 2 degree c. difference in temperature can have
massive affects on weather patterns. Generally, climatologists correlate higher
temperatures with lower precipitation and cooler temperatures with increased
precipitation. See Solomon, et al. Michael E. Mann claims that “The most dramatic
climate extremes [during the Little Ice Age] were less associated with prolonged
multiyear periods of cold than with year to year temperature changes, or even
particularly prominent individual cold spells, and these events were often quite
specific to particular seasons” (Mann, 2002: 1), indicating that such a drop in
temperature contributed to increases in climate variability.
4
Diet was based largely on economic status, with the peasantry relying on bread,
pottage, and dairy. Aristocratic diets would have contained far more meat and
luxury products like wine and spices. See Dyer.
5
As Jordan indicates, some scholars have objected to these figures, calling them
uncharacteristic. Data from the Westminster Abbey shows a 3:1 yield, for instance.
However, even if we go with the highest numbers, or inflate the numbers
arbitrarily to 5:1 or 6:1, the yields were still low.
6
The highest yields from the Middle Ages, according to Jordan, were 10:1 in
France, but he concludes that in the thirteenth century a 3:1 ratio was far more
common. Modern yields, due to fertilization, herbicides, pesticides, and genetic
engineering, are around 200:1 or 300:1 (Jordan, 1996: 25-6).
7
Dyer provides similar figures, although measured differently. He compares the
Winchester bishopric wheat yield of 10 bushels per acre to twentieth-century
yields of 58 bushels per acre in the 1960s and 70s (Dyer, 1998: 41).
Agricultural Crisis and BL MS Harley 913
8
87
On the military reasons for the Anglo-Norman colonization, see F. X Martin.
In 1280, records from the Carbury manor in Kildare report that the fields were
“uncultivated on account of the war of the Irish” (Lydon, 1987b: 265).
10
See Armstrong, Orpen, and Otway-Ruthven.
11
Hooker’s Chronicle reports the damage in Ulster:
“The Scots increased in strength and courage, who spoiling of the countrie, caused
such horrible scarcitie in Ulster, that the soldiers…prolled and pilled insatiablie
wheresoever they came, without need, and without regard of the poore people,
whose only provision they devoured. These people now living in slaverie under
The Bruce starved for hunger, having first experienced manie lamentable shifts,
even to the eating of manie dead carcasses.” (Lyons, 1989: 5)
12
Ranald Nicholson shows that Scottish involvement in Ireland did not end with
Edward Bruce’s death in 1318. Robert Bruce continued to be active in Irish affairs
at least into the late 1320s.
13
In 1270 Hibernia Anglicana reports “a great famine and pestilence, the natural
consequences of war, spread over all Ireland, and sorely afflicted the whole
kingdom" (Crawford, 1989: 4). The following year brought about similar
situations: “pestilence and famine in the whole of Ireland," and the Annals of
Multifernan report for the same year “A great and severe scarcity in Ireland, and a
multitude of people died by famine" (Crawford, 1989: 4). Camden’s Annals say
“Plague, famine, and sword, raged this year, particularly in Methb” and Clyn
reports that “A great famine occurred in Ireland, and a heavy pestilence”
(Crawford, 1989: 5). Lyons's Appendix reveals similar information for these years,
along with supporting tree-ring data (Lyons, 1989: 61).
14
Starvation is rarely the primary killer during a famine, at least in rural regions:
“People in the countryside, therefore, were not in general ‘starving to death.’ (It is
difficult to starve to death even when food intake is completely stopped, as in
hunger strikes; and such complete cessation of eating is not characteristic of
famines, when people look hard for something to eat.)” (Jordan, 1996: 116).
15
Herman Pleij disagrees with these conclusions. Although he acknowledges that
the Middle Ages experienced "a constant recurrence of periodic scarcity," he
claims that "famine in the Middle Ages was not that much of a problem" (Pleij,
2001: 100, 102). However, he provides no evidence for such assertions.
16
"Confiteor reo Bacho omnepotanti, et reo vino coloris rubei, et omnibus ciphis
ejus, et vobis potatoribus.” All Latin quotes are from Thomas Wright and James
Orchard Halliwell’s edition in Reliquiae antiquae. Translations are mine.
17
"Confiteor Deo omnipotenti, beatae Mariae semper Virgini, beato Michaeli
Archangelo, beato Joanni Baptistae, sanctis Apostolis Petro et Paulo, omnibus
Sanctis, et tibi Pater.” Texts of the mass are readily available. The Latin text and
translation here are from the Ordinary of the Traditional Latin Mass in Latin and
English published on the Traditio web site.
18
Garbáty notes that this poem "is unique in the fact that it excludes flies, fleas,
and lice from the town" (Garbáty, 1963: 142). The U. K. experienced a sharp rise
in drone flies, mosquitoes, snails, horseflies, and lice during the extremely wet
summer of 2012. The outbreak of nits affected up to 10% of primary school
students (Wrenn, 2012; Whitehead, 2012).
9
88
19
Chapter Four
Lyons prints evidence of a cattle plague in 1321 (1989: 63), and Jordan indicates
that diseases in livestock occurred in England prior to this date and probably
migrated to Ireland from England (1986: 38-39).
20
On the Land of Plenty tradition see Jonassen's comments on the Saturnalia
relationship, Hill, 1975: 55; Garrett, 2004: 3; Yoder, 1983: 230-31; and Dhuibhne,
1988: 48 .
21
These rivers have been associated with the four rivers of paradise. See Bennett
and Smithers, 1968: 338-339 and Davidson, 1971: 23.
22
See corresponding passages in the French (Väänänen, 1981: 375-406) and Dutch
texts (Pleij, 2001: 431-49).
23
Although prices and wages varied widely, Dyer presents some information on
both. Cinnamon, cloves, ginger, and mace "often cost 1s. to 3s. per pound,
occasionally rising to as much as 6s" (Dyer, 1998: 62-63). To put this in
perspective, he estimates that "a skilled building worker [in England] earned 2d.
per day in 1250, 4d. in 1400 and 6d. in 1500" (Dyer, 1998: xv). A skilled worker
earning 3d. per day would need to work four days to acquire a pound of the
cheapest single spice, twenty-four days in the case of the most expensive.
24
Peter Brueghel the Elder’s 1567 Land of Cokaygne reveals this aspect in art. The
central figures are people, seemingly in a gluttonous stupor. On the fringes are
prepared animals—a pig with a knife in it, what seems to be a chicken or goose on
a plate, and an egg with legs and a knife through its broken shell. This artistic
representation reinforces the poem’s outlook—humans are the center, with all
other aspects of the ecosystem existing to serve human needs.
PART II
BORDERLANDS
CHAPTER FIVE
IN PRAISE OF UNCERTAINTY:
THE LIMINAL AUTHENTICITY
OF THE BORDER BALLADS
COLIN YOUNGER
The field-worker knows that the ballad is a living organism, tune and text
together, the spirit and the body. When the spirit is gone, what is left is a
dead thing (Barry, 1934: 17).
To use a term such as liminal authenticity runs a very real risk of being
accused of employing empty theoretical terms which signify nothing.
However, as I will argue, the notion of liminality, in its shape-shifting,
threshold sense is peculiarly pertinent to the debates over the authenticity
of the ballads as it allows the ballads to be read in opposition to fixed and
codified inscriptions which question their truth function and authenticity
of what is essentially a hybrid and polymorphous practice perhaps, as the
epigraph to this chapter suggests, better carried out by bards and balladeers
than decisively set in stone by authorities of the authentic. With this in
mind this chapter will take a foray beyond the borders (both geographical
and literary) to widen the scope of current critical opinion on the
authenticity of the ballads by challenging the boundaries of truth and
fiction that notions such as authenticity rely on as its fundamental premise.
Following a battalion of critics from Lionel Trilling to Jacques Derrida
I will argue that the debate of authenticity is itself a liminal phenomenon,
dictated largely by the ethos in which it emerges, and that therefore the
concept of authenticity itself cannot be classified beyond the ideology it
serves. Authenticity speaks to, and of a zeitgeist (the term itself an attempt
to render concrete and monologic the spirit of an age), and thus it changes
with each subsequent age in which it emerges. As Miles Orvell argues:
In Praise of Uncertainty: The Liminal Authenticity of the Border Ballads
91
The culture of authenticity that developed at the end of the century [19th]
and that gradually established the aesthetic vocabulary that we have called
modernist was a reaction against the earlier [neo-classical] aesthetic, an
effort to get beyond mere imitation, beyond the manufacturing of illusions,
to the creation of more authentic works that were themselves real things
(Orvell, 1989: xv).
The notion of authenticity is thus one that is liminal, in flux and subject to
change. Nothwithstanding, in its sense of verisimilitude, genuineness,
originality, and authority, 1 authenticity is a fundamental tool of the
historian, and history a discourse which Roy Foster argues is used “to
further an agenda, which requires characters and incidents to be
subordinated to the overall demands of plot” (Hanson, 2009:51). Thus,
following Hayden White, Foster suggests that history is em-plotted,
political and subject to a metahistory which is imposed on it ex post facto
to give it ‘continuity, coherency, and meaning’ (White, 1973: 3). Put
simply history is a narrativised, and teleological discourse which is shaped
by the narrator to carry a particular point of view. Liminality, on the other
hand, based as it is on the interplay of centripetal and centrifugal forces,
operates from a mid-point from which anything can happen. It encourages
us to attend to the marginal by reading against the grain, thereby
challenging univocal notions of history and authenticity to the point of
redundancy.
The Authenticity Debate
Prior to issuing a redundancy notice to the notion of authenticity it is
worth contextualising by discussing the authenticity debate which
surrounded the Border Ballads in the early nineteenth century. It can be
summarised by a quote from William Motherwell, who argued in 1873
that:
It has become of the first importance to collect these songs with scrupulous
and unshrinking fidelity... It will not do to indulge in idle speculations as to
what they once may have been, and, to recast them in what we may fancy
were their original moulds (Motherwell, 1873: 23).
Here Motherwell2 draws attention to what are central concerns to Scottish
literature in general, and the Ballad tradition in particular: authenticity,
originality and veracity. His insistence on the “scrupulous and unshrinking
fidelity” of the ballad collector implies its opposite; that ballads which
blend invention with imitation, legend and myth are somehow unscrupulous,
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Chapter Five
unfaithful, and, fundamentally inferior. This introduces a debate on
History, Literature and Historiography that is as politically suggestive now
as it was aesthetically pertinent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries;
the high period of ballad collections. For example, the now infamous
philosophical anarchist, William Godwin wrote, in 1797:
The historian is confined to individual incident and individual man, and
must hang upon that his invention or conjecture as he can. The writer
collects his materials from all sources, experience, report, and the records
of human affairs; then generalises them; and finally selects, from their
elements and the various combinations they afford, those instances which
he is best qualified to portray, and which he judges most calculated to
impress the heart and improve the faculties of his reader (Godwin, 2005:
367).
In sum, Godwin’s argument precedes and pre-empts what Ruth Mack
describes as:
...debates within the philosophy of history—as well as within history and
literary studies [which] have long been stuck on the question of whether or
not history can tell the truth about past worlds (Mack, 2009: 1).
Notably, Godwin draws attention to the embellished facticity of the
Historian—he invents or conjectures as he can—and the fact of
embellishment in the writer whose creative impetus is governed, according
to Godwin by a selection process based on the twin strands of dulce et
utile 3 ; the former being foremost in his argument. Thus, he makes a
forceful argument for the rhetorical, emplotted, and sometimes
counterfactual elements of historiographical fictions (a category into
which the ballads can be fitted) as these tropological reconfigurings of the
raw material of history give rise to an hermeneutic of presence which
places the author and context (rather than the event) at the centre of the
text, thereby opening up a dialogue between past and present which
extends beyond the mechanistic.
In the context of the present chapter Godwin’s argument proves highly
illuminating as not only does it give rise to discussions about the truth
function of the Literature, it also provides a segue into debates regarding
evidence and authority in relation to the Border Ballads. Furthermore, it
provides insights into the Romantic zeitgeist from which these ballads
emerged; a zeitgeist in which imagination was lauded, and imitation, for
the most part was not. As Regina Bendix observes:
In Praise of Uncertainty: The Liminal Authenticity of the Border Ballads
93
The quest for authenticity is a peculiar longing, at once modern and
antimodern. It is oriented toward the recovery of an essence whose loss has
been realized only through modernity and whose recovery is feasible only
though methods and sentiments created in modernity. [...] The continued
craving for experiences of unmediated genuineness seeks to cut through
what Rousseau has called ‘the wound of reflection,’ a reaction to
modernization's demythologization, detraditionalization, and disenchantment
(Bendix, 1997: 8).
This celebration of the imagination as the vessel of originary creative
genius is unsurprising, given the seismic changes in the perception of the
role of the poet/author which occurred between the Neo-classical and
Romantic periods. “By the end of the eighteenth century”, according to
David Higgins:
...genius—creative rather than imitative; innate rather than learned;
exalted; original; and rare—had become a key concept in aesthetics and
criticism’ (Higgins, 2009: 42)4.
...and as George Buelow points out: “both the concept of originality and
its moral antonym plagiarism appeared as crucial topics in aesthetic
criticism and debate” (Buelow, 1990: 117). The wound of reflection with
its attendant desire to prove culture purity has never healed, and has, in
fact intensified with the emergence of Modernism to the extent that, as
Edward Bruner observes:
…built into our Western metaphysics (Derrida 1974) is the notion of a
privileged original, a pure tradition, which exists in some prior time, from
which everything now is a contemporary degradation. This is what James
Clifford (1986) calls the pastoral allegory including the search for origins,
the ethnographic present, and the idea of the vanishing primitive taken as
a disappearing object, as a trope. It is what I call the problem of
authenticity (Bruner, 1993: 324).
Given the initial terms of this debate (sparked, in part by James
MacPherson’s ‘Ossian’ controversy) it is interesting that Thomas Finlayson
Henderson saw fit to describe David Herd, one of the earliest ballad
collectors, as “one of the most trustworthy of the old collectors… almost
incapable not merely of writing, but of altering, or amending verse”
(Henderson, 1910: 338). Note the use of the term trustworthy taken here to
imply faithful to the original. Such a term suggests that Herd’s collection
Ancient and Modern Scottish Songs, Heroic Ballads etc., collected from
Memory, Tradition and Ancient Authors as unadulterated renditions of
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Chapter Five
earlier texts. The impulse is thus mimetic; a copying and collecting
exercise in which merit is measured by fidelity to a pre-existent text. One
such collection is James Watson’s Choice Collection of Comic and
Serious Scots Poems both Ancient and Modern (1706– 11) which claims to
be: ‘the first of its Nature which has been publish’d in our own Native
SCOTS Dialect’ (Watson, 1711: v), and later Allan Ramsay’s 1724
collection: The Ever green being a collection of Scots poems, wrote by the
ingenious before 1600. The origin of the ballads extant in each of these
collections is not indicated nor is the method used in gathering them made
known, though the provenance of Ramsay’s poems is acknowledged as a
preservation of the Scots Makars of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Importantly, in each instance there is no pretension of originality.
Watson’s are self-professedly “copied from the most Correct Manuscripts
that could be procured of them”, Ramsay’s from the Bannantyne
Manuscript. Each is a retelling of a history in a fictional form based on
older poems and songs.
The same can be said of another noteworthy collection of ballads: Bishop
Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, (1765) a formative text in the
imagination of the young Walter Scott who, according to his son-in-law
and biographer, John Gibson Lockhart rhapsodised over Percy’s Reliques
to the extent that, in his own words:
I forgot the hour of dinner, was sought for with anxiety, and was still
found entranced in my intellectual banquet. To read and to remember was
in this instance the same thing, and henceforth I overwhelmed my schoolfellows, and all who would hearken to me, with tragic recitations about
the Ballads of Bishop Percy. The first time, too, I could scrape a few
shillings together, which were not common occurrences with me, I bought
unto myself a copy of these beloved volumes; nor do I believe I ever read
a book half so frequently, or with half the enthusiasm (in Lockhart, 1853:
30).
Scott’s youthful enthusiasm for Percy’s romantic narrative of itinerant
border poets was later translated into an antiquarian verve, combined with
what he saw as a national duty to compile and preserve these texts as
repositories of traditional culture threatened with extinction. This
historical and national impetus exhibited by Scott was pre-empted by
Percy who argued of his own collection:
...as many of these contain a considerable portion of poetic merit, and
throw great light on the manners and opinions of former times, it were to
be wished that some of the best of them were rescued from oblivion
(Percy, 1765: viii).
In Praise of Uncertainty: The Liminal Authenticity of the Border Ballads
95
Later Scott would make a remarkably similar assertion, suggesting that: an
‘early partiality to the tales of my country, and an intimate acquaintance
with its wildest recesses, acquired partly in the course of country sports,
and partly in pursuit of antiquarian knowledge, will, I hope, enable me at
least to preserve some of the most valuable traditions of the south of
Scotland, both historical and romantic’ (Grierson, 1932: 108-09). Thus, in
common with Percy and his near-contemporary Godwin, Scott espouses a
philosophy of history that is surprisingly modern. Anticipating critics and
historians such as Paul Ricoeur and Hayden White by around two
centuries, Scott implies that history is “everything contained in legend,
myth, [and] fable” (White, 1973: 52). As Ricoeur asserts the “historical
event is not what happens but what can be narrated, or what has already
been narrated in chronicles or legends” (in White, 1973: 169) so Scott
suggests that these chronicles and legends, translated into the ballad form,
and collected by Percy are remnants of an ancient tradition and thus
legitimate sources of recoverable historical data. Indeed, for Scott these
texts (works of fancy) were essential as a means of illuminating the past,
and should, as he argued, be read along with the labours of the professed
historian (Scott, 1805-06: 388). In short, by retrospectively codifying what
Diana Taylor describes as a “so-called ephemeral repertoire of embodied
practice/knowledge” (Taylor, 2003: 21). Scott was not creating a verbatim
reconstruction of the ballads but, in forging the voice of the folk with the
creativity of the Romantic writer, and filtering this through the backward
look of the antiquarian, Scott was undertaking an act of remembrance. His
Minstrelsy was not simply the articulation of some shared volkish
subconscious, but rather the product of intentional creation. In
manufacturing an authentic border culture thus he was recovering a folk
“system for storing and transmitting knowledge” (Taylor, 2003: 21); a
modified volkgeist made to be accessible to the masses, and designed to
encourage collective remembering. Such “remembering” as W. Fitzhugh
Brundage observes:
...forges identity, justifies privilege, and sustains cultural norms. For
individuals and groups alike, memory provides a genealogy of social
identity (Brundage, 2000: 4).
His task was made difficult by two things: the Romantic fascination with
the authentic, and the liminal nature of the works and the people who
created them. It is these liminal borderlands to which I will now turn my
attention.
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Chapter Five
Liminal Borderlands
The first recorded use of the term ‘Border Ballad’ occurs in William
Montgomerie’s A Bibliography of the Scottish Ballad Manuscripts, 17301825, wherein Mongomerie credits Robert Riddell (an antiquarian, and
collector of ballads) of Glenriddell, Dumfriesshire, with the classification
(Mongomerie, 1966: 3-28). The term is now readily accepted as defining
the ballads of the regions which straddle the Anglo-Scottish borders, and
which include, (on the English side), Northumberland, Cumberland,
Westmoreland and Weardale, and the adjacent Scots counties of
Berwickshire, Roxburghshire and part of Dumfriesshire (though these
borders were radically interchangeable and often shifting). The Ballads
therefore emerged from a transformative middle ground during the late
Medieval and Early Modern period. Moreover they were an important
mode of articulation for a border people, who were socially, politically,
and regionally marginalized, and partially self-sequestered in a frontier,
kin-based society which rejected the authoritative laws of the land. In short
I will suggest that the Borderers were what the anthropologist Victor
Turner, following Arnold van Gennep’s 1909 Rites of Passage describes
as “liminal entities” or “threshold people”:
The attributes of liminality or of liminal personae ("threshold people”) are
necessarily ambiguous, since this condition and these persons elude or slip
through the network of classifications that normally locate states and
positions in cultural space. Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they
are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law,
custom, convention, and ceremonial. As such, their ambiguous and
indeterminate attributes are expressed by a rich variety of symbols in the
many societies that ritualize social and cultural transitions. Thus, liminality
is frequently likened to "death, to being in the womb, to invisibility, to
darkness, to bisexuality, to the wilderness, and to an eclipse of the sun or
the moon (Turner, 1982: 38).
Thus the liminal for Turner represents a boundary crossing state of endless
possibility, wherein identities co-exist, and, as he argues: “the social order
may seem to have been turned upside down” (Turner, 1982: 130).
Moreover, as he continues, the cultural symbols produced in the enactment
of liminality mark symbolic transitions, co-existence and states in between
fixed and finalised social positions. Furthermore Turner’s thesis suggests
that liminality:
...may also include subversive and ludic events. The factors of culture are
isolated, insofar as it is possible to do this with multivocal symbols […]
In Praise of Uncertainty: The Liminal Authenticity of the Border Ballads
97
that are each susceptible not of a single but of many meanings. Then they
may be recombined in numerous, often grotesque ways, grotesque because
they are arrayed in terms of possible rather than experienced combinations
– thus a monster disguise may combine human, animal and vegetable
features in an ‘unnatural’ way […]. In other words, in liminality people
‘play’ with the elements of the familiar and defamiliarize them. Novelty
emerges from unprecedented combinations of familiar elements (Turner,
1982: 130-31).
These culturally, and co-operatively creative symbols (which Turner
defines as the “liminoid”) emerge from what wider society would define
as disorderly, and rule breaking; that is not in accord with the norms of
wider society. It is my contention that these notions of liminality, the
liminoid, and, as I will discuss later, communitas are peculiarly apposite to
an understanding of Border Ballads from the perspective of the border, the
people, and the genre of the ballad form itself: a form which is polyphonic,
ludic, and composed to be performed as part of a community. As James
Hogg recalled in 1801:
Till this present age, the poor illiterate people, in these glens, knew of no
other entertainment in the long winter nights, than repeating, and listening
to, the feats of their ancestors, recorded in songs, which I believe to be
handed down, from father to son, for many generations (Scott, 1802: 240).
Ballad singing, in Hogg’s description could thus be seen as a purposive
ritual based on bonds of kinship and reciprocity, designed to emphasise the
shared values, continuity and solidarity of a given group. This ritual
sharing of memory equates to a form of communitas, that is, as Turner
argues, a: “communion of equal individuals who submit together to the
general authority of ritual elders” (Turner, 1982: 96). Such communitas,
according to Turner allows interstitial (or liminal) peoples to criticise
norm-driven models of wider society by interpreting memories which
stress local belonging and involve the sharing of special knowledge and
understanding.
This sense of belonging, in Borders society was narrower than either
nation or region: focussing instead on fidelity to the grayne, a family unit
which coalesced around riding surnames.5 To go against the grayne, or to
betray one’s kinsfolk was considered the basest act a man could undertake,
and his name would be commemorated as a traitor in ballads, thereby
bringing dishonour and public disgrace upon his family with each
recitation. Thus, for example the name Armstrong is irrevocably stained
due to the behaviour of Sim (Simon Armstrong) of the Mains who
betrayed Hobbie Noble6 in the ballad of the same name. As the ballad ends
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Chapter Five
the ill-fated Hobie who is “seld away” by Armstrong offers a final
warning:
Now fare thee weel now Mangerton!
For I think again I’ll ne’er thee see:
I wad betray nae lad alive,
For a’ the goud of Christentie (Marsden, 1990: 134).
Thus, each time the ballad is recited the name of Armstrong is associated
with cowardice, avarice and betrayal in negative comparison to the
impeccable morals of the betrayed Hobbie. Moreover, this betrayal is not
of one man by another, but of the county in which he, Simon Armstrong
was born and raised, as the ballad recounts:
Foul fa’ the breast first Treason bred in!
That Liddelsdale may safely say:
For in it there was baith meat and drink,
And corn unto our geldings gay (Marsden, 1990: 129).
Here the bonds of communitas within the Armstrongs are sundered in
order to reinforce the spontaneous communitas of those performing the
ballad. Sim is metrically scapegoated, in a practice analogous to the
Borderer’s shaming ritual of baffling wherein an effigy of the miscreant
was dragged, heels-up through the ‘toun’ to the attendant charivari of the
‘tounsfolk’. Such participatory rituals which could be described as part of
the sacra of the people, were used to encourage social bonding, and to
reinforce the values of the group: values which like the ballads recounting
them are subject to shifting tides of consensus and dispute, depending
upon who is telling the tale. Yet, even here is a hermeneutic and
interpretative conundrum as Timothy Reuter rightly acknowledges in his
comment that: “what we can know is determined not only by the nature of
the sources, but also by the traditional recipes used to cook them” (Reuter,
1997: 194). Nonetheless, as I argue, notions of liminal and the in between
are particularly apt, not only to the people of the borders, but the
geographical positioning of the terrain and the ballad of the borders (which
are transitional in perpetuity) due to their performed and communal
genesis, and subsequent transformations via interpretations.
A Threshold People
The issue of the aptness of the liminal to the frontier people of the Borders
behoves me to pose a number of rhetorical questions: what is more apt to
In Praise of Uncertainty: The Liminal Authenticity of the Border Ballads
99
the Borderers from the much-debated, debateable lands than Turner’s
description of the threshold people? What is more fitting than the concept
of communitas? Here, indeed is a community who lived betwixt and
between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention,
and ceremonial; neither here nor there, in relation to England and
Scotland, part of both and neither. Indeed, as George Macdonald Fraser
rightly points out, the attitude of the Borderers to the border depended on
what was advantageous to them at any given time:
The administrative advantages of a frontier system, whereby two sides are
neatly divided and controlled by the frontier, were completely lost because
the Borderers used the frontier as and when it suited them, and ignored it
when they felt like it (MacDonald Fraser, 1995: 66).
As Fraser rightly observes, by the late fifteenth and early sixteenth
centuries the Borderers due to intermarriage, shared customs (including
sports such as football), and business alliances were as likely to fraternise
as they were to feud. This refusal to acknowledge national differences was
a matter of no small embarrassment to national officials, as the following
extract from the anonymous 7 The Complaynt of Scotlande, wyth ane
exortatione to the thre estaits to be vigilante in the deffens of their public
weil (1549) makes clear:
There is no thing that is occasione (0 ze my thre sonnis) of your adhering
to the opinione of ingland contrarzour natife cuntre, bot the grit familiarite
that inglis menand scottis hes hed on baitht the boirdours, ilk ane vith
vtheris, in marchandeis, in selling and bying hors and nolt and scheip, out
fang and in fang, ilk ane among vtheris, the quhilk familiarite is expres
contrar the lauis and consuetudis bayth of ingland and scotland Quhar for
there suld be na familiarite betuix inglis men and scottis men, be cause of
the grit deferens that is betuix there twa naturis. in aId tymis it vas determit
in the artiklis of the pace be the tua vardanis of the bordours of ingland and
scotland, that there suld be na familiarite betuix scottis men and inglis men,
nor mariage to be contrakit betuix them, nor conventions on holy dais at
gammis and plays, nor marchandres to be maid among them, nor scottis
men til entir on inglis ground vith out the kyng of ingland sa'te conduct,
nor inglis men til entir on scottis grond vith out the kyng of scotlandis save
conduct' quhon beit that there var sure pace betuix the tua realmis (anon).
In the extract from this text 8 a personified Scotland, the indignant Dame
Scotia, dressed in tattered clothing and speaking in the Scots vernacular
inveighs against her three sons (the Medieval three estates of clergy,
nobility and churls) for destroying the ancient fabric of Scotland by the
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buying and selling of horses and sheep, and the “quhilk familiarite” (quick
familiarity) they exhibit with their English counterparts. There should be
none such, she argues, because of historical “grit deferens that is betuix
there twa naturis” (great differences in our two natures), the like of which
should preclude “mariage to be contrakit betuix them, nor conventions on
holy dais at gammis and plays... quhon beit that there var sure pace betuix
the tua realmis” (marriages, contracts, and games on holy days until there
is peace between the two countries).
While the Complaynt of Scotland can be viewed as nothing more than
a metrical piece of Anglophobe political propaganda, it does serve the
important purpose of containing the earliest extant list of identifiable
Border Ballads including eight “sueit sangis” (sweet songs—including the
Hunting of Cheviot and the Battle of Otterburn)’ and ‘dancis’ (dances—
including early variants of ‘Tam Lin’, and ‘Johnie [sic] Armstrong’).
Importantly The Complaynt indicates that, in their earliest forms Border
Ballads were performed with dance moves to the accompaniment of
musical instruments for the purpose of entertainment; a testimony
supported by the Bishop of Ross, John Leslie (1568-1570) and translated
into vernacular Scots by Father James Dalrymple in 1596:
Thay delyt mekle in thair awne musick and Harmonie in singing, quhilke
of the actes of thair foirbearis thay haue leired, or quhat thame selfes haue
inuented of ane ingenious policie to dryue a pray and say thair prayeris.
The policie of dryueng a pray thay think be sa leiuesum and lawful to
thame that neuir sa feruentlie thay say thair prayeris, and pray thair Beides,
quhilkes rosarie we cal, nor with sick solicitude and kair, as oft quhen thay
have XL or L myles to dryue a pray (Leslie, 1895: 60).
What emerges is a picture of a God-fearing, ingenious, and fortuitous
people who live by driving (and, plundering) cattle, and who delight in
their own music and singing. Elsewhere the Borderers are described as
gifted in oratory: “sa eloquent, sa mony fair and sueit wordes they can
gyue” (Leslie, 1895: 60). Most interestingly, from the point of view of this
chapter, Leslie indicates that the ballads are communally composed. This
suggestion, that the ballads are improvised expressions of a primarily oral,
recreational, and communal volkgeist (expressions of communitas) is one
that renders notions of origin and source even more complex and volatile
than contemporary arguments would indicate (of which more later).
In Praise of Uncertainty: The Liminal Authenticity of the Border Ballads 101
Borderers and Communitas
Unsurprisingly, due to their lack of national allegiances, borderers were
viewed as a liminal society that was dangerous, anarchic and beyond
proscription or classification. This is endorsed by the historian G.M
Trevelyan who argues the borderers were:
...like the Homeric Greeks, the Borderers were cruel and barbarous men,
slaying each other like beasts of the forest, but high in pride and rough
faithfulness (Trevalyan, 1961: 154).
While this may seem like a generalisation the Borderers, due to their
propensity of reiving, blackmail, kidnap and vicious internecine feuds are
remembered as violent, ungovernable, lawless, primitives; “a people” as
their contemporary Thomas Musgrave stated in 1593 “that will be Scottish
when they will and English at their pleasure”: a people “that keep
gentlemen of the country in fear” (Beckingsale, 1969: 80).
The lawlessness of the Borderers resulted from a number of factors
which are beyond the scope of this chapter to describe in full. In sum these
factors included economics, poverty—an English commentator in the
sixteenth century observed that [the Borderers]:
...lyveth in much povertie and penury, having; no howses but ouch us a
man may buylde within iii or iiii houres: he and his wyfe and his horse
standeth all in one rome (Boorde & Furnivall, 1870: 136).
—absentee landlords, and three hundred years of conflict between England
and Scotland, during which times the borders were used a buffer zone
between the warring countries. Such factors resulted in the Borderers
resorting to crime by necessity. As Edward Miller argues:
...the character of the land made parts of the north economically backward,
but that backwardness was intensified by centuries of war” (Miller, 1960:
9).
This resulted in an independent, self-sufficient, and ruggedly individualistic
people, separated by geography in a largely uncultivated landscape which
was inaccessible to many and almost impossible to police by the few
officials who attempted to do so. Once felonies had been committed the
terrain itself did not lend itself to the easy enforcement of the law. As Sir
Robert Bowes observed in 1542:
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102
there countrey is soe stronge full of woodes, Maresses and streat passages
so that in the end they (the reivers) have after their evil doinge obtained the
King's Maties generall pardon … (Hodgson, 1828: 235).
Elsewhere he argues that:
...in one of these hoopes valeys or graynes can not heare the Fraye outecrye
or exclamacion of sue he as dwell in an other hoope or valley” (Hodgson,
1828: 223).
In short, so sure were they of their native topography that the Reivers were
able to engage in guerrilla raids and disappear into the landscape long
before their pursuers were able to give chase. Here, on what was perceived
as the savage edge of civilisation, distanced from the centre of government
and out of reach of the long arm of the law the inhabitants of the borderers
lived as an isolated frontier people for whom official judicial authority was
largely as meaningless as it was unworkable. As the Scottish philosopher,
Hector Boece observed in his 1527 Historia Gentis Scotorum (History of
the Scottish People):
ln all the dales or vales afore rehearsed (i.e., the Anglo-Scottish borders)
are manie strong theeves, which often spoile the countrie, and exercise
much cruell slaughter upon such as inhabit there, in any troublous time.
These robbers (because the English doo border upon their drie marches,
and are their perpetuall enimies) doo often make forceable rodes into the
English bounds, for their better maintenance and sustentation, or else they
pilfer privilie from them, as men leading in the meane season a poore
beggerlie and verie miserable life. In the time of peace also, they are so
inured to theft and rapine, that they cannot leave off to steale at home' and
notwithstanding that they be often verie sore handled therefore, yet they
thinke it praisewoorthie to molest their adversarie as they call the truer
sort, whereby it commeth to passe, that manie rich and fertile places of
Scotland lie waste and void of culture for fear of their invasion (Holinshed,
1965: 4).
Notably, (and perhaps unsurprisingly) Boece applies the Medieval
Scholastic concept of haecceity to delineate and define the essence—the
‘this-ness’ of the Borderers. Thus, he marks criminality, lawlessness,
rapine and theft as part of their ontological makeup. However, while
internal disorder, petty sieges and vendettas were seemingly endemic to
the Borderers they were not part of the quaint quiddity of the people, but
as Simon Roberts argues, in relation to border disputes: “normal and
inevitable as people struggled to secure their objectives” (Roberts, 1983:
In Praise of Uncertainty: The Liminal Authenticity of the Border Ballads 103
4). Arguably, the accusations of the lawlessness of the borders stemmed in
part from their liminality, that is, as Turner argues:
...they [liminal figures] have physical but not social ‘reality,’ hence they
have to be hidden, since it is a paradox, a scandal, to see what ought not to
be there! (Turner, 1967: 98)
and:
…one would expect to find that transitional beings are particularly
polluting, since they are neither one thing nor another; or may be both; or
neither here nor there; or may even be nowhere (in terms of any recognized
cultural topography) and are at the very least ‘betwixt and between’ all the
recognized fixed points in space-time of structural classifications. In
fact…liminal personae nearly always and everywhere are regarded as
polluting to those who have never been, so to speak, ‘inoculated’ against
them, through having been themselves initiated into the same state (Turner,
1967: 97).
In short, liminal personae are outside of the law, and therefore they are
considered pollutants because they are the embodiment of anti-structure;
traditional classificatory boundaries cannot contain or control them, and
thus they represent anarchy and danger to those who attempt to maintain
the customary norms, and entrenched binaries of given societies. This fear
of the liminal would explain the systematic government offensives that
were the pacification of the borders and the Jacobean witchcraft craze.
These scapegoating exercises show how these people were classified as
sentimental, superstitious, slavish and barbaric, and how they were
punished for this in order to rid them of their distinctiveness and make
them part of a greater nation united under the monarch. Thus, the
hyperbolic descriptions of Borders poverty and barbarism and the
imputations of primitivism levelled at them in contemporary documents
can be seen as a response to their liminal status, and as attempts, under the
crown’s centralising imperative to neutralise their adversarial, seditious
and transgressive force as liminal entities in a disunited United Kingdom.
The Ballads: A Liminal Genre
To this point I have discussed the Borders and the Borderers as threshold
terrains and peoples who exist betwixt and between the fixed, the finished
and the predictable. Paradoxically, in this penultimate section, I return to
the source to discuss the usefulness (or not) of applying notions of
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Chapter Five
authenticity to a genre that is arguably the earliest literary form, and one
which is based on communal, primitive folk-dancing and song. Much
scholarly ink has been spilled on the folk performance thesis of the ballad
form, and a tacit acknowledgement, if not agreement has been reached that
the ballad, as an ancient literary form had a communal provenance, based
in probability on the festivals and festivities of a tribe, clan, or for the
purpose of this argument, grayne. As Lachlan Maclean Watt, following
scholars such as Jakob Grimm and George Lyman Kittredge colourfully
argues:
Probably it [ballad composition] first of all began in the tra la la, hey down
derry down,or ho ie ro, which,together with the clapping of hands, found
origin in the measured tread of time with the moment's ecstasy, later on
turning the tables on that fact and becoming the rhythm to which the rude
steps were danced (Watt, 1923: ix).
Or, as Kittredge himself suggests:
More formally, it may be defined as a short narrative poem, adapted for
singing, simple in plot and metrical structure, divided into stanzas, and
characterized by complete impersonality so far as the author or singer is
aware (Kittredge et al, 1904: 11).
In each instance, ballad composition can be seen as part of a communal
web of connectedness and an expression of what Turner described as
communitas; a moment in and out of time and structure which stresses
communal bonds and ties. In concrete terms, then the ballads can be seen
as ritual enunciations of common living, generated spontaneously as a
result of communal events such as a successful raid; the repulsion of an
enemy greyne; success in battle and so forth. As Kittredge suggests: “the
mystery lies in the phrase das Volk dichtet”. Put simply the ballad emerges
from the desires of the people. There is no single author. There is therefore
no authentic source, and arguments over authenticity are therefore
fruitless. In sum, that which is liminal cannot be confined to an either/or
position due precisely to its position betwixt and between those categories
which would attempt to define it.
Conclusion
Given the arguments made regarding the communal and liminal basis of
the ballads it would seem that any further discussion of their originality or
authenticity is a pointless coda to an argument which argues for their lack
In Praise of Uncertainty: The Liminal Authenticity of the Border Ballads 105
of validity. However, I conclude by suggesting that there is a value in
studying these issues, not because they illuminate us about the original
composition of the works, nor indeed that they edify us particularly about
the people about whom they were composed. Indeed, the idea of the
original and adaptation thereof were meaningless concepts prior to the late
eighteenth-century when, according to George Buelow: “both the concept
of originality and its moral antonym plagiarism appeared as crucial topics
in aesthetic criticism and debate” (Buelow, 1990: 117). Prior to this
imitation and adaptation were the most highly prized measures of literary
composition. Therefore poetic composition was seen as part of a liminal
and transitional continuum as opposed to a creative and inventive venture
wherein poetic inspiration sprang from the unique, solitary creative genius
of the individual poet. As William Wordsworth famously asserted of the
poet:
To whom does he address himself? And what language is to be expected
from him? He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endued with
more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater
knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are
supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own
passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit
of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and
passions as manifested in the goings-on of the Universe (Wordsworth,
1987: 6).
At the core of Wordsworth’s words are a reification of the Imagination and
Romantic self-expression; issues which were anathema to the periods
which preceded the Romantic zeitgeist. Indeed, as Albert Geppi observes:
This radical ideological shift [from the Enlightenment to Romanticism]
elevated to primacy the individual’s intrinsic capacity to perceive and
participate in the organic interrelatedness of all forms of natural life and
the individuals consequent capacity to intuit the metaphysical reality from
which that natural harmony proceeds, which it manifests, and on which it
depends. Assimilating Gnostic Neo-Platonism, German Idealism, and
Oriental mysticism, the Romantic supplanted the right reason of the
Renaissance and the logical reason of the Enlightenment with
transcendental Reason, appropriately capitalized. Its flashes of intuitive
perception superseded mere lowercase reason (Gelpi, 1990: 3).
What is important here is the notion of the individual as the originator and
source of poetic output. As we have seen, such an argument bears little
relation to the communal composition of the Border Ballad corpus, thus
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Chapter Five
the argument over authenticity threatens to be easily dismissed as a
dogmatic attempt at codification based on the prevailing literary taste of
the times. Based on this it is possible to suggest that there is a value in
studying the authenticity debate surrounding the Border Ballads, not
because they tell us about the originary genius of a given author, or indeed
about his or her fidelity to a source, but about the zeitgeist in which they
were collected, translated, embellished, augmented or adapted. Literary
history is a liminal state based not on authentic precedents but part of a
continuum wherein the focus shifts cyclically and authenticity has more or
less importance in any given period; it traverses the borders of literary
periodicity with relative ease. In this sense all adaptations of the ballads
can be seen as inventive reinterpretations of a tradition which is
unfinished, unfixed and resident in the liminal spaces of literary tradition.
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Gelpi, Albert. (1990), A Coherent Splendor: The American Poetic
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3.
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Godwin, William. (2005), ‘Of History and Romance’, in Caleb Williams,
Maurice Hindle (ed.). Penguin, London, pp. 359–74 (367).
Grierson, Herbert John Clifford. (ed.). (1932), The Letters of Sir Walter
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Irene Gilsenan Nordin and Elin Holmsten, (eds.). (2009), Peter Lang,
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Holinshed, (1965), Chronicles of Scotland and Ireland, vol. v. London,
New York, p. 4.
Kittredge, George Lyman and Helen Child Sargent (eds.). (1904),
Introduction, English and Scottish Popular Ballads. London, p.11.
Leslie, John. The Historie of Scotland trans. EG Cody and William
Murison Scottish Text Society, Edinburgh 1895, I, p. 60.
Lockhart, John Gibson. (1853), Life of Sir Walter Scott, Everyman edn.,
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MacDonald Fraser, George. (1995), The Steel Bonnets. Harper Collins,
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Mack, Ruth. (2009), Literary Historicity: Literature and Historical
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Miller, Edward. (1960), War in the North: the Anglo-Scottish wars of the
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Percy, Thomas. (1765), Reliques of Ancient English Poetry 3 vols.
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Notes
1
For a further discussion of this see Edward Bruner.
In his lengthy introduction Motherwell asserts the importance of orature in the
ballad tradition: “they have throughout the marks of a composition not meant for
being committed to writing, but whose musick formed an essential part.”
(Motherwell, “Introduction,” Minstrelsy, 1.23–4.). This is a point to which we will
return.
2
In Praise of Uncertainty: The Liminal Authenticity of the Border Ballads 109
3
To delight and teach.
See also (2005), Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine: Biography,
Celebrity, Politics (London: Routledge,
5
The term ‘surname’ was first introduced in 1498 to define a group of bandits or
criminals who banded together.
6
Born in England but adopted by the Armstrongs of Mangerton
7
Though generally attributed to Robert Wedderburn (c. 1510–c.1553),
8
Written immediately after the battle of Pinkie.
4
CHAPTER SIX
BORDERS:
LORD ERNEST HAMILTON (1858-1939),
RACE, RELIGION AND ULSTER-SCOTS
IDENTITY IN THE LAST DECADES
OF THE ANGLO-IRISH UNION*
PATRICK MAUME
Lord Ernest Hamilton (1858-1939) seventh son of the first Duke of
Abercorn, was Unionist MP for North Tyrone 1885-92; he is best
remembered for his books on the Ulster Plantation and the 1641 massacres
and for The Soul of Ulster (1917) which argues that Ulster Protestants
were essentially Scottish Borderers who preserved their ancestral qualities
by refusing to intermarry with the natives. Hamilton’s career as literary,
political and theological agent provocateur was more extensive than
commonly realised; this paper offers the first overview of his writings, and
discusses how Scottish and Irish aspects of his identity relate to his
membership of the United Kingdom aristocracy and his reaction against
his Victorian upbringing.
Family background
The Hamiltons descend from the eldest sister of King James II of
Scotland, and at times in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were
considered possible heirs to the kingdom. (Hamilton’s 1902 historical
romance Mary Hamilton, discussed later, incorporates a fantasy that the
Stewart descendants of Mary Queen of Scots were illegitimate, making the
Hamiltons rightful monarchs of Scotland.) The Abercorns are the senior
line in direct male descent, as the Scottish Dukes of Hamilton descend
from a seventeenth-century heiress hence their family name, DouglasHamilton. The Abercorns participated in the Plantation of Ulster under
Borders: Lord Ernest Hamilton, Race Religion and Identity
111
James VI and I, and since then are associated with western Tyrone and
neighbouring counties. Their seat is at Baronscourt near Newtownstewart
on the western edge of Tyrone; they are one of the few houses who hold
Irish, Scottish and UK peerages.1
Hamilton’s great-grandfather, John James Hamilton, first Marquess of
Abercorn, a political ally of Pitt the Younger, maintained the pride,
ostentation and sexual dissipation of an eighteenth-century grandee into
the nineteenth century. Hamilton’s memoirs betray a certain fascination
with this unregenerate ancestor and recall some of the less outrageous
scandals associated with him.2 He is the model for one of the villains of
The Perils of Josephine, Hamilton’s uninspired 1899 reworking of
Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas, in which a debauched aristocrat with a
fascination for physical beauty switches elder and younger sons in infancy
because the former is puny and lame. The novel is less successful than its
model, because the role of Uncle Silas is divided between the long-dead
aesthete, his guilt-stricken son, and the son’s malevolent Irish Catholic
chaplain who wants to exclude the rightful heiress because she is
Protestant; the interaction of the latter two being only occasionally
glimpsed by the first-person narrator. This division is partly dictated by the
plot, since its resolution depends on the survival to old age of a
blackmailing nursemaid-cum-mistress whom Le Fanu’s Silas would have
killed without hesitation. The novel also discards Le Fanu’s insistence that
sin never goes unpunished; the guilty escape to New York with all they
can steal, and are received ecstatically into American high society while
the priest enters Irish-American politics.
Upbringing
Hamilton’s father James, second Marquess and first Duke of Abercorn
(1811-85), (his father died in 1814, so James succeeded as second
marquess in 1818) reacted against his grandfather, and brought up his
children in the strictest mid-Victorian Evangelicalism; Lord Ernest’s
writings recall childhood exhortations on the evils of the Society for the
Propagation of the Gospel (the main High Church or Anglo-Catholic
Anglican missionary society) and the corresponding virtues of the
Evangelical Church Mission Society (Hamilton, 1904: 217). By his
marriage to Jane Russell, daughter of the duke of Bedford and niece of
Lord John Russell, the first duke had seven sons (one died at birth and one
in his late teens) and seven daughters. Lord Ernest, born 1858, was the
youngest of this enormous brood; as his four eldest sisters were born in the
1830s and married in the 1850s, several nieces and nephews were older
112
Chapter Six
than him. Lord Ernest’s reaction against his upbringing included revulsion
against Evangelical exaltation of fecundity; he recounted dark memories
of a farewell from his second sister Beatrix, Countess of Durham before
her death in 1871 at the birth of her thirteenth child in seventeen years of
marriage:
In those days of Mosaical belief, stupendous families were thought to be
pleasing to the Almighty, and, if human sacrifices are pleasing, it is not to
be doubted that they were. My three eldest sisters had thirty-four children
between them (Hamilton, 1922: 72).
According to his memoirs, from early childhood Ernest made himself
distinctive among this horde by becoming an attention-seeking enfant
terrible.
This enormous family spread its connections by marriage through the
British aristocracy—Hamilton’s links to the Scottish Borders were mainly
due to the marriage of his third sister, Louisa, to the sixth Duke of
Buccleuch (the Conservative candidate defeated by Gladstone at
Midlothian in 1880). From adolescence he was a regular house guest at the
Buccleuchs’ principal residence, Drumlanrig, and for thirty-five years
(from 1881 to 1916) participated in the Buccleuchs’ industrial-scale
grouse-shooting parties at Langholm in the Western Borders (where his
1898 historical romance The Mawkin of the Flow—featuring members of
the Buccleuch family—is set). 3 The Abercorns’ regular movement
between town houses in London, their own country seats, and those of
friends and relations is recaptured for a less aristocratic age in Ernest’s two
volumes of reminiscences, Forty Years On and Old Days and New, and is
reflected in Ernest’s birth at Brocket Hall in Hertfordshire rather than any
of his family’s own residences.
The Abercorns lived in Ireland during the Duke’s two terms as
Conservative Lord Lieutenant of Ireland (1866-68, 1874-76), and from
1878 they made Baronscourt their principal residence. Ernest had already
developed an attachment to it through holidays, and retained lifelong
acquaintance with many estate staff, Catholic and Protestant. He was
struck by the clear-cut division between Catholics and Protestants in the
area, and how the Catholic staff combined genuine friendliness and
attachment towards him and the family with Catholic and nationalist
loyalties - never discussed though both sides knew they existed (Hamilton,
1922: 45-70). These discrepancies became more salient with the extension
of political competition in rural Ulster after the extension of the electorate
in 1868.
Borders: Lord Ernest Hamilton, Race Religion and Identity
113
At first the dominance of the great county interests was challenged by
tenant-right candidates, some Liberals (usually Presbyterian but with
significant Catholic support) others Orange populists from the smaller
gentry. After the outbreak of the Land War in the late 1870s, the
subsequent extension of the Parnellite electoral challenge into Ulster, the
further extension of the franchise in 1885, and finally the realignment
precipitated by Gladstone’s embrace of Home Rule, the division became
much clearer and more starkly sectarian.4 From 1885 Baronscourt stood on
an electoral frontier, in the ultra-marginal North Tyrone constituency
where majorities of less than a hundred were the rule; for the Abercorns,
as for many other Irish aristocrats and Unionists) the land war and the
subsequent Unionist-nationalist contests went beyond the bounds of
normal electoral politics and represented a struggle for civilisation,
property and loyalty against barbarians practising midnight assassination
and cattle mutilation, whose victory would lead straight to ruin and
anarchy (Maume, 2011: 550-566). Hamilton would be drawn into this
struggle, and the landlord-conservative view of the Land War coloured his
political attitudes for the rest of his life.
Political career
After education at Harrow (where he and several friends were soundly
flogged when discovered to be facetiously worshipping Baal), (Hamilton,
1922: 95-98) and at Sandhurst, Hamilton served as a junior officer in the
11th Hussars 1878-85. In 1883 he attracted public notice when he
participated in a violent and successful occupation of the Derry Guildhall
by Apprentice Boys in order to prevent a meeting from being addressed
there by the Nationalist Lord Mayor of Dublin. The riots and exchanges of
revolver fire which accompanied these proceedings caused one death;
Hamilton had to give evidence at the inquest and narrowly escaped
dismissal from the army (Hamilton, 1922: 182-185). He subsequently
began a political career, contesting a by-election in Paisley as a
Conservative in February 1884. He finally resigned his commission in
1885 with the intention of contesting a British seat at the forthcoming
general election; instead, he was drafted as Conservative and Unionist
candidate for North Tyrone when his father’s sudden death removed his
eldest brother (the previous candidate) to the House of Lords, while his
other brothers were committed to seats elsewhere.
Although Hamilton won two hard-fought elections in 1885 and 1886
(in which he was impressed by the willingness of otherwise honest and
honourable men on both sides to commit fraud and falsehood in the belief
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114
that they were serving God’s cause), he quickly wearied of the Commons,
discovering that individual backbench members were expected to keep
their mouths shut and vote as the whips dictated. He also found his party
colleagues displayed little consideration for novice speakers, and
developed personal respect for Gladstone who encouraged junior members
of the parliamentary club—though this did not make Hamilton any more
sympathetic towards Home Rule, (Hamilton, 1922: 204-224). At one point
he and the member for another marginal constituency expressed their
discontent by going salmon-fishing in Norway during a Parliamentary
session, replying to the Chief Whip’s angry messages with a verse epistle
threatening to resign their seats (Hamilton, 1923: 148-151). This distaste
for Parliament as a talking-shop of play-actors remained with Hamilton for
the rest of his life; in one of his satirical Society novels the love interest is
a philanthropic peer who:
if he had only not wasted his time in advocating measures that would
merely have benefited his country, and not his party… would undoubtedly
have been offered a place in the Government… he was looked at by the
Whips with the sick eye of doubt and distrust
and...
the Under Secretaryship was given to Lord Bleat… who was perfectly
“sound”… could be trusted always to go into the right lobby, and never to
incubate an original idea, or deliver himself of an original remark
(Hamilton, 1905: 97-98).
This contempt for parliament had sinister developments in the political
views of his old age.
Hamilton left parliament at the 1892 general election and was
succeeded until 1895 by his brother, Lord Frederick. Thereafter, the North
Tyrone seat was held by Liberal MPs (usually Protestant) under an
informal pact whereby nationalists allowed the official Liberal Party to
contest the seat in the hope that a few Protestants unwilling to support a
nationalist might vote Liberal. Though the Liberal majorities were
extremely slender (sometimes single figures) the seat was never regained
by an Unionist before its abolition in 1918. Ernest Hamilton continued to
travel to North Tyrone to vote for the Unionist candidate (presumably he
was nominally assigned property in the area, or registered as a “lodger
vote” at Baronscourt), exchanging pleasantries with old acquaintances,
nationalist and unionist. He recalls that one old Catholic employee was
profoundly upset when he humorously reproached him for having voted
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115
nationalist in the 1911 by-election—as they both knew; Hamilton expresses
remorse at having discomforted an old friend (Hamilton, 1922: 66-68).
Literary and other experiments
After leaving Parliament Hamilton (who married Pamela Campbell in
1891; they had two sons and two daughters) worked for city mining
syndicates (this involved extensive travel) and became a man of letters.
In 1904 he published under the nom-de-plume “A Leaf”, Strawberry
Leaves, a series of interconnected sketches describing scandalous goingson in Edwardian high society. (Strawberry leaves feature in a duke’s
coronet, so Hamilton’s nom-de-plume refers to his being a duke’s son.)
The characters include Lady St Ayr, who having ensnared a duke by a
parade of girlish innocence and given him two children devotes her life to
captivating rich men who can keep her in the style she prefers (while
occasionally seducing the fiancés of respectable girls who disapprove of
her) and Maurice Krausse, a repulsive Jewish stock market speculator of
great wealth, who recruits Lord St Ormans as chairman of the
Cosmopolitan Finance Company—one of Krausse’s many interests—but
responds to St Ormans’ temporary success in their rivalry for the
Duchess’s favours by forcing down the Cosmopolitan stock through share
manipulation (with the assistance of a Jewish journalist) until St Ormans is
forced to resign and sell at a ruinous loss (for Krausse’s profit as well as
pleasure). The novel features a certain number of upright, old-fashioned
aristocrats who naively:
believed… that the Kingdom of Heaven was settled in direct entail on the
members of the British aristocracy… This was an absolutely genuine
belief, the idea underlying it being that the rabble, being necessarily a little
smelly and unwashed, and dropping their h’s… would naturally have some
difficulty in establishing their claim to be let into a place like heaven,
which is presumably a clean place; but that when a peeress swept up in her
robes, St Peter would, of course, stand aside, and bow urbanely, proud of
the acquisition. It was a nice, easy, refined kind of creed, particularly
comforting to people with clean socks and plenty to eat, though otherwise,
perhaps, a little shortsighted (Hamilton, 1904: 216-217).
There are also some honest wives (Krausse’s revenge on St Ormans is
precipitated when Lady St Ormans, an American acquired on her
husband’s travels, turns down his proposition that as her husband buys
dresses for the Duchess she should allow Krausse to buy some for her),
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high society is presented as full of snobbery and pretence and its morals
are typified by one minor character who made it a point:
...never to deceive any man except her husband, and him she had deceived
without intermission except during two months, when she had the measles
and couldn’t (Hamilton, 1904: 176).
Edward VII is commended because as king he can sleep through a Wagner
opera— “the honest amongst us do the same, or would if they had a chair
to put their feet on”. Honesty and wholesomeness are only found on the
golf-course and the Scottish hunting-moors. In 1905 Hamilton published
another novel as “A Leaf”. A Maid at Large describes husband-hunting by
an impoverished young aristocrat at country-house parties. Through a
mixture of innocence and calculation (the exact proportions are never
made clear though she certainly possesses both) she secures a rich and
benevolent aristocrat ineffectually pursued by her hostess’s daughter.
There is a good deal of incidental comment on room-swapping by countryhouse guests (the heroine’s greatest peril comes when she naively goes to
the bedroom of a notorious womaniser late at night to apologise for a faux
pas, but he pities her and nobody sees her), on “decadent” litterateurs, on
new styles of society portraiture which Hamilton ridicules as based on the
principle that by leaving a picture half-painted the artist can paint twice as
many, and on complacent evangelical aristocrats blissfully oblivious to the
ungodly conduct of their offspring (Hamilton, 1905: 142, 215-216) .5
Religious beliefs
In 1912 Hamilton published Involution, expressing highly heterodox
theological views suggesting the depth of his reaction against the
Evangelicalism of his upbringing, with its idealisation of the Old
Testament Jews and its emphasis on the death of Jesus as sacrificial
atonement. Involution denounces the God of the Old Testament as a
projection of the national characteristics of the Jews of that era, whose
sacrificial priestly religion he regards as particularly cruel and
bloodthirsty. (He emphasises the Old Testament passages in which God
positively commands genocide and punishes those who refuse to practice
it; he also suggests that the Jews practiced human sacrifice to a much
greater extent than commonly believed, and that the Old Testament has
been unskilfully rewritten to conceal this).
Jesus, Hamilton maintains, was not a Jew and did not regard the Old
Testament God as his father but actively rebelled against this sacrificial
system of worship, as a prophet rather than a priest, and was killed for
Borders: Lord Ernest Hamilton, Race Religion and Identity
117
doing so. The Acts of the Apostles and the canonical Gospels, Hamilton
argues, are later distortions of Jesus’ message or outright fabrications by
the Church Fathers, whom he claims were mostly converted Jews and
presented Jesus in terms of their inherited beliefs. Like all ecclesiastical
historians they were blatant liars, suppressing the authentic gospels
propagated by the Gnostics and developing a new form of sacrificial cult –
the inevitable result of accepting the alien and malign Old Testament as
divinely inspired, leading first to Roman Catholic priestcraft, then
Protestant biblical literalism. The true message of Jesus was preached by
St Paul (whom Hamilton called a gentile convert rather than a born Jew)
and inherited by Marcion of Pontus, a second-century heretic who argued
that the Creator-God of the Jews was not the Father of Jesus but the Devil
from whom Jesus came to deliver mankind. Hamilton proclaims himself a
neo-Marcionite (except that he did not believe in the divinity of Jesus or
the existence of the God of the Jews apart from his worshippers).
