| Major Irish Authors: Introduction
Some Quotations
| Note: On this page I have copied some quotations expressing various - and often antagonistic - versions of what Irish nationality and Irish art might be and how they are related. Please consider what you think about the relationship between literature and nation in any context known to you - Irish, Brazilian or otherwise. [BS] |
| Thomas Davis |
‘Make Ireland a nation and you will do more for national art than if you mortgaged your estates for pictures and turned your own halls into drawing school. Make Ireland a nation and the Irish artist will feel himself a partner in your toils, your ambition and your renown; he will be nourished upon great sights and thoughts of liberated people - he will be surrounded by men vying in nationality and worshipful of national genius. He will dedicate that genius to honour the influence that inspired it.’
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| (From The Nation, 1843; quoted in Editorial, The Dublin Magazine, Spring 1966 - with remarks, ‘Alas for Davis’s hopes! ... from the cultural point of view Ireland is a disgrace’, p.5). |
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James Joyce (reviewing William Rooney’s sentimental verse in Poems and Ballads) |
‘For a man who writes a book cannot be excused by his good intentions, or by his moral character; he enters into a region where there is a question of the written word, and it is well that this should be borne in mind, now that the region of literatures is assailed so fiercely by the enthusiast and the doctrine. […] And yet he may have written well if he had not suffered from one of those big words which make us so unhappy.’
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| (Daily Express, 11 Dec. 1902; rep. in Critical Writings, ed. Mason & Ellmann, [1959] 1965, p.85, p.87.) |
| Note that Arthur Griffith reprinted a good deal of the review in his own paper, United Irishman, (20 Dec. 1902), omitting any comment other than to add the word ‘Patriotism’ in brackets after Joyce’s phrase ‘one of those big words’. (Ibid., p.84.) |
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Samuel Beckett (First Love and Other Shorts, London: Calder 1973) |
‘What constitutes the charm of this country, apart of course from its scant population, and this without the help of the meanest contraception, is that all is derelict, with the sole exception of history’s ancient faeces. These are ardently sought after, stuffed and carried in procession. Wherever nauseated time has dropped a nice fat turd you will find our patriots, sniffing it up on all fours, their faces on fire. Elysium of the roofless.’
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(pp.1-30; p.21; quoted in Colm Tóibín, ‘New Ways to Kill Your Father: Historical Revisionism’, Ireland:
Towards new Identities?, ed. Karl-Heinz Westarp and Michael Böss (Aarhus UP 1998), pp.28-36; p.34.) |
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Francis Stuart |
‘National literature is to my mind a meaningless term. Literature can’t be national. Literature is individual. Nationality has nothing to do with it.’
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| (Quoted in Gerry Smyth, The Novel and the Nation: Studies in New Irish Fiction, London: Pluto 1997, cp.15.) |
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Seamus Heaney |
‘[E]mpowered within its own horizons, it looks out but does not necessarily look up to the metropolitan centres. Its impulses and possibilities abound within its boundaries but are not limited by them. It is self-sufficient but not self-absorbed, capable of thought, undaunted, pristine, spontaneous, a corrective to the inflations of nationalism, and the cringe of provincialism.’
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| (Preoccupations, 1980, pp.131-49.) |
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