Cassandra Voices

Tag: Sean O’Casey

  • Hitching the Plough to the Stars

    Paul O’Brien’s biography, Sean O’Casey, Political Activist and Writer (Cork University Press) is a timely re-assessment of an often controversial, figure whose place in the literary canon is, O’Brien argues, is insufficiently acclaimed.

    It coincides with the hundredth anniversary of Druid’s production of O’Casey’s Dublin Trilogy: ‘The Plough and The Stars’, ‘Juno and the Paycock’ and ‘The Shadow of a Gunman’ which opened recently at the Galway Arts’ Festival and will tour Belfast before coming to The Abbey in September. But, with the publication of Timothy Murtagh’s new book Spectral Mansions on how the once graciously lofty Henrietta Street turned into tenements adding to the mountain of scholarship about Dublin tenement life, O’Casey’s plays, are, on that basis alone, destined for immortality.

    As enduring testimonies of the unflinching reality of Dublin tenement life, no playwright evokes and captures the life of Dublin’s tenements as does O’Casey and that is the central theme of this tour-de-force of scholarship.

    Sean O’Casey was born in 1880 into a lower middle class Protestant family – the youngest of eight children – and was raised in Lower Dorset Street, where the family enjoyed a relatively comfortable lower middle-class life until after his father’s death in 1886. His father had been employed in the Irish Church Mission and his older brothers attended the Central Model School in Marlboro Street for which a small fee was required.

    In reduced circumstances after his father death, and when O’Casey was nine, the family moved to the East Wall – a hot bed of the Irish Citizen Army (ICA) and the ITGWU. His entire oeuvre dramatizes with unflinching realism and lack of sentimentality the grim realities of tenement life in Dublin, infusing his characters with compassion and humanity.

    By the 1930s, Dublin’s tenements were among the worst slums in Europe with a very high mortality rate, rampant prostitution and disease reflected in ‘The Plough and The Stars’ in the character Mossler Gogan dying of TB and the prostitute Rosie Redmond. Indeed, according to O’Brien ‘[i]n 1914 it was believed that tenement dwellers had a better chance of survival on the Western Front than in the diseased-ridden hovels of Dublin.’  Thus, O’Casey became ‘a life-long activist for the preferment of dwellers of tenements, reflecting their lives with scrupulous realism and compassion, their humanity always shone through as did their heroism and their promise.’

    Henrietta Street, Dublin.

    Excruciating Detail

    Paul O’Brien biography on O’Casey charts with intense and excruciating detail the development of O’Casey’s politics and how those politics fused and informed his writings, especially his dramatic works. In that sense, O’Brien’s book takes a thematic rather than a chronological approach to O’Casey’s life.

    While O’Casey’s older brothers attended the model school in Marlboro Street, Sean, a delicate child was largely home schooled, self-taught and, for a time, taught by his older sister, a teacher. Later, O’Casey was immersed in all the key political movements of his time, the ICA, the Gaelic League, the GAA and was a big admirer of, and influenced by, Parnell.

    He mastered Irish, hence the change in his birth name from John to Sean and he studied the Classics. From early in his life, he was interested in the national movement but it was the emergent labour movement, gaining momentum under his life-long hero, James Larkin that really gripped him and the entire dynamic of his subsequent political and writing life revolved around his failure to find a synthesis between Irish Republicanism and the international struggle of the working classes.

    In other words he never could accommodated the ‘green’ of Nationalism with the ‘red’ of Labour and this unreconciled tension remained the central dilemma of his entire life and, in exploring it in minute intensity, Paul O’Brien uncloaks it as both the triumph and tragedy of O’Casey’s life too. While Paul O’Brien clearly admires his subject, he is candid about the unjustified personal animosity of O’Casey towards James Connolly. O’Brien does not shirk from revealing any of O’Casey’s flaws in judgement and personality, while never losing sight of his overall genius.

    Imbrications between the cause of the working classes in Dublin and accelerating nationalism were unavoidable after Parnell and were so fused as to often be indistinguishable; the overlaps were everywhere, not least in the Irish Citizen Army (ICS) of which O’Casey was a member until he finally severed all ties in 1914. He also derided the Irish Volunteers which emerged in the South, in parallel with the formation of the Ulster Volunteers in response to the Home Rule Bill of 1912.

    James Larkin.

    James Larkin

    James Larkin arrived in Dublin in 1907 and inspired O’Casey to use ‘words as weapons against exploiters of the Dublin poor.’ O’Casey first gave vent to his rage in Larkin’s paper The Irish Worker. Later, in his biographies, O’Casey lacerated the corruption of Dublin Corporation.

    From an early age, O’Casey’s love of literature was manifest. The hope that Irish life would be transformed died with the early and tragic death of Parnell in October 1891. In the aftermath, the prospect of peaceful evolution along the lines of Dominion Status enjoyed by Canada and Australia receded.

    O’Casey saw Larkin as the greatest Irishman since Parnell. ‘The Plough and The Stars’, O’Casey’s most controversial play premiered in the Abbey in 1926 and was well received on its first night. But on the second night, a combination of 1916 widows and Republicans escalated into full blown riots with added moral consternation at the prostitute Rosie Redmond awaiting clients and the un-named figure in the window, identifiably Patrick Pearse extolling the sanctity of bloodshed.

    The first two acts of the play are set in 1915 looking forward to the liberation of Ireland, but the second two acts are set during the 1916 Easter Rising.

