Playboys of the GPO

Colm Tóibín

Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation by Declan Kiberd
Cape, 719 pp, £20.00, November 1995, ISBN 0 224 04197 5

‘The most important thing we have done is that we have made a modern art, taking our traditional art as a basis, adorning it with new material, solving contemporary problems with a national spirit,’ the Catalan architect Josep Puig i Cadafalch wrote in 1903. By the turn of the century, the national spirit had taken over most cultural activities in Catalonia, so that art, architecture and the Catalan language had become more powerful weapons in politics than resentment about Madrid’s handling of foreign or economic policy. The architects who worked on the new apartment blocks and public buildings in Barcelona between 1880 and 1910 began to play with a dual mandate, not merely innovative but Catalan as well, in an effort to create a national spirit in their buildings. They used the most modern methods available: in 1888 Domènech i Montaner used unadorned brick and industrial iron for his café-restaurant in the Parc de la Ciutadella; 16 years later he used a steel frame for his concert hall, El Palau de la Música Catalana, making it the first curtain-wall building in Spain and one of the first in the world. Both buildings sought to establish the progressive nature of the Catalan enterprise, but both are also laden with medieval motifs, reminders of former greatness, of the time before 1492 and the beginning of Castilian imperialism. Like most turn-of-the-century buildings in Barcelona they used Gothic and Romanesque references, spiky shapes, cave-like entrances, floral motifs in wrought iron, coloured glass or ceramic tiles, ornate sculpture, conveying both craft and opulence. They were intensely political buildings, and both Domènech i Montaner and Puig i Cadafalch became leading politicians – Domènech i Montaner was one of the founders of the Lliga de Catalunya in 1887. Both were elected to the Cortes in Madrid to represent the Catalan cause.

You are not logged in

If you have already registered then you can login here
If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
If you are a member of a subscribing institution or university library please login here
If you have an institutional print subscription without online access then you can find out about our institutional online subscriptions here

Vol. 18 No. 8 · 18 April 1996 » Colm Tóibín » Playboys of the GPO (print version)
pages 14-16 | 5213 words

Letters

From Barra O’Seághdha

In his review of Inventing Ireland (LRB, 18 April) Colm Tóibín mentions ‘the paradoxes, oppositions and juxtapositions’ that characterise Declan Kiberd’s style. If Kiberd’s flamboyance almost invites controversy, Tóibín’s generally understated prose sometimes conceals surprising confusions and contradictions. Buying into Kiberd’s literary-critical vocabulary, he presents Irish nationalism as the creation of writers and artists in the decades before 1916, and the state as ‘a place created by imagination and rhetoric and eccentric dreams’. Elsewhere, the country is ‘dreamed into existence by a mixture of poetry and violence’. In fact, looking at the genesis of the 1916 Rising, Tóibín himself commits the fault for which, in one sentence, he first criticises Kiberd – ‘Literary critics writing about history and politics often mistake them for texts, and this is the real problem with Kiberd’s book’; and then praises him: ‘and, indeed, with the Ireland that was invented – this both gives the book its importance and explains a great deal about Ireland.’ In other words, Kiberd is wrong; Ireland is wrong; but two wrongs make a right, and so Kiberd’s book becomes important and insightful.

Soon, without modifying his dream-theory of Irish nationalism, Tóibín is informing us that ‘cultural nationalism did not lead to the Rising, though it may have been in part responsible for it.’ Bored perhaps with such a prosaic idea, he quickly reverts to his dream-theory: ‘The idea that we all inhabit both an invented and a non-invented Ireland may help explain why people emigrate from here whenever there is an economic crisis.’ The desire for a fuller belly, more money and better prospects may also be relevant.

The fastidious Tóibín must rejoice not to have been born in France or the USA: the legacy of bloody revolution and military adventure and conquest would be too much to contemplate. Oddly enough, his fastidiousness is selective. Like the Irish Republicans whom he abominates, he pays no real attention to Britain. Isn’t it just possible that the origins of Irish nationalist violence may lie not so much in dream-haunted minds as in Ireland’s historical geography: flanking a dynamic, nationalist/imperialist, expansionist world power, set – sometimes distractedly, sometime systematically – on controlling an unruly neighbour which could provide a foothold for rival powers or for internal dissent? And is it surprising that resistance to such control followed various channels over the centuries, swelling and subsiding as circumstances changed?

The curious convergence between Tóibín and the enemy he loves to hate can also be seen in his dismissal of the Irish Parliamentary tradition. From O’Connell to Parnell to Redmond, and on to the Free State, Irish nationalism has shown a remarkable attachment to Parliamentary democracy. With the exception of the Fenian movement in the 1860s, political – non-agrarian – violence was very rare in the century preceding 1916. Tóibín will not have reflected on the message sent to nationalist Ireland by the proscription of O’Connell’s extraordinary (and extraordinarily peaceful) mass meetings in favour of Repeal of the Union, a message reinforced in 1912-14 when the British Army, the Lords and the Conservative Party under Bonar Law bent to the threat of violence from their friends in the Ulster Volunteers, inspiring Pearse and his friends to emulate their methods. But the reaction was rather different on this occasion. Picking up on the fact that H.G. Wells, John Galsworthy and Arnold Bennett wrote to counter the nationalist view of the 1916 Rising in the American press, Tóibín says: ‘I realise when I read this passage that if I had a choice between the ambiguous heritage left by Pearse and Yeats and the unambiguous legacy of Wells, Galsworthy and Bennett, I am happier on this side – the Irish side – of the Irish Sea; it is hard to see how you could get through the day with the dryness of the other heritage.’ Here we go again – the irrational, poetic, unreliable Irish v. the prosaic, decent, dull British. We need not waste our tears on Tóibín as he impales himself on the horns of an imaginary dilemma. The fact is that the modern British prose tradition is both richer and more ambiguous than he chooses to think. And why not compare poet with poet, ambiguity with ambiguity? What of Kipling, Sir Henry Newbolt, Lawrence? It was very easy for an English writer to be unambiguous about Irish violence against the British Army. The real test lies in the attitude of the writer to violence carried out in the name of Britain, or the Empire.

Barra O’Seághdha
Dublin