The Rising Of The Moon: The Language of Power

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The Rising of the Moon The Language of Power

Ella O’Dwyer

Pluto

P

Press

LONDON • STERLING, VIRGINIA

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First published 2003 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 22883 Quicksilver Drive, Sterling, VA 20166–2012, USA www.plutobooks.com Copyright © Ella O’Dwyer 2003 The right of Ella O’Dwyer to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 7453 1862 2 hardback Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data O’Dwyer, Ella, 1959– The rising of the moon : the language of power / Ella O’Dwyer. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0–7453–1862–2 1. English literature––Irish authors––History and criticism. 2. Nationalism and literature––Ireland––History––20th century. 3. Politics and literature––Ireland––History––20th century. 4. Language and languages––Political aspects––Ireland. 5. Ireland––History––20th century––Historiography. 6. Ireland––Intellectual life––20th century. 7. Nationalism––Ireland––Historiography. 8. Power (Social sciences) in literature. 9. Power (Social sciences)––Ireland. 10. Political violence in literature. 11. Ireland––In literature. I. Title. PR8722.N3 O39 2002 820.9'9417––dc21 2002005675

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Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services, Fortescue, Sidmouth EX10 9QG Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Towcester Printed in the European Union by Antony Rowe, Chippenham, England

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Contents

The Rising of the Moon Acknowledgements

vii viii

1. Introduction Reading Institutions Power, Control and Identity Obstructed Discourse Releasing Response Can We Go On?

1 1 2 7 8 12

2. Who Fears to Speak: Silence and Anonymity in the National Discourse Past and Present Empire-speak Immediate and Terrible War Cognitive Control A Culture of Silence Stepping Stones Revolution and Reaction Culture and Colonisation Calling the Tune

13 15 17 18 22 24 29 31 33 37

3. When Slavery’s Night is O’er: The Minefield of Meaning Stalking Knowledge The Booby Trap The Big Idea Partitionist Thought Trojan Forces Cogni-phobia

41 43 48 50 54 55 59

4. The Inquisition: A View of the Present State of Ireland Seclusion Virus in the System Driven to Death Power and the Absentee

60 63 66 68 72

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5. The Split: Doing the Joined-up Writing Doing the Joined-up Writing Split Acute Amnesia Unholy Alliance The State of the Nation The Political Unconscious

74 77 82 85 88 92 99

6. The Threshold: Standing on the Threshold of Another Trembling World Arrested Discourse Stammered Delivery Border and Last Frontier Spell-binding Language

102 104 108 114 118

7. The Rising of the Moon

127

Bibliography Index

153 155

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Traditional And come tell me Séan O’Farrell, tell me why you hurry so Hush a bhuachaill, hush and listen and his cheeks were all aglow I bear orders from the captain, get you ready quick and soon For the pikes must be together at the rising of the moon At the rising of the moon, at the rising of the moon For the pikes must be together at the rising of the moon And come tell me Séan O’Farrell, where the gathering is to be At the old spot on the river quite well known to you and me One more word for signal token, whistle out the marching tune With your pike upon your shoulder at the rising of the moon At the rising of the moon, at the rising of the moon With your pike upon your shoulder at the rising of the moon Out of many a mud walled cabin eyes were watching though the night Many a manly heart was beating for the blessed morning’s light Murmurs ran along the valley to the banshee’s lonely croon And a thousand pikes were flashing by the rising of the moon By the rising of the moon, by the rising of the moon And a thousand pikes were flashing by the rising of the moon All along that singing river, that black mass of men was seen High above their shining weapons flew their own beloved green Death to every foe and traitor, whistle out the marching tune And hoorah me boys for freedom ’tis the rising of the moon ’Tis the rising of the moon, ’tis the rising of the moon Keegan Casey, 1982

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Acknowledgements

I’d like to thank Fr Ray Helmick of Boston College for his encouragement and support while writing this work The Rising of the Moon. Boston College awarded me a Post Doctoral Fellowship on my release from prison, funding which made it possible for me to carry out the work. Again I’d like to thank Prof. Bob Welch (University of Ulster) and Dr Ben Knights (Durham University) for their academic guidance while completing PhD and MA studies while I was in prison – studies which form the basis for this book. I want to thank Prof. Marianne McDonald (University of California) for her immense encouragement and support. Thanks to Jackie McMullan, Raymond Murray and Jim Monaghan for patiently reading early extracts from these chapters. My thanks to Shay Courtney, Patrick Regan (Wacker) and Eileen Power for helping to source some of the songs incorporated into the work. My gratitude to my colleagues in Coiste na nIarchimí (The Committee for Republican Ex-prisoners) for their extensive support throughout. I would like particularly to thank my parents, brothers and sister who kept the work on the agenda by regularly asking ‘Where is the book?’ Well, here is the book – enjoy!

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To Malone and Mahood From your old mate Molloy

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READING INSTITUTIONS This book in essence began in 1985, the year when very altered circumstances provided a sharp, shocking and prolonged access to the bigger picture that is free thought. Free thought thrives in the most surprising contexts, even those settings most geared towards the thwarting of the cognitive and ideological thrust. The background and origin of these chapters emerge from MA and PhD theses on the themes of power, control and the structures of language and orthodox meaning. These overlapping themes are the unsurprising intellectual focus arising out of prolonged imprisonment in Victorian conditions, the near worst that British imperialism could conjure against an ever rising resistance in Ireland. Much was learnt from this experience, and the learning continues through the release process and after. This narrative too was released under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, with the ensuing delivery of a story that connects through the familiar enough voices of historical and literary figures, those who in former or in fictional terms have touched the same intimate relationship with power, control, trouble and freedom in various and at diverse periods. While political prisoners in the modern era faced condemnation and sentence at every level, some of the historical figures visiting these chapters faced the same and call now from the death vaults of time; seeking to have a personal voice in the edited story we call history. That edited account has marginalised even the most renowned figures, obstructing and eclipsing their vision. The book that emerges here with the deliverance from imprisonment carries whispers of these eclipsed voices. The politicised of today is the medium to the past and the unfinished ideological journey is ghosted by the presence of many a thwarted and obstructed statement sentenced to incompletion and eclipse. In the confines of long-term oppression and repressive surveillance, the voice is obstructed in the terms outlined in the work of Michel Foucault. Everything is seen and heard from the centre of control and power, and much is dumped for safekeeping in the bunkers of silence and anonymity. From an analysis of the institution of power and control emerges a rapport with the process of release, and visiting the overall narrative are the voices of the long-serving Casement and Collins 1