    In the evolution of his political ideals, O’Casey had a number of influences aside from Parnell; the writings of James Fintan Lalor (1809-1849) and John Mitchell (1915-1875) influence him. The 1913 Lockout in Dublin was a watershed moment for O’Casey.

    Parnell had provided a vision for Ireland with no conflict between the Protestant religion and the principles of freedom which had a democratic and libertarian pulse, rooted in Constitutionalism. But contemporary conditions would sweep O’Casey away from family and Protestant traditions.

    A Dublin Tram conductor and an Abbey actor introduced him to rawer politics. This, combined with the ICA and the ITGWU provided different currents on O’Casey’s development. In terms of his literary work, Dion Boucicault remained a strong influence in how he used songs and comedy to lighten the tragedy of his own writings. (O’Casey wrote many, long forgotten, ballads)  While Boucicault’s plays are traditional melodramas there is also a ‘political ambivalence that challenges the stereotypical image of the stage Irishman; ‘Arrah-Na-Pogue’ and ‘Peep O’Day’ are about the 1798 rebellion. Boucicault created a more trustworthy image of the Irish, replacing the racial stereotype in English literature which was finally killed off by George Bernard Shaw in Larry Doyle in ‘John Bull’s Other Ireland.’ O’Casey draws on the techniques of Boucicault, Shakespeare’s history plays and on Shaw to create a unique synthesis of his own. O’Brien argues that O’Casey’s conclusions are ‘open-ended.’

    Dion Boucicault.

    The Boer War

    Defining nationhood was intensified by anti-British sentiments after the Boer War, the centenary celebrations of 1798 and the Jubilee celebrations in 1889.

    O’Casey imbibed the sentiments of the Gaelic League like many other Protestants. The plough and the stars was the flag of the Irish Citizen Army, and O’Brien identifies O’Casey’s problem was to ‘hitch the plough to the stars.’

    He joined the Gaelic league in 1901 and took up hurling. He became an apprentice bricklayer and worked for a number of years on the Great Northern Railway Line. In 1908, he became secretary to the Drumcondra branch of the Gaelic League and spent ten years promoting Irish language and culture but increasingly he saw the chief enemy as the crushing force of capitalism, and, as he matured, he rejected romantic nationalism.

    James Connolly was able to unite nationalism and socialism, but O’Casey could never fuse them into a cohesive theory remaining haunted by the voice of the urban poor. O’Casey resigned from the IRB in 1913 when they refused to take the workers’ side in the Great Lockout.

    He ditched the Gaelic League for Larkin and the momentum behind Larkin radical labour movement became the driving force for his plays. This transition is reflected in his earlier plays The Harvest Festival, The Stars Turn Red and Red Roses For Me which deal with the labour history of the 1913-1914 Lockout. After the failure of the Great Lockout O’Casey’s views were crystallised into the view that the ‘struggle was not one of English Imperialism versus Irish Republicanism but between international capitalism and the workers of the world’ and this is reflected uncompromisingly in his plays.

    In 1914, Larkin went to America to organise the international workers of the world and was jailed for criminal anarchy. The Ulster Covenant saw 4,000 Ulster volunteers sign up and the respondent Irish Volunteers were despised by O’Casey who saw it as dominated by ‘overfed aristocrats’.

    He clashed with Tom Kettle and Pearse and wrongly accused them of not supporting workers. In 1914, along with Larkin, he drafted a new constitution for the ICA but the problems of aligning the red of Labour with the green of nationalism persisted for O’Casey.

    Countess Constance Markiewicz.

    ‘a spluttering Catherine Wheel of irresponsibility.’

    When Connolly expressed his vision for the re-conquest of Ireland in a pamphlet in 1915, O’Casey saw it as Connolly lowering the red flag in favour of the green and made a sudden and final split with the ICA. The Countess Markievicz joined the Irish Volunteers and the ICA.

    O’Casey was intensely hostile to her ‘hauteur’: ‘she whirled into a meeting and whirled out again a spluttering Catherine Wheel of irresponsibility.’ His motion, however, to expel her from the ICA failed. According to O’Brien ‘he rushed headlong into one dispute after another, damaging himself and alienating his friends.’

    O’Casey published a book on the ICA in 1919 but, according to O’Brien it lacks balance and is saturated with vitriol and opinions. His core argument was that nationalism gained and labour lost as a result of the ICA’s involvement with 1916. ‘O’Casey was alone is seeing Irish history from a working-class perspective when, after 1916, The Labour movement was subsumed into the struggle for independence.’

    When Connolly joined the Volunteers in 1916 it completed the fusion with the ICA. 220 members of the ICA rose on Easter Monday 1916, but 1,200 Irish Volunteers did. As O’Brien points out, Connolly had little choice but to fight on nationalist terms in 1916.

    Connolly had grasped the importance of a united front where O’Casey failed. O’Casey never acknowledged Connolly’s attempts to unite Labour and Nationalism but in later years he did acknowledge Connolly’s standing in the Labour movement but ‘he never lost an opportunity to denigrate Connolly in favour of Larkin.’

    O’Casey became ‘a disgruntled outside, a hurler on the ditch, shouting the odds as history passed him by.’ Many critics put O’Casey’s vitriol against 1916 in ‘The Plough and the Stars’ down to ‘survivor’s guilt.’ The summary execution of Francis Sheehy Skeffington, a socialist and passivist abhorred him. He felt successful revolution on nationalist terms only empowered the new Irish ruling classes – the very people who had reduced the Dublin poor to abject poverty.

