In a rousing introductory speech, retired diplomat Philip McDonagh described the publication of Cuban Love Songs as a ‘significant moment for the Irish province of the Republic Letters.’ He spoke of the ‘importance of the Republic Letters for us all’, that space where we ‘can explore intelligently and in a disinterested way both the world and our place in the world.’
McDonagh also spoke about his concerns over the blockade against Cuba. He argued that there had never been a level playing field to allow the Cuban economy to prove itself and looked forward to a better dialogue between Washington and Havana.
Reflecting on a challenging period in international relations, McDonagh wondered:
are we prepared to wait for the gifts of the muses, on political truths that do not depend on what Shelley called the calculating faculty? Are we prepared to work towards restoring the resonance of great fundamental words: mercy, discernment, justice, trust and hope?
He said:
we need the poets and the public authorities to come together in something like the Republic of Letters to practise humility and re-evaluate key aspects of our culture, and this must be done of course in freedom … where citizens are prepared to discuss public challenges on the basis of first principles.
There were also readings from Anthony Colclough, Caoimhe Lavelle, Karl O’Neill, Anne Haverty, Luke Sheehan, and Ronan Sheehan.
The event took place in Merrion Cricket Club and drew a colourful crowd.
On February 15th, 2021, John Buckley McQuaid, released an album of original songs about Ireland, This Is Where I Keep My Dreams, to a thundering silence from the media.
Long have I missed albums from Irish artists that address our present situation of apathy and indifference. Could it be that the media is ignoring such releases or could it be that such releases have so little commercial appeal, that artists refrain from recording and releasing them?
The situation for musicians is desperate, between Spotify and COVID-19, many musicians have thrown in the towel and have had to find other means of supporting themselves.
This brings me to ‘This Is Is Where I Keep My Dreams’, which delves into Irish history and has many comments, both critical and compassionate to make on the present situation. Mr. McQuaid (no relation to the late Archbishop!) is saying something that needs to be heard – now, more than ever! He has also created videos which add wonderful visuals to accompany many of the songs (links provided).
Here’s to the island of saints and of scholars ere’s to the biblical beasts of the field Here’s to the kingdom of clerical collars Here’s to the wounds that may never be healed. John Buckley McQuaid, ‘Land Of The Magdalenes’
‘Land Of The Magdalenes’ is a tale of the Diaspora, echoing James Joyce, a man who would not bend the knee to either Church or State, who referred to Irish art as ‘the cracked looking glass of a servant’ – an image of colonial subjugation.
Joyce himself went into exile in Europe, not being a man to play popinjay to an English court. He was guilty of the cardinal sin of pride, the sin of the devil – the defiant Joycean stance is still a reproach to any servile attitude towards Church, State, or a twisted, demonic God, who may, even now, be making Joyce pay throughout all eternity for his defiance.
Today the image in the servant’s looking glass is that of a post-colonial pig in lipstick smirking at its own reflection, aping its betters, mired in its own moral excrement, the sow rolling merrily on its young.
Rosary Beads and Respectability
Instead of rosary beads and respectability, we have the brash, vulgar, ignorant Castle Catholics, educating their children in private schools, a new pernicious breed of self-interested professionals and the very wealthy, whose aspirations are status, the acquisition of wealth, and self-advancement.
Give us this day lord, our villas in Spain, Lord Give us our castles with breakfast in bed
Give us a case of expensive champagne Lord,
Give us a place Lord, to lay down our heads. John Buckley McQuaid ‘Dear Mister Taoiseach’
All a far cry from the childhood of the late Frank McCourt, who wrote of having to conceal a pig’s head under newspaper walking home for fear he’d be mocked at Christmas, as they couldn’t afford a turkey.
When the brash Celtic Tiger gave way to the Crash; in a pub one afternoon, I noticed a couple walk in with Brown Thomas bags and noted their instinct to conceal them. People did not approve.
Today the Brown Thomas Brigade no longer care – the sale of luxury goods goes up and up, and the divide between the wealthy and the poor has widened and widened, decimating an already struggling middle class.
And you can be sure that we’ll never forget The culture of vultures and dealers and debt The struggles and troubles, the gold, white and green So much for our beautiful 1916 John Buckley McQuaid ‘Prodigal Kiss’
So we have replaced foreign oppressors with our own.
Class Solidarity
Class solidarity and resistance against oppression is necessary around the world today, but this nation has an extremely important role to play, and is surely judged by how it treats its vulnerable – the young – sure stick them in hotel bedrooms where they can’t even learn how to crawl – the sick – let them drop dead on waiting lists – and the old – let them die in nursing homes.
As capitalism consumes itself, we witness the consequences globally, increasingly powerful vested interests hold sway in so called democracies, polarising the divide, the social fabric disintegrates, and the world begins to convulse.
We have witnessed Brexit, Trump, civil unrest, our own electoral shifts, the established powers clinging on as the centre weakens, and the left and the right finding themselves curious bedfellows in opposing the establishment. All the while in this country, we have:
Trotters trotting to the trough. John Buckley McQuaid ‘Homeless Hotels’ (unpublished)
So what would a visitor from the past witness here? If Oisin were to return from the land of his youth:
His heart is still young ‘though he’s long in the tooth For want of a horse, he’ll be taking the Luas He used to be cool now he’s yesterday’s news. John Buckley McQuaid ‘Prodigal Kiss’
Maybe he’d notice the cherished children of the nation queueing outside the GPO. Maybe he’d
notice the obscenity of the tents in the city and the spectral figures begging for money. He might not even be sure what century he was in. He might notice the undeserving child eating its dinner off the ground outside the GPO.
So we had the Mother and Baby homes, the Industrial schools, the orphanages, the Magdalene laundries, the lunatic asylums, the Ferns report, the Ryan report…. those Girls who lived in hell:
Where cruelty prevailed
In gardens with forbidden trees
Whose walls we never scaled
John Buckley McQuaid ‘Girls Who Lived In Hell
What of the babies they left on our doorsteps What of the innocent girls that they shamed What of the idols they fearfully worshipped What of the bones that they buried unnamed What of the tears they pretend not to notice What of the orphanage blood in our veins What of the postcards that nobody posted Telling us where they could find the remains? John Buckley McQuaid ‘Dear Mister Taoiseach
Today we have our homeless hostels:
Children living on the street, leave these premises by ten, Every day’s a new defeat, seven, they’ll be back again John Buckley McQuaid ‘Here In Deirdre Land’
The homeless, who are forced:
To scrounge for a crust, and curse the hyenas betraying our trust. John Buckley McQuaid ‘Homeless Hotels’
Today we live in an open air Magdalene laundry, again sanctioned by the State, (and there are no high walls,) where the vulnerable are shoved into single rooms in hotels, battened on by private interests – if they’re in the way, they can be shovelled into a machine to clear them off the streets.
In the land of polished halos, nothing ever changes….
Undercurrent of Sadness
The undercurrent of sadness on this album by John Buckley McQuaid, himself an emigrant who lives in Denmark, is something that will actually suck you in, challenging the paralysis, indifference and passivity here, the ongoing connivance with the Church:
There’s a crowd of ghosts on O Connell Street And a spire where a pillar used to be Now the city boasts a mighty tourist fleet While the Liffey’s full of longing for the sea…. John Buckley McQuaid ‘Prodigal Kiss’
Nothing ever changes. Nothing ever changes, in the land of polished halos…….
Comfort’s a terribly cruel addiction, Comfort may never be cured, Comfort is closing its eyes to affliction Comfort just won’t be disturbed John Buckley McQuaid ‘Comfort Just Won’t Be Disturbed’ (unpublished lyric)
The prod of a pitchfork might cure it.
There’s a distant sound of drumming From the prisons of the poor Soon the pitchforks will be coming To administer the cure.
We should hang ourselves in private
For the greater common good And they dared us to survive it Or to write it down in blood. John Buckley McQuaid ‘Likes Of You And Me’ (unpublished lyric)
The depressed souls in our world serve a useful function – the first to be picked off in a dysfunctional, valueless world – as an unheeded warning to the stampeding herd hurtling over a cliff.
Sins of the Father
The children of the Celtic rodent may bang away on their pianos, but the Sins of the Father will be visited on them.
Dreams may be real for the freaks and the fools Finding employments like winning the pools Thats why we sent him to all the right schools Freedom is freedom to follow our rules John Buckley McQuaid ‘Follow Our Rules’ (unpublished lyric)
And what of this boy? I’m looking for a child With a heart of gold Stars in his eyes And a long way to go. John Buckley McQuaid ‘Looking For A Child’ (from the album Call It Love)
The Dreams of a child. The Dreams of a nation. Who dreams of being a pig?
Take a look in that cracked looking glass, and you may see the reflection of a lipsticked pig, possibly your own. You might ask yourself the question: is compassion possible in a land with a legacy of Church and State being so inextricably intertwined?
As a barrister I am given to quoting from Shakespeare’s plays in closing speeches. This may seem pretentious, but I find his acute observations on the human condition continue to speak to juries, and judges. He remains highly relevant to legal education, and indeed the practice of law. I would go so far as to say that a good knowledge of his work provides a real advantage to any practitioner.
William Shakespeare’s Birthplace.
Stratford-upon-Avon
Recently, I was delighted to have the opportunity to appear in a rare in-person trial in Royal Leamington Spa, which is in Shakespeare’s home county of Warwickshire. I recalled John Betjeman’s poem about dying in the town, whose name conjures images of Bertie Wooster on a bucolic retreat:
oh, you know that the stucco is peeling.
Do you know that the heart will stop?
From those yellow Italianate arches
Do you hear the plaster drop?
Times have changed. To my chagrin, Leamington Spa is not actually a spa town – any longer at least – but is just a short hop from Stratford-on-Avon, Shakespeare’s birthplace, where I stayed for the duration of proceedings.
Thehouse where Shakespeare was born was previously an ale house and is now a museum. Nearby, in The Holy Trinity Church, lies his grave, which contains a stern warning that his bones should remain in situ.
Unfortunately, the well-preserved Anne Hathaway House was closed for the duration of my stay, but the exterior and gardens were at least visible. Likewise, the complex of theatres – home to the Royal Shakespeare Company – were also no go in this bleak period for the performing arts.
Shakespeare’s era was marked by recurring plague, tyranny and civil strife, themes according to Stephen Greenbelt’s Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics (2018) the Bard approached obliquely, for fear of persecution. Under conditions of tyranny, public art may still be an outlet for mockery of the powerful. Thus we find in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
In what follows I recite some of Shakespeare’s lines that inform my understanding of our present world.