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and the for long silent Tone and Emmet. Various advisors are invited to this narrative panel; all tutors in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire, 1974). When I was released from prison this book came with me. Voices from Tone, Emmet, Devlin, Casement, Collins, Sands, Farrell and many an elusive other came to call like Rain upon the Window Pane (McHugh, 1966, p. 334) and mediated between the stunted narrative of imprisonment and the outside. It’s hard to deliver the awarenesses gathered in such a restrictive setting and but for the various historical and fictional characters flitting in and out of the narrative, the story might never have been told. Samuel Beckett was the major interpreter and medium between the fortresses of restriction and the larger picture. Again, as with all these characters, his fortitude and vision was inspirational and so like Mahood, Malone and sundry Mollys, the story emerges: I can’t go on, I must go on, I know so I’ll go on. (Beckett, 1979 edn, p. 382) POWER, CONTROL AND IDENTITY Meaning is at once an expression of the variously most empowering and annihilating dynamics, an improbable merger personified and borne out through the undulating fortunes of the literary and actual subject. Distinct and serious interests relating to the operation of power and control are prime energies relentlessly driving the thinking process behind this and earlier research towards a doctoral degree. That sustained predilection towards the study of power, while hardly unique in itself, is perhaps particular for an enduring critical experience colouring the actual analytical approach adopted for this work. Intimate access to the circumstances of the dramatic subject as permitted and enhanced through the reading encounter facilitated bountiful engagement with the mores and propensities exchanged between subject and meaning. While it is flagrantly the case that issues of cognitive control and sovereignty are the propellants compelling and charging this research, it is useful to note that the critical practice and mode with which it is coloured is marked with an habitual sensitivity to the reader’s creative input. The selection of fiction as a vehicle for conveying and expounding this excavation is partly fortified by certain comments of Jacques Derrida. In a discussion of ‘[i]nstitutions and Inversions’ (Culler, 1987, p. 153) Derrida is quoted as saying, ‘the present in general is not primal but rather reconsti-

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tuted’ (Culler, 1987, p. 164). Derrida’s concept of a reconstituted present brings together the issues of history, narrative and the construction of meaning. The dichotomy between past and present dissolves under this notion since the present can be shown to be an arrangement drawn up out of already existing cognition. Furthermore, the perceived gap between fact and fantasy is likewise undermined by this disruption of the realistic fundamentals inherent to the notion of presence or the present. If the present or presence is a reconstitution, then such reality is substantially a product of its binarily opposed other, i.e. the past and absence, just as fantasy overlaps with what is perceived as realism. The very concept of fiction or imaginative construction raises the matter of otherness, a recurring term for a crucial feature in the study of sub-culture. Otherness here refers to the common concept of things outside of and detached from one’s self, in a rigid arrangement where each self or subject is perceived as a singular and separate identity. Identity is delineated in response to preconceptions as to who, where and what is other and this arrangement is fundamental to the emergence of conflict and resistance. The typical narrative, by its very inclusion of select elements of language and creativity, consigns otherness to invisibility and silence. The meanings of given linguistic signs and cognitive images rely on their being understood to be different from, or other than, the surrounding world of ideas and identities. The structures around which language and meaning are organised work in this way. Ideas are told, heard, thought and even dreamt about, and subjects are defined against the identities of other subjects, ideas or signs. Identities are framed in terms of either their similarity to or difference from others. The very sense of self emerges out of the images selected and borrowed from an old stock of memorised ideas, and identity rests on the discourse we select from a bank of linguistic signs, in order to shape that image. The formation of identity therefore is linked in and around/about otherness. Creation, as already indicated, is about making an other. The negotiation of such creativity and of identity among the constraining trappings and rigid structures of standard meaning does however involve making an other even of the self. An assimilated perception that existence consists of separate, single entities locked in opposition to other single subjects is the axis around which normal structures of thought and language revolve. The other selves that don’t conform to the normal standard, or that are cognitively problematic, are secluded in silence and invisibility. Furthermore, as

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already noted, we think, talk, hear and dream about things and thinking about the self is no exception. As such, an inevitable gap exists in the subject, arising from the attempt to assume an identity. This gap is aggravated by the fact that thought patterns are organised against a sustained notion of pairs in opposition, where one meaning is distinguished against a binarily located other. The belief in an either/or structure extends to the definition of identity, which is understood as one of two scenarios. One is either a self or an other, with deviance being framed against that same structure. Alienation likewise is understood as an other in exile from a self which is divided in two. The self splits in order to mobilise the emergence of its identity within the constraints of the system of meaning accepted as normality where one talks, writes and thinks about oneself. Alienation thrives on this internal distancing, and the consequent sense of being partially absent from one’s self cultivates a guilt-ridden notion that we create our identities behind our own backs. The misinterpretation which passes for understanding means that people unconsciously live double lives in which fiction truly has a role. The notion of the split self is so central to human identity that much art and literature is sadly afflicted with the concept. Literature frequently sustains the illusion that human identity is split in two, describing the self as consisting essentially of one in a state of internal, polarised opposition. Despite the multiplicity of selves going to form the human identity, we lock ourselves between the safety nets of self and other, life and death, here and there, one word or the next. What of the selves and ideas eclipsed in between, in silence and invisibility, as intuitively confirmed when Mahood exclaims; ‘it will be the silence where I am ...’ (Beckett, 1979 edn, p. 382). The either/or pattern at work in the relationship between past and present is analogous with the tension between all the binary pairs sustaining traditional understanding. Usually one of each couple loses the battle for dominance and is relegated to the suppressed or marginalised role. Oppression depends heavily on this system of polarised thinking. Sometimes neither side predominates and then narrative becomes negotiation. Quite often, with sufficient attention, readers will note that the structure of a literary plot repeats on the dramatic level the same binary pattern at work in language itself. The great intensity of that conservative system of thinking becomes evident then and it’s clear that this system reinforces itself with use. Thus the task of unravelling the maze and dissolving that condensed institution of meaning and its languages emerges in all its