    O’Casey was in sympathy with the views of Ernie O’Malley who resented the legendary status that emerged in the aftermath of the 1916 martyrs as they were twisted and idealised by a new state to consolidate its position. O’Brien argues that ultimately O’Casey neither deified or vilified the 1916 heroes but rather projected the realities of the new Free State that emerged, and, in that, he saw it as advancing commerce over the plight of the poor.

    In ‘The Plough and The Stars’ he ‘inverted the nationalist myth … and summoned his characters from the margins of history and placed them in the spotlight.’

    ‘The Shadow of a Gunman’ was influenced by Ernie O’Malley’s views in the character of Davoren, an opportunistic carpetbagger who capitalised in the new Free State which the play mocks. The rhetoric of romantic nationalism is ridiculed and critiqued.

    In all of O’Casey’s plays his characters are overwhelmed by events outside of their control. Unlike ‘The Dublin Trilogy’ his plays ‘The Cooing of the Doves’ and ‘Kathleen Listens In’ supports the pro-treaty side. Kathleen also counters the glorification of dead heroes and martyrdom.

    Bertolt Brecht.

    Influenced by Brecht

    ‘Juno and the Paycock’ (Abbey 1924) fuses tragedy and comedy: Captain Boyle, a figure broken by poverty and drink is still a sympathetic character. The life of the tenements is always pitched against the life outside and many saw the play as a condemnation of all war.

    Juno too has been seen as an attack on the Republican movement. The character Juno is Brecht’s Mother Courage of Dublin with her strength and humanity. O’Casey was influenced by Brecht, Ibsen and other experimental dramatist.  In common with Shaw and Joyce, he despised the cult of Cathleen Ni Houlihan as symbol of Ireland. In a feminist twist, Juno does leave her abusive husband and goes off to make a new life with her unwed pregnant daughter.

    O’Casey moved to London in 1926 to receive the Hawthornden prize and produce the London production of Juno. He met and fell in love with actress Eileen Carey and he married her and the couple moved to Devon where they went on to have three children.

    Yeats refused to produce The Silver Tassie at the Abbey in 1928 causing an irrevocable breach between the Abbey and its most successful playwright. When Juno opened in London O’Casey was a minor celebrity and controversially hobnobbed with a succession of high society grandees, especially with Lord and Lady Londonderry, even spending a week at their residence, Mount Stewart, on the Ards Peninsula in 1934.

    They were the direct descendants of Lord Castlereagh, ruthless executioner of the United Irishmen in 1798. He rubbed shoulders with figures as controversial as Oswald Mosely. On the other hand, his Communist activities led him to clashes with George Orwell who, in 1949 supplied O’Casey’s name as part of a secret list of about a hundred writers, artists and intellectuals who should not become ‘cheerleaders in Britian’s fight against communism’ to British intelligence (see issue 3, History Ireland, Autumn 1998).

    O’Casey’s was unable to deal objectively with the Stalinist pogroms and took the Russian side against Hungary in the uprising of 1956. For all his human lapses, O’Casey emerges largely as mostly being on the right side of history and was an ardent supporter of Noel Browne. His later plays too were polemics against Nazism and Fascism. He was bitterly disappointed by the failures of his expressionist plays, ‘The Silver Tassie’ and ‘Within the Gates’.

    Dublin, 1916.

    An Exhaustive Feat

    Paul O’Brien’s book, with some occasional unavoidable repetition is an exhaustive feat of research and scholarship that should become an indispensable handbook to all aficionados, practitioners, academics and teachers of Irish drama. In addition to existing scholarship, O’Brien opens a new window of insight into O’Casey’s passion, commitment and motivations while never eschewing his human flaws.

    This is also an indispensable history of the development of the Irish labour and nationalist movements and their fraught and intricate interface in the aftermath of Parnell and into the early twentieth century; through The Easter Rising, The War of Independence, The Civil War and its aftermath.

    As a writer, O’Casey developed his own unique style and never failed to move with the modernism of Ibsen, the Expressionism of Ernst Toller – the German anti-Nazi playwright – Brecht and Shaw who were early influences. He disliked pessimistic theatre but made an exception with Beckett. Paul O’Brien makes a compelling case that O’Casey’s expressionist and modernist plays are overlooked. His book certainly inspires a fresh look at O’Casey overall oeuvre.

    With ‘The Dublin Trilogy’ currently enjoying a successful run as part of the decade of centenaries his place in the pantheon of Irish dramatists seems assured, and, as the history of Dublin tenement life continues to burgeon, his plays are set to endure as visceral, dramatic slices of that life. Perhaps the most astute accolade O’Brien accords O’Casey is to observe that; ‘he was one of the most sensual writers of his era’ where ‘sexual love is always presented as positive, joyful and life affirming’ and that was the common humanity that placed the characters of Dublin’s tenements on a par, as O’Brien suggests, with ‘Maud Gonne, the Countess and their aristocratic circle.’

    Paul O’Brien richly deserves the accolade of O’Casey’s biographer, Dr Christopher Murray, Emeritus Professor of Drama at UCD who greeted, ‘An extraordinary achievement bringing O’Casey centre-stage again with supreme skill. Bravo!’

