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National character, as a category, illuminates some of the connections between speech and land in their various representations, most especially when the possession of each is taken to be a matter of critical political importance. There is a way of possessing speech and land that is held to be native to the Irish; and there is equally a mode of possession that is English. It is not merely a matter of claiming a difference between these. It is a matter of making one claim superior to the other or, alternatively, of eliding that difference and showing that the Irish can speak English as do the English and that they can, comparably, hold land according to English law.
However, if national character is to be altered, renovated so that it will allow the Irish to enter into the English world of progress and modernity, the consequence might seem to be that such a renovation might make the Irish indistinguishable from the English. In reforming the national character, national identity might be lost. It is, of course, true that the words identity and character are miscellaneously used in a diverse number of texts right through that century and beyond. But there is, I suggest, a difference between them.
In becoming a nation-state, England or France, for instance, could claim that the national identity had been preserved because identity was the condition attained by the national character when it became duplicated all over the globe via imperial expansion. Only privileged, successful versions of a local national character could claim a place in the evolutionary story of the character of nations - nations, that is, that were simultaneously particular in themselves but also universal in their global appeal. This, obviously, could neither apply nor appeal to the Irish; for them the character of nations, so construed, was profoundly oppressive. It assigned to them a national {56} character that had no global future. To the extent that they tried to reform this character so that it might find an entry into the imperial adventure of modernity, they risked losing their identity. The risk was taken. The first step was to find a mode of representation for Ireland that would confirm its uniqueness and liberate it from the notion that it was a civilization doomed to extinction in the evolutionary history of nation-state formations.
The first requirement for the national character was to find a manner in which its speech might be represented. This was first engaged with as a conscious political and historical question by Maria Edgeworth, both in Castle Rackrent and in her Essay on Irish Bulls. It remained a charged issue in Irish fiction thereafter, undergoing its ultimate transformation in Joyce’s work, where the idea of representing an already existing national character was replaced by that of forging the national identity through the act of writing.
If Castle Rackrent is set alongside Gerald Griffin’s The Collegians (1829), the effectiveness of the national character as an agency for the production of the country’s general history in the form of an exemplary, ostensibly ‘private’ or family, narrative is further vindicated. Griffin was ultimately upset that the villain of his novel, the half air, Hardness Cregan, should be more memorable and more likeable than the stalwart Kyrie Daly, the young Catholic son of a middleman farmer who eventually marries Ann Chute, the daughter of a landed family and the heiress whose fortune will confer respectability and ease, as well as freedom from sectarian identification, on her spouse. Griffin was right to be so worried, although his ethical or moral anxiety is perhaps too limiting in its version of the problem. For the melodramatic form of his novel demands that the choice between good and evil be stark, and its ethical imperative - that control win out over excess - ensures that the history of past excess, embodied in Hardness, should be much more materially present to us than the yet to be written history of control ever could be. The good are pallid because they have, in the economy of this novel, no historical time; they are anachronistic, out of time, in a sense opposite to that which applies to the villains of the piece. Peter Brooks establishes the convention’s norms and anxieties: {57}
Melodramatic good and evil are highly personalized: they are assigned to, they inhabit persons who indeed have no psychological complexity but who are strongly characterized. Most notably, evil is villainy; it is a swarthy, cape enveloped man with a deep voice. Good and evil can be named as persons are named - d culorlearra, tend in fact to urce, coward a clear nomination of the moral universe The ritual of melodrama involves the commutation of clearly identified antagonists and the expulsion of one of them, It can offer no terminal reconciliation, for there is no longer a clear transcendent value to be reconciled to. There is, rather, a social order to be purged, a set of ethical imperatives to be
made clear. (Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess, Yale UP 1976, 1984, pp.16-17.)