Neither a borrower nor a lender be. (Polonius, Hamlet)
In the light of the bailing out of toxic banks – socialism for the mega rich – and the infliction of austerity, being indebted now brings serious dangers. With so much crime linked to social exclusion and poverty, it is as if we are returning to an era of Debtors’ Prisons, ubiquitous in Shakespeare’s day.
The late David Graeber’s excellent book Debt: the First 5,000 Years(2011) precisely illustrates how debt, and now student debt in particular, is creating a permanent rentier class with no educational outlet for upward mobility, and low prospects of home ownership, at least for those who don’t have access to the bank of Mum and Dad.
The power of bankers in contemporary society should lead to consideration of The Merchant of Venice, which, apart from dreadful antisemitism – Shakespeare often expressed the prejudices of his day – provides a searing attack on the sin of usury, the existence of which is conveniently ignored by far right Christians today.
In the play, Portia (Bassano’s betrothed who finds himself in a spot of bother after taking on a debt on unfavourable terms from Shylock) presents herself in court, disguised as a male lawyer, and pleads for mercy against the enforcement of the bond, which is the extraction of a pound of flesh.
Shylock and Portia (1835) by Thomas Sully
In a famous passage she argues:
The quality of mercy is not strained, it dropped as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath: it is twice blessed, it blessed him that gives, and him that takes, tis mightiest in the mightiest, it becomes the throned monarch better than his crown, His sceptre shows the force of temporal power, the attribute to awe and majesty, wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings: But mercy is above this sceptred sway, it is enthroned in the heart of kings, it is an attribute to God himself; and earthly power doth then show likes god’s, when mercy seasons justice…
Shylock responds with a narrow vision of justice that sadly is all too familiar in our time of dispossessions:
I crave the law, the penalty and forfeit of my bond.
Portia then shifts ground and cleverly argues that the bond should be enforced but:
The bond gives thee there no jot of blood – The words expressly are a pound of flesh … Then take they bond, take thou thy pound of flesh, but in the cutting it, if thou dost shed one drop of Christian blood, thy lands and goods are by the laws of Venice confiscate … For as thou urge justice, be assured, thou shalt have justice more than thou deserts.
In this morality tale, therefore, Shylock – unlike our contemporary bankers in most cases – is forestalled in his extraction of the pound of flesh. If only such arguments against the extraction of financial flesh were available to barristers defending the disposed today.
Three daughters of King Lear by Gustav Pope
The True Criminals
So who are the true criminals today? Shakespeare offered an answer through the medium of the wise Fool in Kind Lear:
What art mad. A man may see how this world goes with no eyes. Look with thine ears see how yon justice rails upon yon simple thief. Hark in thine ear, change places, and handy dandy, what is the justice which is the thief.
Governments bail out Goldman Sachs and other banks. There are no repercussions for their reckless lending, save in Nordic countries like Iceland. But If Jean Valjean steals a loaf of bread, they pursue him to the ends of the Earth to extract the pound of flesh.
Similarly, if you become a whistle-blower and reveal the machinations of the powerful such as Julian Assange, then you are turned into a criminal, while Messrs Blair, Kissinger, and indeed Varadkar, are never forced to face the music.
Amanda Knox
The lady doth protest too much, methinks, (Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 2).
Stacey Schiff’s Witches: Salem 1692 (2015) observes how the hysteria of witch hunts appear to represent a sublimation of pre-existing grievances, and envy. This remains the case for modern day witch hunts such as that directed against Amanda Knox, which have been highlighted by the Innocence Project.
The book makes clear that children can be manipulated into holding false belief, even to the extent that they incriminate themselves. False allegations are also linked to hysterical parents or authority figures. As occurred in Amanda Knox’s case, young minds are easily turned to mush by persistent questioning, fear of authority, and interaction with nefarious police officers and social workers.
This is what is referred to as falsely implanted memory syndrome, on which subject Elizabeth Loftus and Maggie Bruck are experts.
Categorising someone as a witch or a warlock also reflects jealousy if that person holds a gift you do not possess. Seen in Freudian terms, it is a form of transference of perceived inadequacies.
All that glisters is not gold. (The Merchant of Venice, Act 2, Scene 7)
This zeitgeist is one of post-truth amorality, a phenomenon with long antecedents. In King Lear we hear that ‘a scurvy politician seems to see the thing thou does not’; while Henry VI speaks of: ‘Stuffing the ears of men with false reports’, which seems curiously relevant to Covid Times.
Purveyors of nonsense and incomprehensible prose – the structuralists and post-modernists who took over the universities – represent a movement, or grouping, united in their rejection of universal values. Relativism leads to the dismissal of evidence, rationality, science, rigour, precision and all the integrative forces that tie society together, as Noam Chomsky has observed: ‘if I am missing something, then show me what it is, in terms I can understand.’
The first point to note about the post modernists nonsense is that it has encouraged a distrust of the truth and an atmosphere of looseness and imprecision, wherein any old argument, or moral position, is accorded equal weight.
In 2005 the lateDavid Foster Wallace observed that this created an epistemic free-for-all in which any truth is seen from the vantage of perspective and agenda.
Relativistic and structuralist ideas such as the indeterminacy of texts, alternative ways of knowing and the instability of language fed into Trump and his aides saying that every word he utters should not be taken literally. Just as a text by Derrida could contradict itself, similarly Trump can jump from one inconsistency to the next.
The work of The Innocence Project is littered with examples of perjured evidence, false and fabricated claims and cognitive and confirmation bias by experts or pseudo experts, which have led to wrongful convictions. All too many innocent people are incarcerated on the basis of lies. With the embrace of subjectivity, we are celebrating opinion over knowledge, feelings over facts.
Confirmation bias applies where people rush to judgment, and give into their prejudices, rather than evaluating evidence.
According to Evan Davies in his recent book Post Truth, one aspect of all this bullshit is a desire to believe something unreasonable to be true. Pope Francis sagely remarked that ‘There is no such thing as harmless disinformation: trusting in falsehood can have dire consequences.’
There is no such thing as harmless disinformation; trusting in falsehood can have dire consequences.
To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man. (Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 3)
In general, social media is weaving a web of deceit and destroying the social fabric through lies, disinformation, smears, and character assassination. Pierre Omidyar a founder of eBay argued that the monetization and manipulation of information is rapidly tearing us apart.
Trolls and bots were unleased by Trump, Bannon, and Cambridge Analytica to spread disinformation in the U.S presidential election, undermining democratic institutions and fact-driven debates.
Now the social media platforms have moved on to shilling for Big Pharma – laying the ground for a Screen New Deal – while shutting down alternative assessments of the pandemic, and unprofitable treatments.
It leads me to an unhappy conclusion that we increasingly developing a generation of technocratic fascist, selfish, materialistic ultra-conformists receptive to post-truth deception. The silos they occupy reinforce their prejudices. It is less important now to establish the truth than to ask whose side you are on.
As Cicero, a minor character in Julius Caesar remarks:
Indeed, it is as strange, disposed time but men may construe things after their fashion clean from the purpose of things themselves.
Lies in fact have become intrinsic to commercial and business interaction. In The People of the Lie(1983) Scott Peck contends that Evil is untruth, undermining life and liveliness. Such people operate by covert means. Evil people, Peck argues, scapegoat others, and cover up their misdeeds. They prevent the rest of us from making informed choices. Evil is also linked to a self-image of respectability and, as Peck defines it, the exercise of coercive power, often by authority figures. Evil is also surprisingly obedient to authority.
In contrast, in times of stress those who genuinely good people, even in times of acute stress, do not desert principles.
Hannah Arendt presaged our Brave New World.
The ideal subject for totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (standards of thought) no longer exists.
Cry “havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war, (Mark Antony, Julius Caesar)
The film, Wag the Dog witnesses the beginning of a fake war. Today, apart from military engagements that are generally played out on our television screens – such as Iraq and Afghanistan – there are new types of fake wars. The War on Drugs is a smokescreen that obscures failure to deal with the root causes in poverty and austerity. Now the war on the virus – a disproportionate reaction to a significant but not overwhelming public health crisis – has generated unprecedented panic.
People are told to comply or face gruesome death. But how safe are we really in these circumstances? We will not be safe in authoritarian police states with restrictions on liberty, freedom of movement, privacy and associational or community ties. Nor will we be necessarily safe from a plethora of hastily tested pharmaceutical products, enforced by so-called vaccine passports.
How to subjugate the world population? Create a hyper real sense of emergency. Engender panic, leading to compliance and deference
Should we disassociate ourselves from the unvaccinated? Even putting it in these terms shows how admen dominate the discourse.
The disproportionate response to the pandemic represents a fascist creep. People are desensitized to loss of liberty once they are in fear of their lives, and increasingly dependent on the state for the pile of gruel it so generously provides, having removed any prospect of employment for hundreds of thousands in precarious work.
Meanwhile, the corporate law firms and mega rich have won big in our new version of disaster capitalism usingModern Money Theory to oil the chains of patronage.
Thus, whether centrally orchestrated, or more likely arising out a coalition of vested interests, and made possible through an increasingly uneducated, desperate and compliant population, COVID-19 has brought us the Shock Doctrine par excellence.
Procession of Characters from Shakespeare’s Plays. Artist unkown.
The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones. (Mark Anthony, Julius Caesar)
The problem of evil in our times is embodied in extremism, fundamentalism, draconian laws, high consumerism, and the negation of the rule of law. Today, unselfish communal behaviour go unrewarded, while the innocent are framed.
What is left of compassion, sincerity, truth, community, and optimism? Well at least we can still find it in the poetry of Shakespeare.
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed.
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed.
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owls.
Nor shall death brag thou wander in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’s:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Put simply, love conquers all. Or should. The Bard of Avon has much to say in these troubled times.
Featured Image: Lear and Cordelia by William Blake.
Picture the scene: the small backyard of a tiny working-class pub in Belfast at around 8pm on a dark Autumn night. I am smoking with a friend, older by a few years, and with way more life experience, talking about books. A dim-light is ebbing away, further subdued by the frosted glass of the bar-door. He looks at me and says: ‘Strumpet City (James Plunkett‘s 1969 novel) is a good book’. I did not take the time to ask about the work as the conversation was rolling along, covering other novels about Ireland which we had both read, and were reading, or intended to read.