Hamilton postulates a non-personal divinity perfected over time through a
struggle between the centrifugal forces of chaos, which may be identified
with the Devil - based in nature which is essentially evil - and the
centripetal forces of order, making for transcendence and the perfection of
the godhead. (Hamilton’s emphasis on an underlying spiral or nebular
pattern may derive from the famous proto-evolutionary tract, Vestiges of
the Natural History of Creation). 6 He denies personal immortality,
maintaining that we find fulfilment in assisting the growth of the One and
being reabsorbed into it; he argues that all the major world religions have
an esoteric core which teaches this message of progressive divinisation
through the Golden Rule.
Hamilton maintained this view for the remainder of his life; it is further
developed in an unpublished treatise (now in the Public Record Office of
Northern Ireland) called The Identity of God.7 This modifies Hamilton’s
views on some points (he accepts that St Paul was at least partly Jewish by
descent and that Justin Martyr and other Church Fathers described as Jews
in Involution were gentiles; he speculates that John the Evangelist was not
the son of Zebedee—dismissed as a narrow Jewish bigot— but a Greek
convert, that the “beloved disciple” was another Greek called Aristion, and
that John’s Gospel, though mutilated, is the nearest approximation to the
true Gnostic message of Jesus) but he continues to insist that the Bible’s
central revelation, obscured by suppressions and falsifications, is the
struggle of prophets of whom Jesus was the last and greatest, against the
sacrificial priesthood of the malevolent Jews, and that it is absurd and
harmful that:
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...in defiance of the fact that we are Anglo-Saxons of Nordic origin, we
still raise ecstatic voices at the prospect of one of David’s descendants
delivering the Jews from foreign thraldom (Hamilton). 8
This view of a spiritualised and anti-priestly Hellenistic Jesus reflects
contemporary nationalist types of liberal Protestantism, most developed in
Germany. Two political implications are worth bearing in mind in relation
to Hamilton’s historical works; the first is that such views can be used to
justify colonisation and imperialism as furthering the triumph of order
over chaos, the second is that its view of nature as malign allows a certain
amount of pity for victims of this process as succumbing to a cruel
necessity which disturbs their contented savagery. In this he works out
certain sinister potentials within the Scots Enlightenment’s view of the
stadial process of civilisation and Sir Walter Scott’s view of Highlanders
and Borderers as tragically upholding an ethos which possesses certain
virtues but must nonetheless succumb to the superior power of law, order
and reasoned civilisation.
Border novels
In the late 1890s Hamilton published two historical novels set in the Scots
Borders around the period of the Union of the Crowns. Both are precisely
located; The Outlaws of the Marsh (1897), set in the Liddesdale area,
actually includes photographs of some of the sites mentioned. The narrator
is an Elliott of the Redheugh who, looking back in old age to his youth in
1587, describes how he made the acquaintance of his English future wife
when he took part in a border raid on her homeland, and struggled to
secure her against the malign Armstrongs of Whithaugh (a family of
lawless raiders owing something to RD Blackmore’s Doornes) and to
evade a law forbidding marriages across the Border. Writing in the 1620s,
the narrator makes it clear that he inhabits a more peaceful society—with
the Union of the Crowns the reivers have been put down by newly
effective law enforcement, sent off to die in foreign wars, or transplanted
to Ulster—but although the reivers are violent and lawless, and practise
rape as well as murder, their displacement is treated with a certain
ambivalence. The classical historical novel often draws the protagonist
into contact with a recognised historical figure who acts as patron and
facilitator and through whom the historical process is observed; in The
Outlaws of the Marsh this role is taken by Francis, earl of Bothwell
(nephew of Mary Queen of Scots’ husband) whose retinue the narrator
joins and whose patronage secures the happy ending. Since Bothwell’s
involvement intrigues against James VI brought about his dispossession
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119
and exile, a standard Whig narrative of Scottish history would see him as
exemplifying lawless aristocratic power rightly displaced by efficient
central administration and law enforcement – but the narrator insists that
he was a just and benevolent lord slandered and destroyed by malign
enemies, and nothing in the novel suggests this view is not correct.
Towards the end of the novel, the royal sheriff responds to the
Armstrongs’ depredations by leading a massive sweep of Liddesdale (most
of the reivers escape); this is presented not as advancing civilisation, but as
harsh and cruel repression of a society completely unacquainted with the
standard by which it is suddenly being judged. One captive naively admits
to cattle-raiding in England; he is totally nonplussed when he is ordered to
be hanged on the spot and the narrator considers his death a senseless act
of cruelty. (Here Hamilton echoes those border ballads which lament the
deaths of reivers at the hands of royal executioners.) The narrator is so
repulsed that he assists Sim’s Jock Armstrong, hitherto his bitterest enemy
and the novel’s principal villain, to escape the cordon.9
The Mawken [i.e. Maiden] of the Flow is a slighter work, set further
west in Langdale. Set in the 1620s, it is the story of a beautiful country girl
and the shrewdness with which, as news of her beauty spreads, she evades
wooers from her own locality and from further afield. The narrator is an
unsuccessful wooers; after the Mawken is impregnated by the mysterious
Wat o’ the Burnfoot, who promptly disappears but whom she regards as
her husband, the narrator with some friends travels eastward along the
river valleys of the border, hoping that if Wat is found and discredited the
Mawken may reconsider his own suit. The searchers become entangled in
a hue-and-cry after a young woman called Jenny-pu’-the-dockens, another
victim of history; her talent for taming animals led to her being accused of
witchcraft and forced into outlawry, becoming the most skilled and
resourceful sheep-stealer on the Border. The narrator does not approve of
her criminal habits or her sexual morals, but the novel delights in her tricks
and eventual escape from justice (endorsed by the narrator, who remarks
that seeing a supposed witch burned alive at Lockerbie gave him an
abiding distaste for such things). The searchers locate Wat, who explains
that he was suddenly called away into foreign lands; he sent money to
assist the Mawken, but his messenger was drowned crossing a river. When
the party reaches the Mawken she is dying, but lives until Wat
acknowledges before witnesses that she is his wife and her son his lawful
heir (in accordance with Scots marriage law). It is implied that Wat is the
Duke of Buccleuch or his heir.
Hamilton published a third Scottish historical romance; Mary Hamilton
(1902) based on the well-known Childe ballad “Mary Hamilton” (also
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known as “The Four Maries”—the best-known recording is by Joan Baez).
The ballad’s central character, one of the “Four Maries” who attended
Mary Queen of Scots, has an illegitimate child by “the highest Stewart of
all” (Mary’s second husband Henry Stewart Lord Darnley) and is hanged
for infanticide. Mary Queen of Scots had no attendant called Hamilton,
and the ballad is generally regarded as fictitious; Hamilton’s novel is best
seen as a historical romance or fantasia, self-consciously escaping from
the historical process where the historical novel proper engages with it, as
Hamilton’s two Border novels do however loosely.
In Lord Ernest’s version, Mary Hamilton is daughter of the Earl of
Arran (heir to the Duke of Hamilton) by a clandestine marriage and
brought up ignorant of her parentage by elderly Hamilton relatives. Her
story is narrated by her attendant Anne Cunninghame, who witnesses her
clandestine marriage to Darnley, preceding Darnley’s marriage to Queen
Mary. Mary’s Hamilton kinsmen acquiesce in Darnley’s marriage to the
Queen on the basis that if the Queen predeceases Darnley, he will
acknowledge Mary; if the Queen outlives Darnley, the Hamiltons will
prove on her death that her children by Darnley are illegitimate and assert
their own claim to the throne. Hamilton incidentally has Anne remark that
the Queen’s biggest mistake was not marrying a Hamilton (Hamilton,
1902: 234).
Mary follows Darnley to court, accompanied by Anne; Darnley makes
her pregnant. Lord Ernest’s treatment of Darnley as an irresponsible
adolescent accords with the original ballad. Where the ballad presents a
jealous and vindictive Mary Queen of Scots, however, Lord Ernest is
favourably disposed to the Catholic monarch—quite remarkably for an
Ulster Unionist MP with an evangelical upbringing. Mary’s Catholic faith
is described with the utmost respect; she is presented as courageous, pious
and morally upright, her chief fault being excessive harshness towards
others’ sexual frailties. (She is infuriated to find that Mary Hamilton is
apparently the King’s mistress and treats her with icy disdain until
discovering, to her dismay, that Mary Hamilton is the wife and her own
expected child is illegitimate). Lord Ernest’s principal villain is James
Stewart, Earl of Moray, Mary’s illegitimate half-brother and leader of the
pro-English Protestant faction at court, who manipulates popular feeling to
serve his own ambitions, alienates Mary from the loyal Hamiltons
(Hamilton, 1902: 75-76), spreads distrust between King and Queen and
makes Darnley complicit in the murder of Mary’s secretary David Rizzio.
The traditional Protestant account of Mary presents her as adulterous lover
of James Hepburn, earl of Bothwell, and plotting Darnley’s murder with
him; although the novel might be read as allowing for the subsequent
Borders: Lord Ernest Hamilton, Race Religion and Identity
121
development of such a relationship, Hamilton portrays Bothwell as a
rough and unsophisticated but loyal supporter of the queen who regains
Darnley for her by the transparent honesty with which he explains that he
knows Mary is not an adulteress because she fiercely rejected his own
attempts at seduction (Hamilton, 1902: 218-220). Moray is fully aware of
Mary Hamilton’s secret marriage to Darnley, though Anne Cunninghame
frustrates his attempt to secure proof of it. Anne and the queen try to
protect Mary Hamilton, but she is driven mad by shame and by Moray’s
surveillance; she kills her child thinking she is protecting it from Moray,
and Moray has her condemned to death (Anne is condemned for
concealing the birth) while making the queen seem responsible for the
sentence. As Mary dies on the gallows Darnley, who had been away from
Edinburgh, makes a futile attempt to save her and Anne escapes in the
confusion. The novel ends with Anne Cunningham, now in exile,
lamenting that Moray’s machinations have brought about the death of the
King and the deposition and captivity of the Queen. (Hamilton seems to
imply that Moray directly or indirectly caused Darnley’s assassination.)
Anne predicts that Moray, now Regent, will eventually kill the infant
James VI and seize the throne unless divine justice intervenes. Readers
familiar with Scottish history are meant to infer that her prayer was
granted; James Hamilton of Bothwellhaugh, Moray’s real-life assassin,
appears early in the novel as a childhood friend and unsuccessful suitor of
Mary Hamilton, with the implication that he avenged her fate.
Lord Ernest’s reaction against his Evangelical upbringing is also
noticeable in his presenting John Knox as comic relief. At one point, Knox
is persuaded by Mary Queen of Scots to attend one of her masked balls
with the plea that before condemning them he should see them for himself;
Knox, disguised as a hooded friar, is put to undignified flight by a court
fool who besieges him with requests for holy water, confession, etc. The
narrator describes Knox as a “madman” who thought “laughter was
lewdness, dancing was lechery, and merriment was sin”, claims that his
accounts (in his History of the Reformation in Scotland) of sternly
reprimanding Queen Mary at their private meetings were retrospective
fabrications, and remarks that any other sovereign would have had him
summarily executed for his scurrilous public attacks upon her (Hamilton,
1902: 135, 146).
Unionist polemicist and historian
Lord Ernest Hamilton is best remembered as a polemicist in favour of
Ulster Unionism, in a series of works still sometimes quoted by Unionist
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publicists: The Soul of Ulster (1917), Elizabethan Ulster (1919), The Irish
Rebellion of 1641 (1920), and Tales of the Troubles (1925). The Soul of
Ulster is a series of essays, probably originally articles in some journal;
although it capitalises on public interest in Ulster resistance to Home Rule,
it is deeply influenced by the 1880s Unionist view of nationalism as a thin
veneer of middle-class and clerical respectability concealing, with varying
degrees of delusion and cynicism, a pre-political savagery hostile to law
and government as such and sustaining its resistance with completely
amoral violence, savagery and treachery. Hamilton agrees that the
colonisation process involved a good deal of cruelty but argues that this
was necessary if civilisation was to be brought in from outside, since
Ireland’s insular position removed her from the mainstream of European
civilisation (he acknowledges that this has been true to some extent of
Britain as well). The Irish were not only barbarians (much is made of
Shane O’Neill’s anti-social habits) they were contented barbarians who
actively resisted any attempt to raise them from barbarism. The success of
the Ulster Plantation as compared to earlier settlements is attributed to the
settlers’ having brought their wives with them. Generalising from one
aspect of the Plantation (particularly significant in western Ulster) 10 he
argues that the Planters were all transplanted Scots Borderers whose
descendants preserved the rougher habits of their ancestors (with which
readers of Scott and other Border authors would be familiar) and thereby
made themselves a bulwark of civilisation though lacking some of its
graces and not completely acquiescent to its laws. Reading back the
clearcut sectarian divide he encountered in North Tyrone (with virtually
every vote being clearly assignable on religious lines) Hamilton suggested
that an absence of intermarriage preserved the characteristics of the
Planters. He ended with the melancholy and rather fanciful prediction that
the Sinn Fein movement, by breaking clerical authority, would secure the
Union by undermining collective Catholic solidarity, but that consequent
intermarriage would dissipate the Planters’ distinctive identity.11
Hamilton’s histories of the Elizabethan conquest and of the 1641
rebellion certainly display pro-colonial bias, but they draw on research in
the Calendar of State Papers, the Camden MSS and other printed
secondary sources, and are consequently less inclined to minimise Planter
atrocities and accept Dublin Castle administrators’ self-portrayal as
disinterested statesmen than is The Soul of Ulster.12 The portrayal of the
1641 uprising as the work of reckless aristocrats and reluctant Catholic
clerics resenting the encroachments of modern civilisation and stirring up
a jacquerie which they find impossible to control (Hamilton accepts that
sections of the Catholic priesthood did endeavour to restrain the massacres
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123
and save some of the Planters)13 once again reflects the 1880s Unionist
analysis of Irish nationalism, but Hamilton’s overall Gnostic view of
history as a struggle towards transcendence in opposition to a malign
Nature pulling back towards chaos and atrocity is also discernable.
Tales of the Troubles is an exercise in docudrama, drawing on the
depositions of 1641 victims to recreate incidents in the conflict (sometimes
presented as third-person narrative, sometimes as imagined depositions by
people mentioned in existing depositions). Even allowing for sentimental
love scenes, heroic Planter deaths, and emphasis on the cowardice and
confusion of the rebels when facing organised military resistance, it
authentically evokes the unpredictable and erratic development of
atrocities and the willingness of perpetrators to save victims known to
them while slaughtering others, sometimes turning from saviours to killers
in abrupt changes of mood.
Last years and death
Hamilton’s writings on seventeenth-century Ulster are implicitly (sometimes
explicitly) linked to fears of Bolshevik revolution after the upheavals of
the First World War. (Hamilton’s contribution to the war effort had been
The First Seven Divisions, an instant history of the British Expeditionary
Force’s role in the campaigns of 1914; his elder son died on active
service.) In the 1920s he was a founding member of the British Fascists
(not to be confused with the 1930s British Union of Fascists), which
attracted the support of numerous aristocratic right-wingers; he thundered
against “alien” (i.e. Jewish) immigration in their Fascist Bulletin, and it
probably influenced the contemptuous views on parliamentary government
expressed in his memoirs. These repulsive attitudes, however, had been
fairly frequent among pre-war aristocratic Tories and Hamilton remained a
diehard Tory rather than a full-blown fascist; like most of the groups’
aristocratic backers, he resigned when the BFs refused to offer active
support to the Conservative government during the 1926 General Strike.14
His two volumes of memoirs, Forty Years On (1922) and the more
anecdotal Old Days and New, tap a Lytton Stracheyesque postwar mood of
mingled derision and nostalgia for the now definitively-vanished Victorian
era, as does Halcyon Days (1922), an elegantly-illustrated account of
aristocratic mores which elegantly deprecates Victorian art, hairstyles, and
female dress as the ugliest of their kind in recorded history, and declares
the simpler and freer dress and recreations of his children’s generation
infinitely superior to those of his youth.
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His last published works were The Four Tragedies of Memworth, a
clumsy though sometimes interesting combination of old-style sensation
novel with new-style country house detective story, and Lancelot (1929), a
wearisome pastiche of Malory’s Arthurian stories chiefly notable for
minimising the Lancelot-Guinevere relationship; here Lancelot is happily
and respectably married to Elaine (mother of his son Galahad) and
commits adultery with the Queen only twice – when taken unawares after
Guinevere lures him to a remote castle by pretending she has been
kidnapped, and when he is deceived by magic. (In another, unpublished
version of the book, now in PRONI, Lancelot is never Guinevere’s lover at
all. This contains a historical preface suggesting –probably tongue in
cheek - that Malory’s account is based on genuine lost documents and
more or less historically accurate.) 15 It seems that Hamilton remained
somewhat more Victorian than he was prepared to admit. He spent his last
years in England and died at his London home on 14 December 1939.
Conclusion
In conclusion, what is the historic significance of Lord Ernest Hamilton?
He stands at the transition between the Victorian view of history drawing
on Sir Walter Scott’s depiction of the history of the Scots Borders to
present the development of civilisation as an inevitably progressive and on
the whole benevolent process underpinned by a British Protestant
Providence, and a fin de siècle questioning of whether history was not
more chaotic, less progressive, and certainly less Christian than had been
assumed. Insofar as Hamilton is remembered at all, it is by provincial
defenders of the Northern Ireland border and students of Ulster Unionist
political thought, but he had little in common with the provincial (and
often Evangelical Protestant) twentieth-century Ulstermen who cited him.
His defence of the Ulster Plantation, like his brief parliamentary career in
North Tyrone, is part of a wider story of the decline of the Victorian style
of aristocratic government by a pan-British elite and the responses –
sometimes clever, sometimes malign—to that decline by marginal
members of that elite. His career and writings demonstrate as he sensed—
though not always in the way that he intended—that the self-proclaimed
defence of civilisation from barbarism could itself be a great deal more
barbaric than his parents’ High Victorian generation were prepared to
admit.
Borders: Lord Ernest Hamilton, Race Religion and Identity
125
Works Cited
Hamilton, Lord Ernest. (1902), Mary Hamilton. Methuen & Co, pp. 75-76,
135, 146, 218-220, 234.
—. (1904), Strawberry Leaves. TF Unwin.
—. (1905), A Maid at Large. Aeveleigh Nash, London. pp97-98
—. (1922), Forty years on. Hodder and Stoughton Ltd., pp. 30-33, 66-68 ,
72-74, 95-98, 130-158, 182-185, 204-224,
—. (1923), Old Days and New. George H. Doran Company, pp.148-151,
Maume, Patrick (2011), ‘The Dublin Evening Mail and pro-landlord
conservatism in the age of Gladstone and Parnell’ in Irish Historical
Studies vol. XXXVII no. 148 (November 2011), pp550-566.
Notes
*
Thanks to Paul Bew, Derval Fitzgerald, and James McGuire. This paper draws on
research for my entry on Lord Ernest Hamilton in the Royal Irish Academy’s
Dictionary of Ulster Biography, James McGuire & James Quinn eds. (Cambridge
U.P., 2009). All works cited by Lord Ernest Hamilton unless otherwise stated.
Researchers are warned that the list of Hamilton’s works in Public Record Office
of Northern Ireland (PRONI) D623/A/345/1 misattributes to him three books by
the Scottish novelist Cosmo Hamilton (1870-1942) – A Rustle of Silk (1922),
Unwritten History (1924) and His Majesty the King (1926) while omitting some
genuine publications and garbling the titles of others.
1
For the Abercorns’ role in the Plantation see M. Perceval-Maxwell The Scottish
Migration to Ulster in the Reign of James I (Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation,
1990 – first pub. London & New York 1973).
2
Forty Years On (1922) pp30-33, Old Days and New (1923) pp23-42. For some of
the more outrageous scandals see APW Malcolmson The Pursuit of the Heiress
(rev. ed. Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation, 2006) pp150-151, 169, 172.
3
Forty Years On pp130-158; Old Days and New pp286-317.
4
Brian Walker Ulster Politics: The Formative Years, 1868-86 (Belfast: Institute of
Irish Studies, 1989).
5
A Maid at Large pp142 (aristocratic providentialism), 215-216 (Streaker the
fashionable painter)
6
James A Secord Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception
and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago,
2000).
7
D623/A/345/12
8
D623/A/345/12
9
This may be emblematic of the massive and bloody crackdown on the Borderers
which followed the Union of the Crowns (cf. Perceval-Maxwell Scottish Migration
to Ulster op. cit. pp22-26).
126
10
Chapter Six
For Borderers in the Plantation see Perceval-Maxwell Scottish Migration op. cit.
pp280-287, 312,
11
For a brief discussion of this theory, which argues that it reflects the reluctance
of Ulster Unionists to develop a fully-fledged view of themselves as a separate
nation, see D.W. Miller Queen’s Rebels (Dublin: University College Dublin Press,
2007 with introduction by John Bew; first pub. 1978) pp112-114. Miller’s
discussion is confined to Soul of Ulster and ignores Hamilton’s other publications
and broader career. In light of Miller’s remark that Soul of Ulster oddly combines
racism with advocacy of miscegenation, it may be worth noting that Hamilton’s
late detective novel The Four Tragedies of Memworth (1928) features an
ambivalent portrayal of a relationship between an English maidservant and a
Chinese man (himself half-European), presented simultaneously as animalistic and
as sympathetic, even admirable. For a modern Ulster Unionist description of
Planters as transplanted Borderers (by an Ulster Unionist with West Tyrone
antecedents) see John Laird A Struggle to Be Heard: By a True Ulster Liberal
(Exeter, 2010) pp21-27.
12
Elizabethan Ulster (1919); The Irish Rebellion of 1641, with a History of the
Events which led up to and succeeded it (1920).
13
Irish Rebellion pp94-128, especially pp107-108 (criticizes Lecky for palliating
the massacres). Cf. the ambivalent portrayal of the rebel leader Bishop Eimar
(Heber) McMahon in Irish Rebellion pp199-201, 280-281 and Tales of the
Troubles (1925) pp257-259, 267-272. Note the implicit comparison of English
royalists downplaying the extent of the massacre with post-1886 Gladstonians
downplaying the connection between Parnellism and agrarian violence (Irish
Rebellion p.94). For a discussion of Hamilton in relation to the wider historical
controversies over 1641 see John Gibney The Shadow of a Year: The 1641
Rebellion in Irish History and Memory (University of Wisconsin Press, Madison &
London, 2013) pp142-144, 193n175.
14
James Loughlin “Northern Ireland and British fascism in the inter-war years”
Irish Historical Studies vol. xxix (1995) p.539; Martin Pugh ‘Hurrah for the
Blackshirts!’: Fascists and Fascism in Britain Between the Wars (London:
Jonathan Cape, 2005) pp52, 66.
15
PRONI D623/A/346. Hamilton also presents Guinevere as considerably older
than Lancelot, noticeably ugly, and sexually frustrated since Arthur married her for
political reasons and preferred the company of other women. He suggests the
Lancelot-Guinevere relationship was invented to flatter Eleanor of Aquitaine
(whose marriage with Henry II may underlie Hamilton’s take on Guinevere).
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE FANTASY OF THE CELTIC REVIVAL:
LORD DUNSANY, FIONA MACLEOD
AND W.B. YEATS
TANIA SCOTT
For good or for bad, the Celtic genius is more airy and unsubstantial, goes
less near the ground, than the German. (Arnold, 1867: 102)
Nothing to make a song about but kings,
Helmets, and swords, and half-forgotten things
(Yeats, 2004: 5-6)
This chapter will consider two authors on the fringes of the Celtic Revival
in Ireland and Scotland and analyse how their fantastic fiction fits in with
the perceived narrative of that movement. Fiona MacLeod was the
authorial alter-ego of William Sharp, a Scottish writer who was involved
with several aspects of the Revival movement, particularly through his/her
occultism. MacLeod fully embraced tropes of Celticism such as the
feminine and flighty Celt described by Mathew Arnold, putting her works
at some distance from Yeats and the Irish Revivalists. Lord Dunsany, on
the other hand, writing later than MacLeod views all versions of
Revivalism as ripe for parody, but interacted directly with Yeats and
company through his involvement in the Abbey Theatre. One element
which connects these two writers, then, is that they both had ambivalent
personal and professional relationships with the foremost writer of the
Revival, W.B. Yeats. In this chapter the ideological conflicts between
MacLeod and Dunsany and their Revival counterparts will be shown to
play out within the texts themselves. Fantastic literature, for both Dunsany
and MacLeod, was a means of simultaneously embracing and interrogating
the ideology of the Revival.
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Chapter Seven
The terminology of the Revival becomes complicated when referring
to Scotland as well as Ireland. I have chosen Revival, rather than the
widely used term Renaissance when commenting on both countries as the
Scottish Renaissance generally refers to a later movement. Although the
Irish aspect of the Celtic Revival is well known to present day literary
criticism, the Scottish element has received relatively little critical
attention. Most works seem to credit the origins of the Scottish Revival or
Renaissance with Hugh MacDiarmid around 1922, by which point the
Revival in Ireland was largely over. This Scottish Revival as epitomised
by MacDiarmid and others, seems to be a much more standard version of
post-War modernism, and their tenet “Not Traditions—Precedents”
(Scottish Chapbooks qtd. in Harris: 164) seems antithetical to the concept
of pure Revivalism. William Sharp died in 1905, and in both literary
guises was an associate of Yeats and AE, so clearly predates
MacDiarmid’s version of the Revival. MacLeod’s Scottish kinship is
perhaps more with the Kailyard writers of her period, but they seem to
have been written out of the story of the Scottish Literary Revival. The
term Kailyard translates from Scots as ‘cabbage patch’, and was coined in
1895 by the critic J.H. Millar to refer to the works of writers such as J.M.
Barrie which employed stereotypical, idealised tropes of the Scottish
countryside, (see Carruthers, 2009: 117). In common with a good deal of
Victorian Scottish texts, the Kailyard writers have received short shrift
from literary critics. For example, in George Bruce’s anthology titled The
Scottish Literary Revival he boldly claims: ‘It is now general agreed that
no Scottish poetry of great consequence was produced between the death
of Burns in 1796 and 1922.’ (Bruce, 1968: 1) The Kailyard writers were
mainly producing prose, but it still seems extraordinary that this
movement has been removed from the narrative of Scottish literature. It is
particularly interesting that elements such as the valorisation of the
peasant, and the emotive portrayals of landscape that were so successfully
embraced by the Irish Revival writers have led to the disenfranchisement
of their Scottish counterparts. Revivalism, to the critics at least, means
something very different in Scotland than in Ireland.
One fundamental question that arises from the background of
Revivalism in Scotland is why the Revival in Scotland only gained
momentum in Scotland in the years following World War 1, several
decades after the movement had grown popular in Ireland. The answers to
this may be found by examining the work of Fiona MacLeod, a
pseudonym used by William Sharp who was born in Paisley but spent
most of his life in exile from Scotland. Sharp was already an established
critic and minor poet by the time he started writing as MacLeod, whose
The Fantasy of the Celtic Revival
129
works are fantasies set in the Scottish Highlands. Murray Pittock expresses
a fairly typical view of MacLeod’s work when he states:
The people of this Celtic world are presented as instinctual, intuitive,
Catholic, sentimental, weak, passive and grossly superstitious. Unbearably
slushy and lugubrious as the reading of this material now is, Fiona
MacLeod’s fiction was one of the powerful influences in shaping
twentieth-century elegizing of the Celt, and Sharp was, unlikely as it may
seem, one of the propagandists-in-chief of a Celtic revival. (Pittock, 1999:
71)
Pittock’s distaste for MacLeod’s fiction is evident, but he nevertheless
highlights the importance of the works of Sharp and MacLeod in shaping
the Celtic Revival in Scotland and beyond. He also notes another key
element of MacLeod’s fiction; it’s enactment of the ‘Arnoldian landscape
of Britishness’ (Pittock, 1999: 72). In this Pittock is referring to
MacLeod’s tendency to place Scotland as the feminine other to England,
following on from Matthew Arnold’s descriptions of the Celtic races. This
chapter will take this concept one step further: by splitting his work into
two distinct authorial personae, Sharp enacts this Arnoldian dualism
within his own writing psyche.
If Fiona MacLeod is discussed at all in present day criticism, it tends to
be with a lurid fascination for the circumstances surrounding Sharp’s
pseudonym. In Elizabeth Sharp’s Memoir of her husband she considers
W.B. Yeats’s description of MacLeod as a ‘secondary personality’ (Sharp,
1910: 424). Yeats is using the vocabulary of occultism, referring to
MacLeod as some kind of psychic presence. Like many authors of this
period, Sharp was fascinated by the occult, and Yeats considered him to be
a fine medium. The use of the occult was not confined to the MacLeod
personae however, and Sharp’s wife explicitly states that works under both
names were influenced by visions. More recent commentators, including
Terry Meyers, have considered Fiona MacLeod to be evidence of Sharp’s
bisexuality (Meyers passim). Perhaps less speculative is the consideration
of how MacLeod fits into Sharp’s writing aesthetics. We can then consider
MacLeod as less of a hidden sexual identity, but as a careful construction,
created to embody a separate artistic strain in fin de siècle writing. Thus
we bring MacLeod and Sharp’s works into the debates surrounding the
Celtic Revival, in particular the Arnoldian and Yeatsian formulations of
the Celt.
Matthew Arnold was a seminal figure in the racial theory of the Celt,
and his importance to the Celtic Revival cannot be overestimated. In
works such as ‘On the Study of Celtic Literature’ from 1867, Arnold
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Chapter Seven
considers the character of the Celtic race, and compares it with the AngloSaxon and German. Arnold’s ideological approach is to suggest that the
Celtic character must be tempered with the Anglo-Saxon, and he therefore
makes a case for the continuation of Britain, and the dangers of Home
Rule. Arnold explains that, ‘The Celtic genius [has] sentiment as its main
basis, with love of beauty, charm and spirituality for its excellence,
ineffectualness and self-will for its defect’ (Arnold 1867:115). According
to Arnold this ‘ineffectualness’ must be governed by the calm hand of
England, giving racial justification for the continuation of English
governance of Ireland.
Arnold’s cultural unionism understandably sits unhappily with the
nationalist W.B. Yeats’s agenda for Irish literature, and he challenges
Arnold directly in ‘The Celtic Element in Literature’ in 1897. The
publication date of this is worth noting where Fiona MacLeod is
concerned as the majority of her writings are published around 1894 to
1896. At this point therefore Yeats has already read MacLeod (as well as
Sharp), along with Standish O’Grady and other early writers of the Celtic
Revival in Ireland. In this essay Yeats challenges the nature loving Celt –
what Arnold describes as the Celt’s affinity for ‘natural beauty and natural
magic’ (108) – by explaining that all early races anthropomorphize the
natural world. It is worth noting that this trait in particular is challenged as
it is precisely the valorisation of nature that is such a feature in the
MacLeod’s stories. Yeats has an ambiguous relationship with the term
Celt. He is simultaneously eager to place the Celt within the historical
context of a pre-Christian society when he claims that all primitive races
share the same beliefs, yet he also notes the Celtic proclivities in the
writing of his contemporaries in Ireland. He writes that: ‘Oisin and
Leyrach Hen are, I think, a little nearer even to us modern Irish than they
are to most people. That is why our poetry and much of our thought is
melancholy.’ (Yeats, 1924: 226) So according to Yeats, the characteristics
of the Celt are found in contemporary literature in Ireland, and these
characteristics are not something that should be regarded as weaknesses
needing to be shored up by Anglo-Saxon strength, but instead a fitting
understanding of timeless ideas of love, life and death.
Into this debate over the relevance of the term Celt to Irish and British
literature steps William Sharp writing as Fiona MacLeod. The dedication
to Pharais, MacLeod’s first published work, sets out her stall:
The sweetest-voiced of the younger Irish singers of to-day has spoken of
the Celtic Twilight. A twilight it is; but, if night follow gloaming, so also
does dawn succeed night. Meanwhile, twilight voices are sweet, if faint
and far, and linger lovingly in the ear.’(MacLeod, 1894: 8)
The Fantasy of the Celtic Revival
131
MacLeod’s dedication to Yeats is also a challenge, one vision of the Celtic
Revival coming into dispute with another. For Yeats, embracing the tropes
of the Celt is a form of artistic as well as political activism, a new cultural
nationalism. For MacLeod, however, the Celt is largely passive, and past,
a subject for nostalgia. Yeats flirts with the nostalgic, lyrical Celticism
favoured by MacLeod in his Red Hanrahan period, but quickly moves on
to a more sophisticated idea of Irish identity. MacLeod however seems
trapped in this earlier stage, and cannot escape the Ossianic imagery of her
Celtic realm.
While MacLeod’s texts differ from Yeats, particularly in their reaction
to the narrative of Celticism, they differ just as strongly from those works
published under Sharp’s own name. Even the titles of the Sharp and
MacLeod texts illustrate the differences in style and influence between the
two authorial personae. A selection of titles of Sharp’s works include:
Sophistra and Other Poems; Flower o’ the Vine, The Sport of Chance and
similar classical and mythological themed names. Sharp also published his
literary translations under his own name. Fiona MacLeod’s works include
Pharais, The Gipsy Christ, The Mountain Lovers, The Washer of the Ford
and similar titles. MacLeod is therefore invoking an authentic folk
narrative, with names reminiscent of folk tales and superstitions, much like
Lady Gregory did with her Kiltartan tales. Like many other Revival
writers, MacLeod presents an idealized view of primitivism, and valorises
the simple country folk.
The division between Sharp and MacLeod can be seen most clearly by
the close examination of texts from each author. ‘The Ocean Chorus’
appears in Earth Songs, a book of nature poems published in 1884. The
emphasis on the natural world anticipates MacLeod’s texts, the difference,
however, can be seen in the style and vocabulary of Sharp’s work:
Sea meeting sea, we circle round all lands
And chant aloud our old eternal song:
With wild fierce music upon northern strands
We break, or surge white tropic shores along,
And thunder hoarsely our tempestuous boom
Far inland till the hollow blast has rolled
'Midst distant vales with ominous sound of doom,
The echo of sea-dirges manifold. (Sharp, 1884: 44)
In these lines Sharp personifies the sea in a traditional poetic fashion. His
imagery is standard for the subject, perhaps even clichéd, and his language
is bordering on banal. It is worth comparing this section to some lines
from MacLeod’s Pharais, also describing the sea:
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From the darkness to the north came the low monotone of the sea, as a
muffled voice prophesying through the gates of Sleep and Death. Far to the
east the tide-race tore through the Sound with a confused muttering of
haste and tumult. Upon the isle the wind moved as a thing in pain, or idly
weary: lifting now from cranny to corrie, and through glen and hollow, and
among the birk-shaws and the rowans, with long sighs and whispers where
by Uisghe-dhu the valley of moonflowers sloped to the sea on the west, or
among the reeds, and the gale, and the salt grasses around the clachan that
lay duskily still on the little brae above the haven. (MacLeod, 1894:46)
This section of the novel is typical of MacLeod’s emotive language, and
the constant anthropomorphism of landscape elements such as the sea. Part
of the attraction of MacLeod’s writing over Sharp’s is a reduction in the
pomposity of a feigned classical style. MacLeod’s passage is the more
engaging for the reader, despite the tendency toward extended metaphors
and over-Romanticising the landscape which is very much in evidence
with the pain of the wind and the sound of the sea. The use of Scots dialect
words is also prominent, as well as some Gaelic terms.
MacLeod’s use of Gaelic is interesting; it is always translated,
confirming that the works were written for a Sassenach audience. By
translating the Gaelic, MacLeod could arguably be accused of writing for
the literary tourist. The characters in MacLeod’s fiction are often
unrealistic and idealised, and characterisation often stems from their
physical appearance, such as the deformed Caliban-figure of Nial in The
Mountain Lovers. When MacLeod presents the rural Scottish people as
exotic and mystical, she is performing a similar act to the approach of
Yeats and Lady Gregory who utilized the Irish peasantry to present a true,
unsullied Ireland both contemporary and ancient.
It is tempting to assume a pan-Celticism, where the same tropes are
embraced by both Ireland and Scotland during the Revival period. As
already mentioned however, even the period of the Revival does not
necessarily match in Scotland and Ireland, and there is a similar
discontinuity in their respective ideologies. In fact, there is a tension
between the two, which could probably be largely explained through their
respective attitudes to nationalism.
Even to her contemporaries, MacLeod’s position as a Scot placed her
outside a true Celtic spirit, according to the Irish writer and critic AE
(George Russell). In one public letter AE explains that MacLeod is a
unionist, and suggests that she should not form an ideal model for a Celtic
writer: ‘for the Gael in Ireland, in addition to his traditions, which are
shared to some extent by the Scottish Celt, has the aspiration to a distinct
and self-governed nationality’ (AE qtd by T W Rolleston, 1900: 1). What
The Fantasy of the Celtic Revival
133
AE is objecting to here in particular is an essay by MacLeod from The
Divine Adventure called ‘Celtic’. In this essay MacLeod writes
controversial statements on the nature of Celticism, which provoked a
furious debate amongst AE and his fellow revivalists:
So far as I understand the ‘Celtic Movement,’ it is a natural outcome, the
natural expression of a freshly inspired spiritual and artistic energy. That
this expression is coloured by racial temperament is its distinction; that it is
controlled to novel usage is its opportunity. When we look for its source
we find it in the usufruct of an ancient and beautiful treasure of national
tradition. One may the more aptly speak thus collectively of a mythology
and a literature, and a vast and wonderful legendary folk-lore, since to us,
now, it is in great part hidden behind veils of an all but forgotten tongue
and of a system of life and customs, ideas and thought, that no longer
obtains. (MacLeod, 1894: 298)
So far this sentiment fits with Revivalism in Ireland, except perhaps for
MacLeod’s reluctance to acknowledge the continued presence of the Celt,
something that the Irish would endeavour to claim still existed in the
peasantry and in their literature. It is the next section that is more
controversial for the Irish Revival:
I am unable, however, to see that it has sustenance in elements of revolt. A
new movement should not be a revolt, but a sortie to carry a fresh position.
When one hears, as one does every now and then, that the Celtic
movement is a revolt against the tyranny of the English tradition, one can
but smile; as though a plaster-cast, that is of to-day, were to revolt against
the Venus of Milo or the Winged Victory that is of no day. If a movement
has any inherent force, it will not destroy itself in forlorn hopes, but will
fall into line, and so achieve where alone the desired success can achieved.
(MacLeod, 1894: 298-9)
Here we come to the crux of the tension between MacLeod and the Irish
Revivalists. In this section MacLeod follows very much the Arnoldian
line: Gaelic or Celtic imagination must be subordinated within an English
tradition. MacLeod echoes Arnold with her analysis of the characteristics
of the Celt:
Celtic emotion, Celtic love of beauty, and Celtic spiritualism [must be]
refined and strengthened by the wise relinquishings and steadfast ideals of
Celt and Saxon, united in a common fatherland, and in singleness of pride
and faith.
She then directly attacks Irish nationalism:
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But above all else it is time that a prevalent pseudo-nationalism should be
dissuaded. I am proud to be a Highlander, but I would not side with those
who would set the heather on fire. If I were Irish, I would be proud, but I
would not lower my pride by marrying it to a ceaseless ill-will, an
irreconcilable hate, for there can be a nobler pride in unvanquished
acquiescence than in revolt (MacLeod, 1894: 305).
MacLeod may be reluctant to burn the heather, but she certainly is not
afraid to ignite the ire of the nationalist Irish literary establishment. AE’s
repudiation of this essay was swift and blunt: ‘It is to be hoped in the
future if Miss MacLeod wishes to write semi-political essays she will
speak only for the Scottish Celt. We are a strange people over here and we
dislike being preached to by foreigners.’ (AE, 1900: 3) Any possibility of
a pan-Celtic union seems unlikely in this exchange.
If MacLeod’s romantic, mystical writings seem a little false in their
attempt to combine Ossianic influences, nineteenth century mysticism and
‘Celtic imagination’, then this is certainly nothing new. John Kelleher
points out that “Celtic Revival literature does not resemble Celtic literature
very much at all” (Kelleher, 2002: 9), and writers in both Scotland and
Ireland were happy to reinvent their own native traditions to justify the
status of the national literature in their own time. The difference between
the Scottish and Irish Celtic Revivals is one of the importance of nation:
for Sharp, his Scottish national identity can only be expressed through
Fiona MacLeod, and is in danger of being seen as a clichéd vision
conforming to Arnoldian traits of Celticism. Whereas for Yeats and his
fellows the commitment to Irish nationalism gives the authors the selfconfidence to rebuild and to challenge traditions, and to effect a true
cultural Revival.
Like MacLeod, Lord Dunsany’s commitment to Unionism complicates
his relationship with the Celtic Revival. Dunsany began writing in 1898,
just as the Revival in Ireland was achieving its full momentum.
Throughout his career until his death in 1957 he exhibited a fascination for
the tropes of the Revival, and in particular with the writing of W.B. Yeats.
Lord Dunsany is a writer who is unmistakably Irish and whose work
concerns Irish affairs, but who has nevertheless received little attention
from the Irish critical establishment. It is partly this connection of archaic
Revivalism and political Unionism that makes him an unpopular with the
current critical establishment.
Lord Dunsany was never comfortable in his relationship with the other
Revivalists, and this was largely due to his antipathy towards the Irish
fight for Home Rule. In April 1919 he arrived in America for a lecture
tour, and was questioned by reporters eager to know about his connections
The Fantasy of the Celtic Revival
135
with the writers of the Irish literary Revival and the involvement of these
authors in nationalist politics. Dunsany gave the following statement:
Perhaps I should say that I am no part at all of the Irish movement in art.
No poet should be a part of any movement. [...] I am not interested in
depicting Irish condition; what matters with me is the condition of man,
not in his relation to governments, as they are, or should be, but solely in
relation to Destiny. (Dunsany qtd in Joshi, 1995: 184)
Lord Dunsany’s statement to the reporter is cagey and defensive, as might
be expected of an Irish aristocrat with well-known Unionist sympathies
just a few months into the war of independence. Yet the need for Dunsany
to make such a statement shows the intimate relationship between art and
politics in Ireland, a theme particularly significant to both MacLeod’s and
Dunsany’s engagement with Revivalism.
One of the most successful elements to come out of the ethos of the
Irish Revival was the establishment of the Irish National Theatre. The
theatre at this time was not just an established national institution; it was
also a nationalist institution. With Yeats and his colleagues in control the
theatre became a stage on which to act and enact the political ideologies of
turn of the century Irish cultural nationalism. For Yeats the establishment
of a national theatre was one element of his attempt to revive, rebuild and
renew Irish arts and culture, and so solidify Ireland’s claim to be a country
worthy of independence. Yet alongside such avowedly nationalist plays as
Yeats and Gregory’s Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902) were a variety of other,
often discordant versions of Irish drama. Even within the works of the
directors there was great variation, for example between the mythic lyric
plays of Yeats and the light comedies of Lady Gregory. Far from a unified
sense of drama, the Abbey created a dialogue of forms and concepts and
competing representations of Ireland, a dialogue in which Dunsany would
struggle to stage his own aesthetic ideology.
Dunsany had several plays produced at the Abbey Theatre, but the one
that deals most overtly with Revivalism and Irish nationalism is King
Argimēnēs and the Unknown Warrior which debuted in Dublin in 1911.
The first act opens in the slave fields where the deposed King Argimēnēs
has been forced to work as a slave by Darniak, Argimēnēs’s successor.
Argimēnēs struggles to accept his lot as he remembers a higher form of
living: ‘It is very terrible to have been a king’ (Dunsany, 1918: 59). This,
then, is a play about kingship, what it is to be a king, to have been a king,
and to desire to be a king. The focus on the right to rule, and the desire to
rule, was particularly pressing for Dunsany at the time of the play’s
production, with the rise of Irish nationalism.
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In the first act of King Argimēnēs the deposed king finds an old green
sword buried in the earth. The colour of the sword is a clue for the
audience to the Irish subtext. When Argimēnēs finds the sword it becomes
an embodiment of kingship, giving him the charisma to lead the slaves and
defeat Darniak. The impact of the weapon is borne out by the reaction of
Zarb, a fellow slave, when Argimēnēs tells him he has found the sword:
King Argimēnēs. I have found such a sword. (A pause)
Zarb. Why – then you will wear a purple cloak again, and sit on a great
throne, and ride a prancing horse, and we shall call you majesty. (Dunsany,
1918: 68)
From the possession of the sword the stereotypes of royalty necessarily
follow. In this play the right to rule can be contained within an object, and
kingship is a matter of cloaks, thrones and prancing horses; this mocking
tone is all the more amusing due to the author’s aristocratic heritage. The
sword has always been an important symbol for the heroic character,
particularly when one thinks of literary heroes such as Arthur with
Excalibur or Charlemagne and his sword Joyeuse. There are also Irish
equivalents such as Cuchulain’s Cruadan or Fergus’s Caladbolg, beloved
of Revivalists like O’Grady, Yeats and Lady Gregory. By finding a heroic
sword, Argimēnēs may finally become a true hero, and one in an Irish
heroic tradition.
Far from asserting the right of good kings to rule their people, as one
might expect from such an aristocratic author, King Argimēnēs suggests
that one king may well be much the same as another. Written in an Ireland
which was struggling to gain self-governance this takes on a deeply
satirical tone. Dunsany may be warning the Irish audience that their new
government will do little to improve life for the ordinary subject. Yet
whichever ruling powers are criticised in this play, no viable alternative is
presented.
It is through Dunsany’s portrayal of Argimēnēs as hero that we may
best evaluate this play as interacting Revivalists tropes within the Abbey
dramatic canon. One of the seminal texts of the Irish Revival, Yeats and
Lady Gregory’s Cathleen Ni Houlihan may illuminate the nationalist
heroic tradition that would have been in Dunsany’s mind when writing his
own play. This play is set in and around a small cottage in a rural area and
sees a family encountering the title character who is a personification of
Ireland. Cathleen calls to the young men of the family to join the cause to
regain her ‘four green fields’ (Yeats and Gregory, 1908: 153) that have
been lost to the English. This is a ritualistic play that verges on the bloodcult, encouraging men to die for their country:
The Fantasy of the Celtic Revival
137
Old Woman. It is a hard service they take that help me. Many that are redcheeked now will be pale-cheeked; many that have been free to walk the
hills and the bogs and the rushes, will be sent to walk hard streets in far
countries; many a good plan will be broken; many that have gathered
money will not stay to spend it; many a child will be born and there will be
no father at its christening to give it a name. They that had red cheeks will
have pale cheeks for my sake; and for all that, they will think they are well
paid. (Yeats and Gregory, 1908: 163)
The stirring leadership of Cathleen Ni Houlihan is absent in the character
of Argimēnēs who is much more passive and lethargic. Death or exile in
the earlier play is little enough to suffer in exchange for being a hero in the
nationalist cause. This call to martyrdom is challenged in Dunsany’s play,
where heroic sacrifice may change nothing for ordinary people. Ben
Levitas in The Theatre of Nation sees King Argimēnēs as:
a manifest allegory complete with vanquished King and soothsayers
prophesying impeding [sic] calamity to spoilt courtiers. The King-madeslave Argimenes finds an ‘old green sword” —symbol of unearthed culture
and tradition restored, and despite Dunsany’s exoticism, doubtless an
accessory to Yeats’s Green Helmet (Levitas, 2002: 191).
Yeats’s green helmet in the play of the same name is a prize awarded to
the man who may unite Ireland, Cuchulain in this legend. Dunsany’s green
sword is a far more unstable symbol, and its unifying powers seem rather
transitory. Ben Levitas’s reading of King Argimēnēs as a play about
restoration of an unearthed culture is hard to reconcile with the sense of
circularity within the play where gods replace gods, kings replace kings
with few apparent changes.
There is another poignant critique of nationalist tropes when
Argimēnēs gives a monologue on his desire for assistance from the old
green sword:
O kingly spirit, that once laid here this sword, behold, I pray to thee,
having no gods to pray to, for the god of my nation was broken in three by
night. […] Aye, though thou wert a robber that took men’s lives
unrighteously, yet shall rare spices smoulder in thy temple and little
maidens sing and new-plucked flowers deck the solemn aisles; and priests
shall go about it ringing bells that thy soul shall find repose. O but it has a
good blade this old green sword; thou wouldst not like to see it miss its
mark (Dunsany, 1918: 64-65).
In this speech Argimēnēs is happy to emulate an unknown warrior who
has robbed and taken lives ‘unrighteously’. For the twentieth century
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audience the old warrior code sits uneasily with present day morality, a
hint to the theatre-goers at the Abbey not to accept without question the
nationalist rhetoric of plays such as Cathleen Ni Houlihan which
transplant old codes into modern political situations.
Criticism of heroic violence occurs several times in Dunsany’s fiction
and there is a clear parallel for King Argimēnēs in the short story ‘The
Sword of Welleran’ (1908). In this story a young man called Rold is
visited in his sleep by the ghosts of ancient heroes and made to fight
against the enemy attacking his town. When he sees what he has done,
rather than rejoicing at his victory in battle, he is stricken with remorse,
crying:
“O sword, sword! How horrible thou art! Thou art a terrible thing to have
come among men. How many eyes will look upon gardens no more
because of thee!”
And the tears of Rold fell down upon the proud sword but could not wash
it clean (Dunsany, 1908: 102).
The concept of the warrior himself rejecting the cult of violence, as Rold
does in this story, challenges the literal interpretation of Irish heroic myths
that was being undertaken by Padraig Pearse and other nationalists in
Dunsany’s era. The resurrection of ancient Irish myths and legends
undertaken by the Revivalists in the artistic sphere was soon embraced in
the political rhetoric of the nationalists. It was common for nationalists at
the beginning of the twentieth century to identify, overtly or covertly, with
mythological heroes and the figure of Cuchulain in particular. Murray
Pittock notes that “not only Pearse, but Cathal Brugha and Michael Collins
were to be identified with the hero: Cuchulain loomed over the typology of
the period” (Pittock, 1999: 81). Part of the reason why Dunsany does not
introduce Irish figures without disguising them in foreign clothes in these
early plays is that they could not be used without evoking the nationalist
cause; something Dunsany was understandably loath to do, given his
Unionism.
It is interesting when considering the ideological differences between
him and the cultural nationalists of the Irish Revival who embraced the
term Celt, that Dunsany was often described as a Celtic writer by
contemporary critics:
Dunsany seems, to the superficial glance, to be outside the so-called Irish
“school”, — that popular fiction. He chose Pegāna, and the fabulous cities
of Babbulkund and Perdondaris, instead of Celtic Ireland and its heroic
figures, but his adventures are as stirring to the imagination as any
The Fantasy of the Celtic Revival
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recounted by Gaelic legend. His work, both drama and narrative prose, is
part of that rekindling of the flame which has invested the Irish world with
the glow of Celtic vision (Boyd, 1918: 162-3).
Ernest Boyd in a study of Dunsany’s plays identifies in the author a
“Celtic vision” held in common with the writers of the Irish revival. Yet
Dunsany often embraces the tropes of Celticism in order to expose them
through parody, such as Argimēnēs’s old green sword, showing his
distrust in any absolutist version of Irish identity. As noted earlier, Yeats
takes Matthew Arnold’s argument of the Celt’s weakness compared to his
Anglo-Saxon conquerors as his strength, claiming that it is precisely these
differences that mean that Ireland is incompatible with Britain and should
self-govern. For Yeats, the Celt, or the ancient Irishman, may provide the
nation with the legends for its renewal, the basis for a new national
culture.
Ernest Boyd’s descriptions of Dunsany as Celtic are thus compromised
by the political implications of the word. Yet the term Celtic as used by
the Revivalists provides a useful roadmap to Dunsany’s fiction. The Celtic
imagination is pre-modern, pre-Christian, rural not urban, imaginative
rather than rational. The ancient Celt is found most clearly in depictions of
legendary heroes, the stories of whom would be endlessly remade by
writers during the Irish Revival. As early as 1906 Dunsany publishes a
story called For the Honour of the Gods which features a civilisation
enticed to fight for warring gods:
And from one of the isles all the folk came forth in ships to battle for gods
that strode through the isle like kings. And from another they came to fight
for gods that walked like humble men upon the earth in beggars' rags; and
the people of the other isle fought for the honour of gods that were clothed
in hair like beasts; and had many gleaming eyes and claws upon their
foreheads. But of how these people fought till the isles grew desolate but
very glorious, and all for the fame of the gods, are many histories writ.
(Dunsany, 1906: 76)
In this passage the heroes may have achieved fame for their gods, but the
islands themselves have been left empty and desolate. This tale, written
before Irish independence, shows Dunsany’s fear that heroism and the
quest for fame are merely illusory states, and that the fight for a new
government ignores the needs of the people of Ireland.
Of all the Revival figures W.B. Yeats had perhaps the greatest ability
to combine ancient legend and contemporary politics and he is much more
self-aware than Pearse. When all his poetic images desert him in The
Tower Yeats clings to his hero Red Hanrahan who featured in his early
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poetry: “Go therefore; but leave Hanrahan, / For I need all his mighty
memories” (Yeats, 2004: 87-88). The poet admits that Hanrahan is just
another created symbol that has no power to comfort one in one's old age,
but cleaves to him nonetheless, recognising that mythic ideals are
necessary for the soul even if they may be no longer relevant to modern
society. This recalls Dunsany’s Quixotic narratives where the necessity of
maintaining illusions is stressed precisely because they bear little relation
to reality, such as Argimēnēs’s less than heroic sword. The ‘mighty
memories’ of Hanrahan are in fact no more real than any other fictional
figure that inhabits Yeats’s works. In later years, Yeats became concerned
with using ancient ideals of the heroic in modern, real situations and even
commented on Pearse’s appropriation of the mythic: “When Pearse
summoned Cuchulain to his side, / What stalked through the Post Office?”
(Yeats, 2004: 25-26). For Dunsany, and even for a committed nationalist
like Yeats, the hero borrowed by the Revivalists as a model for modern
rebellion has become a rough beast, an uncontrollable metaphor made real
with troubling consequences.
Across the fiction of Fiona MacLeod and Lord Dunsany we witness
the desire to engage with the Celtic Revival, and the internal conflicts this
creates. For MacLeod, this conflict actually splits the author in two, her
creation taking literally Matthew Arnold’s phrasing of the Celt/Teutonic
dichotomy in gender terms: “no doubt the sensibility of the Celtic nature,
its nervous exaltation, have something feminine in them, and the Celt is
thus peculiarly disposed to feel the spell of the feminine idiosyncrasy”
(Arnold, 1867: 108). Gender also figures prominently in Dunsany’s
engagement with Celticism where the heroic masculine ideal is the subject
of parody. This parody extends to Irish nationalism itself, and indeed the
story of the Revivals in Scotland and Ireland cannot be separated from the
narrative of nationalism; it is partly this conjunction of ideologies that has
exiled both MacLeod and Dunsany to the literary margins, where they
remain.
Works Cited
AE. (1900), “Review of ‘The Divine Adventure’” in All Ireland Review 1
29, pp. 2-3.
Arnold, Matthew. (1867), On the Study of Celtic Literature. Smith, Elder
and Co., London.
Boyd, E.A. (1918), The Contemporary Drama of Ireland. Talbot Press,
Dublin.
The Fantasy of the Celtic Revival
141
Bruce, George. (1968), The Scottish Literary Revival: An Anthology of
Twentieth-Century Poetry. Collier MacMillan, London.
Carruthers, Gerard. (2009), Scottish Literature. Edinburgh University
Press, Edinburgh.
Dunsany, Lord. (1918), Five Plays. Grant Richards, London.
—. (1908), The Sword of Welleran. George Allan and Sons, London.
Harris, Jason Marc. (2008), Folklore and the Fantastic in NineteenthCentury British Fiction. Ashgate, Aldershot.
Joshi, S.T. (1995), Lord Dunsany: Master of the Anglo-Irish Imagination.
Greenwood Press, Westport Connecticut.
Kelleher, J.V. (2002), Selected Writings of John V. Kelleher on Ireland
and Irish America. Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale.
Levitas, Ben. (2002), The Theatre of Nation. Clarendon, Oxford.
MacLeod, Fiona. (1894), Pharais. Harper and Murray, Derby.
Meyers, Terry L. (1996), The Sexual Tensions of William Sharp. Peter
Lang, Oxford:
Pittock, Murray GH. (1999), Celtic Identity and the British Image.
Manchester University Press, Manchester.
Rolleston, T.W. (1900), “AE and Fiona MacLeod” All Ireland Review 1
34 1-2.
Sharp, Elizabeth. (1910), William Sharp: A Memoir. Duffield, New York.
Sharp, William. (1884), Earth’s Voices. Elliot Stock, London.
Yeats, W.B. (1924), Essays. MacMillan, London.
—. (2004), Poems. Everyman, London.
—. (1908), Lady Gregory. The Unicorn from the Stars and Other Plays.
MacMillan, London.
CHAPTER EIGHT
MARTIN MCDONAGH’S CELTIC TIGER FEET:
TRADING ON THE TWISTED LEGACIES
OF IRISH DRAMA
WILLY MALEY
Martin McDonagh’s The Cripple of Inishmaan (1997) is a play that
crosses borders of time and space, writing back to Robert Flaherty’s Man
of Aran (1934), and to John Millington Synge’s Playboy of the Western
World (1907). In this essay I will examine some of the issues around the
politics of representation in McDonagh’s work, and review some recent
critical perspectives. I want to begin with a characteristic narrative and a
brief biographical sketch. When Martin McDonagh was fourteen years of
age, he told his older brother John a story that was a version of the
medieval German tale, ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’. In McDonagh’s
teenage tale, an old man with a cart that gives off a strange smell meets a
young boy sitting on a wall and sits and speaks with him. After a while the
man says he has to go, but that he would like to give the boy a gift. With
that he takes out a cleaver, cuts off the boy’s toes, and throws them to the
rats that appear from the cart. Then he goes off, and when all the boys in
the village follow him, the little boy with the missing toes is left behind,
the sole survivor. When he later came to read Grimm’s Fairy tales
McDonagh saw that the original ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ for example
was much more gory and garish than the BBC or bedside version – more
Angela Carter, in fact as it involved disemboweling the wolf to rescue
Little Red Riding Hood and her friend, putting stones in its stomach in
place of the two girls, then stitching it back up with green wire, so that
when the wolf woke up it had stones grating against its intestines.