    Sean O’Casey Political Activist and Writer by Paul O’Brien is published by Cork University Press in hardback at €49. It is 297 pages with a Foreword by Shivaun O’Casey. There are an additional 100 pages of notes, bibliography and index.

    Feature Image: Study of Seán O’Casey by Dublin artist Reginald Gray, for The New York Times (1966)

  • An A.B.C. of Irish Modernism: Apocalypse, Boredom, Crack

    In a powerful 1997 essay, Seamus Deane suggested that the twin forces that beset modern Irish writers such as W.B. Yeats and James Joyce were those of Apocalypse and Boredom.[1]  Both the culture in which the writers lived and the art-works they produced are marked by phasic interruptions into colonial despondency of revelatory dramas and epiphanies:

    In Yeats’s work–plays and essays, we may feel at times that a little boredom might be something of a relief from the constant appropriation of almost everything that happened in his lifetime to a visionary apocalypse in which all that is ‘past, or passing or to come’ flashes up in a conflagration that consumes time and exposes eternity. What I want to suggest here is the natural alliance between Joycean boredom and Yeatsian apocalypse in relation to temporality and therefore to history.[2]

    ‘visionary apocalypse’ W.B. Yeats. (c) Daniele Idini.

    Deane’s proposal reflects something of the deadlock of revisionist and radical criticism in Irish Studies in the 1990s – a political  deadlock which has largely passed into desuetude in the post-Good Friday atmosphere. If revisionism proposed a certain constitutional conservatism and was a bit of a bore, the radical cultural critics wielded a language which was apocalyptically difficult to understand in its more post-post-structuralist modes. And what was lost in the debate was something of the craic of ordinary people, and the points of cracked reality in ordinary life which do not succumb easily to academic enquiry.

    Methodologically, of course, we find ourselves these days stretched across wide and strange territories of discourse and discipline, and at a very late stage in the drama of literary criticism from Leavis to Baudrillard.  Contemporary criticism has a surfeit of entry points and elaborations, resembling a quantum field in its complexity. I could, whilst sticking only to a psychological theme, find many feminist responses to one essay in late Lacan. Or I could argue for yet another return to a missed aspect of a deconstructed Freud. I would prefer though to draw simple and broad brush-strokes which would not incite the total indignation of a casual reader. My psychological terms are broadly popular (the aesthetic terms are more or  less commonly known in academia since Bakhtin).  And the argument is willingly simple: that ‘Apocalypse and Boredom’ as a binary needs a mediating term (Crack) which turns out to be dizzyingly deconstructive in its implications. Modern scholars cannot either manoeuvre round or simply ignore this post-structuralist facet of a text but must, as Terry Eagleton has suggested, go through theory and out the other side.  And wisdom is to be found in many places including the most demotic and the most abstruse.  Our common language in the end must be the structures of wisdom, and Derrida has as much a claim to them as does the greatest ‘realist’ of a pub in Grafton Street. [3]

    Deane’s broad historical binary can be broadened to include a psychological dimension and also an aesthetic principle for the detailed analysis of culture, society and art. The psychological dimension appropriate to Irish modernism, I shall argue, is manic-depressive in structure. The corresponding aesthetic principle is a principle of carnival-nihilism where the hyphen suggests an affinity with the related manic-depressive psychology. The hyphen should suggest that the prior term in each case (mania, carnival) is not necessarily adjectival but has also an intimate link with its sister terms depression and nihilism. Adding these terms to Deane’s we might produce a more complex matrix for the discussion of Irish modernism for there are fascinating dialogical correspondences between manic, carnivalistic and apocalyptic phenomena, as indeed there are between depressing, nihilistic and boring colonial experiences. In the process of thus broadening the terms of reference, we will discover the emergence of that third term which ironises the solemnities of apocalypse and boredom: the term known to our common culture as crack.

    It is a question of corollaries of structure. Manic-depression is episodic and interruptive of quotidian life in the same way that apocalyptic and boring experiences can be said to be episodic diversions from  the ‘normal’ functioning of a happy democratic culture. Mania wrecks routine, and depression makes us incapable of routine. The terms carnival and nihilism are not new, but in an internal relationship with each other they form an aesthetic principle which deforms the more staid genre of tragi-comedy which is often taken by older critics to represent an aesthetic ‘norm’ for representing the human condition.[4] Carnival,  like mania, achieves a disruption of normal boundaries, hierarchies and empirical states of mind.  Depression and nihilism can kill our sense of the value of the ordinary. Christian apocalypse disrupts boundaries (‘ye shall be as gods’), hierarchies (‘I am the Alpha and Omega’) and forms of empiricism ( ‘they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory’). But it is also true that boredom can at its extreme give us an extremely interesting sense of what eternity might be like.  In a Derridean sense each of these terms when pushed to its limit can turn into its opposite: there is nothing more boring than an over-long carnival, and nothing more likely to reveal ‘the hidden’ than a night of nihilistic visions.

    The dialogical inter-action of these terms furnishes us with both ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ opportunities if we imagine the structure thus:

              Apocalypse                      Boredom       (Socio-cultural level).

              Mania                              Depression   (Psychological level)

              Carnival                           Nihilism        (Aesthetic level).