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daunting immensity. Stories can demonstrate how silence becomes something of an attractive semblance of control and order for the oppressed, in the chaos and strife of the battle to secure a place on the tightrope of meaning. Space and silence suggest a kind of rest period for the ground down subject where the machinery of standard meaning might be metaphorically switched off, or toned down at least. Sometimes oppression leads to a voluntary submergence into silence and invisibility, as if the oppressed were forming a sub-culture or space of their own. This space proffers them an illusion of identity, while further proclaiming their marginalised state. Such displacement is mounted against the oppressive backdrop of the binarily structured system co-ordinating normality. Thorough and tortuous probing of that loaded space yields cognitive intimacy, often of a disturbing hue. The thesis being developed here will be concerned with the issue of how literary consumption, and all reading and writing, function as instruments for thought, and with the narrative process as the site of logic. That logic or system of interpretation is one based on a programme of ascendancy; of the subordination of one category to another in a binarily arranged system of hierarchies. I want to use the literary field to research the feasibility of a different form of cultural operation where readers, writers and thinking people break out of the straitjacket of either/or. The question arises as to whether or not readers can avoid being stifled and silenced by the context, and how writers and readers avoid colonising silences, others’ and their own. Binary pairs, composed on gender, class, cultural or any antagonistic bases, tend to split into polarised categories with one grouping replicating the structured pattern of the other. As such, even opposing parties sustain and reproduce each other’s basic composition. With that, there is a characteristic of domination and colonisation inherent in traditional linguistic and interpretative structures. That thinking style prevails to such an extent as to design and even epitomise official culture. In questioning how writers/readers avoid colonising silences, internal and external to themselves, the objective is to probe that dominant system, often through more marginalised voices. The intention is to investigate the possibility of processing alternative outcomes while throwing light on the paraphernalia of narrative power affecting the fortunes of all its participants. Various critical predilections answering to the call of ‘deconstructionism’ (Culler, 1987, p. 17), and similar theoretical consolidations, venture

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alternatively liberating engagements with the literary text, and response-orientated criticism postulates the notion of open or closed work variously facilitating or constraining the creative liberty of the reader. Such concepts are not the quarry of this book, the nucleus of which thrusts the reader to the coalface of conflict at many diverse levels. Not surprisingly, colonialism has provided an expansive interpretative plane against which to assess the relations of power being negotiated in and by language. Furthermore, the material contest for land, and the zealous attention to boundary crucial to colonialism, facilitates an examination of how individual and community identities are constructed on the narrative level. How an account or image is packaged can be as telling as the plot itself, and how that narrative is received can indicate the flashpoints and nuances which trace that narrative structure. As already discussed, no text can realise its cognitive harvest without the participation of the reader, who learns, errs, winces or weeps at the points crucial to the emergence of the narrative. All readers are responding ones, consciously or not, and they therefore form some part of the drama being studied and come somewhat under the writer’s command. The ensuing implication for the critical role is mirrored by a similar dissolution of the writer’s perceived authority, when the creative input of the reader is taken into account. Novels and their authors do after all depend upon interpretive reaction for the timely realisation of dramatic effect. The question of authority is therefore part of reading, since the interpreter works without clearly given and delineated validation. Similarly, because it is the fate of individual readers to respond to and trace out the nuances and workings directing their interpretative experience, the question arises as to where such a lone traveller goes for validation of their analyses. That same sensitivity to the issue of power revolves around authorship. Assuming validation does occur, and even though the authorial role is an establishment in itself, the reading critic, like the oppressed, often has difficulties establishing a discourse. This is just the notion explored through Farrell’s Thy Tears Might Cease (1963). Many of today’s literary theorists such as Edward Said and Homi Bhabha have commented upon the sort of issues arising out of post-colonial endeavours to retrieve an identity ‘stripped of its imperial past’ (Said, 1993, p. 254). While Said questions the merits of nationalism in the latter work, and Homi Bhabha extensively examines the issue in his Nation and Narration (1990), there is

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perhaps a need to explore and experience what it is to be that postcolonial community with its feelings of difference, for all its existence in ‘Overlapping Territories’ (Said, 1993, p. 1). While yet being infiltrated by the culture of empire, the particular cultural baggage with which such post-colonies have been packed is an identity of its own equally warranting representation. Most evident in post-colonial narrative is the struggle to speak at all. OBSTRUCTED DISCOURSE The occupation of Ireland, a theme pursued in Farrell’s novel, brought together a number of factors, from the militant to the linguistic. These are themes which enmesh themselves in history so as to become parts, however divergent, of the emerging cultures of each involved polarised group. The selective silences which Said traces in his analyses of colonial writers are parallelled by what he calls the ‘Resistance Culture’ (Said, 1993, p. 252) of the oppressed. However, the ultimately resisting hero of Michael Farrell’s novel, Martin Mathew Reilly, had indeed initially epitomised the child’s innocent ‘acceptance of subordination – [which] through a positive sense of common interest with the parent state or through inability to conceive of any alternative – made empire durable’ (Said, 1993, p. 11). Martin’s own unorthodox brand of republicanism and his mixed cultural and class affiliations are expressed in just such an intermittent ‘sense of interest with the parent state’ (Said, 1993, p. 11). He furthermore personifies on the personal level the artist’s dilemma, which Said describes as the theme of Yeats’s work in the 1928 period: ... how to reconcile the inevitable violence of the colonial conflict with the everyday politics of an ongoing national struggle and also how to square the power of the various parties in the conflict with the discourse of reason, persuasion, organisation, and the requirements of poetry. (Said, 1993, p. 284) Homi Bhabha argues that nation is a product of narration. In Nation and Narration he demonstrates just how much forgetting is required of any nation in order to sustain itself as such. He even exposes how it is necessary for such cultural identities to remember to forget. These bouts of amnesia coincide with the careful silences in colonial narratives investigated by Said. In contrast with the relentless focus upon the land demonstrated by the indigenous