The Collegians, is, self-consciously, a national novel in the form of Romantic melodrama. Various people are identified as having the national characteristics of recklessness, vivacity, unsteadiness, lack ofmoral perception - excepting young Daly, who is the rational and noble emblem of the new type who is to inherit the Irish earth after Emancipation. The novel can indeed be read as an account of the newly emergent relationship between the national and the rational, with the rational understood to be that progressive condition that grows out of and surpasses the national. But this is not the revolutionary rationality of the system maker. Rather the reverse: it is the rationality of control, of reform, of modified, educated improvement. Kyrie is controlled by his rationality and is thereby equipped to control what would otherwise be his national fate - epitomized by his Trinity College friend Hardness Cregan, The young Catholic beauty, Eily O’Connor, the Colleen Bacon, is murdered by the young half air Hardness (or at his instigation) after a secret marriage and his subsequent regret at a liaison that is both socially embarrassing and financially unwise - since only Ann Chute’s fortune will redeem his property. Hardness is a version of the Rackrents; and the other HCs in the novel (Hyland Creagh, Hepton Connolly) are cut from the sarne cloth-duellists, hard drinkers, ruinous spendthrifts, sportsmen, and, most important of all, anachrofixtre, ‘Me Hepton Connolly was one individual of a species now happily extinct among Irish gentlemen. He just retained enough of a once flourishing patrimony to enable him to keep a hunter, a racer, and an insolent groom.’ [12] {59}
One of the features of Edgeworth’s and Griffin’s texts - as also of those of novelists like the Burma brothers, Carleton, Charles Lever, Lady Morgan - is the rendering of Irish speech as a mode of authenticity and as a claim to realism. But whatever the fidelity of this rendering, the function of dialect, most especially cafa dialect that is marked by vigour, oddity, fierceness, malapropisms, grammatical framaires - iS worth considering more closely than any dispute about its authenticity. its claim to authenticity resides in its mere presence, not in its proximity or otherwise to the actual speech offilish people. In The Collegians there is a correlation between certain physical characteristics and certain forms of speech. Kyrie Daly and his friend Hardness Cregan have servants, Lowry Looby and Danny Mann. Both these servants are physically deformed, although in different ways, and both speak a dialect that is, in Looby’s case, endearingly attractive (or mean[ to be so) and in Mann’s case coarsely repellent. Their dialect is, like themselves, inferior to the educated speech of their young masters. Because each speaks in this instance, each is manifesting a national characteristic - but that national characteristic is indissolubly allied with degradation. Looby has come down in the world: a cottier, he has lost what land he had in an agricultural crisis during the Halifax administration. Now he is a faithful retainer, exhibiting in his posture ‘the effect ... of habitual penury and dependance’,11 But from the outset Looby was doomed to misfortune. In his physique, it seemed as if nature ... had laid the foundation of a giant ... but ... had been compelled to terminate her undertaking within the dimensions of a dwarf."’ He has ‘the national talent for adroit flattery’;" and before he became a servant he lost the chance to become a postmaster because of a superstitious belief. In this respect he is like his master, Mr Daly, father to Kyrie, who named a child of his ‘Noah-East’ in compliance with a popular superstition, again because the Dalys, otherwise sensible, ‘were not wholly exempt from the prevailing weakness of their countrymen’." Landless, superstitious, Physically grotesque, illiterate, comically eloquent with a strong country brogue, Looby is an exemplary instance of the national character of the Irish, benignly viewed; one step back from his master, Mr Daly; two steps back from Kyrie Daly. Danny Mann, by contrast, besides being a hunchback, is {60} marked ‘by that look of pert shrewdness which marks the low inhabitant of A city, and vents itself in vulgar cant, and in ridicule of the honest and wondering ignorance of rustic SmrpIjvjry.’17 Mann’s injury has been inflicted by Hardness: when they were younger, Hardress hurled Mann down a flight of stairs, injuring his spine. But the consequence is that Mann is Hardress’s slave; he will do anything, even to the point of committing murder for him. He may be free of Looby’s disabling superstition; but he has so internally secreted his own oppression that his savage fidelity is itself a form of superstition too. Both men are physically, psychologically, socially, and economically retarded. Their speech is geared to their conditions; one rural and innocent, the other urban and corrupt; one superstitious, the other cynical; one harmless, the other violent. Neither has undergone civic emancipation. Nor can they. They are no more than representations of a historical moment in the evolution of their respective masters. There is no question of psychological complexity here. These four male figures constitute a palimpsest of an evolving historical condition, with Kyrie Daly the most highly evolved in the direction of rationality and Hardness Cregan the most fatally, if attractively, still engaged with the emotional intensities of his forebears. The extent of evolutionary progress is indicated by the difference between a speech that is civil and one that is disfigured, between received pronunciation and dialect, analogous to the physical characteristics of the handsome masters and their deformed servants.