McDonagh’s version of the Pied Piper, the story of someone who is
maimed in order to be saved, like the story of stones taking the place of
children devoured in Grimm’s ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, fed into
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McDonagh’s fantasies and fictions. He’s never stopped telling stories
since.
I. Shurely Shome Mishtake? My Name is my Bond
In December 1996 at the Evening Standard Theatre awards there was a
confrontation – what in Scotland would be called a stramash – between an
Englishman whose parents hailed from the West of Ireland and a
Scotsman from Edinburgh who could trace his Irish Catholic roots on his
father’s side back to County Wexford. The Englishman was Martin
McDonagh and the Scotsman was Sir Sean Connery. Here’s what
happened. McDonagh, nominated as Most Promising Newcomer for his
first play, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, was at the event with his older
brother, John. They were a little the worse for wear – “tanked up on
vodka” was the phrase – when Max Hastings, editor of the Evening
Standard, proposed a toast to the queen. The McDonagh brothers grew
restless and, as Martin McDonagh recalls, “started taking the piss”. Next
minute, Martin feels a hand on his shoulder and hears a voice say “Shut up
or leave!” He looks up to see James Bond and immediately pipes down as
requested, then thinks about it, and says “Feck off!” The headline in the
tabloids read: “Irish Writer Curses Bond at Arts Bash”. It may only have
been a tough love version of male bonding, but when McDonagh’s mother
read about it, she refused to speak to her son for a week. McDonagh was
angry that Hastings had proposed the toast when not all present were
British and loyal, and bemused that someone like Connery, a professed
Scottish nationalist, should be acting as an enforcer. Viewed differently,
here was a young twenty-something playwright insulting not just her
majesty, but her majesty’s secret servant, more than just a name, but three
numbers. McDonagh’s own recollection is characteristically courteous and
restrained:
It was drunken eejit stuff, really … That wanker journalist Max Hastings
was toasting the Queen. I mean, come on, it was bullshit. Do these people
take no account of how many people in there were actually British, let
alone how many even supported her? Anyway, me and my brother John
were taking the piss, and next thing I know there’s a hand on my shoulder,
and Sean Connery is standing over me, saying, ‘Shut up, or leave’, in that
James Bond voice of his. It was surreal. I mean, is this guy supposed to be
a Scottish nationalist, or what? Anyway, I initially said, ‘Sorry, no offence,
mate’, then I thought about it, and went, ‘Yeah, right, fuck off, mate’.
(Anon, 2006)
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Later that same night at that same event McDonagh kissed Jessica Lange,
who happened to be married to one of his big influences, the playwright
Sam Shepard, but he had no recollection of this encounter. Shurely shome
mishtake?: “Apparently I kissed Jessica Lange, but I have no memory of
that whatsoever” (O’Toole, 2006).
Martin McDonagh, what’s he like? We could compile a long list of
influences, actual or imagined, on McDonagh’s work, under the heading.
Some of these are things McDonagh’s mentioned himself in interviews,
while others have been conjectured by critics. They include the following
influences: Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot), Brendan Behan (The
Hostage), Jorge Luis Borges, Brookside, Dion Boucicault, Marina Carr,
Cervantes, Coen Brothers, The Clash, John Dos Passos, Roddy Doyle,
Father Ted, Lady Augusta Gregory, M. R. James, Buster Keaton, Sergio
Leone, Tracy Letts (Killer Joe), David Lynch, Conor McPherson,
Terrence Malick (Badlands), David Mamet (American Buffalo), Tom
Murphy, Vladimir Nabokov, Nirvana, Sean O’Casey, Joe Orton
(Entertaining Mr Sloane), Sam Peckinpah, Harold Pinter, The Pogues, J.
D. Salinger, Martin Scorsese, The Sex Pistols, Steptoe and Son, Sam
Shepard (True West), J. M. Synge (Playboy of the Western World; Shadow
of the Glen), Jonathan Swift, Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction). To which
one might add various influential forms and themes: ‘black pastoral’,
cartoon violence, fairytale, folklore, gargoyles, globalization, gothic,
Grand Guignol, grotesque, hybridity, melodrama, mimicry, nativism,
parochialism, parody, pastiche, postmodernism, provincialism, primitivism,
pulp fiction, revivalism, ‘satanic kailyard’, ‘Tiger Trash’.
When I was making this list I started separating out the Irish influences
from the others but I stopped, and for a reason. Father Ted, The Pogues,
and The Sex Pistols, can be seen as English and/or Irish depending on your
perspective, and in a way that’s an issue too for McDonagh, the question
of how far expatriate Irish writers, as part of the Irish diaspora, can claim
to speak for the old country. Like John Lydon (aka ‘Johnny Rotten’)
McDonagh is London Irish, with Irish parents and a London accent. Lydon
published in 1993 a memoir entitled Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs
(London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1994). It’s a non-topic in one sense as
the expatriate Irish remain a fact of history and life. On the other hand, a
lot of the early negative criticism of McDonagh revolves around the issue
of authenticity. He’s a London boy with “Irish leanings” (Diehl, 2001:
103). Catholic and Republican in upbringing, an immersion in punk and
anarchism made him—paradoxically—a pacifist and very anti-violence.
Although we are told—by D. H. Lawrence, among others—to trust the
tale, not the teller, it is always worth listening to how a writer sees their
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art. McDonagh has said his own “idea of theatre is some kind of punk
destruction of what’s gone on before, kind of like what the Pogues did to
classical Irish music” (Cited Feeney, 1998: 28). McDonagh has cited the
Sex Pistols’ 1976 hit ‘Anarchy in the UK’ as a crucial influence:
It’s like that great Sex Pistols’ song, where he sings, “I wanna destroy
passers-by”. It doesn’t really get any better, or simpler, than that. It just
seems sad to me that nobody wants to shake it up any more. Everybody
plays the game now. It’s not good enough, is it? (Cited O’Hagan, 2001).
This insistence on influences outside of the theatre has led McDonagh to
be viewed as a ‘pulp’ or ‘punk’ or ‘postmodern’ playwright. He’s been
called ‘the Quentin Tarantino of the Emerald Isle’ (Feeney, 1998: 29).
McDonagh himself says:
People should leave a theatre with the same feeling that you get after a
really good rock concert. You don’t want to talk about it, you just let it
buzz into you. I can’t stand people analysing things. A play should be a
thrill like a fantastic rollercoaster’ (Feeney, 1998: 28).
McDonagh also maintains:
I believe completely in fiction and as little research as possible’ (Cited
Price, 2001), and speaks of the volatile mix of humour and violence in his
work: ‘I suppose I walk that line between comedy and cruelty … Story is
everything. Story and a bit of attitude’ (Cited O’Hagan, 2001).
McDonagh’s views on art may to some extent have been informed by his
own upbringing, so just a word or two about his biography: Martin
McDonagh was born in the Elephant and Castle district of London on 26th
March 1970 to Irish parents from the West of Ireland (his mother was a
cleaner and part-time housekeeper from Easkey in Sligo, his father a
construction worker from Connemara in Galway). Raised in nearby
Camberwell, McDonagh left school at 16. When his parents returned to
Ireland he and his brother John stayed on in London. He then spent the
next ten years either in what have been called dead-end jobs or
unemployed, but since he never stopped writing and built up a portfolio of
plays that would see him have four productions playing in London in the
same season, rivaling Shakespeare, you could say it was time well spent,
and that there was nothing ‘dead-end’ or ‘out of work’ about him.
McDonagh’s first trilogy of plays, The Leenane Trilogy, was produced
between 1996 and 1997, consisting of The Beauty Queen of Leenane, A
Skull in Connemara, and The Lonesome West. His second trilogy of plays,
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The Aran Islands Trilogy, was produced (partially) between 1996 and
2001, and comprised The Cripple of Inishmaan, The Lieutenant of
Inishmore, and The Banshees of Inisheer (the last of these unproduced).
The film Six Shooter appeared in 2006, and In Bruges in 2008.
McDonagh’s brother wrote the screenplay for Ned Kelly, the 2003 film
starring Heath Ledger, so writing runs in the family, as does a
preoccupation with film. Camberwell, McDonagh’s local London district,
is allegedly also known as Cripple Well, near Cripplegate, where beggars
stood at the ancient city boundaries.
Like Father Ted, The Cripple of Inishmaan takes rural Ireland as its
subject matter, a rural Ireland that time forgot. Akin to Craggy Island,
Inishmaan in 1934 has a far edge of the flat earth feel to it. With its
cartoon violence and in-your-face attack on political correctness it’s also
the world of Beavis and Butthead, Viz and South Park. The Cripple of
Inishmaan has traveled well. It’s been staged in more than forty countries.
There have been at least two Japanese productions. It was produced in
Tokyo in October 1999 as Yumenoshima Inishman and again in several
theatres across Japan in 2004 as Biri to Heren (Mikami, 2005). According
to Joseph Feeney, in what I think is one of more interesting of the early
essays on McDonagh, a relatively new Irish playwright who has attracted a
lot of attention but not necessarily a lot of sustained and serious criticism:
McDonagh manages a highly personal – perhaps unique – blend of three
styles: the mythic realism of Synge, the flashy violence of Tarantino’s Pulp
Fiction … and an unstable postmodernism also found in Tarantino. Synge
appears in his language, settings, rural characters, stunted lives,
sympathetic perspective, and love of storytelling. Tarantino is seen in the
gunshots, bludgeonings, car-accidents, suicides, self-mutilation, bloody
shirts, bashed skulls and bones, microwave-baking of a hamster, even
Slippy Helen’s aggressive egg-throwing. Many of these events, like the
back-seat shooting in Pulp Fiction, are at once very funny and very
shocking. McDonagh’s postmodernism needs more explanation. The word
itself is one of the least clear terms in artistic and cultural discussion. As I
understand it, postmodernism involves exhaustion, instability,
dehumanization, and parody: (1) the exhaustion of literary possibilities and
human hopes; (2) an instability of language, content, form, and
expectation; (3) dehumanization in a bizarre, absurd world, so that content
and form devolve into comic-strip characters, surface action, bright
colours, and simple lines; and (4) a parody of content and form in a mood
of playfulness and irony. (Feeney, 1998: 29-30)
But if he’s a postmodern playwright—parodying the peasantry, too often
idealised in Irish history—then McDonagh also has deep dramatic roots.
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And not just in Irish drama. Ireland’s answer to Shakespeare would
probably be no, but let’s assume it’s in the affirmative. The links between
McDonagh and Shakespeare are tenuous but interesting. In the early stages
of his career, McDonagh had four plays on in London in a single season, at
the age of 27 in the summer of 1997, as many as Shakespeare. By the year
2000 ‘he was more produced in the US than any other dramatist but
Shakespeare’. The Guardian theatre critic Michael Billington said that
McDonagh’s play The Lieutenant of Inishmore made Shakespeare’s
notorious gore-fest Titus Andronicus ‘look like the proverbial vicarage tea
party’. Cue a critic – Mike Wilcock – who came along and produced a
detailed analysis of the two plays showing that McDonagh is indeed a
dramatist following in the bloody footsteps of Shakespeare. Wilcock
argues that as radical and dissenting figures – and as Catholics –
Shakespeare and McDonagh have more in common than the bloodiness of
some of their drama (Wilcock, 2008).
II. What Ish My Nation?
In Shakespeare’s Henry V, the Welsh Captain Fluellen refers to the
‘nation’ of the Irish Captain Macmorris, provoking an outburst from
Macmorris:
FLUELLEN: Captain Macmorris, I think, look you, under your correction,
there is not many of your nation –
MACMORRIS: Of my nation? What ish my nation? Ish a villain and a
bastard and a knave and a rascal? What ish my nation? Who talks of my
nation? (3.3.59-63)
Like Macmorris, McDonagh has issues with his Irishness. He has said
that: ‘Thinking about being Irish only came into my life when I decided to
write Irish plays’ (Cited Fintan O’Toole, 1998). Elsewhere he remarked:
It’s only when I started doing [interviews], and people heard my south
London accent, that the work started to be weighed against my
background. The truth is that I’ve always felt half-Irish, half-English. The
suggestion seems to be that I’m not allowed to write about where my
parents are from. I hate that idea of authenticity, that you must be tied
down only to what you know at first-hand. (Cavendish, 2001)
As the character Joxer Daly says in Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the
Paycock, ‘If you want to know me, come and live with me.’ That’s exactly
what Synge and O’Casey did. Synge lived in Mayo and O’Casey formed
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close associations with the nationalist movement in Dublin and with the
Dublin working-class. McDonagh too knew Ireland like the back of his
hand, and he gave it the back of his hand too. McDonagh is rather like the
twelfth-century colonizer Maurice Fitzgerald as described by Giraldus
Cambrensis, who was considered English in Ireland and accounted Irish in
England: ‘Everyone assumes I’m Irish [says McDonagh] but I don’t see
myself as either English or Irish’ (Cited Price, 2001).
In The Cripple of Inishmaan, when Billy plays the stage Irishman in
his Hollywood screen test he describes himself as:
BILLY: An Irishman! (Pause.) Just an Irishman. With a decent heart on
him, and a decent head on him, and a decent spirit not broken by a
century’s hunger and a lifetime’s oppression! (McDonagh, 1997: 52-3)
Later, the audience realises that this scene was a screen test, when Billy
recalls:
BILLY: To tell you the truth, Bartley, it wasn’t an awful big thing at all to
turn down Hollywood, with the arse-faced lines they had me reading for
them. ‘Can I not hear the wail of the banshees for me, as far as I am from
me barren island home … An Irishman I am, begora! With a heart and a
spirit on me not crushed be a hundred years of oppression. I’ll be getting
me shillelagh out next, wait’ll you see’. A rake of shite. And had me
singing the fecking ‘Croppy Boy’ then ...
BARTLEY: Them was funny lines, Cripple Billy. Do them again.
(McDonagh, 1997: 63)
One of the targets of McDonagh’s drama is Irish sentimentality, or rather
the image of Ireland as a place of easy sentiment. (Though in The Cripple
and his other plays there is an argument as to whether he still succumbs to
sentimentality even as he kicks against it. The politics of pity in literature
– or even just sympathy – is quite complex). Which brings me to The Man
of Aran.
III. ‘Abuses of Reality’, or, Shooting the Messenger:
Revisiting Flaherty’s The Man of Aran (1934)
One of the key elements of The Cripple of Inishmaan is its response to
Robert Flaherty’s classic 1934 film, The Man of Aran:
The Aran Islands of Western Ireland are renowned not only for the
traditional folk culture possessed by their inhabitants, but for their
numerous, well-preserved antiquities which attest to at least five thousand
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years of human habitation, and their great beauty of land and seascape. For
over a century, writers and scientists – and more lately film, radio, and
television producers – have visited Aran, and their many works have
served to familiarize the world with the unique and picturesque way of life
of the islanders. (Messenger 1966: 15)
So begins an essay by Professor John Messenger, an ethnographer (one
engaged in ‘the study of individual contemporary primitive and folk
cultures’) who visited the Aran Islands in 1958 at the start of a ten-year
study. In 1966, Messenger published an essay entitled ‘Man of Aran
Revisited: An Anthropological Critique’. One of Messenger’s purposes,
one of his experiments, was to test the accuracy and authenticity of a series
of well-known works on the Aran Islanders themselves, to see as it were if
the islanders recognised themselves in the mirror of earlier cultural and
anthropological studies. In 1903, in a work entitled The Aran Islands, John
Millington Synge said the West of Ireland was possibly the most primitive
place left in Europe. In 1934, Robert Flaherty, famed director of the 1922
groundbreaking documentary, Nanook of the North, and less famed later
for Elephant Boy (1937), went to Ireland to film Man of Aran (or Nanook
of the West). Messenger’s texts were John M. Synge’s play, Riders to the
Sea (1904), and his study, The Aran Islands, Pat Mullen’s book Hero
Breed (1936), and Robert Flaherty’s film, Man of Aran. Messenger found
that these documents and texts misrepresented the Islanders because of
two factors, nativism and primitivism. Nativism is the tendency or desire
to see native groups or communities as distinctive in terms of their
customs and traditions, and primitivism is the conviction that natives know
best and that there is value in adopting so-called primitive beliefs and
techniques.
Messenger concluded that Flaherty’s film, Man of Aran, was one of the
‘least accurate depictions of Aran cultural reality’ (Messenger, 1966: 40).
Messenger, interestingly, pointed out back in 1966 that many aspects of
the island culture such as “practical joking” were ignored by Flaherty in
favour of manufactured scenes set up for scenery rather than accuracy –
for example, tilling high ground unsuitable for planting, carrying seaweed
in a storm, etc. In a later essay, published in Anthropology Today in 1988,
Messenger wrote:
Flaherty hired a Scottish shark fisherman and craft to teach the fishing
crew how to hunt basking sharks. Near the end of our year of research
during 1959 and 1960 we spent two days at the Irish Folklore Commission
in Dublin viewing Man of Aran many times. Armed with the views of our
informants and our own ethnographic data we discovered over 50 abuses of
reality in the film. (Messenger, 1988: 19)
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Fifty abuses of reality is a lot of abuse. In other words, and with all due
respect, despite winning Best Film of 1934 at the Venice Film Festival,
The Man of Aran was ‘a pile of fecking shite’. These are of course the
words of Slippy Helen in The Cripple of Inishmaan, upon viewing
Flaherty’s film and pegging eggs at the sheet on which it’s being
projected, a sheet that apparently has other stains on it already. Helen
reaches the same conclusion as Professor Messenger:
HELEN: Oh thank Christ the fecker’s over. A pile of fecking shite.
(McDonagh, 1997: 61)
Helen takes a close interest in the shark-fishing scene. In another essay
entitled ‘Fishing for the Sun-Fish or Basking Shark in Irish Waters’,
Arthur Went and Seán Ó Súilleabháin noted that: ‘The scenes of hunting
of basking sharks in the Man of Aran had to be specially staged in 1933
when Robert J. Flaherty was shooting his now famous film, because at that
time the traditional fishery for this species had been abandoned’ (Went
and Ó Súilleabháin, 1966/1967: 91). Flaherty actually considered reviving
the shark industry, but maybe he ran out of costumes, because it appears
that in the absence of the baskers – the pathetic sharks never showed up –
Flaherty was reduced to sending extras dressed in grey donkey jackets into
the water to pretend to be sharks…
José Lanters picks up on this question of accuracy of representation, or
authenticity of culture with regard to The Cripple of Inishmaan,
McDonagh’s play set around the making of Flaherty’s film:
Of all the plays, The Cripple of Inishmaan goes further in taking the notion
of performativity to its logical conclusion by depicting every act as a reenactment of no original. The ‘Aran Islanders’ of McDonagh’s play
perform the parts of ‘Aran Islanders’ in Robert Flaherty’s film, a copy of
which they subsequently watch in the course of the play. The ‘real’ film
they watch (Man of Aran) was billed as a documentary of ‘real’ life on
Aran featuring ‘real’ Aran Islanders, but contains scenes that had no
counterpart in the lives of the islanders on the Inishmore of 1934. The
‘Aran Islanders’ of McDonagh’s play reject the ‘Aran Islanders’ of
Flaherty’s film as bogus, even as their own status as characters in The
Cripple is no more ‘real’ than that of the actors in Man of Aran. In
Hollywood, a real cripple cannot play a cripple as well as a non-crippled
actor, says Cripple Billy, the ‘real’ cripple, who was played in the original
production by the perfectly able-bodied Ruaidhri Conroy. (Lanters, 2007:
15).
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Paddy Lyons, puts it like this: ‘The Cripple of Inishmaan is in many
senses a play of dis-identifications – the island community holds itself
together by scapegoating, an extreme form of dis-identification; and when
the community gathers to watch the film Man of Aran, the response is
again to dis-identify, and not see itself in the on-screen images’ (Lyons,
2008: 64-5).
That urge to dis-identify is evident in John Messenger’s ethnographic
studies in the 1960s. To be offstage is to be obscene, etc. According to
James Joyce, ‘Irish art is the cracked looking-glass of a servant’. In Inis
Beag Revisited: The Anthropologist as Observant Participator (1989),
Messenger pointed out that:
Foremost among the many topics addressed in my writings which have
caused hurling sticks to be brandished on high are the social control
techniques of priests, anti-clericalism, pagan retentions and
reinterpretations in the folk Catholicism, sexual repression, disputes, the
Gaelic Revival as a nativistic movement, primitivism, and impression
management meant to fulfill the expectations of tourists. Yet most of these
topics, among others equally controversial, have graced the plots of novels,
plays, and short stories by Irish writers. (Messenger, 1989: 124)
Why can writers get away with saying things that anthropologists are
barred from saying? Or are writers in Ireland given that freedom at all?
Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, one of the inspirations behind
The Cripple of Inishmaan, is a dark comedy lit up by its lyrical language.
A man who kills his father and wanders into a remote Irish town finds
himself hailed as a hero by a community that likes murderers more than it
does priests or policemen. McDonagh is on record as saying: ‘I read The
Playboy of the Western World and the darkness of the story amazed me’
(Richards, 2003: 202). McDonagh’s plays take us from Synge and Beckett
to the sick bucket, and they do so through visceral language and close-tothe-bone humour, so close to the bone as to be painful at times.
McDonagh’s drama doesn’t extol family values in any ‘traditional’ sense,
and nor are they upheld in Synge’s Playboy. Likewise McDonagh’s plays
are attacked for distorting Ireland when they may be in their own twisted
way closer to the truth as well as the bone, and closer to Synge than
Flaherty.
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IV. The Language Question: Irish English,
Hiberno-English and Synge-Song
That way of representing Irish speech that goes back to Shakespeare and
Ben Jonson hasn’t endeared itself to Irish viewers or reviewers.
McDonagh is acutely aware of the legacy of Synge. According to Nicholas
Grene:
Some critics accuse McDonagh of simply not knowing the dialect well
enough to reproduce it correctly, but it may be more deliberate than that: a
caricature of the lyricism of Synge-song, sardonically consigning it to an
antiquated stage-land … [a] knowing latter-day travesty. (Grene, 1999:
307)
But McDonagh himself claims to be closer to fidelity than parody, when
he says:
In Connemara and Galway, the natural dialogue style is to invert sentences
and use strange inflections. Of course, my stuff is a heightening of that, but
there is a core strangeness of speech, especially in Galway. (McDonagh,
cited in Feeney, 1998: 28).
Moreover, McDonagh was liberated by the Synge-song language he
revived:
Writing in an Irish idiom freed me up as a writer. Until then, my dialogue
was a poor imitation of Pinter and Mamet. I used to try and write stories set
in London, but it was just too close to home. Now I’ve shaken off those
influences, I can move back. (Cavendish, 2001).
As regards The Cripple of Inishmaan, some critics speak of “the bleeding
hearts beneath all its blarney” (Sommer, 1998), the sentiment under the
Synge-song, and the question of the haunting presence of the stage
Irishman, from Shakespeare’s Captain Macmorris to Channel 4’s Father
Ted remains a live issue – are we laughing at or with?
V. Staging the Body of the Nation
Billy’s disability, played on and preyed on by the community in which he
lives, which both ties him to his home and gives him a potential mealticket out, has been seen as a metaphor for the Ireland he inhabits, or in
Martin McDonagh’s Celtic Tiger Feet
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Billy’s own terms as a corrective to the emotional paralysis or fixity of his
community. As Michael O’Neill remarks:
McDonagh writes, as did Synge, with an ear that reassembles the
Gaelicized English of the Aran Islands into a melody both comic and
deeply sad – but, unlike Synge, his language is sprinkled generously with
rollicking obscenities. The London-based McDonagh, whose Connemara
Trilogy is steeped in Irish self-deprecation, here is at times more cynical,
setting up a game in which Helen plays England to her brother Bartley’s
Ireland by smashing eggs in his hair … Limping and dragging himself to
America and back, Billy Claven embodies the impossible and improbable
legacy that Ireland, deformed by its history, cannot escape. (O’Neill, 1998:
259-60)
Here again is that idea that Billy represents an Ireland “deformed by its
history”, as though he was the nation in miniature, the product of damage.
(Those who have read Patrick McCabe’s 1992 novel The Butcher Boy will
be aware of this Irish tradition of depicting the nation’s health – mental
and physical – through a single character, as a sort of national allegory
where childhood and history are intertwined). Ben Brantley also believes
that Billy’s body and the place he lives in have something in common.
Brantley speaks explicitly of “the warping effects of small-town
claustrophobia”. When Billy says, “Well, there are plenty round here just
as crippled as me, only it isn’t on the outside it shows”, the pathos of this
line is undercut by what follows, as Babbybobby takes a length of lead
piping and starts hitting Billy with it (McDonagh, 1997: 66). (Incidentally,
Alasdair Gray’s Working Legs is a play produced in 1997 about an ablebodied character living in a world of people who do not have his supposed
ability. He is the odd one out). What are we to do with McDonagh’s cruel
humour and caricatures, his paddywhackery and skullduggery?
According to Joseph O’Connor: ‘In the theatre, the bittersweet vision
of Martin McDonagh has turned the clapped-out Oirland of sentimentalised
Syngesong on its head’ (O’Connor, 1998: 248). But is it the same old
Synge-song? And was Synge really sentimental. Given McDonagh’s
reaction to Playboy of the Western World, finding in it darkness rather
than light. Vic Merriman sees it differently: ‘McDonagh’s plays …
substitute for human vitality a set of monsters frozen in the stony gaze of
the triumphant bourgeoisie’ (Merriman, 2004: 256). Romantic Ireland may
be dead and gone, as Yeats said a hundred years ago, but that’s no reason
not to dig it up again and give it a good kicking, or smash its dead skull in
with a mallet, as happens in McDonagh’s A Skull in Connemara to the
tune of Dana’s ‘All Kinds of Everything’, winner of the 1970 Eurovision
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Song Contest, which one character calls “Music to hammer dead fellas to”,
probably a play on the Roy Wood/Wizard 1970s ‘B’ side ‘Music to
Commit Suicide To’.
As John Messenger pointed out, in Ireland, “impression management
meant to fulfill the expectations of tourists” took the place of critical or
realistic reflections on Irish life as it was actually lived. It had to be
sanitized for foreign consumption to the pint where even the natives
swallowed the lie. José Lanters observes that:
The running gag in The Cripple of Inishmaan – that ‘Ireland mustn’t be
such a bad place, so, if the Yanks want to come here to do their filming’
(TC 13), and ‘if French fellas want to live in Ireland’ (13), and ‘if coloured
fellas want to come to Ireland’ (25), and ‘if German fellas want to come to
Ireland’ (37), and ‘if sharks want to come to Ireland’ (55), and ‘if cripple
fellas turn down Hollywood to come to Ireland’ (63) – suggests that the
country’s value is not inherent (the country is great and therefore attracts
tourists), but must be gauged in terms of its potential to attract visitors
(tourists come here and therefore the country is great). (Lanters, 2007: 15)
McDonagh is a hugely successful playwright and screenwriter now, but
he’s a slippery character too as a writer, and he does divide critics, a fact
that is evident from the critical reception that his work has had. Relatively
speaking he’s a new writer, even after twenty years on the scene, but he’s
already beginning to attract a body of criticism that goes beyond reviews
and previews.
VI. What the Critics Say
To say that critical opinion on McDonagh has been divided is an
understatement. Shaun Richards identifies the ways in which he is both
innovative and part of a particular tradition:
From Synge to Martin McDonagh the rural is home to viciousness and
violence. But there are still questions as to what is staged and examined
through that well-established lens, for even when parodied, as in
McDonagh … what is staged is an Ireland set firmly within the horizon of
expectations and has little to do with the actualities captured in the
newspaper headlines – above all those of the financial papers. (Richards,
2007: 8)
It’s a question of a battle between ‘realities’. There is premonition and
prophecy in McDonagh’s kick up the backside of conservative complacency
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about Celtic Tigers and never having it so good. According to Ondrej
Pilney:
To claim that the plays of Martin McDonagh offer representations of Irish
reality is equivalent to regarding the films of Quentin Tarantino as images
of urban life in the USA, or treating David Lynch’s Twin Peaks as a
microcosm of present-day America … Only very few would nowadays
view the exuberant spectacle presented by a McDonagh play as a realistic
sketch of life in rural Ireland … So far, the only notably outspoken—and
also notably comical—exception seems to have been the campaign of the
Catholic Action League of Massachusetts against a school performance of
The Cripple of Inishmaan in 2001 which characterised the play as ‘an
obscene, degrading depiction of Irish people, Catholic priests, and the
Catholic religion’ which ‘portrays the Irish as extraordinarily crude, vulgar,
un-Christian, uncharitable people’. The experience of watching the play –
‘written by a fellow named Martin McDonagh who despite his name is
actually British’ – was outlined by an outraged Catholic parent as follows:
‘It was just horrible. I can’t describe it. It was so insulting and degrading,
and I was there with my daughter’. Despite that, not many are really so
adamant about McDonagh’s corruptive influence these days. (Pilny, 2004:
225)
Is there any reality in Tarantino? Or in McDonagh? Is it all grotesquerie?
(Writers like Richard Wright or Bret Easton Ellis have depicted poverty
and violence as realities thrown up racial and social segregation – even
Jane Austen knew a thing or two about class and gender and the complex
nature of reality – she is as rigorous in her representation of a particular
social world as James Kelman or Irvine Welsh.) Others are more highbrow
and don’t raise an eyebrow. Graham Whybrow insists that “McDonagh
writes both within a tradition and against a mythology” (Cited in Rees,
2005: 28). What tradition? Which mythology? The false opposition
between critical and sentimental perspectives fails to fully take account of
the social realism and satirical force of McDonagh’s drama. The work of
Irish writers from Synge, O’Casey and Joyce to Edna O’Brien, Marina
Carr and Ann Enright tackles idealizations and sentimentalizations of
Ireland.
Vic Merriman is arguably Martin McDonagh’s harshest critic, despite
his name. He’s not a very merry man at all. Speaking of McDonagh’s
dramatic output, Merriman says: ‘These plays offer a kind of voyeuristic
aperture on the antics of white trash whose reference point is more closely
allied to the barbarous conjurings of Jerry Springer than to the continuities
of an indigenous tradition of dramatic writing’ (Merriman, 1999: 314).
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Merriman sees McDonagh as pandering to the lowest common
denominator:
There is a view that McDonagh’s work is in some postmodern sense
metatheatrical, that the whole project is a wonderful jape in which the
jaded repertoire of Boucicault, Synge, and the ‘lesser’ Abbey playwrights
has been plundered as an antique hoard of quirky, dated images. Such
theatrical freaks have no currency in an urbane present, so to parade them
in all their benightedness is a big joke, in which the laugh is on the naive
drama of a past which really must be left behind. From the point of view of
the art form itself, one of the casualties here is the radical potential of those
theatrical figures from the past. (Merriman, 1999: 315)
Soon after The Cripple of Inishmaan was staged – to wide acclaim –Vic
Merriman called McDonagh’s drama ‘The Theatre of Tiger Trash’ (1999),
a backward-looking drama at odds with a fast forward moving nation. The
term ‘Tiger Trash’ is insulting for two reasons. First, because there was no
Celtic Tiger, beyond a housing bubble and some dodgy dealing, and even
if there was a stuffed tiger, like a pantomime horse, those who rode it have
no right to be vilifying the poor that followed in their wake, or that made
up its four legs. Ireland’s Celtic Tiger was always a Paper Tiger.
Some of the vitriol to which Synge was subject a hundred years ago
has been visited on the head of Martin McDonagh. When McDonagh
wrote a play about the IRA/INLA – The Lieutenant of Inishmore (2001),
probably his funniest work – he wrote it in the vain hope that it would get
him killed. It never worked. But he has had a few caustic reviews. One of
these appeared in The Threepenny Review in 2000. Written by Gerald
Weales it was called ‘Feck the Fecking Success’. Curiously, Weales
seemed to think that Flaherty’s film would be a kind of cure-all for
McDonagh’s audiences as it would give them a counterweight to his
fantasies in The Cripple of Inishmaan:
If Man of Aran were known to a wider audience today, it might be possible
to see the film as a comment on McDonagh’s Ireland. For McDonagh,
whose Irishmen face forces less elemental than Flaherty’s, the characters
do not end as determined profiles against a stark landscape, but as liars,
beggars, criminals for whom verbal abuse and incidental cruelty provide
the only recourse for empty lives. (Weales, 2000: 27)
This tuppence worth is a severe judgement, and it ignores the fact that if
we’re looking for liars we need look no further than Flaherty. In fact,
when John Messenger spoke to locals about Flaherty’s Man of Aran in the
early 1960s he found that they laughed at scenes where fishermen struggle
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to keep a boat afloat and say that three sixteen year olds could do the job
no problem. It sounds as if McDonagh is closer to the truth than Flaherty.
That’s fiction for you. Shaun Richards provides a useful corrective to this
notion that Irish drama has been ragged through the mud, traduced and
travestied by McDonagh: ‘Condemnation of McDonagh has frequently
been couched in terms of a falling away from the achievement of Synge
who, in his time, was condemned in terms remarkably similar to those now
directed at McDonagh’ (Richards, 2003: 212). Debates rehearsed a
hundred years ago in responses to J. M. Synge come back to haunt Irish
culture in responses to Martin McDonagh. As has been pointed out, the
fact that Synge relied on a man called ‘Martin McDonough’ for authentic
props for his Aran Island plays suggests there may be a ghost in the works.
Vic Merriman, as I’ve said, is not an admirer of McDonagh. Merriman
sees McDonagh as trading in stereotypes and serving them up for the
titillation of a middle-class audience, and he maintains that:
McDonagh’s plays are often greeted as parodies of the works of John
Millington Synge. This needs to be challenged. In staging peasant life,
Synge unambiguously confronted the ideological project to which it had
been co-opted: a travesty serving the need felt by a resurgent nationalist
bourgeoisie for a foundational myth … McDonagh’s work – notably The
Cripple of Inishmaan – parades the emptied shell of peasant life for smug
dismissal by a metropolitan audience. The journey from Synge to
McDonagh takes us all the way from images which challenge the
submerged ideological positions of an emergent neocolonial class to those
which collude in reinforcing them. (Merriman, 1999: 316)
Guardian theatre critic Michael Billington is more positive:
His sources are visible for all to see, from Synge to Tarantino, and his
Ireland is based not on real experience of the place but on an almost
postmodern recollection of Irish drama in the last century’ (Cited in
O’Hagan, 2001).
Gerald Weales, though, shares Merriman’s view of McDonagh as a
cannibalizer and mongrelizer of Irish dramatic traditions that he fails to do
justice to, and as a mere sensationalist rather than an edgy dramatist: “The
catalogue of major and minor cruelties finally reduces everything to one
level, the plateau of quaintness on which McDonagh has built his Irish
villages” (Weales, 2000: 26).
In an Irish context, there are informed observers who see realism rather
than romanticism in McDonagh’s no-holds-barred representations of
violence (McDonald, 2008). Our attitude as readers and audiences to the
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depiction of violence, the representation of cruelty, is complex. Public
executions were once popular forms of entertainment, attracting large
crowds. In a work entitled The Theatre and Its Double (Paris, 1938),
Antonin Artaud had mapped out a new theatre, a theatre of the spectacle,
stripped of the character-based, individualistic, bourgeois psychology of
modern drama, a drama of puppets and Peeping Toms. Artaud declared:
A concept of the theatre has been lost. And in direct proportion to the
manner in which the theatre limits itself only to allowing us to penetrate
into the intimacy of some puppet or to transforming the spectator into a
Peeping Tom, it is to be expected that the elite will turn away from it and
the crowds will go to the movies, the music halls, or the circuses, in search
of violent satisfactions which at least have no false pretenses.
After the wear and tear to which our sensibilities have been subjected,
it is certain that, before all, we have need of a theatre that will awaken us:
heart and nerves.
The misdeeds of the psychological theatre since Racine have made us
unaccustomed to that violent and immediate action which the theatre must
possess. Then come the movies to assassinate us with shadows, which,
when filtered through a machine, no longer are able to reach our senses.
For ten years they have kept us in a state of ineffectual torpor, in which all
our faculties seemed to have been dulled.
The agonizing and catastrophic period in which we live makes us sense
the urgent need for a theatre which will not be left behind by the events of
the day, and which will have within us deep resonance and which will
dominate the unstability of the times we live in.
Our long familiarity with theatre as a form of distraction has led us to
forget the idea of a serious theatre, a theatre which will shove aside our
representations, and breathe into us the burning magnetism of images and
finally will act upon us in such a way that there will take place within us a
therapy of the soul whose effects will not be forgotten.
All action is cruelty. It is with this idea of action pushed to its extreme
limit that the theatre will renew itself. (Artaud, 1958: 75)
In a similar vein, writing hundred years ago, shortly before his death, John
Millington Synge said: “Before poetry can be human again it must learn to
be brutal”. That could stand as a testament to the writing of Martin
McDonagh, the brutal bard with his cruel comedy, cartoon grotesquerie,
and verbal wizardry.
It turns out it was the ‘Celtic Tiger’ that was trash all along, a mythical
beast conjured up by those addicted to speculation and the violent swings
of boom and bust. Recent criticism of McDonagh, post- Tiger, is less
condemnatory and more understanding than initial knee-jerk reactions.
He’s now more likely to be treated seriously than trashed. In an excellent
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essay on a more recent play, Eamonn Jordan analyses A Behanding in
Spokane (2010) through the lens of Grand-Guignol, and displays a degree
of sensitivity, subtlety and sophistication absent from earlier commentators,
maintaining that McDonagh’s work evinces:
a challenging and contentious disposition towards the staging of cruelty
and moments of intense terror that are enhanced by performance idioms
which blend the farcical, the surreal, the horrific, the melodramatic, and the
carnivalesque. When these diverse styles are drawn together they suggest a
way of making theatre that is very close both in dramaturgical emphasis
and in their potential performance sensibility to the Théâtre du GrandGuignol. (Jordan, 2012: 448)
In grasping the complexities of McDonagh’s theatre, Bakhtin is as relevant
as Behan. Above all, McDonagh is a dramatist who crosses borders and
pushes boundaries. He belongs both to a tradition stretching back to
Synge, and to a new generation of Irish writers as such of twilights
disguised as false dawns as they are of riding stuffed tigers.
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McDonagh’s Leenane Trilogy’, The Journal of Religion and Theatre 5,
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Anon. (2006), ‘Profile: Martin McDonagh: The “greatest” playwright
looks forward to Oscar night’, The Sunday Times (5 February),
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, accessed 28/11/09.
Artaud, Antonin. (1958), ‘The Theatre and Cruelty’, trans. James O.
Morgan, The Tulane Drama Review 2, 3, pp. 75-77.
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Cavendish, Dominic. (2001), ‘He’s back, and only half as arrogant: Five
years after his explosive playwriting debut, Martin McDonagh’s
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Chambers, Lillian, and Jordan, Eamonn (eds.). (2006), The Theatre of
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September 11, producers have backed off West End transfer for black
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Heilpern, John. (2006), ‘Martin McDonagh’s Lieutenant: Best Bloody
Play I Ever Saw’, The New York Observer (19 March),
http://www.observer.com/node/38556#, accessed 28 November 2009.
Heininge, Kathleen. (2007), ‘An Invigorating Romp Through McDonagh’,
Irish Literary Supplement 27, 1, pp. 18-19.
Eamonn Jordan, ‘A Grand-Guignol Legacy: Martin McDonagh’s A
Behanding in Spokane’, Irish Studies Review 20, 4 (2012): 447-461.
Lahr, John. (2006), ‘Blood Simple: Martin McDonagh’s Lieutenant of
Inishmore’, The New Yorker (13 March),
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/03/13/060313crth_theatre,
accessed 28/11/09.
Lanters, José. (2000), ‘Playwrights of the Western World: Synge, Murphy,
McDonagh’, in Stephen Watt, Eileen Morgan, and Shakir Mustafa
Martin McDonagh’s Celtic Tiger Feet
161
(eds.), A Century of Irish Drama: Widening the Stage. Indiana
University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, pp. 204-22.
—. (2007), ‘The Identity Politics of Martin McDonagh’, in Richard
Rankin Russell (ed.), Martin McDonagh: A Casebook. Routledge,
Oxford, pp. 9-24.
Lonergan, Patrick. (2004), ‘“The laughter will come of itself. The tears are
inevitable”: Martin McDonagh, Globalization, and Irish Theatre
Criticism’, Modern Drama 47, 4, pp. 636-58.
—. (2005), ‘Too Dangerous to be Done? Martin McDonagh’s Lieutenant
of Inishmore’, Irish Studies Review 13, 1, pp. 65-78.
Lydon, John. (1994), Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs, Hodder and
Stoughton, London.
Lyons, Paddy (2008), ‘The Montage of Semblance: Martin McDonagh’s
Dramaturgy’, in Paddy Lyons and Alison O’Malley-Younger (eds.),
No Country For Old Men: Fresh Perspectives on Irish Literature,
Peter Lang, Oxford and Bern, pp. 47-67.
McDonagh, Martin. (1997), The Cripple of Inishmaan, Methuen, London.
—. (1999), Plays: 1: The Beauty Queen of Leenane; A Skull in
Connemara; The Lonesome West, Methuen, London.
—. (2001), The Lieutenant of Inishmore, Methuen, London.
—. (2003), The Pillowman, Faber, London.
McDonald, Henry (2008), ‘He has made people think about violence …
the violence he portrays is a very true picture of modern urban Ireland’,
The Guardian (25 April),
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/apr/25/theatre.northernireland,
accessed 28/11/09.
Mahony, Christina Hunt. (1998), ‘Barry, McPherson and McDonagh in the
States: Cops, Critics, and Cripples’, Irish Literary Supplement 17, 2,
pp. 6-8.
Merriman, Vic. (1999), ‘Decolonisation Postponed: The Theatre of Tiger
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—. (2004), ‘Staging Contemporary Ireland: Heartsickness and Hopes
Deferred’, in Shaun Richards (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to
Twentieth-Century Irish Drama, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, pp. 244-57.
Messenger, John C. (1966), ‘Man of Aran Revisited: An Anthropological
Critique’, Irish University Review 3, 9, pp. 15-47.
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McDonagh’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore’, Irish University Review 38,
2, pp. 325-69.
PART III
BORDER CROSSINGS
CHAPTER NINE
THE “ROARING IRISHMAN”:
WILLIAM MAGINN, IRELAND
AND BLACKWOOD'S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE
ALISON O’MALLEY YOUNGER
AND JOHN STRACHAN
The whisky, frisky, rummy, gummy, brandy, no dandy Irishman.
(Noctes Ambrosianae, no. 1, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, March
1822)
In the summer of 1821 a commotion occurred on the premises of
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine at Prince’s Street, Edinburgh. Inside
stood a gentleman with a very strong Irish brogue loudly denouncing the
periodical and demanding from its proprietor and editor, William
Blackwood, the identity of the paper’s libellous Irish contributor from the
County Cork. Though not an everyday event, such a ruckus was fairly
unremarkable for a magazine which regularly provoked brawls— and law
suits—for its merciless, often ad hominem attacks directed for the most
part at Whigs, Radicals, Cockneys and unsuspecting members of the
literati and liberal intelligentsia. In this instance, however, the complaint
was actually a jest undertaken by one of Blackwood’s brilliant though
volatile and incautious contributors: this “stamping, ramping, swaggering,
staggering, leathering swash of an Irishman” (BEM, 1822: 370)1 was none
other than their Irish correspondent Dr William Maginn, come to introduce
himself and resolved to make a career away from the Cork schoolmastering to which he was not, perhaps, best suited.
William Maginn was a man of many talents, and almost as many
pseudonyms and alter-egos. Before his visit to Edinburgh he had first
introduced himself to Blackwood’s (or ‘Maga’ as the publication was
fondly and colloquially known) as Ralph Tuckett Scott and had
contributed various squibs and satires to the journal both anonymously and
The “Roaring Irishman”
167
under the initials O. P. and M. N. With his dissolute ways Maginn is
commonly accepted as an inspiration for Captain Charlie Shandon in W.
M. Thackeray’s Pendennis (1850), but he is perhaps best remembered as
the waspish Hibernian wit who contributed streams of satire, parodies and
invective to Blackwood’s, who borrowed the magazine’s existing,
roistering, bibulous persona of Morgan Odoherty2—to the point where he
became identified with the character in the mind of its later readership—
and who was lead author on six of the first eighteen numbers of the Noctes
Ambrosianae, the comic dialogues published between 1822 and 1835 in
episodes written collaboratively by J. G. Lockhart, John Wilson and,
initially, by Maginn himself.
Described by William Bates as a standard-bearer, “a giant in
literature,—an erratic genius, Protean in intellect as in appellation” (Bates,
1883: 40) Maginn was also extravagantly lauded by his contemporaries as
“abler than Coleridge” (Bates, 1883: 41) 3 in philosophy and “equal to
Swift” in satire. 4 “His learning”, admitted Samuel Carter Hall, who
strongly disapproved of Maginn’s moral character and drunkenness:
...was profound; his wit of the tongue and the pen ready, pointed, caustic
and brilliant, his essays, tales, poems, scholastic disquisitions - in short his
writings upon all conceivable topics were of the very highest order (Bates,
1883: 40) .5
By turns astute and scurrilous, generous one moment and venomous the
next, in his barbed insightfulness and his playful high intellectualism
Maginn caught the tone of ‘Maga’ perfectly, contributing satirical squibs
and humorous articles combined with meditations on the condition of
Ireland; a matter of particular interest to the High Toryism of the magazine
in the 1820s, with the issue of Catholic Emancipation and moves towards
reform in that country the subject of some heated polemic.
As Louise Imogen Guiney remarked in her preface to an 1897 edition
of the poetry of James Clarence Mangan, Maginn’s reputation did not long
endure after his death:
It seems ironic to recall to the present generation of readers the Sir Morgan
Odoherty of Blackwood's, the star of Fraser’s and the Noctes, now cinis et
manes et fabula, the joyous, the learned, the amazing William Maginn,
LL.D., who, because he reaped a temporal reward as the most magazinable
of men, has all but perished from the heaven of remembered literature
(Guiney, 1897: 35).
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Chapter Nine
Happily, in more recent times Maginn’s work as a magazinist has started
to be read once again. This chapter adds to the ongoing revival of interest
in Maginn, part of the ongoing renaissance of Blackwood’s studies. 6
However, it also does something new in focusing on his border crossing
contribution to the proudly Scottish ‘Maga’. We discuss how this dissolute
Hibernian genius became one of the leading lights in Blackwood’s, where
he irreverently wielded his rapier wit with equal force against Scots and
Irish targets alike (alongside English Cockneys, Whigs, and radical poets)
partly for jest, partly for sport, and partly from a kind of cheery partisan
malice. It considers how Maginn’s writings for Blackwood’s discussed the
state of Ireland, and how these demonstrate the tonal shifts of the Scottish
magazine in its attitude to that country in the 1820s. In short, this “Roaring
Irishman” was a worthy contemporary of John Gibson Lockhart and John
Wilson in the vanguard of both Romantic-era satire and contemporary
magazine culture.
I
In a ‘Literary Portrait’ of William Hamilton Maxwell published in
Bentley’s Miscellany in 1840, William Maginn turned his satirical quill to
the characteristics of the “gentleman class in Ireland”. With characteristic
brio he described these fellows as being:
Eternally in debt or drink or duelling, [a] horsewhip-handling, triggerpulling, lady-killing, claret-drinking, steeple-chasing, hot-headed, puzzlepated, tumultuous race of gentlemen issuing from “Ould Thrinity”
(Maxwell, 1859: xi).
Though not a consciously autobiographical sketch there is perhaps an
element of self-portraiture here in Maginn’s depiction of the dashing but
dissipated aspects of the men who constituted what Terry Eagleton has
characterised—with an equal degree of stereotyping—as that “brawling,
gluttonous, chronically-inebriated crew” (Eagleton, 1995: 58); the
Protestant Anglo-Irish gentry. Though not the kind of social-climbing
Irishman, like Thomas Moore, who cultivated the aristocracy (“Tommy
loves a lord” (Kelly, 2008: 304) laughed his friend Byron), Maginn
certainly identified, at least in part, with the last three adjectives, not least
in his adoption in the pages of ‘Maga’ of the pre-existing persona of the
hard-drinking and louche Blackwood’s character Ensign Morgan
O’Doherty, the boozy soldier who became, as Ralph Wardle has observed,
“the embodiment of Irishness in several men’s minds—and most of them
dyed-in-the-wool Scots” (Wardle, 1933: 716-27).7
The “Roaring Irishman”
169
It is worth pausing over Maginn’s part-mocking approbation of these
dissolute gallants as it locates him within a cross-border spectrum of
nation and nationalism which fuelled controversies about Irishness and
Anglo-Irishness in the early nineteenth-century. Due to the benighted
condition and disenfranchisement of most of the native Catholics the
Anglo-Irish ruling classes were sometimes stereotypically perceived as
feckless, venal, parvenu parasites; an arriviste, morally incontinent and
irresponsible squirearchy, lacking in rectitude and intent on distancing
themselves—socially and often geographically—from the people they
ruled. Maginn’s view is more nuanced. In Bentley’s he clearly sympathises
with the bluff, unthrifty frolicking and rollicking of these gallants by
presenting their vices as virtues, albeit in the form of a joshing burlesque
as opposed to a didactic sermon. However, in more serious mode he also
had very hard words for the absentee landlords who sucked capital out of
Ireland, neglected their estates and their duties to their tenants, creating
resentments which, he felt, were seized upon by dangerous political
radicals and anti-Union zealots spreading sedition.
Maginn’s Tory paternalism, unionism and pro-establishment views,
allied at the same time to the rakish wit manifested in his irrepressible jeux
d’esprit in Maga, made Maginn an apt contributor to Blackwood’s, that
principal conduit for high Tory wit in Scotland. 8 And high Tory the
journal certainly was. Nonetheless, though ‘Maga’ was “ferociously Tory”
(Duncan, 2006: 70), this was a Toryism that was witty, quick-witted and
decidedly nostalgic.
I like their Toryism’ wrote Hartley Coleridge of the fictional inhabitants of
Ambrose’s Tavern, ‘because it is of the old, hearty, cavalier, fox-hunting,
beef and port kidney, such as Ben [Jonson], and Shakespeare … would
have chimed in with (Morrison, 2006: 40).
‘Maga’ adopted a political stance which upheld the “good old cause” of
Toryism, satirically excoriating “rats and Radicals” (Morrison, 2001: 148)
but tempering this with the idiosyncratic and profoundly humorous
posturing, puffing and persiflage of its pseudonymical contributors, not
least in the symposium of unruly but brilliant Bacchanalians who made up
the staple imaginary guests of Ambrose’s Edinburgh hostelry in the
Noctes: ‘Christopher North’, ‘Timothy Tickler’, the ‘Ettrick Shepherd’ and
‘Morgan O’Doherty’. In Alan Lang Strout’s account, in that long-running
series these “gay young Tory wits” established an “intimate relationship
with their readers” which made Blackwood’s “the most intimate of
magazines” (Strout, 1936: 497). The enduring popularity of the Noctes,
indeed, derived precisely from its ability to startle and shock in the
170
Chapter Nine
dialogues’ provocative discussions, rough-elbowed satires and sometimes
near-libellous lampoons. “Touch it as you will”, counselled Robert Louis
Stevenson, “it gives out shrewd galvanic shocks, which may perhaps
brighten and shake up this smoke-dried and punctilious generation”
(Strout, 1936: 493). The quicksilver intellect of the founding authors, not
the least of them Maginn, saw the Noctes become an embodiment of postByronic Regency literary sprezzatura and brio.
II
William Maginn, who possessed, in B. G. McCarthy’s opinion, “the
tongue of an adder and the heart of a lamb” (MacCarthy, 1943: 350), was
born, the son of a schoolmaster, on 10 July 1793 in Cork, “a place”,
according to Margaret Oliphant’s weak jest, then “more associated with
pigs and salted provisions than with literature” (Oliphant, 1897: 362). In
fact, the Cork of Maginn’s youth, far from being some extended pig-sty,
was a hive of literary and intellectual activity. Terry Eagleton makes some
large claims: the city was “A stronger literary centre than Belfast’ and
‘more active than Dublin in the publication of fiction” (Eagleton, 1998:
59) and R. Shelton Mackenzie’s account is even more exalted—“The
Athens of Ireland” (MacKenzie, 1854: iv). The city was, moreover, a
nursery to left-field literary talents such as Maginn and the Reverend
Francis Sylvester Mahony (also known as the rakish Father Prout);
“brilliant wastrels”—in Eagleton’s view—who “lavish[ed] their
considerable philological talents on poems in praise of port or wicked
burlesques of Wordsworth” (Eagleton, 1998: 266).
These talents were evident from an early age in Maginn. He swiftly
showed a precocious intellect which some have seen as savantism; Miriam
Thrall claims, for instance, that “he lisped Latin in babyhood” (Thrall,
1934: 166). At the age of eleven, fluent in a number of languages “the Boy
Bachelor”—as Robert Shelton Mackenzie described him—matriculated at
Trinity College, Dublin. After graduating in 1811 he taught in his father’s
academy, and thence proceeded to an LL.D from his alma mater. When
the higher degree was awarded in 1816, he supposedly became the
youngest ever recipient of the award from that university.
Though a prodigious satirist in his native land, notably in his early
contributions to the Irish journal the Freeholder, Maginn’s earliest
experiment in publication outside of Ireland came about in 1819, when,
under the name of P. J. Crossman, he began submitting articles, squibs and
parodies to William Jerdan’s Literary Gazette. As well as enjoying a
modicum of success in that London-based forum, he also turned his
The “Roaring Irishman”
171
attention north, to the increasingly popular Blackwood’s Edinburgh
Magazine, bombarding it with the unsolicited fruits of his pen under the
various pseudonyms of ‘Olinthus Petre, D.D’ (sometimes ‘O. P.’) and, as
we have seen, ‘M. N.’, and ‘Ralph Tuckett Scott’. Once established as a
contributor Maginn parodied Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth and Coleridge,
wrote on Ireland and, later and with Wilson and Lockhart, created the
early Noctes.
Maginn initially made his name in Blackwood’s as a parodist and
satirist who joined the ranks of ‘Maga’’s radicals and cockney-bashers.
His first substantial verse satire in Blackwood’s, ‘Don Juan Unread’,
appeared in November 1819 and demonstrates the satirist’s method very
well. The poem is a comic imitation of Wordsworth’s ‘Yarrow Unvisited’,
printed to the left of Maginn’s poem, which attacks Byron and his Whig
and radical literary contemporaries (Fig. 9-1 shows the poem as set).
Fig. 9-1. William Maginn, from ‘Don Juan Unread’ (1819)
Maginn’s poem is prefaced by an imitation of S. T. Coleridge’s famous
‘Of the Fragment of ‘Kubla Khan’’, which describes Coleridge’s
composing ‘Kubla Khan’ in his sleep after reading Purchas’s Pilgrimage,
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Chapter Nine
but being afterwards disturbed from transcription—once awoken—by the
visit of the person from Porlock. ‘M. N.’, Maginn’s pseudonym, has
instead been reading the Edinburgh Review, Archibald Constable’s Whig
magazine, ‘Maga’’s despised literary and political rival, with inevitable
results:
MR EDITOR:
I composed the following poem on Tuesday-night last, between the hours
of eleven and twelve o'clock, during a sound sleep, into which I had fallen
while in the act of attempting to peruse Constable's Magazine. While I
slept I was busily employed in versifying, and should, I am sure, have
composed much more, but that I unfortunately threw the Magazine off the
table upon my foot, which instantly awaked me. A half-hundred could not
have descended with more weight, a circumstance which proves how very
heavy the articles contained in that work must be; and I feel the effects of it
yet. I send my lines merely as a psychological curiosity like Kubla Khan. It
is a remarkable fact, that a poem of Mr Wordsworth’s, ‘Yarrow Unvisited’,
bears a resemblance to this of mine; how to account for this coincidence I
know not. 1 remain, Sir, your humble servant, M. N (BEM, 1819: 194).
But Maginn’s poem says little about Coleridge, or, indeed, Wordsworth.
His satire is as much political as literary, as he attacks Byron’s Don Juan
as a licentious waste of poetic talent: “What’s Juan but a shameless tale /
that breaks all rules asunder?” (BEM, 1819: 195). Blackwood’s veered in
its treatment of Byron from eulogistic praise to vituperative moral
condemnation, and here the poet is described in his cloven-footed mood.
In ‘Don Juan Unread’ Byron is traduced alongside Blackwood’s usual cast
of villainous literary and political adversaries: the Whig grandees of
Holland House and the ‘cockney chorus’ of Leigh Hunt, William Hazlitt
and John Keats, alongside a dig at the author of Frankenstein:
Let Whiggish folk, frae Holland House,
Who have been lying, prating,
Read Don Giovanni, ‘tis their own,
A child of their creating.
On jests profane they love to feed,
And there they are - and many,
But we, who link not with the crew,
Regard not Don Giovanni.
There’s Godwin's daughter, Shelley’s wife,
A writing fearful stories;
There's Hazlitt, who with Hunt and Keats,
Brays forth in Cockney chorus (BEM, 1819: 194).
The “Roaring Irishman”
173
In his catalogue of Whig iniquity, Maginn catches the true Blackwoodian
vein. However, as well as paying out Blackwood’s Scot rivals the
Edinburgh and the London crowd of cockneys and oppositionalist
politicians, Maginn also adds an Irish dimension to his satire, attacking the
poet who became his usual suspect, Thomas Moore, for the supposedly
lascivious verse of Poetical Works of the late Thomas Little (1801), with
its ‘list of loves’. Maginn also mocks two of the most notable
contemporary Irish novelist, both of whom were not to his taste. The
Reverend C. R. Maturin (‘the parson’) is rebuked for the allegedly
amorous themes of his recent novel Women; or, Pour Et Contre; a Tale
(published by Constable in Edinburgh in 1818). The work of Lady Morgan
(published by the notorious self-publicist Henry Colburn), a novelist who
had Whig sympathies, is bluntly dismissed as “filth”, and its author
dismissed as “the granny”:
There’s pleasant Thomas Moore, a lad
Who sings of Rose and Fanny:
Why throw away these wits so gay
To take up Don Giovanni?
…
Let Colburn's town-bred cattle snuff
The filths of Lady Morgan,
Let Maturin to amorous themes
Attune his barrel organ
We will not read them, will not hear
The parson or the granny;
And, I dare say, as bad as they,
Or worse, is Don Giovanni (BEM, 1819: 195).