    Taken together as a matrix of six terms we can begin to be experimental, and the advantage of adding psychological and aesthetic terms is to furnish us with a complex language for discussing the contingencies of modernist culture: what, for instance, might a manic-nihilism resemble, say in the early Nietzschean plays of W.B. Yeats such as Where there is Nothing? Could we consider the possibility of a carnival of boredom in Joyce’s Dubliners or Brendan Behan’s The Hostage? How might a sense of apocalyptic depression inform Sean O’Casey’s  The Silver Tassie? The terms are reversible, too, and this adds a further level of vocabulary to our exploration of forms: what is the function, for instance, of a depressive carnivalism in the plays of Samuel Beckett, a nihilistic apocalypse  at the end of O’Casey’s Purple Dust and a boring mania in the work of Denis Johnston and Spike Milligan?   I will now explore some of these terms more categorically and then go on to demonstrate how their presence can best be detected in the work of Sean O’Casey, a writer placed in the ‘minor’ category of modernists behind Joyce and Yeats, but who may come into his majority when seen as the first realist of crack.

    Samuel Beckett, illustration by Malina/Artsyfartsy
    1. Mania.

    In 1921, at the height of European  modernism, the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin described manic depression for the first time as involving ‘a heightened distractibility’, a ‘tendency to diffusiveness’, and ‘a spinning out the circle of ideas stimulated and jumping off to others’. [5]  In 1924 the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler concurred and drew a parallel with artistic production:

    The thinking of the manic is flighty.  He jumps by by-paths from one subject to another, and cannot adhere to anything.  With this the ideas run along very easily and involuntarily, even so freely that it may be felt as unpleasant by the patient….

    Because of the more rapid flow of ideas, and especially because of the falling off of inhibitions, artistic activities are facilitated even though something worth while is produced only in very mild cases and when the patient is otherwise talented in this direction. The heightened sensibilities naturally have the effect of furthering this.[6]

    We should notice the stress here upon the ‘heightened’ sensibility of the maniac for this reminds us of the heightened sensibility required to experience epiphany and revelation. We should also note the ‘falling off of inhibitions’ for this is a feature we will observe in our analysis of carnivalesque activity. The rapid flow and spinning of ideas also reminds us of some of the features we associate with modernist texts such as Ulysses. In short, the phenomenon of mania touches upon both frenetic literary activity and apocalyptic or transformative experience.

    1. Depression.

    Seamus Deane refers in his essay to the ‘marks of boredom’ he detects in Joyce, Beckett and Kafka.  They include:

    – ‘dinginess of physical circumstance and dress’,

    – ‘extreme routinization of action and speech’,

    – ‘an individual eloquence that derives from consensual banalities’,

    – ‘a sense of personal insignificance’ ,

    – ‘the belief that one is … in a void ….’  [7]

    Let us contrast this list with a list of depressive symptoms described by Irish psychiatrist Anthony Clare:

    ‘-Feelings of guilt or worthlessness

    – Loss of concentration

    – Loss of energy and noticeable tiredness of fatigue

    -Suicidal thoughts …

    -Agitation or marked slowing down (retardation’).[8]

    Sean O’Casey, Image by Reginald Gray.

    It is clear from these lists that clinical depression and cultural boredom are intimately related.  As we shall see in the work of Sean O’Casey, the subject feels that he has been broken into pieces.  It is an experience of extreme boredom as a form of disintegration which results, paradoxically, in a form of apocalyptic fear:

    [The depressive] feels solitary, indescribably unhappy, as ‘a creature disinherited of fate’; he is sceptical about God, and with a certain dull submission, which shuts out every comfort and every gleam of light, he drags himself with difficulty from one day to another.  Everything has become disagreeable to him; everything wearies him …  he thinks he is superfluous in the world, he cannot restrain himself any longer: the thought occurs to him to take his life without his knowing why.  He has a feeling as if something had cracked in him, he fears that he may become crazy, insane, paralytic, the end is coming near. (Italics inserted).[9]

    Colonial depression is a much more disintegrative experience than the term ‘boredom’ allows.  The depressive is opened up to extraordinarily painful inner confusion and despair as he ‘cracks’ under the strain of living a false life. The only redemptive feature of the experience lies in the fact that extreme depression can become a form of revelation of capitalism’s utter inner monotony.  The depressive subject can become aware of his extreme oppression through his consciousness of his fractured personal moods.  There is , also, as we shall see, something redemptive and ironical about that ‘crack’.

    1. Carnival.

    So much has been written about carnival in recent decades that the term has sadly been recuperated as a ‘boring’ academic category.  We can crack open the term however when we inflect it with an analysis of its relationship with mania and nihilism.  The classic description of the function of carnivalism belongs to Mikhail Bakhtin:

    The laws, prohibitions, and restrictions that determine the structure and order of ordinary, that is noncarnival, life are suspended during carnival….  All distance between people is suspended, and a special carnival category goes into effect: free and familiar contact among people.[10]

    It is a characteristic feature of mania that the patient demonstrates a ‘loss of inhibitions, particularly sexual and social’ and displays an ‘infectious mood – humorous, jocose, euphoric.’[11] The maniac also enjoys breaking the boundaries of propriety- talking to people familiarly on the street, entering private property without permission, cocking a snook at policemen and authority figures.  In a sense, we might think of carnival as a form of collective mania licensed by its social contract. The maniac is stigmatised because of his solitude- his actions are not very different from those of the carnival clown. ‘The basic principle of grotesque or Carnival realism’, writes Michael Bristol, ‘is to represent everything socially and spiritually exalted on the material, bodily level.  This includes cursing, abusive and irreverent speech, symbolic and actual thrashing’ and so on.[12]  The patient in a manic phase often dresses bizarrely, curses abusively and irreverently, thrashes around  and confuses his own body with that of a god. Mania is, in a sense, a one-man carnival.

