A New World. Yes, but When ?
Let us try to filter the idea of that century through a work by an emblematic Irish writer, contrasted with his European counterpart. The idea of that century is that it generated a subjectivity marked by an openness to antagonism, caused in turn by a determination not just to think about a better world but to actually engage in projects of transforming human society.
Sean O'Casey is a quintessentially Irish revolutionary playwright, as Brecht was the European revolutionary playwright. He contrasts starkly with Brecht. Where Brecht sought to purge all vestiges of romanticism from German writing, O'Casey sees in romanticism, partciularly in its expressionist form, as expressing the zeal which the revolutinary endeavour requires. O'Casey is the revolutionary socialist artist taken up with the gestures of the nationalist revolutionary. For Brecht the revolutionising of dramaturgy is his contribution to revolution. For O'Casey, dramaturgy only reflects its inverse. I mean by this that the sense of self arising from the mise en scene is only a posture of the identity of self underlying the moment, for O'Casey. O'Casey relies primarily on his sentimental attachment to the working man (and, even more, the working class woman), while Brecht relies primarily on his sentimental attachment to the writer.
Brecht adopts a critical relationship to the expressionist theatre of the masses, exemplified in Ernest Toller's play of the same name. O'Casey rejects Arnold Whesker's project of taking theatre to the massess, insisting the workers must learn to act themselves. For Brecht, there is, in addition, the interrelationship between character and history. The poetic sensibility characteristic of the century is a shadow on his theatre, as he struggles to place the individual within the inhuman scale of a kind of history which insists on eliminating all ideals in the reality of blood. O'Casey does historical backdrop merely as assured technique. It isn't the fundamental technical problem, rather it is a fact he brings to the play from life. Nor is it the moral issue.
Brecht engages with the ideal of a proletarian art, while O'Casey (like Trotsky) denies the existence of any such thing. Where for Brecht the self-celebration of a spectating bourgeoisie at the theatre must be rejected and fought, for O'Casey it must be expanded and extended. Badiou says of Brecht "Without doubt, Brecht is the most universal and the most indisputable among those artists who explicitly linked their existence and creativity to so-called communist politics." (P. 43) O'Casey, by contrast, is neither universal nor indisputable. Where Brecht was always tangental and contained within the sphere of art, even as he seemed repeatedly, magically, to step outside that sphere; O'Casey is not a party man, but his admiration for the USSR knows no bounds. He serves on the editorial board of the Daily Worker without being in the party.
All hints of Shakespearean universality are increasingly undermined in O'Casey by the particular, the symbolic and the farcical. Far from being indisputable, O'Casey seems more often than not a man of the romanticism of the 19th century, apparently disgarding the tropes of modernism as fast as he can. It is very easy to look down on him and very hard not to feel his distance from the post-modern intellectual. The Shakespearean constantly seeps through in Brecht, his historical references often whisking him away from the condition of the workers to the human condition. And then, as if to confirm the contrast, the deeper you dig, the more O'Casey's 19th century styles seem more and more like a mysterious modernism, somehow very specifically twentieth century.
In the documentary, Cradle of Genius, O'Casey breaks into song with an abandon more akin to the real homeless than to the Beckettian homeless. We approach his mature plays with regret that the Shakespearean sheen is gone off them, the inverse of the perception of comtemporary communists, who preferred the mature plays. Those later plays were O'Casey grappling with the reality of an independent Catholic, autarkic, Ireland and doing so in fantasy, in symbolism, didactically - by any means possible. In his autobiographic Inishfallen Fare Thee Well, O'Casey talks about the 'curtain of dark separation' which had fallen down between him and Irish political culture when he expressed his crticisms of the 1916 rising.
Unbeknownst to W.B. Yeats, his rejection of O'Casey's Silver Tassie then came to constitute the key hegemoic act of the Abbey, asserting itself as the dominant ideological institution of national culture in theatre. In that way the a-political Yeats set himself up to be used, after Yeats, by failed politician Ernest Blythe and others to support the homogeneous catholic, nationalist culture that was to prove so critical to the Irish century, thus transforming the Abbey in to the sinister institution it would long be. Thus appeared the dividing line between O'Casey and the institutions of 20th Century Ireland, a dividing line which reflected O'Casey's express challenge to contemporary ideology on behalf of the search for the dramma of 20th century life. By contrast, Brecht insisted on ending his days in the German Democratic Republic, institutionalised.