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population peopled by the likes of the Reillys of Farrell’s novel, the absenteeism and dismissive forgetfulness of the colonial agent confirm the existence of two very different ideological perspectives. The oppressed come from another school of thought from that of the colonialists, who choose to believe that imperialism runs itself without the manipulative and regulative agency of just such lords of the land, absentee or not. The colonised or post-colonised mind is forever concentrated upon the ground on which ‘someone loses [and] someone gains’ (Said, 1993, p. 234). Again, that factor highlights the difference between this group and the colonialists who hold a ready-made discourse of so practised a kind as to seem to have a reality all of its own. By contrast, the Reillys, and other characters, are forever conscious of every metre of meaning etched in and around their stifled history. The level of amnesia called for on the part of the colonialist must be intensely greater than that required of the fold of the unborn nation. Spenser and Beckett demonstrate a broader application of forgetfulness and similar strategies of cognitive obstruction. Martin’s narrative difficulty is very much the opposite to the amnesiac state of empire. His story is laced with repetitions and quotations recurring rhythmically throughout. The recourse to memory and repetition indicates a struggle to grasp and hold onto an emerging narrative or history. How can such a speaker remember to forget when the personal and historical identity bequeathed him comes devoid of a narrative from which to recognise and memorise the differences required in order to express? While the colonising party lives off centuries-thick empire-speak, the other worries at, but nevertheless etches out, the next word forward. RELEASING RESPONSE Narrative power does not rest solely in the hands of the author, a factor illustrated through the confirmed role of the reader. Neither do readings need to be monologic to the degree where they seek mastery in the work. Reading power over a text can squeeze and crush the life out of it, if only by making it too obvious and predictable. The matter of internal colonisation arises here and again connects with the search for a workable voice or discourse on the part of all those reading through an oppressive cogitative terrain. Socalled liberating texts do have oppressive effects upon the reader. On the other hand, the kind of single-minded and masterly interpretation rendered in traditional criticism has often the effect of

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portraying all things as crystally and singularly clear. Meaning is thence packaged in separate and conclusive frames like rigid cognitive units, ultimately sustaining the institution of received truth or reality. Here it is crucial to attend to the concept of meaningmaking as process, where its emergence and creation is perceived as an ongoing and connected matter. The intertextual relations between literary works is a factor of crucial interest to the fields of response and deconstructionist criticism. Again, the variety and overlap of interpretation available from every novel, sentence and image is comfort to critics searching for alternative cogitative experience. Those engaged in this pursuit often demonstrate an urgent anxiety to maintain an opening uncertainty in the site of narrative engagement. The intention is to resist enclosing a given work in an enframed isolated interpretation, while at once deflecting usurpation by that text. For those researching colonisation in literature and power relations in narrative, an irresistible pull keeps that opening process on the agenda when, like Yeats, one struggles to ‘reconcile the inevitable violence of the colonial conflict ...’ with the need to emerge with a clear and open ‘discourse of reason ...’ (Said, 1993, p. 284). That irresistible pull amid the turbulent currents of power is the age-old call to freedom forever the backdrop of the entire heaving contest. That same inevitable resistance prefaces the faceless and unnamable intimacy within the annihilating creativity of meaning. The internal colonisation at work amid the paraphernalia of narratives dedicated broadly to that same general theme is reflected in the broader and more visible relations of power mapped out in novels again to do with colonisation. The investigation of narrative power, whether relating to the internal effect upon participants or to the broader field of national histories, proceeds less convincingly through an allocation of fixed meanings to texts, than through engaging them in a dialogue with each other. That dialogue might be at once a reenactment of whatever cognitive procedures the selected works urge upon us, and a deconstruction of those procedures. As an observation of the cogitative procedures in the texts chosen here will demonstrate, an underlying strand in this book is an account of narrative as a pedagogic and even pre-emptive performance. That system of relations is erected along lines where those seeking to influence, write or parent are juxtaposed against the concept of the comparatively childlike reader. An extension of this basic pattern

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exists in the paralleling cultural relatedness between metropolis and colony, where a similar hierarchical arrangement figures. At many levels the familial connections present in some novels dramatise something of the play of events in and around the kind of colonial experiences often forming their themes. A certain elusiveness of origin pervading the plots of these texts traces a cultural hinterland readily enough accessible to the literary critic. Amnesia, as occurring with Beckett’s Molloy (1979 edn), recalls the attempt to retrieve a lost origin, as discussed in Said’s reference to nationalism. The elusiveness of the parent figure, with all the implied loss of source, name and sign, again recalls the colonial experience where cultural history is interrupted in a way that forever affects the ensuing identity, however post-colony. On another level, the custody and subsequent forfeiture of the person rather than place similarly affects identity. As a study of such novels will demonstrate, history often does sustain itself at the cost of a narrative future and the past does indeed occupy the present. Parent and empire thus lose the unifying and self-perpetuating potential of offspring or issue. The thread of internal colonisation is one which indeed links together familial ties in the different texts selected for this study, with the various layers on the thematical level. Knitted into these works are paradox, counter-arguments, contradiction, conflict and many semi-veiled voices. The very seclusion or omission of voices leaves traces and evidence of the exclusion, as implied by Said’s very successful pursuit of just such ghosts. Intimacy and exchange with literary subjects is required to yield the desired insight, a commerce commanding a generous interaction of feeling amid the narrative engagement. Passions and pains registering the annals of meaning, the story haunting all narrative, emerge only on equally impassioned probing. The critic is thus an agent at risk in a soul-grinding cognitive interaction where unreined sensitivities can lead to exhausted response, ultimately thwarting critical interpretation. Only the compelling thrust to freedom dislodges the oppressive baggage of victimage to which the immersed reader is subjected in the swell and rush of power. The collisions and emergences with which the pursuit of a workable discourse is charged are reflected in the concept of narrative direction dramatised in the Farrell and Achebe novels. In Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah (1987) a heaving build-up of silenced story is finally unleashed in a mighty unfettering of history.

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Here again the matter of boundary and constriction arise when the text illustrates the obstruction of issue, or the arrest of cognitive propagation. Similarly, Okonkwo’s stammer suggests restricted narrative, while the repeated use of proverbs and tales from the oral tradition recalls Martin Reilly’s attempt to memorise a history. The proverbs in the Achebe novel do, however, serve a liberating function through the radical format of select idioms of address. Indigenous discourse apparently incorporated additional, invisible presences within its audience. Instead of simply answering a question on the basis of a subject–object relationship, such speakers would call up and echo past voices, using their wisdoms or proverbs to indirectly talk to the addressee. In this way binary logic was eluded to some degree, a significant cognitive feat in the context of this research. Again, significantly, the very title of Achebe’s earlier novel, Things Fall Apart (1973 edn), recalls Yeats, who is also quoted within the drama. It must be noted that the discourse of empire has for generations been the standard fare of students of English literature, no matter of what nationality. In effect such students have already been colonised and partially implanted with the ways, views and narrative of the dominant imperial voice. Notable too is the extensive list of writers choosing to express their lot in the coloniser’s tongue. In an interesting way, the untold stories probed by Said and others consist of a kind of political and moral unconscious which the coloniser bears down on its subject races for us to absorb. The negativity and shame long veiled by the dominant colonial narrative is fed into the struggling voices of the oppressed. So many of our songs are sad and our prose bitter as a result. Language hinges on a system of differences and repetitions. In order for a sign to have meaning it must be differentiated from other images and words with their cogitative messages. At the same time, all words rely for the interpretation of their meanings on an already memorised bank of referents, to which the reader or hearer will have access. The extension of this fundamental system onto the broader landscape of narrative and history raises issues in relation to the pattern of repetition and othering identifiable in much of the material included in this study, most emphatically in the Farrell and Achebe works. On the theoretical level, Heidegger’s An Introduction to Metaphysics (1979) has much to say on the subject of repetition in history. The progress of these chapters will incorporate an ongoing demonstration of how historical and narrative emergence on individual and national levels are obstructed and/or facilitated by

