The Irish Century (5)

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.