The dividing line between Brecht and O'Casey is not that between 20th century modernism and 19th century naturalism. Although O'Casey is confusingly labeled naturalist by many critics, the label does not bear critical examination. Indeed his rejection both of nationalist naturalism and 1930s socialist realism was categoric. What is characteristic of O'Casey, and what separates him from Brecht, is that his faith in humanity is unshakeable. He does not grasp towards a revolutionary cause, he begins from it. Revolutionary politics, it is sometimes said, relies on the blind enthusiasm of youth. O'Casey was that impossible thing, an eternal teenager. Brecht is admired because he creeps forward like an aging Galileo, the multiple inflections of his reflections open, by accident, to expression in the modernist form. Where Brecht constituted the undrammatic post-modernism enveloped within modernism, O'Casey constituted the drammatic expression of the aspirations which always lie outside the shallow idealism of nationalism.
Thus when O'Casey writes about Ireland, we experience something alien both from the militant consciousness of 20th century European culture and from the isolated, in-bred shadow of a culture that Ireland's marginal existence allowed it.
I cannot think of a single piece on Ireland by O'Casey to match Brecht's short, apocaplyptic piece used by Badiou. Yet it is not hard to imagine his responses to Brecht's modernist radicalism:
a) Where Brecht says that the new can only come about as the seizure of ruin; O'Casey would say that the future can only be built out of people's lives;
b) Where Brecht thinks that the adversary of the new is no longer a force, but is now a neutral abjection, a rotting neutrality; O'Casey feels the vitriol of piety and deception all around, suppressing the vibrancy of life;
c) Where Brecht is so conscious that the relationship of words to things has been undone; O'Casey is brimful of words to glorify the imagination;
d) Where in Brecht the passion for the real has become a conviction that in murder we can make out the metonymy of History, for O'Casey just living verges on being a metaphor for the future.
e) Where Brecht imagines that the end is with us once the oppressor no longer wears a mask; O'Casey would not so much unmask the oppressor as the oppressed.
Even as Ireland, in the character of O'Casey, embraces 20th century dissent in so many of its forms, there is never despair. The real is never just banal. O'Casey, in letters, complains of how plaintive Irish writers have become in the 1940s and 1950s. Most impressively of any event in this century, Ireland seemed to protect O'Casey from the impossible burdens of the 20th century culture he knew well. He was always his own man, unlike Brecht. And the new world ? Well, that might have to wait.
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
The Irish Century (4)
The Unreconciled
The unfolding of the twentieth century was a transition from a catclysmic war to a worse war. The First World War created two contrary senses - that this must be the last war or that this wasted war must be repaired by a good war. Thus the century went from violence to violence and threw aside its pacifists
The First World War deepened the sense of the twentieth century as, at the same time, an age of hope and an age of exhaustion. "The century is haunted by a non-dialectical relationship between necessity and will".(P.31) Violence - the violence so characteristic of the century - marks the points where the dialectical conjunction might have been. In this century, these unreconciled opposites would not be endured. They would be violently reconciled, irrespective of the cost, or at least unaware of it.
As we look back on nationalist Ireland today, we do so from within a new restoration, similar to the restoration of the bourbons after the fall of Napoleon. This new restoration is, again, marked by the apparent triumph of resignation towards necessity. The collapse of the Berlin Wall, the fall of the USSR, the withering of Chinese communism, the eclipse of the European Communist parties, the weakening of trade unions everywhere, all constitute parts of the long failure of the Russian Revolution and the restoration of the pre-World War One society of internationally mobile capital.
After that century, this has become a world in which it would cost as much to feed the whole planet as Euopeans and North American's spend on perfume; but this fact seems without immanent consequence. After that century, Ireland has become a country which seems, in GDP terms, one of the richest in the world and seems to have left behind the past which made it so. The European resignation and the Irish enrichment mean that the distance between Ireland and its European environment is marked, less and less, by the counterposition of the nationalist martyr and the modernist killer which once seemed to mark Ireland apart. The history of Irish participation in the First World War, a point of shame for nationalist Ireland, has become a mere gap in historiography to be filled and reaffirmed in walking tours of World War One graveyards in Belgium and Northern France. The restoration of pre-WW1 Europe and the invention of post-colonial Ireland create a meeting of minds such that European culture now empowers the Irish businessman, rather than comforting the closet Irish intellectual.