Maginn takes the preoccupations of the Scots wits, but adds a specifically
Irish frame of reference to his satire.
III
In 1821, after his outrageous introductory Prince’s Street prank William
Maginn quickly became friends with ‘Maga’’s editor and proprietor
William Blackwood and soon became part of ‘Ebony’s’ remarkable troika
of Tory satirists—John Wilson, John Gibson Lockhart and William
Maginn—who, according to James Thomson (‘B.V.’), were “let loose
upon Whigs, Radicals, Benthamites, Joe-Humists, Cockneys [and]
heretics” (Thomson, 1889: 41). Marshalled by Blackwood, Maginn took
his place in the ranks, in Thomson’s colourful phraseology “ramping and
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raging, bellowing and roaring, full of tropical ardour and savagery, neither
taking nor giving quarter” (Thomson, 1889: 41).
The timing was right for Maginn to enter this wild and witty band of
brothers. In a letter of 1820 Blackwood himself remarked that:
Christopher [North; that is, John Wilson] says it is quite astonishing how
you enter so completely into the very spirit and essence of “Maga”, just as
if you had all along been seated with us at Ambrose’s where the highest of
our fun was concocted (Oliphant, 1897: 378).
However, besides his fittedness to the camaraderie and jest of ‘Maga’, and
besides his brilliant contributions to the journal’s literary parody from
‘Don Juan Unread’ onwards, one of Maginn’s key roles in Blackwood’s
Tory cabal was also to offer a voice on Irish affairs from his standpoint as
an ultra-Tory Protestant.
It is interesting to note that Maginn’s early writings on Ireland in
Blackwood’s are more concerned with warning about the dangers of
radicalism and revolution than with attacking Roman Catholicism. His
first effort in this vein, the ‘Letter of Ensign and Adjutant Morgan
O’Doherty, introductory to a Few Remarks on the Present State of Ireland’
(November 1820), contrives to sound almost ecumenical:
In Ireland, there are positively no Whigs—so few at least, that they are in
no way worth mentioning. There the great division of mankind is into
Protestants and Catholics, for both of which parties we have the utmost
respect, and whom we hope in good time to see reconciled to each other,
and living … without heart-burning and bad blood (BEM, 1820: 196).
Where there is turmoil, writes Maginn, this is the consequence of
Jacobinical rabble-rousing rather than sectarian or party ill-feeling:
...the animosities which have been kept alive among the people of Ireland
have been nursed and cherished only for the filthy purposes of a few
interested demagogues (BEM, 1820: 196).
Maginn assumes that public “education” against Radicalism will defuse its
threats: “nothing but a little more education is necessary, to enable the
whole of that generous people to see through their tricks” (BEM, 1820:
196). In the year of the Cato Street Conspiracy and the revolutionary
Scottish insurrection which led to the Battle of Bonnymuir, Maginn
compares the state of Britain, where radicalism was supposedly rife, and a
quietist Ireland. Parts of England and Scotland might be up in
revolutionary arms, but Ireland was not:
The “Roaring Irishman”
175
What a refreshing contrast does the state of Ireland at this moment present,
to that of so many turbulent infatuated districts in England … London and
Montrose are in the paws of the Radicals, but the cities of Ireland are all in
the hands of staunch and true men (BEM, 1820: 197).
Maginn adopts a similar view in his February 1821 Blackwood’s article
‘Letter of Lord Carberry on the Cork County Meeting’, an admiring
review of a loyalist pamphlet by the 6th Baron Carberry, in which he writes
optimistically that ‘the agents of revolution have no chance of succeeding
in Ireland” (BEM, 1821: 562) and attacks the Edinburgh for their
conviction “that Ireland would not be tenable without the application of
the firelock to the breasts of its inhabitants”(BEM, 1821: 562). Indeed, in
the light of the abortive recent radical plots and uprisings at Cato Street,
Pentridge and elsewhere in Britain, Maginn claims that the island of
Ireland was actually calm and loyal in comparison. The turbulent days of
Wolfe Tone and Robert Emmet are long gone:
The behaviour of Ireland, during the late agitations in this island, affords
indeed a strong contrast to its former turbulence. In spite of every effort of
sedition, the voice of loyalty burst from almost every quarter of the
country, drowning the wretched cry of disaffection wherever it was
attempted to be raised (BEM, 1821: 562).
“Such we trust”, Maginn writes optimistically, “will be the future
character of Ireland” (BEM, 1821: 563).
In his notice of the Letter, Maginn again identifies Radicalism, rather
than Catholic uprising, as the principal threat to Ireland. He approvingly
quotes Lord Carberry on the “insidious poison” of political extremism,
which was “infusing itself into the minds of our tenants and neighbours,
through the columns of some Radical newspaper” (BEM, 1821: 563).
Religion, whether Catholic or Protestant, can provide a bulwark against
such infidel danger; it was:
...the duty of the ministers of religion, (and here let me say, when I speak
of religion, I mean the Christian religion generally, under all its forms of
worship)
...to act as a foil against revolution: “I am ready to acknowledge the clergy
of all denominations in Ireland are vigilant pastors” (BEM, 1821: 563).
In the Carberry review, Maginn attacks the absenteeism of the Protestant
Irish gentry and the oppressive behaviour of their land agents: “no
circumstance has been productive of so many unhappy consequences to
Ireland, as the non-residence of her nobility and gentry” (BEM, 1821:
176
Chapter Nine
564). The tenants of such thoughtless people are “deprived” of the paternal
guidance of their betters:
Deprived of the guidance of their natural leaders and left to the
management of agents and underlings, by whom they were often
oppressed, and whom they almost always despised, the moral culture and
her people has been for the most utterly neglected (BEM, 1821: 564).
Blame in such cases lies with the Ascendancy.
IV
Sometimes Maginn’s iconoclasm, anti-Whig convictions, gift for parody
and preoccupation with Ireland find their way into his Blackwood’s satire.
In 1821, for instance, he sends up Thomas Moore’s emerald
mythologizing in a series of parodic Irish Melodies in an article which is
half hatchet-job review and half burlesque send-up of a new issue of the
poet’s work. The first of these, “St Patrick”, offers a noisy and bibulous
celebration of the patron saint of Ireland:
A Fig for St. Denis of France
He’s a trumpery fellow to brag on;
A fig for St. George and his lance,
Which spitted a heathenish dragon;
And the saints of the Welshman or Scot
Are a couple of pitiful pipers;
Both of whom may just travel to pot,
Compared with that patron of swipers,
St Patrick of Ireland, my dear! (BEM, 1821:617).
Maginn presses Thomas Moore’s national songs into his own comic
celebration of Ireland. In the face of Moore’s reverential “sentiment” and
“mythological botheration”, Maginn uses broad literary travesty to imply
that Moore is unmanly: “is this the national songwriter for this muchinjured and harddrinking island?—Perish the idea” (BEM, 1821:614).
As we have seen, and in large part because of his Whiggism, Maginn
had no time for the “bard of Erin”. Earlier in the same article he declares
that the Irish Melodies “have as much to do with Ireland, as with Nova
Scotia” (BEM, 1821:613).
Were I in a savage mood, I could cut him up with as much ease as a
butcher in Ormond market dissects an ox from the county of Tipperary; but
I shall spare him for this time, intending, if I have leisure, to devote an
The “Roaring Irishman”
177
entire paper to prove his utter incompetence; at present I shall only ask,
whether, in these pseudo-Irish Melodies, there is one song about our saints,
fairs, wakes, rows, patrons, or any other diversion among us? Is there one
drinking song which decent individuals would willingly roar forth after
dinner in soul-subduing soloes [sic], or give to the winds in the full swell
of a thirty-man chorus? Not one – no - not one. (BEM, 1821:613).
Maginn was as good as his word; lampooning Moore in ‘Maga’, going on
to attack the poet in the scurrilous John Bull newspaper in the mid-1820s
and continuing the campaign in Fraser’s Magazine where he labelled
Moore “an inferior punster, a second rate diner-out, a fifth-rate political
buffo” (Fraser’s Magazine, 1830: 182).
In one of his Noctes episodes, published in 1823, Maginn returned to
the subject of Ireland in his satirical mode, jocularly comparing the
Protestant, Catholic—and Orange—divisions in the country to a jug of
punch:
There’s the Protestant part of the population: inferior in quantity, superior
in strength, apt to get at the head, evidently the whisky of the compound.
The Roman Catholics, greater in physical proportions, but infinitely
weaker, and usually very hot, are shadowed forth by the water. The
Orangemen, as their name implies, are the fruit, which some palates think
too sour, and therefore reject, while others think that it alone gives grateful
flavour to the whole (BEM, 1823: 102).
For one whose name, according to Michael Sadlier’s splendid Keatsian
joke was “writ in spirits and water” (Sadleir, 1933: 246) the comparison is
telling; the most potent politics in Ireland are Protestant. The emancipation
of Catholics might see the water rising—a liquor which might quench the
thirst for enfranchisement but weaken the compound of the body politic.
Here Maginn’s jest—in persona Morty Macnamara Mulligan of Dublin—
about “the horrors of sobriety” (BEM, 1821: 613) in the review of the Irish
Melodies is given political heft and resonance.
R. Shelton Mackenzie’s memoir declares of the author that “No
mongrel Irishman was William Maginn, but proud of his country”
(MacKenzie, 1857: lx, lxi).9 Nonetheless, Maginn was even-handed in his
satire, and could lampoon Hibernian as well as Scots or English targets.
He travestied the nationalist aisling tradition in his fairy story ‘Daniel
O’Rourke’—written for Thomas Crofton Croker’s The Fairy Legends and
Traditions of the South of Ireland (1825)—wherein the ‘dream vision’ of
the talking eagle and the man-in-the-moon experienced by the slumbering
protagonist is motivated by spirits of an all-too-worldly sort, but equally
he thrust his rapier into some national Scots stereotypes (kilts, pipers,
178
Chapter Nine
carroty hair) in the Noctes of November 1824—co-written with J. G.
Lockhart and John Wilson—in the song given O’Doherty when he is about
to leave Edinburgh for the south:
Farewell, farewell beggarly Scotland,
Kilted kimmers wi’ carroty hair,
Pipers who beg that your honours would buy
A bawbee’s worth of their famished air.
I’d rather keep Cadawallader’s goats10
And feast upon toasted cheese and leeks,
Than go back to the beggarly North,
To herd ‘mang loons with bottomless breeks (BEM, 1824: 399).
Though this was doubtless a ‘bam’ (the Blackwood’s term for a leg-pull)
meant to entertain as much as affront, it certainly caused mock-affront in
the next number of the Noctes, where John Wilson imagines James Hogg
singing a satirical response to the poem from the Dumfries Journal to
O’Doherty, who is described as a “dastardly loon” and cursed to be
haunted by “a muckle deil” should he ever return north across the border.
The squib ends:
Go, get thee gone, thou beggarly loon,
On thee our maidens refuse to smile –
Our pipers are scorned to beg from thee,
A half-starved knight of the Emerald Isle.
Go rather and herd thy father’s pigs
And feed on ‘tatoes and butter-milk;
But return not to the princely North,
Land of the tartan, the bonnet, and kilt (BEM, 1825: 120).
V
We will now return to William Maginn’s polemical prose about the state
of Ireland, and discuss the change in tone which is evident in those
writings from 1823 onwards. In the first few years of his association with
Blackwood’s Maginn’s attitude in his prose writings about Ireland is fairly
measured, on the point of (albeit Tory) moderation and he is certainly
more concerned with the dangers of Radicalism than Roman Catholicism
in the island. Indeed, he writes to William Blackwood in a letter of 8 May
1821 that “I do not like to write anti-Catholic articles for you” (Oliphant,
1897: 361). In September 1821, Maginn explicitly addressed what he calls
“the great question which agitates Ireland—Roman Catholic emancipation”
(BEM, 1821: 227). Here his tone is fraternal, and once again approaches
The “Roaring Irishman”
179
the ecumenical. There is no sign of the venom against the Catholic interest
and the priesthood which was to come:
The Protestant objection to the measure is founded not on any ill will to his
brothers of the Roman Catholic Church; for in fact both parties mix in the
most unrestrained intercourses of private friendship in Ireland, without any
of that bitterness which we find sometimes so pathetically lamented by
writers on this side of the water (BEM, 1821: 227).
Nonetheless, Maginn explains that opposition to Emancipation is still
necessary, and was built on:
...a conviction, grounded on past experience, that as long as the Roman
Catholics retain the antipathy to the established church which they have
always displayed when in power, it will be unsafe to trust them with
offices which might be turned to the injury of that establishment (BEM,
1821: 227).
He concludes that should the Catholic hostility to the established Church
cease, then he would immediately endorse Emancipation: “If at any time
that spirit shall depart from the Roman Catholics, Protestant opposition to
the measure would instantly cease” (BEM, 1821: 227).
The relatively moderate stance evident in Maginn’s earlier writings
was not to last. By late 1823, Blackwood’s—and William Maginn—began
to harden its tone towards Roman Catholicism and to the newly clamorous
Irish Catholic leaders, Daniel O’Connell in particular. The increasing
concensus in Whig and radical circles—both political and literary—as to
the necessity of Catholic Emancipation, from Whig parliamentarians to
Jeffrey’s Whiggish Edinburgh Review, prompted a backlash in Blackwood’s
and it also seems to us that a particular trigger to this was the
establishment of O’Connell’s Catholic Association in May 1823. After
this point Blackwood’s upped the ante, allowing existing anti-Catholic
firebrand contributors such as Reverend George Croly their heads and
recruiting anti-Catholic newcomers such as the political economist David
Robinson to stand up for Protestantism in the face of O’Connellism and to
attack “the hideous system of Popery” (BEM, 1828: 193). The antiCatholicism of the magazine became so natural a tone that in 1828
William Blackwood could protest, mistakenly, that:
What we have throughout asserted is that Popery is and must continue to
be, always the same, a degrading superstition which when it has the power
is hostile to liberty, both civil and religious (Milne , 1984: 238).11
180
Chapter Nine
In the previous month he had printed an article, “Ireland as It Is”, which
expressed its view of the Catholic Association in similarly forthright
terms:
This body has been all along at once despicable and dangerous. When we
first looked at the throng of which it was composed, we felt disposed to
treat it with contempt; but when we contemplated it as a body incessantly
employed in stirring up the ignorant population to mutiny, levying a heavy
tax on the people for political purposes, and preaching to them the efficacy
of exerting their combined numerical strength, we felt inclined to exclaim
with Didius, when he looked upon the superstitious ceremonies of the
Druids, I scorn them, yet they awe me.
It is in vain to mince the matter, or try to disguise the fact. The
Government are much to blame in this business of the Roman Catholic
Association. They should have crushed it in 1825, when they saw the
mischief it was doing (BEM, 1828: 556).
The shift in the magazine’s attitude to Ireland was also evident in
Maginn’s writing. He, too, changed his manner and his tone both in public
utterance and in private. Indeed, Maginn’s most apocalyptic note is
sounded in private correspondence to William Blackwood in 1823 where
his previous conciliatory tone is renounced. Maginn warns of a “Dublin in
a flame” (Oliphant, 1897: 389) and an Ireland where “Toleration” is
denied the Protestant, rather than—as per Emancipationist rhetoric—the
Roman Catholic. His letter describes:
...priests domineering, swaggering, and libelling our faith, our conduct, and
our principles; and, worst of if we dare to say a word in reply to the most
atrocious calumnies or downright insults, we are denounced as not
conciliatory … In a word, the question is now narrowed to this—Is the
Protestant religion to be tolerated in Ireland? (Oliphant, 1897: 389-90)
In the face of Catholic mischief-making, what is “England” (Scotland is
ignored) to do? The answer is uncompromising: “the end will be that
England will have to conquer the country again, which consummation I
hope most devoutly to witness” (Oliphant, 1897: 90).
In the magazine, Maginn’s tone towards Catholicism hardens, and the
previous compromising positions are abandoned. A letter to ‘Christopher
North’ of May 1824 entitled ‘Pike, Prose and Poetry’ captures the author’s
position in the final period in which he wrote principally for the magazine
(Maginn divided his time between a number of journals after his move to
London in 1824 and by 1830 and the establishment of Fraser’s he was no
longer a welcomed contributor to Blackwood’s). Maginn describes the
The “Roaring Irishman”
181
threat to civil order posed by the Catholic interest in Ireland:
It is well known to you, North, what vast endeavours the Roman Catholic
party of Ireland is making to get that country altogether into its own hands,
and how eagerly it enlists every auxiliary in that cause. Such is the abuse
of words, that chiming in with the most illiberal priesthood in the world, is
styled liberality; and any endeavour to mitigate their oppression, comes
under the designation of tyranny (BEM, 1824: 593-4).
In his earlier work the Catholic had been seen as, at worst, the dupe of the
radical. Now he is portrayed as being at the heart of a vast network of
subversion supported by wrong-headed fools in Great Britain. The rabblerousing Catholic Association, part of some huge conspiracy, is supported
by other elements, unsavoury British fellow travellers—the radical
journalists, the Whig parliamentarian, the extra-parliamentary working-class
orator, and the oppositionalist poet (such as the Byron of the ‘Irish Avatar’):
For this the demagogue spouts—the newspaper froths—the liberal in
Parliament proses—the sensitive poet mourns—or the libellous poet
calumniates (BEM, 1824: 594).
Maginn, as per his letter to William Blackwood attacking the lack of
toleration of the Church of Ireland in that country, also portrays the
Church and the constitution as under threat, demonizing the mob as he
does so:
Every epithet of abuse or insult is heaped upon those who write to defend
the constitution of the country: everything is done which can tend to
exasperate the feelings of the demi-savage lower orders against the
established church (BEM, 1824: 594).
Whereas he could previously countenance the notion of a Romanist priest
as a bulwark against radical conspiracy, now he is seen as a pernicious
force, trading in false marvels and encouraging the loutish Irish common
man to believe himself a noble-hearted fellow oppressed by the wicked
laws of a land of oppression:
At home, the priesthood keep their flocks subject to their nod by the
disgraceful agency of mock miracles, and stimulate them to the field by
bloody prophecy; in this country such weapons would not do; and their
battle is accordingly fought here by painting the Irishman as a creature of
fine feelings, warm heart, intense good nature, - all repressed by cruel and
impolitic laws (BEM, 1824: 594).
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Chapter Nine
In Maginn’s opinion, as a consequence of “the brutal atrocities of the
priestridden mob” the “character”, of the average Catholic has become
debased. Far from being a fine, upstanding patriot of the false sentimental
Irish imagination, what is occurring is “the degradation of the Irish
character—which, I am sorry to say, appears to be rapidly barbarizing”
(BEM, 1824: 594).
And what is the final piece of evidence as to the specious nature of
Irish complaint and British sympathy for the same? The answer is clear.
Maginn returns to his favourite bête noir:
The most active person in turning away the eyes of the English public from
the real state of affairs in Ireland, has been, unquestionably, Mr Thomas
Moore. Young ladies and old women sucked in from his pretty songs, not
merely matter for prurient imaginings, but a delicate sensitiveness about
the wrongs of Erin (BEM, 1824: 594).
Here at least William Maginn remains consistent in his attitude to Ireland
and to the way in which that country was understood in Great Britain in
his dismissal of Moore’s bleating about the wrongs of Erin.
In conclusion, whether he was living in Cork or in London, a man such
as William Maginn was never far from Ireland in his literary imagination.
Whether lampooning the myths and legends of his county, delivering ex
cathedra judgments on the state of Ireland or satirising its novelists or
poets the country resounded through his work. And in his career trajectory
in Blackwood’s we can see the manner in which that brilliant, troubling
and complex magazine shifted its tone and manner in its cross-border
relationship with Ireland.
Works Cited
Bates, William. (1883), The Maclise Portrait Gallery of Illustrious
Literary Characters with Memoirs. Chatto & Windus, London, p. 40,
41.
Bentley, Richard. (1883), Retrospect of a Long Life, 2 vols vol. 1. London,
p. 120.
Noctes Ambrosianae. in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine vol. 11 (March
1822). Edinburgh, p. 370.
Noctes Ambrosianae, by John Wilson, William Maginn, J. G. Lockhart,
James Hogg and Others, in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine vol. 5,
p. iii.
BEM, vol. 6 (November 1819), p. 194.
BEM, vol. 8 (February 1821), p. 562
The “Roaring Irishman”
183
BEM, vol. 10 (September 1821), p. 227.
BEM, vol. 10 (December 1821), p. 613, 614, 617, 620.
BEM, vol. 11 (March 1822), p. 370
BEM, vol. 14 (July 1823), p. 102.
BEM, (May 1824), pp. 593-4.
BEM, vol. 16 (November 1824), p. 399.
BEM, vol. 17 (January 1825), p. 120.
BEM, vol. 24 (August 1828), p. 193.
BEM, vol. 24 (November 1828), p. 556.
Duncan, Ian. (2006), ‘Blackwood’s and Romantic Nationalism’, in Print
Culture and the Blackwood Tradition, 1805-1930. Finkelstein, David
(ed.). University of Toronto Press, Toronto. p. 70.
Eagleton, Terry. (1995), Heathcliff and the Great Hunger. Verso, London
and New York: p. 58.
Finkelstein, David (ed.). (2006), Print Culture and the Blackwood
Tradition, 1805–1930. University of Toronto Press, Toronto.
—. (2006), Blackwood's Magazine 1817-1825: Selections from ‘Maga’'s
Infancy, 6 vols, gen. ed. Nicholas Mason (gen. ed.). Pickering and
Chatto, London.
Fraser’s Magazine, (1830), vol. 2 (September 1830), p. 182.
Guiney, Louise Imogen. (1897), James Clarence Mangan, His Selected
Poems. John Lane, London, p. 35.
Kelly, Ronan. (2008), The Bard of Erin. Penguin Ireland, Dublin, p. 304.
MacCarthy, B. G. (1943), ‘Centenary of William Maginn 1794-1842’,
Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, vol. 32, no. 127 (September 1943),
p. 350.
Mackenzie, R. Shelton (ed.). (1854), Noctes Ambrosianae, by John
Wilson, William Maginn, J. G. Lockhart, James Hogg and Others, 5
vols, vol. 5. W. J. Widdleton, New York, p. iv.
Mackenzie, Robert Shelton. (1857), Miscellaneous Writings of the Late Dr
Maginn, 5 vols vol. 5. Redfield, New York, p. lx-lxi.
Maxwell, William Hamilton. (1859), Erin-go-bragh; or Irish life in
pictures. London, p.xi.
Milne, J. M. (1984), The Politics of Blackwood’s 1817-1846: A Study of
the Political, Economic and Social Articles in Blackwood’s Edinburgh
Magazine, and of Selected Contributors (unpublished thesis),
Newcastle University, p. 238.
Morrison, Robert. (2001), ‘“Abuse Wickedness but Acknowledge Wit”:
Blackwood’s and the Shelley Circle’ in Victorian Periodicals Review,
vol. 34, No. 2 (summer 2001), p. 148.
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Chapter Nine
Morrison, Robert. (2006), ‘William Blackwood and the Dynamics of
Success’ in Print Culture and the Blackwood Tradition, 1805-1930.
Finkelstein, David (ed.). University of Toronto Press, Toronto, p. 40.
Oliphant, Margaret. (1897), Annals of a Publishing House: William
Blackwood and his Sons, Their Magazine and Friends, 2 vols, vol. 1.
William Blackwood and Sons, Edinburgh and London, p. 361, 362,
389.
Sadleir, Michael. (1933), Bulwer and His Wife: A Panorama, 1803-1836.
Constable, London, p. 246.
Strout, Alan Lang. (1936), ‘Concerning the Noctes Ambrosianae’, Modern
Language Notes, vol. 51, no. 8. (December 1936) p. 497.
Terry Eagleton, (1998), Crazy John and the Bishop, and Other Essays on
Irish Culture. Cork University Press, Cork, p. 59.
Thomson, James. (1889), Selections from Original Contributions by James
Thomson to ‘Cope's Tobacco Plant’ Office of Coke’s Tobacco Plant,
Liverpool, p. 41.
Thrall, Miriam. (1934), Rebellious Fraser’s: Nol Yorke's Magazine in the
Days of Maginn, Thackeray, and Carlyle. Columbia University Press,
New York, p. 166.
Wardle, Ralph. (1933), ‘Who was Morgan O’Doherty?’ in PMLA, vol. 58
September 1933. pp. 716-27.
Notes
1
We borrow the phrase from Ensign Odoherty’s song, ‘There was a lady lived at
Leith’ from the first of the Noctes Ambrosianae in Blackwood’s Edinburgh
Magazine [hereafter BEM], vol. 11 (March 1822), p. 370. The poem is by J. G.
Lockhart rather than William Maginn in this instance.
2
The persona was the invention of Thomas Hamilton in the number for February
1818, though William Maginn (most famously), D. M. Moir, J. G. Lockhart and
John Wilson also put words into Odoherty’s mouth.
3
By ‘Delta’, D. M. Moir. Cited in Bates, 1883: p. 41.
4
By Robert Macnish. Cited in Bates, 1883.
5
Samuel Carter Hall. Cited in The Maclise Portrait Gallery, p. 40. Hall’s
compliments serve as counterpoint to his condemnation of Maginn’s supposed
waste of talent: ‘His acquaintances, who would willingly have been his friends,
were not only the men of genius of his time; among them were several noblemen
and statesmen of power as well as rank. In a word, he might have climbed to the
highest rung of the ladder, with helping hands, all the way up; he stumbled and fell
at its base’ (ibid.).
6
See, for instance, Finkelstein, David (ed.). (2006), Print Culture and the
Blackwood Tradition, 1805–1930 (University of Toronto Press, Toronto.
The “Roaring Irishman”
185
and (2006), Blackwood's Magazine 1817-1825: Selections from ‘Maga’'s Infancy,
6 vols. Nicholas Mason (gen. ed.). Pickering and Chatto, London.
7
However, Wardle disputes the sole identification of O’Doherty with Maginn,
seeing him as a composite of Scottish caricatures of the Irishman (‘Who was
Morgan O’Doherty?’ PMLA, vol. 58 (September 1933), pp. 716-27). Later, Eugene
Nolte, in ‘David Macbeth Moir and Morgan Odoherty’, PMLA, vol. 72. No 4.
(September 1957), pp. 803-6, argued that D. M. Moir (Blackwood’s ‘Delta’) was
the model for the Ensign. He, too, dismisses the common association of Odoherty
with Maginn.
8
In a footnote to one his [parodic] Irish Melodies in Blackwood’s Maginn notes:
‘Tory in Ireland is a kind of pet name. “Oh! you Tory”, is the same as “Oh! You
rogue”. If a man wishes to call another a rogue seriously he calls him a Whig, the
terms being convertible’, BEM, vol. 10 (December 1821), p. 620.
9
“Not his the meanness of trying to curry favor with the English, by abusing Irish
aspirations, Irish genius, and Irish patriotism, and boasting of his ‘British
proclivities”’.
10
The red dragon of Cadwallader is an emblem of Wales.
11
Letter of 18 December 1828 to William Johnston. Quoted in J. M. Milne, The
Politics of Blackwood’s 1817-1846: A Study of the Political, Economic and Social
Articles in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, and of Selected Contributors
(unpublished thesis, Newcastle University, 1984), p. 238.
CHAPTER TEN
MORBID ANATOMY:
DE’CRYPT’ING THE MONSTROUS:
BURKE AND HARE
ALISON O’MALLEY YOUNGER
“Battle not with monsters lest you become one.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
This is a chapter on monsters, or more precisely on the creation (and
destruction) of monsters as the embodiment of the social anxieties in a
given time and place. As Steven Bruhm argues: “the Gothic has always
been a barometer of the anxieties plaguing a certain culture at a particular
moment in history” (Bruhm, 2002: 260). Monstrosity is thus contingent: it
needs a context or a norm against which it can be perceived as aberrant or
Other. Equally the monster to cite Bruhm, both “arouses and assuages”
(Bruhm, 2002: 260) those anxieties which characterize the zeitgeist in its
inescapable corporeality. Frankenstein’s much-debated creation, for
example is described by David McNally as:
The inhuman human, a violation of the social order who is nonetheless its
product. He is a capitalist society’s dirty secret— one it must disavow in
order to legitimate itself in its own eyes. The monster’s very being is thus
an offence to bourgeois sensibility. And, for this simple ontological fact—
not for anything he has done—he must be destroyed (McNally, 2012: 103).
McNally’s argument is convincing. The creature, for him represents an
anxiety made flesh. It is an emblematic and morbid social commentary on
“bourgeois sensibility” in a society in which “the human corpse was
becoming a new kind of commodity” (McNally, 2012: 23). Indeed, so
valued was the cadaver in what McNally described as this “corpse
economy” that, according to Ruth Richardson:
Morbid Anatomy: De’crypt’ing the Monstrous
187
Corpses were bought and sold, they were touted, priced, haggled over,
negotiated for, discussed in terms of supply and demand, delivered,
imported, exported, transported. Human bodies were compressed into
boxes, packed in sawdust, packed in hay, trussed up in sacks, roped up like
hams, sewn in canvas, packed in cases, casks, barrels, crates and hampers,
salted , pickled or injected with preservative …human beings were
dismembered and sold in pieces, or measured and sold by the inch
(Richardson, 1987: 72).
Much of this once-human cargo was labelled “destination Edinburgh”; a
city at the cutting edge of medical science at the start of the nineteenth
century where demand for cadavers vastly exceeded supply. This gave rise
to a new trade: grave robbing; the horrors of which (and the attendant
murder-for-profit undertaken by Burke and Hare), according to Walter
Scott:
Resemble nothing so much as a wild dream … the tragedy [of which] is
too true, and I look in vain for a remedy of the evils, in which it is easy to
see this black and unnatural business has found its origin …The veriest
wretch of the highway may be better booty than a person of consideration,
since the last may have but a few shillings in his pocket, and the beggar,
being once dead, is worth ten pounds to the murderer (Dudley Edwards,
1984: 82).
The gothic idiom employed by Scott is notable here in his descriptions of
the “evils” of society, and the “black and unnatural business” of murder
for profit. The “origin” of this horror which Scott perceives is the illicit
and thriving trade in bodies which resulted in the poorest being worth
more dead than alive as specimens for the anatomist’s table.
Unsurprisingly this practice was a source for popular anxieties, as
Richardson argues:
The fear of bodysnatching was extremely pervasive, most notably in
metropolitan and urban areas, but also in suburban and rural districts. A
strong and deeply held antipathy to the violation of the grave was evident
at all levels of society. Many expedients were devised to prevent, thwart,
or at very least hinder the bodysnatchers. There were furious and often
physically violent attacks upon grave-robbers when they or their
handiwork was revealed. On some occasions the violence was so ferocious
as to result in death (Richardson, 1989: 108).
This strength of feeling and “abhorrence towards so wicked a crime”
(Adams, 2002: 3) was peculiarly prevalent during what Norman Adams
describes somewhat hyperbolically as:
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Chapter Ten
...the so-called age of the Scottish resurrectionists …when no unguarded
grave was spared, and no gravestone left unturned in the quest for
“something for the surgeon. (Adams, 2002: v).
The constellation of fears which surrounded the undertaking resulted,
perhaps unsurprisingly in the labelling of the practitioners as “human
ghouls”, vampires, fiends, devils and as one eighteenth century ballad puts
it “these monsters of mankind”. (Adams, 2002: 1)
In what follows I will examine what David McNally colourfully terms
the “monsterisation” of William Burke and William Hare. Both, it has
been argued were monsters; both were killers but despite their traffic in
dead bodies neither were grave robbers despite their popular association
with the practice. As one contemporary report laconically suggests:
...they were apparently too indolent, or inexpert, or lacked courage too
much to adopt the ordinary but hazardous mode of raising the dead from
church yards”. (West Port Murders, 1829: 185).
Instead, it continues, they chose to “imbrue their hands in fellow mortals”
blood (West Port Murders, 1829: 187).
In keeping with the theme of this book I examine the monster as a
symbol of liminality: the ultimate boundary-crosser whose existence calls
into question conceptual absolutes such as good and evil, and, more
fundamentally, what it means to be human. Their “double function”, as
Elaine L. Graham suggests is:
...simultaneously marking the boundaries between normal and the
pathological but also exposing the fragility of the very taken-forgrantedness of such categories. (Graham, 2002:39).
We reject them but we require them as negative reflection of who we
are, replicating in reverse our hidden terrors, while forcing us to confront
the fact that they exist. Very often, as David Gilmour asserts, monsters:
Are not simply monstrous; they are victims of their environment. More
than anything else, monsters are a reflection of ourselves: “Hence there is
always a non-fixed boundary between men and monsters. In the end, there
can be no clear division between us and them, between civilization and
bestiality. As we peer into the abyss, the abyss stares back” (Gilmore,
2003: 191).
I introduce a caveat here, I am not undertaking what David McNally
defines as a “giddy embrace of monstrosity” (McNally, 2012: 10), and
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189
covering Burke and Hare with the “monochromatic formalism” (McNally,
2012: 11) which valorises and celebrates monsters for their heroic
deviation from the norm. To paraphrase McNally I hold to the notion that
“not all monsters are equal, and this is especially so where the monsters
who stalk this chapter are concerned” (McNally, 2012: 11).
Burke and Hare were multiple murderers whose actions were
individually horrifying and whose culpability was not in doubt. In a single
year, 1828 they killed at least 16 people (these are the ones to which Burke
admitted in his confessions) and disposed of their bodies, for money to the
Anatomists for the purposes of dissection. As space is limited I will leave
a catalogue of the deceased and dismembered to the Ettrick Shepherd, aka
James Hogg who listed them with black humour thus in the High Tory
Blackwood’s Magazine of March 1829:
First ae drunk auld wife, and then anither drunk auld wife—and then a
third drunk auld wife—and then a drunk auld or sick man or twa. The
confession got uncto monotonous—the Lights and Shadows o’ Scottish
death want relief—though to be sure, poor Peggy Paterson, the
Unfortunate, broke in a little on the uniformity; and sae did Daft Jamie
(Adams, 2002: 79).
What is striking is the way in which Hogg satirically dehumanises the list
of undifferentiated victims as old, drunken, sick men and women; a
tedious collection of pauperised flesh made colourful only by the inclusion
of a prostitute (who was preserved in whisky for three months, due to her
shapely body and limbs), and a well-known imbecile (as contemporary
science would have labelled him); both of whom it was said, were
recognised by the surgeons’ assistants in the anatomy theatres of Dr
Robert Knox. Walter Scott (who purchased a window seat for the
execution of Burke), like North describes the death of the anonymous poor
with a curious, tongue-in-cheek detachment:
Our Irish importation have made a great discovery in Oeconomics
…namely that a wretch who is not worth a farthing while alive becomes a
valuable article when knocked on the head & carried to an anatomist and
acting on this principle have cleared the streets of some of those miserable
offcasts of society whom nobody missd [sic] because nobody wished to see
them again (Rosner, 2010: 74).
In both instances the writers draw our attention to the fact that these
killings were, for their time depressingly mundane: sordid rather than
sensational, suggesting among other things that Burke and Hare
themselves were more banal than their legends would have us believe.
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Yet, they were effectively marketed as a monstrous, gothic spectacle to be
consumed by a baying mob, and written into a compelling, spine-chilling
tale which includes many of the staple elements of Gothic: recidivism,
intrigue, murder, chaos, mouldering corpses, subterranean underworlds,
labyrinths, nocturnal settings, Promethean doctors and mad scientists,
sensation, taboo, vengeance, affect and shock and at the centre of the
narrative the skulking stock figures of (at least) two hellish monsters.
Indeed, the tale of Burke and Hare was so “picturesquely horrifying”
(West Port Murders, 1829: 3) as one contemporary account put it that it
eclipsed the imaginary horrors of Gothic novels of the day:
… even Mrs Radcliffe, with all her talent for imagining, and depicting the
horrible, has not been able to invent or pourtray [sic] scenes at all to be
compared in deep tragical interest with the dreadful realities of the den in
the West Port (West Port Murders, 1829: 2).
The mention of Anne Radcliffe, ‘the Queen of Terror’ must give pause, as
the anonymous writer of the West Port Murders identifies the story of
Burke and Hare as beyond Radcliffe’s subtle manipulation of threat and
uncertainty to evoke what Edmund Burke described as the sublime. As she
comments in On the Supernatural in Poetry:
They must be men of very cold imagination with whom certainty is more
terrible than surmise. Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first
expand the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the
other contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them’. (Clery & Miles,
2000: 168).
In short, according to Radcliffe explicit, ghoulish and graphic details of
the school of Horror are not capable of evoking the imaginative frisson
associated with the terror tale. As Jerrold Hogle comments, the Tale of
Terror: “holds characters and readers mostly in anxious suspense about
threats to life, safety and sanity kept largely out of sight or in shadows or
suggestions from a hidden past” (Hogle, 2002: 3).There is little that is
obscure, shadowy or suggestive about the stories of Burke and Hare.
Indeed, they have more in common with the Tale of Horror which
“confronts the principal characters with the gross violence of physical or
psychological dissolution, explicitly shattering the assumed norms”
(Hogle, 2002: 3). Gross violence and psychological dissolution are the
stuff of Burke and Hare’s stories. We are invited into the charnel house to
witness the horrific ends of the victims, in scenes which can best be
described as horror-mongering to a bloodthirsty mob intent on violent
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191
disorder. The veil of terror is only drawn around the anatomist’s slab,
except when it comes to the dissection of Burke. This is a Horror tale in
which:
... all that is abjected is thrown under in another fashion: cast off into a
figure or figures criminalized or condemned by people in authority and
thus subjected to…their gaze and the patterns of normalcy they enforce
(Hogle, 2002: 7).
This chapter is an attempt to illuminate how a tale of two murderers (and
essentially two cities) was sensationalised and Gothicised, and the
murderers themselves abjected and made monstrous as symptomatic
representations of a web of contemporary fears surrounding race, class and
the commoditisation and anatomisation of the body (both living and dead).
Its focus is the monsterisation of Burke and Hare, and at its core is a
question posed by David Punter: “how much … can one lose … and still
remain a man?” (Punter, 1980: 240).
Making Monsters
I do not make the simple declaration ‘Burke and Hare were monsters’ as
this is a copula: it insists on its own truth when no self-evident fact is there
to support it. The statement itself therefore demands analysis and scrutiny.
In the first instance a definition of ‘monsters’ would prove helpful. There
is a problem here, however in that monsters have a profound “ontological
instability” (Weiss, 2004: 124). We cannot really agree on what they are.
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, for example suggests that: “the epistemological
spaces between the monster’s bones … reveals an over-determined
monster that is inaccessible to full analysis” (Cohen, 1996: 4). Weiss
contributes to this discussion on the protean and endlessly malleable
nature of monsters suggesting that:
Monsters are variously characterized by accident, indetermination,
formlessness; by material incompleteness, categorical ambiguity,
ontological instability. One may create monsters through hybridization,
hypertrophy, or hypotrophy; through lack, excess, or multiplication;
through the substitution of elements, the confusion of species, or the
conflation of genders and genres (Weiss, 2004: 124).
All that we can know then is that they are unknowable, indefinable and
impossible to categorise. Moreover, as Holly Baumgartner and Roger
Davies assert the unclassifiable nature of ‘the monster’ is a near insoluble
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conundrum, the study of which is paradoxically self-defeating to the
academic researcher:
Jeffery Jerome Cohen has noted that the “monster is a category that is not
bound by classificatory structurations.” As a “breaker of category,” the
monster resists conventional Enlightenment structures. Its very nature is to
dismantle knowledge, to destroy structure, to resist classification.
Therefore, academic study of monsters immediately encounters problems.
The impulse to theorise the monster is to structure the unstructurable, to
classify the unclassifiable (Baumgartner and Davies, 2008: 1).
“Reason”, they continue “destroys the monster” precisely by defining it,
“yet”, they suggest: “the monster always remains just beyond reach,
lurking at the edges of knowledge” (Baumgartner and Davies, 2008: 1).
This desire and fundamental failure to classify what constitutes the
monster is part of the substance of this chapter which does not attempt to
define what is monstrous about Burke and Hare but how and why they
were discursively constructed as such.
This begs the question of monstrosity. Given that no concrete
definition of the monster can be postulated with any certainty, we need, at
least to distinguish between two terms, ‘the monstrosity’ and ‘the monster’
as Georges Canguilhem points out: “the morphology of the former is
abnormal in degree and its study rooted in medicine, whereas the
morphology of the monster is abnormal in kind and rooted in the law”
(Canguilhem, 1962:28, 30). Therefore we must discriminate between the
shape and form of the monstrosity to the extent that it deviates from a
norm from that of the monster which ontologically transgresses those
systems which govern our society. As Katherine Angell discusses, the
medical hypothesis resulted in:
Those individuals with especially grotesque bodies were diagnosed as
human monsters. Teratology, a new branch of medicine that theorized the
origins of human monsters emerged, but “[u]nable to provide an agreed
scientific alternative to explain, diagnose and treat monstrosity … [it]
became a scientific ‘limbo’ (Angell, 2008: 132).
Monsters in nineteenth-century medical treatises, fuelled by the
Enlightenment drive towards taxonomy were thus classified as atypical,
pathological beings, “reduced to a series of objects, things, and internal
organs” (Smith, 2004: 90) and classified according to the extent of their
deviations from a ‘norm’. Monstrosity was thus viewed as something to be
categorised and diagnosed by doctors, for whom monstrosity was a
symptom to be revealed under the anatomist’s scalpel, and also by quasi-
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193
medics such as Teratologists, Phrenologists and Physiognomists for whom
it could be read in and on the bodies, faces and skulls of monstrous beings.
I will touch on this medicalisation, and pseudo-medicalisation of
monstrosity in relation to Burke and Hare prior to examining other
possibilities as to why, in popular parlance they jointly adopted the lead
role as a Hydra-headed Hibernian monster in what became one of the most
infamous, grisly and densely atmospheric crimes of the nineteenth century.
A Monstrous Race
Besides its deserved status of being at the vanguard of science during the
nineteenth century Scotland’s capital was, also in the forefront of research
for highly contentious though popular pseudo-sciences such as phrenology
and physiognomy. Often, the implausible and unprovable observations of
the proponents of these theories were racially motivated and used as
cautionary tales against monstrous miscegenation. In short, such theories
anatomised the criminal and rendered criminality visible in the observable
stigmata of race and/or class. To quote Rafael Huertas:
Certain traits of the degenerated person’s external morphology (stigmata)
made the abnormal shape of his body quite clearly evident, and justified …
his qualitative separation from the normal individual on apparently
scientific grounds.… Anthropological racism, medical somaticism,
persecution of the abnormal or the unusual, and so forth, were some of the
major contributions of positivist science (Huertas et al, 1992: 391).
In Georgian Edinburgh, as Luke Gibbons suggests, “this persecution of the
abnormal” extended to “The Celts” (in particular the Irish), who were seen
as “a source of pollution in the body politic” (Gibbons, 2004: 42), their
“priest maddened…wolfish spirits at once contagious and incurable”
(Gibbons, 2004:: 41). In part this was to do with what was perceived as
“swarms of Irish spreading like locusts across the whole kingdom”
(Rosner, 2010: 63) and a “less civilised population spreading themselves
as a kind of substratum beneath a more civilised population” (Huertas et
al, 1992: 63).
As William Pitt Dundas’s The Races of Men in Scotland (1871) fumed,
in 1820: “an invasion…of the Irish race began, which slowly increased
until it reached enormous dimensions after 1840, when the railways began
to be constructed over the country” (Dundas, 1871: xix). In what can be
described as a prolonged xenophobic rant he fulminates over the ruinous
effects of this “alien invasion” to the racial integrity of Scotland and
bewails the ‘”deterioration” of the Scots before informing his readers that:
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“the very high proportion of Irish in Scotland…has lowered greatly the
moral tone of the lower classes, and greatly increased the necessity for the
enforcement of sanitary and police precautions” (Dundas, 1871: xxxiv). In
a register which teeters dangerously close to the paranoid, liberally
smattered with fears of miscegenation taken from nineteenth-century
biological theories of race, Dundas gothicises the Irish as a menacing alien
race, as “disease carriers [and] pollutants of the modern city” (Gibbons,
2004: 43). The Irish, thus viewed support Rosemarie Garland Thompson’s
suggestion that monsters: “function as magnets to which culture secures its
anxieties, questions, and needs at any given moment... (Thompson, 1996:
2). When the “given moment” was “the era of Frankenstein” the Irish in
Britain were, as David McNally convincingly argues: “racialised, depicted
as a violent, disorderly and uncivilised breed” (McNally, 2012: 84). He
continues:
The Irish were rebel monsters in every sense of the word. At home they
plotted insurrection, never more dangerously than 1798 when the United
Irishmen made common cause with revolutionary France in its war with
Britain (McNally, 2012: 84).
Citing William Petty he observes the latter’s comments that: “Ireland
as a Political Animal is susceptible to anatomisation of the sort carried out
on common animals” (McNally, 2012: 84). This “discourse of
monstrosity” McNally argues is one that was re-animated in the wake of
fears of the revolutionary spirit of the French spreading across the channel
post 1789. The primary source of this, he suggests is Edmund Burke’s
widely used “language of monstrosity” (McNally, 2012: 78) in Reflections
on the Revolution in France wherein: “Burke decisively [appropriated]
popular anxieties about grave-robbing and dissection into his counterrevolutionary discourse of monstrosity” (McNally, 2012: 79). He adds that
Burke (Edmund, not William) in his “rhetorically charged defence of the
old order” (McNally, 2012: 80) deploys a recidivist logic in which ghosts
and phantoms rise in “a scene of horror in which the dissectors are
themselves threatened with dissection” (McNally, 2012: 80).
Besides these imagined and amorphous anxieties, depictions of the
carnage of Irish revolution had spread across the Irish Sea, not only by
word of mouth, and in the popular press, but in Gothic texts such as
Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer which includes the much-cited
scene of literally unutterable horror when Lord Kilwarden is impaled by
pikes by a Dublin mob in 1803. One witness to the events, according to
Maturin’s text:
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195
Stood at the window, gasping with horror, his wife attempted vainly to
drag him away. He saw the last blow struck—he heard the last groan
uttered, as the sufferer cried, ‘put me out of my pain’, while sixty pikes
were thrusting at him. The man stood at the window as if nailed to it; and
when dragged from it became an idiot for life. (Gilfeather, 2004: 61).
The mute abjection of the observer here echoes Burke’s near-hysterical
fear of the retaliation of the masses, and symbolises the heightened
cultural anxieties about Irish revolutionary savagery which existed in
Britain. This was corroborated in the popular press as, according to
Siobhan Kilfeather: “the stock-in-trade” of the gothic migrated to
newspaper and magazine illustrations as well as to the penny dreadfuls,
and such well-known figures as the “Irish Frankenstein”, “the Irish
Maniac” and “the Irish Vampire” were frequently cited in cartoons and
satire (Kilfeather, 2004: 52). In Georgian Edinburgh no great imaginative
leap was required to attach a gothic plot to two Irish murderers who were
involved in the hated resurrectionist trade. This was compounded in some
‘scientific’ quarters such as comparative phrenology wherein they were
often labelled as “liminal beings that occupied the borderland between
human and animal” (Garland Thomson, 2010: 8). The simian comparison
has been widely discussed (by L.P Curtis, for example). Less widely so is
the Irish comparison to dogs: “curs of low degree” as the American
physiognomist James W. Redfield described them:
Compare the Irishman and the dog in respect to barking, snarling, howling,
begging, fawning, flattering, back biting, quarrelling, blustering, scenting,
seizing, hanging on, teasing, rollicking, and whatever traits you may
discover in either, and you will be convinced there is a wonderful
resemblance. (Redfield, 1884: 253)
Admittedly Redfield’s mock-heroic attempt at drollery is extreme.
Nonetheless it is worth noting the way in which “the Irishman” Sui generis
is defined in bestial terms as something less than human. He is, according
to Redfield a garrulous mendicant and an untrustworthy predator who will
turn on his master without compunction. Moreover, argues Redfield, the
snappish “beslavering” Irish man has a “taste for the vinous fermentation
which leads to the putrefactive”. At these times, he warns “he himself is
the monster that is to be dreaded”.
In each of the instances cited above the monster (in this case the Irish)
is coded as “impure” by what Carroll identifies as taxonomic “types” of
monstrosity. Redfield’s rant codes the Irish as impure by “fusion” in their
combination of categorically distinct characteristics: they (the Irish) in
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combining the characteristics of canines and humans are violations of
natural law. That this anomalous state is endemic to the race marks them
as monstrous by “fission”, and their mob-like tendencies (as is evident in
the murder of Kilwarden) mark them as a monstrous unified entity. By
process of “magnification” the gargantuan proportions of this mob are
exaggerated to encode the Irish people as categorically impure and
transgressive. This renders them deserving of appellations and epithets
such as “maniac”, “Frankenstein” and “Vampire”.
In Redfield’s definition the Irish provoke disgust due to their
categorical impurity. In order to fulfil the twin strands of what makes a
monster monstrous they must also evoke fear. To quote Carroll:
This can be satisfied simply by making the monster lethal. That it kills and
maims is enough. The monster may also be threatening psychologically,
morally, or socially… Monsters may also trigger certain enduring infantile
fears, such as those of being eaten or dismembered, or sexual fears,
concerning rape and incest (Carroll, 1990: 43).
Thus the monster represents a threat that is both primal and acute, both of
which characteristics are amply fulfilled by the savage and seditious Irish
according to Redfield: “Bloody Irishman is a name applicable to the Irish
in general” and “Kill is a word attached to half the places in Ireland—
Killdare, Killarney, Killkenny, Kilkerney etc.” (Redfield, 1884: 264). If
we follow Redfield’s logic the Irish are killers whose bloody dispositions
are reflected in the naming of the terrain. It follows that Burke and Hare
by virtue of being Irish are predisposed to killing, despite neither of them
coming from a town with the prefix “kill”. This satisfies Carroll’s
requirement that the monster is a psychological, moral or social threat.
Equally, in their violation of the dead they embody enduring fears of what
happens after death. They are taboo-breaking deviants, prepared to prey on
their own, for whom nothing, not even the sanctuary of the crypt is sacred.
In the course of the nineteenth century the fantastical and fanatical
Celts responded to the call of the industrial revolution, “invading” to use
Dundas’s word, urban centres throughout England and Scotland. Once in
the city they were viewed as malign and deadly criminal contagions—
agents of destruction, threatening the structure of cosmopolitan society—
wreaking havoc with their lawless and indolent ways and debilitating and
destroying the health of the people. Widespread fear of social, physical
and psychic decay and degeneracy, fuelled by crime reporting, pamphlets
and broadsides resulted in moral panics and the inevitable Gothicisation of
the Celt. In the case of the Irish, as Judith Halberstam points out: “the
monster peeps through the window, enters through the back door, and sits
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beside you in the parlor; the monster is always invited in but never asked
to stay” (Halberstam, 1995: 15). The Irish were needed to aid the march of
progress in industrial Scotland. Against this background Messrs Burke and
Hare arrived in Edinburgh to work as navvies on the Union Canal in 1818.
In this moment, if contemporary accounts are to be believed, the doubleheaded Irish monster arrived at the frontiers of scientific progress and
entered the heart of the Scottish Enlightenment wreaking further chaos on
a world with a passion for order.
The Court of Cacus
Despite their notorious indefinability there is some scholarly consensus
around the etymological root of monstrosity: a monster is something that
we can see. For example as Michel Tournier observes: ‘‘monster” comes
from “monstrare,” “to show”. A monster is something which is shown,
pointed at, exhibited at fairs, and so on. “If you don’t want to be a
monster, you’ve got to be like your fellow creatures, in conformity with
the species” (Tournier: 1970: 11-12). Furthermore, as Haberstam argues:
“the monster functions as a monster …when it is able to condense as many
fear-producing traits as possible into one body” (in Durbach, 2010: 3). In
sum, history has led us to expect that monstrosity is something visible,
tangible; a pathologised and corporeal index of anomaly which inspires
horror or awe; its body, according to Bruhm: “that which is put on
excessive display, and whose violent, vulnerable immediacy
gives…Gothic fiction [its] beautiful barbarity” (Bruhm, 2002: 7). Take, for
example the topical figure of the body snatcher Andrew Merrilees, or, as
he was ironically nicknamed “Merry Andrew” as he is described in
Andrew Leighton’s The Court of Cacus:
The appearance of this miscreant was in keeping with his foul calling. Of
gigantic height he was thin and gaunt even to ridiculousness, with a long
pale face and the jaws of an ogre. His shabby clothes, no doubt made for
some tall person of proportionate girth, hung upon his sharp joints more as
if it had been placed there to dry than to clothe and keep him warm. No
less grotesque were the motions and gestures of this strange being, and
even the muscles of his face, as they passed from grin to idiot pleasure to
the scowl of anger, seemed to obey a similar power. (Leighton, 1861: 45).
In this admittedly tendentious description Leighton uses a combined
language of fairy-tale and the Gothic to depict Merrilees as a badly
assembled collection of body parts which are grotesque and fundamentally
unclean. In his gigantic, ogre-like appearance and grotesque facial tics he
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is physiognomically inscribed as a monster in order to elicit terror and
disgust. Similarly somatically tainted are his comrades: the sinister and
snivelling “Praying Howard” (a preacher-gone-wrong who alerted the
gang to the soon-to-be-deceased); the “deaf-mute” “Spune”, so named for
his propensities with a spade, and the thief “Moudiewarp” (mole) whose
sobriquet indicates his nocturnal “borrowings”. All of them, but in
particular Merrilees are depicted as “border entities” (Hurley, 1996: 24);
the existence and appearance of which defies classification. Citing Mary
Douglas, Kelly Hurley describes the dangers of such creatures “through
which [the] culture is able meaningfully to organize experience” (Hurley,
1996: 24):
Hybrids and other confusions are abominated …Holiness requires that
individuals shall conform to the class to which they belong. And holiness
requires that different classes of things shall not be confused …in general
the underlying principle of cleanness in animals is that they shall conform
fully to their class. Those species are unclean which are imperfect
members of their class, or whose class confounds the general scheme of the
world. (Hurley, 1996: 24)
The hybrid, in its corporeal deviance is thus considered unclean and
abnormal as a way in which to establish social norms and establish
humanity: we are human precisely because we are not monsters, and
monsters are not human because they deviate from the norm of what
stands for humanity. This is physicalised in the abnormal, ugly or
animalistic appearance of the monster. The early nineteenth century
witnessed the growth of popular belief; endorsed by a combination of
Lavaterian physiognomy and Burkean aesthetics, that moral good or evil
was evident in the features and expression of the face. To simplify, there
was a commonly held belief based on the Platonic axiom that the beautiful
is good, and the ugly is evil. It follows that monsters, due to their ugliness
would be considered ugly, as Harold Bloom succinctly summarised: “a
beautiful 'monster, even a passable one, would not have been a monster”
(Bloom, Hurley, 1996: 13). Conversely, the ugly were considered
monstrous.
One of the few corroborated facts that remain about William Hare was
that he was ugly. Several contemporary accounts labelled him “the beau
ideal of a drunken and stupid profligate”, a rude and diabolical ruffian, a
vacant and imbecilic “goule” [sic], socius criminus and, in the Court of
Cacus as a “Cain-marked murderer”. However the best account of his
physical appearance remains that given by Professor John Wilson,
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199
speaking in the persona of Christopher North in Blackwood’s Magazine of
March 1829. He recalls Hare as:
The most brutal man ever subjected to my sight, and at first looked
seemingly an idiot. His dull, dead, blackish eyes, wide apart, one rather
higher up than the other; his large, thick or rather coarse-lipped mouth; his
high broad cheekbones and sunken cheeks, each of which when he
laughed, which he did often – collapsed into a perpendicular hollow,
shooting up ghastlily from chin to cheek bones – all steeped in a sullenness
and squalor not born of the jail, but native to the almost deformed face of
the leering miscreant, inspired not fear, for the aspect was scarcely
ferocious, but disgust and abhorrence, so utterly loathsome was the whole
look of the reptile.( Bailey, 2002: 33)
While Wilson (an Olympian and well known pugilist) is keen to scotch
any suggestion that he feels fear in the presence of Hare, “the vilest of the
two monsters” he acknowledges “abhorrence” and “disgust”. Every
physical characteristic of Hare’s face from the dead eyes (considered
windows to the soul) to the leering expression (a mark of malign
imbecility) mark him out as an evolutionary throwback and genetic
criminal. Wilson’s observations, though doubtlessly satirical, reflect
populist conceptions of physiognomy and phrenology and from these he
interprets Hare as a hereditary delinquent, ugly and degenerate in extremis
and biologically predetermined to be evil. Walter Scott also acknowledged
the repugnance of Hare’s visage in his recollection of him as “a most
hideous wretch so much that I was induced to remark him from having
observed his extremely odious countenance once or twice in the street”
(Bailey, 2002: 124). The overall impression is one of memorable and
macabre foulness of a man-monster branded with the mark of Cain as
monstrosa hominum genera: one of the monstrous races of men.
The link with Cain, “the wrathful renegade”, cursed by God, exiled and
marked for his sins explains the somewhat enigmatic title of Leighton’s
book. Cain according to biblical testimony was the first murderer, sullied
by his sin of fratricide. In subsequent mythological representations
hebecame not only the first monster, but also the progenitor of a race of
monsters: monstrosa hominum genera.
As John Friedman remarks: Cain’s “violent nature, his association with
the devil, and his degradation from human status, often figured by his
ugliness or physical deformity” (Friedman, 2000: 95). Ugliness and
criminality (the one being an indicator of the other) are therefore the mark
of Cain. The sons of Cain (including the giants) carried his brand as a sign
of God’s displeasure and thus came to be viewed as “dedicatedly,
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unremittingly evil”, (Stephens, 1989: 96), “antisocial, criminal, and chaotic”
(Stephens, 1989: 3), and “archetypal enemies of both human culture and
divine authority” (Stephens, 1989: 75). Similarly, all the kin of Cain, due
to their lineage were marked, according to James Phillips as: “predators in
an aggravated sense. They prey not only on animals but also on humans.
The deformed enemy of humankind deformed” (Phillips, 2008: 43). Thus,
to reside in the Court of Cacus was to live in the nether worlds, and carry
the stigma of violence and crime in a face made ugly by its irredeemable
evil. In all of these attributes, William Hare was a first among monstrous
equals.