Here were two talking heads, tongues loosened and wagging after a couple of pints. Yet somewhere in the back, ploughed, crow-lifting fields of my sub-conscious, the adjective ‘Strumpet’ and the noun ‘City’ lodged as an unlikely pairing; lighting a candle of intrigue that would burn inside my brain. A decade has sailed past since then.
Cut to a month ago, and I am in my local library with the mad literary hunger on me – the reading hunger. This is where one desires material to satisfy personal taste and preference. For me this is for a well-written and narrated book. And not what I find so demoralising: one that bends down on one knee to the easily accessible, clichéd fountain whose water(s) flow tepidly, and which is, in the beginning, saccharine sweet but gives way to a brackish and unpalatable torpor.
I pick the work up and thumb through its 549 pages. A novel of heft, requiring dedication it seems. I bring it to the desk, and steal away into a showery, sun-lit Wednesday evening with the novel safely stowed inside my bag.
Strumpet City is an historical-led novel which sets out… well… this is a work which, ostensibly, is about the Dublin Lockout(s) of the early twentieth century, narrating fictional, and real, lives of the people involved, including the almost mythological Union leader, Jim Larkin (1874-1947), who James Plunkett previously worked for as his secretary.
This is a novel of coal, ash, and soot. Of wasps amongst blackberries; of hunger and of greed; a novel of slum dwellings and collapsing dockside houses; a work which radiates a stench of unclean bodies and souls, in dire need of cleansing and thorough rituals of purification brought to task.
There is an alcoholic priest who loses his mind due to the drink, whiskey, and on one occasion, topples a coffin off its trestles. It tips over, and the enclosed incumbent resident, due to the lid springing open, falls out, rolling on to the floor. The widowed wife, upon seeing this, screams and two priests soon come over, calm her down and take her away from the morbid scene. The priest, a Father Giffley (memorably played by Cyril Cusack in a memorable 1980 RTE adaptation), is found, soon thereafter, prostrate at the foot of the altar, face-down, unaware of the immoral chaos he has just created and is dozing away.
There is Rashers Tierney, the almost toothless, romantic wanderer who is dirt poor but in the ownership of a rarefied wit and tongue which darts rebuttals in defiance of perceived, and real, attacks; with his mongrel, Rusty, and a penny-whistle in tow. Rashers, as my Belfast friend would have said, ‘Hasn’t a bar in his grate.’
Father O’Connor is the moral authority in the book, a ‘sky pilot’ who turned his back on the riches of a diocese more becoming of his class. He finds his spiritual bedfellow in the form of Mrs. Bradshaw, the face of female humility; in contrast to the encompassing greed of her ideologue, capitalist husband. However, there is an artifice to O’Connor too, which yields a quavering hatred to his position as sitting tenure in the local, disenfranchised, Dublin district which he does acknowledge but does not run away from, which would be the coward’s option. No. He has staying commendable power and you feel for him.
There is a terrible accident at a coal yard and you feel empathy for big Mulhall and the further poverty his family will suffer in its wake.
There are wonderful characters, including Fitz, Hennessy and Mary, set against the backdrop of the 1913 Lockout; striking dockers; the stamping foot(s) of the law and the piercing, shrill whistles of authority. This novel, let me tell you, has a social-economic range, and has it in abundance.
This is not a work to compare to the quotidian, creative deliciousness’ of Joyce’s Ulysses. On this, I have read a good few books, and have many, many more to grapple with, but having read some of Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekov, and other Russian masters’ creations, this work here, Strumpet City, is, in my view, the Irish equivalent, and a masterpiece.
In Ireland, North and South, the Arts Sector, currently, is a sinecure. Those middle-class mentalities which dominate, and, indeed, hold most high profile positions, would argue vehemently against such – as they would see it – an offensive statement, but nevertheless I believe it to be a fair characterisation.
‘Stephen says bitterly, “It is the symbol of Irish Art. The cracked lookingglass of the servant.” This was Stephen Dedalus’s view in Joyce’s modernist magnum opus, Ulysses, and we find this idiom pre-settling into an ‘independent’ Republic as a statement on colonial subjugation, and a lack of confidence in the national character. And since that imperial rule withdrew, neoliberal, self-serving attitudes, have moved – and settled – in as they have done across the Western World.
With the arrival of mass market production, relentless advertising and consumerism, which took over Irish sensibilities around twenty years ago, Ireland became no different to elsewhere.
Up to €7 for a pint of ‘Stout’ in Temple Bar?! Dublin rents going through the roof, past the cloud-clapped ivory towers and beyond into the dazzling astral heights, for pure unadulterated profit. This is an Ireland I do not care to recognise anymore. Everything, including morality, is up for sale.
With the internet, one can purchase the ‘lookingglass’ and have it in your hand the next day if one so wishes; but it will, inevitably, end up being tossed away, into landfill, soon thereafter. We live in ephemeral ‘throwaway’ times. Qualities like validity, truth and morality are diminished – and indeed ‘blend’ into ‘fiction-meets-truth’ in an Orwellian-era of ‘fake news’, outright lies and endless spin.
Ireland enjoys intellects but only if they are not overtly clever, and don’t create a sense of inferiority. Does the cracked lookingglass serve as a basis for the national character or identity?
A deep resonance of shame bubbles up from oppressiveness, whether it is indoctrination through the Catholic Church and a State which could not separate the two; and, in the wake of centuries of Viking, Norman, and indeed Anglo-Saxon, subjugation a deep hurt has not even been addressed. The need for a healing process in the collective psyche has not been considered by the remote heads of the post-modernist, mildly liberal, and increasingly secularised state.
Ireland was banished, but she was not razed and buried; she would return. And return she did onto her fertile isle, on the edge of Western Europe – the land of milk and honey, so rich in potential and verdant imagination.
It is true: I am in love with Ireland as landscape; and the mythical potency brings to mind an unconforming otherness – which espouses freedoms that rouse the romantic variant in a wanderer.
There is, however, now the prescient, palpitating and unresolved issue of the published writer: the ego, which conflates on the surface area of their proposed brilliance, leading to the belief that they, and their literary output, rival, and even surpasses the authors of literary Classics. In effect, canonising their own brand – this is where we are.
Let me add, that the Western World’s Canonical Works are up there for a reason, they are regarded as ‘the Classics’ and should be read and championed as such. A ‘Classic’ can be considered a strongly composed noteworthy book.
Among the writers who are generally considered the most important in Western literature are: Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides, Virgil, Horace, Geoffrey Chaucer, Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare, François Rabelais, Jean Racine, Molière, Miguel de Cervantes, Michel de Montaigne, John Milton, Samuel Johnson, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, William Wordsworth, Jane Austen, Stendhal, Walt Whitman, Gustave Flaubert, Emily Dickinson, Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy, Henrik Ibsen, Sigmund Freud, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, William Faulkner, Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, Albert Camus and Samuel Beckett.
The first writer to use the term ‘classic’ was Aulus Gellius, a second century AD Roman writer who, in the miscellany Noctes Atticae (19, 8, 15), refers to a writer as a classicus scriptor, non proletarius (‘A distinguished, not a commonplace writer’). Such classification began with the Greeks’ ranking their cultural works, with the word canon (‘carpenter’s rule’).
Moreover, early Christian Church Fathers used canon to rank the authoritative texts of the New Testament, preserving them, given the expense of vellum and papyrus and mechanical book reproduction. Thus, being placed in a canon ensured a book’s preservation as the best way to retain information about a civilization.
Contemporarily, the Western canon defines the best of Western culture. In the ancient world, at the Alexandrian Library, scholars coined the Greek term Hoi enkrithentes (‘the admitted’, ‘the included’) to identify the writers in the canon.
If you are a writer with a couple of books in print, and if you deride these works because you are so high upon your stamping, nose-blustering, mighty charger, due to being published, I am sorry, but this is out-and-out naïveté. It is emotional, inferior narcissism and ego-led savagery and in its way, denigrates the reputations of great writers of the past and their output.
Recently, reading an interview in which a writer stated that they did not, or could not, raise a little interest towards Jack Kerouac’s Beat Classic, On the Road, equating the experience with hitting one’s head ‘with a plastic spoon.’ – a petulant and unworthy response.
Infantilised Youth Culture
Infantilization of culturally accepted ‘norms’ through Happy Meals’ language, ‘LOLs’, and other solipsistic accepted ‘bant’ has led us down this cul-de-sac. Snowflake is used as a pejorative term. Other ‘trendy’ Smartphone-induced abbreviated terms such as ‘Merch’ and ‘Bae’: are now the common argot of an infantilised youth culture that permeates mainstream discourse.
Any perceived ‘criticism’ of these so called ‘established writers’ i.e., a writer who has a recent published book on the shelves, is meted out with condemnations and calls the gallows! In this solidarity, an insidious, irrational, emotionally-charged cabal is missing the point.
The media in Ireland love to promote long established writers and their works, but they routinely forget the Garret-based writers who slog bravely away by a figurative candle over their ‘Art’.
Please, fellow scribes, do not ‘Drown’ your ‘book’ like Prospero. Do not become disheartened because you are not alone. Your magic is your own and do not let it die because of the success of mediocre fare, which publishing houses choose to release.
Irish publishers, like UK publishers, and American publishers, are greedy for a quick return on profit and this mantra only serves their deity, the golden calf of money. Forget this wide-eyed, commandeering for a few hedonisms, and continue on.
Yeatsian Revival
Simply because Ireland has a vibrant literary-cultural inheritance – which came to the fore especially during the Yeatsian Irish Literary Revival from the turn of the twentieth century – should not, ergo, give prominence to literary reputations simply on the assumption they are part of a great tradition. Extreme reverence is the death-knell of strongly composed literature, which is kept in its primordial place for lack of oxygen, dragging itself off to the literary hinterlands, to peer through fissures of granite rock – redundant.
There are simply too many Creative Writing Courses being run in universities, which gladly take a student’s money – assuming they pay it up front and often – in order to place their ego on a pedestal; but the massive issue with this kind of fawning is that it misses the whole point of literature, which is to enjoy the simple immersive experience of reading something new, fresh, challenging that sets you upon the unknown territories of an adventure, knapsack in tow.
In Brian Friel’s Philadelphia, Here I Come, the main protagonist, ‘Gar’ Gareth O’Donnell, has a public and private self, played by two actors. The mimetic structures of the ego, in the Irish Literary Art’s Scene(s) do not allow for any logical critique – this kind of thought is placed in emotional narcissism, firmly rooted in insecurity: the public image of oneself in a position of power and the private self behind pulled chintz curtains. Seemingly, the paradoxical self is difficult for the Irish mentality to examine closely.