    ‘Carnival’, writes Bakhtin, ‘celebrates the shift itself, the very process of replaceability, and not the precise item that is replaced,  Carnival is, so to speak, functional and not substantive. It absolutizes nothing, but rather proclaims the joyful relativity of everything.’[13]  The maniac, remember, is identified by his infectious mood, flights of ideas, pressurised speech with fast punning and rhyming, loss of judgement and inhibition. The maniac, too, proclaims the joyful relativity of all relationships, concepts and objects. There are clear structural connections, then, between the forms of apocalypse, mania and carnival, and I would suggest that mania is the mediating element between the two apparently unconnected forms of apocalypse and carnivalism.  In one grotesque twist, the Christian apocalypse is all about the burning flesh of men, and carnival too (L. carne) concerns the destiny of the flesh.  We might indeed view the Last Judgement through one grotesque optic as a kind of carnival of revelation.

    1. Nihilism.

    Nihilism is the rationalisation of boredom and depression.  It is, as it were, the ideology of melancholy.  Where people merely act bored or depressed, as in, say, Joyce’s Dubliners , there is at least hope that some relief might come from the pain of their condition.  These characters are not committed ideologically to the notion that life is meaningless but are merely acting out the paralysis of a cycle of colonial history.  Nihilism, however,  perceives the permanent negation of teleology, divinity and broadly socio-spiritual meaning.  It searches for the lethal nothingness at the heart of any project and proclaims this as its secret truth.  In conjunction with carnivalism as part of the couplet carnival-nihilism, nihilism acts as a corollary to the depression in manic-depression though with an even greater sense of finality.  Where the maniac is reduced, in time, to the horrible vacuousness at the heart of his euphoria, the carnival subject, too, comes to understand that his destruction of all actually existing social forms conceals a secret and permanent nihilism. Carnival cocks a snook at authority but conceals from itself the secret vacuousness of its activity.  It is a good thing to place a king’s crown on an ass’s head but it is also a gesture of hatred towards norms. Nihilism is thus the darkest of the six terms with which we are approaching Irish modernism because it emerges from the very heart of parodic action.  But, in a final redemptive twist, we shall see that nihilism can be dialogised by the comical.  Too much nihilism is, simply, funny, as James Joyce illustrates in his ironic parody of Catholic hell in  A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and as Samuel Beckett discovered in Waiting for Godot. [14]  Several pages of doom and gloom can become amusingly intense.  As we shudder at the crack of doom, we cannot help but be reminded of the craic.

    ‘I cannot enter the social order except as a vagabond.’ – James Joyce, 1904

    The Crack.

    To be cracked can mean, as we have seen, to be depressed to the point of madness,  but to ‘have the crack’ can mean the opposite: to be infected with carnivalistic joy. A crack can be a fault-line from which revelation might arise (literally ‘a seismic event’ as Deane has it) or a blow inducing paralysis. [15]  It is an ambivalent term which mediates between our six analytical terms thus:

    Apocalypse                     Boredom

                        Mania           Crack         Depression

                        Carnival                         Nihilism.

    Crack is the deconstructive term which mediates the transition from one side of the grid to the other. When apocalypse turns into boredom there must be a point at which a position is neither apocalyptic nor boring and I would suggest that the subject here acts like a manic-depressive. When mania begins to turn into depression the patient feels that he is cracking up in the manner described by Emil Kraepelin:

    He has a feeling as if something had cracked in him, he fears that he may become crazy, insane, paralytic, the end is coming near. [16]

    A post-apocalyptic culture can feel that the old moulds have been cracked but this can induce a morose fear for the future that can induce an anxious boredom. Contrarily, when a culture experiences the onset of an apocalypse it encounters heightened, euphoric feelings as in the 1916 rebellion where millennial fever gripped sections of the population of Dublin. As it becomes hypomanic society can have an almighty craic before its euphoria reaches its peak of revelation and collapses back into self-hatred and paralysis. Crack is therefore something of a pharmakon. A good night out in Temple Bar can be a ‘cure’ for depression, but the booze leaves us with a poisonous headache. A crack on the head from an Irish Brother can give us a poisonous hatred of authority, but can also cure us of all our idealism. Crack is undecided in its effects: both violent and creative, fun and pain, a break and a mould. It is a very archetype indeed of deconstruction, for what could be more ambivalent than a textual crack: a point where the text roars and collapses, enjoys and splits, surges and cleaves. At the very point where Beckett reaches his cracked vision of futility, we can’t help but begin to crack up. There is no craic where there is no crack. And there is no crack where there is no craic.  In fact, the term is not just a pharmakon, but the very possibility of there being a pharmakon because there could not be a limit which could not crack, crack being the condition of its hymenicity.

    Crack is a transitive term then but one which cannot sustain itself either as a form or a limit. We crack under pressure but then crack away at a solution. A crack in a cup is a pain but great craic if it causes our landlord to drop tea on his trousers.  Ireland itself is cracked along its Ulster border, but the border itself is ‘crackers’.  A crack cannot be a thing, by definition: but is certainly something. The crack may be Ninety in the Isle of Man, but the crackdown in the Dublin of 1916 was terrible. 

    Sean O’Casey and The End of the Beginning.