Monstrous Medicine
To wax lyrical if Hare was the apex of monstrous malevolence there were
others who competed for the title.
Dr Robert Knox, MD was a maverick, medical pioneer who in appearance
(and some would argue character) was monstrous. In sum he was:
... a stiff upright figure, huge domed head which was balding prematurely,
with powerful shoulders and long arms. He had lost his left eye which had
atrophied as a result of smallpox in his infancy, leaving an empty socket
(Bailey, 2002: 55).
‘Old Cyclops’ as he came to be known presented a grotesque figure in his
dandified flounces and frills, surrounded by the ephemera of the anatomy
room, twitching and smacking his lips involuntarily. He was also an
arrogant, obnoxious racist and Celtophile who had more in common with
his monstrous namesake than his scornful students may have realised. A
giant in the field of anatomy, he was also an isolated outsider who was
hostile to humanity. Most pointedly, like Cyclops, Robert Knox lived off
the bodies of the weak. If Burke and Hare loaded the conveyor belt with
human matter, Knox received the contents and reduced them to body parts
in the service of Mammon.
Refusing to speculate on the culpability of Knox in the case of Burke
and Hare, James Moore Ball (MD) offers the cryptic interdiction: “let the
dead rest” (Moore Ball, 1989: 105). The supreme irony of this statement in
relation to Knox needs no embellishment further than an
acknowledgement that Knox may have fared better had he heeded these
words. From his occupation, through his appearance and mannerisms, to
the macabre manner in which he conducted his business Knox was almost
an embodied Gothic trope. His tireless and shady quest for corpses to
dissect, combined with his occupation as a doctor rendered him a
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201
supremely suitable (and sinister) figuration for contemporary anxieties
about the bloody business of medicine, disease, depravation and death
hidden behind the near-sacred edifice of 10 Surgeons Square and its
associated medical establishments.
Both Promethean hero and Faustian villain the figure of the doctor in
Gothic is an embodied paradox straddling the boundaries between life and
death; attempting to transcend both and, at times obeying neither. A
memento mori incarnate the doctor speaks to our deepest fears and takes us
into taboo and unspeakable realms wherein lurk reminders of the fragility
and vulnerability of the human body, the certainty of its extinction and the
inescapability of our own fate. Furthermore, as David Punter asserts: the
mad scientist (or doctor) is:
... always the most complex and interesting character in Gothic fiction,
even when drawn with a clumsy hand: awe inspiring, endlessly resourceful
in pursuit of his often opaquely evil ends, and yet possessed of a
mysterious attractiveness (Punter, 1980: 11).
It is fair to say that these characteristics applied to Knox. Though
physically repellent he did, contemporary sources argue have a strange,
mesmeric charisma, and his resourcefulness in procuring corpses is
legendary. It is the methods by which he did this, and the growing
suspicion of the populous of Edinburgh and beyond that led to his
downfall, which was swift, absolute and registered with “the savagery of
the war whoop and tomahawk” (Moore Ball, 1989: 110) by John Wilson
and his colleagues from Noctes Ambrosianae in March 1829. Space
precludes a discussion of this “savage attack of the literary ruffian” as
Lonsdale describes it, but it is exemplary of the significant public
execration Knox received in the wake of the murders.
If the doctor presents a chilling and unsettling figure, it is in the
Anatomist that the medical man reaches his Gothic apotheosis. Standing at
the nexus of the natural and the supernatural he literalises our darkest
imaginings about death and what happens after it. Hubristic and amoral he
exposes the prohibited and hidden interior of the body, transforming it
with an uncanny detachment from a vital vessel for the soul to mere meat
and matter. In short, in forcing us to confront the monstrous and the abject,
the Anatomist exemplifies what Kelly Hurley describes as “the permeable
boundaries between science and occultism, between natural phenomena
and monstrous ones” (Hurley, 1996: 20); in him “Science in gothicised
and gothicity is rendered scientifically plausible” (Hurley, 1996: 20). Such
a man was Robert Knox who, like his fictional contemporary Victor
Frankenstein exemplifies the apparently inexorable progress of science
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and medicine which both fascinated and repelled British society in the first
decades of the nineteenth century. Standing in the vanguard of debates
about body and spirit he challenges orthodoxies and threatens religious
dogma. In this he is the archetypal anatomist recast as the dark side of the
Enlightenment: a narcissistic and Cyclopean monster dabbling in
forbidden knowledge and hell-bent on self-advancement who becomes
caught in a cautionary Gothic tale.
The Mark of Cain
If ugliness is the standard by which to measure monstrosity, Burke was by
definition not a monster. He did not have what Halberstam, citing
Baudrillard describes as “the obscenity of immediate visibility”
(Halberstam, 1995: 1) commonly associated with the monstrous body.
This is ratified by the observations made about Burke’s appearance by
Henry Cockburn, counsel to the defence at his trial: “except that he
murdered”, argued Cockburn, “Burke was a sensible, and what might be
called a respectable man; not at all ferocious in his general manner, sober,
correct in all his other habits” (Fido, 1988: 104). Even taking into account
his nature as part of a defence plea it is a disquieting description in that it
appears to imply that everything after the first phrase might mitigate for
the fact that he murdered. Beyond the assizes, however, the general
impression of Burke was that he was: “kind and serviceable, inoffensive
and playful, industrious, seldom inclined to drink: a great favourite with a
fund of low humour and a jocular, quizzical turn” (Fido, 1988: 105). In
fact, from the point of view of ‘monsterisation’ the only truly remarkable
thing about him was how truly unremarkable he was. As The Caledonian
Mercury of Thursday 25th December 1828 recounts:
The male prisoner as his name indicates is a native of Ireland. He is a man
rather below the middle size and stoutly made and of a determined, though
not peculiarly sinister expression of countenance. The contour of his face
as well as his features is decidedly Milesian. It is round, with high
cheekbones, grey eyes, a good deal sunk in the head, a short snubbish nose
and a round chin but altogether of a small cast … he had upon the whole
what we call in this country a wauf rather than a ferocious appearance,
though there is a hardness about the features, mixed with an expression in
the grey twinkling eyes that is far from inviting.
The editorial which juxtaposes the ethnocentric rhetoric of phrenology
with that of physiognomy seems at first counter-intuitive. There is nothing
compelling to bespeak the monstrousness of the defendant. This lack of
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203
visible monstrosity is endorsed by Lisa Rosner who argues that according
to contemporary accounts: “he” [Burke] was considered: “charming and
well-spoken”, with the typical “natural vivacity associated with Irishmen”.
Citing Henry Cockburn she continues: the “outgoing, gregarious member
of the group” he was “not at all ferocious in his general manner”, and
“sober, correct and kind in all his other habits” (Rosner, 2010: 60). On the
surface, then Burke displays no anatomical abnormality or evident deviant
behaviour that would signify his monstrousness. In fact his only
distinguishing characteristic is his Milesian phenotype. Though not overtly
ghoulish or villainous, Burke’s face displays hints of an inner, deviant
character which is decidedly Milesian. For ‘decidedly Milesian’ read
‘decidedly Irish’ as an article in Blackwood’s of the following year
observes:
Unfortunately, the domination of the Celt over Irish character is modified
chiefly by that of the Milesian, whose large and dark eye, high and sharp
nose, thin lips and linear mouth, declares his southern origin more surely
than Irish history or Irish fable (BEM, 1829).
Notably the appearance of the Milesian reflects sui generis a volatile
melanic temperament, or one given as the article suggests to “love of
splendour, want of taste, voluptuousness and licence” characteristic of the
Southern European. Unchecked, when combined with the “imagination
and passion of the aboriginal population of Ireland” this leads to a people
deficient in “reasoning and judgement” who, according to the writer:
... must naturally be less distinguished in the discrimination of good and ill,
and the calm and patient discharge of duty, than in the love of friends and
the hatred of foes, or in the devotion, even unto death, to any cause which
they may espouse (BEM, 1829).
The Milesian Irish are thus distinguished by their irrationality, their
fanaticism, and their inability to distinguish between good and evil. “Not
less obvious is it” he argues:
How utterly worthless and contemptible must seem Irish want of
judgement, want of principle and want of industry; and how well deserved
Irish wretchedness though it is to be feared that the inevitable effect of this
contempt is less salutary than for the sake of Ireland one would wish it to
be (BEM, 1829).
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The term ‘Milesian’ can thus be seen as a term of abuse indicating the
non-rational propensities of the bearer of such racial stigmata as discussed
above. In The Mercury’s article however these facial features are
specifically associated through phrenological and physiognomic discourse
with criminality: the sunken eyes and the snubbed nose indicate ferocity,
vanity and villainy; his singularly uninviting expression is described as
“wauf”—“freakish” or “startling”—and yet, in comparison with descriptions
of other criminals of the time what is most surprising is that the source of
Burke’s evil is not immediately evident in his face. On closer inspection
however, the graphic pen of North paints a monster lurking beneath the
Irishman’s uncannily normal appearance:
Impenitent as a snake, remorseless as a tiger. I studied in his cell his hard,
cruel eyes, his hardened lips which truth never touched nor moved from
their cunning compression; his voice rather soft and calm but steeped in
hypocrisy and deceit; his collected and guarded demeanour, full of danger
and guile—all, all betrayed as he lay in his shackles, the cool, calculating,
callous and unrelenting villain (BEM, 1829).
The image produced is bestial and atavistic, stressing Burke’s cunning,
hypocrisy and deceit, combined with his observable lack of remorse. This
displays not only his evident culpability but also a capacity for deliberate
and intentional evil. In the absence of clear somatic indicators, Burke’s
diabolical depravity is defined as part of his essence or soul and becomes
more sinister because it is cunningly concealed by his cold and calculated
manner. However, his inner monstrosity manifests itself in his facial
expressions which mark him irrefutably in the eyes of North as a monster
and “an unrelenting villain”.
On the surface Burke, unlike Hare did not carry the mark of Cain. In
the case of Hare his repulsive physiognomy, combined with his abnormal
morphology accurately represents his inner evil, yet his apparent idiocy
(indicated by his dead eyes and grotesque grimacing) mitigates his
monstrosity and marks him as the lesser of two evils set against the cold,
calculating Burke. One might speculate that this, along with his turning of
king’s evidence resulted in the former escaping the gallows while the latter
was hanged, gibbeted, anatomised and dissected: taken in death by the
profession he had so nefariously served in life.
A Tale of Two Cities?
As Cohen points rightly points out the body of the monster is “pure
culture” (Cohen, 1996: 4). In this he identifies the monstrous body as an
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205
ambiguous, polysemic and revelatory sign which signifies a whole
constellation of fears which threaten to undermine the society from which
it is spawned. Therefore, as Cohen continues: “Monsters must be
examined within the intricate matrix of relations (social, cultural, and
literary-historical) that generate them” (Cohen, 1996: 5). Monsters can
therefore be seen as an unsettling part of our social consciousness in that
they are deviant boundary-crossers who demonstrate the instability of our
norm-driven society by transgressing the ‘laws’ we create, and traducing
the borders we erect. Elsewhere Cohen argues that monsters are created
and constructed to meet the demands of a given audience. It follows that
they can reveal worlds about the cultures to which they belong. They live,
as David Gilmore asserts:
In borderline places, inhabiting an ‘outside’ dimension that is apart from,
but parallel to and intersecting the human community. They often live in
lairs deep underground, in an unseen dimension as it were, or in watery
places like marshes, fens, or swamps. Or else they infest distant
wildernesses of which people are afraid, like mountain tops, oceans,
glaciers, or jungles. They emerge from these fastnesses at night or during
abnormal cosmological events to shake humans from their complacency,
appearing in darkness or during storms, earthquakes, famines, or other
times of disturbance (Gilmore, 2002: 12-13).
And from these liminal habitats, as Cohen suggests, “the monster stands as
a warning against explorations of its uncertain demesnes … to step outside
this official geography is to risk becoming monstrous oneself” (Cohen,
1996: 12).
It is fair to say that the tale of Burke and Hare is a tale of two cities as,
due to the disparities of wealth and amenities, as Robert Louis Stevenson
would observe “the whole city leads a double existence” (Stevenson,
1988: 89-90). While the New Town was a thriving metropolis at the
vanguard of medical advances, the Old Town with its dens of iniquity,
putrid smells and murky labyrinths of shadowy, decaying streets and
wynds housed deep-seated fears in the population of both sides of the
Scottish capital. As John Geddie commented in 1900 successive waves of
Irish immigrants had made this sense of tension manifestly worse.
Discussing the Old Town he stated that:
Wester Portsburgh never an aristocratic quarter suffered social deterioration
from incursions of the ‘Irishry’…it had always had a dubious reputation as
a refuge and rallying ground for schism and faction (Geddie, 1900:167).
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This progressive mistrust of “the Irishry” erupted when the atrocities of
1827 came to light:
... the last and heaviest stroke was delivered to the reputation of the West
Port when discovery was made of the hideous series of crimes perpetrated
in 1827 and 1828 in Log’s lodging, Tanner’s Close by those Irish Thugs,
William Burke and William Hare (Geddie, 1900: 168).
The monsters they had imagined in those dark corners and tortuously
winding streets had suddenly became manifestly real as they came to
realise that Irish monsters stalked their own back yard.
The Lair of the Monster
On that note, I invite the reader to step outside of the official geographies
of Edinburgh’s New Town: leave behind the neo-classical terraces and
open squares—homes to the bourgeoisie of the Athens of the North, and
head down to the outside dimension of the crumbling, crowded tenements
and doss-houses, of Auld Reekie. The year is 1828, and you are about to
enter the lugubrious and nocturnal atmosphere of the West Port.
In the encroaching darkness of this underworld, the first thing you will
notice is the stench and miasma emanating from the open drains which are
overflowing with decaying human and animal excrement. The inhabitants,
as derelict and filthy as the buildings are plagued with disease: “a fearful
amount of destitution prevails” argued Alexander Miller, Assistant to Dr
Robert Knox, and “continued fever is never absent from the dwellings of
the poor” (Rosner, 2010: 73). In this “uncertain demesne” according to
Brian Bailey:
... tall tenement building known as ‘lands’ crowded together in narrow,
stinking wynds and closes beneath a permanent pall of smoke from the
congested multitude of chimneys. Filthy winding staircases, called
‘turnpike stairs’, led from squalid yards and apartments into apartments
where washing hung out of the windows during daylight hours, and human
and other refuse was tipped out of them at night. (Bailey, 2002: 30).
Note the gothic idiom used to evoke the stench and squalor in this putrid
sewer of the lowest forms of humanity. The abject squalor of this
underground dystopia is summed up even more graphically by Henry
Lonsdale whose moral outrage and disgust is recorded in his retrospective
biography of Dr Robert Knox thus:
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207
Those who knew the Old Town of Edinburgh, its wretched ‘wynds’, its
hovels, or rather styes, its whisky shops and dens of iniquity, could have no
difficulty in comprehending the frequency of casualties amid such a
frightfully debased population. Life was everywhere surrounded by the
contingencies of death …housed in the sunless and fetid alleys, or worse
the tainted cul de sacs of ‘closes’, sheltered by dilapidated gables and shed
for cattle, or half smothered amid burrowed ruins and cellarage tenanted
with rats and vermin, men, women and children huddled together in brutal
fashion. Of what consideration was life to mortals in the veriest rags and
tatters, in the midst of stench, and feeding on the garbage of the gutters, or
the poison of the dram shops? Was death not rather a consummation
devoutly to be wished? (Bailey, 2002: 58)
For at least sixteen of the denizens of this nether region this wish was
about to be consummated.
Dystopias and Dysgenics
The inhabitants of the West Port were commonly viewed as “the lowest,
dampest, dirtiest, most unhealthy and ruinous rabble” (Bailey, 2002: 31).
Most of them were itinerant and transient Irish or Highlanders; pauperised
immigrants who had come to work on the Union Canal, undertaking
backbreaking work, hacking out rocks for the sum of 2 shillings per day.
Amongst these immigrant Irishmen were William Burke and William Hare
whose ‘career of crime’ according to James Moores Ball “has scarcely
been equalled” (Moore Ball, 1989: 84) and whose lair, “to which they
enticed their victims” should have carried Dante’s lines: “Lasciate ogni
speranza, voi ch’entente” (Moore Ball, 1989: 84).
The same inscription: ‘Abandon all hope ye that enter’ could be
applied to the Old Town of Edinburgh. The wynds of the West Port,
besides being incubators for disease were hatcheries for crime, and
magnets to the wandering mendicants who happened into the city. As
stated, disease was rife, hunger was the norm and death was a daily
occurrence to the unfortunates who found themselves in these nests of
deprivation. Predictably these haunts of the urban poor came to be
categorised as sites of degeneration—lairs of iniquity in which lurked “the
lowest rabble, full of menacing oaths and ferocity” and “women half nude,
half drunk, and more than half savage” (Kirkyards, 2011: ). Amongst these
deprived and depraved inhabitants of the West Port were Burke and Hare’s
nominal ‘wives’ Helen MacDougal and Margaret (Lucky) Hare, described
by Christopher North as:
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Poor, miserable, bony, skinny, scranky, wizened jades both, without the
distant approach to good-lookingness, either in any part of their form, or
any feature of their face—peevish, sulky, savage and cruel, and evidently
familiar, from earliest life, with all the wretchedness of guilt and polution
[sic] —most mean in look, manner, mind, dress—the very dregs of
prostitution (Roughhead, 1921: 14).
It is a moot point as to whether, in the case of Burke and Hare the female
of the species could be seen to be more monstrous than the male. Despite
the fact that both women (along with William Hare) walked free it is
almost certain that they were implicated to a greater or lesser extent in the
16 murders to which Burke confessed. For North they are exemplars of
evil—each carrying the stigmata of degeneracy in their repulsive
physiognomies. Of the two, however it is Lucky Hare whom North
observes has “the most of the she-devil” (Roughhead, 1921: 14) clutching
“her yellow yammering infant (the image of its father) in her arm—in
prison as we saw her as if it were a bundle of rags” (Roughhead, 1921:
14). For North, any pretence of maternal feeling in Hare’s “leddy” is a
ruse and the child nothing more than a prop to solicit sympathy and save
her from the scaffold. In this, North argues she is similar to the “angry
beggars” who dash their children’s head against the pavement in order to
importune favours from passers-by. In short she is part of an unnatural and
degenerate class who display an utter lack of moral values—a class upon
whose children the sins of the fathers are brutally and manifestly visited.
As Kelly Hurley explains:
Degeneration, like syphilis, with which it was often confused, could be
seen as a divine punishment for some “original sin”. Degenerationists
wrote in highly coloured, apocalyptic style of the sins of the parents being
visited most heavily on the heads of children who had forfeited their
innocence even before birth. The perverted morals of one generation—of
the alcoholic mother, the father who had contracted syphilis from
prostitutes - found literalization in the deformed bodies and minds of the
next.(Hurley, 1996: 57)
The appearance of Hare’s unnamed child complies almost exactly with
this theory. Note for example the jaundiced appearance of the monstrous
nursling, suggesting it is infected with the criminal dissoluteness of its
parents. Added to this it carries the same repellent and felonious features
as its father signifying its genetic propensity for criminality. In short it
embodies the ‘morbid heredity’ codified in theories of dysgenics and is
symptomatic of nineteenth century gothic anxieties concerning
degeneration, devolution, and ‘criminal man’. Sickly, defective and barely
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209
recognisable as a human infant this spawn of a degenerate culture carries
the mark of Cain and symbolises the terrifying possibility of reverse
ontogeny or as David Punter puts it that “if evolution is a ladder it may be
possible to start moving down it” (Punter, 1980: 244).
Conclusion
The crimes of Burke and Hare reflected a constellation of fears related to
dissection, body snatching, popular notions of criminality, and the horror
of the surgeon’s trade in nineteenth century Edinburgh. Intertwined with
these are anxieties of the threats posed by the urban metropolis to strangers
and itinerants who have become alienated and atomised by the
unstoppable wave of progress and industrialisation. The monstrous lead
actors are unique, timeless and archetypal, but the setting is time-bound
and audience-specific, relating to the expanding and unregulated
metropolis of Edinburgh wherein the anonymous and the poor could, and
did become fodder for the surgeon’s knife. It is a gothic tale in every sense
of the word, including in its grimly ironic epilogue.
In an etymological sense, Burke fulfilled the basic requirement for
monstrosity in his post-mortem dissection. To quote Garland Thomson:
“monster derives from the Latin monstra, meaning to warn, show, or sign,
and which has given us the modern verb demonstrate” (Garland Thomson,
1996: 3). The question remains, however whether the monstrousness lay in
the demonstration or the demonstrators who reduced him to “a beast who
is all body and no soul” (Halberstam, 1995: 1). Like countless felons
before him he was executed, anatomised, in what was a demonstration of
the surgeon’s skill, and displayed, to satisfy the morbid curiosity of the
mob. As Walter Scott caustically observed:
The corpse of the Murderer Burke is now lying in state at the College, in
the anatomical class, and all the world flock to see him. Who is he that says
we are not ill to please in our objects of curiosity. That strange means by
which the wretch made money are scarce more disgusting than the eager
curiosity with which the publick have licked up all the carrion details of the
business. (Bailey, 2002 : 118).
In this sense Scott transfers the monstrosity from the murderer to the mob
and the Medics who had ensured that, in the spectacle of Burke’s end, and
his butchered remains, the punishment was more horrific and macabre
than the crime. In this he became an embodied and mutilated emblem; a
sign, as McNally observes that: “bodysnatching, dissection and the trade in
corpses were proof that the monstrosities of the market respected no
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limits” (McNally, 2012: 58). Ironically, for the poor of Edinburgh who
flocked to see the thing that lay on the anatomist’s slab he demonstrated,
to paraphrase McNally: the demeaning of the destitute, and “the public
humiliation and degradation of the poor” (McNally, 2012: 56).
As Asa Mittman suggests:
I would argue that the monstrous does not lie solely in its embodiment
(though this is very important) nor its location (though this is, again, vital),
nor in the process(es) through which it enacts its being, but also (indeed,
perhaps, primarily) in its impact’ (Mittman, 2012 : 7).
It is here, in the final impact of one of the monsters that the supreme irony
lies. As mentioned, the pseudo-sciences of Phrenology and Physiognomy
were used to label both Burke and Hare ‘monsters of mankind’. It is
supremely ironic, then that William Burke would end up disproving the
theory that labelled him thus. Though the apex of quackery Phrenology’s
apologists continued to argue its validity as an exact science. “One would
like to find a little discrepancy now and then” argued an anonymous
acolyte of the famous Phrenologist Combe “but no such thing ever occurs.
Phrenology is a rule without exceptions” (West Port Murders, 1829: 245).
William Burke would prove him and the pseudo-science wrong.
After being hanged on 28th of January, 1829 Burke’s body was, as I
have stated donated for “useful dissection” to the Medical School of
Edinburgh University. After post-mortem examinations were undertaken
by “several eminent scientists” a lecture was delivered on the subject of
the criminal’s brain by Edinburgh University’s Dr Munro. Far from
endorsing the pseudo-science which labelled him congenitally degenerate
“his cranium” as Henry Lonsdale, a medical student observed, “resembles
that of a woman, and could hardly have been taken for that of a murderer”
(Lonsdale, 1870: 76). In direct contradiction to the expected phrenological
profile, Burke’s organs of benevolence, amativeness and conscientiousness
were larger than average, while the organ of destructiveness was below the
average size. Indeed, as the President of the Royal Medical Society,
Thomas Stone acknowledged: “so hardly did Burke’s ‘bumps’ fit the
Combean theory that his last work may be called a triumph of
destructiveness; he ended by burking phrenology”.
Despite the curiously anomalous condition of Burke’s brain, Science
had yet to finish with Burke’s earthly remains. His eviscerated carcass was
exhibited for the edification and voyeuristic titillation of the baying mob
with enough macabre spectacle, “to satisfy the most epicurean appetite for
horrors” (MacGregor, 1884: 177). The cadaver, (with the top of the skull
temporarily replaced) was, according to Alexander Leighton:
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211
Placed naked on a black marble table in the anatomical theatre…There
were as yet no signs of corruption, so that the death pallor, as it contrasted
with the black marble table showed strongly to the enquiring and often
revolting eye; but the face had become more blue, and the shaved head,
with marks of blood not entirely wiped off rather gave effect to the grin
into which the features had settled at the moment of death. (MacGregor,
1884: 178).
Notably, in this gruesome, visceral description attention is drawn to the
face, which Leighton recalled had retained in the rictus grimace: “a bitter
expression of the very scorn with which he had looked upon that world
which pushed him out of it, as having in his person defaced the image of
the Maker” (MacGregor, 1884: 176). Here Leighton takes facial
characteristics entirely consistent with a violent asphyxial death and
shapes the facts of actuality into a grisly moral message: Burke was not, in
his last moments choking to death but snarling at the world and the
Almighty; a clear indicator of the hubristic impenitence and monstrous,
diabolical malignity concealed behind his innocuous face in life only to be
spectacularly revealed in death.
Thus, desecrated, dissected and damned William Burke was consigned
to hell and to history, leaving behind him a new word for the English
language, countless tales of terror but few material possessions other than
four books, his Milesian skull, his cadaver and the book covers, tobacco
pouches and portrait canvasses made from his flayed skin which were
given as gruesome mementos to the civilised gentlemen-medics who had
labelled him ‘monster.’ To return to Punter’s question of “how much . . .
can one lose . . . and still remain a man?” (Punter, 1980: 240) Burke had
lost everything, even his mortal remains in his passage to monstrous
abjection. The man who had commodified the dead in life, became in
death “a mass of bones, muscles and arteries” (McNally, 2012: 97); the
prized commodity in a burgeoning corpse economy that ghoul-like relied
on the cadavers of the poor, the unruly and the criminal for its sustenance.
The question, then remains; in the tales of Burke and Hare who was the
most ‘inhuman human’? (McNally, 2012: 103) Was it Burke and Hare the
monstrous suppliers of the raw material, or those doctors who created the
cadaverous demand and turned a collection of abstracted body parts into
profit? The question has no unequivocal answer but will no doubt continue
to stimulate debate for as long as the tales of Burke and Hare in all their
shocking strangeness continue to be told.
212
Chapter Ten
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Goblinshead, Musselburgh.
Angell, Katherine. (2008), “Joseph Merrick and the Concept of
Monstrosity in Nineteenth Century Medical Thought” in Hosting the
Monster. Holly Lynn Baumgartner and Roger Davis (eds.). Rodopi,.
New York, pp.131-152.
Bailey, Brian. (2002), Burke and Hare: The Year of the Ghouls.
Mainstream Publishing, Edinburgh and London.
Baldick, Chris. (1987), Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and
Nineteenth-century Writing Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Barrie, J.M. (1892), An Edinburgh Eleven: Pencil Portraits from College
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Baumgartner H.L and Davies R. (eds.). (2008), Monsters and the
Monstrous’ Probing the Boundaries, (Rudophi. Amsterdam, New
York.
BEM. (1829), Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (March 1829).
Bloom, Harold. (2002), ‘Introduction’ to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
Penguin, New York.
Bruhm, Steven. (2002), “The Contemporary Gothic: Why We Need It.”
The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Jerrold Hogle (ed.).
Cambridge UP, Cambridge, pp. 259-70.
Canguilhem, Georges (1962):. ‘Monstrosity and the Monstrous’ in
Diogenes Therese Jaeger. (trans.). 40, pp. 27-42.
Carroll, Noël; (1990), The Philosophy of Horror – Or Paradoxes of the
Heart,: Routledge, New York.
Cheng, V. (1995), Joyce, Race and Empire, Cambridge University Press,
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Clery Emma and Robert Miles (eds.). (2000), Gothic Documents: A
Sourcebook 1700-1820, Manchester University Press, Manchester, pp.
163 – 171.
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome (ed.). (1996) Monster Culture (Seven Theses,)
Monster Theory: Reading Culture. pp. 3-25. University of Minnesota
Press, Minneapolis.
Durbach, Nadja. (2010), Spectacle of Deformity: Freak Shows and
Modern British Culture. University of California, Berkeley.
Edwards, Owen Dudley. (1984), Burke & Hare. Polygon Books.
Fido, Martin. (1988), Bodysnatchers: A History of the Resurrectionists.
Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London.
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Friedman, John Block. (2000), ‘Cain’s Kin’ in The Monstrous Races in
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Garland Thomson, Rosemary. (ed.). (1996), Freakery: Cultural Spectacles
of the Extraordinary Body, New York University Press, New York &
London.
Geddie, John, (1900),.Romantic Edinburgh, Sands & Co., London.
Gibbons, Luke. (2004), Gaelic Gothic, Race, Colonization, and Irish
Culture Arlen House, Galway.
Gilmore, David D. (2003), Monsters: Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts, and
All Manner of Imaginary Terrors. University of Pennsylvania,
Philadelphia.
Graham, Elaine L. (2002), Representations of the Post/Human: Monsters,
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Halberstam, Judith. (1995), Skin Shows. Duke University Press, Durham
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Hogle, Jerrold E. (ed.). (2002). ‘Introduction: the Gothic in Western
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159-97.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
TWO SIDES OF THE SAME DARK COIN:
GOTHIC CITYSCAPES AND MASCULINITIES
IN WILLIAM MCILVANNEY’S LAIDLAW
AND EOIN MCNAMEE’S RESURRECTION MAN
MARTYN COLEBROOK
This is the city as a cadaver … a city whose mortification precludes all
possibility of change (Patterson, 1994: 43)
Glen Patterson’s vivid analogy for Belfast suggests the presence of a
deadly and corporeal atmosphere in the city which is expressed through its
depictions in fiction. The motif of the cadaver is significant as it draws
together the foci of this chapter: the representation of post-industrial
masculinities and violence in the working class communities of Glasgow
and Belfast, as expressed in the novels of William McIlvanney and Eoin
McNamee. McIlvanney, whose trilogy of detective novels featuring the
eponymous Glaswegian interloper, Jack Laidlaw, provided the outline for
the existentially angst-ridden, hard-bitten John Rebus in Ian Rankin’s
fiction.
McIlvanney is posited as the progenitor for the rise to eminence that
Scottish crime fiction has undergone, the Tartan Noir that Rankin refers to,
but another pertinent comment that accompanies this is the critical
reception that Laidlaw (1978) received in relation to the previous works
such as Docherty (1975) and The Kiln (1996). As Isobel Murray informs
the reader: “Published in 1978, Laidlaw was an unexpected crime novel
from a ‘serious’ writer”. [italics and emphasis in original text] (Murray,
2008: 197) thus the generally pejorative attitude to popular genre fictions
and the “serious” writers who indulge in them makes for an important
statement that McIlvanney and his contemporaries counterpoint and react
to through the different complexities they weave into the text and their
unashamed appropriation of and transformation of canonical texts as well.
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Chapter Eleven
The Gothic is unavoidably intertwined with crime fiction and Paul
Skenazy, when discussing Raymond Chandler, applies the term “gothic
causality” (Skenazy, 1995: 114) to the “hauntings that structure most
crime narratives” (Scaggs, 2005: 16) where “a secret from the past . . .
represents an occurrence or desire antithetical to the principles and
position of the house (or family)” (Skenazy, 1995: 114). In the focus text,
this secret disrupts different traditional power structures in place, the
transgression being the murder of a child.
Further to these Gothic characteristics is the theme of hidden secrets
awaiting detection and Fred Botting suggests that crime fiction draws
“From the Gothic novel, a concern with secret or hidden knowledge and
the narrative and thematic spectre of social disintegration” (Botting, 2001:
5). The knowledge lies in the eventual solution to the crime and the
aspects of social disintegration are located strongly in McIlvanney’s work
with his distinctive focus on the families and communities which are
affected by the murder. McIlvanney’s detective exists in a specific
community created by their isolation and disparate relationships with
members of their own family, which lies with their colleagues and the
supposition that when seeking the murderer the Police Force will unite in
their efforts. Laidlaw ostensibly bucks this trend by his decision to operate
alone yet still rely on colleagues for information and thus the sense of
social disintegration operates at different levels, within the personal lives
of the detectives and within the wider groups of whom they are a part
through familial or other connections. Interestingly, one criticism of
McIlvanney is that:
[o]ne reason The Papers of Tony Veitch and Strange Loyalties don't work
so well is that Laidlaw and Harkness have learned to work together—
giving less scope for Laidlaw’s existential witticisms (O'Connor, 2006:
53).
McIlvanney plays a similar game with his detective's name encompassing
his intention and profession, the metaphorical laying down the law.
Edmund O’Connor rather provocatively states that, with regards to
crime fiction, “we are all criminals” (O'Connor, 2006: 58). At this point, I
am not trying to ascribe the traits of a serial killer or one who commits
murder in the heat of the moment to those readers who devour crime
fiction, instead there is a quite striking relationship between practitioners
of Scottish crime writing: their use of narratives render the reader
complicit in the murders committed within their pages and this is
expanded to include the problematic position for the detective who finds
Two Sides of the Same Dark Coin
217
themselves accused of betrayal, a crime not recognised by legal statute but
by the unspoken codes of fraternity.
“Glasgow on a Friday night, the city of the stare.” (McIlvanney, 1991:
1) Here McIlvanney delivers one of the devastating opening sentences in
crime fiction, Strange Loyalties, and in doing so successfully and
succinctly “evok[es] the rituals of the working-class week and the implicit
threat posed by ‘looking’ in male working-class culture”. (Dentith, 1990:
32) The observer objectifies the body, whether the body is that of the male
or his partner. The identification of “Friday night” identifies the
conclusion of the working week and the temporary release from paid
labour for two days and a night, a time for release.
Hugh McDonald comments in a recent interview with McIlvanney:
It does not require a detective to divine that both Laidlaw and Docherty
take something from their creator. "Laidlaw allowed me to say something
to a wider audience," he says. “He has an abrasive voice but he is dealing
with hard things. You are saying things about real people in a real city. If it
has a philosophy, it is about surviving with dignity and decency in the
main” (McDonald, 2013: np).
It is McIlvanney’s commitment to the subject of his fiction—working
class Glasgow—which leads me to draw parallels between Glasgow and
Belfast through their respective position as post-industrial cities.
We begin Laidlaw with a strong sense of the Gothic:
Running was a strange thing. The sound was your feet slapping the
pavement. The lights of passing cars batted your eyeballs. Your arms came
up unevenly in front of you, reaching from nowhere, separate from you and
from each other. It was like the hands of a lot of people drowning.
. . . Running was a dangerous thing. It was a billboard advertising
panic, a neon sign spelling guilt. Walking was safe. You could wear
strolling like a mask. Stroll. Strollers are normal.
The strangest thing was no warning. You worse the same suit, you
chose your tie carefully, there was a mistake about your change on the bus.
Half-an-hour before it, you had laughed. Then your hands were an ambush.
They betrayed you. It happened so quickly. Your hands, that lifted cups
and held coins and waved, were suddenly a riot, a brief raging. The
consequence was forever.
And the meaning of everything was changed. It had no meaning or too
many meanings, all of them mysterious. Your body was a strange place.
Hands were ugly. Inside, you were all hiding places, dark corners.
(McIlvanney 1977: 5)
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Chapter Eleven
The strategy deployed is that of the second person narrator, immediately
unsettling the reader and forcing them into a situation of confusion,
bewilderment and unknowing. The first lines establish the atmosphere and
the environment but are also alienating due to the anonymity of the
narrator and the dislocation within unknown surroundings. ‘Strange’
suggests the narrator’s actions are obviously different, out of the ordinary,
inappropriate to the location they are moving in but the reasons for the
actions are not revealed. That the lights of cars “batted your eyeballs”
indicates the speed of the movement, not a gentle jog but an intensive,
frantic, panicked run yet the gender and intentions of the narrator have still
not been revealed. That the “arms came up evenly in front of them”
problematises whether this is a pleading run and they are seeking help
from a pursuer or whether they are the chasing, their arms reaching to grab
and touch their victim to prevent escape. These arms which are: “reaching
from nowhere, separate from you and from each other. It was like the
hands of a lot of people drowning” seem dislocated from the body running
they may be the arms of others attempting to obstruct or capture. Their
separation “from you and from each other” further questions just how
many arms there are, suggesting a lack of co-ordination and control. The
final image of “drowning” suggests an inevitable helplessness, the narrator
pleading for assistance or trying to attract attention. Paragraph two
intensifies the problematic position for the reader because it now becomes
apparent that the narrator is in a degree of distress and their activities are
attracting the seemingly unwanted attention of others who may intervene
but may pose a threat. The repetition of “strange” in the first and third
paragraphs suggests a detachment from the actions that are occurring and
disorients the reader further because it is apparent that these actions are
being observed and witnessed. That “[t]he strangest thing was no warning”
implies that the events precipitating this have been observed as well and
that there is a background to this running which is out of the protagonist's
control, hence it is “strange[ly]” , out of character for the time, the lack of
warning reinforcing this, that the running is a product of confusion.
McIlvanney’s selection of “riot” and “raging” are the key to understanding
the temperament of the scene and, one suspects, the protagonist. The
actions were not expected, not anticipated, they were the product of
unanticipated conditions, a situation gone wrong in which emotion has
ruled over pragmatism or logic. The nature of the protagonist has been
imbalanced, is unpredictable, their next actions cannot be determined. This
protagonist has no long-term escape route and has been driven to
desperation. The concluding paragraph of this sequence demonstrates
powerfully the possible endpoints of the actions:
Two Sides of the Same Dark Coin
219
And the meaning of everything was changed. It had no meaning or too
many meanings, all of them mysterious. Your body was a strange place.
Hands were ugly. Inside, you were all hiding places, dark corners.
(McIlvanney, 1977: 5)
Now everything has changed and nothing is known or certain. The
absence or excessive amounts of meaning creates further confusion;
people and places now take on different connotations and possibilities.
The “strange” body the protagonist inhabits is not one they know: their
actions have dislocated persona and body; “hiding places” and “dark
corners” implies something lurking that is estranged from the outward
facade; a deeper instinct that manifested itself during the activities which
was previously unknown; unsuspected. At the moment of “raging” the
darker side of the protagonist was exposed, able to escape when the wits
were fragile and vulnerable; the restraints let go and unable to be recoiled
or hidden again.
Reinforcing the Jekyll and Hyde structure in Laidlaw, the narrator soon
begins to analyse the psychological profile of “you”:
You were a monster. How had you managed to hide from yourself for so
long… for twenty years to make your life a blur behind which that was
really you could hide. Until it came to introduce itself. I am you…
You could only walk and be rejected by the places where you walked,
except the derelict tenements. They were big darknesses housing old griefs,
terrible angers. They were prisons for the past. They welcomed ghosts.
(McIlvanney, 1977: 5-6)
“Monster” and “hide” seem to be evident references here and the idea of
‘hiding from “yourself” suggests a split personality, a hidden side which
has been repressed. More emphatically, “monster” is the standard tabloid
terminology repeatedly applied to a killer of children which imparts
another clue for the linguistically alert reader. Referring to the life as a
“blur” suggests something smudged or unclear, difficult to identify or
interpret, the “life” that is the “blur” is a perpetual act of deception and
masking, one person hiding behind another. The idea of this alternative
side, the “I am you” coming “to introduce itself” suggests not only a state
of alienation but also that the repressed side has been hidden and denied,
buried deep in an effort to prevent its return, an assiduously forgotten
friend emerging uncomfortably from the past. Emphasising the haunted
Gothic cityscape which is the location for this atavistic clash between the
suppressed and the latent is the characterisation of the “derelict tenements”
as “prisons for the past”; that “welcomed ghost”. That the past must
remain imprisoned implies that it has a criminal status and the word
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Chapter Eleven
“ghost” locates the narrator’s alternative side as something presumed dead
which is haunting, lurking spectrally in the far reaches of the mind.
In his review of McIlvanney’s work, Simon Dentith lauds his:
...skilful appropriation of the conventions of American hard-boiled style to
challenge the dominant, more genteel tradition of British crime writing’
(Dentith, 1990: 19-20)
...and this transatlantic dimension is also heavily present in contemporaries
such as Iain Banks’ and Ian Rankin’s work. The transatlantic influence is
apparent in the convention of the abrasive, isolated but street-savvy
detective of the hardboiled genre who shirks the company and assistance
of their colleagues and refuses to play by the rules, evidenced in the figure
of Laidlaw.
In their analysis of the ‘Police Procedural’, Robert Winston and Nancy
Mellerski note that the policeman represent “a dominant Western symbol
of social control” (Winston and Mellerski, 1992: 2) and this concept of
“social control” lies at the heart of the crime narrative, whereby the
policeman is a bridge between the worlds of the criminal and the lawabiding citizen, patrolling the boundaries to prevent permeation of one by
the other. Similarly, when not on duty, the policeman is the exemplar of
ambiguity, preparing to “go down into the darkness” (Sallis, 2003: 7) in
order to preserve order by eliciting and soliciting information from those
in the criminal fraternity, hence the often uncomfortable relationship
McIlvanney has with Glasgow’s underworld figures, such as the
ubiquitous John Rhodes, whom he relies upon for information.
Jack Laidlaw represents a figure for which these problems of paradox
and contrast come to define his approach to police work and the actions he
takes:
He felt his nature anew as a wrack of paradox. He was potentially a violent
man who hated violence, a believer in fidelity who was unfaithful, an
active man who longer for understanding. He was tempted to unlock the
drawer in his desk where he kept Kierkegaard, Camus and Unamuno . . .
He knew nothing to do but inhabit the paradoxes. (McIlvanney, 1977: 9)
In this sequence, the contrasts inform the reader’s perception of Laidlaw:
noting the term “wrack” as opposed to the expected “wreck” suggests this
is an individual in possible crisis and fragmentation. Laidlaw’s outlook
means he is ethically questionable but morally indomitable. The
philosophers he maintains suggest a sense of alienation due to these
paradoxes and the “wrack” which lies at the heart of it as he sets about
Two Sides of the Same Dark Coin
221
repairing the damage caused by the child’s murder yet still realizing he has
the dangerous potential to go against his own beliefs and instincts in order
to achieve this.
Later, Harkness and Laidlaw find themselves in the city centre and it is
here that McIlvanney’s depiction of Glasgow is further attuned to the
nuances and characteristics of the city:
Harkness read the words carved on the stone: ‘Nemo me impune lacessit.’
He knew it was Latin but did not know what it meant.
‘No one assails me with impunity,’ Laidlaw said. […] ‘I like the civic
honesty of that.’ Laidlaw was smiling. […]
The message gained force was they went beyond the Cross. At that
point the Trongate divides into two streets running east, the Gallowgate on
the north, London Road on the south. The sense of a choice is illusory.
Both lead to the same waste of slum tenements hopefully punctuated with
redevelopments, like ornamental fountains in a desert. (McIlvanney, 1977:
92)
The persistent deflation of pretension and grounding of individuals who
are perceived to have grown beyond their station, to have acquired a sense
of self beyond their peers is one such “leveller” which Glasgow is known
for and Laidlaw recognises this, in both the citizens of the city and its
architecture. That the “message gained force” as they move into a different
part of Glasgow is significant. The grammar of the urban city is notably
different as the street splits in two, allowing the façade of choice. At the
end of the roads there remains the same conclusion, a “waste of slum
tenements” which is pockmarked with temporary but ultimately hopeless
financial investments in “redevelopment”. The use of “ornamental
fountains in the desert” indicates the status of these buildings, pandering to
appease the frustrations of residents by providing lip-service gestures
which will ultimately fail.
Eoin McNamee presents Belfast in a light which emphasises its origins
as a city whose history is marked by the post-Imperial status of the
declining British Empire:
The city itself has withdrawn into its placenames. Palestine Street,
Balaklava Street. The names of captured ports, lost battles, forgotten
outposts held against inner darkness. There is a sense of collapsed trade
and accumulate decline. In its names alone the city holds commerce with
itself, a further levying of tariffs in the shadow. (McNamee, 1994: 4)
The atmosphere of collapse and decline is symptomatic of the postindustrial wastelands which McIlvanney identifies in Glasgow, where the
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currency of trade has been replaced by darker economies. That the city
“holds commerce with itself” emphasises the political and religious
dichotomies at work within the social fabric, like the motif of the
doppelganger, McNamee emphasises the split and doubling which is
characteristic of both cities. The “forgotten outposts” makes Belfast seem
an abandoned refuge in which the citizens are taking part in their own
unique conflict, fighting a common enemy.
Following this, we are introduced to the protagonist, Victor Kelly, who
founds the Resurrection Men, a group of paramilitaries whose name
directly references the reinvigoration and reintroduction of a set of
historical masculinities. Kelly is:
...a fictional version of Lennie Murphy, a real Loyalist killer, and both can
tell us much about extreme variants of Northern Irish masculinities.’
(Magennis, 2010: 18)
In the opening pages, the killer is described after one attack as having “laid
it open to the bone” (McNamee 4) and it is the invasive, ritualistic
violations of the body which characterise and distinguish the acts
committed by the Resurrection Men and Kelly from other terrorists. Such
an act which exposes the body automatically demonstrates significant
weakness on the part of the victim or superiority on the part of the
aggressor, connoting dominance. In this particular novel, “[m]urder is an
attempt to feminise the victim, to literally objectify” (Magennis, 2010: 48).
After a later killing, the body is discovered after being subjected to a
highly specific and marked attack:
The body was found in a shop doorway on Berlin Street. There were 124
careful knife wounds on the body. Death due to strangulation. The victim
appeared to have been suspended from a beam while he was stabbed.
(McNamee, 1994[2004]: 50)
There are two significant aspects to the style and method by which the
murder is carried out: the markings on the body and the weapon used to
carry out said attack. The specifics of the knife wounds and the
strangulation through suspension connote feelings of the religious or the
sacrificial, the helplessness of the victim and the process by which the
body is violated initially by cuts and mutilation, and then finally by cutting
off their oxygen. As Dillon highlights:
... the knife has been used by those on the fringes of paramilitary
organisations: people out of control and therefore not subject to the kinds
Two Sides of the Same Dark Coin
223
of disciplines imposed by the majority of terrorist groupings.’ (Dillon,
1989: 111)
Kelly’s status as outsider is reinforced by this reading, whereby the refusal
to accept him into the main organisations is a reflection not only of his
sociopathic tendencies but also that his masculinity is a hypermasculinity,
wherein the excesses and transgressions are identified as posing a threat to
those people who are on his side and are viewed as being uncontrollable.
That he is not associated with discipline emphasises how Victor deviates
from the conventional strictures and structures of Celtic masculinity. In his
portrayal, Kelly is seen as one who would “demand ritual. He would sever
the throat regardless of arterial blood. He would hold the knife aloft”
(McNamee, 1994: 16). This combines two overlapping traits in Victor—
namely his appropriation of the “discourses of theatre and religion” which
Dermot McCarthy considers to be “almost ‘natural’ in his community”
(McCarthy, 2000: 157). The imagery further promotes Victor as a
Messianic figure, elevating his portrayal to an almost supernatural status.
As Magennis states, “Victor’s hyper-masculine identity is confirmed by
his infamy, this is masculinity as spectacle” (Magennis, 2010: 70).
When the Resurrection Men meet, their sessions are occasionally
marked by the “collective watching of pornography in order to reaffirm
masculine bonds” (Magennis, 2010: 36) thus enabling the domination and
objectification of the female body as an integral part of Northern Irish
masculine culture. In a novel where Dorcas, Victor Kelly’s mother, acts as
a cultural and social legitimiser of her son’s violence, the contrasting
strength of the mother figure and the denigration suffered by other women,
place this novel firmly in the crime genre. When the two detectives who
will eventually be assigned to track down Kelly discuss the Resurrection
Men, their own language evokes the cultural stereotypes that Kelly and his
colleagues propound: “a partially undressed corpse… like the slut must
have done something to deserve it” (McNamee, 1994: 36). The reduction
of women to the status of “slut[s]” for the display of flesh on a corpse, the
assumption that she must have acted in such a way which justified her
demise, is further reflected in the way that female partners are also
reduced to sex objects for use by the paramilitaries. That the woman
cannot speak to accuse her assailants connects with the manner by which
the bodies are reduced to being un-manly, namely the root of the tongue is
severed. As McCarthy observes:
By cutting out the tongue of his victims, Victor removes the instrument of
their subjectivity which is also the source of his own alienation.
(McCarthy, 2000: 143)
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Chapter Eleven
By denying the victims their language, Kelly controls the discourses in
which his own activities are framed, as well as ensuring that they cannot
identify or question him.
The shifts in politics and expectations of men within this culture are
captured emphatically when reading this eloquent and precise explanation
of why certain attire is worn by the men and the popular media which
determines how their identities are formed:
It was rare for paramilitaries to wear stocking masks. It was a question of
vanity. It made you look like an ancient bare-knuckle boxer. It suggested
mild brain damage. Parkas were popular, berets, sunglasses. The black
balaclaver was a favourite and Coppinger held that this was due to
command films popular in the city. The Cockleshell Heroes. (McNamee,
1994: 57).
The legacy of the bare-knuckle boxer connects McNamee’s and
McIlvanney’s work through the Celtic hard-man, whose status in workingclass communities is defined by his strength and capabilities with his fists
and his body, as opposed to his use of weapons. A figure who is the
archetype of traditional manual labour, the bare-knuckle boxer appears in
McIlvanney’s The Big Man (1985) and Docherty as a result of the decline
of traditional labour in the respective Celtic communities that feature in
his work. That McNamee points to the paramilitaries’ selection
representing a “question of vanity” dictated by fashions in the “command
films popular in the day” is explained by Kelly and his squad defining
their own identities against figures such as John Dillinger and other
gangsters, folk heroes operating above and without the law. As Margaret
Scanlan concurs:
...movies, television and popular journalism are media through which
McNamee’s grim ‘city’ acquires its knowledge of itself (Scanlan, 2001:
38).
The Northern Irish masculine identity is narrated through the popular
media of the time, marking a transition between different masculinities
according to the expression and differences between inherited beliefs and
family structures. That Kelly’s father is represented as meek and quiet in
contrast with the matriarchal Dorcas emphasises these generational shifts
in culture and attitude. Magennis makes the point further, inviting the
reader to “Contrast the muscular ‘hard men’ of Loyalist culture with the
folkloric emaciated bodies of the hunger strikers” (Magennis, 2010: 52).
Resurrection Man comes to narrate and portray the masculine body in its
Two Sides of the Same Dark Coin
225
different states of decline and represent how working-class masculinities
are all too often expressed through violence. Moving back over the water
and connecting this to the original text, I am drawn here to McIlvanney’s
comments about Laidlaw which poses challenging moral and ethical
questions through the protagonist:
Laidlaw invites us to join him in a place where there is no them and us.
There is only us. It is a place where murder may result from a still-born
attempt to love, where in the ugliest moments we may catch a momentary
reflection of part of ourselves, where protectiveness may be a mode of
destructiveness, where we may feel a little bit lost among the shifting
borders of good and bad, of right and wrong, of normal and abnormal
(McIlvanney, 1991b: 162).
The lack of distinction between “them” and “us” highlights the criminal
potential in everyone and the persistent opportunities for alignment
between legality and criminality, irrespective of the severity (or lack of) in
the act which has been committed. Particularly powerful is his comment
that “murder may result from a still-born attempt to love”.
McIlvanney problematises the position of the reader, forcing the reader
to question different standpoints and the places where their empathies and
sympathies may lie. Ray Ryan contends:
In responding to Scotland’s disenfranchisement under Thatcherism,
McIlvanney here comes dangerously close to endorsing an essentialist,
unapologetically masculinist, ethnically tinged foundational myth as their
replacement. (Ryan 2002: 80)
Figures such as the father of the dead girl, Bud Lawson, and Jack Laidlaw
come to embody these models for performance and action with their own
opinion and potential for violent revenge against the killer. In essence,
McIlvanney counters this Thatcherite assault on the nation and the culture
with a suggestion that the answer is a return to the reductive gender-based
attitudes which recent Scottish writers and publishing have worked hard to
progress beyond. As Petrie argues further:
[t]he centrality of class, gender, national identity and the modern city,
alongside considerations of the meaning of morality, justice and
criminality in modern society, provides a clear indication of the more
weighty dimensions that are contained within contemporary Scottish crime
fiction, and equally central to the reimagination of the nation itself. (Petrie
2004: 159)
226
Chapter Eleven
Arguably, Petrie’s comment could be translated to the fiction of Belfast
and an indication of how the Troubles thriller and contemporary crime
fiction from both Celtic nations allow the authors to mobilise the different
generic vehicles in order to question, reconfigure and interrogate the status
of significant thematic and philosophical questions which are being asked
within the communities connecting and comprising that which is known
collectively as ‘Celtic’.
Works Cited
Botting, Fred. (2001), Gothic. D S Brewer, Woodbridge.
Dentith, Simon. (1990), ‘This Shitty Urban Machine Humanised: The Urban
Crime Novel and the Novels of William McIlvanney’ in Ian A. Bell and
Graham Daldry (eds.). Watching the Detectives: Essays on Crime Fiction
Macmillan, London, pp. 18-36.
Dillon, Martin. (1989), The Shankhill Butchers: A Case Study of Mass
Murder. Hutchinson, London.
Magennis, Caroline (2010), Sons of Ulster: Masculinities in the
Contemporary Northern Irish Novel. Peter Lang, Bern.
McCarthy, Dermot. (2000), ‘Belfast Babel: Postmodern Lingo in Eoin
McNamee’s Resurrection Man.’ Irish University Review 30.1. pp. 132148
McDonald, Hugh. (2013), http://www.heraldscotland.com/books-poetry/
interviews/william-mcilvanney-following-the-demon.20590326
accessed April 16th.
McIlvanney, William (1975), Docherty. Allen and Unwin, London.
—. (1977), Laidlaw. Sceptre, London.
—. (1983), The Papers of Tony Veitch. Hodder and Stoughton, London.
—. (1985), The Big Man Hodder and Stoughton, London.
—. (1991), Strange Loyalties. Hodder and Stoughton, London.
—. (1991b), ‘The Courage of our Doubts.’ In William McIlvanney (ed.).
Surviving the Shipwreck. Mainstream, Edinburgh, pp.153-155.
—. (1996), The Kiln. Sceptre, London.
McNamee, Eoin 1994 [2004] Resurrection Man. London: Faber and Faber
Murray, Isobel. (2008), ‘Ian Rankin.’ In Isobel Murray (ed). Scottish
Writers Talking 4: Jackie Kay, Allan Massie, Ian Rankin, James
Robertson, William (Bill) Watson. Kennedy and Boyd, Glasgow, pp.
181-236.
O'Connor, Edmund. (2006),‘Tartan Noir,’ Chapman, Volume 108, pp. 5058.
Two Sides of the Same Dark Coin
227
Patterson, Glen. (1994), ‘Butcher’s Tools’ in Fortnight. September 1994.
43-44.
Petrie, Duncan. (2004), Contemporary Scottish Fictions: Film, Television
and the Novel. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh.
Ryan, Ray. (2002), Ireland and Scotland: Literature and Culture, State
and the Nation 1966-2000. Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Sallis, James. (2003), ‘A writer who went down into the darkness’in The
Boston Globe, ‘Arts and Entertainment’, 28 December, p.8.
Scaggs, John. (2005), Crime Fiction. Routledge, Abingdon.
Scanlan, Margaret. (2001), Plotting Terror: Novelists and Terrorists in
Contemporary Fiction. University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville,
VA.
Skenazy, Paul. (1995), ‘Behind the Territory Ahead.’ In Los Angeles in
Fiction: A Collection of Essays David Fine (ed.). University of New
Mexico Press, Albuquerque, pp. 103-125.
Winston, Robert P. and Mellerski, Nancy C. (1992), The Public: Ideology
and the Police Procedural. Macmillan, Basingstoke.
CHAPTER TWELVE
WHEN SCOTTISH EYES ARE IRISHISED
MARK CORCORAN
The publication dates of James Joyce’s Dubliners and Irvine Welsh’s
Trainspotting frame the twentieth-century: Dubliners published in 1914
and Trainspotting in 1993. The themes which cross over into each author’s
work justifying such a literary grouping are the repetition and paralysis of
characters living in a troubled familial setting, the condition of addiction
tied to both substance abuse and behavioural patterns, an Irish historical
heritage with a major Irish political figure haunting proceedings and Irvine
Welsh’s highlighting of the influence of Dubliners. Stories involving
characters suffering with addiction or in a state of inebriation usually
involve the verbal presence of a principled political figure. Tapping into a
Foucualtian narrative regarding the production of truth and how major
institutions of society reward and implement truth, I shall use the term
‘enforced truth’ to describe a narrative at work in society exerting pressure
to become a dominant and accepted belief through peer pressure. The
argument that enforced truth is tied to inebriation and political figures in
fictional narratives will draw a comparison of how these authors depict
their society’s usage of Irish political figures. Both author’s portrayals
reveal a complicated narrative and enforcement of truth at work in society
suggesting that the implementation of narratives whether in a familial or
political group can garner regressive responses leading to addiction and
inebriation as a response to enforced truth. This essay will also ask how
these narratives and associations perpetuate in an emigrant tradition across
the sea in literature repeating a paradigm that ties addiction and Irish
political figures in an Irish community in Scotland.
The French philosopher Michel Foucault challenged universal
scientific truths about human nature. He traced their roots to the ethical
and political leanings of a section of society. Foucault weakens established
truths through examining their conditional historical influences disrupting
When Scottish Eyes are Irishised
229
their supposed status as scientifically grounded truths. Foucault states in
Two Lectures:
[...] We are subjected to the production of truth through power and we
cannot exercise power except through the production of truth. This is the
case for every society, but I believe that in ours the relationship between
power, right and truth is organised in a highly specific fashion [...] we are
forced to produce the truth of power, that our society demands, of which it
has need, in order to function: we must speak the truth; we are constrained
or condemned to confess or to discover the truth: it institutionalises,
professionalises and rewards its pursuit [...]
(Cited Gordon, 1980: 94)
The individuals of society are born into existing paradigms and
structures which are learned and ingrained through education and the
various institutional practices of society; be they familial, educational or
spiritual. One learns Irish history or Irish-Scottish history and the various
historical figures which are part of that narrative of history similar to the
way one deciphers the figures and narratives of the local community albeit
through different mediums. One gathers the different levels of national and
community narratives and figures. One is then taught to believe and act in
a certain narrative of history and is expected to perpetuate this as a truth.