The Commentariat
Who are the Irish commentariat on which these assertions are based? One does not have to look too far: remember when Roddy Doyle, a decent Dublin novelist, took a few naïve swipes at Joyce’s masterpiece:
‘Ulysses could have done with a good editor,’ Doyle told a stunned audience in New York gathered to celebrate the great man who is credited with inventing the modern novel.
‘You know people are always putting Ulysses in the top ten books ever written but I doubt that any of those people were really moved by it.’
‘I only read three pages of Finnegans Wake and it was a tragic waste of time,’ he added. ‘Dubliners was Joyce’s best work, but Ulysses was undeserving of reverence.”
According to Richard Ellmann’s biography Joyce was once described as ‘A corner boy who spits in the Liffey.’ Jealously appears to lie behind denunciations such as Roddy Doyle’s.
The reality is that many aspiring Irish novelist are forced into work that prevents them from writing: no one doubts this, but many working class writers are living on the breadline; the cultural establishment response: ‘Ah, he’s grand’ desensitizes them to this struggle.
They may console themselves, ‘Sure, he was rejected thirty-seven times.’ Well, Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was rejected over a hundred times – so statistics have little relevance, especially considering a lot of agents don’t know their furnished onions from their hot potatoes? The author of Moby Dick, Herman Melville, died in abject poverty. Those who seek justification in ‘statistics’ lack in the cold reasoning of logic.
The effete North – once a fertile ground for freedom of expression, and in around the harrowed fields of poetry, has been conquered by a small literary clique, who look out from their parapets, pouring scorn on anyone who dares to have the tenacity to write ‘good’ work – work which they see as threatening to their output.
A few diminutive literary-based, artsy, types run pop-ups and suchlike, now and again, as an alternative to the mainstream, but some, most, fall like a bright star into the slopping wetness of the Lagan, or the Foyle, only to have their inner-core frazzled and inevitably extinguished – another avenue burnt-out.
There will be those who will be quick to trot out, on horseback, with lances aloft, with ‘Ah, sure he has a chip on his shoulder,’ and other negative, quick-to-judge, comments. My riposte to this is: yes, I do have a chip, or rather the plural, ‘chips’, one on each shoulder, which helps balance me out. They will use the term ‘bitterness’, but ‘frustration’ is more apt. Ingratitude will be another conceited proclamation.
Also, the Halo-Effect: this being the over-promotion of well-established writers, with no love left for the outsider, unknown writer. Ireland’s cultural media embargo on new and fresh writing is wan to say the least; anytime an important event comes along they wheel out figureheads. Michael Longley’s poem, ‘Ceasefire’ is often wheeled out upon a gurney; again to be speculated upon; again in times of conflict; but I can safely say Ulster Unionism, which Longley would identify himself with, would never get down upon their knees to kiss anyone’s hand except their aristocratic, they believe, betters.
Ireland’s media has an infatuation with their well-established poets – poets who have been hanging around for thirty years – waiting for them to come on stage to deliver homilies of breathy, dramatic words. A false panacea for ongoing violent times.
The cult of literary reverence and priesthood in the Irish poetry scene is archaic, embarrassing, and non-progressive, and equates to the mystical sorcery in a Harry Potter inspired world of fakery. The ‘everyone wants to be famous’ and well-regarded, and thought highly of as a ‘writer’ is a trope which has simply gone too far.
It is fine to have dreams and aspirations, but one has to put the hard work, through falling, in failure, by rejection, after derision, and in managing jealousy. One only has to look at the work which is coming out of university produced magazines to see this. Recently, I read a short story in an Irish newspaper, online edition, and I despaired. What I see is diaphanous clichéd fare time and time again.
Not so long ago, I conversed with a very fine, and clever, female Irish poet who is not well known in Ireland. She told me that she has given up trying to have her work published in any Irish Arts-led magazines as her work is continually rejected.
I have read her work, it is good, and all that I can summarise is that some of these Arts folk do not know what they are doing, but, or rather, what they really are doing is selecting the work of their chums and, indeed, the work of themselves, for publication.
These are magazines which are supposed to have a fair-handed, even democratic, selection process for work which is submitted from the four tent-pegged corners of the island of Ireland. Nepotism is rife in the Irish Arts scene. If you are a friend of a friend, nudge-nudge, wink-wink, then you are ‘A-Okay, pal…I will get you published,’ literary merit notwithstanding.
There are of course exceptions, with real talents. Colm Tóbín is up there with the alive Irish intelligentsia, as is John Banville, both are true novelists in the sense of sitting down to read, to learn, then to write their own work, in conformity with the traditional literary model, and they should be applauded for their due diligence. They have hauled long nets and reeled in empty lines for their patience and perseverance to their Art, to pay off in the end.
What is to be done?
Easy – read more books. Read the Classics. A good novel will lead you to a wood at dusk, whereupon you will find a finely woven thread of golden-silk, and, as night falls, slowly traverse the wood and feel, along with the golden-thread, a growing self-belief. That is the power of strong writing. Do not shy away from challenging yourself with any prejudicial assumptions around what a reading experience is, should, or could, be.
An grá is an gráin, say these two words out loud, say them out loud to yourself, out loud to the listening others around, and feel in your mouth how subtle the shift is between them; how the open mouth of love — grá — gets slighted by the brush of your tongue’s curled tip shaping hate — gráin; feel the quick lick it gives the roof of your mouth. It’s that kind of sliver, isn’t it, the one we know to be true; the one that suddenly shifts the friend or the lover to the one we don’t know or want to know. In shape and in sound, there in your mouth, Irish gathers together a distinction of meaning in a unity of resonance. Where the mind of English fragments and scatters, (say them too out loud, say love, say hate), Irish holds in an elemental poetry we need to participate in to sense.
Sometimes what language teaches us can be that visceral.
I am digging words in the Burren when I hit upon this realisation —
tá go leor eile, more abound, Siobhán chirps; an saoirse is an daoirse, an solas is an dolas; seo é an fhilíocht nádur atá le fáil sa teanga! Siobhán is leading us in an archaeological word excavation, amuigh san aer i gciorcal Hedge School, uncovering from Irish some sense of a way of being in the world we have only just forgotten. If we lost it in a generation, we can reclaim it in a generation. Dictionaries are scattered all around, I hold one in my lap, but there is no discussion here of the tuiseal ginideach, we are not being questioned about the modh coinniollach and all mentions of Peig are with endearment and jest. We are just picking words at random and letting the connective threads be woven from there and we weave them without trying. It feels illicit to use a dictionary in this way, and I love it. Here a space is opened of pure play, without the plámás of getting anything right. Here the severed head of Irish we suffered in school is reunited with our bodies — the vibrations in Irish are cosúil le Sanskrit — tugann sí fuinneamh láidir duit. Just feel and the rest will follow; this seems to be the unspoken mantra of the Wild Irish Retreat weekend.
Earlier that morning, the sun rising from behind Slieve Elva, Cearbhuil leads the women down to the hazel wood chun macnamih a dheanamh, to meditate, and we follow, trusting this woman who is keeper of this land; and we go down to the hazel wood, and there’s a stillness in our hearts. We’ve been invited to observe a noble silence and so our passage through the curly tendrils is punctuated only by snaps of twigs, the brush of branches newly leafing and birdsong from birds I have no name for, not in either tongue. And we pause then as Cearbhuil stops and simply says — éist — just listen. No crossed legs, no chanting, nothing specific to learn, we are simply tuning in to what is here, all around us; we are simply letting our civilised bodies contact the coill, and letting the coill touch deep into us. And later, when Cearbhuil leads us again, now through a forage walk on the land chun lón a sholáthar, we listen then too, not just to the names that fall like small prayers to all the invisible Gods, slanlóg, nóinín, neantóg, casairbháin, but to all the reverence is an méad meas atá ann in this woman’s gestures; we’re listening to all the wisdom in her fingers that know when to pluck, what to leave and how to reap without plundering. It is simple, even obvious, and so all the more unbelievable that we need to be shown how to see what is in front of us and all around us; an leigheas is an maitheas ag fás go fiáin. As if nothing has happened, all the goodness and plenitude of the land is still offered— here, the seamsóg extends itself —here, the seamair dhearg —had we but sense and right vision to see. Tá gach rud fós ann, I hear whispered in my head.
I spoke of these Iseas in Croke Park recently, ideas that have been forming around me and inside of me that were inspired by John Moriarty and my experience of hurling. He gave me leave to understand the world for myself, deferring to no one.https://t.co/b5U0XPU5FD
And then on the beach with Diarmuid, the same principles we have absorbed from Siobhán and Cearbhuil without any direct tutelage apply now to the game of hurling; listen, play, be here in your body. There are real players on the trá, none more so than Diarmuid who seems to skip through the sand goat-like, whilst my legs are heavy pillars that have to be heaved and hefted to keep up with the ball. But this game is not about cé mhéad blianta atá ar do dhroim; it’s not about how many times you’ve kitted out in any coloured jersey. Here, now, with the crashing waves of Fanore in our ears, we return to the pleasure of simply pucking a ball. We léim go hard, we scuttle for the liathróid, we roar anseo to each other, and when we scramble too fast ahead of ourselves, get too caught up in a race to get, Diarmuid beckons us to stop and asks us to check in with ourselves; éistigí cad atá ar siúl i do chorp. Stay with the place of ease, cé comh éasca can you make it lads, don’t strain. And while there may be taithí go leor leis an cluiche ar cuid daoine, none of us have much experience in that. Play till you’re played out; win at whatever cost. Something in us knew that wasn’t the way it had to be, but we had no guidance in respecting the rhythm of our nádur; how to join effort with ease, doing with non-doing. And then, as if in an ancient ritual of bowing to our human limitation, when the hurls are finally cast aside, we throw ourselves into an Atlantach fiáin herself; engulfed in the white and the rush of her embrace; tógtha.