However, the most important dialect, the one that places the speech of the male quartet most luminously, is that of the Colleen Bacon, Eily O’Connor, herself. Even the fact that she has two names, one in phonetically rendered Irish, the other in English, establishes her as a person who summarizes in her name a historical process, a transition between folk origin and social respectability. Eily’s birthday is St Patrick’s Day; the celebrations on that day in Garryowen are as boisterous as one could wish: Garryowen, like Eily herself, has An Irish name, Garbh Eoin, meaning Eoin’s garden, which we are told, because of the Garryowen boys, and because Moore, ‘our national lyrist’, has adapted the song ‘to one of the liveliest of his melodies la has made the place ‘almost a synonime for Ireland’; [19] {91} Eily’s fateful meeting with Hardness takes place on Patrick’s Day and in the course of it she and her father are rescued from the boisterousness of the Garryowen boys by Hardress. Her condition is, to say the least, overdeterinined; her position is self-consciously allegorical. But the allegory extends itself to speech also. In the following passage, the links between speech, physical appearance, and a violent communal history are heavily marked:
It is true, indeed, that the origin of the suburban beauty was one which, in a troubled country like Ireland, had little of agreeable association to recommend it; but few even of those to whom twisted hemp was an object of secret terror, could look on the exquisitely beautiful face of Eily O’Connor, and remember that slu, was a ropemaker’s daughter; few could detect beneath the timid, hesitating, downcast gentleness of manner, which shed an interest over all be, motors, the traces of a harsh and vulgar education. It was true that she sometimes purloined a final letter from the King’s adjectives, and prolonged the utterance of a vowel beyond the term of prosodaical orthodoxy, but the tongue that did so seemed to move on silver wires, and the lip on which the sound delayed[,] ‘long murmuring, loth to pa[rt]’ - [innscred?] to its own accents an association of sweetness and grace, that made the defect an additional allurement,’
The links are telling. Eily is a ropemaker’s daughter; the rope is associated with the hangman (McDaly calls Micil O’Connor ‘a species of collateral hangman’): in a country such as Ireland the association is inevitable; her beauty does not mask vulgarity; her speech is not the King’s English: she filches from it, she breaks its orthodox rules, yet this defect is the more attractive for the sweetness of her voice. State violence, defective pronunciation of the King’s English, female beauty, Irish accent: as with Looby and Mann, there is a politics inscribed in speech, a politics understood in terms of a degradation that cannot be represented in received English. For Eily’s speech is not rendered in dialect, although we are to understand that the King’s English undergoes some distressingly Irish mutations in her mouth. Eily has had a measure of education, through her crude, the priest, Father Edward, who was educated at Salamanca in the penal era. But the ‘moral entertainment’ provided {62} by her reading of Addison and Dr Johnson is insufficient to raise her, in appearance or in speech, to the status of Ann Chute, whose beauty is described in terms that indicate she is of the classical ‘act’ tradition (the Temple of Theseus, the Doric pillars of Trinity Col lege22) rather than that of nature, like Eily. Degradation of speech, unruly behaviour leading to violence, tatterdemalion dress, the small variations in low economic status, the lack of personal or civic control, are all symptoms of Ireland’s past and all have to be overcome - as in Kyrie Daly~o that the emergence of Ireland from its history can be completed. That history is represented at one level as something to be escaped from and finally resolved in the national marriage of Kyrie Daly and Ann Chute.
Despite the fact that history is represented as a retarding influence, manifest in defective speech, physical deformity, and in the violence that takes the lives of Eily, Danny Mann, and Hardness, it retains its dominance. Even the long perspective in which the story is cast, the better to persuade us that the bad old days are gone, does not disguise the inescapable reality of this unreal territory and its murky past. The novel’s attempt to abandon a delinquent nationality fora modem rationality is a failure. What we may call the fielklodsh elements in the fiction, the authenticity of the Irish cultural and historical setting, is precisely what must be sacrificed for a marriage that will be economically emblematic of future success and that will be representable not only in the King’s English but by people who speak the King’s English. Irish history, the Ireland of Garryowen, the Ireland of the 1770s, the Colleen Bawn, duellists, exotic murder, shadowed by the hangman’s noose, is a foreign country because it is a country foreign to the present of the 1820s. To travel in it is to wonder how it can ever be reformed into a proper and civil part of the United Kingdom, Catholic Emancipation was not merely a matter of the franchise and the penal laws; it was a matter of emancipation from the past into civic freedom from that dark, phantasmagoric unreality of earlier times.