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manipulative, dominant authorities. The narrative space of the novel, for reasons already explained, is one most adequate for this purpose. While the wider relations of power involved on the geographical and historical levels are paralleled in the domestic arrangements dramatised in the novel, another play for autonomy is negotiated between reader, text and author. The study of power in narrative has been undertaken by many critical schools of thought, from feminist critics like Kristeva and Spivak, to deconstructionists like Culler, de Man, and Reader-Response critics like Ingarden, Fish and others. Similarly, people like Derrida, Barthes and Foucault have written extensively on the subject, as have Marxists like Eagleton and Hayden White. Homi Bhabha, Said, Lloyd and Aijaz Ahmad provide a crucial theoretical link between narrative power within fiction and the global, historical arena that forms the tangible background to this entire field of analyses. CAN WE GO ON? Visiting and making random passage through that scholarly landscape is the nervous face of the much-taxed subject, trudging a lonesome voyage of murky discovery. Such is the disenchanting profile spiriting along as intimate companion to this research. Through the twisted grimace of that troubled visage I brushed the breath of my rising familiar, in a precarious encounter with thesis. Like a suffocated flame that instant is flown, a fugitive and nameless thing sporadically revisiting these chapters. Cold comfort attends regions of cognitive passage, though the exertions of process surprise with empowerment. Yet the rumbling labours of sincerest endeavour cannot enframe an eclipse. Nor can it fuel forever the subject’s torch, with quenching folds and gowns of meaning. So here ‘I [write] the cloak of Sorrow’ (‘The Cloak, the Boat and the Shoes’ in Yeats, 1977 edn, p. 69) where death rides life in cognitive embrace. ‘Fair and bright’ (Yeats, 1977 edn, p. 69) that stark caress of freedom’s spirit and human pain, a clanking throb of deadly power, ‘[t]he muted [brush] of snow on snow’ (Kelly, 1989, p. 39). Beauty kills, with creative meaning; can we go on at all? ‘You must go on, I can’t go on’ (Beckett, 1979 edn, p. 382), I know so ‘I’ll go on’ (Beckett, 1979 edn, p. 382).

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Who Fears to Speak: Silence and Anonymity in the National Discourse

Evaluating the morale of the occupying forces on Dublin streets in 1921, Rex Taylor, a biographer of the life of Michael Collins, identifies the ‘terror created by a force uncertain of the measure of its strength’ (Taylor, 1961, p. 11). The fear or terror of uncertainty is fundamentally the fear of the unknown; the uncolonised or loose knowledge around which consensus has not been framed. While the unresolved and unfinished business of Irish independence hosts its own tense drives, more troubled and fearful energies lie rooted at the core of ideology and thought. An awkward and uncomfortable tension hovers around the untamed future, a realm visited by history, vision and event in an intimate engagement with power. Knowledge is the ultimate currency of power at any level of the politico-cultural context. The challenge of the unknown is the context against which power defines itself and both of the above concepts are vital to the shaping and making of history. The fear of the unknown and untamed possibilities of the future, however, is as nothing compared to the fear of agreement, consensus and, ultimately, the certainty of knowledge. Taylor’s reference to uncertain strength is a near identification of the most unlikely of exchanges. The network of power and fear smouldering through the currents of Irish history stems from the nervous negotiations between uncertainty and vision. ‘The country is Ireland, the city Dublin: and the time the early months of the year 1921’ (Taylor, 1961, p. 11). Post-insurrection therefore, as opposed to post-conflict, is the backdrop against which Rex Taylor writes his biography, Michael Collins. The Easter Rising of 1916 was one of those major historical moments which inevitably project onto and shape the future with powerful insistence, and the shape and project of the 1921 period was a direct aftermath of that all-inflaming moment. While knowledge is the currency of power, victimage is the climate against which power defines itself, and both contexts were key players in the political processes of this as of all chapters of the conflict in Ireland. History and vision are themselves regular victims 13

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of extenuating circumstances and external events. Chance as much as intention played vigorously on the course of events in Ireland, and these players took the field at every moment of engagement. By chance or by intention, the might-have-been revolution in Ireland was thwarted at the outset, when the order to revolt was countermanded and a carefully planned gunrunning intercepted. Many roads diverged in the ideological journey envisioned by the players on the turf of Ireland’s fight for freedom. The unforeseen impacts powerfully on vision, dictating surprising messages in the unfolding context. The strategies and agendas of a given project are sometimes reshaped by the meeting of coincidence and vision. However, it is only the most powerful and empowering thrust of the historical moment that affords and facilitates the dynamic of diversion, disruption and segregation arising from obstructed ideological intention. The loaded and compelling momentum of striking historical enterprises such as the 1916 Rising and the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty, are the vehicles of often disruptive and divergent energies. Packaged within the frame of one such endeavour is the uncontainable and eruptive potential of the alternative. Contradiction and inconsistency are therefore often demonstrated in ideology, where apparently incompatible influences compete for authority. Occasionally, as Taylor comments, these incompatibilities apply to the field of combat and more often they surface at the table of negotiation. What is crucially in question here is the equally mundane attendance of fear, an entity applicable to the most surprising of contexts. In the 1920s fear of the unnamed and the unknown future was aggravated by the awesome terror entwined in the fear of power and the known. Uncomfortable relations with an unnamed future give way to the fear of vision itself, with its implied monopoly on the future. The terror Rex Taylor identifies in the occupying forces in relation to its own uncertain strength has its corollary in the intriguing foreknowledge of the visionary insurgent. The historical moments with which Michael Collins engages are among those rare instances of foresight and foreknowledge that unnerve the staunchest of thinkers. Michael Collins, the man and the text, continues to be a carrier of troubled awareness; the perception that history in fact is not the story of the past, but the strategic architect of the future. Laced with historical moments and groundbreaking events, ideology consistently impacts upon and projects itself onto the story of tomorrow, and the story of Michael Collins travels through the most compelling events of modern Irish history.