Of course, there is much more that could be shared here about cad atá ar siúl leis an Wild Irish Retreats. I could tell you about the food, not just cé comh blásta is atá sé, but how it is prepared with such care and attention; slow cooking at its finest. And even more, how it is served to you, with grace and kind eyes; accompaniments you didn’t know you needed and that nourish far into the depths of you. And the music, and the fire, and the joy of being together at last. But I am not offering an advertisement here. If this sounds like a sale’s pitch, it isn’t. If you think I’m trying to convince you of something, I’m not. The arguments for Irish are many; many more those for how to rescue ourselves from our current catastrophe and our abominable alienation from the land. This is not a proof, nor is it a plea, this is simply a love song; a song of praise. This is just a need to acknowledge my luck of having returned home, after many years away, to find myself among mo mhuintir arís, ag caint as gaeilge, le mo dhá chosa ar an talamh. This is just to sing that it feels like a dream I am still not waking from; to sing because it is hard to say what it has all opened in me, because I feel it to be opening still. I offer these words as a return song then, a homecoming tune for the other way; what these wild Irish legends are demonstrating. There’s nothing you need to know, nothing to do, nothing to fix, there’s just letting go; there’s just peeling back the thick layers of our resistance, our wilful control, so that other dimension of our being can re-surface; the one who did not get us into this mess; the one whose skin trembles and dances with the sheer delight of being here; the one who is fós fiáin. Go down to Clare, go down to Kerry, and be with the Wild Irish Retreat folk if it calls you, if it be within your means. If it doesn’t, if you can’t, find your own way back. But claim it —claim the part of you that can’t be claimed; the place in you no worldly concern, no worry or slight of ill-will can reach; the place in you that is open, playful, fluid flúirseach. You don’t need anything special. Open your mouth, lig amach í; slip back i ngrá
If stylistically Francesca Banciu’s latest novel translated into English Fleeing Father (Vatherflucht) is a much simpler construct than her previous incarnation, Mother’s Day – Song of a Sad Mother, it is written in the same inimitable prose, rendered beautifully by Banciu’s publisher, Catharine Nicely with Elena Mancini as translator.
I was immediately reminded, on reading the first few pages, of Ernest Hemingway’s dictum ‘write just one true sentence’ multiplied by every passing line. A rule that is simple in its apparent ruling, but whose practical implications are wrought with sinister complexity.
You’re worthless, nothing will ever come of you. And no one in this world will ever marry you. Father said to motivate me.
The staccato punch of the lines hits the reader as ceaselessly as I imagine Carmen-Francesca Banciu punching the keys of her typewriter-computer. The fact that all quotation marks have been jettisoned is a wonderfully seamless way of incorporating the almost casually brutality of the father’s remarks into his ten-year-old daughter’s worldview.
It is matter of fact, a ‘this is how it is’ Hemingwayesque, simple complexity which renders the text, or rather the reality that is portrayed in the text, into a highly ambivalent and stylistic reading, which personally I find extremely refreshing.
A kind of brutal clarity emerges akin to the visual sumptuousness of Stanley Kubrick’s visual narrative. I suppose the reason for such taut precision is the uncluttered narrative technique of the writer; the absence of sub-clauses.
Banciu is a kind of Anti-Proust in this respect, which is curious as I happen to be a huge fan of the Parisian narrator and veritable King of complex sentence structure. But, surely this is where form fuses equally with content. Banciu is not describing the fin de siècle opulence of decadent Paris, but rather the almost spartan livelihoods of Nicolae Ceauşescu’s Socialist Republic of Romania which she grew up in. So, the prose is just as spartan. Brutal.
Ironically, as a reader who happened to grow up during the 1980s, and so can remember quite clearly the revolution and eventual fall of the Dictator, his bloody corpse appearing to me in black and white splashed across the front page of Liberation in miniature while the hawklike head of Samuel Beckett took up the majority of the page (his death having been announced and deemed more important that day in his native Paris), I see parallels with the misery of my own upbringing in the cold and extremely repressive Republic of Ireland during that same period, and so can empathise enormously with Banciu.
The almost reflexive callousness is all too familiar. There is a sexual assault, for example, merely mentioned in passing already five pages into the novel. Domestic violence too, in the form of corporal punishment inflicted upon children, as was standard practice of the time. Spare the rod, and all that.
So, Banciu’s childhood world will be a very familiar one to anyone reading the novel in Ireland who grew up during the eighties, which is a savage indictment in itself of the collective misery which was inflicted on a whole generation here, not to mention people growing up in socialist Romania.
So, the Socialist Republic of Romania and Catholic Republic of Ireland, despite the superficial difference in ideologies, held a lot in common.
One of the central ideas that conjoin both regimes, I couldn’t help noticing while reading Fleeing Father, was the obsession with maintaining appearances on the parts of the protagonist’s parents, and how parents who bought into both regimes were willing to sacrifice the lives of their children in order to maintain the appearance of social order.
This is the most frightening thing about all of Banciu’s fiction, how mothers and fathers will put the happiness and well-being of their own children at the service of the status quo. I saw the very same subservience as a child growing up in the Irish Republic, and while the outward trappings of a police state, constantly surveying on the citizens, may have had a very different modus operandi – the Church filling in for the network of informers which supplied the state police in Romania with information on ‘undesirables’ – what were the mass confessionals which we grew up with as children but a very elaborate way of keeping us in line, even worse, when you think of it as we were programmed, and from a very young age, to inform on ourselves!
All the familiar trappings of patriarchy are here. The subservient mother, at the service of both state and husband. Banciu’s father, as in her novel, was high up in the party and an avid believer in the subservience of the individual for the betterment of the state.
As cognizant as Father wanted to be, he’d never learned Russian. Nor any other foreign language for that matter. It meant he was an anti-talent, unlike my mother.
How I found reading this all too familiar. The fundamental ignorance of the man, the belittling nature of his ways to anything that was foreign to him. Governed by paranoia and fear.
But mother wore high heels that emphasized her gorgeous
Legs. Whether it had been her will or not. Who knows.
Father loved it in any case. And that’s also how she was buried.
Again, the casual way of effacement, Banciu’s staccato sentences dispatch characters with the same casual and disdainful force as the state system and apparatus that kept the Romanian people in check. Like the callous Church that lied to so many here, who suffered all kinds of abuse at the hands of so many priests, and teachers, politicians, and other so- called pillars of society that tried to protect and hide them.
Of course, Carmen- Francesca Banciu rebelled against them all, and ran away to Berlin. Just as I went to Paris. Such a repressive upbringing fuels your creativity for life. Of course, the ideological systems change, just as the means of surveillance do, but the inherent nature to control the populace is still the same, and as long as there are people who rebel books like Fleeing Father will continue to be written. Would that they were all written as well and clearly, and well – thought out though!
Vaterflucht (Flight from Father), 1998 by Francesca Banciu (translated from the German by Elena Mancini) 309 pages.
I was briefly a Professor of Law and International Relations at the Anglo-American University in Prague, near where the Jewish, German-speaking Kafka was born and raised.
Before arriving, I had acquired a superficial knowledge of the main sights, which are somewhat deceptive and largely unrewarding in that rich tapestry of a city – of which it has been written that by the end of the nineteenth century, ‘deprived of political significance, abandoned by the aristocracy, commercially and industrially backward, [it] had the feeling of an industrial city, suffused by the elegiac atmosphere of a glorious past.’[i]
Apart from heavy industry – the Czech Republic retains a glorious rail infrastructure – the Prague of that period can be likened to Dublin in the wake of the 1801 Act of Union, after which it fell into terminal decline. And, indeed, Arne Novak’s description of the Czech national temperament might apply to the Irish literati: ‘continually fluctuating between two poles: on the one hand a self-righteous over-estimation of everything native, with a stubborn clinging to ancient privileges; on the other hand, impatient curiosity about the latest foreign literary fashions, and a readiness for slavish imitation.’[ii]
Nonetheless both nations, dominated by two cultural blocks – the British Empire and the European Catholic Church in the case of the Irish; Germany or Austria and Russia or the Soviet Union in the case of the Czechs – have produced literary titans, who have railed as much against native subservience as against colonial usurpers.
Thus, in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) Stephen Daedalus calls himself ‘the servant of two masters,’ indicting ‘The imperial British state’ and ‘the holy Roman catholic and apostolic church’, while Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk (1923), also written in the shadow of the Great War, remains one of the great anti-war novels.
In this article I focus on two Czechs authors, the aforementioned Franz Kakfa, and Milan Kundera whose response in different epochs, to imperialist oppression, provide important insights for contemporary challenges.
Prague Spring
It is in Prague’s shadowy labyrinth of side streets, with a rich diversity of specialist shops and bookstores – fast disappearing from other urban conurbations – that one finds the real gems. Apart from brief excursions, my knowledge of the Czech Republic had mostly been gleaned from cinema and literature of a society that has endured the evils of both Nazism and Communism, while managing to preserve its civilisation.
This rich inheritance can be found in the gloriously satirical 1960s films of Milos Foreman such as ‘The Fireman’s Ball’, which provides an anatomy of the soul of man under Communism.
Milan Kundera 1929-
More importantly, there is the contemporary work of that most deserving living candidate for the Nobel Prize, the Czech writer, Milan Kundera. His novels are a crash course in uninhibited eroticism, vastly different culturally to an Irish sensibility. They offer textbook exercises in a form of European decadence alien to the repressive Irish mindset, and our smutty obsession with sexual activity – not undivorced, I believe, from the extremities of sexual perverted crimes that dominate newspaper headlines in an increasingly hedonistic society.
Kundera’s novels, in translation at least, are written in an elegant lapidary style. There is a lot of dark laughter in those books, not unlike the Irish lachrymose sense of humour and despair, found in Flann O’ Brien especially.
One such example is Kundera’s exposition on litost, ‘an untranslatable Czech word’, in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting:
Its first syllable, which is long and stressed, sounds like the wail of an abandoned dog. As for the meaning of this word, I have looked in vain in other languages for an equivalent, though I find it difficult to imagine how anyone can understand the human soul without it…
Kundera expands on its meaning by way of anecdote.
She was madly in love with him and tactfully swam as slowly as he did. But when their swim was coming to an end, she wanted to give her athletic instincts a few moments’ free rein and headed for the opposite bank at a rapid crawl. The student [the boy] made an effort to swim faster too and swallowed water. Feeling humbled, his physical inferiority laid bare, he felt litost. He recalled his sickly childhood, lacking in physical exercise and friends and spent under the constant gaze of his mother’s overfond eye, and fell into despair about himself and his life. They walked back to the city together in silence on a country road. Wounded and humiliated, he felt an irresistible desire to hit her.…and then he slapped her face.
His most prescient points concern historical amnesia and the onset of tyranny. As he put it: ‘The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.’
