Eagleton undertakes to insert Irish history
into cultural theory, but also to challenge current repressions and evasions
of cultural theory in relation to class, state, revolution, ideology,
and material production, being categories which he thinks dangerously
neglected. [x] Intro. includes a parody of revisionist deliberations on
Irish infanticide [x-xi]
Yeats: A moment comes in every
country when its character expresses itself through some group of writers,
painters, or musicians, and it is this moment, the moment of Goethe in
Germany, or the Elizabethan poets in England, of the van Eycks in the
Low Countries, or Corneille and Racine in France, of Ibsen and Bjornson
in Scandanavia, which fixes the finer elements of national character for
generations ... Generally up to that moment literature has tried to express
everybodys thought, history being considered merely as a chronicle
of facts, but now, at the instant of revelation, writers think the world
is but their palette, and if history amuse them, it is but, as Goethe
says, because they would do its personages the honour of naming them in
their thoughts. [...]
Just as they use the life of their own times, they
use past literature - their own and that of other countires - selectying
here and there under what must always seem, untile their revelation understood,
an impulse of mere caprice .. (Explorations, NY 1962, pp.236-37;
cited in Schliefer, ed., The Genre fo the irish literary Revival, 1980
p.3.
Quotes Carleton on Thackeray: he
writes well about Ireland, for an Englishman. [ix]
Patrick Branwell made a more
spectacular hash of [his life] than was strictly necessary. [1]
Cites J. C. Becketts unpleasantly
patronising comment that we have in Ireland an element of
stability - the land, and an element of instability - the people,
along with J. W. Fosters response that in [Irish] literature
- and I suspect in history ... landscape is a cultural code that perpetuates
instead of belying [these] instabilities and ruptures. (Col.
Conseq., p.149; Eagleton, p.6.)
My aim was something beyond that of
the ordinary class of portrait painting ... it was my wish to produce
an irish picture somewhat historical in its object, and poetical in its
sentiment. (Quoted Stokes, Life and Labours, 1868, p.15;
Eagleton, 6.)
Land in Ireland is a political rallying
cry as well as a badge of cultural belong, and a question of rents as
well as roots ... Whatever the cause, the naturalising strategies of English
ideology dont stick well in Ireland. To claim that the Ascendancy
ruled, but was never entirely able to hegemonise that rule, is to suggest
that it could never properly naturalise it. While a new system has
been given to the country, remarks the distinguished surgeon and
literary scholar George Sigerson, little has been taken to naturalise
it. (Modern Ireland, 1868, p.15 [sic]; Eagleton, p.7]
The unconscious, however, is
a site of ambivalence: if Ireland is raw, turblent, destructive, it is
also a locus of play, pleasure, fantasy, a blessed release from the tyranny
of the English reality principle. Ireland is the biological time-bomb
which can be heard ticking softly away beneath the civilised superstructure
of the Pall Mall clubs; and its history offers to lay bare the murkey
matieral roots of that civility as pitilessly as does Heathcliff.
...
Ireland figured as Britains unconscious. Just as we indulge in the
world of the id in actions which the ego would find intolerable, so nineteenth-century
Ireland became the place where the British were forced to betray their
own principles, in a kind of negation or inversion their conscious beliefs.
Ireland represented a rebarbative world which threatened to unmask
Britains own civility, and no doubt some ingenious critic could
uncover an allegory for this in The Picture of Dorian Gray.
[9]
Bibl. Thomas A Boylan and Tomothy
P. Foley, Political Economy and Colonial Ireland (1992); Isaac
Butt, Introductor Lecture delivered before the Univ. of Dublin (Dublin
1837), inaug. extending concept of wealth to immaterial goods.
Comments on Castle Rackrent: Such
is the doubleness of one of Irish ficitions most intriguingly enigmatic
characters, Thady Quirk in Maria Edgeowrths Castle Rackrent (1800),
and it is perhaps not surprising that this ambivalent creation should
be the work of an upper-class woman, who is likely toe xperience a somewhat
parallel conflict between her social power and sexual subordination. [161]
How tongue in cheek is Thadys
toadying to this lineage of moral desperadoes? [162]
The verve and brio of his discourse
partly qualify its cringe: he may be a groveller, but the language which
betrays the fact is garrulously self-assertive
His loquacyity is
a kind of artlessness, an unstaunchable excess of speech; but it is also,
so we may suspect, the rhetorical strategy of the lower Irish,
disarming authority by its rumbustious spontaneity and wrapping unpalatable
truths in its endless parataxis. [162]
The more Thady exculpates his masters,
or can be felt blandly manipuating the narrative in their favour, the
worse it is for them: they are now responsible not only for their own
squalid conduct but for a monstrous blunting of moral sensibility around
them. [163]
Castle Rackretn can be read
as embodying an idoelogical conflict we can disceern elsewhere in Edgeworth,
between the values of a vital if anarchic ruling class which is able,
whatever its moral shabbiness, to secure the allegiance of its underlings,
and the rational virtues of a more sober social order whose austere utility
will win it few ardent adherents. [163; sees the treatment of King Crony
and Ulick OShane in this light]
The danger with unreliable first-person
narration is the lack of a metalanguage by which its flaws might be measured
[it is] the Preface, footnotes and glossary which supervise and
regulatre Thadys dishevelled Irish discourse with a very English
ironic condescension. [164]
From this standpoint, the novel is
not after all a masterpiece of Swiftian undecidability or triumph of dialogic
indeterminacy
[164]
Is Castle Rackrent, however, really
as assured a text as all that? [quizzes its relation to the 1798 Rebellion].
[
164] What if
Thady were no loyal lackey but a type of the
disaffected Catholic peasantry, concealing his subversion beneath a mask
of servility and working covertly for the overthrow of the landlords?
His story would then be a species of performative contradiction
[cites Tom Dunne, Maria Edgeworth and the Colonial Mind, 1984).
If the meaning of the novel is hard
to decipher, then, it may be because of an ambaiguity in its assesesment
of the past forced upon it by present circumstances [i.e., the Rebellion;
166]
other [Edgeworth] novels largely dismissive
of Gaelic traditionalism [166]
The theory that Thady is dissembling
his disaffections has some interesting implications. For it is we he is
fooling - we, the readers, who exert no kind of power over him, but who
are consequently placed in [166] the position of his superiors.
[or else] it is less the reader he
is conning than the Editor to whom he recounts his tale, a
figure who would fall squarely enough for him into the category of class
enemy
In this sense, curiously, itis Maria Edgeworth who is being
taken for a ride by one of her own creations. [167]
Thady is a domestic servant, and so
in a sense in the position of a woman;
his narrative, which has
a stereotypically feminine intimacy, eye for detail and obliqueness to
the public world., is thus at one level that of a wife who knows her husband
too well to thing anything but badly of him, but who is patriarchially
constrained from defining herself as disloyal. [167]
Thadys self-serving blunders
and oversights
would then be
Freudian paraprax[e]s, symptoms
of a smouldering animosity barred from the conscious mind. Such a reading
of the work is wholly debatable; but it would make the novel an extraordinarily
perceptive portrait of the workings of ideology, in which conscious beliefs
and unconscious intentions can often be at odds; and it would chime with
Edgeworths sense, elsewhere in her writing, that truth and fictin
in Ireland are not so much at odds as inextricably intermingled. [167]
[...]
[Gothic fiction:] the unconscious screen on whcih a dying social class projects its fantasies [...] the policital unconscious of the Anglo-Irish society, where its fears and fantasies definitively emerge. (p.188; quoted in Susan Parker, UUC, MA Diss., 2008.) |