In Boucicault’s dramatic version of The Collegians, The Colleen Bawn, first performed in New York in 1860, the question of accent is even more prominent. But now there is a significant change in roles. {63} Hardness is no longer the squireen. He disapproves of whiskey, smoking, and, above all, of Eily’s brogue and her frequent use of Irish chevilles - ‘astbore’ and the like. All the obloquy that was formerly his is now transferred to the gombeen man, Corrigan. But by the close Edy is commanded to speak (or rather ‘spake’) in her natural accent, and the ‘Brides of Garryowen’, she and Ann Chute, me happily reconciled with Hardness and Kyrie Daly. The most significant alteration in the Boucicault play, and in the opera derived from it, The Lily of Killarney, is not in the roles of the characters so much as in the disappearance from these adaptations of the heavily upholstered prose of Griffin himself For that is the form of the Kings English that is ultimately dominant - self consciously respectable, wearing its teaming on its sleeve, even making its classical quotations, rags, and references a ground bass to the lighter Irish melodies of place names, personal names (Myles-na-Copaleen), and chevilles. It is writing with an accent, the accent of respectability, education, responsible and tender feeling. In this novel, it is crucially important that speech should not be deformed, for deformity of speech indicates moral, social, or political delinquency. This is a point exploited in the opera adaptation, especially in Danny Mann, is recitative, where he makes the connection between physical and moral and emotional deformity clear in the standard way of the villain:
Duty, yes, I’ll do my duty,
What is love and what is beauty To a cough misshapen creature,
c ... k d in form and hard m feature?
Hearts that melt m soft compassion Beat in frames of ocher fashion, I’D help the master where I can, No other law has Danny Mann." |
{70}
LAND AND SPEECH
Speech has its norms and abnomms; so too has land. If we look at the ways in which the island of Ireland has been figured in literary and political discourse, we can see, from the Famine onward, a terminological shift that indicates sequences of attitude towards the object that is nominated as ‘Ireland’. Three terms are of particular importance - territory, land, and sod. ‘Land’ is the middle term in the sense that it always occupies the civic space in the ontological bier archy the three constitute. ‘Territory’ I will call the term that belongs to the conception of Ireland as a state; ‘land’ belongs to the conception of Ireland as an economy, within the civic sphere; ‘soil’ is the term that belongs to a nationalist and communal conception of Ireland as a cultural reality that is not fully represented in the modes of artumlation that are proper to the other two. In Isaac Butt’s pamphlet The Irish People and the Irish Land (1867), he laments the fact that agrarian reform is more easily accomplished in India than in Ireland, because Ireland is not recognized as being sufficiently foreign:
And this is not done in the case of Ireland, just because we have the fiction of an identity with England. The owner of the soil is a ‘landlord’ not a zonindar - the occupier is a ‘tenant’ and not a ryor. 1 believe in my conscience, that if we had Irish or Gaelic names to express the relation, if the owner were ‘eb,’ and the occupier a ‘keme’, an English Parliament would not for one session tolerate the continuance of this wrong. Our misfortune is that English phrases are applied to [of.dons] that bear no resemblance to the things which the words describe in the English tongue.
Butt’s point is effective. All the legislation directed towards the reform of the land question in Ireland between the 18205 and the 1870s - the Sub-letting Act of 1826, the Incumbered Estates Act of 1849, Deasy’s Act of 1860, the establishment of the Board of Works in 1831 and the extension of its powers in 1842 to cover drainage and fisheries was founded on the conviction that the British system of legality must be extended to Ireland. We may begin from the fundamental and familiar concept of the contrast between custom and {71} status on the one hand and contract on the other. The native land systems of both Ireland and India included certain elements of status defined only by custom, and therefore by no means precisely defirred. But ‘the British mind found incomprehensible a society based on unwritten custom and on government by personal discretion; and it knew of only one sure method of marking off public from private rights - the introduction of a system of legality’.
Such Edgeworthian efforts ignored a cultural and agricultural reality. For there is a difference between the Irish battle for the land in the nineteenth century and the battle for the soil, even though the two merge and interfuse at various points. Soil is what land becomes when it is ideologically constructed as a natal source, that element out of which the Irish originate and to which their past generations have returned. It is a political notion denuded, by a strategy of sacralization, of all economic and commercial reference.
In an allied version, soil is what land had been when it was communally owned, by tribe, comunity, or nation. Soil is eternally possessed by a community; land is temporarily owned by an individual. The various migrations from one term to the other tend to enforce a polarization between the diachronicity of the systems of landholding and the syochronicity of the link with the soil, even though there is no escaping the fact that any such claim to synchronicity must ultimately give preference to some system of landowning that is rooted in history, however ancient. Still, it is pan of the nationalist, as it is part of the imperialist, self-characterization to claim that the custom that was initially local and original has thereby also a claim to universal assent. The straining for ontological purity in this kind of discourse is one of its most notable and least attractive characteristics; it makes a virtue of a philosophical excess that is registered consistently as a rhetorical deficiency.]
An analogous stress characterizes the movement from oral to print culture, from Irish to English language, from folklore to rationality. The basic paradigm is that of original possession to modem dispossession and then, in a second reversionary variation, of converting that dispossession into a repossession. The recovery of land and the recovery of speech through an act of repossession that will alter the established hierarchies of speech and [...] |