Forgetting
The internet and social media are fast becoming a tool of forgetting or non-remembrance through the deluge of unfiltered information. The greatest area of amnesia is the subject that Milan Kundera dedicated his career to preserving, namely the horrors of Communism, which finds strange echoes in our current transition from neoliberalism to neoconservatism.
The ‘Liberation’ of Prague by Soviet Forces in 1945.
Kundera described what passed for public discourse under Communism as political kitsch in his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being. This emanates from an aesthetic ideal ‘in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist’. ‘Kitsch’, he argued, ‘is the aesthetic ideal of all politicians and all political parties and movements.’
It is the dream scenario of the spin doctor where the press is utterly compliant. He gives the example of politicians kissing babies as an obvious expression political of kitsch.
In Kundera’s view political kitsch is not dangerous in itself, and most politicians cultivate a clean-cut, artificial, image. The real danger lies in totalitarian kitsch such as that encountered by the character of Sabina, who recalls the Communist parades of her youth, which projected an idealised vision of the worker removed from the corruption, suspicion and cruelty that infected her society. Indeed, it was said in Czechoslovakia that love for one’s family required theft in the course of one’s professional life.
Kundera contrasts what looks suspiciously like de-platforming, or cancel culture, with the plurality of voices that he believed still lay in Western democracies:
Those of us who live in a society where various political tendencies exist side by side and competing influences cancel or limit one another can manage more or less to escape the kitsch inquisition: the individual can preserve his individuality. The artist can create unusual works. But whenever a single political movement corners power, we find ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch.
It begs the question whether the Internet has reawakened this “totalitarian kitsch.”
Air-brushed from History
In the same work Kundera describes a moment in Prague in 1948 amidst heavy snow in which the bareheaded Communist leader Klement Gottwald, while giving a speech in Wenceslas Square, was handed a hat by his comrade Vladimír Clementis. Four years later Clementis was purged – charged with treason on trumped up charges and hanged. The propaganda section literally airbrushed him out of history by removing him from the photograph that is the title image for this article. Ever since Gottwald has stood on that balcony in splendid isolation.
Where Clementis once stood, there is thus only a bare wall. All that remains of him is the cap on Gottwald’s head. Similarly, to get rid of an enemy today, you do not have to prove anything against them. Instead, you use the internet or family courts, or indeed a compliant media, to generate conflicting accusations and contradictory data. You sow confusion to elevate hatred and fear until that enemy is either banned from social media, their history re-written or erased from the minds of millions through smear, disposal and, in fact, apathy.
If the struggle of man is the struggle of memory against forgetting, as Kundera put it, then we have in the cacophony of the internet a vast machine for forgetting. One that is building a new society upon the shallow, shifting sands of what Gore Vidal described as the United States of Amnesia.
Of huge relevance to our times, Kundera said:
The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what, it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.
It is like a clairvoyant presaging our times. A pre-Facebook comment on our age of gnat-like attention spans. A world of amnesia and the distortion of history; of canned laughter and forgetting.
Václav Havel in 1965.
Kundera’s only modern contemporary intellectual equal, the former President of the Czech Republic Václav Havel issued a similar warning in his seminal political essay, ‘The Power of the Powerless’ (1978). The then dissident playwright and philosopher argued that empowerment requires us to ‘live in truth,’ which means facing up to the uncomfortable reality that we are not solely victims of the political and economic order we live under, but sometimes also enablers who play into its myths and cover up its lies.
We turn the lies into truth and come to believe it is the only way to get through; the only way to survive in what we are told again and again is a ‘dog-eat-dog’ world. In a reappraisal at the end of his tenure, Havel observed how neoliberalism had created similar social dynamics to Communism.
Franz Kafka as a young man.
Kafkaesque
Despite writing in German, Franz Kafka reigns supreme as the writer par excellence of Prague. He now resides like an all-enveloping spirit in Prague. In the Jewish quarter there is a rather modernist statue of him; his visage and silhouette adorn mugs and t-shirts in every tatty tourist shop. There is also an expensive and rather uninformative Kafka Museum, and a bookshop in his name.
Above all else, there is his former house near the Castle, down from the narrow Jewish mile road. His house, now converted into a museum, is not that dissimilar to the two bedroomed artisan houses near the Four Courts in Dublin.
Apart from writing in German, Kafka was Jewish, giving him an outsider status in the Czech Republic; historically an uncomfortable position – though not anything like as bad as it was in Poland – to be in.
While living in Prague, it was an immense surprise to find how Germania had been expurgated from Czech culture after the War. The Czechs now speak English primarily, and Russian occasionally, despite being enveloped by German speaking territories. Still, they venerate Kafka and why not.
Legal Conformism
Part of my own adoration of Kafka comes from training to be a lawyer, and an expression used in a case that has dogged and at times unsettled my career: Gilligan v Ireland. (1997).
The expression I used a ‘Kafkaesque situation’ arrived impromptu to describe what was happening, although I was aware that other Irish judges, particularly Cathal O’Dalaigh had used a similar phrase.
In a legal context the expression conveys a situation of labyrinthian complexity, absurdity, and perversity: one where the law is traduced by procedure and injustice and has become – to use common parlance – an ass.
Franz Kafka did not find the study of law to be an edifying experience. Indeed, according to one account cited by the legal scholar Robin West, he found it ‘had the intellectual excitement of chewing sawdust that had been pre-chewed by thousands of other mouths.’
In Authority, Autonomy, and Choice: The Role of Consent in the Moral and Political Visions of Franz Kafka and Richard Posner (1985), Robin West argues that in Kafka’s world law is alienating and excessively authoritarian, exerting in people a craving for conformity. Students have an urge to conform or obey the law. She argues:
Kafka’s world is populated by excessively authoritarian personalities. Kafka’s characters usually do what they do – go to work in the morning, become lovers, commit crimes, obey laws, or whatever – not because they believe that by doing so, they will improve their own wellbeing but because they have been told to do so and crave being told to do so.
Plaque marking the birthplace of Franz Kafka in Prague.
She contrasts this negative view of the law, with the view that it facilitates the maximization of one’s own welfare, which is presented by the right-wing law and economics scholar Richard Posner:
Whereas Posner’s characters relentlessly pursue autonomy and personal wellbeing, Kafka’s characters just as relentlessly desire, need and ultimately seek out authority.
Further, West points out that although both Kafka and Posner see people as consenting to the various transactions they enter, for Kafka, such consent can lead to humiliating and degrading employment, sex and even death. This point is not expressly made by West, but this may be familiar to readers of The Trial. For Posner, such consent is rational and self-fulfilling. For Kafka, such consent leads to victimization.
West thus posits a conclusion from Kafka on consensual market transactions which is far from positive:
In all these market transactions – commercial, employment, and sexual – Kafka portrays one part consenting to a transfer of power over that party’s body, and in each instance the transfer, although consensual, is horrifying. In none of Kafka’s depictions does consent entail an increase in wellbeing … The participants are often motivated by a desire to submit to authority, not to enhance autonomy, and in each case, the authoritarian relationship they create proves to be a damaging one.
Moreover, West examines the question of consent to law in Kafka. According to Posner, people consent to legal imperatives that are wealth maximizing. According to Kafka, they consent to impersonal state imperatives not because of wealth maximization but out of a deep-seated desire for judgment and punishment. Or one might add compliance.
‘The Judgment’ and ‘The Refusal’
Thus, in Kafka’s short story ‘The Judgment’, a son submits to death by drowning as his father has decreed. And in another short story ‘The Refusal’, the townspeople obey the colonel in charge of the town because authority has ‘just come about,’ and submit to his various denials of their petitions.
The most dramatic example of this submission to authority is of course in The Trial, where Joseph K is arrested without having ever done anything wrong. He never learns the nature of the charges laid against him; he is arrested but not imprisoned; interrogated but never forced to appear; yet in time he passively accepts the jurisdiction of the court and the law’s authority, which results ultimately in his own death sentence.
Finally, West relies upon the short parable ‘The Problem of our Laws’, in which Kafka informs us that law is ultimately sustained, not by force but by the craving of the governed for judgement by lawful, noble authority. It is this human craving, even more than the urge of the powerful to dominate, that sustains the illusion of certainty, fairness, generality, and justice.
In conclusion, West derives the message from Kafka that:
Our tendency to legitimate lawful authority – to give our hypothetical consent – may have good or evil consequences, depending upon the moral value of the legal system to which we have submitted and the moral quality of the relationship between state and citizen that our consent nurtures.
Scepticism Towards Authority
How much of this is of jurisprudential or indeed morally significance? First, it confirms an innate prejudice of mine which is to be at the very least sceptical of authority. Deep scepticism. Far too many people who have had no interaction with authority figures, such as police officers or indeed judges, are inclined to defer to their wishes and take what they say at face value. My experience as an Irish barrister has engendered in me the opposite instinct. Always confront, challenge authority, and never commit the cardinal error of submitting to the edicts or wishes of authority.
Also, ask who is in authority and why they are there? Who appointed them and what agenda do they serve?
Kafka also touches on the way procedural tangles and processes often run contrary to that elusive concept of justice. Law then should be transparent and accessible, and often it is not. Unduly complex procedures among other casuistries militate against just outcomes.
Law of course relates to questions of punishment and both in The Trial and, above all, in the shocking story ‘In the Penal Colony’ – surprisingly neglected by West – about a perfect execution machine, the barbarism and cruelty of legal processes are there for all to see. It is frightening to see how the condemned man submits and, in some ways, enjoys the barbarity of his torture, just as occurs to the dissident in Arthur Koestler’s 1940 novel Darkness at Noon. Today we call this Stockholm Syndrome, where you empathise with your captors.
I have always hated the death penalty and indeed torture or state sponsored cruelty, anyone who has experienced the jihadism of Roman Catholicism will know what I mean.
Fishelson’s version of The Castle at Manhattan Ensemble Theatre, January 2002.
Bureaucratic Nightmares
Kafka lived under a deeply authoritarian extended Germanic state of bureaucracy and authoritarianism then ruling the Czech Republic. A Weberian bureaucracy gone mad.
Alberto Moravia’s 1951 novel The Conformist demonstrates how a bureaucratic conformity evident in lawyers far too easily morphs into fascism. Kafka lived in a proto-totalitarian state and is often seen as someone who mystically envisages dystopian totalitarianism. In some respects, Kundera observed the completion of the projection. The full negation of the individual, and individual rights.
Now such harbingers of dystopia are right back, for want of a better expression, in fashion and the reasons for this are obvious to anyone who looks up from their screen.