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PAST AND PRESENT The country is Ireland, the city Dublin: and the time the early months of the year 2000. It is again a time of great event, with the compelling project of a united and independent Ireland vividly to the fore with the negotiation of the Good Friday Agreement. Many chapters and decades have unfolded along the story of a revolution which ‘smoulders and occasionally flares to intensity’ (Taylor, 1961, p. 11) with again the prognosis that England’s hold on Ireland is about to be relinquished. As evinced through Taylor’s work, literature often revisits the present with forgotten interpretation, providing a context through which earlier cultural scenarios can be rewound into vivid portrayals of the present. The city that was ‘the haunt of the spy and the informer’ (Taylor, 1961, p. 11) is today the haunt of civilian surveillance, in the aspect of sundry researchers, from the speculative journalist to the infatuated academic. The access of insight that is knowledge therefore, remains the currency of power in a context where the lust for information has reached almost embarrassing proportions. What becomes clearer, however, is that it is not in the gift of such surveillants to know, since they miss the moment and recoil from the event. The visionary dynamic that pre-empts the future to become the writ of the past is housed in the historical moment. The makers of history with its inflaming moments are, by extension, the visionary architects of the future. The reporting surveillants, on the other hand, are the reviewers and inevitably the revisionists of the moment, with little hand in the delivery of tomorrow. A crucial divergence emerges here, a dichotomy or segregation ascending through complex layers of history and meaning, and nowhere more vividly than in the Irish politico-historical context. The segregation established between the makers and the writers of history reflects a deeper separation draped along the stage and ground of meaning itself. Various critical theorists studying the momentum of language and the nature of reality assign widely opposed interpretation, on their themes. Post-modernists describe the micro-context within which language operates as discourse. Discourse, in turn, is commonly credited with the facility to orchestrate meaning and culture as a kind of hyper-reality, created to order by the power of language and its authorial administration. In the context of Dublin in the year 2000 therefore, the surveillants reporting on a moment of distinction are credited with the power

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to orchestrate reality on demand. Relying on the word and world of discourse, the surveillant assumes the historian’s role. While discourse therefore is a power-loaded entity, theorists like Terry Eagleton point to the helpless inadequacy of words in the face of a strategically applied materiality. Witness the seriously challenged student of ideas in the face of a highly charged tank, a scenario reminiscent of the Irish context, and impacting vitally upon the national discourse. This contradiction or dichotomy is at the core of the common perception of reality, where the making and writing of history are fundamentally divided. The Treaty that is the ultimate among charged events crucially impacting upon the course of modern Irish history vividly segregates the writing from the making and application of history. That segregation manifests itself at every step of the ideological journey, and especially within the current political chapter. While segregation in itself is a loaded cultural concept in Irish politicocultural history, the segregation identified in this book is of deeper origin. An inheritance of intentional silence and anonymity long pursued in Ireland, is largely bequeathed by a crucial event like the signing of the Treaty. The message and lesson of that event alerted the Irish to the threat of enforced statement and signature. Under the inherited shadow of imminent attack, the revolutionary remained staunchly resistant to interrogation. The inherited culture of imminent war, however, is not the birthplace of Ireland’s silence. That culture of silence presents itself within the most complex of fields, not least the actual context of republican discourse; witness Robert Emmet’s last words. The condemned patriot instructed from the dock: ‘Let no man write my epitaph … until my country takes her place among the nations ... .’ A blunt silence and anonymity hankers around the cultural context of Ireland – the suspended discourse of a people unfree. The obstruction or thwarting of discourse is an expression of colonial interference at its most sophisticated level. The Irish national narrative, fiercely preoccupied with the attempt to dislodge the empire, is inscribed with a discourse of resistance which inevitably foregrounds the reality of oppression in the national psyche. While this expression of resistance is entirely legitimate, its compelling message has weighed heavily upon and thwarted the emergence of a national discourse. Quoting Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1969), Said adds that ‘colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of

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all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic it turns to the past of the people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it’ (Said, 1993, p. 276). The side effects of that perverted logic are eminently discernible in the silence and anonymity that are the hallmarks of Irish historical discourse. The silence and anonymity imposed through oppression are the hallmarks of a colonial imposition forever to the fore of the national consciousness, hallmarks of infiltration where empire-speak corals us into silence and repetition. EMPIRE-SPEAK Tales and lyrics tell the story of reality, and the repeats and choruses of indigenous narrative reflect patterns at the historical level. The sad, bitter songs and stories that go to tell our tale amount to the repeating and stammering struggle of a thwarted discourse. Obstructing the emergence of the national discourse, empire-speak infiltrates and shapes indigenous narrative at all levels. Furthermore, the incessant repeat and recycle to which that narrative is compelled in its drive to tell our story is in itself a form of occupation. In arguing as he does that the present is largely a reconstitution of the past, literary theorist Jacques Derrida postulates crucial implications for the progress of the national discourse. If indeed, as is evident, current discourse is an occupied cognitive ground from where the thumb prints of the past will equally project upon and occupy the discourse of today, it is probable that the past will equally impact upon and occupy the discourse of tomorrow. The most challenging task of the colonised subject and nation is to speak at all. ‘Who fears to speak of ’98’ (Ingram, 1998, Side 1. no. 1), Easter week 1921, or indeed the year 2000, is the dubious beneficiary of the legacy of silence groaning incessantly in the Irish psyche. The silence and anonymity permeating the event of the Treaty is the same fear that obstructs the national discourse throughout modern Irish history. In order therefore to speak at all, the fear that thwarts the statement and signature of identity must be addressed. The moment of engagement with that challenge offers itself in the immediate context of Ireland in the year 2000 with its familiar and recycled echoes of earlier times. The shortfall and lack latent in the cultivated consensus of the Treaty or Agreement is the agency of access to the seeping wound of fear troubling culture and meaning itself. The alienation hosted in language and meaning is an expression of the troubling treaty and entreaty underlying modern discourse. Caught between the opposed binary structures that administer logic, where