The unfolding of the twentieth century was a transition from a catclysmic war to a worse war. The First World War created two contrary senses - that this must be the last war or that this wasted war must be repaired by a good war. Thus the century went from violence to violence and threw aside its pacifists
The First World War deepened the sense of the twentieth century as, at the same time, an age of hope and an age of exhaustion. "The century is haunted by a non-dialectical relationship between necessity and will".(P.31) Violence - the violence so characteristic of the century - marks the points where the dialectical conjunction might have been. In this century, these unreconciled opposites would not be endured. They would be violently reconciled, irrespective of the cost, or at least unaware of it.
As we look back on nationalist Ireland today, we do so from within a new restoration, similar to the restoration of the bourbons after the fall of Napoleon. This new restoration is, again, marked by the apparent triumph of resignation towards necessity. The collapse of the Berlin Wall, the fall of the USSR, the withering of Chinese communism, the eclipse of the European Communist parties, the weakening of trade unions everywhere, all constitute parts of the long failure of the Russian Revolution and the restoration of the pre-World War One society of internationally mobile capital.
After that century, this has become a world in which it would cost as much to feed the whole planet as Euopeans and North American's spend on perfume; but this fact seems without immanent consequence. After that century, Ireland has become a country which seems, in GDP terms, one of the richest in the world and seems to have left behind the past which made it so. The European resignation and the Irish enrichment mean that the distance between Ireland and its European environment is marked, less and less, by the counterposition of the nationalist martyr and the modernist killer which once seemed to mark Ireland apart. The history of Irish participation in the First World War, a point of shame for nationalist Ireland, has become a mere gap in historiography to be filled and reaffirmed in walking tours of World War One graveyards in Belgium and Northern France. The restoration of pre-WW1 Europe and the invention of post-colonial Ireland create a meeting of minds such that European culture now empowers the Irish businessman, rather than comforting the closet Irish intellectual.
Monday, June 11, 2007
The Irish Century (3)
The Beast (The Age)
Poetically, the twentieth century lies between trace and destination. When Yeats tried to elucidate the meaning of the national revolution for him, it was primarily as an event from which he distances himself. But it was also something he articulates himself as intimately related to.
As the century began, the scientific view had been giving way to a more subjectivist, organicist approach in which there was an insistence on uncovering what it means to 'live in accordance with the will-to-live'. (P. 14) When Yeats looks at the national revolution, he knows that the national revolution is looking at itself through him, its least likely sympathiser. Thus he can reduce history to his own moral ambiguities.
Noone ever believed more firmly in the esoteric and the private than Yeats, but behind these hobbies he partakes more fully than many Irish writers in the subversion of the private by the sense of history which pervades the modernism of the early twentieh century. This intensifying sense of history made it seem sensible to sacrifice the individual for grand causes. This was so not only in the throes of national revolution. Decades later as Ireland watched the history of Europe unfold, there still seemed causes for which, in the 1940s and 1950s, a few men would sit in reconciled bravery, within condemned man's cells and await execution, telling family and sweathearts in final letters how they accepted their fate for the justice of their cause.
But the Irish hold tenuously to this twentieth century intensity. More often than not, the revivialist catholicism of Cardinal Paul Cullen seems to be framing such self-sacrifice, rather than the aspiration to transform mankind. The Irish nationalist sensibility is less about building the future than recapturing the mythical past. The speedily re-written failure of the 1980s hunger strikes, strangely echoing the triumph of failure of 1916 itself, only re-emphaisises the hollow militancy and unsettling traditionalism of Ireland's revolutionary tradition.
In Ireland's case, the sense of history was at the service of myth. "The Twentith Century Idea was to confront history, to master it politically" (P.15), writes Badiou. But, as so many commentators noted, the Irish sensibility was captured by history, not surpassing it. The Irish appeared to be compulsively reliving the past - to the point that the few modernist intellectuals seemed entirely out of place and the most 19th century intellectuals seemed most at home.
Thus Yeats does not see a confrontation between the burden of history and the aspirations of the promethian hero. It is not hubris that worries him. It is a more classic tragedy - the foolish defiance of fate. Marx had written of the the transformation of the self conciding with the transformation of society - but it is quite the opposite to believe that the sacrifice of the self can be a substitute for the transformation of reality; it is altogether more primitive.