We are in a new age of corporate fascism, with an ever increasingly authoritarian state. Mass monitoring and surveillance through artificial intelligence is dictating and controlling our choices. Ascendant right-wing extremism throughout much of Europe has drawn lessons from religious fundamentalism.
Thus, Kafka’s arguments on the dangers of unconditional surrender to authority and acceptance of its legitimacy, as well as his arguments around how consent to authority can destroy us are important points to recall. Even in our daily lives.
Both Kafka and Kundera urge us to challenge authority, and at the very least always ask: who is making a decision and why? Don’t look at the office, but at the man or women in control of it, and what he or she is purporting to do.
The enlarged Kafkaesque state – in many respects experienced by Kundera – is right back in force in the coronavirus panopticon, with the vectors of evil apparent everywhere, not least in a plethora of falsely accused and indeed framed Joseph K’s. worldwide. Let us call them the dissentient.
We have all too much faith in the law, a failing which led my friend the late Supreme Court Justice Adrian Hardiman to entitle an article on how the state falsely accused the DJ Paul Gambaccini, ‘Kafka On the Thames’; and yet faith in due process and legal fairness is one of the few values left to clutch on to.
"The cry of "emergency" is an intoxicating one, producing an exhilarating freedom from the need to consider the rights of others and productive of the desire to repeat it again and again." Former Supreme Court Justice Adrian Hardiman (2011, in Dellway Investments v NAMA) pic.twitter.com/w77qN0IGM7
Kundera and Kafka are two titans of the Czech intelligentsia who have much to say in our contemporary era: be careful about unconditional obedience to authority and distrustful of legal processes; antennae should be raised to detect post truth nonsense and dissimulation; and witness how Communist totalitarianism has been replaced by another decline of the human condition: neoliberal degradation.
Never unconditionally comply with the edicts of authority. Just say No. Do not obey orders just because they are orders. Exercise judgment.
[i] Arne Novak, Czech Literature (translated from Czech by Peter Kussi), Ann Arbor (1976), p.170
Does an age of frenetic online activity afford time for literary masterpieces, especially Outsider Novels, transcending what is considered ‘normal’?
He whose vision cannot cover
History’s three thousand years
Must in outer darkness hover
Live within the day’s frontiers.
The above stanza is from a twelve-book, poetry collection by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, which was inspired by the work of fourteen century, Persian poet, Hafez.
Rather than take the above stanza as concrete, it is worth taking it as an allegorical device, and metaphor, for what this piece sets out to champion: the work of the literary Outsider.
With various electronic devices such as, the laptop, smartphone, iPad, and media outlets like Netflix, YouTube and other broadcasters, vying for our attention(s) – and successfully so – one must enquire into whether serious, attentive reading means anything anymore?
Has the modern age – the tempered, electronic milieu – filtered out literary tomes?
The very idea of ‘The Outsider’ literary work may be unnerving in what is an age of tantamount addiction to a frenetic social media; what the writer Will Self refers to as ‘bidirectional media.’ The resulting anxiety disinclines us to engage with what many may deem ‘difficult’ books, or ‘heavy’ tomes. Knocking the bottom out of the known literary universe.
It might be said in relation to reading such books: who has aeons of uninterrupted time? In response you might say that the pandemic and lockdowns have afforded us such time. Note: no banana breads were harmed in the writing of this piece.
Critics sometimes venture towards difficult literary works from a canon such as that identified in Harold Bloom’s tautological, yet, feverish and impassioned, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. These are the works of literature which ebb in from the external to the field of the Literary Arts, and which Bloom eulogises in his reviews.
In 1812 by the Russian artist Illarion Pryanishnikov.
War and Peace
Who has read Tolstoy’s big bangers? War and Peace anyone? History’s frontiers fought over during the Napoleonic Wars, backed up with sweeping pastoral symphonies; with a charge of Russian calvary sweeping through the narrative, backed with Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. A silver Samovar dispensing tea in the officers’ mess, the colour of unearthed rubies; tea sweetened with a cube of sugar, held between the drinker’s teeth.
Or Tolstoy’s more subdued asides, with bucolic scenes of bleating lambs; and navvies sitting down in a wooded glade to consume their lunches. While out there in high summer, in the protracted Russian steppe, brown bears nosey along through tall grass to hallowed fishing grounds. With a scurry of gnats flitting at their ears.
Or what about Joycean punnery – the nightbabble of Finnegans Wake – or Beckettian gurglespeak?
If the safe, go-to novel is a halfway-house where thoughts run easily along the neuron-led rafters; where sable-eared bats hang, unruffled, in the belfry; where a forgotten greenhouse with cracked panes of burping green glass dwells in the back garden of the mind, they are there serving as a concrete, model village. Known territories; safe catch-all neighbourhoods, which imbue the reading-self with tangibility.
There has been a loss of faith in big difficult books due to less than attentive mindsets; and upon latching on this, Mediocrity Inc., sweeps in to garner easier-to-read works, which dominate book charts. What does this say about the demographics so enamoured by ease of access?
Literary, like most paradoxes, operate through conflating, and contracting, obligations. They are in a constant state of flux. (Not helpful for the binary-seeking world of the definite article, which Mediocrity Inc., often seek out to nail to the masthead.)
Satan Arousing the Rebel Angels, William Blake (1808)
Self-Made
When all the joy of writing is being sucked out of it by marketing mentalities, then things are in a bad way; they are, rather, Miltonesque: bleak; morally obtuse. Greed has taken over the minds of formerly, we hope, reasonable people.
Quality dissipates in such trends.
If you put your faith in the superficial, then the meaning of actual literature – that with substance – is diluted. Worship at the golden calf and you cannot expect your palpating thirst to be quenched.
However, the brave, writing for themselves, writer(s) will always venture out towards a different plane to help buck these acclamatory, accepted trends. The strongly composed novel could be summed up as a transference of the quotidian whereby one’s will becomes the whole of the fictional law in an expansive, infinite world.
Will Self is such a writer whose output is ‘challenging’. A writer, thinker, who goes it alone and does not yield to the Mediocrity Inc., whose plaintive, rebellious, immature cries rail that they know better, but which do not.
Outsider Novel
The stolid mentalities who often quip, “I couldn’t get into it”, say this, because, I believe, they are not prepared to challenge their perceptions of what the Outsider Novel means to them – an ungraspable leviathan which slips away into the listless fog.
Five or six literary Outsider ‘heavy’ novels from the Western Literary Canon dominate and stand on the rostrum; representing the cornerstones of the literary house that encapsulate the Canon.
Two have already been alluded to, and then there is: Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman. Bellicose in its exposition from conception to the screaming infant through to his uncle’s nose and to maturity.
One of the first ‘Outsider’ works, it is inspired by the Rabelaisian, and inhabits the world of the absurd and the fabulist. There are long paragraphs on his Uncle’s Toby’s European adventures with his servant, Trim, and of course, reams of information on the prowess of his conk. It will have you amused if not bewildered at the thought of how he got away with publishing it in the 18th century.
James Joyce’s Ulysses is a tome in tribute to the mimesis of life, and everything which Joyce termed ‘A shout in the street.’ It takes the epic towards modernism, and a rebirth of consciousness in the early-to-mid twentieth century. There are diegetic elements to the inner monologues of the characters and the streets of Dublin. You will find an urban mammoth with its quarry caught upon its wide tusks, braced with metal struts to keep the weight of the tome from falling.
This is no Cuneiform script to procrastinate over, it is a layered, complex novel to be discovered. Through two main characters, Leopold Bloom, and Stephen Dedalus we find an unparalleled commentary on twenty-four-hours in Dublin on June 16th, 1904. That is the plot. Simple. Yet, all-encompassing. Tributaries, feeding into the literary infinity pools of the Liffey, and further afield.
Hopefully readings of Ulysses will soon resume in Sweny’s Pharmacy.
Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow is thronged – absolutely imbued – with a myriad of characters, and a talking lightbulb. Each copy of Gravity’s Rainbow should include its own Philharmonic Orchestra to play alongside the running-hare-prose. It is about the Second World War and V Rockets and their trajectory before falling to Earth on the places where a main character is having coitus.
Sounds mad, right? Yes. Quite, but fantastical and industrious. The prow of this literary Gridiron, in a reading, a universal, Manhattan bearing down on the sugary pap and mulch which is dished out – and is not at all, nourishing.
Launch of a V-2 rocket.
David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest is totemic in its appreciation of Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, with a nod to Don DeLillo, and John Dos Passos’s U.S.A trilogy, mainly, The 42nd Parallel.
The plot of Infinite Jest is initially tertiary to Wallace’s intellect and ego in fluidity. The beginning is pure vaudeville to the main circus, big-top act which is the intellect of Foster Wallace himself and the prefrontal cortex mythology, which he conspired to create and then exuded, seemingly, so effortlessly. But did Foster Wallace write a capable work? Yes he did, but it is an apostrophic set of hymnals on tennis, drug addiction and geo-political set-ups.
I looped the meta-modernist, hyper-realist circle and went along for the ride on David Foster Wallace’s encyclopaedic, metadata novel; figuring that while sedate prose is at the behest of book seller’s, and publishers – means and modes of production for the masses – I thought ‘To hell with this, give me a novel with shtick.’
So, by means of reposed epidural, I plugged into Foster Wallace’s acicular vein, man, and plunged the diviner right on into the other side. And it is shtick all the way.
Foster Wallace’s reliance on using nomenclature, acronyms are, well, trifling when you forget all the organisations he coins; we do know, for example, that O.N.A.N stands for Organization of North American Nations, a kind of dystopian superstate which is comprised of Mexico, the United States and Canada, and that the novel takes place during ‘The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment’ Y.D.A.U. It opens with tennis. Wallace was a court man, he liked to court tennis and he schlongs his racket into being more often than enough in this work.
This is not a linear prose tale as we know it.
Transcendental Idealism
These literary works fail to fall into the crushing jaws of a Western, ‘easy’ read sunset; they transcend the ‘normal’.
The oddity of the largess of such peripatetic works are still revered by committed readers. Literature, and indeed, great literature was, and is, and will forever be, a magical portal which has the power to transport consciousness into another realm. Some works, some bigger, well-crafted works exist outside the normally accepted coda of what is regarded as ‘the novel,’ and do so by existing beyond the ‘day’s frontiers’, beyond paragraphs, in marginalia.
And out there beyond the environs of ‘known-knowns’ lies the quotidian, infinite in its readiness to bypass the grassy verges of rhetoric, and up beyond ionosphere and stratosphere.