    In the work of Sean O’Casey, nihilism is articulated as it emerges from the scandalous pranks of his exuberantly carnivalesque Dublin slum-dwellers. [17] As his work progresses through the years of modernism and civil war, his vision becomes increasingly bleak, so bleak, in fact that it becomes, in an ironic twist, comical. O’Casey’s work hovers in the space of ambiguity created by the word ‘crack’  which can represent both a fault or interruption in the smoothness of a quotidian continuum and a sense of comical social play (craic). ‘Mr O’Casey’, wrote Samuel Beckett, ‘is the master of knockabout in this very serious and honourable sense- that he discerns the principle of disintegration in even the most complacent solidities, and activates it to their explosion.’[18]  O’Casey’s wilful destruction of empirical solidities impressed Beckett philosophically (it was entropic) but also because, to use a contemporary phrase, it cracked him up.  O’Casey was at his most amusing when he was being nihilistic and achieved his greatest spasms of laughter from his creation of ‘spasms of dislocation’ in the art-work.[19] In his 1934 play The End of the Beginning, two characters, Darry Berrill and Barry Derrill set about the destruction of an Irish country house with great relish and, in the process, wreck themselves:

    Darry falls down the chimney … there’ll be a nice panorama of ruin … nothin’ done but damage …   I’m after nearly destroyin’ meself!  [20]

    The country house should be read as symbolic of an emerging De Valeran pastoralism which both O’Casey and Conor Cruise O’Brien took to be a disappointment.[21] ‘Our generation’, wrote O’Brien, ‘grew into the chilling knowledge that we had failed, that our history had turned into rubbish, our past to a “trouble of fools.”‘[22] O’Casey’s country house is an objective correlative of post- Free State Ireland’s paralysis in which his comedic pair stumble blindly about in a void:

    Darry (shouting madly).  Barry, Barry, come here quick, man!  I turned the key of the tap too much, ‘n it slipped out of me hand into a heap of rubbish ‘n I can’t turn off the cock, ‘n I can’t find the key in the dark.  (p. 41.)

    O’Casey and O’Brien could agree upon the ‘heap of rubbish’ that Irish history had become.  Typically, however, O’Casey intensifies the nihilism in the sub-text of the play until its atmosphere becomes apocalyptic:

    I can’t do anything … I don’t know what to do …What in the Name of God has happened? … can you do nothin’ right! … God grant that it won’t be the end … Is the clock stopped?  For God’s sake, touch nothing … It’s as dark as pitch in there …  (pp. 21-30).

    At the centre of Free State Ireland, O’Casey surmised, there lay a metaphysical darkness and his play establishes an atmosphere of cosmic doom throughout. Strangely, though the effect of the treatment  is comical because his pair of clots are so endearing, reminding us of Laurel and Hardy as they crash into furniture, disappear up and down chimneys and knock cracks in the walls of the de Valeran dream. We cannot tell whether the apocalypse of nihilism is serious or part of the craic. ‘Can’t you find anything?’ asks Darry.  ‘I can see nothing’ replies Barry, as the play reaches its climax (p. 24), but again, the effect is amusing in the manner of a cartoon where all the lights go out and we see just the cartoon rabbit’s eyes glowing in the dark. O’Casey is attempting a serious critique of his country’s post-apocalyptic (Easter 1916) boredom, but he discovers that boredom holds a potential energy within it which can explode into epiphanies of entropy, at which point he cannot decide whether to laugh or go mad. His culture is exhausted (‘not a drop left in it, not a single drop!  What’re we goin’ to do n– …’) but hysterically explosive:  ‘… He lets go of the rope, and runs over to the oil drum.  Darry disappears up the chimney‘ (p. 33).  For O’Casey, De Valeran Ireland is  literally ‘cracked’,  deformed in a vortex of nihilism and farce:

    He turns and sees that Darry has disappeared.

                            Lizzie (speaking outside in a voice of horror).  The heifer, the heifer!

    Darry (calling out).  Lizzie, Lizzie!

             Lizzie rushes in as Darry falls down the chimney….  (p.33.)

    The terms Apocalypse and Boredom are not adequate in their singularity to capture such ambivalencies.  Boredom taken too far can rebound as a form of apocalyptic emptiness as in O’Casey’s work from 1923-34 where we encounter darknesses which take us beyond the merely paralytic state of Joyce’s Dubliners towards Beckettian nihilism. Apocalypse, too, can be strangely boring as we can note from my opening quotation where Seamus Deane speaks of the relief that we seek from Yeats’s constant revelations.  We must seek mediating terms for the movement between Deane’s  twin poles of analysis for, in the end, the terms begin to deconstruct one another.  The first step in moving towards a more complex analysis is to introduce more specific psychological and aesthetic terms.  The second step is to seek a mediating term for the deconstructive activity of this more complex matrix.  In the term ‘crack’ we have a term which mediates  the ambiguities of the deconstructive inter-actions of apocalypse, mania and carnival, boredom, depression and nihilism.  Yeats and Joyce may have wanted Ireland to aspire to being  an Attic culture, but I would wish to install Crack within Seamus Deane’s  paradigm to remind us that Ireland was always, already, a very Antic country. [23]

    [1]  Seamus Deane, ‘Boredom and Apocalypse: A National Paradigm’ in Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1970  (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1997).