This is amenable to immediate and wider societal levels. This is a very
linear description of Foucault’s work and does not do justice to the variety
and complexity of human experience however an engagement with such
grand narratives in social groups is being stressed here. There are
negatives and positives to such positions, to be part of and to be removed
from historical and political narratives, producing effects such as
acceptance, power, loss of individuality, castigation or alienation. Foucault
continues:
In another way, we are also subjected to truth in the sense in which it is
truth that makes the laws, that produces the true discourse which, at least
partially, decides, transmits and itself extends upon the effects of power. In
the end, we are judged, condemned, classified, determined in our
undertakings, destined to a certain mode of living or dying, as a function
of the true discourses which are the bearers of the specific effects of power.
(Cited Gordon, 1980: 94)
This is what the fiction of both books struggle with, that sense of
paralysis in the face of an all powerful juggernaut of behavioural
expectation and stultification of political and moral philosophy. One
response to this sense of entrapment by a large number of characters in
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Chapter Twelve
each book is to be consumed by addiction and to seek the escape of
inebriation such as Joe Farrington, Mrs Sinico, Mr Kearney, and Martin
Cunningham’s wife in Dubliners or Spud, Renton, and Sick Boy in
Trainspotting.
Is there an enforced truth hanging over the author Irvine Welsh as an
author entering the narrative of fiction? In an email correspondence with
Irvine Welsh I questioned him regarding Dubliners influence:
Have you read Dubliners by James Joyce?
Four times over thirty years.
Did it have much of an impact on you?
Gets better every time.
What books would you say had most impact on your writing of
Trainspotting and your writing in general?
I think the one you mentioned takes a lot of beating (Welsh, 2011).
As a major literary figure of the canon from an Irish community Joyce is
that figure who must be contended with and his work known; read or
unread. If a writer is to try to capture their city and its consciousness
particularly in Ireland and Britain Dubliners and Ulysses would seem to be
the ‘go to’ books. Is this the case or is my education and research forcing a
truth here or is the academic and historical narration, I am part of, working
its influence? The desire perpetuated in Dubliners remains the same in
Trainspotting that is to perpetuate or escape from the subjective historical
narratives of family, established behavioural patterns and wider political
elements into a new country or way of life. Is to rebel simply another
perpetuation of an enforced truth; another form of paralysis? It is hardly a
new idea however it will bring new experience to the individual albeit in
another established society with its own methods in the production of truth
giving the illusion of freedom. However it does give, the rebel, the
opportunity of comparison and fresh insight as Joyce, the rebel, would
discover. What should develop out of an evolved progress away from the
machinations of power and the production of truth? This theme was also
prevalent long before Joyce and prevailed long after.
Ashley Woodward states of Lyotard’s work in The Postmodern
Condition: A Report on Knowledge:
Using IBM as an example, he suggests a hypothetical in which the
corporation owns a certain belt in the Earth’s orbital field in which they
circulate satellites for communication and/or for storing data banks.
Lyotard then asks, ‘who will have access to them? Who will determine
which channels or data are forbidden? The State? Or will the State simply
be one user among others? (Woodward, 2002)
When Scottish Eyes are Irishised
231
Knowledge as a production of truth and an enforced truth shall always be
to the forefront of a societal imbalance of access and hierarchy.
Irvine Welsh and Trainspotting remain outside the canon for many
scholars, classed as un-literary: this is a position which the work of Joyce
once occupied. Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) was once a banned and shocking
book and Dubliners has a long struggling and complicated history before it
came to publication. The production of truth regarding Ulysses has come
full circle as it now resides in its lordly canonical position rather than the
banned book of yore. Both writers have had their experiences with
addiction and form a crucial part of the characters of their works:
[...] the Joyces prepared to move again. The sense of home life as a
continual crisis, averted from disaster by pawnbroker, obliging friend, or
sudden job, became fixed in James Joyce’s mind. (Ellmann, 1982: 41)
When a series of arrests for petty crimes culminated in a suspended
sentence for trashing a North London community center, a shaken Welsh
decided to clean up his act, one which he had fuelled with copious amounts
of alcohol and lesser quantites of speed and (briefly) heroin. He worked as
a clerk for the Hackney Council (London) and studied computing under a
grant from the Manpower Services Commission. (Morace, 2001: 9)
Both authors grew up in an Irish nationalist setting, Welsh (Morace, 2001:
8) amongst the Irish community of Muirhouse, Leith in Edinburgh and
Joyce, famously, in Dublin (Ellmann, 1982: 21). Each writer endeavours
to capture their locality and their generation in their first major literary
works. Both writers place representations of Irish political figures into
their fictional narratives, these scenes also are closely detailed accounts of
alcohol abuse and drug addiction. All Joyce’s prose works make explicit
reference to Charles Stewart Parnell and many of the works of Welsh treat
of the figure of James Connolly. Joyce also treats of Connolly. These are
dominant political figures from their own familial and communities shared
history, which are placed within characters’ historical, political,
community and familial histories in order to exert force to produce a
required truth. James Joyce’s father’s ineptitude in work and lust for
alcohol induced the continual downgrading of the family home:
For John Joyce the fall of Parnell, closely synchronized with a fall in his
own fortunes, was the dividing between the stale present and the good old
days. He had done everything he could to save ‘the Chief,’ even to going
down to Cork before a by-election to plead with his tenants there (in the
days when still had tenants) to vote for the Parnellite candidate (Ellmann,
1982: 33).
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It is not hard to see the influence of politics and alcohol within James
Joyce’s life or the passing down of a narrative from generation to
generation regarding a principled truth about a politician, in this case
Parnell. Joyce, the writer, would not be so one-eyed regarding Parnell
however he would share his father’s reverence in this handed down
narrative. Joyce would also share a similar fate to his father with alcohol.
Various perceptions of these historical and political figures in the
authors’ fictional communities are used through character portrayal to
undermine the narratives of history at work in the community. Joyce and
Welsh display a distrust of the portrayal of the historical figure at the level
of the local and of the dominant historically accepted narratives. There is
an attempt to reveal how historical figures are treated within a certain area
by a particular class often simply self-motivated.
Within Trainspotting we are made privy to the phenomenon of an Irish
community of Famine emigrant heritage. In 1851 the “notable
concentrations in Edinburgh” number 12,514 Irish born dwelling in the
city (Swift, 2002: 35). Removed geographically and historically from
Scottish national identity in terms of the histories of their origin, the effort
then is to build and reaffirm their historical sense of identity through the
perpetuation of an Irish political-historical narrative. Fast-forward to Mark
Renton’s family—in 1980s setting Trainspotting—whose mother and
father come from the traditional opposing religious threads of Irish
society: the Orange Protestant paternal side and the Catholic side however
both sons choose to buy blindly into the narratives of the opposing
sectarian narratives on offer in their community. This shows the strength
of enforced truth despite their shared experience of each other in a family.
These attempts to satisfy the various neighbourhood imperatives for
individual behaviour and the subjective needs within the familial structure
give Trainspotting its important layers. With two characters, Stevie and
Renton, self identity asks for a separate contemporary sense of self
(International—London). Welsh by choosing to write of his home city and
his Irish community, generation, and heritage cultivate the Joyce
comparison. Dubliners is a collection of characters dealing with their
family’s past, society’s present, and their national history. Some characters
perpetuate a desire to leave the country and become the ideal they envision
such as ‘Eveline’ and Gabriel in ‘The Dead’ (Joyce, 1914: 160).
‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’ (Joyce, 1914: 108) is set in a
Committee room, used by Joyce to call to mind to the reader Tim Healy’s
challenge to Parnell’s leadership in Committee Room 15 in Westminster
(Torchiana, 1986: 178). Various canvassers discuss their representatives,
When Scottish Eyes are Irishised
233
politics and gossip. The men are primarily concerned with getting paid for
doing as little work as possible and also in alcohol:
‘Is there any chance of a drink itself?’ asked Mr O’Connor.
‘I’m dry too,’ said the old man.
‘I asked that little shoeboy three times,’ said Mr Henchy, would he
send up a dozen of stout. I asked him again now, but he was leaning on the
counter in his shirt-sleeves having a deep goster with Alderman
Cowley[...]
‘I think I know the little game they’re at,’ said Mr Henchy. ‘You must
owe the City Fathers money nowadays if you want to be made Lord
Mayor. Then they’ll make you Lord Mayor. By God! I’m thinking
seriously of becoming a City Father myself. What do you think? Would I
do for the job?’ (Joyce, 1914: 115)
They await the arrival of alcohol and one character Mr. O’Connor sits
inside never canvassing his candidate using his candidate’s canvassing
cards as a light for his cigarettes. Intermittently various opinions are
propounded and reversed at whim. Various characters gossip and betray in
turn their employers and friends e.g. “Wait till you see whether he will or
not. I know him. Is it Tricky Dicky Tierney?” The men of ‘Ivy Day in the
Committee Room’ seek to perpetuate a narrative about Parnell which is
Irish, of high principle and in turn what is expected of their Irishness: “If
this man was alive”, he said, pointing to the leaf, “we’d have no talk of an
address of welcome”. The statements are alcohol fuelled.
Politics, enforced truths, family and alcohol are aligned from the
beginning of Joyce’s story. The story opens with Old Jack lamenting his
son as a layabout, drinking his days away while he, the father blindly goes
on to perpetuate the same lifestyle throughout the rest of the story:
[...] Now who’d think he’d turn out like that! I sent him to the Christian
Brothers[...] there he goes boozing about. I tried to make him someway
decent.[...] Only I’m an old man now I’d change his tune for him. I’d take
the stick to his back and beat him while I could stand over him – as I done
many a time before. The mother you know, she cocks him up with this and
that…’
‘That’s what ruins children,’ said Mr O’Connor.
‘To be sure it is,’ said the old man. ‘And little thanks you get for it,
only impudence. He takes th’upper hand of me whenever he sees I’ve a sup
taken. What’s the world coming to when sons speaks that way to their
fathers?’
‘Sure, amn’t I never done at the drunken bowsy ever since he left
school? “I won’t keep you,” I says. “You must get a job for yourself.” But,
sure it’s worse whenever he gets a job; he drinks it all.’ (Joyce, 1914: 109)
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Chapter Twelve
Old Jack does not leave to canvass and happily drinks his share when it
arrives. His son is merely adopting his father’s lifestyle while his father
full of self hatred beats him for it. It bears its resemblance with the plight
of the Joyce family:
John Joyce, for his part, was not pleased with his son’s failure to continue
winning scholastic prizes at the university. He would ask him what
profession he planned to go into, journalism, the bar, or medicine, and get
no answer. He prodded and taunted his son, but got nowhere. Neither of
them contemplated doing anything about the family situation; it was
irremediable, and they cultivated a disregard for it which the son carried
off more easily than his father. [...] (Ellmann, 1982: 69).
Years later his behaviour would resemble his father’s as he wrote
Dubliners in Italy:
[...] On other evenings Joyce would sometimes shake his off his brother
and get drunk; then Stanislaus would hunt him down in disgust, and make
him
come home. [...] Sometimes Stanislaus, in a fury over his brother’s
resolute efforts to cause his own ruin, would pummel James when he got
him home, and Francini, hearing blows and cries, would go up, against the
advice of his wife, to tell Stanislaus, ‘It’s no use.’ (Ellmann, 1982: 215)
In ‘Ivy Day’ Joe Hynes works for an opposing candidate Colgan, he joins
the men in the committee room and then proceeds to undermine and gossip
about their contender being a British informer despite running as a
Nationalist, citing the historical example of Henry Charles Sirr.
(Kleinmann, 2009). Major Sirr was an Irish born British army officer who
helped suppress an Irish rebellion. John Henchy returns, giving a cool
reception to rival canvasser Hynes and he too sets out to undermine the
candidate Tierney however, as regards issues of payment and keeping his
word. As soon as Hynes leaves, Henchy speaks of Hynes as an informer
for the rival candidate Colgan. Henchy now takes on Hynes’s role in a
pattern that will perpetuate throughout the story as those who are not
present or leave the room have their character discussed, undermined and
dismissed in a vicious circle of mistrust as Hynes becomes the informer.
The leadership of the room is constantly challenged. The vast majority of
the men, who enter the room, pretending to work, are drawn from the
candidate’s place of work.
Mr Henchy offers to the group a narrative regarding the familial
business origins of Tierney undermining his current standing as a
candidate. This is soon forgotten when the alcohol arrives later. The
candidate is a publican, and the men are alcoholics it would seem; a
When Scottish Eyes are Irishised
235
collection of bar flies from the publican’s bar though he does not pay them
but shall later provide them with alcohol as he knows this is sufficient for
them to work:
‘From the Black Eagle,’ said the boy, walking in sideways and
depositing a basket on the floor with a noise of shaken bottles[...]
‘Any bottles?’
The publican wants the empties from previous occasions:
‘Come back tomorrow,’ said the old man[...]
‘Ah, well, he’s not so bad after all. He’s as good as his word, anyhow.’
(Joyce, 1914: 116)
The “word” is to provide alcohol. The type of effort the candidate is
receiving is minimal: “Is that the way you chaps canvass”, said Mr Lyons,
“and Crofton and I out in the cold and rain looking for votes?” (Joyce,
1914: 119). The men’s addiction forces them to work for alcohol for
politicians they do not believe in. Cofton is an Orangeman who puts aside
his allegiance to work for a Nationalist candidate and later offers a
perception of Parnell as a gentleman. The work shy characters perpetuate
their behaviour despite the lionising and principles of their interpretation
of Charles Stewart Parnell. A Parnell who supposedly fought for his vision
of Irishness and a free Ireland which the drinkers aim to attach themselves
to however their convictions will not spread to action. A silence of
inaction greets a terrible poem about Parnell at the end of the story:
Mr Hynes sat down again on the table. When he had finished his recitation
there was a silence and then a burst of clapping: even Mr Lyons clapped.
The applause continued for a little time. When it had ceased all the auditors
drank from their bottles in silence. (Joyce, 1914: 123)
Not all men were of nor could afford to be of Parnell’s perceived
unshakable principle, this is an enforced truth surrounding narratives of
Parnell, and this interpretation of Parnell is challenged.
In ‘Ivy Day’ we witness how individuals tailor Parnell to their own
subjective needs.
Anne Fogarty outlines in ‘Parnellism and the Politics of Memory’ that
the character Colgan shadows that of the electoral experience of James
Connolly in the 1902/03 elections. Connolly made various allegations in
the Workers’ Republic in March 1902 and in January 1903 outlining
corruption and the politics of a “slanderer and traducer” (Fogarty, 2006:
107). Connolly outlines how Home Ruler P.J. McCall won over him due
to his practice of gaining support through free drink in his pub on the eve
of the election. Connolly writes:
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Chapter Twelve
...every public house in the Ward was a committee room for McCall, and
all who were degraded enough to sell their votes could soak themselves in
liquor, free of expense (Fogarty, 2006: 117).
Connolly struggles against the impact of free alcohol on the Dublin
political scene.
The power of historical narratives, as established truths, on the identity
of a section of society forces people and whole groups within groups from
families, to a community collective such as a soccer club to perpetuate an
established or acceptable form of veracity. Truth is a production in this
way. How does addiction play its role in this? Do the states of being
inebriated or addiction and the mental state it creates make it easier to fall
into line with the production line of established truths or to rebel against
those truths? The heroin addict or alcoholic removes himself from family
and society. The addiction can allow one to remove powerful determinants
demanding a production of truth about family or society. The drug
becomes the sole focus of life and the narratives of one’s existence
become removed while the drug state lasts. This results in a form of
negative escape.
Is addiction a knock-on effect of the truth enforced by powerful
institutions, be it through the family experience or historical narratives in
collectives? This truth, which is forced, can oppress an individual to the
point of seeking escape:
[...] I have hesitated before telling you that I imagine the present relations
between Nora and myself are about to suffer some alteration. [...] I daresay
I am a difficult person for any woman to put up with but on the other hand
I have no intention of changing. Nora does not seem to make much
difference between me and the rest of the men she has known and I can
hardly believe that she is justified in this. I am not a very domestic
animal—after all, I suppose I am an artist—and sometimes when I think of
the free and happy life which I have (or had) every talent to live I am in a
fit of despair. At the same time I do not wish to rival the atrocities of the
average husband and I shall wait until I see my way more clearly. […] I am
not sure that the thousands of households which are with difficulty held
together by memories of dead sentiments have much right to reproach me
with inhumanity (Ellmann, 1982: 214).
Joyce seeks to escape the oppression of narrative beliefs regarding how
a man must perform as a husband and father. He highlights the thousands
of families bonded by “memories of dead sentiments” dismissively and yet
he is conscious of their moral gaze watching him. Escape is one possible
outcome. Does addiction contribute to the production of truth? The
When Scottish Eyes are Irishised
237
Romans recognised the power of religion politically to temper a people.
Are addictive elements, self-administered and an extreme example, used in
a similar fashion to religion as an escape or removal from enforced truths?
Escape from narratives through imposing another dominant narrative. One
must participate or reject the forced truth of the collectives they occupy.
The power of a collective in unison brings a community together or a
group together in an area to bring a sense of togetherness, power, and an
ability to achieve more whether politically or socially. Addiction or the
state of inebriation it would seem can ease the pressure to reproduce truth;
it can remove an individual from direct consciousness of what is taking
place. Addiction or inebriation rebelling against being forced to produce
truth can be itself a forced rebellion. A rebellion which is as much a defeat
as it is self-annihilation, a form of self-abuse, a punishment for the truth
seeker.
Within Joyce’s short story we have references to Parnell as a figure
who was undermined by the apparent on-goings of his private life, namely
Parnell’s affair with Kitty O’Shea:
‘What I mean,’ said Mr Lyons, ‘is we have our ideals. Why, now,
would we welcome a man like that? Do you think now after what he did
Parnell was a fit man to lead us? And why, then, would we do it for
Edward the Seventh?’
‘This is Parnell’s anniversary,’ said Mr O’Connor, ‘and don’t let us stir
up any bad blood. We all respect him now that he’s dead and gone - even
the Conservatives,’ he added, turning to Mr Crofton. (Joyce, 1914: 121)
The death of Parnell has ensured an agreed upon narrative in the Joyce
story, where opposing sides can agree, regarding Parnell as a gentleman.
There is a negotiation taking place regarding an acceptability of a Parnell
narrative: a production of truth, “[O]ur side of the house respects him,
because he was a gentleman” (Joyce, 1914: 121). Connolly’s narrative of
his campaign becoming derailed by the draw of free alcohol by a rival
candidate is another narrative Joyce is playing with. Joyce uses a past
politician, Parnell, as a father figure, for some of the men in his old offices
while representing the plight of a then contemporary politician, Connolly,
to document the abuses of such narratives and figures by men who have
little interest in principles except when it involves alcohol and payment. It
is the perpetuation of the same political paradigm which is tied to a
political figure and alcohol.
Stuart Hall in his essay ‘Cultural Identity and Disaspora’ states:
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Cultural identities[...]like everything which is historical,[they] undergo
constant transformation. Far from being eternally fixed in some
essentialized past, they are subject to the continuous “play” of history,
culture, and power[...]identities are the names we give to the different ways
we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the
past (Hall, 2003: 236).
While familial or societal structures can retain a label of being Irish or
Scottish there is change and subjective practice within such cultural labels
over generations. These changes raise questions about the unchanging
label. Within Welsh’s work there is a more vehement, conscious effort to
be destructive to historical narratives of nationality especially within
hegemonic and local structures. At one point in Welsh’s Trainspotting
Stevie is assaulted by opposition Heart of Midlothian supporters, a
Protestant club in opposition to Stevie’s Hibernian club:
-Happy New Year boys! Love and peace, Jambo brothers! He laughed
at them, and sucked his sour, spilt lip.
-Cunt’s a fuckin heidcase, one guy said. He thought they were going to
come back for him, but they turned their attention to abusing an Asian
woman and her small children.
- Fuckin Paki slag!
- Fuck off back tae yir ain country.
They made a chorus of ape noises and gestures as they left the station.
-What charming, sensitive young men, Stevie said to the woman, who
looked at him like a rabbit looks at a weasel. She saw another white youth
with slurred speech, bleeding and smelling of alcohol. Above all, she saw
another football scarf, like the one worn by the youths who abused her.
There was no colour difference as far as she was concerned, and she was
right, Stevie realised with a grim sadness. It was probably just as likely to
be guys in green who hassled her. Every support had its arseholes (Welsh,
1997: 56).
Stevie is part of several collectives and narratives despite his own
subjective leanings within these groups. He is a white man, a Hibernian
football supporter and Scottish-Irish. His attempts at humour to alleviate
the tense situation of being assaulted and witnessing the racist abuse this
woman suffers does not result in disassociating himself from these rival
supporters who abuse this woman and her children. She perceives him
through established associations to football supporters, influenced by the
abusive situation, linked to sectarianism and racism. There is a long
established sectarian element to Glaswegian and Edinburgh football clubs
which is being successfully tackled by most clubs. As recently as June
When Scottish Eyes are Irishised
239
2011, a new bill was introduced to tackle sectarianism in Scottish football
(BBC News, 2011).
The paralysis of self in locality and narrative threads of political
history documented in Dubliners by Joyce appears in Trainspotting. This
evolves into a rushed search for what can be conceived as a postmodernist
self in individualism, seeking the impossible, to untie from particular
histories choosing its own individual histories that perpetuate outside a
collective. However like Stevie this is also the abandoned wish of Eveline
who has not quite the strength to follow through. This is the case whether
this exists in Steve’s desire to be a London boy or Renton’s desire to leave
Scotland and live in Amsterdam:
Ripping off your mates was the highest offence in his book, and he would
demand the severest penalty. Renton had used Begbie, used him to burn his
boats completely and utterly. [...] He could now never go back to Leith, to
Edinburgh, even to Scotland, ever again. There, he could not be anything
other than he was. Now, free from them all, for good, he could be what
he wanted to be. He’d stand alone or fall alone. [...]
(Welsh, 1997: 350)
In Edinburgh Renton cannot escape his personal history, the area’s
histories and the surrounding community’s demands of perpetuating their
interpretation of these histories regardless of how mutilated they become.
He feels he cannot escape who he is historically in Muirhouse. Yet Mark
Renton manages to support and partake of the sectarian football chants
despite one half of his family being Protestant:
Mark’s older brother, Billy, who had recently reenlisted in the British
army, is killed in an ambush while on patrol in Northern Ireland. He is
mourned by his family especially by the paternal, Protestant side whose
sectarian Orange bigotry helped fuel Billy’s violent sense of patriotic
duty [...] (Morace, 2001: 36).
Renton’s plan to go to Amsterdam means he feels he can reinvent
himself there however the depiction questions this ambition of Renton as
every time he has tried to change he has failed whether this is in his own
attempts at giving up his drug habit or methadone programmes. Dubliners
possesses a universality, existent in threads of thought prevalent in the
journals of the period, which is present in Joyce’s local depiction of
Dublin.
A reinterpretation of dominant historical narratives appears around the
period Joyce is writing Dubliners. Quite prevalent is the practice of
finding historical narratives which go beyond the present histories of the
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240
coloniser to ancient periods, stressing the importance of older empires and
the interlinking history of all nations and countries on a similar plateau of
interconnectedness. Joyce writes in ‘Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages’, a
lecture he gave in 1907 in Trieste that the Irish Race is:
...compounded of the old Celtic stock and the Scandinavian, Anglo-Saxon
and Norman races [...] with the various elements mingling and renewing
the ancient body” (Barry, 2000: 114).
He goes on to state:
Our civilization is an immense woven fabric [...] What race, or what
language [...] can boast of being pure today? And no race has less right to
utter such a boast than the race now living in Ireland” (Barry, 2000: 118).
Some of the articles which may have impacted upon Joyce’s beliefs on
this subject include the author Sir William Preece’s article, written just
three years prior to this in 1904 entitled ‘Egyptians and Celts’ in the Celtic
Review which states:
In all countries nations come and go. The ruling race changes frequently,
but the workers remain. The fighting men are killed off, but the mothers
and children flourish, and with them their language. It is impossible to
eradicate a language. [...] Thought and early education are conducted in
the language of the mother and of childhood, and thus from generation to
generation the Welsh and Irish of to-day retain the form and roots of the
early Celts. French and Spanish are but modern forms of Latin (Preece,
1904: 100).
This article goes on to stress the similarities of the practices of the
druids and the Egyptians. Another example in the same Journal almost a
year later states:
It is certain that, without mingling and without contact, the earliest
Touranian Tribes derived from the anterior civilisation of the Eastern
Black Race much more certain linguistic and religious analogies with the
Celto-Aryan group of the habitat of the ancient Race of the Dolmens, and
certain, too, that the Far- Eastern Touranians, the Chinese [...] were not
without points of contact with the earliest Celts [...] (Radiguet, 1905: 95).
Within the culture of the period there is an effort to undermine the
British narrative of empire through the narrative of an identity which is
intermeshed with various races. There is also an eagerness to highlight a
When Scottish Eyes are Irishised
241
historic pattern of engagement between cultures and races. This is serving
to create an identity which is multifaceted and beyond the rigid borders of
a nationality. This reveals a history of change and development where the
paradigm of coloniser/colonised does not change but who becomes
coloniser/colonised does change. Joyce for a number of decades has been
seen as a coloniser of sorts, as one of the major writers of the canon and a
figure whose works proceed to act as a barometer for writers with literary
ambitions. Is Welsh following a paradigm found in Joyce or simply
reflecting accurately his society?
While Ulysses and Dubliners are books fighting for mental and Irish
freedom they are also books labouring under the oppression of moral and
philosophic enforced truths seeking escape from the confines of the
society it was borne out of. Joyce writes within the backdrop of the Home
Rule movement in Ireland and there are similar political movements afoot
in the years preceding Welsh’s novel. In the year 1979 there was a Scottish
referendum on self-rule which failed leaving Scotland open to the rule of
the Thatcher years:
[...] Although a majority of voters said yes, the referendum failed because
of a clause, added late, which stipulated that in order for the measure to
pass, it had to be approved by forty percent of the total electorate [...]
(Morace, 2001: 19).
We witness the reinterpretation of the Irish historical figure and
narratives at the level of the local also in Trainspotting this time in the
representation of Irish emigrant descendant narratives pervading in
Scotland in the 1980s. Hibernian Football club was founded by Irish
emigrants in 1875. The complex sense of Irish identity is complicated by a
New Year Eve’s house party where the singing turns into sectarian
football chants:
So wir aw off tae Dublin in the green – fuck the queen!
Whair the hel-mits glisten in the sun – fuck the huns!
And the bayonets slash, the aw-ringe sash
To the echo of the Thomson gun (Welsh, 1997: 51).
There is a history of the Irish immigrating to Leith in 1840s due to the
plight of the famine. Hibernian which is the soccer club the characters
depicted in the book choose to support has Irish Catholic origins. The men
sing the song in Scottish English, in their Muirhouse vernacular. It
highlights their supposed nationalistic leanings and their opposition to the
various other Protestant clubs. In the situation that develops, we are
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presented with a group of friends born and bred in Edinburgh, Scotland
indulging in an Irish heritage going back to the 1840s. They are singing an
Irish rebel ballad song in a Scottish accent. Changing the traditional words
from terms which are ambiguous and point to an Irish history which is less
than pure than a bigot would wish but is of a mixed history and race.
Welsh here treats of the complexity of the various selves and narratives
at work. This is not about a belief in a nationalistic social vision of their
Irish heritage or a future that that might hold but simply alcohol and
nationalism are used as a vehicle to bring them together in some sort of
drunken unity, an enforced manufactured truth. It is an effort to unite their
various subjective beliefs, histories and concepts of each other. This is to
give the illusion of a unity and shared desire with the help of alcohol.
However what other options do they have to solidify and bring themselves
together if not through heroin or alcohol addiction but through the shared
history of their ancestry? Nevertheless we never witness any serious
discussion of this. It is merely a device warranted amid the revelry of a
party. If this was articulated to any great degree it could fall asunder. We
could view this as an empty vessel to facilitate the end product, bonding,
rather than a belief in various histories. However this is a perpetuated
manufactured truth which has an existence and deep roots in a community
which these men are perpetuating. It has a reality regrettably which results
in various sectarian abuses. The contradictive nature of ‘fighting music’
bringing them supposedly closer together is apt to the false nature of the
gathering. The associations are muddled and confused from another time
period reaching out to a collectivity the men have descended from.
The singing endorses the historical violence prevalent to the divide.
The figures associated with such events follow and their conception in this
particular setting. Gav remarks to Renton:
A fuckin great rebel, a fuckin great socialist and a fuckin great Hibby.
James Fuckin Connolly, ya cunt, Gav said to Renton who nodded (Welsh,
1997: 51:52).
Gav seeks to remind Renton of this Irish heritage when he cites James
Connolly just as the characters cite Parnell in Joyce’s work to apparently
state a principle and belief. Connolly is claimed by academics to be either
Scottish or Irish born and a query of competing narrative histories still
exists over his place of birth; whether it is Clones or Edinburgh. He is a
man steeped in both Irish and Scottish heritage:
When Connolly came to Ireland in 1896 at the age of 28, he was already a
socialist with a view of history, the world and the labour struggle that were
When Scottish Eyes are Irishised
243
basically, though critically, Marxist. An Irish nationalist from his early
youth, he had already, during the few previous years in Edinburgh, begun
to apply his socialism, in a general way, to Irish circumstances (Kearney,
1985: 57).
Connolly spent time in Ireland, married an Irish Protestant lady in
Perth before returning to Little Ireland in Edinburgh. Becoming more and
more involved in socialism and politics he raised money for Hibernian
F.C. Back and forth between Dublin and Edinburgh he would catch up
with the status of his treasured Hibs. He would return to Ireland to become
a leader in the 1916 rising. The narratives of the histories of James
Connolly are complex as many groups possess their own visions,
enforcing a production of truth, some even professing what Connolly
would have deciphered through his experiences as a child:
The first thing to remember about James Connolly and Irish tradition is
that he was born outside it. He was Edinburgh born, his parents were
Monaghan emigrants to Edinburgh; but as an Irish emigrant to Edinburgh
[...] the young Connolly could learn Marxism simply by seeing the stately
folk walking far above him on the fashionable George IV Bridge which
swept above the slums below. He could see he was a proletarian long
before he could hear he was Irish (Edwards, 1979: 411).
One of the narratives of James Connolly points to the heritage of
Welsh’s working class group in Muirhouse, Edinburgh. There are
narratives at work in this depiction, which the individuals of 1980s
Muirhouse have inherited, evident in Richard Kearney’s paragraph which,
contrary to Owen Dudley Edwards’ depiction, tries to envision what
Connolly would have seen and thought as a child. Edwards’ production of
truth continues:
In Irish tradition, Connolly was born at the age of 28 in Dublin in 1896 [...]
when he was not born in Clones at the age of 0 in 1870. But in fact, he was
of course born at the age of 0 in Edinburgh in 1868, and therefore his view
of Irish tradition was never wholly Irish (Edwards, 1979: 412).
A simpler fact is that Connolly lived a large part of his life in Scotland
despite Ireland being the country whose independence he was dedicated to
and lost his life for. For the men of Muirhouse in the 1980s Connolly as a
rebel is closely tied to their conception of their identity, Hibernian football
club and their sectarian songs. However this conception or reinvention of
Connolly is far removed from other academic enforced truth narratives
about Connolly:
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The dysfunction of sectarianism resulted from the pathology of imperialism
in Ireland. Connolly did not believe that Catholics in Ireland had a
monopoly on tragedy as a result of colonialism. In a column written for
Forward on 12 July
1913, he addressed Orangeism and the Twelfth
marchers, exploring the plight of Scottish “planters” and their relationship
with the land in Ulster. He was sympathetic to Presbyterians in Ulster,
seeing them as victims “introduced” as tenants of English noblemen and
London companies to “keep Ireland for the English Crown and till the land
of Ireland for the benefit of the English landlord [...] (Githens-Mazer,
2008: 98).
Whilst the men of Muirhouse are born choicelessly into an identity of
various narratives and a level of economic status amongst other defining
structures they do possess the power to carve narratives within their own
community as long as another allows them this narrative through
acceptance; a shared narrative and experience as an audience is needed to
give it a reality. This possesses an obvious parallel with the men of ‘Ivy
Day’ and the figure of Parnell as the men seek a shared appraisal of
Parnell after securing their alcohol. By the same token Connolly has
become a ghost of Leith perpetually held as a standard of achievement for
its inhabitants. The father figure has been formed to suit particular
behaviours and beliefs prevalent to the perceiver. These father figures
come to haunt these areas as unreachable principles of behaviour. The
meaning becomes diluted into images as from major product figures of a
T-Shirt industry or part of a narrative of causes seeking to be perpetuated
by paramilitaries or as with the passing decades their meaning distorts to a
point where they, like rebel songs or like authors, become an empty vessel
for the false sentiments expressed in a drink fuelled party.
This sing-song continues into a version of The Boys of the Old
Brigade:
Oh fa-thir why are you-hoo so-ho sad
Oan this fine Ea-heas-ti-her morn
Whe-hen I-rish men are prow-howd ah-hand glad
Off the land where they-hey we-her born
[...]
Aw-haun be-ing just a la-had li-hike you
I joined the I-hi-Ah-har-A – provishnil wing! (Welsh, 1997: 52).
Within the song the men noticeably leave out the word brigade in
favour of their pronunciation of IRA which is broken up by Welsh’s
Muirhouse dialect resembling somebody falsely laughing, “I-hi-Ah-harA”. An agenda is in place to define themselves against the local enemy,
When Scottish Eyes are Irishised
245
the football club of Protestant heritage ‘Hearts’, and in doing so to
perpetuate a binary denying global histories of a mixed transnational race;
nowhere is this more evident than in James Connolly’s marriage to a
Protestant woman and in the word “brigade.” These unthinking sectarian
insults to an opposition actually on logical inquisition highlight the
inseparability and explode the illusion of a binary as Ireland and Britain,
Catholic and Protestant are truly immersed in their blood and history.
Within Dubliners and Trainspotting we witness attempts to copper-fasten
an interpretation of a historical figure to suit the group and individual
needs of various sub-groups and its members. This carving of their own
interpretation of a historical figure has a very real impact upon their local
society in terms of creating divisions and negative action in the various
football supporters. That these narratives do not possess accuracy is not
the point as they clearly possess a reality perpetuating various actions and
beliefs. They can renew and maintain a line of interpretation preventing a
real deviating shift beyond the preceding generation into a fresh identity.
The framework of a concept of identity lies in wait for those born and
the societal pressure is then to fit within these borders as is evident in
Trainspotting and Dubliners as the surrounding communities’ concept of
an Irish political figure and Irishness constantly presents itself to the
individual. This is akin to a writer reading of another writer’s past in
fiction and then contending with finding his own voice and identity whilst
also building upon existing narratives.
This past, passed down, of Irish heritage amongst these Scottish-Irish
characters in Trainspotting is reinvented in the present for individual and
group needs at the different levels of society. However within every
community as with the inclination to build upon established historical
narratives there is also the impulsion to be different and go against
established lines: to be individual. To perform one’s Irishness or ScottishIrishness and be accepted within the community one must perform and be
allowed to perform these actions of Irishness. Joyce also harbours a similar
position within literary circles; a canon figure that writers must write
through not just acknowledge but seek to carve an identity from, whilst
also building upon such authors’ work. However to read Welsh’s work in
a Joycean manner, one must approach it from a background that is aware
of Joyce.
The legacy of Joyce has become inescapable in ways for the likes of
Welsh; a Joyce handed down throughout the generations just like the
Irishness handed down by the Scottish-Irish in Trainspotting. However
Welsh does take some aspects to different places. In one chapter Johnny
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Swan, a one legged dealer who has fallen on hard times, poses as a
Scottish soldier in order to mislead people into giving him money:
Ah love ma country; ah’d dae it aw again. Besides, ah regard masel is
one ay the lucky yins; ah came back. Ah loast some good mates in that
swedge at Goose Green [...]
-Good luck, the man says softly, before turning and mounting the steps
up to Market Street.
- Fuckin radge cunt, Johnny mutters to himself, shaking his bowed
head, as spasms of light laughter ripple up his sides.
He makes £26.78 after a couple of hours[...]
Brian nivir came back, god love um. Twinty-one he wis. Ma laddie [...]
Ye know son, ah’ll hate that Thatcher till ma dying day. Thir isnae a day
does by whin ah dinnae curse her (Irvine, 1997: 326).
Few characters in Trainspotting consider removing themselves from
their known lives and groups whether it is family, friends or Edinburgh.
However, Renton seems to leave the city of his upbringing, contrary to
Dubliners where many consider leaving however fail to act upon this such
as ‘Eveline’ and Little Chandler of ‘A Little Cloud’. For example it is the
successful, hard-drinking, and unlikable, Gallaher, who sets on fire
Chandler’s desire for a poet’s life who has successfully left Ireland. The
men in Dubliners seek refuge in their political hero Charles Stewart
Parnell and alcohol addiction to avoid the everyday failures and illusions
of their own lives. Welsh’s depiction of his Irish-Scottish generation in
Trainspotting is a vision centred on trying to remove oneself from
historical and present day narratives through drugs and illusions as it is the
space that they occupy that is sought to be blamed rather than themselves.
As Roland Robertson states in Identities Race, Class, Gender, and
Nationality:
[e]ntities in the contemporary world are making and remaking their
histories in terms of the constraints of the current phase of globalization
(Roberston, 2003: 310).
Renton is trying to use a narrative of globalisation to try to diversify
his Scottishness and Irish heritage in favour of an individualistic self
devoid of a strict regional identity demanding boundaries and divisions.
However identity exists within the mind, just as Joyce left Ireland to
continually and obsessively write about his homeland, Renton shall find
his native soil and all his historical narratives waiting within him in
whatever country he resides within.
When Scottish Eyes are Irishised
247
Works Cited
Barry, Kevin. (2000), James Joyce Occasional, Critical, and Political
Writing. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
BBC News Scotland. (2011), ‘New bill to tackle sectarianism in Scottish
football’. BBC News. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-13796044
accessed 6th January 2012.
Edwards, Owen Dudley. (1979), ‘Connolly and Irish Tradition’, The
Furrow Vol. 30, No. 7.
Ellmann, Richard. (1982), James Joyce. Oxford University Press, New
York.
Fogarty, Anne. (2006), ‘Parnellism and the Politics of Memory: Revisiting
‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’ in Andrew Gibson and Len Platt
(eds.). Joyce, Ireland, Britain, University Press of Florida, Gainesville,
FL.
Githens-Mazer, Jonathan. (2008), ‘Ancient Erin, Modern Socialism:
Myths, Memories and Symbols of the Irish Nation in the Writings of
James Connolly’ in Interventions Vol 10, No. 1
Gordon, Colin (ed.). (1980), Foucault: Power/Knowledge: selected
interviews and other writings, 1972-1977 Harvester Press, (Brighton)
Hall, Stuart. (2003), ‘Cultural Identity and Disaspora’. Theorizing
diaspora: a reader. Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur (eds.).
Blackwell Pub, Malden, MA.
Joyce, J. (1914) Dubliners, Granada Publishing Ltd., London.
Kearney, Richard. (1985), ‘James Connolly’ in The Crane Bag Vol. 9, No.
1.
Kleinman, Sylvie. (2009), ‘Sirr, Henry Charles’, Dictionary of Irish Birth.
Royal Irish Academy.
http://dib.cambridge.org/viewReadPage.do?articleId=a8099&searchCli
cked=clicked&quickadvsearch=yes accessed 15th January 2012.
Morace, Robert. (2001), Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting : a reader’s guide.
Continuum, New York.
Preece, Sir William. (1904), ‘Egyptians and Celts’ in The Celtic Review.
Vol. 1 No.2.
Radiguet, Lionel.O. (1905), ‘Celt and Semite and the Determination of our
Origins’ in The Celtic Review. Vol. 2, No. 5 (Jul., 1905).
Robertson, Roland. (2003), Identities Race, Class, Gender, and
Nationality. Linda Alcoff; Eduardo Mendieta (eds.). Blackwell
Publishers, Malden, MA.
Swift, Roger (ed.). (2002), Irish Migrants in Britain 1815-1914 A
Documentary History. Cork University Press, Cork.
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Torchiana, Donald T. (1986), Backgrounds for Joyce’s Dubliners, Allen &
Unwin, Boston, Mass. and London.
Welsh, Irvine. (1997), ‘Trainspotting’ in The Irvine Welsh Omnibus.
Johnathan Cape/Secker & Warburg, London.
—. (2011), No Subject Title. Email from the author Irvine Welsh. 13 Jan.
2011.
Woodward, Ashley. (2002), ‘Jean-François Lyotard (1924—1998)’ in
Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. University of Queensland.
http://www.iep.utm.edu/lyotard/ accessed 21st January 2012.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“THE PLACE YOU DON’T BELONG”:
BORDER-CROSSINGS AND AMBIVALENCE
IN THE NORTHERN IRISH NOIR-THRILLER
THOMAS RUDMAN
The tragedies of the past have left a deep and profoundly regrettable legacy
of suffering. We must never forget those who have died or been injured,
and their families. But we can best honour them through a fresh start, in
which we firmly dedicate ourselves to the achievement of reconciliation,
tolerance, and mutual trust, and to the protection and vindication of the
human rights of all.
—Article 2, The Good Friday Agreement
This chapter sets out to examine the metaphor of border-crossings in ‘postTroubles’ Northern Irish noir fiction. The chapter begins by outlining a
central ambiguity of the celebrated peace-process era of today—the
entrenchment of inter-community separation in an era of official crosscommunity power-sharing—before exploring how Stuart Neville’s recent
noir-thriller, The Twelve (Neville, 2009), negotiates this apparently
contradictory trend. Drawing upon Louis Althusser’s theory of articulation
and Walter Benjamin’s notion of redemption, the novel will be shown to
blur the borders, albeit problematically, of both genre-based readings of
literature and also the normative ‘two-traditions’ narrative through which
Northern Irish politics has traditionally been envisioned.
With its dedication towards a fresh start, the reconciliatory stance of
the 1998 Good Friday Agreement signalled an attempt to move beyond the
violent ethno-sectarian divides of Northern Irish history. After almost 30
years of civil war and almost half-a-millennium of struggle over Irish
independence, the past decade of an often fraught power-sharing
agreement between previously warring nationalists and loyalists has
generally been viewed as evidence of a progressive movement towards a
more open and prosperous liberal-democratic community. In a preface to a
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collection entitled Multi-Culturalism: The View from the Two Irelands
(2001), the then Irish President Mary McAleese heralded the Agreement’s
attempt to move beyond the exclusionary and violent separations that had
scarred both unionist and nationalist communities in the North.
Celebrating the advent of a new era of “equality and parity of esteem”,
McAleese hailed the creation of an inclusive constitutional framework
within which “both main traditions can come together to work for their
mutual benefits” (vii). The notion that a “solution” to the identitarian
divides had finally been found, that the Province could now step forward
into the daylight of “modernity”, has also been echoed across the water in
Great Britain. In a recent interview with the Belfast Telegraph, former
British Prime Minister and now Middle East peace envoy Tony Blair
declared the Northern Irish political settlement an inspiration all “round
the world” (Gordon, 2010).
In keeping with the prevailing narratives of market-liberalization that
dominate the politics of the North Atlantic, the optimism of both the
British and Irish states has been brought-together in a key ideological
narrative: that the mutual benefits of peace are to be achieved through
economic advancement (Shirlow, 2006: 73). This is perhaps best captured,
as Peter Shirlow notes, by the recent metamorphosis of war-marked
Belfast into a site of global living (Shirlow, 2006: 73). After intense
economic investment, the city, with its new waterfront developments, has
been transformed into a modern if generic cosmopolitan locale whose
new-fangled opulence signals a state of normality and security that is a far
cry from the bombs of the past (Shirlow, 2006: 73). As, Gerry Fegan, the
repentant ex-paramilitary protagonist of Stuart Neville’s The Twelve,
observes, Belfast is now populated by “students and young professionals”
who frequent the new “designer boutiques, restaurants and wine bars” to
“buy overpriced coffee without fear” (Neville, 2009: 27). In other words,
the city now “belongs”, as Fegan notes with some relief, to people who
were probably not “even born when they scraped body parts off the streets
with shovels” (Neville, 2009: 27).
If the commercial regeneration of Belfast city centre signals a new,
ecumenical opening of Northern Ireland’s public sphere into the liberal
modernity of economic globalisation, then the politics of cross-community
power-sharing have yet to break-down the long-standing borders of ethnopolitical divides in the city’s residential margins. Since the Good Friday
Agreement in 1998, six new peace walls or interfaces between loyalist and
nationalist communities have been constructed and eleven existing barriers
have been extended in Belfast alone (Tonge, 2006: 212; Shirlow, 2006:
79). With the number of peace walls throughout the province now greater
“The Place You Don’t Belong”
251
than during the Troubles, the proliferation and hardening of established
social and cultural divides suggests that the official discourses of crosscommunity politics have yet to actually cross let alone break-down the
internal borders of Northern Ireland’s troubled past.
It is precisely these notions of break-down, borders and their
relationship to the aesthetic practices of the noir-thriller that this chapter
sets out to explore. Emerging in the era of rapid economic and
technological change in the 1920s, the dark, suspense-laden narratives of
the roman noir were originally associated with the hard-boiled American
school of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Characterised by
William Marling (1995, ix) as a moral critique of the prodigal excesses of
the US Jazz Age as it moved into the Great Depression, the narrative
structure of the early American noir-thriller is frequently underlain by a
notion of mythic or chivalrous degeneration in a new culture of
commodity consumption. The lonely detective heroes of Hammett and
Chandler express a cynical note of caution in relation to the new socioeconomic transformations. “Knights”, as Chandler’s private detective
Phillip Marlowe laments in The Big Sleep “had no meaning in this game”
(Marlowe, 2005, 170).
In the recent period of vast social and economic change, Northern
Ireland has also emerged as a productive setting for what has become
known as the ‘Emerald noir’. Over the past two decades writers such as
Eoin McNamee and more recently Stuart Neville have employed the
“rank, allusive narrative” forms of the noir-thriller to engage with the
transformations of the province (McNamee 1995, 233). While McNamee’s
attempt to reveal a “ghostly infrastructure” (McNamee, 2005, 10) behind
the narratives of social progress has been characterised by an exploration
of controversial historical figures from the Troubles—the Shankhill
Butcher Lenny Murphy in Resurrection Man (1995) and the mysterious
British Army Captain Robert Nairac in The Ultras (2005)—Neville’s The
Twelve follows a more orthodox noir trope in narrating the struggle of a
fictional outsider, Gerry Fegan. Despite this apparent orthodoxy, what is
interesting about The Twelve is that Fegan’s character inhabits a
paradoxical position that permits a critical engagement with the complex
and contradictory problems of contemporary Northern Ireland outlined
above. In short, Fegan embodies an apparently redemptive movement
across Northern Ireland’s long-standing divides of politics and identity
that is narrated, in part, through the suspenseful conventions of the popular
thriller. At the same time, however, this redemptive cross-community
quest to atone for past crimes is also accompanied by a darkly violent and
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noir-inflected paranoia. What I want to do in this chapter is to explore how
metaphors of border-crossings in Neville’s noir-thriller articulate both the
historical divisions and the present contradictions of the post-peaceprocess era. This involves a related critical engagement with, and breakdown of, certain key pre-conceptions within the dominant paradigms of
Northern Irish literary criticism, in particular the negative position of the
thriller form in debates over aesthetics and political change in the North.
Criticism and articulation in the noir-thriller
To begin, then, I’d firstly like to contextualise my reading of bordercrossings and the noir-thriller in relation to recent publications within
Northern Irish literary studies by figures such as Gerry Smyth, Eve Patten,
Eamonn Hughes and Elmer Kennedy-Andrews. These works are important
because they outline a perceived inadequacy within certain fictional
responses to Northern Irish cultural identity and demarcate the boundaries
of a new, utopian critical terrain through which the complexity of the
contemporary North can, in the critics’ eyes, be competently explored. As
will become clear, my central concern here is to question the boundaries of
this field. Drawing upon Althusserian ideas of articulation and
overdetermination, I will suggest that this criticism itself does not fully
attend to the contradictory practices of popular literary forms such as the
noir-thriller.
Over the past few decades, criticism of Northern Irish literature has
frequently centred on the search for new aesthetic forms which, in Gerry
Smyth’s words, could help “develop new languages and new perspectives
as a contribution to the imagination of change” (Smyth, 1997: 116). For
Smyth, the traditional use of the thriller in the North “tends towards
melodrama and a sort of voyeuristic violence in which stock characters
and images are recycled in more or less disabling ways” (Smyth, 1997:
114). Smyth’s search for a “new” authentic form of representation has
centred, therefore, on a demand for novelistic styles that could help “break
out of the orthodoxies which had fed and sustained the conflict” (Smyth,
1997: 123).
The attempt to dismantle the sectarian divides through which the North
has frequently been envisioned is shared by Eve Patten. In her essay,
Fiction in Conflict: the North’s Prodigal Novelists (1995), Patten
celebrates new novelists such as Frances Molloy, Robert McLiam Wilson
and Glenn Patterson who subvert the “received images of Northern Irish
society from British, Irish or American sources” (Patten, 1995: 129).
Similar to Smyth’s search for the “new”, Patten advocates what she terms
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253
an “overdue exploitation” of “postmodern” literary techniques such as
“perspectivism, ambiguity and displacement” when narrating the North
(Patten, 1995: 129). According to Patten “representations of contemporary
Northern Irish self-image” cannot be found in the stable narratives based
on outmoded, binary allegiances (Patten, 1995: 129). A more acute
awareness of the modernity of the North in terms of a “sustained
constitutional and psychological identity crisis” is required (Patten, 1995:
129-30).
Despite the critical celebration of recent postmodern novels by Robert
McLiam Wilson and Glenn Patterson, contemporaneous literary
experiments with the noir-thriller in Northern Ireland by figures such as
Eoin McNamee have received a more ambivalent critical reception. While
Eamonn Hughes (1996) and Elmer Kennedy-Andrews (2003) have
celebrated the ironic fusion of gothic and Chandler-esque motifs in
McNamee’s bleak narration of Belfast in Resurrection Man, McNamee’s
work has been criticised by Smyth for an alleged failure to provide any
new perspectives on the changing local landscape of contemporary
Northern Ireland. While ostensibly dealing with the problems of
paramilitarism, McNamee’s fictionalisation of the Shankhill Butchers in
Resurrection Man, writes Smyth:
...reveals itself as another reactionary response to the ‘Troubles’, interested
not in sectarianism (nor indeed in the more significant agendas of state
sovereignty which underpin sectarianism in Northern Ireland) but in some
inscrutable darkness at the heart of the self. The local matters only in so far
as it can be incorporated into a larger existential overview, as some sort of
evidence for the human condition. (Smyth, 1997: 123)
Read in this way, McNamee’s experiment with a Conrad-inflected noir
aesthetic seems almost as reductive and non-organic as the much maligned
“Troubles-trash” thrillers which Smyth laments for their stereotypical
characters, “melodrama” and “voyeuristic violence” (Smyth, 1997: 114).
Indeed, since the explosion of violence in 1969, the thriller form has been
one of the popular forms through which the Troubles have been
represented. As Eve Patten notes, the growth of the “Troubles thriller” has
led to one of the most profitable literary industries in the North since the
violence began (Patten, 1995: 128). Despite its vivid evocation of a
suspenseful sense of emergency, Smyth’s dismissal of the thriller form has
been shared by other critics. For Kennedy-Andrews (2003: 41) “the
reductive nature of popular fiction”, with its “genre-based”, formulaic
narrative conventions means that the thriller form has “given wide
circulation to unhelpfully simplified ideas and images of the Northern Irish
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conflict.” Similarly, for Eamonn Hughes (1996), the clichéd stereotypes of
the genre eschew any sustained concern with the specificities of the
province as a distinct place. In “Troubles-trash” thrillers, the geography of
Northern Ireland is, as Hughes notes, merely a void, “a blank space filled
by novelists and film-makers with stock properties” of crazed terrorists,
tribalism and violent hatred (Hughes, 1996: 141-2). In Tom Clancy’s The
Patriot Games (1987) for example, Belfast, and indeed Northern Ireland as
a political-geographical whole is, continues Hughes, “left completely out
of the account” despite the fact that “events there fuel the plot” (Hughes,
1996: 142).
In short, then, the dominant thriller-based traditions of Northern Irish
fiction fail, according to the above critics, to express the complexities of
life in the province. What is interesting about these accounts however, is
that while they frequently call for a “new” type of ironic postmodern
“perspectivism” (Patten; Kennedy-Andrews) or “imagination” (Smyth),
their model of utopian criticism is ultimately based, as Richard Kirkland
(2002: 78) notes, on a demand for more “realistic” narratives. For critics
such as Smyth and Patten, narrative forms such as the thriller are
conceived in terms of a generic sameness which is deemed incapable of
authentically representing what the critics see as the (post)modernity of
contemporary Northern Irish society. However, by creating a divisive
framework whereby an older or popular style of text such as the thriller is
deemed unsatisfactory while newly emergent styles are celebrated for their
ability to map social change, this type of critical paradigm becomes, as
Kirkland notes, “vulnerable to an accusation that it divides formal and
historical continuities into formal epochs” (Kirkland, 2002: 83). To
envisage literature in terms of a series of homogenous genre-dominated
fields whose ideological articulation of the social whole can be read
formally or thematically in terms of immutable generic or formal
conventions ignores the way individual texts constantly redefine the rules
and received practices of a genre (Collins, 1989: 46; Beebee, 1994: 19).
‘Popular’ as much as canonical texts relate to other texts within and
beyond their given genre and thus produce differences and deviations
which disturb the abstract criteria of a demarcated literary field. An
awareness of the “Troubles thriller” as a heterogeneous space of “struggle”
between different ideologies of form is a point forcefully argued in a
recent addition to Irish literary studies by Aaron Kelly (2005: 11).
Drawing upon Fredric Jameson’s notion of a “political unconscious”,
Kelly observes that the imaginary resolutions of popular literary texts
relating to the ‘Troubles’ are fractured by a series of formal instabilities
and antinomies. Thus rather than view popular literature as an example of
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pure ideology or conservative recuperation, Kelly notes that the formal
contradictions within the ‘Troubles’ thriller mean that each novel should
be envisioned as a “contestatory cultural process” (Kelly, 2005: 11). Signs
of formal instability in the ‘Troubles’ thriller mark out the effect of an
unruly political unconscious upon the text which can be read in relation to
the “unresolvable social contradictions” within the real of history (Kelly,
2005: 3). A sense of this formal uncertainty can be grasped immediately in
Neville’s The Twelve which fuses the dark suspense of a noir-thriller with
a gothic depiction of ‘post-Troubles’ Belfast. In Fegan’s quest to take out
a series of corrupt figures within the Republican movement, he is
accompanied by the ghosts of the people he killed during his time as a
paramilitary. Indeed, Fegan’s murderous actions are, to a certain extent,
motivated by the ghosts who demand that he exact revenge upon the
figures within the Republican movement who ordered their deaths.
Emphasising formal instability and deviation within a single text,
irrespective of its genre, seems more appropriate, therefore, when
exploring aesthetic engagements with the contradictions of contemporary
Northern Ireland and its troubled history. As Fegan’s nemesis, the undercover British agent, Davy Campbell notes, the new world of ‘postTroubles’ Belfast “made him dizzy just to picture it” (Neville, 2009: 167).
Before I progress to discuss Neville’s novel in detail, I want to briefly
outline a theoretical framework through which so-called popular literature
can be seen to condense the complex ambiguities of modern Northern Irish
society. To do this I want to draw upon the Althusserian idea of
articulation and re-read it in relation to the previous discussion of criticism
and literary practice.
In general, the concept of articulation refers to the notion that different
discourses and practices interact with varying social forces to actively
produce and mediate understandings of an object under investigation. The
comprehension of an object in terms of its mediation by cultural or
political practices outlines the difference between the object and the
practice through which it is articulated (Burke and Faulkner 2010: 5-6, 134; Radstone 2010: 26-7). As such, the object of the investigation in
literature, the social reality of contemporary Northern Ireland for instance,
is viewed not as a mere realistic reflection but rather as a part of a process
of production, or in more literal terms, as a social-cultural formation.
Within materialist studies the idea of articulation is strongly associated
with the work of Louis Althusser (2001: 90-1, 100) who argued that
“ideological” practices within society or culture, such as literature in all its
various forms, were “relatively autonomous” and therefore could not be
viewed solely as unitary expressions of an underlying “reality” or
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economic determinism, to use Marxist terms. Althusser’s view of the
“autonomy” of cultural practices did not entail, however, a comprehension
of each individual discourse in terms of a separate and singular expressive
unity—as, for example, in the previous critical discussions of the thriller
form. Rather, Althusser’s notions of articulation and “relative autonomy”
are marked by a distinct mistrust of such exclusive formulas (Althusser,
2001: 91). Drawing upon Freud’s notion of overdetermination, Althusser
emphasised the inter-relationships and internal dissonances of specific and
often contradictory discourses in the comprehension of any individual
example of social or political practice. The “complex whole” of social,
political or even cultural practices, notes Althusser, “cannot be envisaged
without its contradictions, without their basically uneven relations”
(Althusser, 2001: 204-5).
In relation to my discussion of the noir-thriller then, Althusser’s work
has two important implications. Firstly, on a general level, attention should
be focused on the way an individual text relates to, incorporates and
perhaps also re-configures other styles from outside its own specific genre.
As I have already noted, The Twelve contains a strongly gothic element
and the articulation of haunting alongside a quest for justice will be
explored later in this chapter. Secondly, in terms of closer textual analysis,
critical reading should not simply attend to the manifest narrative structure
of the text or to pre-existent critical conceptions of the thriller’s structure
in terms of a final formulaic restoration of an earlier imbalance. This is
indeed the most conventional method of approach (see Palmer 1978;
Knight 1980; Porter 1981). It frequently reads the thriller in terms of the
narrative’s final act of textual closure, reducing the novel to a mere act of
conservative recuperation; order having finally been restored. Instead, as
Pierre Macherey (1978: 87) states, reading should focus on the conflictive
images and structures within the text, the points of contradictions that
outline a disjunctive “relation between the implicit and the explicit”. To do
this is to explore the multiple tensions within the text whose ambiguities
cannot be contained by a notion of “closure” or “alleged plenitude”
(Macherey, 1978: 80, 90). I will return to this at the end of this chapter by
relating the ambivalences of The Twelve, and in particular its own ending,
to the ambiguities of contemporary Northern Ireland. To summarise then,
the concept of overdetermination encourages an exploration of the
specificities and contradictory interactions of different cultural practices in
their generation of meaning within a complex social whole. In other
words, the idea of articulation works against the idea that a particular
cultural practice constitutes an unproblematic reflection of social “reality”.