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identity is outlined against its polarised other, important consensus are cultivated against a backdrop of a fear as imposing as the threat of imminent war. The juxtaposition of Agreement against Treaty and consent against consensus therefore form the theatre of transition pertinent to the examination of the fear identified above. Analogous to the terms and transaction of meaning, the working language of culture, event or discourse hover around the dimensions of understanding. The Treaty around which identity is named is often a very entreating struggle for agreement and rarely a resolution of the given query. As with all historical moments, the attempted negotiation of vision and empire make for fearsome engagement – negotiations as threatening as the prospect of imminent war. In fact, the fear obstructing the emergence of an Irish discourse is more troubling than combat, an experience with which the Irish are very well accustomed. While Collins negotiated and scrutinised the measure of his opponent at the negotiating table, vision and empire exchanged unnerving awareness. Where the coloniser searched for the next sod or ground of colony, vision caught sight of the immediate and terrible ideological infertility of empire. Vision, nevertheless, gave itself to the historical moment, with the unnerving edge of the informed. While colonialism scavenged the worn ground of the past, the visionary pre-empted the pastures of the future, and never the twain can meet. As Taylor points out, the occupants of the room where the Treaty was negotiated ‘will go down in history not so much for the agreement which they made’ as ‘for the legends which they created which run contrary to one another’ (Taylor, 1961, p. 149). The crucial point around which debate revolved was ‘whether the Irish delegation was actually threatened, by Lloyd George ... [with] ... immediate war’ (Taylor, 1961, p. 149). The 4 February edition of the newspaper The Republic of Ireland, to which Taylor refers, cites an important statement of Collins’s evaluation of the prospects of imminent war. IMMEDIATE AND TERRIBLE WAR It has been stated that the Treaty was signed under threat of immediate and terrible war. The position never appeared to me to be that. I did not sign the Treaty under duress except in the sense that the position as between Ireland and England, historically, and because of superior forces on the part of England, has always been

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one of duress. The element of duress was present when we agreed to the Truce … but there was not and could not have been any personal duress. Again the threat of immediate and terrible war did not matter overmuch to me. The position appeared to be then exactly as it appears now [6 February 1922]. The British would not, I think, have declared terrible and immediate war upon us. (Taylor, 1961, p. 149) According to Gavan Duffy, another signatory of the Treaty, Lloyd George issued an ultimatum to sign or face immediate war. In a Dáil debate on the Treaty, Duffy commented that ‘the ultimatum might have been bluff, but everyone of those who had heard the British Prime Minister believed beyond all reasonable doubt that this was not play acting, and that he meant what he said’ (Taylor, 1961, p. 150). Collins, however, as Taylor points out, did not think so and he was in fact present at the time, while Duffy was not. At the Dáil session of Tuesday 20 December 1921, Eamon Duggan, the fifth member of the delegated negotiating party, emphasised the fact that he had not signed under pressure, as he was not physically present when pressure was allegedly used. While it is largely irrelevant in today’s terms whether any threat of war hung over the decisions contingent on the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, it is important to identify the defensive and threatening aspect of fear which emerged in reports of events in London. If fear was a key player in this historical engagement, then fear factored in the interpretation of the however unsatisfactory outcome. Also in attendance at the London negotiating table in 1921 were the agencies of consensus, agreement, treaty and entreaty; the essentially inadequate facilitators of meaning. Policing the proceedings were the inevitable envoys of language and logic; a necessary and compulsive application of control over the fearsome tide of the unconquered future. The challenge of the unknown, the dynamic by which power claims the promised ground of verification, also ferries the unnerving prospect of untamed possibilities. The fear that compels consensus and treaty ingresses at two traditionally polarised vents. One is the coloniser’s fear of the very terrain of knowledge it seeks to plunder. The other or converse conduit is the intuitive identification of that fear on the part of the subject or colonised; an awareness compounding into a terrifying perception of the limited vision of the coloniser. The treaty or agreement emerging

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from this confluence and consensus is sealed against impending crisis; the fearsome meeting of reaction and revolution. Again, as Taylor points out, this is the ‘terror created by a force uncertain of the measure of its strength’ (Taylor, 1961, p. 11), a description applying as much to the colonised subject as to the challenged empire. Creativity and annihilation come dangerously close at the interface of reactionary and revolutionary thought. This same interaction of creativity and destruction is explored with unnerving clarity in Danny Morrison’s novel The Wrong Man (1997), where traffic in knowledge is presented in its most dangerous terms. Unauthorised and deceptive use of knowledge is vividly portrayed through the aspect of the IRA informer. A kind of cognitive treachery leads to death in the crossfire of two cognitive players when British forces and IRA men engage in the handling of the informer. The detail of the thriller is not crucial here; suffice it to say that British minders shoot a legitimate IRA man as he leads the informer away for interrogation. Conflicting drives in the passage of knowledge engage and collide in a tangible illustration of the deadly propensities of meaning. Morrison’s novel deals intuitively with the issue of loose knowledge; again the information around which consensus, consent, agreement and treaty has not been framed. This is, after all, the reassuring ground of knowledge that empire seeks for itself. The Wrong Man is about the elusive traffic of information, when an IRA man and an informer are shot in the crossfire between his minders and his interrogators. Serious contenders for knowledge meet in the contest for control of Todd’s information; the minders shooting the interrogating IRA volunteer and the volunteer shooting the informer. Knowledge is seen to be a dangerous commodity and not to be allowed out alone. Much fiction identifies the unlikely confluence of a kind of killing creativity. Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness (1902), reminiscent of Roger Casement’s life, is a more intimate expression of this creative annihilation. The Heart of Darkness takes the reader to the coalface of meaning, where the spectre of skulls surrounding Kurtz’s tent proffer the notion that death is the enlightened agency equipped to see beyond the cognitive frame. Throughout the text, this author compels a relentless association of meaning and annihilation, a theme reminiscent of the scenario presented in Morrison’s recent work. The challenge of the unknown or the lust for knowledge is the ultimate currency of power and this insatiable momentum visits narrative and thought processes at all levels. Certain authors,