    [2]  Deane, Strange Country, p. 171. For a discussion of manic-depressive activity in the life of W.B. Yeats, see my ‘”Down Hysterica Passio”: The Mood Structures of W.B. Yeats’, Irish University Review  vol. xxviii, no. 2, Autumn/Winter 1998, pp. 272-80.

    [3]  A very Derridean street name.

    [4]  See, for instance,  David Krause, Sean O’Casey: The Man and His Work (London, MacMillan, 1960), pp. 86-89 and passim.   ‘Carnival’ and ‘nihilism’ should be thought of as standing to the extreme left and right, as it were, of the traditional terms ‘comedy’ and ‘tragedy’.  Where tragi-comedy suggests an organic genre in which its terms are nevertheless discrete, carnival-nihilism should suggest an aesthetic that is in creative contradiction with itself.  For further discussion of the principle of carnival-nihilism, see my (unpublished) M. Litt. thesis, Ideology and Dramatic Form in the Plays of Sean O’Casey, 1922-46 (Oxford, Bodleian library, 1994).

    [5]  Emil Kraepelin, Manic-Depressive Insanity and Paranoia , trans. R.M. Barclay, ed. G.M. Robertson (Edinburgh, E&S Livingstone, 1921) in Kay Redfield Jamison, Touched with Fire: Manic Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament (New York , Simon and Schuster: Free Press, 1994), pp. 107-8.  We might consider manic depression to be a ‘modernist’ illness in the way that some writers have conceived schizophrenia to be a ‘post-modern’ illness (see, for example, Frederic Jameson, ‘Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism’, New Left Review, 146, pp. 53-92.)  Where the schizophrenic patient loses touch with structures of space and time permanently, the manic-depressive experiences episodic  disorientation.  He is able to recuperate his identity, albeit tentatively, and thus retains a sense of ironic detachment from a self in crisis which a schizophrenic patient cannot since his very sense of self has collapsed into a permanent ‘flow’ of disorder.

    [6]  Eugen Bleuler, Textbook of Psychiatry, English ed. A.A. Brill (London, Macmillan, 1924)  in Jamison, Touched with Fire, p 108.  The reader is referred to  Jamison, Touched with Fire, pp. 262-3 (Appendix A)  for the fuller Diagnostic Criteria of Mania.

    [7]  Seamus Deane, Strange Country, p. 170.

    [8]  Spike Milligan and Anthony Clare, Depression, p. 35.

    [9]  Emil Kraepelin in Milligan and Clare, Depression, pp. 23-4.

    [10]  Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Theory and History of Literature, Vol. 8, trans., ed., C. Emerson (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. 122-3.

    [11]  Milligan and Clare, Depression, p. 38.

    [12]  Michael Bristol, Carnival and Theatre: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England (New York,  Methuen, 1985), p. 22.

    [13]  Bakhtin, Problems, p. 125.

    [14]  See, for example, James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (London, Minerva, 1992), pp.130-40 and Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (London, Faber and Faber, 1965), pp.11-15.

    [15]  Deane, Strange Country, p. 170.

    [16]  Emil Kraepelin in Milligan and Clare, Depression, pp. 23-4.

    [17]  See, for instance,  Sean O’Casey, ‘The Silver Tassie’, Collected Works vol. ii (London, MacMillan, 1967) where a carnivalesque opening of great joy mutates into a despairing nihilism: The sound of a concertina playing in the street outside has been heard, and the noise of a marching crowd….  Shouts are heard– ‘Up the Avondales!‘ ; ‘Up Harry Heegan and the Avondales!’ Then steps are heard coming up the stairs, and first Simon Norton enters, holding the door ceremoniously wide open to allow Harry to enter … carrying a silver cup joyously…. (p. 25).

    cf.:

    Teddy:  Strain as you may, it stretches from the throne of God to the end of the hearth of hell.

    Simon.  What?

    Teddy.  The darkness.  (p. 89).

    [18]  Samuel Beckett writing about The End of the Beginning in ‘The Essential and the Incidental’, Thomas Kilroy, ed., Sean O’Casey: Twentieth Century Views (London, MacMillan ,1975), p. 167.

    [19]  Beckett, ‘The Essential and the Incidental’, p. 168.

    [20]  Sean O’Casey, ‘The End of the Beginning’, Five One Act Plays (MacMillan, 1990),  p. 33.  Further references to this play can be found in the text.

    [21]  This pastoralism would later produce the De Valeran vision of a countryside ‘bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, the romping of sturdy children, the contests of athletic youths, the laughter of maidens; whose firesides would be the forums of the wisdom of serene old age.’  (Eamon De Valera quoted in David Krause, intro., Cock-a-Doodle Dandy (London, MacMillan, 1991), pp. 15-16.  In Cock-a-Doodle Dandy , O’Casey developed the point made in  The End of the Beginning– that the boredom of pastoralism concealed an apocalyptic force (the cock) which could rip its pretensions apart.

    [22]  Conor Cruise O’Brien, ‘The Embers of Easter’, O.D. Edwards and F. Pyle, ed.s, 1916: The Easter Rising (London, MacMillan, 1968), p. 231.

    [23]  For an interesting essay on the relationship between antics and melancholy, see Harry Levin, ‘The Antic Disposition’, Hamlet: A Selection of Critical Essays, ed. John Jump (London, MacMillan, 1968), 122-36. The word antic derives etymologically from the Italian antico (antique) which gives the phrase ‘Antic country’ a satisfyingly Yeatsian accent.