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With specific reference to literature, it also suggests that a text or genre
does not constitute a unitary, closed, or formulaic narrative whole.
In light of this discussion, I now want to examine how the noir-thriller
aesthetic and the various metaphors of border-crossings within The Twelve
can be seen to articulate the complex ambiguities of contemporary
Northern Ireland. In keeping with the formulaic notion of closure or
restoration, the novel’s ending does attempt to provide a type of resolution
to the dislocations depicted in the text. Nevertheless, as I will argue
towards the end of this chapter, the drive towards redemption within the
novel is fissured by a series of contradictions that disturb any sense of
clear-cut resolution upon the novel’s termination. To begin, however, I
want to highlight how certain key images and structural features relating to
the noir-thriller genre and its intersection with the gothic articulate, in their
own aesthetic way, a sense of the key contradictions of contemporary
Northern Ireland.
Border-crossings in The Twelve
In The Noir Thriller (2001) Lee Horsley underlines the central importance
of an unstable and vulnerable protagonist in the dramatic narrative
structure of literary noir. In the traditional detective or crime story, there
is, as Horsley notes, often a stable triangle of detective, victim and
criminal. The noir-thriller breaks with this convention:
...the treacherous confusions of his role and the movement of the
protagonist from one role to another constitute key structural elements in
the noir narrative” (Horsley, 2001: 10).
The break-down or slippages between these positions can be read in The
Twelve.
Fegan’s liminal status, his sense that he no longer “belongs” neither
temporally nor politically— “I’m not…with them any more”, he confesses
in reference to his Republican contemporaries (Neville, 2009: 52)—,
constantly re-configures him as an unstable and dramatically fluctuating
figure within the text. Fegan is, on the one hand, a hybrid of the detectivecriminal. In his murderous quest to avenge the dead, Fegan goes in pursuit
of certain corrupt figures within the Republican hierarchy. Aided by
Fegan’s ghosts, the reader discovers that these rogue figures had used
“mugs” like Fegan (Neville, 2009: 8) to kill in order to facilitate their own
self-serving lust for power, “to get a leg up” within the organisation:
“They died to make your name,” curses Fegan (Neville, 2009: 309-10). In
this sense Fegan partly embodies the characteristics of the classic noir-
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thriller detective. He maintains a code of honour different to his powerhungry contemporaries, “I’m going to make up for what I’ve done,” he
vows (Neville, 2009: 123). And attempts to put a stop to their prodigal
excesses: ‘Everybody pays[...] Sooner or later,’” he informs his final
adversary (Neville, 2009: 318). On the other hand, however, Fegan is also
a victim. His effort “to put things right” makes him a target: “Gerry
[Fegan] will have to be dealt with,” states a Republican leader who
unknowingly entrusts the job to a British double-agent (Neville, 2009:
123, 127).
The effect of this slippage and its disturbance of any clear-cut sense of
subject position are of signal importance when considering the literary
articulation of identity in ‘post-Troubles’ Northern Ireland. In terms of
content, Fegan’s violence and the lazy depiction of the Republican
movement as a duplicitous and intransigent force does, of course, follow
what Gerry Smyth (1997: 114) has called the “stock characters and
images” of the ‘Troubles’ thriller. However, the break-down of established
subject positions within The Twelve seems to temper Smyth’s dismissal of
the thriller form. On a formal level, Fegan’s dramatic switch between the
different character positions of crime fiction indicates that identity is not
consistent nor bounded, but unruly. Unlike the exclusionary narratives of
the ‘two-traditions’, which frequently depict the North in terms of two
opposed and homogenous subjectivities, the heterogeneous and unstable
role of Fegan breaks down the binary framework of formal oppositions
from which the conflict has long been imagined. Read in this way, the
dramatic structural movements of the noir-thriller can be seen to articulate
a more subtle sense of identity and its complex ambiguity than has hitherto
been acknowledged.
The unstable notion of identity articulated by the novel is also
intertwined with an intersection of different formal styles. As I have noted,
the noir-thriller form of The Twelve also contains an important gothic
element: Fegan’s haunting. I now want to focus on this stylistic elision of
the gothic with the thriller form because to do so will bring forth an
interesting notion of overdetermination which articulates quite appositely
the ambivalence of contemporary Northern Irish society, in particular the
paradoxical entrenchment of inter-community separation in an era of
celebrated cross-community power-sharing.
To begin then, the key temporal border-crossing of the novel, the
ghostly return of Fegan’s twelve victims, commences during “his last
weeks in the Maze prison” (Neville, 2009: 6-7).Tired of the “shouting and
arguing” over “the Agreement in ’98”, Fegan becomes disillusioned with
his fellow Republican prisoners (Neville, 2009: 120). Realising that he
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259
“didn’t want to be around the boys anymore” Fegan begins to “stay behind
in the workshop” whereupon he is befriended by a “Prod, from the
Loyalist block” named Ronnie Lennox (Neville, 2009: 120).
Fegan had spent hours in the Maze Prison’s workshop, watching the old
man at his craft. Ronnie hated being penned up with the rest of the
Loyalists, so the guards let him pass the time in his own corner of the
woodwork room. The Republican prisoners tolerated his presence when
they had the use of the place, thinking him harmless, and even let him
teach them a thing or two. Fegan always paid close attention. (Neville,
2009: 37)
Like Fegan, Lennox feels a sense of guilt about his murderous past and
wonders “what use” he could be in an era of peace (Neville, 2009: 136).
After teaching Fegan “how to use a coping saw properly” and instructing
him in “joints and dowels”, the two begin to work together restoring
broken guitars (Neville, 2009: 120, 136). What is interesting in this almost
utopian image of “cross-community” friendship is that it coincides with
the violent haunting of Fegan by his twelve victims: “I’ve seen them in the
daytime,” he confesses to Lennox (Neville, 2009: 138).
As can be discerned from the above, the overdetermined conjunction of
the noir-thriller with the gothic begins to articulate a sense of the key
paradoxes of contemporary Northern Irish society. Rather than provide a
reflection of the continued existence of ‘identitarian’ conflict in terms of a
mimetic verisimilitude, the aesthetic intersection of a violent temporalcrossing alongside a “cross-community” act of reconciliation articulates
quite provocatively the notion of a complex and on-going struggle within
Northern Irish society. As the metaphor of Fegan’s haunting suggests, the
establishment of cross-community power-sharing does not demarcate an
easy resolution to the complex and violent legacies of the past.
The problematic notions of border-crossing and separation captured in
the metaphor of haunting are also reinforced via the symbolic nature of the
setting. As Louise Purbrick (2010) has argued, the history of the Maze also
articulates the ambivalences of the conflict in a way that goes beyond the
material divides of the concrete prison walls and compounds. With
internment in 1972 and the special category status for political detainees,
Long Kesh/The Maze was originally viewed as a prisoner of war camp.
Republicans and Loyalists ran their own compounds and prisoners were
thus segregated along political lines. Despite institutional attempts to depoliticize the prison system—the abolition of internment and the removal
of political status that marked the new H-Block system—both sides fought
to re-establish it. The campaign for political status among Republicans led
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to a no-wash campaign and ultimately the death of ten men on hunger
strike in 1981. Loyalist prisoners escalated their own demand for
segregation by smashing around two hundred cells in 1982 (McKeown,
97). The maintenance of order within the prison through an unofficial
policy of segregation continued therefore until the prison’s closure in 2000
(Purbrick, 118). The official attempt to break down the physical and
political boundaries could not be completed ideologically. By the end of
the conflict, however, the prison was renowned for its liberalism. Cells
were left unlocked for twenty-four hours a day: “You could do what you
wanted in the Maze, not like a normal prison”, recalls Fegan (The Twelve,
120). In spite of such an apparent liberal opening, however, the political
segregations remained. Republicans and Loyalists continued to run their
own wings and their own separate educational and social programmes
(McKeown, 2001: 129-148).Thus, as Purbrick notes: “Long Kesh/Maze
attempted to contain but ultimately exposed the relationships of the
conflict” (Purbrick, 2010: 118). In other words, the concrete walls and
wire fences alone could not demarcate the extent of the divides running
through the conflict. As the emergence of Fegan’s ghosts within the Maze
reveals, despite the peace-process and its related notion of political
“progress”, the “invisible borders remained the same” (Neville, 2009: 91).
The Twelve then, contains border-crossings at both formal and thematic
levels. It is through these crossings that the novel succeeds in articulating
the on-going conflicts and ambivalences of contemporary Northern
Ireland. Indeed, the stylistic elisions, which bring together a gothic
element within the noir-thriller sensibility, rule out any clear-cut definition
of a boundary between the past and the present. These temporal
dislocations—captured most forcefully in the ghostly haunting of Fegan—
indicate that the present era of the peace-process is fraught with tension:
Fegan tried to avoid seeing or reading the news as much as he could, but
the last two months had been a hurricane of change. Just five months ago,
as one year turned to the next, they’d said it was hopeless; the political
process was beyond repair. Then mountains moved, deals were struck,
another election came and went, while the shadows gathered closer to
Fegan. And more often than before, those shadows turned to faces and
bodies and arms and legs. Now they were constant and he couldn’t
remember when he last slept without first drowning them in whiskey.
(Neville, 2009: 6)
Importantly, this notion of a ghostly, unresolved struggle from the past
undermines a conception of Northern Irish history in terms of a
progressive break from the violent legacies of the ‘Troubles’. The violent
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261
ex-temporizing captured by Fegan’s ghosts suggests that the current
institutional narratives of the ‘post-Troubles’ era are permeated by a sense
of incompleteness or a lack: “It didn’t seem real,” muses the British undercover agent Campbell on the new order (Neville, 2009:167). This
disjunctive conception of time, the sense of incompleteness in the present
emerges, as the metaphor of haunting indicates, from an unfinished gap or
lack of being in the past which—and this is the crucial part—persists into
the present. In other words, the past in The Twelve makes a claim on the
present insofar as the past is marked by a void which continues to trouble
the present. As Fegan realises, apropos the screams of his shadowy
followers, “they would let him sleep. If he gave them everything they
wanted, they would give him peace and let him sleep” (Neville, 2009:
141).
Redemption and its ambivalences
The idea that the present conjuncture of peace-process Northern Ireland is
haunted by a demand to redress the failures of history invites a comparison
with the concept of historical redemption as outlined by Walter Benjamin.
For Benjamin (1999: 247), the true picture of time is not produced via a
chronological conception of linear historical development, or in notions of
progress, as captured in the celebrations of the Good Friday Agreement.
According to Benjamin, a “genuine historical image” is instead only
achieved posthumously through a process of temporal contraction: “To
articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it
really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at
a moment of danger” (Benjamin, 1999: 247-8). A truly transformative
moment occurs then, when the flashing memory of an oppressed past, a
denial or failure from a previous epoch, is taken up, or as Benjamin puts it,
“redeemed” in the present (Benjamin, 1999: 253-4). In other words, the
past must be “recognized by the present as one of its own concerns”
(Benjamin, 1999: 247).
In the following discussion, I want to explore this notion of redemption
and its relation to the novel’s image of gothic ex-temporality further.
While the idea of redemption recalls the formulaic and often conservative
notion of closure that characterises the structure of many thriller novels,
reading the ghostly demands for redress in terms of a redemptive drive to
atone for the past will be seen to destabilise certain conventional
conceptions of the gothic. When this is complete, I will then proceed to
outline how the textual act of closure is riven with a series of
contradictions that again articulate the resilience of the communitarian
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divides within Northern Ireland today. As I will demonstrate, the attempt
to redeem the haunting traces from the past in The Twelve does not, in the
last instance, actually succeed in halting the problematic legacies of the
conflict that Fegan tries to solve.
With its stress on hellish terrors and haunting, the gothic is
traditionally read as depicting a site of sin and corruption, a place where,
in Hamlet’s words, “the time is out of joint”. As Eamonn Hughes notes in
‘Town of Shadows’: Representations of Belfast in Recent Fiction (1996),
in societies with a particularly “ruralist ideology” such as Ireland, the city
and its association with modernity and the new, is frequently narrated in
terms of unspoken terrors and fear (Hughes, 1996: 152). However, as
Hughes continues, with Belfast’s recent literary emergence from
“invisibility into representation,” the use of gothic motifs can also be read
as bespeaking a “transformative element” in contemporary Irish literature
(Hughes, 1996: 155, 149). Redolent of the transformation of Joyce’s
Dublin from the depraved “Nighttown” to the “New Bloomusalem” in
Ulysses (2000, 606), the gothic can be seen as a “utopian category” which
stresses an ethical attempt “to find a new language” for “the unspeakable”
amidst the changes within contemporary Northern Ireland (Hughes 1996:
149, 155).
This transformative and subversive notion of gothic temporality—
where the unspoken past returns to demand what Benjamin would call a
“messianic” compensation in the present—can be read in The Twelve. As I
alluded to above, what Fegan discovers through his ghosts is that his
hauntings constitute a “virtual archive” which registers an absence of
ethical action in the past. The notion of a “virtual archive” is developed by
Eric Santner (2006: 88-9) in his Benjamin-inspired reading of Christa
Wolf’s novel about coming of age during the Nazi period, A Model
Childhood. Commenting on the series of neurotic symptoms that plagued
the family of Wolf after the war, Santner argues that a “virtual archive” is
characterised by the persistence of a “signifying stress” or symptom which
marks the void of a subject’s own historical failure to partake in a
responsible and ethical action on the part of the oppressed (Santner, 2006:
88-9).What is recognised in Fegan’s haunting, therefore, are not so much
forgotten acts, but an index of failures to act ethically on the part of
“innocent people” both during and after the ‘Troubles’ (Neville, 2009:
309). The ghosts reveal to Fegan the real reason for their deaths—a hidden
nexus of corruption within the Republican movement that remains in the
present day. Fegan’s atonement for his own personal role in these
unnecessary deaths, his murderous pursuit of the figures who originally
ordered him to kill, adheres to the demands of his ghosts for redress. “I’m
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going to put things right,” decides Fegan (Neville, 2009: 123). Redemption
emerges then from an unspoken or unrealised element from the past which
subsequently becomes, in Benjamin’s terms, “recognized by the present as
one of its own concerns” (Benjamin, 1999).
One of the key metaphors for Fegan’s drive for redemption is that of a
broken guitar:
Fegan coughed. ‘Guitars were Ronnie’s thing. He played beautiful. Not
like those guys in the pubs, banging out the same old songs, but really
playing it. Like he was talking to you […] He always told me about this
guitar he had at home. A Martin D-28 from the Thirties—a herringbone, he
called it. He said he would fix it up when he got out.
That’s what kept him going.
‘About half a year ago, this woman knocked on my door. She said she
was Ronnie’s daughter. She handed me this guitar case, all battered and
torn up. She said Ronnie had wanted me to have it, he told her that before
he died. It took all that time for her to find me. It was the Martin. I’m
restoring it now. It’s almost done.’ (Neville, 2009: 120-1)
As this extract reveals then, the attempt to redress a past failure can be
achieved by, as Benjamin puts it, making “whole what has been smashed”
(Benjamin, 1999: 249). The novel suggests that an escape from the violent
and repetitive structures of the conflict—“banging out the same old
songs”— can only be achieved by “restoring” the “beautiful” harmony
from the past —“A Martin D-28 from the Thirties”. While this return to a
pre-lapsarian time chimes with the restorative logic of crime fiction and
noir, there is an inter-subjective and cross-community notion of
consciousness in the extract that importantly recalls my earlier gothicinflected discussion of communal redemption—the living Fegan
embodying the redemptive demands of the (un)dead. By fixing Ronnie’s
broken guitar, Fegan again takes up the project of another person from
across the political-divide. His communion with the other is cemented
when Fegan himself decides that he too will “learn to play” (Neville,
2009: 121).
This structure of restoration and communal redemption is repeated
throughout the text. In his struggle to redeem the dead, Fegan
inadvertently intervenes in the life of Marie and Ellen, a Catholic mother
and her child who are threatened by the same rogue Republican figures
that Fegan is pursuing: “I won’t let McGinty hurt you. Or Ellen,” swears
Fegan as he realises their predicament (Neville, 2009: 124). In the process
it becomes clear that Fegan’s own family life was torn apart by his
misguided involvement with the corrupt elements from the Republican
movement that he now pursues. With his first killing as a paramilitary,
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Fegan is abandoned by his mother who refuses contact with her son for the
rest of her life: “I’m ashamed I carried the likes of you inside me”
(Neville, 2009: 227). Significantly, the violent climax to the novel ends
with Fegan having redeemed, in an inter-subjective and communal way,
both the past and the future for the broken families of the novel. Upon
Fegan’s final liquidation of the corrupt Republican politician McGinty, the
ghost of the dead mother and her screaming baby finally depart for
“heaven” (Neville, 2009: 323). Crucially at this moment the dead mother
utters the first and only spoken word from beyond the grave by the ghosts:
As she disappeared into the morning light beyond, she turned to look at
Fegan once more.
‘Mercy,’ she said. (Neville, 2009: 323)
With this Fegan finally receives the blessing he had long begged for
but never received in his unanswered letters to his estranged mother:
“Please have mercy. Please let me see you before you get any sicker”
(Neville, 2009: 215). At the same time Fegan also rescues Marie and Ellen
who had been held-hostage by the recently deceased McGinty. Following
the final bloody shoot-out on the Irish border, Fegan stands in the
“morning light” cuddling the child whom he hoped to see grow up free
from the violence that had “smothered this place for more than thirty
years” (Neville, 2009: 323, 122). As the ending suggests, redemption
occurs when a failure or break-down in the past is taken up and shared
with others. In this the novel again recalls Benjamin’s notion that the
present is “endowed with a weak Messianic power […] to which the past
has a claim” (1999, 246).Time contracts in Fegan’s final actions—his
salvation of the living mother and child (Marie and Ellen)—when he
simultaneously redeems not only the repressed elements of the past (his
twelve ghostly followers, and the ghosts of the dead mother and child in
particular) but also Fegan’s own failed relationship with his own mother.
Redemption in The Twelve bespeaks something beyond the personal; it is
shared, communal and cross-generational. “There is a secret agreement
between past generations and the present one”, writes Benjamin. “In other
words, our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of
redemption” (Benjamin, 1999:, 245-6).
As I noted previously, this notion of redemption and its relation to an
unspoken element from the past is interesting when considering the
resilience of communitarian divides within Northern Ireland. Towards the
end of my discussion of articulation earlier in this chapter, I made
reference to Macherey’s (1978) idea that criticism should attend to the
formal contradictions between the explicit and implicit levels of a text.
“The Place You Don’t Belong”
265
According to Macherey (Macherey, 1978: 79), literary works are always
fissured by a series of “disparities which point to a conflict of meaning.”
While the work may attempt to provide an explicit sense of “sufficiency”
or “completion”, which in the thriller form is most commonly perceived to
operate in the final “resolution” of its ending, the “presence of an
opposition between the exposition or levels of the composition” infuses
the text with a sense of “incompleteness” (Macherey, 1978: 79). It is from
an interrogation of these “discontinuities” and points of contradiction that
literature can, as Macherey argues, be seen to work upon, or articulate,
ideological conflict “outside” the text (Macherey, 1978: 87). I now want to
conclude this chapter by briefly returning to this critical, Althusserian
paradigm in order to elucidate a series of tensions within The Twelve that
destabilise the final act of redemptive closure and articulate a wider
relation to the on-going ambiguities of peace-process Northern Ireland.
The first and most obvious point to make here is that Fegan’s quest for
redemption involves the same use of violence that caused the original
sense of dislocation and injustice within the text. At the start of the novel
Fegan laments the lack of real change in the political make-up of the
peace-process:
McKenna smiled down at him [Fegan], his teeth white and even. He’d had
them fixed so he could look presentable for the cameras. The party
leadership had insisted on it before they gave him the nomination for his
seat in the Assembly. At one time, not so long past, it had been against
party policy to take a seat at Stormont. But times change, even if people
don’t. (Neville, 2009: 5)
What is interesting in the conclusion to the novel is that the reliance on
violence in Fegan’s drive for redemption actually ensures that his actions
in the ‘post-Troubles’ period do not formally constitute a fundamental,
historical change in his being. Imprisoned for murder he continues to kill
upon his release:
McGinty laughed. ‘You’re just a drunk who’s gone soft in the head. So
you turn against your own so you can make yourself feel like a big man
again. Is that it, Gerry? Is that what this is about? You’re just a lonely,
drunk has-been who’s nothing without a gun and someone to point it at.’
Fegan screwed his eyes closed. ‘Shut your mouth!’
‘And what about when it’s over, eh? What then? What’ll you be,
Gerry?’ (Neville, 2009: 311)
Fegan’s explicit search for “peace” (Neville, 2009: 141) both from and
for his ghosts operates at a point of contradiction. Similar to the on-going
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Chapter Thirteen
structures of communitarian division within the peace-process era of
cross-community power-sharing, the novel relies on a continual use of
violence in order to secure its own textual redemption.
A second, and related point, refers to the novel’s depiction of the
family. On one level, the novel attempts to re-store a safe divide between
the private and public sphere. Fegan’s penance for his own family breakdown is articulated in his defence of Marie and her child Ellen. His search
for personal fulfilment is located by the novel therefore in an escape from
the public realm of politics and community. In this the novel recalls the
idealisation of apolitical domesticity in earlier Northern Irish domestic
romances such as Bernard MacClaverty’s Cal (1983). However, the final
re-establishment of a harmonious order of the family outside what the
logic of the novel perceives as an aberrant growth of paramilitarism,
forecloses the logic that Fegan’s own actions throughout the text have left
more families broken. Attending the funeral of one of his victims, Vince
Caffola, Fegan is ashamed to see the suffering of Caffola’s sons: “The
boys couldn’t meet his eyes as he spoke, and Fegan was glad of it”
(Neville, 2009: 142). Since the drama is narrated in terms of family
struggle and personal vendettas, the novelistic act of closure, the notion
that existential fulfilment can be found within a depoliticised vision of the
family, is ultimately destabilised. Fegan’s actions have created more
demands for redress and more potential ghosts within the families of his
contemporaries. The fragile sense of restoration is vulnerable to its own
undoing. As Caffola’s girlfriend, unaware of Fegan’s culpability, states
apropos the deceased: “So long as he’s buried and gone, no one gives a
shite who done it. It’s not right, Gerry.” (Neville, 2009: 142). The point
here then is not that Northern Irish politics must be considered in terms of
insoluble violence, but that the tensions within the novel’s drive for
redemption articulate a sense of the on-going vulnerabilities and
ambivalences that continue to structure the divided reality of life in the
North.
Conclusion
Notions of progress and the new are frequently pronounced in relation to
contemporary Northern Ireland. The official transition of the North from a
terrain of troubling and violent divisions to peaceful co-existence through
the initiatives instigated by the Good Friday Agreement is well under way.
Within the prevailing institutions of politics both inside and beyond the
borders of Northern Ireland, the changes of the past few decades have
been envisioned as an opening for different forms of identity and social
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267
development. Yet the impact of several decades of conflict still stands.
Despite the official narratives of mutuality and co-operation, the
maintenance of political order through the institutions of cross-community
power-sharing continues to mobilise Northern Irish politics through the
same communitarian divides that characterised the conflict in the first
place. On a more local level, the paradoxes of this new order are most
strikingly articulated in the continued existence of peace-walls which
maintain the long-standing divisions between loyalist and nationalist
residential areas. The physical and political boundaries of the conflict have
yet to be broken down.
The political and social upheavals in the North over the past decades
have also been matched by a demand within Northern Irish literary
criticism for a new type of cultural imagination (Patten 1995; Smyth 1997;
Kennedy-Andrews 2003). While it is true that certain older novels may not
have captured the changing complexity of Northern Irish identity,
dismissals of popular fiction in terms of generic and formulaic sameness
cannot account for the series of destabilising contradictions, disturbances
and ambiguities contained within each individual text. What is so
interesting about The Twelve is that its metaphors of border-crossings
intersect with the noir-thriller form to produce a series of ambivalent
messages that exceed the text’s attempt at narrative closure. The ghostly
hauntings and use of illegal violence to restore order articulate a state of
insufficiency within the temporal and institutional arrangements of the
North. Despite the official and dominant ideologies of the new, a critical
focus must also be brought to bear therefore on what is perceived, often
erroneously and negatively, as the popular and the old. As my reading of
The Twelve suggests, literary articulations of Northern Ireland’s
contemporary ambivalences can also be found in the resources of popular
literature, in other words, in “the place” where, according to many critics,
they apparently “don’t belong” (Neville, 2009: 52).
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CHAPTER FOURTEEN
LEARNING TO THOLE:
THE UNCONSCIOUS CONNECTIONS
BETWEEN IRELAND AND SCOTLAND
IN THE THOUGHT OF SEAMUS HEANEY
EUGENE O’BRIEN
For Seamus Heaney, the role of literature is of value in itself, as an
autotelic discourse, but it is also of value as an enabling lens through
which to view political and ethical issues; as he puts it: “I credit poetry, in
other words, both for being itself and for being a help” (Heaney, 1995:
11). I would suggest that what makes Heaney a valuable writer and
thinker, in both poetry and prose, is that he is able to write in a way that
accesses aspects of the unconscious in his epistemological and ontological
deliberations. In postmodern thinking, the role of the unconscious has
become increasingly more central, and for Jacques Derrida, such
exploration of the unconscious is part of an Enlightenment heritage: “the
Enlightenment to come would have to enjoin us to reckon with the logic of
the unconscious”, because the unconscious has become central to our
understanding of human motivations in the wake of what he calls the
“psychoanalytic revolution”, and its exploration is necessary for a critical
thinking that “does not limit the living being to its conscious and
representative form” (Derrida, 2005: 157).
It is my contention that a similar level of engagement with areas of
knowledge beyond “the conscious and representative form” pervades
much of Heaney’s work. This work is driven by an intellectual desire to
probe the interstices of politics, ethics and aesthetics in an attempt to come
to a more complete understanding of what it means to be fully human in a
“world of meditated meaning”, by attempting to fill “a knowledge-need”
(Heaney, 1988: 106). He uses this term in an essay about the poetry of
Elizabeth Bishop, where he is speaking about her poem ‘At the Fishhouses’,
Learning to Thole
271
and noting the descriptive power of the text. He suggests that the
descriptions are so accurate that they could be part of “a geography text
book” (Heaney, 1988: 106). However, he goes on to explain that these
lines are “poetry, not geography”, and this means that they have a “dream
truth as well as a daylight truth about them, they are as hallucinatory as
they are accurate” (Heaney, 1988: 106). The use of “hallucinatory” here is
instructive, as for Heaney, knowledge, while related to the rational, is also
related to the unconscious and to the emotional: hence the phrase
“knowledge need” which relates the rational world of knowledge to the
world of desire as outlined in the works of Sigmund Freud and Jacques
Lacan, who see need as a precursor to desire, which for both of these
thinkers is at the core of human existence. He goes on to quote Ana Swir,
who sees a poet as an “antenna” who captures “the voices of the world”;
Heaney approvingly cites her view that a poem is a way of expressing the
individual “subconscious and the collective subconscious” (Heaney, 1988:
107), and I would argue that it is the analysis and exploration of this
epistemological aspect of poetry that is at the core of Heaney’s project.
Frederic Jameson argues that interpretation in all its contemporary
forms, always presupposes:
…if not a conception of the unconscious itself, then at least some
mechanism of mystification or repression in terms of which it would make
sense to seek a latent meaning behind a manifest one (Jameson, 1981: 50).
In his The Political Unconscious, Jameson makes the point that these
underground master-narratives are always already present in our cultural
matrix, and thus they are ideologically operative in much of our thinking.
The task of the thinker, then, is to unearth aspects of this political
unconscious through “the dynamics of the act of interpretation” (Jameson,
1981: 3). He sees this unconscious as an absent cause, and as something
which is only available to us in textual form, and goes on to suggest that
our access to “the Real itself necessarily passes through its prior
textualisation, its narrativisation in the political unconscious” (Jameson,
1981: 26).
The location of this unconscious has always been a matter of some
debate. The attempt to gain access to the unconscious is hindered by the
opacity of the concept itself. Freud’s typology would suggest that the
unconscious is internalised in the individual or the subject, but for Lacan,
“the unconscious is outside” (Lacan, 1977: 123), by which he means that
we repress aspects of our interaction with our environment which comes
from outside ourselves. As he puts it “the unconscious is the discourse of
the Other. Now, the discourse of the Other that is to be realized, that of the
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unconscious, is not beyond the closure, it is outside” [italics original]
(Lacan 1977: 131). Similarly, Giorgio Agamben can talk about how the
“territory of the unconscious, in its mechanisms as in its structures, wholly
coincides with that of the symbolic and the improper”, and he proceeds to
describe how the dissociation of “form from its signified, now becomes
the hidden writing of the unconscious” (Agamben, 1991: 145). Writing, as
it was for James Joyce, becomes a sort of “linguistic psychoanalysis of the
repressed” (Kearney, 1995: 183), which attempts to probe and bring to
light aspects of the unconscious which is, by definition: “serial,
problematic and questioning” (Deleuze, 2001: 108). It is also a mode of
connection to our bodies and to their interaction with the environment, a
point again noted by Gilles Deleuze when he says that:
…every proposition of consciousness implies an unconscious of pure
thought which constitutes the sphere of sense in which there is infinite
regress (Deleuze, 2001: 155).
I will argue that for Heaney, Scotland serves as an example of aspects of
the unconscious in his thinking. Looking at connections between Ireland
and Scotland allows him to enunciate aspects of identity and experience
that would otherwise lie dormant. The reasons for this are complex. Like
Ireland, Scotland shares an anomalous position on the postcolonial project:
Caesar’s Britain, its partes tres,
United England, Scotland, Wales,
Britannia in the old tales,
Is common ground.
Hibernia is where the Gaels
Made a last stand. (Heaney, 1983: 7)
Each country could make a strong case in terms of being colonised and yet
both are also complicit in the processes of colonisation as Irish and
Scottish generals, politicians and administrators have been central to
British imperial conquest, people like the Irish Duke of Wellington,
Bernard Law Montgomery and Brendan Bracken, and the Scottish Richard
Oswald (Glaswegian slave trader) Sir David Baird (military leader
involved in the East India Company), and Admiral Lord Cochrane
(involved in the Napoleonic wars). David Lloyd makes the point that he
has become increasingly aware of the theoretical value of other:
…postcolonial locations in all their disjunctions and analogies with one
another, to find ways in which to comprehend the apparent peculiarities of
Irish cultural history (Lloyd, 1993: 2).
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273
For Lloyd, the similarity between the Irish experience and that of other
colonies is clear. Given the historical framework adduced earlier in this
discussion, it seems obvious that, to quote Homi Bhabha, the Irish
question has “been reposed as a postcolonial problem” (Bhabha, 1994:
229). Similarly, Declan Kiberd, in his Inventing Ireland, speaks of the
colonialist crime, in an Irish context, as the “violation of the traditional
community” (Kiberd, 1997: 292), a notion that Ania Loomba sees as
paradigmatic of the colonial process in general. As she puts it in her
comprehensive Colonialism/Postcolonialism, the process of “forming a
community” in a new land necessarily means the “unforming or reforming of the communities that existed there already” [italics original]
(Loomba, 1998: 2). Edward Said observes that Yeats, while almost
completely assimilated into the canons of “modern English Literature” and
“European high modernism”, can nevertheless also be seen as belonging to
the tradition of “the colonial world ruled by European imperialism” (Said,
1990: 69). Said’s essay places Yeats as a postcolonial poet, and hence,
through synecdoche, places Ireland within the postcolonial ambit. Finally,
in his introduction to Nationalism Colonialism and Literature, Seamus
Deane makes the point that colonialism is a process of “radical
dispossession” and that a colonized people is often left without a specific
history and even “as in Ireland and other cases, without a specific
language” (Deane, 1990: 10).
Language is, as Deane has rightly noted, central to issues of identity
and of course to the signification of that identity. In terms of the territory
of Northern Ireland, Scotland equates linguistically with the Protestant,
loyalist tradition more so than with Heaney’s own nationalist background.
He is able to make this distinction in the sounds of his own place, pointing
out that the accents “at one end of the parish that reminded you of Antrim
and Ayrshire and the Scottish speech I used to hear on the Fair Hill in
Ballymena”, while those at the other end of the parish recalled:
…the different speech of Donegal, speech with the direct, clear ring of the
Northern Irish I studied when I went to the Gaeltacht in Rannafast’
(Heaney, 2002: 50).
The Scottish tradition was that of the Planters, and he has made this point
in an etymological excavation of his own home placename:
Our farm was called Mossbawn. Moss, a Scots word probably carried to
Ulster by the Planters, and bawn,the name the English colonists gave to
their fortified farmhouses. Mossbawn, the planter’s house on the bog. Yet
in spite of this Ordnance Survey spelling, we pronounced it Moss bann,
and bán is the Gaelic word for white. So might not the thing mean the
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white moss, the moss of bog-cotton? In the syllables of my home I see a
metaphor of the split culture of Ulster. (Heaney, 1980: 35)
Scotland, and its linguistic influence, is at the core of this split culture of
Ulster, and it is symbolically coterminous with the colonisation by the
Planters from Scotland. In an early poem ‘The Other Side’, referring to a
neighbouring farmer of Protestant stock, he sees his brain as a
“whitewashed kitchen” which was “swept tidy/as the body o’ the kirk”
(Heaney, 1972: 35). This metaphor, allied to the culturally and
colloquially significant title, encapsulates the binary oppositional culture
of Northern Ireland where an individual was either on one side or the
other. Heaney felt a pressure to write for his own tribe, to see “his gift like
a slingstone/Whirled for the desperate” (Heaney, 1975: 72), but
interestingly, he also resisted this strongly. In his late poem, ‘The Flight
Path’, he dramatised this sense of obligation and resistance. On a “May
morning, nineteen-seventy-nine” he is confronted by “this one I’d last met
in a dream”. He describes the dream where he had been asked by this
school friend, presumably a member of the Provisional IRA, to “drive a
van”, presumably loaded with explosives “to the next customs post/At
Pettigo” (Heaney, 1996: 24), and then leave it and get driven home “in a
Ford” (Heaney 1996: 25). Now, in a railway carriage, their encounter is
more real, and it encapsulates the antinomy that we have been tracing in
his work between the political and the aesthetic:
“When, for fuck’s sake, are you going to write
Something for us?” “If I do write something,
Whatever it is, I’ll be writing for myself.” (Heaney, 1996: 25)
Heaney has told Denis O’Driscoll that this was Danny Morrison, a Sinn
Fein activist (Heaney and O’Driscoll, 2008: 257-58). And for Heaney, this
‘self’ is shot through by the language and traces of Scotland and of
Scottish literature. In his description of the etymology of Mossbawn, there
was no prioritisation of the Gaelic, nationalist meaning of the name: both
significations “the white moss, the moss of bog-cotton” and the “planter’s
house on the bog” coexisted in the linguistic structure of the paragraph and
this is very much how Heaney sees the Scottish linguistic inheritance in
his life and work. He does not subscribe to the notion of a destruction of
an existing community, but rather to a gradual change in the mode of
expression of that community. The “other side” is part of the truth of his
inheritance, and it is a truth that is linguistically expressed: “it is because
language exists that truth exists” (Lacan, 2008: 28, 29).
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275
For Heaney, a core truth of poetry, and of poetic thinking, is the search
for truth and fullness of expression. I equate poetry and thinking here in
the sense used by Martin Heidegger when he argued that “thinking as
poetizing”. Heidegger was keen to stress connections between thinking
and what he termed the “poetic”. He was anxious to critique the Platonic
view that poetry was not of value in philosophical thinking, as it was a
distraction from rationality. For Heidegger:
Thinking is primordial poetry, prior to all poesy, but also prior to the
poetics of art, since art shapes its work within the realm of language. All
poetizing, in this broader sense, and also in the narrower sense of the
poetic, is in its ground a thinking. (Heidegger, 1975: 19)
In Heidegger’s thinking: “human expression is always a presentation and
representation of the real and the unreal” (Heidegger, 1971: 190) and this
translates into the conscious and the unconscious. This sense that truth is
somehow fictional or almost accidental, that it needs such strategies to
reach the aspect of the unconscious that would make it fuller, is echoed by
Heaney himself who makes the point that “there’s such a thing as truth and
it can be told — slant” (Heaney and O’Driscoll, 2008: 467). Heaney like
Lacan realises that there can be no overt access for language to any sense
of full truth or knowledge; instead this has to come by way of the
connection between language and the unconscious, a connection that is far
from direct or rationally-driven.
The issue of language is central as both Ireland and Scotland have seen
their disparate versions of Gaelic gradually superseded by Standard
English. Both countries share a fractured relationship with that language,
seeing it as both oppressive and expressive. For Heaney, Scotland forms
part of this territory, in both a real and unreal way, to refer back to
Heidegger. It is as real as it is grounded in the accents and placename
etymology of his own place; it is unreal in that it forms a submerged facet
of the political unconscious of both nationalists and unionists in Northern
Ireland. He tells, in his translator’s preface to Beowulf, how Professor
John Braidwood explained that the:
…word ‘whiskey’ is the same word as the Irish and Scots Gaelic word
uisce, meaning water, and that the River Usk in Britain is therefore to some
extent the River Uisce (or Whiskey) (Heaney, 2007: xxiv).
This led him on to a sense of ownership over a language of colonisation,
achieved through this sense of unconscious connection. He describes the
effect of this in an image of rivers flowing into each other:
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…a kind of linguistic river of rivers issuing from a pristine Celto-British
Land of Cockaigne, a riverrun of Finnegans Wakespeak pouring out of the
cleft rock of some prepolitical, prelapsarian, urphilological Big Rock
Candy Mountain (Heaney, 2007: xxiv).
The final reference is to a song recorded by Harry McClintock in 1928,
referring to a utopian idea of paradise, and for Heaney, such a paradisal
strain is found when the unifying force of poetry allows differences to be
subsumed into a new structure which enables them all to interact and
intersect, and to do this he must locate submerged aspects of language and
tradition. Heaney actively embraces segments of tradition from literatures:
…almost too numerous to count (including English, Irish, Polish, Latin,
Italian, American, Ancient Greek, and Scots) and yet his choice within
these traditions is selective’ (Tyler, 2005: 7)
…and it is selective because it is guided by the shaping imperative of his
aesthetic which is to be as inclusive as possible in terms of all of the
resources of the linguistic unconscious through which he expresses both
himself and his sense of identity
We have already seen how Beowulf was one such example of a
tradition which he found salubrious to his own situation, and later in that
translator’s preface, he found another unconscious connection between
Ireland and Scotland and the English literary tradition, a connection which
would diminish another sense of language as oppressive and build another
layer of language as emancipatory. He tells of how, as he learned the
history of English as part of his studying of Beowulf, he came across the
word ‘Þolian’, meaning “to suffer” which looked strange with “its thorn
symbol instead of the familiar th”, but which he then realised was actually
not strange at all as it was “the word that older and less educated people
would have used in the country where I grew up”, and he remembers his
aunt using the term:
And now suddenly here was ‘thole’ in the official textual world, mediated
through the apparatus of a scholarly edition, a little bleeper to remind me
that my aunt's language was not just a self-enclosed family possession but
an historical heritage, one that involved the journey Þolian had made north
into Scotland and then across into Ulster with the planters, and then across
from the planters to the locals who had originally spoken Irish, and then
farther across again when the Scots Irish emigrated to the American South
in the eighteenth century. (Heaney, 2007: xxv)
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277
He goes on to cite the frisson that reading this term in a poem by John
Crowe Ransom gave him, and to explain how his “heart lifted again, the
world widened, something was furthered”, and interestingly goes on to
describe the “phenomenological pleasure of finding it variously
transformed by Ransom’s modernity and Beowulf’s venerability” (Heaney,
2007: xxv). “Phenomenological” here harks back to his earlier reference
to “prepolitical, prelapsarian, urphilological”, and all of these terms refer
to the unconscious of language, an unconscious for him that is deeply
rooted in the connection with Scotland.
This connection works across a number of levels because the Scottish
relationship with the English language and culture is paradoxical. The
planters who colonised Northern Ireland were in the main Scottish and as
such a settler culture associated with hegemonic English imperial power.
However, in terms of language, Scottish writers faced the same complex
relationship between seeing English as either an oppressive or an
expressive mode of expression. But it is a connection that is intrinsic to
Heaney’s experience of Northern Ireland. In a poem based on the
Sweeney myth, which refers to an Irish king who was cursed by Saint
Ronan after a battle and was condemned to wander Ireland and Scotland,
having been transformed into a bird-like figure, he makes this clear at the
level of territory when he speaks of a country road which is running
“straight across North Antrim bog” and which is lined by old fir trees and
then in a separate clause which is has the grammatical structure of a
sentence he expands on the description of the trees: “Scotch firs, that is.
Calligraphic shocks/Bushed and tufted in prevailing winds” (Heaney,
1991: 89). Here the presence of Scotland is written into the actual shape
of the landscape itself, just as it is written into the placename of Heaney’s
own home. These trees are both Irish and English and serve as
prelinguistic, calligraphic signifiers of their migration. In a way they
parallel the journey of thole as they move from Scotland to Ireland and
they become part of the prevailing winds of the place, though of course
such winds can also scatter the seeds beyond their local rootedness. In this
way they embody Heidegger’s sense of thinking as grounded in the place
and in language; in the real and in the unreal.
So when, speaking of Edwin Muir, Heaney can pose the question
“Why all this about the English tradition? Is Edwin Muir’s place not in
Scotland?” (Heaney, 2002: 225), and can go on to answer in the
affirmative but with an interesting disclaimer “in spite of objections
lodged long ago by Hugh MacDiarmid” (Heaney 2002: 225, 226). And
there is also a further caveat because it is an expansive and syncretic form
of Scottishness which is best appreciated in “the light of a much older
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alliance between Scotland and Europe”. This form of writing, which
opened “a path where there is free coming and going between the local
conditions and the broader historical realities of the age” allowed Muir to
rob “the English/Scottish dichotomy of much of its determining power” by
accepting and availing of the resources it made available and then walking
a little dreamily off to one side and into Europe. For Heaney, this is a
lightning rod as it allowed Muir to orient “himself towards the future”
(Heaney, 2002: 256). It is this expansive view of the postcolonial use of
language, a view where the territory of the unconscious allows the territory
of the local to become the territory of a more universal country of the mind
that is one of the achievements of his Scottish connection. It encouraged
him to look for such opportunities as the one found in:
…meeting up with thole on its multi-cultural odyssey was the feeling that
Osip Mandelstam once defined as a “nostalgia for world culture”’
(Heaney, 2007: xxvi).
The poet to whom Muir is compared in this essay is Hugh MacDiarmid,
who is seen as “far more influential in the literary and political history of
Scotland” than Muir (Heaney, 2002: 256), and Heaney has written about
him elsewhere in the emblematically entitled ‘Tradition and an Individual
Talent’. There is a strong influential connection between Eliot and Heaney
so the title of this essay is far from random or accidental. Intertextually
referencing T. S. Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, Heaney
pluralises the discussion from ‘the’ individual talent to ‘an’ individual
talent, thereby suggesting that such talents can be plural, and by extension,
so can their constituting traditions. Eliot, adducing what he termed the
historical sense, set out a very contemporary idea of how art affects the
audience by noting that each new work modified the perception of the
existing ones and that essentially this is the relationship between tradition
and the individual talent who ascribes to a position within that tradition:
…the existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is
modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among
them (Eliot, 1920: 44).
Eliot here is speaking of a European and English high cultural canon, “the
mind of Europe” (Eliot 1920: 46). Eliot is writing about European
mainstream culture from an aesthetic perspective and the politics of the
text are not really a feature of his discourse. The somatic, ideological and
situated condition of those in whose minds the order of tradition is
modified by the genuinely new text is not a matter of concern.
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279
Given the pan-European perspective, with its examples from Dante and
Homer, it might seem odd that Heaney would refer to this essay in a
consideration of Hugh MacDiarmid who wrote in a very culture-specific
discourse. I would suggest that it is typical of Heaney’s poetizing logic
that he places a writer who is immersed in dialect: “whiles appliable,
whiles areird,/The polysemous poem’s planned”(Heaney, 1980: 196), in
the shadow of Eliot, and in comparison with Wordsworth in the opening
lines of the essay in a form of litotes. Heaney says that while MacDiarmid
would have been the last to “admit any comparison of himself with an
Englishman”, nevertheless his poetic career reminds Heaney of that of
Wordsworth (Heaney, 1980: 195). Heaney is deliberately placing
MacDiarmid in contradistinction to the canonical figures of Wordsworth
and Eliot in order to open the frontiers of that canon and of Eliot’s notion
of tradition by examining the modality of expression used by MacDiarmid,
a modality that is not part of a received pan-European sense of tradition.
For Heaney, the medium is very much part of the message. The
conscious and unconscious dimensions of language are at the core of his
own sense of epistemology, and so, the specific dialect of MacDiarmid is
reminiscent of the thole which has earned its own rite of passage into the
English literary tradition, and which unites, at the level of a cultural
unconscious, his aunt, John Crowe Ransom and the Beowulf poet. He sees
MacDiarmid’s project as a reactive one, where he wrote from an
“enervating cultural situation” in which he saw “Scottish civilization as
damned and doomed by influences from south of the Border”. His use of
“Lallans, his poetic Scots language”, as exemplified above, would seem to
place him in the role of a minor poet, as someone outside of any formal
canonical tradition, but interestingly, Heaney sees this choice of language
as “based on the language of men, specifically on the dialect of his home
district around Langholm in Dumfriesshire” (Heaney, 1980: 195).
Heaney sees this as indicating a sense of “an uncertainty about
language” in MacDiarmid’s work which is peculiar not just to
MacDiarmid, but also to others who write generally in English:
...but particularly out of a region where the culture and language are at
variance with standard English utterance and attitudes. It can be a problem
of style for Americans, West Indians, Indians, Scots and Irish. Joyce made
a myth and a mode out of this self-consciousness, but he did so by taking
on the English language itself and wrestling its genius with his bare hands,
making it lie down where all its ladders start, in the rag-and-bone shop of
Indo-European origins and relationships. (Heaney 1980: 196)
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As Heaney puts it, such self-consciousness is a necessary part of poetic
thinking as it is this self-consciousness that delves into a broader cultural
unconscious which is referred to in the submerged Yeatsian quotation of
“the foul rag and bone shop of the heart”. This quotation comes from the
late poem ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’ (Yeats, 1965: 357), and a
further node is set up in the intertextual constellation within which the
work of MacDiarmid is being discussed. His work is now being read
through the hauntological framework of Eliot, Joyce and Yeats, probably
the three most important figures in the literary modernist movement, and
writers who are seen as metonyms of high culture.
To read the idiosyncratic language of MacDiarmid in this light is to
attempt to deconstruct the certainties that pervade Eliot’s writings about
the evolving of the European tradition. For Heaney, looking at this from
the perspective of someone who is linguistically situated outside of this
tradition, these certainties are far from certain, and the function of poetic
thinking is to render this uncertainty real in the world of ideas; a mode of
thought which has strong affinities with the writings of Heidegger. As we
have seen, for Heidegger, all poetizing “is in its ground a thinking. The
poetizing essence of thinking preserves the sway of the truth of Being”
(Heidegger, 1975: 19). MacDiarmid’s twisting of the English language so
that it could take the shape and dialect of “his home district around
Langholm in Dumfriesshire” (Heaney, 1980: 195) is part of a process
whereby the literary refuses to be cowed by the political. Just as English
power colonised Scotland as it did Ireland, so Scottish poetry will not
change its voice to attune itself to an English language discourse of
colonisation. No matter what cultural and educational ideologies are
operative in a society, literature, and specifically poetry is still able to
enunciate emancipatory voices of counter-hegemonic resistance, but the
process does not stop there.
Instead, Heaney, through his use of thole, which mirrors MacDiarmid’s
use of Lallans, and specifically, through his reading of this in the context
of the high culture of modernism, is inserting the wedge of home, as
embodied by the dialect pronunciation of the spoken word in the language
of the self, of the colonised, into the hegemonic world-language of the
standard English of the colonising other; instead of allowing himself to be
culturally disenfranchised, he is instead becoming culturally creative and
setting up his own views on how home can be enunciated in the language
of the self that is also the language of the other at the same time. And in a
manner that is specific to this discourse, poetry is capable of infiltrating
and transforming the language of the other in order to make it eat the
messy, local enunciations of the language of the self, and not completely
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281
digest them, but instead alter itself to accommodate them. The nobility of
poetry says Wallace Stevens “is a violence from within that protects us
from a violence without. It is the imagination pressing back against the
pressure of reality” (Heaney, 1995b: 1), and this pressing can change the
shape of that reality and this is precisely what Heaney is doing by inserting
MacDiarmid into this very unusual version of a modernist canon. Just as
MacDiarmid is an individual talent, which suggests that there can be many
more, so too by implication, there can be other versions of tradition and
this is at the core of Heaney’s own thinking on the notion of the frontier.
Thus cultural debilitations become cultural invigorations and ultimately
cultural transformations as the unconscious pieties of home find some
measure of expression in the language of the other—the Unheimlich
invades the Heimlich.
The confidence that Heaney found in his realisation of the worldtravelling history of the word thole is what gave him the voice-right
(Heane, 2007: xxiv) to translate Beowulf by using the Northern Irish
expression ‘So’ as a translation for ‘Hwaet’ (Heaney 2007: 2-3). And
MacDiarmid was a factor in this increased sense of confidence, both
personally, and in terms of the Irish literary landscape, as his:
…linguistic overweening was hugely encouraged by the example of Joyce,
whilst Yeats and other post-Revival writers continued to be highly
influential in his programme of cultural nationalism (Heaney, 1995b: 103).
Heaney sees part of the value of his Doric Scots as being able to enunciate
some:
…unconscious elements of a distinctive Scottish psychology, and he has
gone on to undertake a parallel project in the case of enunciating aspects of
an unconscious Irish psychology himself (Heaney, 1995b: 104).
And of course, the creative imagination to which MacDiarmid gave voice
also gave voice to him, as in 1922, he emerged like a new and fiery form
out of the agitated element of Christopher Grieve’s imagination, or it could
be said with “equal justification that he emerged from the awakened
energies of the Scots language itself” (Heaney, 1995b: 106). In his case, in
particular, Heidegger’s notion that “poetically man dwells” (Heidegger,
1971: xiv), is all the more true.
For Grieve, the MacDiarmid persona was necessary to act as a
signifier for a very particular use of language, a language like the arboreal
calligraphy which we referred to earlier, one which resembled what Frost
termed “the sound of sense”, which was a:
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…phonetic patterning which preceded speech and authenticated it, a kind
of pre-verbal register to which the poetic voice had to be tuned (Heaney,
1995b: 111-112).
In this sense, Heaney’s view of language is very close to that of Heidegger
who sees art, and poetry especially, as one such form of knowing, in which
the essence of things is released (Beistegui, 2005: 120). This access to the
prelinguistic, mentioned again by Heaney in his comments on thole,
reminds us of the calligraphic firs. One of the lessons he learns from
MacDiarmid is the ability to access the phonetic, sonic aspects of the
unconscious. Through this musical element:
…poetic language commemorates its own inaccessible originary place and
it says the unspeakability of the event of language (it attains, that is, the
unattainable) (Agamben, 1991: 78).
One aspect of this attaining is found in MacDiarmid’s masterpiece ‘A
Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle’, and what Heaney admires about this is
the ability to see the thistle as both “part and parcel of Scottish kitsch” but
at the same time as a form of “the yggdrasil, the world-tree, a cosmic
symbol that allows for a poetry that is more visionary than satiric”
(Heaney, 1995b: 112) and this vision is a revision of the colonial language
of English as an expressive as opposed to an oppressive mode—it is an act
of imaginative ownership and one which Heaney will repeat in Beowulf.
Such acts are not easy and they resist postcolonial distrust of the
language of the coloniser. Heaney’s thinking is more expansive and is
very much in tune with the Heideggerian idea that poetizing is thinking
because it takes account of the materiality and the differences inherent in
language and in the performing of language: “poetically man dwells” and
his view that that the “thinker of first rank must accomplish, a thinking
which has all the purity and thickness and solidity of poetry” (Heidegger,
1971: xi-xii). I would strongly suggest that the changes to grammatology
and orthography that are produced by a spoken dialect or accent thicken
the language in terms of grounding it in a locality, and for Heaney, as for
Heidegger, this has a strong philosophical charge in terms of any serious
thinking about poetry and its role as a constituting or as an emancipatory
discourse.
Heaney writes about his own early poem ‘Follower’ which appeared in
Death of a Naturalist, and he quotes the first line: “My father worked with
a horse-plough”, and goes on to note that while this line may seem
“unremarkable”, it was the result of some revision as his original line was:
“My father wrought with a horse-plough” (Heaney, 1995b: 63). This verb
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283
was in common use in Heaney’s South-Derry parlance; it denoted working
with tools and connoted a sense of wholehearted commitment to the task.
As Heaney observes, the word “implied solidarity with speakers of the
South Derry vernacular and a readiness to stand one’s linguistic ground”
(Heaney, 1995b: 63); in short, it is a version of the “synthetic Scots”
(Heaney, 1995b: 104), and the Lallans dialect of MacDiarmid. Heaney
goes on to rhetorically wonder why he made that revision; to ask why he
used the “more pallid and expected ‘worked’”, and he provides the answer
that it was because he “thought twice”, and he notes that thinking twice
about a local usage means that:
...you have been displaced from it, and your right to it has been contested
by the official linguistic censor with whom another part of you is secretly
in league. You have been translated from the land of unselfconsciousness
to the suburbs of the mot juste. This is, of course, a very distinguished
neighbourhood and contains important citizens like Mr Joyce, persons who
sound equally at home in their hearth speech and their acquired language,
persons who see to have obliterated altogether the line between selfconscious and unselfconscious usage, and to have established uncensored
access to every coffer of the word-hoard. But this spontaneous multivocal
proficiency is as far beyond most writers as unbroken residence within the
first idiom of a hermetically sealed, univocal home place. (Heaney, 1995b:
64)
The use of rational thought is interesting here, as it would seem to enact
the very process of the Althusserian ISAs which we spoke of earlier. To
think within the cognitive and conscious norms of the voices of education
and culture is to desire to be in league with, and commended by, that
linguistic censor of which Heaney speaks and which Althusser sees as an
ideological apparatus. This censor is both educational and cultural, for as
Althusser notes, culture “is the ordinary name for the Marxist concept of
the ideological”, (Althusser, 2001: 242), while he sees education as the
apparatus which has “replaced in its functions the previously dominant
ideological State apparatus, the Church” (Althusser, 2001: 154). The
power of this censor is strong, but a deep or thickened version of language
that is to be found in poetry will allow the frontiers of the “suburbs of the
mot juste” to be extended and broadened so as to include the local pieties
of home.
The intersection and dialectical interaction of hearth-speech and
acquired language is at the core of Heaney’s thinking and of his
epistemology of poetry. The skill of his writing can make it seem an easy
process but the prog— the gain or profit in this bargain—between selfconscious and unselfconscious usage, is not an easy one, but it is
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worthwhile, and it definitely is at the core of Heaney’s poetizing.
Heidegger repeats Herder’s idea that: “a breath of our mouth becomes the
portrait of the world, the type of our thoughts and feelings in the other’s
soul” (Heidegger, 1971: 136), and Heaney would agree with the power
and transformative notions of the spoken word, especially in terms of
taking possession of the language. It is surely with this in mind that he
quotes Gerard Manley Hopkins’ adjuration to his readers to “take breath
and read it with the ears, as I always wish to be read, and my verse
becomes all right” (Heaney, 1980: 88). The act of saying the language of
the other in one’s own voice conveys a power of personal ownership
which can deconstruct the colonial hegemonic overtones of the English
language. We have seen evidence of this need to inhabit the language of
the coloniser on an individual basis but now we turn to a more overt
collective example of this process of redefining the frontiers of language.
Heidegger sees language as that which “first brings man about, brings
him into existence”, an as that which is always “a presentation and
representation of the real and the unreal” (Heidegger, 1971: 190), and
there is evidence of this crossing of the frontier in Heaney’s eponymous
essay in The Redress of Poetry, where he looks at the frontier between
poetry as art and poetry as some form of political act with a force in the
real world. Heaney as ever is patrolling the frontier between poetry as
being full of “self-delighting inventiveness” but also of being part of a
socio-cultural context of “politically approved themes, post-colonial
backlash and ‘silence-breaking’ writing of all kinds”. He is keen to stress
the integrity of both positions and uses the term redress as a syncretic
vehicle with which to express this duality, a duality that parallels
Heidegger’s real and unreal. He stresses that care needs to be taken while
using poetry as an “agent for proclaiming and correcting injustices”
(Heaney, 1995b: 5) that we do not in any way neglect the other frontier
which he sees as redressing “poetry as poetry” which sets up its own
category (Heaney 1995b: 6). For Heaney, the frontier between aesthetic
and aesthetic-political teleology of poetry is one in constant need of
patrolling and also one where the relationship the tradition and the
individual needs to be monitored. If, as Lyotard has suggested, the metanarratives of culture are now working at a societally-unconscious level,
then any individual writer needs to engage with the hegemonic metanarratives of colonisation and language if he or she is to achieve any form
of emancipation from these:
Obviously, patriotic or propagandist intent is far from being a guarantee of
poetic success, but in emergent cultures the struggle of an individual
consciousness towards affirmation and distinctness may be analogous, if
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285
not coterminous, with a collective straining towards self-definition; there is
a mutual susceptibility between the formation of a new tradition and the
self-fashioning of individual talent. (Heaney, 1995b: 6)
Once again we see the interaction of the individual with tradition, and as
ever with Heaney, there is an interrogative dimension to this assertion as
the new writing will be part of a new form of tradition. The individual
writer has the power to shape and change that tradition by looking to a
new unconscious meta-narrative, as embodied by the terms ‘bis-cake’, the
messy stuff of the North, and Lallans.