On the y-axis of a line-graph in the evolutionary trajectory of the Outsider Novel, one could hope for, works which operate outside the perceived, ‘normative’ structures of the known, easy to digest novel. In a sense they occupy the strata of the strange, the unfamiliar; their tentacles reach into the dark nooks and cervices of the mind and bring lax grey-matter in there forward, and into pulsating, roving life.
Kant’s house in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad).
If one postulates further, and looks at Kant’s Transcendental Idealism in The Critique of Pure Reason, it can be said that space and time are merely formal features of how we perceive objects; not things in themselves, existing independently of ourselves, or properties or relations among them.
Objects in space and time are said to be ‘appearances’, and Kant argues that we know nothing of substance about the things in themselves, of which they are appearances. He calls this doctrine (or set of doctrines) ‘transcendental idealism.’
Ignorance along the lines of myopic conjecture about a novel one has not read, is the syphilitic chancre on the body of literature – based on appearances and perceived conjecture on what a novel is, without taking the trouble to read it. This is harmful, detracting from the creativity behind such a work.
There are literary keys available to break those harder to ‘crack’ literary tomes. Those keys are in other books; yes, books which help you with books. Isn’t that what a dictionary is for, or a thesaurus for that matter?
Take, again, Finnegans Wake, the indolent reader’s worst nightmare – they start by gambolling around in search of the missing apostrophe ignoring the entrée; and hell, they proclaim it to be the most difficult of books.
In Christopher Marlowe’s adaptation on the stories of Faust, Doctor Faustus says, ‘Hell is just a frame of mind.’ The demonic Mephistopheles in Doctor Faustus does, however, imply a similar idea by saying that losing his place in heaven gives him experience of hell wherever he is:
Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.
Think’st thou that I who saw the face of God,
And tasted the eternal joys of Heaven,
Am not tormented with ten thousand hells,
In being depriv’d of everlasting bliss?
If one was to take the evolution of the novel, we could look at Sterne, Joyce then David Foster Wallace and who knows where the creative literary genre will head next?
L’histoire naturelle, ce n’est rien autre que la nomination du visible. Michel Foucault – Les mots et les choses
Walking with my dog this morning, I was struck by the various rewilding projects which certain aspects of my local community have been embracing. For example my twelve-year-old daughter’s primary school, in its wisdom, has decided to carve out niches in its grounds for ‘Managed Wildlife’, otherwise known as rewilding projects.
What does this mean? Well, whereas previously the grass would have been meticulously trimmed like a tight haircut, thus permitting no wildlife to blossom or bloom, be it wildflowers or grass, the latest trends is to encourage the wild to grow again.
Any botanist will tell you that in the absence of wild flowers and long stemmed grasses the biodiversity of our green spaces suffer. An absence of flowers lead to less insects and less insects to less birds, and on and on.
Now, instead of regimented green empty spaces a profusion of wild flowers and grasses grow, roped off so school children cannot run amok, and destroy the phenomenal growth on display. I also noticed that the local council has adopted similar rewilding practices along the green spaces by the roadsides. This has increased bird song all around, which is really quite wonderful.
While Argo, my Jack Russel of four years seemed quite content sniffing the blossoming flowers, and as I extracted the biodegradable poop bag in anticipation of his morning’s delivery, I couldn’t help but think how our own culture would benefit from a similar rewilding process.
The Wild Ones
When was the last time that you read a book that was described as ‘Wild?’ Yeah, that’s what I thought. We never read such an adjective alongside a work of contemporary literature any longer. And why is that? Why are there no more Flann O’Briens, Thomas Bernhards or William Burroughs? Where are all the wild men and women of literature?
William S. Boroughs
You don’t hear about them anymore. Why is that? And more importantly, what does this say about contemporary society? These are just some of the questions that I considered while looking at the rewilding projects this morning.
One of the things you will read about, on a similar topic, in both the mainstream media and on social media sites is the apparent decline of Western culture. There is a lot of rhetoric, particularly promoted in far-right media that are waging a cultural war against what they see as the fundamental destruction of Western values by what they perceive as the inexorable rise of political correctness or ‘Woke’ culture. Why is this? And could there be any truth in what they are saying?
Having completed the paragraph above, I now enter the political minefield of the culture wars. This article could be dismissed as yet another text advocating a far-right agenda, but hear me out, as I can assure you that I am not a Populist, and have nothing to do with exclusionary ideas, Yet nether am I an apologist for the political left. So, what am I then?
I am, first and foremost, a Writer. Yes, with a capital W. And that means that I am a champion of free speech. This is extremely important as it seems to me that we are at a cultural impasse in the West because publishers are so afraid of the negative feedback that they refuse to publish anything deemed offensive,
As a result, these days, there is practically nothing of any interest going on in contemporary literature. This probably sounds very polemical, but I ask the question again; when was the last time that you read anything remotely Wild lately?
I am reminded of Rabelais, now, particularly. His bawdy sense of humour which was to cause so much shock, and yes, offence to some. That was the whole point! There was a time when to publish meant shocking people out of their comfort zones.
If literature or writing could ever be described as having a function then it is to shock people out of their day-to-day existence, and get them to sit up and question it. That is to say, question the society in which they are living.
But that is not the case today because there are no wild writers any more. They have all been silenced. The great blanket of fear has gently stolen over a whole civilisation, and now everyone is looking over their shoulders. Nobody has the guts to say anything difficult or troubling, without necessarily believing in it, any more, as no publishers has the guts to publish it for fear of a backlash from the politically correct ‘Woke’ brigade.
How did we get here?
It is a particularly disturbing phenomenon for me as an Irish writer who grew up in Cork during the 1980s, which was a period of incredible repression, mainly due to collusion between Church and the State.
Image: Richard Tilbrook (wikicommons)
I eventually escaped the awful cultural conformity and went to live in Paris like so many writers and artists before me. Globalisation and the boom eventually blew away that culture of fear, and I returned to live in Ireland on the eve of the millennium in order to experience first hand the most historic cultural shifts that have taken place on this island since independence one hundred years ago.
The boom years had an enormous effect on every single aspect of Irish life, in particular the influence the Church which gave way to a newfound secularisation.
But what has happened in the intervening years? Consider education and the huge changes that have happened there. I remember while studying for a PME in one of Ireland’s leading universities a few years ago being advised to drop history as a subject if I wanted to have any real chance of getting a job. Instead I was encouraged to train to become a religious teacher. It was as if we had come full circle!
As an Irish writer, with over ten publications behind me, I seriously worry about the future. In the last couple of years, I have had to reject offers of working with commercial publishers, both here and abroad, who wanted me to make major changes to books that I had written as they were too scared to take them on in their current form. My best selling book, for example, More Micks than Dicks despite selling a thousand copies in its first year of publication remains out of print as the content is considered to ‘wild’ for current tastes.
This is sad. The satirical book is a send up of academia in the spirit of Beckett and yet remains out of print as it may ‘offend’ certain sensibilities. On that basis, I ask the question: would Beckett have had a single one of his books published today? This question must be considered not only by the world of literature but society at large, if there is to be any significant change.
Recently, I was looking at a European website offering courses for teachers and students alike which were being financed in part by the European Union. I found the contents of the majority of the courses truly shocking, as they amplified these newfound sensitivities. A lot of buzz words, without any real substance. You know you have a serious problem when your system of education is actually offering you nothing of any real substance.
Of course, gardens and ideas, more specifically philosophical systems, have been around for as long as man has been cultivating nature.
Royal Hospital Kilmainham.
One only has to think of the exquisite formal gardens at the Royal Hospital in Kilmainham here in Dublin. These formal gardens, the only ones of their kind on the island, are a beautifully ornate reconstruction of the gardens one would fine typically anywhere in Europe during the period of the Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries.
The gardens, rather like the rational mind, were symmetrically ordered into very carefully refined partitions, labyrinthian yet clearly purposeful and well-defined, so that in the botanical body we can find man’s most elaborate and refined expression of his development of order in nature.
The grasses and hedges are so neatly trimmed, so tidy are they that a team of gardeners are required to keep on top of the work, ensuring that an apparently disorderly nature does not predominate. Indeed, one merely has to peer over the walls of the garden and look onto some of the common land that surrounds the Royal Hospital at Kilmainham to be reminded of a wilder nature when she is not maintained by man.
And there you have a prefect illustration of the mind body duality characteristic of the Enlightenment. Nature on her own is chaotic and man, being a part of nature, must keep a firm hold on himself, subduing his wild passions. Such was the moral instruction, at least, behind the formal gardens at the Royal Hospital in Kilmainham.
But we should remember their historical origins also: the gardens were to be a place for peaceful contemplation for reposing soldiers recuperating from the various wars they had borne witness to. Indeed, one only has to visit the Hospital grounds and walk along its carefully laid out lanes to appreciate the solace and contentment that the gardens must have brought to the poor, suffering men.
However, the appreciation of gardens and nature is a very subjective experience. What may bring clarity and peace to one – the formal garden for example – may be the stuff of nightmares for others.
To get a better demonstration of the multiple facets of human personality, I would recommend a stroll through your nearest allotments like where my wife spends the greater part of her days. There, here again in Skerries, you can see the very rich profusion of plants in some of the organic plots.
She cultivates numerous species of tomato growing in her polytunnel: Black Russian, Brandywine, Cherokee Purple, Chocolate Cherry, Hillbilly, Jubilee, Ukrainian Purple and Old German each one as distinctly ornate and tasty as the next. The very diversity of nature, cultivated or otherwise, is simply remarkable. Surely a similar form of diversity should be reflected in our nation’s literature? Yet is it?
And so I ask the question again. Where are all the wild women and men of literature gone? The truth of the matter is we are killing our Western Culture, just as we killed our environment. This is one of the principle reasons why the West is in decline, and it is in decline. You can see the evidence everywhere; it is in our schools, in our work places, it has even crept into our pubs, the places of our supposed relaxation.
I shall leave you with a question: if you don’t have any freedom worth speaking of, any real freedom to speak your mind, what freedom are you actually fighting for? This is a very serious question and its importance, as far as I can see, is only going to grow in stature over the coming months and years.
Here is another: where were YOU when it died? And another: what did you do exactly to protect her?
The first point to note about the post modernists nonsense is that it has encouraged a distrust of the truth and an atmosphere of looseness and imprecision, wherein any old argument, or moral position, is accorded equal weight.