The characteristic Irish tragedy is not the terrorisation of the mass, it is the lonely execution of the political martyr, a more genteel, more desolate and less transformative outcome. The heroism seeking discontinuity which transfixes Europe has little resonance in Ireland. While Europe's modernist culture increasingly thought of itself as a new age, the ruling culture of Ireland was increasingly located in a sense of itself as a timeless celtic refuge. It is not without significance that the Pearse cult at its height toyed with a sacriligious analogy with 'the' crucifixtion. The spiritual does not follow from the transformation of the material, as seemed so obvious across Europe, it seems in Ireland to substitute for the transformation of the material and, maybe, to transform the material.
This difference is overlain on a similarity. If we look across Europe to Badiou's choice, Osip Mandelstam, in his poem The Age (1923), we find the very same sense of the funereal heaviness of the age interwoven with a delicate, fragile promise. Detoured through a 19th century nationalism, the Irish poet ends up, with the simulacrum of a European sensibility.
Poetically, the twentieth century lies between trace and destination. When Yeats tried to elucidate the meaning of the national revolution for him, it was primarily as an event from which he distances himself. But it was also something he articulates himself as intimately related to.
As the century began, the scientific view had been giving way to a more subjectivist, organicist approach in which there was an insistence on uncovering what it means to 'live in accordance with the will-to-live'. (P. 14) When Yeats looks at the national revolution, he knows that the national revolution is looking at itself through him, its least likely sympathiser. Thus he can reduce history to his own moral ambiguities.
Noone ever believed more firmly in the esoteric and the private than Yeats, but behind these hobbies he partakes more fully than many Irish writers in the subversion of the private by the sense of history which pervades the modernism of the early twentieh century. This intensifying sense of history made it seem sensible to sacrifice the individual for grand causes. This was so not only in the throes of national revolution. Decades later as Ireland watched the history of Europe unfold, there still seemed causes for which, in the 1940s and 1950s, a few men would sit in reconciled bravery, within condemned man's cells and await execution, telling family and sweathearts in final letters how they accepted their fate for the justice of their cause.
But the Irish hold tenuously to this twentieth century intensity. More often than not, the revivialist catholicism of Cardinal Paul Cullen seems to be framing such self-sacrifice, rather than the aspiration to transform mankind. The Irish nationalist sensibility is less about building the future than recapturing the mythical past. The speedily re-written failure of the 1980s hunger strikes, strangely echoing the triumph of failure of 1916 itself, only re-emphaisises the hollow militancy and unsettling traditionalism of Ireland's revolutionary tradition.
In Ireland's case, the sense of history was at the service of myth. "The Twentith Century Idea was to confront history, to master it politically" (P.15), writes Badiou. But, as so many commentators noted, the Irish sensibility was captured by history, not surpassing it. The Irish appeared to be compulsively reliving the past - to the point that the few modernist intellectuals seemed entirely out of place and the most 19th century intellectuals seemed most at home.
Thus Yeats does not see a confrontation between the burden of history and the aspirations of the promethian hero. It is not hubris that worries him. It is a more classic tragedy - the foolish defiance of fate. Marx had written of the the transformation of the self conciding with the transformation of society - but it is quite the opposite to believe that the sacrifice of the self can be a substitute for the transformation of reality; it is altogether more primitive.
The characteristic Irish tragedy is not the terrorisation of the mass, it is the lonely execution of the political martyr, a more genteel, more desolate and less transformative outcome. The heroism seeking discontinuity which transfixes Europe has little resonance in Ireland. While Europe's modernist culture increasingly thought of itself as a new age, the ruling culture of Ireland was increasingly located in a sense of itself as a timeless celtic refuge. It is not without significance that the Pearse cult at its height toyed with a sacriligious analogy with 'the' crucifixtion. The spiritual does not follow from the transformation of the material, as seemed so obvious across Europe, it seems in Ireland to substitute for the transformation of the material and, maybe, to transform the material.
This difference is overlain on a similarity. If we look across Europe to Badiou's choice, Osip Mandelstam, in his poem The Age (1923), we find the very same sense of the funereal heaviness of the age interwoven with a delicate, fragile promise. Detoured through a 19th century nationalism, the Irish poet ends up, with the simulacrum of a European sensibility.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)