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.