But in terms of individual talents who are attempting to alter the
traditions from which they are constituted, the situation becomes more
fraught and the frontiers become more difficult to define and demarcate.
The unconscious meta-narrative of tradition has already achieved its
influence: even the most disaffected writers, whether they are postcolonial or feminist or nationalistically-driven, “will have internalized the
norms and forms of the tradition from which they wish to secede”
(Heaney, 1995b: 6). This is precisely what Heaney does in his translation
of Beowulf. He opens his translation with the colloquial ‘So’ replacing the
rhetorically declarative ‘Hwaet’, and explains how this word has been
taken from its local usage, that of relations of his from Northern Ireland
who had a kind of “Native American solemnity”, and that it functioned as
both an expression which:
…obliterates all previous discourse and narrative, and at the same time
functions as an exclamation calling for immediate attention utterance
(Heaney, 2007: xxvii).
He also put the word ‘bawn’ in Beowulf, something which also placed the
local as the voice of the universal, and I would argue, his reading of
Scottish poets such as Muir and MacDiarmid was a seminal factor in this
process. Both poets’ faith in the local as a means towards enunciating an
imaginative universal contributed to Heaney’s own sense of this voiceright. In terms of tradition and an individual talent, Heaney deliberately
inserted a postcolonial, South Derry, version of English into the beginning
of that tradition:
Putting a bawn into Beowulf seems one way for an Irish poet to come to
terms with that complex history of conquest and colony, absorption and
resistance, integrity and antagonism, a history which has to be clearly
acknowledged by all concerned in order to render it ever more ‘willable
forward/Again and again and again (Heaney 2007: xxx).
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The confidence and the openness that allowed Heaney to begin one of the
canonical works of the English language with a word taken from
“Hiberno-English Scullionspeak”, (Heaney 2007: xxvii) comes, I would
contend, from the realization and the enunciation of the Scottish strain that
is part of his literary and cultural unconscious. The sense that local words,
such as “graith” for “harness”, and “hoked” for “rooted about” can have
“special body and force” (Heaney 2007: xxx) is rooted in his use of the
unconscious connections with Muir and MacDiarmid, themselves standing
in metonymy for the language and culture of Scotland. Through learning
to thole, Heaney has come through the postcolonial sense of language as
oppressive and instead has created a corpus of work which is predicated on
an ownership of language which now becomes expressive of its different
constituents.
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Heidegger, Martin. (1975), Early Greek Thinking. Krell, David Farrell and
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Jameson, Fredric. (1981), The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a
Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, New York.
Kearney, Richard. (1995), Poetics of Modernity: Toward a Hermeneutic
Imagination Philosophy and Literary Theory. Humanities Press, N.J.
Kiberd, Declan. (1997), Ireland: The Literature of a Modern Nation. Vol.
Vintage, London.
Lacan, Jacques. (1977), The Four Fundamental Concepts of PsychoAnalysis. Sheridan, Alan. (trans.). Hogarth Press, London.
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Lloyd, David. (1993), Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the PostColonial Moment. Lilliput Press, Dublin.
Loomba, Ania. Colonialism-Postcolonialism. London: Routledge, 1998.
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CONTRIBUTORS
Mike Adamson holds a PhD in archaeology from Flinders University of
South Australia, where he has both studied and taught for over twenty
years. Born in England, his family immigrated to Australia in 1971; after
aspirations in writing and art, Mike returned to study and secured
undergraduate degrees in both marine biology and archaeology, followed
by Honours and Masters in the latter. Mike is a passionate photographer
and a master-level hobbyist who writes for international magazines.
Martyn Colebrook recently completed a PhD focusing on the novels of
Iain Banks in relation to British fiction after 1970. He has wider research
interests in contemporary American literature, transgression and
contemporary culture and apocalypse fictions. He has published a number
of chapters on topics such as ‘J. G. Ballard and The Atrocity Exhibition’,
‘Paul Auster, The Music of Chance and Alienation’, ‘The Gothic and
Mental Disorder’, ‘Don DeLillo and Terrorism’, ‘Novelistic
Representations of the Yorkshire Ripper’ and ‘The Troubles Thriller and
Contemporary Scottish Crime Fiction’. He has also organised a number of
conferences focusing on topics such as ‘The Representation of 9/11 in
Contemporary Narratives’, ‘Millennial Fictions’, ‘Jeanette Winterson’ and
‘Angela Carter’, and is currently organising a conference focusing on
‘Popular Fiction and Popular Revolt’. He is co-editing a collection of
essays focusing on Iain Banks (forthcoming, 2012), and an edited
collection focusing on Jeanette Winterson, and is a regular book reviewer
for Critical Engagements and Literary London.
Mark Corcoran undertakes his Ph.D. work in the National University
Ireland, Galway, on intertextual influence and the portrayal of marriage in
the novel and short story from a historical perspective, between 1880 to
1930, under the supervision of Professor Nicholas Allen. Mark is in his
third year. He recently returned from the University California Santa
Barbara where he was on scholarship.
Michael W. George is associate professor of English at Millikin
University in Decatur, IL, USA. His teaching responsibilities include
literature in English before 1800 and a wide array of writing and
publishing courses. His research focuses on ecocriticism and humor, with
Border Crossings
289
an emphasis on representations of the environment in Early English
literature.
Willy Maley is Professor of Renaissance Studies at the University of
Glasgow. He is the author of A Spenser Chronology (1994), Salvaging
Spenser: Colonialism, Culture and Identity (1997), Nation, State and
Empire in English Renaissance Literature: Shakespeare to Milton (2003),
and Muriel Spark for Starters (2008). He is editor, with Andrew Hadfield,
of A View of the Present State of Ireland: From the First Published
Edition (1997). He has also edited eight collections of essays: with
Brendan Bradshaw and Andrew Hadfield, Representing Ireland:
Literature and the Origins of Conf lict, 1534–1660 (1993); with Bart
Moore-Gilbert and Gareth Stanton, Postcolonial Criticism (1997); with
David J. Baker, British Identities and English Renaissance Literature
(2002); with Andrew Murphy, Shakespeare and Scotland (2004); with
Alex Benchimol, Spheres of Inf luence: Intellectual and Cultural Publics
from Shakespeare to Habermas (2006); with Philip Schwyzer,
Shakespeare and Wales: From the Marches to the Assembly (2010); with
Michael Gardiner, The Edinburgh Companion to Muriel Spark (2010); and
with Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, This England, That Shakespeare: New
Angles on Englishness and the Bard (2010), and Celtic Connections: IrishScottish Relations and the Politics of Culture (2013)
Patrick Maume is a researcher with the Royal Irish Academy's
Dictionary of Irish Biography. He is a graduate of University College Cork
and Queen's University Belfast, and spent many years in Northern Ireland.
He now lives in Dublin. He is the author of biographies of Daniel Corkery
and D.P. Moran, of a study of early twentieth-century Irish nationalist
political culture (THE LONG GESTATION (1999) and of many papers
and articles on nineteenth and twentieth-century Ireland; he has also edited
several texts relating to nineteenth and twentieth-century Irish history for
UCD Press.
Eugene O’Brien is senior lecturer, Head of the Department of English
Language and Literature in Mary Immaculate College, Limerick. His
publications include: The Question of Irish Identity in the Writings of
William Butler Yeats and James Joyce (1998); Examining Irish
Nationalism in the Context of Literature, Culture and Religion: A Study of
the Epistemological Structure of Nationalism (2002); Seamus Heaney –
Creating Irelands of the Mind (2002); Seamus Heaney and the Place of
Writing (2003); Seamus Heaney: Searches for Answers (2006) and Kicking
290
Contributors
Bishop Brennan up the Arse – Negotiating Texts and Contexts in
Contemporary Irish Studies (2009). He co-edited: La France et la
Mondialisation/France and the Struggle against Globalization (2007);
Reinventing Ireland through a French Prism (2007) and Modernity and
Postmodernity in a Franco-Irish Context (2008) and Breaking the Mould:
Literary Representations of Irish Catholicism (2010)
Alison O’Malley-Younger is Senior Lecturer in English at the University
of Sunderland. With Professor John Strachan (Bath Spa University), she is
co-director of NEICN (The North East Irish Culture Network). Her
primary research interests lie in Irish Literature, particularly Irish Drama
from the nineteenth century to the present day. She has published in the
fields of contemporary critical theory, Irish cultural history, Women’s
writing in Ireland, Advertising and Commodity Culture, Blackwood’s
Magazine, Irish and Scottish Gothic and Irish Drama. She has edited and
contributed to Representing Ireland: Past, Present and Future (2005),
with Frank Beardow, Essays on Modern Irish Literature (2007) and
Ireland at War and Peace (2011), both with John Strachan, No Country
for Old Men: Fresh Perspectives on Irish Literature (2008), with Paddy
Lyons, and Celtic Connections: Irish-Scottish Relations and the Politics of
Culture (2013). She is currently working on a further edited collection,
Consumer Culture and Literature in Ireland from the Famine to
Independence with John Strachan, and completing a monograph entitled
The Business of Pleasure: Advertising, Spectacle and the Irish Culture
Industries at the Fin de Siècle.
Prof. Peter Rushton is Professor of Historical Sociology at the University
of Sunderland. He teaches a range of modules, from core social theory to
gender, the family, and systems of punishment. His research interests are
in the general area of law and the history of British society, with reference
to both personal and family relations, systems of welfare, and crime and
punishment. With Gwenda Morgan he has published Rogues, Thieves and
the Rule of Law: The Problem of Law Enforcement in North-East
England, 1718-1800 (UCL Press, 1998), The Justicing Notebook (175064) of Edmund Tew, Rector of Boldon (Surtees Society 2000, vol. 205,
The Boydell Press), Eighteenth-Century Criminal Transportation: the
Formation of the Criminal Atlantic (Basingstoke: Palgrave,2003), and
Banishment in the Early Atlantic World: Convicts, Rebels and Slaves
(Bloomsbury Academic, 2103), as well as many articles and essays. He is
a member of the management committee of the NE England History
Institute and is its Publications Secretary.
Border Crossings
291
Thomas Rudman is a postgraduate student in English at Manchester
Metropolitan University. His research interests lie in critical theory and
cultural representations of political violence. He is currently writing his
doctoral thesis on representations of class politics in the 1970s in
contemporary crime fiction.
Prof. Nick Serra is a specialist in the intricacies of Yeats’s occult
symbolism and symbol systems. He holds degrees from the University of
Notre Dame, Drake, and the State University of New York at Binghamton.
Currently, he teaches British and Irish literature (as well as undergraduate
writing) at Upper Iowa University, Fayette, Iowa, USA—where he has
resided with his flock of heritage Jacob Sheep for the last fourteen years.
Dr Tania Scott completed her PhD at the University of Glasgow in 2011.
Her thesis was on the works of Lord Dunsany and his relationship with the
canonical figures of Irish literature. Her research interests include
nineteenth and twentieth century literature from Scotland and Ireland, and
she has published work on the Victorian author George MacDonald. She
cannot resist texts that have been left marginalised by the critical
establishment, and is currently working on a monograph on early twentieth
century crime fiction.
John Strachan is Professor of English Literature at Bath Spa University.
His books include Advertising and Satirical Culture in the Romantic
Period (2007) and, edited with Alison O’Malley-Younger, Ireland at War
and Peace (2011). He is Associate Editor of the Oxford Companion to
English Literature and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
Colin Younger is lecturer in English Literature and Creative Writing at
The University of Sunderland.
He is currently in the writing up period of his PhD on the writings of
the Anglo-Scottish borders, in particular the 'Gothic' works of Robert
Burns, James Hogg, and Walter Scott.
He is about to publish an edited collection of Gothic Creative Writing
entitled Spectral Visions: The Collection, whilst developing his
publication portfolio at the same time.
He is also the manager of NEICN (North East Irish Culture Network)
and founder/ director of SIN (Scottish Irish Network) both sited at the
University of Sunderland.
Colin is an invited committee member of LIONRA (a professional
business networking group).
INDEX
A.E. (See George Russell)
Abbey Theatre 81, 127, 135, 136,
138, 156
Abbot of Gloucester’s Feast 78
Ad infinitum 55
Adams, Norman 187, 188, 189
Agamben, Giorgio 272, 282
Agriculture 73, 74, 75, 81
Aisling 177
Alighieri, Dante 207, 279
Althusser, Louis 13, 249, 252, 255,
256, 265, 283
America 38, 41, 45, 46, 56, 57, 59,
61, 63, 64, 67, 68, 69, 134, 153,
155
American Expeditionary Forces 5,
61
Anderson, Benedict 5, 31
Anderson, Marjorie Ogilvie 20, 21
Angell, Kathrine 192
Angles 22
Anglo-Irish 6, 8, 57, 72, 77, 78, 110,
168, 169
‘Anglo-Irishness’ 169
Anglo-Norman 74, 75, 77, 79
Anglo-Saxon 118, 130, 139, 240
Anglo-Scottish 8, 96, 102
Anthropology Today 149
Anti-Catholic / Anti- Catholicism
178, 179
Antrim 20, 273, 277
Anzaldúa, Gloria 2, 4, 11, 14
Architecture 80, 81, 82, 221
Argyll 20, 21, 34
Argyllshire 20
Aristion 117
‘Armstrongs’ 97, 98, 100, 118, 119
Arnold, Matthew 9, 127, 129, 130,
133, 139, 140
‘On the Study of Celtic
Literature’ 129
Artaud, Antonio 158
The Theatre and Its Double 158
Articulation 13, 95, 96, 249, 252,
254, 255, 256 258, 264, 267
‘Auld Reekie’ 12, 206
Austen, Jane 155
Authentic / Authenticity 7, 8, 32, 90,
91, 93, 95, 104, 106, 117, 123,
131, 144, 147, 149, 150, 157,
252, 254
Ayrshire 273
Bacchus / Bacchanalian 12, 78, 79,
169
Baez, Joan 120
Bailey, Brian 199, 200, 206, 207,
209
Baird, Sir David 272
Bakhtin, Mikhail 11, 159
Ball, James Moore 200, 201, 207
Banishment 29, 30, 31, 32, 35, 37,
38, 43, 46
Bard / Bardic 18, 22, 24, 90, 158,
171, 176
Baronscourt House (Co. Tyrone)
111, 112, 113, 114
Barrie, James Matthew 128
Barry, Philips 90
Bates, William 167
Battle of Bonnymuir 174
Baudrillard, Jean 202
Baumgartner, Holly 191, 192
Beavis and Butthead 146
Beckett, Samuel 144, 151
Waiting for Godot 144
Behan, Brendan 11, 144, 159
The Hostage 144
Border Crossings
Belfast 12, 13, 170, 215, 217, 221,
222, 226, 250, 253, 254, 255,
262
Political divides 250
Site of global living 250
Belfast Telegraph, the 250
Bendix, Regina 92, 93
Benjamin, Walter 13, 249, 261, 262,
263, 264
Benskin, Michael 78
Bentley’s Miscellany 168, 169
Berwickshire 96
Bhabha, Homi K. 3, 6, 7, 273
Bible, the 20, 117
Allegedly rewritten 116
Billington, Michael 147, 157
Bishop, Elizabeth 270
‘At the Fishhouses’ 270
BL MS Harley 913 6, 72, 75, 77, 83
‘Black pastoral’ 10, 144
Blackmore, Richard Doddridge 118
Blackwood, William 173, 174, 178,
179, 180, 181
‘Ireland as It Is’ 180
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine
11, 12, 166, 167, 168, 169, 171,
172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 178,
179, 180, 182, 184, 189, 199,
203
Noctes Ambrosianae 11, 166,
167, 169, 170, 171, 177, 178
Blair, Tony 250
Bloom, Harold 198
Boece, Hector 102
History Gentis Scotorum
(History of the Scottish
People) 102
Border Ballads 7, 90, 91, 92, 97,
100, 106, 119
Border Crossing 4, 8, 10, 11, 12,
168
Border Reiver (s) 7, 102, 118, 119
Borderlands 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 11, 14,
95, 96
Borderlines 4, 5
293
Borders 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12,
13, 14, 90, 96, 97, 98, 101, 102,
103, 106, 110, 112, 118, 124,
142, 159, 205, 225, 241, 245,
249, 250, 251, 260, 266
Borges, Jorge Luis 144
Brookside 144
Botting, Fred 13, 216
Boucicault, Dion 144, 156
Bowes, Sir Robert 101
Boyd, Ernest 139
Boys of the Old Brigade, the 244
Bracken, Brendan 272
Braidwood, John 275
Brantely, Ben 153
Brehon Law 19
British 2, 20, 30, 33, 35, 38, 39, 40
43, 44, 45, 57, 112, 113, 115,
123, 124, 126, 130, 143, 155,
181, 182, 202, 220, 234, 239,
240, 250, 251, 252, 255, 258,
261
British Empire 30, 43, 221
British Expeditionary Forces 123
British Isles 19
British Protestant Providence 8, 124
‘Britishness’ 129
Brittany 21
Brown, Agnes 61
Bruce, Edward 75
Bruce, George 128
The Scottish Literary Revival
128
Bruce, Robert 75, 76
Brugha, Cathal 138
Bruhm, Steven 186, 197
Brundage, W. Fitzhugh 95
Bruner, Edward 93
Buelow, George 93, 105
Bundoran 57
Burke, Edmund 190, 194
Reflections on the Revolution in
France 194
Burke, Thomas 5, 6, 60, 61, 65, 66,
67, 69, 70, 71
294
Burke, William 12, 186, 187, 188,
189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194,
195, 196, 197, 198, 200, 202,
203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208,
209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214
Burns, Robert 128
Burrough, Edward 34
Byron, Lord George Gordon 168,
170, 171, 172, 181
Don Juan 172
‘Irish Avatar’ 181
Cabbage Patch (See Kailyard)
Caesar, Julius (Writings of) 18
Cailleachan Mor (Hag) 25
Cain 199, 200
Cain Adamnan 19
Caledonian Antisyzygy 8, 9
Caledonian Mercury, the 202
Camberwell 145, 146
Cambrensis, Giraldus 148
Camp Dodge (Iowa) 5, 61, 64
Canada 57
Canguilhem, Georges 192
Carberry, Lord 175
Carlow 74
Carr, Marina 144, 155
Carroll, Noel 195, 196
Carter, Angela 142
Cartlidge, Neil 83
Cash, Jonny 57
Catholic / Catholicism 31, 34, 38,
40, 41, 43, 44, 45, 56, 61, 66,
69, 111, 112, 113, 114, 117,
120, 122, 129, 143, 144, 147,
151, 155, 169, 174, 175, 177,
178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 232,
241, 244, 245, 263
Catholic Association 179, 180, 181
Catholic Colonisation Association
59
Catholic Emancipation 167, 177,
178, 179
Cato Street Conspiracy 174, 175
Cauldron of Plenty 24
Index
Celtic 1, 5, 9, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23,
25, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131,
132, 133, 134, 138, 139, 223,
224, 226, 240
Celtic Review, the 240
Celtic Revival / Celtic Revivalism 9,
127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 134,
139, 140
Celtic Tiger 142, 155, 156, 158
Celticism 8, 9, 127, 131, 133, 134,
139, 140
‘Cernunos’ 22
Chambers, Robert 35, 36
Vestiges of the Natural History
of Creation 117
Chandler, Raymond 216, 246, 251,
253
The Big Sleep 251
Chapman, Malcolm 45
Charlemagne 20, 70, 136
Chicago 68
Christianson, Aileen 7
‘Gender and Nation: debatable
lands and passable
boundaries’ 7
Church Mission Society 111
Church of Ireland 41, 181
Clancy, Tom 254
The Patriot Games 254
Clash, The 144
Climate 72, 73, 79
Cochrane, Admiral Lord 272
Cockburn, Henry 202, 203
Cockney 11, 166, 168, 171, 172,
173
Coen Brothers 144
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome 191, 192,
204, 205
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 166, 171,
172
‘Of the Fragment of Kubla
Khan’ 171
Collins, Michael 138
Collis, John 19
Colonial 1, 2, 3, 5, 14, 43, 75, 77
Colonialist / Colonialism 3, 244
Border Crossings
Coloniser / Colonised 3, 6, 10, 118,
122, 240, 241
Columbia 62, 63, 65, 66
Communitas 8, 11, 97, 98, 99, 100,
101, 104
Complaynt of Scotlande, wyth ane
exortatione to the thre estaits to
be vigilante in the deffens of
their public weil, the 99, 100
‘The Hunting of Cheviot and the
Battle of Otterburn’ 100
‘Tam Lin’ 100
‘Johnie Armstrong’ 100
Connacht 38, 74
Connaught 70
Connemara 68, 145, 152, 153
Connery, Sir Sean 143
Connolly, James 231, 235, 236, 237,
242, 243, 244, 245
Constable, Archibald 172, 173
Cork 12, 74, 166, 170, 175, 182,
231
Cornwall 20
Covenanters 31, 32, 34, 44
Creole / Creolised 5
Crime Fiction 12, 13, 215, 216, 217,
225, 226, 258, 263
Critical responses 256, 265, 267
Croker, Thomas Crofton 177
The Fairy Legends and
Traditions of the South of
Ireland 177
Croly, Reverend George 179
Cromarty 25
Cromwell, Oliver 23, 30, 31, 38, 39,
41, 66
Cromwellian Interregnum 32
Cu Chulainn 23, 26
Cumberland 96
Dal Riata 20, 21, 22, 26
Dalrymple, Father James 100
Dark Ages 21
Darnley, Lord Henry Stewart 120,
121
Davies, Roger 191, 192
295
de Burgh, Richard Óge 70
de Burgh, Walter 77
de Burgh, William 70
Defoe, Daniel 32
Deane, Seamus 273
Nationalism Colonialism and
Literature 273
Deleuze, Gilles 272
Dentith, Simon 217, 220
Derrida, Jacques 10, 90, 93, 270
Derry (London Derry) 104, 113
Des Moines (Iowa) 5, 56
Devon 20
Dhuibhne 81
Diaspora 6, 11, 43, 44, 45, 144
Diasporic communities 45, 61
Diasporic consciousness 44
Diasporic emotions 44
Diasporic identity 44
Dier el Medina 18
Dillon, Martin 222, 223
Donegal 273
Doric Scots 281
Dos Passos, John 144
Dositheus’s Response 78
Douglas, Mary 198
Doyle, Roddy 144
Drogheda 38, 39
Druid / Druidry 18, 180, 240
Drumlanrig Castle (Dumfriesshire)
112
Dublin 13, 41, 57, 61, 68, 74, 75,
113, 122, 135, 148, 149, 170,
177, 180, 194, 231, 236, 239,
241, 243, 262
Dudley- Edwards, Owen 187, 243
Dumfries Journal 178
Dunsany, Lord Edward John
Plunkett 8, 9, 127, 134, 135,
136, 137, 138, 139, 140
‘The Sword of Welleran’ 138
For the Honour of the Gods 139
King Argimēnēs and the
Unknown Warrior 9, 135,
136, 137
296
Eagleton, Terry 168, 170
Easkey 145
Easter Rising (Revolution, 1916) 5,
57
Easton Ellis, Bret 155
Ecclesiastical centres 21
Ecclesiastical historians 117
Alleged lies of Edward VII 117
Edinburgh 12, 121, 143, 166, 169,
173, 178, 187, 193, 195, 197,
201, 206, 207, 209, 210, 231,
232, 238, 239, 242, 243, 246
Edinburgh Review, the 172, 179
Edward I 24, 74, 75
Edward VII 116
Egypt 18, 240
Eleanor of Aquitaine 126
Eliot, T. S 278, 279, 280
‘Traditional and the Individual
Talent’ 278
Emerald Noir 251
Emigration 5, 38, 41, 44
Emmet, Robert 175
Enforced truth 13, 228, 230, 231,
232, 233, 235, 237
Enlightenment, the 10, 36, 105, 118,
192, 197, 202, 270
Enright, Ann 155
Essentialist / Essentialism 1, 225,
238
Ethnic / Ethnicity 5, 6, 31, 55, 56,
59, 60, 66, 71, 225
Europe / European 6, 19, 20, 30, 37,
39, 61, 62, 64, 73, 76, 122, 149,
203
Eurovision Song Contest, the 153
Evangelical / Evangelicalism 111,
112, 116, 120, 121, 124
Evangelical Church Mission
Society, the 111
Evening Standard Theatre Award,
the 143
Evening Standard, the 143
Exile 29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 35, 37, 38,
41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 58, 60,
66, 119, 121, 128, 137, 140, 199
Index
Fair Hill (Ballymena) 273
‘Fall and Passion’ 83
Famine 6, 44, 61, 75, 76, 87, 205,
232, 241
Fantasy 110, 127
Faroe Islands 23
Father Ted 144, 146, 152
Faulkner, Simon 255
Faust / Faustian 201
Feeney, Joseph 145, 146, 152
Fenian Orators 58
Fergus Mor mac Eirc 20
Fielding, Henry 32
Fighting Irish’ 57
Filidh 18
Fin de Siècle 8, 124, 129
Finlayson Henderson, Thomas 93
Fitzgerald, Maurice 77, 148
Flaherty, Robert 142, 148, 149, 150,
151, 156, 157
Elephant Boy 149
Man of Arran (or Nanook of the
West) 142, 148, 150, 151,
156
Nanook of the North 149
Flight of the Earls, the 37, 51
Fogarty, Anne 235, 236
‘Parnellism and the Politics of
Memory’ 235
Folklore 10, 144, 149
Food 6, 45, 72, 73, 74, 76, 77, 78,
79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 87
Forbes, Bishop Robert 35, 36
Form 14, 94, 97, 104, 146, 156, 169,
192, 252, 253, 258. 265, 267
Formal instability 254, 255
Forsyth, Katherine 21
Foster, Roy 91
Foster, Sally M 20, 21, 25
Foucault, Michel 13, 228, 229
Two Lectures 229
Four Treasures of Ireland 24
Foxe, John 31, 49
Book of Martyrs 31, 49
France 35, 37, 39, 45, 63, 69, 70, 86,
176, 194, 252
Border Crossings
Franciscan / Franciscan Order 6, 72,
83
Frankenstein 172
Fraser’s Magazine 167, 177, 180
Freeholder, the 170
Freud, Sigmund 256, 271
Friedman, John 199
Gaelic 8, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, 25, 26,
37, 45, 74, 75, 76, 79, 132, 133,
139, 153
Gaelic culture 45
Gaelic language 19, 45
Gaelic Revival 151
Gaeltacht 273
Galway 60, 70, 145, 152
‘Galway Bay’ 57
Geddie, John 205, 206
Gender 7, 9, 19, 140, 155, 191, 218,
225
General Strike (1926) 123
Genre 6, 10, 12, 32, 97, 103, 104,
191, 215, 220, 223, 249, 253,
254, 255, 256, 257
Geppi, Albert 105
Germany 63, 64, 65, 69, 118
Giants’ Causeway, the 5, 24
Gibbons, Luke 193, 194
Gibson Lockhart, John 94, 168, 173
Gilmore, David 205
Gilmour, David 188
Gladstone, William Ewart 112, 113,
114
Glasgow 12, 13, 61, 215, 217, 220,
221
Glenriddell (Dunfriesshire) 96
Globalisation / Globalization 10,
144, 246, 250
Glover, Ann 40, 41
Gnostic / Gnosticism 105, 117, 123
Godwin, William 92, 95, 172
Good Friday Agreement, the (1998)
249, 250, 261, 266
Gothic / Gothicism 10, 12, 144, 186,
187, 190, 191, 194, 195, 196,
197, 200, 201, 202, 206, 208,
297
209, 215, 216, 217, 219, 253,
255, 256, 257 258, 259, 260,
261, 262, 263
Gothic causality 216
Gothic novel, the 13, 190, 216
Graham, Elaine L 188
Grand Guignol 10, 144
Gray, Alasdair 153
Working Legs 153
Great Depression, the 251
Greenland 73
Gregory, Lady Augusta 131, 132,
135, 136, 137
Grene, Nicholas 152
Grieve, Christopher 281
Grimm, Jacob and Wilhem 142
Fairy Tales 142
‘Little Red Riding Hood’ 142
Grimm, Jakob 104
Grotesque 10, 23, 97, 144, 155, 158,
192, 197, 200, 204
Grove, Jean 73
Guardian, the 147, 157
Guiney, Louis Imogen 167
Halberstam. Judith 196, 197, 202,
209
Hall, Samuel Carter 167
Hall, Stuart 237, 238
‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’
237
Hamilton, James (First Duke and
Second Marquess of Abercorn)
111
Hamilton, James (of
Bothwellhaugh) 121
Hamilton, Jane (nee Russell;
Duchess of Abercorn) 111
Hamilton, John James (First
Marquess of Abercorn) 111
Hamilton, Lady Beatrix (late
Countess of Durham) 112
Hamilton, Lady Louisa (late
Duchess of Buccleuch) 112
Hamilton, Lady Pamela (nee
Campbell) 115
298
Hamilton, Lord Ernest (‘A Leaf’) 8,
110, 111, 112, 114, 120, 121,
124
A Maid at Large 116
Elizabethan Ulster 122
Forty Years On 112, 123
Halcyon Days 123
Involution 116, 117
Lancelot 124
Mary Hamilton 110, 119
Old Days and New 112, 123
Strawberry Leaves 115
Tales of the Troubles 122, 123
The First Seven Divisions 123
The Four Tragedies of
Memworth 124
The Identity of God
(unpublished) 117
The Irish Rebellion of 1641 122
The Mawkin of the Flow 112
The Outlaws of the Marsh 8,
118
The Perils of Josephine 111
The Soul of Ulster 8, 110, 122
Hamilton, Lord Frederick 114
Hammett, Dashiell 251
Hare, Margaret (Lucky) 207, 208
Hare, William 12, 186, 187, 188,
189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 196,
197, 198, 199, 200, 204, 205,
206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211
Harrow School 113
Hastings, Max 13
Hazlett, William 172
Heaney, Seamus 10, 270, 271, 272,
273, 274, 275, 276, 277, 278,
279, 280, 281, 282, 283, 284,
285, 286
Beowulf 275, 276, 277, 279,
281, 282, 285
Death of a Naturalist 282
‘Follower’ 282
‘The Flight Path’ 274
‘The Other Side’ 274
The Redress of Poetry 284
Index
‘Tradition and an Individual
Talent’ 278
Hebrides 22, 24
Heidegger, Martin 10, 275, 277,
280, 281, 282, 284
Heimlich / Unhemlich 281
Henry II 70, 126
Henry VII 23
Hepburn, Francis (First Earl of
Bothwell, second creation) 118
Hepburn, James (Fourth Earl of
Bothwell - first creation) 120
Herd, David 93
Ancient and Modern Scottish
Songs, Heroic Ballads etc.,
collected from Memory,
Tradition and Ancient
Authors 93
Hibernian 167, 168, 177, 193, 241
Hibernian Football Club 238, 241,
243
Hiberno-English 152
Higgins, David 37, 93
Highland (s) 30, 36, 45, 129
Highlander (s) 7, 8, 118, 134, 207
Hogg, James 36, 97, 178, 189
Hogle, Jerrold 190, 191
Home Rule 113, 114, 122, 130, 134,
235, 241
Homer 69, 101, 279
Hopkins, Gerald Manley 284
Horsley, Lee 257
The Noir Thriller 257
Horton, W. T 70
Book of Images 70
Hound of Ulster 25
Huertas, Rafael 193
Hughes, Eamon 252, 253, 254, 262
Town of Shadows:
Representations of Belfast in
Recent Fiction 262
Human sacrifice 112, 116
Attributed to Jews 116
Humm, Maggie 7
Hunt, Leigh 172
Hurley, Kelly 198, 201, 208
Border Crossings
Hussars, 11th 113
Hybrid / Hybridity 3, 5, 10, 14, 90,
144, 191, 198, 257
Hypermasculinity 223
Iceland 23
Imagine Communities 5, 31
Imperialist / Imperialism 118, 244,
272, 273, 277
INLA (Irish National Liberation
Army) 156
Iona 21
Iowa 5, 56, 61, 64
IRA (Irish Republican Army) 156,
244
Ireland, Bishop John 59, 61
Irish Catholic Colonization
Association 59
Irish diaspora 11, 144
‘Irish Frankenstein’ 195
Irish National Theatre, the 135
Irish Peasants / Irish Peasantry 58,
132
Irish Revival 128, 133, 135, 136,
138, 139
Irish Sea 5, 13, 20, 24, 194
Irish Synchronisms 20
Irish Tourist Board, the 57
‘Irish Vampire’ 195
Irish-American 45, 60, 111
‘Irishness’ 10, 13, 55, 56, 57, 60, 62,
68, 71, 147, 168, 169, 223, 235,
245
Iron Age 19, 21
Italian 5, 55, 56, 57
Italy 56, 234
Jacobean 103
Jacobite (s) 29, 30, 35, 36, 37, 44,
45
Rising (1715) 35
Rising (1745) 29
Jacobitism 36, 45
‘Sentimental’ 36
‘James Bond’ 143
James I/VI 23, 111, 118, 121
299
James II 31, 110
James, M, R 144
James, Simon 19
Jameson, Fredric 254, 271
The Political Unconscious 271
‘Jekyll and Hyde’ 219
Jerdan, William 170
Jesus 116, 117, 118
Allegedly not a Jew 116
John Bull 177
John son of Zebedee 117
John the Evangelist 117
Jonson, Ben 152, 169
Jordan, Eamon 159
Jordan, William Chester 73, 74, 76
Joyce, James 13, 151, 155, 228, 230,
231, 232, 233, 234, 235, 236,
237, 239, 240, 241, 242, 245,
246, 262, 272, 279, 280, 281,
283
‘A Little Cloud’ 246
Dubliners 13, 228, 230, 231,
232, 234, 239, 241, 245, 246
‘Eveline’ 232, 246
‘Ireland, Island of Saints and
Sages’ 240
‘Ivy Day in the Committee
Room’ 232, 233, 234, 235,
244
‘The Dead’ 232
Ulysses 230, 231, 241, 262
Justin, Martyr (Saint Justin) 117
Kailyard 128
Kaiser, the 63, 65, 69
Kapuscinksi, Ryszard 2
Kearney, Richard 243
Keats, John 172, 177
Kelleher, John 134
Kelly, Aaron 254, 255
Kelman, James 155
Kennedy-Andrews, Elmer 252, 253,
254, 267
Kenny, Kevin 44
Kiberd, Declan 273
Inventing Ireland 273
300
Kidd, Colin 36, 37, 45
Kildare 6, 72, 74
Kilfeather, Siobhan 195
Kiltaran 131
Kingdom of Dalriat 20, 25
Kinship 5, 97, 128
Kirkland, Richard 254
Knox, John 121
As comic relief 121
History of the Reformation in
Scotland 121
Knox, Robert 189, 200, 201, 206
Lacan, Jacques 10, 271. 272, 274,
275
Laird, John (Lord Laird of
Artigarvan) 126
‘Lallans’ 279, 280, 283, 285
Land War 113
Landscape 21, 75, 80, 81, 101, 102,
128, 129, 132, 156, 253
Lang Strout, Alan 169
Langdale (Cumbria) 119
Langholm (Dumfrieshire) 279, 280
Lange, Jessica 144
Langholm (Dumfriesshire) 112
Lanters, Jose 150, 154
Latin 18, 21, 69, 72, 78, 79, 170,
209, 221, 240
Lawrence, D.H 144
Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan 111
Uncle Silas 111
Lecky, William Edward Hartpole
126
Leighton, Alexander 210, 211
Leighton, Andrew 197, 199
The Court of Cacus 197, 198,
200
Leinster 70
Leith 231, 239, 241, 244
Leslie, John, Bishop of Ross 100
Letts, Tracy 144 Killer Joe 144
Levitas, Ben 137
The Theatre of Nation 137
Liberal Party 114
Liddesdale 118, 119
Index
Limerick 74
Liminal/ Liminality 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6,
7, 8, 10, 90, 91, 95, 96, 97, 98,
101, 103, 104, 105, 106, 188,
195, 205, 257
Literary Gazette, the 170
Literature 1, 6, 9, 55, 57, 58, 72, 80,
91, 92, 127, 128, 130, 133, 134,
148, 167, 170, 228, 249, 252,
254, 255, 257, 262, 265, 267
Little Ice Age, the 73, 75
Lloyd, David 272, 273
Lockerbie (Dumfriesshire) 119
Lockhart, John G 94, 167, 168, 171,
173, 178
London 26, 43, 124, 144, 145, 146,
147, 173, 175, 180, 221, 231,
239, 244
Lonergan, Patrick 10
Long Kesh/Maze, the 259, 260
Lonsdale, Henry 201, 206, 210
Loomba, Ania 273
Colonialism/Postcolonalism 273
Lordship of the Isles 23, 26
Lower Danube (Bavaria) 18
Loyalist / Loyalism 13, 175, 222,
224, 249, 250, 259, 260, 267,
273
Lydon, James 74, 75
Lydon, John (Johnny Roten) 144
Rotten: No Irish, No Black, No
Dogs 144
Lyman Kitteradge, George 104
Lynch, David 144, 155
Twin Peaks 155
Lyons, Mary C 75, 76, 80
Lyons, Paddy 151
Lyotard, Jean-Francois 230, 284
The Postmodern Condition: A
Report on Knowledge 230
Mac Cana, P 168, 22, 23, 24
MacAlpin, Kenneth 20, 21, 24
MacClaverty, Bernard 266
Cal 266
Border Crossings
MacDiarmid, Hugh 10, 128, 277,
278, 279, 280, 281, 282, 283,
285, 286
‘A Drunk Man Looks at the
Thistle’ 282
Macdonald Fraser, George 99
Macdonald, Flora 36
MacDougal, Helen 207
Macherey, Pierre 256, 264, 265
Mack, Ruth 92
MacKenzie, Donald A 25, 26, 27
Mackenzie, Robert Shelton 170, 177
Maclean Watt, Lachlan 104
MacLeod, Fiona (see William
Sharp)
MacPherson, James 93
Ossian controversy 93
Magennis, Caroline 222, 223, 224
Maginn, William (P.J. Crossman,
Olinthis Petre, DD (O.P) M.N
and Ralph Tuckett Scott) 11, 12,
166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171,
172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177,
178, 179, 180, 181, 182
‘Don Juan Unread’ 171, 172,
174
‘Letter of Ensign and Adjutant
Morgan O’Doherty,
introductory to a Few
Remarks on the Present
State of Ireland’ 174
‘Letter of Lord Carberry on the
Cork County Meeting’ 175
‘Literary Portrait of William
Hamilton Maxwell’ 168
‘Pike, Prose and Poetry’ 180
‘St Patrick’ 176
Mahony, Reverend Francis
Sylvester 170
Maley, Willy 1, 8, 9, 10
‘Ireland, versus Scotland:
crossing the (English)
language barrier’ 9
(ed) Celtic Connections: Irish
Scottish Relations and the
Politics of Culture 1
301
Malick, Terrence 144
Badlands 144
Malory, Sir Thomas 124
Mamet, David 144, 152
American Buffalo 144
Mangan, James Clarence 167
Marcion of Pontus 117
Mark of Cain, the’ 198, 199, 200,
202, 204, 209
Marling, William 251
Martyrdom / Martyrologies 43
Marxist / Marxism 243, 256
Mary Hamilton (or The Four
Maries)’ 119
Mary, Queen of Scots 110, 118,
120, 121
Maryland 35, 42, 43
Mascuch, Michael 32
Masculinity / Masculinities 9, 12,
140, 215, 222, 223, 224, 225
Mass 78, 79
Massachusetts 34, 40, 41, 155
Mather, Cotton 41
Maturin, Charles Robert 173, 194
Melmoth The Wanderer 194
Women; or, Pour et Contre: A
Tale 173
Mayo 147
McAleese, Mary 250
Multi- Culturalism: The View
from the Two Irelands 250
McCabe, Patrick 153
The Butcher Boy 153
McCall, P.J 235, 236
McCarthy, B.G 170
McCarthy, Dermot 223
McClintock, Harry 276
McDonagh, Martin 10, 11, 142, 143,
144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 151,
152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157,
159
A Behanding in Spokane 159
In Bruges 146 Six Shooter 146
Skull in Connemara 145, 153
The Banshees of Inisheer 146
302
The Beauty Queen of Leenane
14, 143, 145
The Cripple of Inishmaan 142,
146, 148, 150, 151, 152,
154, 155, 156, 157
The Lieutenant of Inishmore
146, 147, 156
The Lonesome West 145
McDonald, Henry 157
McDonald, Hugh 217
McIlvanney, William 12, 13, 215,
216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221,
224, 225
Docherty 215, 217, 224
Laidlaw 215, 217, 219, 220, 225
The Big Man 224
Strange Loyalties 216, 217
The Kiln 215
The Papers of Tony 216
McLiam Wilson, Robert 252, 253
McMahon, Bishop Eimar (Heber)
126
McNally, David 186, 188, 189, 194,
209, 210, 211
McNamee, Eoin 12, 13, 215, 221,
222, 223, 224, 251, 253
Resurrection Man 215, 224,
251, 253
The Ultras 251
McPherson, Conor 144
Medieval Warm period, the 73
Mellerski, Nancy 220
Melodrama / melodramatic 10, 144,
159, 252, 253
Merrilees, Andrew (‘Merry
Andrew’) 197, 198
Merriman, Vic 153, 155, 156, 157
Messenger, John 149, 150, 151, 154,
156
‘Man of Aran Revisited: And
Anthropological Critique’
149
Inis Beag Revisited: The
Anthropologist as Observant
Participator 151
Meyers, Terry 129
Index
Michael of Kildare. Friar 72
Middle Ages 26, 73, 74, 75
Milesian 202, 203, 204, 211
Millar, J.H 128
Miller, Alexander 206
Miller, David W 32, 126
Queen's Rebels 126
Miller, Edward 101
Miller, Kerby 38, 41, 42, 45, 46
Mimic / Mimicry 10, 144
Minnesota 59, 61, 62, 64, 65, 66, 68,
69
Miscegenation 193, 194
Mitchison, Rosalind 21
Mittman, Asa 210
Modernist / Modernism 10, 91, 93,
128, 273, 280, 281
Moffatt, Alistair 18, 21, 26
Molloy, Frances 252
Montgomerie, William 96
A Bibliography of the Scottish
Ballad Manuscripts 17301825 96
Montgomery, Bernard Law (Duke
of Wellington) 272
Moore, Thomas 168, 173, 176, 177,
182
Irish Melodies 176, 177
Poetical Works of the late
Thomas Little 173
Morgan, Lady Sydney 173
Morrison, Danny 274
Motherwell, William 91
Mossbawn 273, 274
Muir, Edwin 277, 278, 285, 286
‘Muirhouse vernacular’ 241
Mullen, Pat 149
Hero Breed 149
Multicultural / Multiculturalism 55
Munster 70
Murphy, Tom 144
Murray, Isobel 215
Musgrave, Thomas 101
Myerhoff, Barbara 5, 6
Myth / Mythology 5, 22, 23, 24, 25,
26, 40, 43, 58, 91, 95, 131, 133,
Border Crossings
135, 138, 155, 157, 176, 182,
199, 225
Nabokov, Vladimir 144
Nation / Nationhood 2, 7, 9, 31, 43,
62, 63, 97, 103, 137, 139, 147,
153, 169, 225
National University of Ireland
(Galway) 60
Nationalists / Nationalism 2, 3, 7, 9,
13, 26, 31, 33, 42, 43, 45, 55,
62, 112, 113, 114, 115, 118,
122, 123, 130, 131, 132, 133,
134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 140,
143, 148, 157, 169, 177, 231,
234, 235, 238, 241, 242, 243,
246, 249, 250, 267
Native American 5, 56, 59, 60
Nativist / Nativism 10, 144, 149,
151
Neville, Stuart 13, 249, 250, 251,
252, 255, 257, 258, 259, 260,
261, 262, 263, 264, 265, 266,
267
The Twelve 13, 14, 249, 250,
251, 255, 256, 257, 258,
260, 261, 262, 264, 265, 267
New Ross 6, 72, 77
Newgate (London) 29
Newman, David 11
Nietzsche, Fredrich 186
Nirvana 144
Noble, Hobbie 97
Norman (s) 70, 240
Norman-Irish 70
Norquay, Glenda 3, 4, 7
(ed) Across and Margins:
Cultural Identity and
Change in the Atlantic
Archipelago 3
North Atlantic 250
North East Irish Culture Network
(N.E.I.C.N) 57
North Leitrim 61
North Tyrone (Westminster
Parliamentary Constituency)
110, 113, 114, 122, 124
303
Northern Ireland 13, 20, 117, 124,
239, 250, 251, 253, 254, 255,
256, 257, 258, 260, 261, 262,
264, 265, 266, 267, 273, 274,
275, 277, 285
Novgorod 18
O’Brien, Edna 155
O’Brien, Eugene 10
O’Brien, John 64
O’Casey, Sean 144, 147
Juno and the Paycock 147
Ó Cianáin, Tadhg 37
O’Connell, Daniel 179
O’Connor, Edmund 216
O’Connor, Joseph 153
O’Donnell, Hugh 58
O’Driscoll, Denis 274, 275
O’Grady, Standish 130, 136
O’Malley Younger, Alison 1, 8, 9
(ed) Celtic Connections: Irish
Scottish Relations and the
Politics of Culture 1
O’Neill, Michael 153
O’Neill, Shane 122
O’Shea, (Katharine) Kitty 237
Ó Siochrú, Micheál 39
Ó Súilleabháin, Seán 150
‘Fishing for the Sun-Fish or
Basking Shark in Irish
Waters’ 150
Okri, Ben 1
Oliphant, Margaret 170 174, 178,
180
Orange order / Orangeism 113, 177,
232, 239, 244
Orangemen 177, 235
Ordnance Survey 273
Orkney Islands 23, 24
Orton, Joe 144
Entertaining Mr Sloane 144
Orvell, Miles 9, 91
Oswald, Richard 272
Ouse 22
304
Pagan / Paganism 19, 20, 22, 24, 25,
151
Paisley 113, 128
Parnell, Charles Stewart 113, 125,
231, 232, 233, 235, 237, 242,
244, 246
Parochial / Parochialism 10, 144
Parody 9, 10, 78, 79, 127, 139, 140,
144, 146, 152, 174, 176
Passion of Monks According to
Bacchus, the 78
Pastiche 10, 58, 124, 144
Patriot / Patriotism 5, 33, 44, 63, 65,
66, 182, 239, 254
Patten, Eve 252, 253, 254, 267
Fiction in Conflict: the North’s
Prodigal Novelists 252
Patterson, Glen 215, 252, 253
Peace Process (Northern Ireland)
13, 249, 252, 260, 261, 265, 266
Peace walls’ 250
Pearse, Padraig 138, 139, 140
Peckinpah, Sam 144
Peden, Alexander 34
Pennsylvania 61
Percy, Bishop 94, 95
The Reliques of Ancient English
Poetry 94
Petrie, Duncan 225, 226
Petty, William 194
Phillips, James 200
Phenomenology / Phenomenological
277
Phrenologists / Phrenology 193,
195, 199, 202, 204, 210
Physiognomists / Physiognomy 193,
195, 198, 199, 202, 204, 208,
210
Picti 21
Picts / Pictish 19, 21, 22, 25, 27
‘Pied Piper of Hamelin, the’ 142
‘Piers of Bermingham’ 6, 77, 78, 83
Pilney, Ondrei 155
Pinter, Harold 144, 152
Pitt Dundas, William 193, 194, 196
Index
The Races of Men in Scotland
193
Pittock, Murray 36, 129, 138
Plato / Platonic 275
Plutarch 69
Sayings of Spartan Women 69
Pogues, The 144, 145
Poland 73
Polymorphs / Polymorphous 90
Portugal 40
Post- Famine 45
Post- Imperial 221
Post- Industrial 12, 13, 215, 217,
221
Post- Troubles 13, 249, 255, 258,
261, 265
Postcolonial / Postcolonialism 10,
55, 272, 273, 278, 282, 285, 286
Postmodernist / Postmodernism 10,
144, 145, 146, 156, 157, 239,
253, 254
Preece, William 240
‘Egyptians and Celts’ 240
Presbyterian / Presbyterianism 31,
34, 35, 41, 44, 61, 113, 244
President Wilson 65
Primitivist / Primitivism 10, 103,
131, 144, 149, 151
Prometheus / Promethean 190, 201
Protestant / Protestantism 8, 23, 31,
34, 41, 43, 44, 45, 50, 110, 111,
112, 114, 117, 118 120, 124,
168, 174, 175, 177, 179, 180,
232, 238, 239, 241, 243, 245
Provincial / Provincialism 10, 124,
144, 159
Provisional I.R.A 274
Psychoanalysis / Psychoanalytical
10, 272
Punter, David 191, 201, 209, 211
Purbrick, Louise 259, 260
Purchas’s Pilgrimage 171
Quaker (s) 29, 31, 32, 33, 34, 37,
44, 45
Quiet Man, the 68
Border Crossings
Radcliffe, Anne 190
On the Supernatural in Poetry
190
Radicals 11, 166, 169, 171, 173. 175
Radstone, Susannah 255
Ramsay, Allan 94
The Ever green being a
collection of Scots poems,
wrote by the ingenious
before 1600 94
Rankin, Ian 215, 220
Rannafast 273
Ransom, John Crone 277, 279
Redfield, James W 195, 196
Reizbaum, Marilyn 1
Remembrance Day (1987) 57
Republican / Republicanism 61, 66,
67, 144, 255, 257, 258, 259,
260, 262, 263, 264
Reuter, Timothy 98
Revivalist / Revivalism 9, 10, 127,
128, 133, 134, 135, 136, 138,
140, 144
Richards, Shaun 154, 157
Richardson, Ruth 186, 187
Ricoeur, Paul 95
Riddell, Robert 96
Ritchie, Graham 21
Ritchie. Anna 21
Rizzio, David 120
Roberts, Simon 102
Robertson, Roland 246
Identities Race, Class, Gender
and Nationality 246
Robinson, David 179
Roman Empire, the 20
Romans, the 18, 20, 22, 237
Rosner, Lisa 189, 193, 203, 206
Roxburghshire 96
Runaway adverts 42
Russell, George 132
Russell, Lord John 111
Ryan, Ray 225
Sadlier, Michael 177
Said, Edward 273
305
Saint Brigid 25
Saint Columba 19
Saint Paul 78
Salinger, J.D 144
Sand, Bobby 57
Sandhurst College 113
‘Sarmun’ 82
Sassenach 132
‘Satanic kailyard’ 10, 144
Satire 82, 166, 167, 168, 170, 171,
172, 173, 176, 177, 195
Saxons 22
Scandinavia 22, 73, 240
Scanlan, Margaret 224
Scapegoat / Scapegoating 98, 103,
151
Scoti 19, 20, 21
Scotia, Dame 99
Scots Makars 94
Scott, Sir Walter 94, 95, 107, 122,
187, 189, 199, 209
Minstrelsy 95
Scottish Enlightenment, the 118,
197
Scottish Literary Revival, the 128
Scottish Presbyterians 34, 35
Scottish Renaissance, 128
Scottish Revival 128
‘Scottishness’ 57, 62, 67, 246
Sea of the Hebrides 24
Serra, Nick 59
‘Peasant Patriarch: Irish Epistles
from Exile’ 60
The Blanding and Blandisments
of Yeats’s Heroic Ideal in
Easter, 1916 59
‘Settlement’ of Ireland 31, 48
Sex Pistols, The 144, 145|
Shakespeare, William 10, 145, 147,
152, 169
Henry V 147
Titus Andronicus 147
Sharp, Elizabeth 129
Sharp, William 8, 9, 127, 128, 129,
130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 145,
140
306
Earth Songs 131
Flower o’ the Vine 131
Pharais 130, 131
Sophistra and Other Poems 131
The Divine Adventure 133
The Gipsy Christ 131
The Mountain Lovers 131, 132
‘The Ocean Chorus’ 131
The Sport of Chance 131
The Washer of the Ford 131
Shelly, Percy Byshee 171, 172
Shepard, Sam 144 True West 144
Shetlands 24
Ships 29, 39, 41, 63, 67, 139
Baltimore, the 41
Forward, the 43
Shirlow, Peter 250
Sinn Fein 122, 274
Allegedly strengthens Unionism
122
Sirr, Henry Charles 234
Skenazy, Paul 216
Slaves / Slavery 3, 7, 32, 39, 40, 42,
135, 136, 137
Sligo 57, 145
Smith, G. George 9
Smith, Gerry 3, 252
(ed) Across the Margins:
Cultural Identity and
Change in the Atlantic
Archipelago 3
Smyth, Alfred. P. 21
Society for the Propagation of the
Gospel 111
Song of the Times’ 83
South Park 146
Spain 37
Spectacle 155, 158, 190, 209, 210,
223
Springer, Jerry 155
Steptoe and Son 144
Stevens, Wallace 281
Stevenson, Robert Louis 170, 205
Stewart, James (First Earl of Moray)
120
Stone of Destiny (Lia Fail) 24
Index
Stone of Scone 24
Stramash 143
Swir, Ana 271
Swift, Jonathan 144, 167
Synge, John Millington 10, 11, 142,
144, 146,147, 149, 151, 152,
153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158,
159
Playboy of the Western World
142, 144, 151, 153
Rider’s to the Sea 149
Shadow of the Glen 144
The Aran Island 149
Táin Bó Cúailnge 23
Tarantino, Quentin 144, 145, 146,
155, 157
Pulp Fiction 144, 146
Tartan Noir 215
Taylor, Diana 95
Teratology / Teratologist 192, 193
Teutonic 9, 140
Thackeray, W. N 167
Pendennis 167
Thatcher, Margaret 241, 246
Thatcherite / Thatcherism 225
The Drinkers’ Mass (or Missa
potatorum) 6, 72, 78
The Land of Cokaynge 6, 72, 78, 79,
80, 81, 82
‘The Song of Michael Kildare’ 82,
83Thompson, J.G 19, 24
‘The Theatre of Tiger Trash’ 156
The Walling of New Ross 6, 72, 77
‘Thole’ 270, 276, 277, 278, 279,
280, 281, 282, 286
Thompson, Rosemarie Garland 194
Thomson, James (B.V) 173, 174
Threepenny Review, the 156
‘Tiger Trash’ 10, 144,
Tipperary 74, 176
Tone, Wolfe 70
Tory / Tories 123
Tournier, Michael 197
Translate / Translations (s) 10, 21,
94, 95, 100, 106, 128, 131, 132,
226
Border Crossings
Trevelyan, George. M 101
Trilling, Lionel 90
Trinity College (Dublin) 170
Trinity Temple 25
Troubles, the 13, 226, 251, 253,
254, 255, 258, 260, 262
‘Troubles-Trash’ 253, 254
Critical responses 253, 254
Turner, Victor 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 11,
96, 97, 99, 103, 104
Ulster 8, 10, 25, 34, 41, 42, 56, 66,
67, 74, 78, 110, 112, 113, 118,
120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 244
Ulster Plantation 10, 56, 66, 67,
110, 122, 124
Ulster Uprising (1641) 122
Union Canal 197, 207
Union of the Crowns (1603) 118,
125
Unionist / Unionism 8, 110, 113,
114, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124,
130, 132, 134, 135, 138, 169,
250
United Kingdom (U.K) 8, 54, 103,
110, 111, 145
United States (U.S) 55
University of Notre Dame 57
University of Sunderland 57
Unconscious / Unconsciousness 13,
255, 270, 271, 272, 275, 276, 277,
278, 279, 280, 281, 282, 284, 285,
286
van Gennep, Arnold 96
Rites of Passage 96
Venice Film Festival 150
Victorian / Victorianism 8, 110,
111, 123, 124, 128
Viking (s) 22
Violence 2, 10, 12, 122, 126, 138,
144, 145, 146, 154, 155, 157,
158, 161, 187, 190, 200, 215,
220, 223, 225, 242, 252, 253,
258 264, 265, 266, 267
307
Virginia 34, 42, 43
Virginia Gazette, the 42, 43
Vis 146
Wagner, Richard 116
As pretentious bore 116
Wales 1, 21, 57
Wardle, Ralph 168
Waterford 6, 51, 68, 72, 74
Watson, James 94
Choice Collection of Comic and
Serious Scots Poems both
Ancient and Modern 94
Weales, Gerald 156, 157
Weardale 96
Weather 6, 40, 59, 72, 73, 74, 75,
76, 79, 80, 83
Weber, Max 55
Welsh 5, 55, 56, 57, 147, 176
Welsh, Irvine 13, 155, 228, 230,
231, 232, 238, 239, 240, 241,
242, 243, 244, 245, 246
Trainspotting 13, 228, 230, 231,
232, 238, 239, 241, 245, 246
Went, Arthur 150
‘Fishing for the Sun-Fish or
Basking Shark in Irish
Waters’ 150
West Indies 29, 37, 52
West Port 12, 190, 206, 207
West Port Murders 188, 190, 210
Westminster Abbey 24
Westmoreland 96
Wexford 74, 143
Whigs / Whiggism 36, 119, 166,
168, 171, 172, 173, 174, 176,
179, 181
White, Hayden 91, 95
Whybrow, Graham 156
Wilcock, Mike 147
Williamite War 67
Wilson, John 167, 168, 171, 173,
174, 178, 198, 199, 201
Wilson, Woodrow 60
Winchester 73
Winchester, Charles 35
308
Winston, Robert 220
Witches / Witchcraft 27, 41, 103,
111, 119
Wodrow, Robert 34, 35
Wolf, Christa 262
A Model Childhood 262
Woodward, Ashley 230
Wordsworth, William 105, 170,
171, 172, 279
‘Yarrow Unvisited’ 171, 172
Workers’ Republic, the 235
Wright, Richard 155
World War I (First World War) 5,
60, 61, 123, 128
Yeats, William Butler 5, 8, 9, 57,
58, 60, 68, 70, 127, 128, 129,
130, 131, 132, 134, 135, 136,
137, 139, 140, 153, 273, 280,
281
Index
‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’
70
‘Blood and the Moon’ 70
‘Byzantium’ 70
‘Symbols’ 70
Cathleen ni Houlihan 135, 136,
137, 138
Reveries over Childhood and
Youth 58
‘The Circus Animals Desertion’
280
The Green Helmet 137
The Tower 70, 139
The Winding Stair 70
Yorvik 22
Young Ireland Society 58
Zeitgeist 8, 90, 92, 105, 106, 186