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however, achieve an unnerving intimacy with the modalities involved and these modalities reflect the deeply contradictory nature of meaning where cultivated consensus marks the cognitive journey. While the greater dynamic of the historical moment projects and pre-empts the future, that vision travels through the usually inadequate framework of tense agreement. The more mundane and often less enchanting administration of these processes is revealed in the framework of Collins’ latterly performance as ‘Speaker and Writer’ (Taylor, 1961, p. 211). Returning to the painfully contradictory discourse of the 1920s in Ireland, soldier and negotiator Michael Collins commented: ‘We were unable to beat him [the British] out of the country by force of arms. But the enemy is going – will soon be gone’ (Taylor, 1961, p. 213). The Republic is dead; long live the Republic! According to John Regan, in his review of Irish history of that period, ‘[t]he commencement of negotiations between Sinn Féin plenipotentiaries and the British Government in London on 11th October 1921 marked the beginning of the end of the Irish revolutionary movement as a united front’. In The Irish Counter Revolution 1921–1936 (Regan, 1999, p. 3), the author writes of the ‘Reaction and Creation’ visiting the passage of early twentieth-century Irish history. This is the creative annihilation troubling Ireland’s discourse; a contrary set of dynamics framed into uncomfortable and entreating agreement. Regan’s work identifies the ways in which revolution and treaty signed up, in the pragmatic terms of interim agreement, with vision and aspiration taking safe passage in the diplomatic process. Not an historian, I nevertheless appreciate the importance of the chronicler’s role. Clear citation of actual events is the surest practice in challenging the culture of silence addressed earlier. Surprisingly that same inheritance of silence at times provides the tension and energy required to rush the fortress against truth. The more an agency seeks to seclude its history or to forget, the greater the abundance of ghosts, mirrors, doubles and returns of marginalised peculiarities. Much narrative bears the insignia of this physical and psychological conflict, with an emergence of a killing creativity at most complex levels; a relentless association of meaning and annihilation. The evervulnerable subject is host to equally conflicting and destabilising drives. Imprisoned among the contrary drives of meaning, the contest for balance and control becomes the cognitive imperative.

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COGNITIVE CONTROL But who gives ‘a tinker’s curse about being off [his] balance, dragged to the right hand and the left, backwards and forwards’ (Beckett, 1979 edn, p. 69) at the absurd whim of reason? The marginalised and peculiar Molloy does; the heavily challenged passenger in The Beckett Trilogy: Molloy, Malone and Mahood. The Irishman Molloy is the ultimate expression of troubled intelligence; a however miscalculated entity, infinitely familiar and yet rarely understood. Beckett, however, understood the nature of creative annihilation and the compulsive control to which reason drives its hosts. Silence and amnesia are the inevitable switches on the panel conducting the currents of thought, and few authors reach so intimate a sense of this modality as Samuel Beckett. The essence of his insight is delivered in the short, sharp and shocking antics of his literary entourage Molloy, Malone and Mahood. The hero of his ensemble, Molloy, furiously engages himself in the troubling conundrum of how to succeed in negotiating the traffic of sixteen stones around his person such that he can, surely and with precision, suck them each and all on a perfectly consecutive basis. This ludicrous conundrum is for sure the troubling question of the western world: how to indulge ourselves in the possibility of absolute control, such that we can write the story of yesterday, report the incidents of today, and predict the context of tomorrow. We want to juggle the wheel of the world, and our various microscopic and cultural rituals assigned to that project meet but rarely at conference or negotiating table. If our languages, cultures and various soul-felt endeavours engage but in one place, they do so on the eclipse or moment of vision, whatever our various choreographic presentation of that ideological dynamic. When discussing nativism in Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said warns against leaving the ‘historical world for the metaphysics of essences like negritude, Irishness, Islam, or Catholicism’, saying that to do so would be to ‘abandon history for essentializations that have power to turn human beings against each other’ (Said, 1979, p. 276). In the Irish cultural context, we did not abandon history for essentialisations of any sort. The perhaps essentialised modes of Irish expression are the blunt utterances of a voiceless people. The silence and amnesia that are the other and backdrop of the national voice and memory are the troubled voices thrust against the murals and proclamations of modern Ireland. The repeats and choruses of indigenous memory as recorded in narrative,

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reflect patterns at the historical level, where the sad, bitter songs that go to tell our tale amount to the repeating and stammering struggle of a thwarted discourse. Obstructing the emergence of the national voice, empire-speak has infiltrated a colonised Ireland at deep and consuming levels. The laborious task of the colonised subject is to speak at all; a dilemma long ago identified by the visionary Beckett and mirroring Molloy’s troubled urge to control. Entombed in the prison house of meaning, Molloy’s facility to control rests within, where he erects an internal institution no less absurd than that he contends with in the world of meaning. There are few terms that transgress the borders of time, place, language and ideology. Yet transgression occurs, penetrating barriers of every kind and even onto the research ground of another Fellow of the academic world: Michel Foucault. I can attest to the authority of Foucault’s work, having spent years imprisoned in the Victorian time warps of Brixton and Durham prisons. He got it right; a circle of surveillance called empire projects an imposed silence and anonymity upon the subject psyche. What surveillance ultimately detects is the intuitive awareness that captive silence yields to the subject. The time warp that was the life sentence emerged as another of those strangely precocious historical events – the loaded moment, however prolonged, of vision itself. The story of meaning in the context of the historical moment is not about the past, but about the visionary’s pre-emption of tomorrow. The ideological infertility of empire, on the other hand, is about the ravaged ground of the past. Any agreement, Treaty or consensus sealed over this gaping morass is erected against an uneasy diplomacy; the stressful intermingling of reaction and revolution. Every culture has its historical moments, and Irish history has erupted sporadically with some of those rare instances of foresight and energy that take vision to the field of conflict. Laced with such historical moments and groundbreaking events, ideology consistently impacts upon and projects itself onto the story of tomorrow, with the surprising inference that history in fact is not the story of the past, but the strategic architect of the future. The visionary dynamic that pre-empts the future to become the writ of the past is housed and hosted in the historical moment of whatever cultural identity. Conflict, like power itself, has its own victims, and often the ultimate losses are of voice, memory and identity. Disappointed ideology and shortfallen agreements are some of the influences cultivating cultural self-censorship. Dubious treaties and aggressive

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interrogation factored in the reclusive discourse of Irish republicanism where the rallying cry was to say and sign nothing. Against the backdrop of an already impeded national discourse, this security strategy all but cost us the national discourse. While the visionary architects of the future ought to articulate the story of today, a crucial divergence emerges between the architects of vision and the articulators of discourse. The segregation established between the makers and the writers of history reflects a deeper schism thrust through the layers of meaning itself. If, as postmodernism would have it, meaning is simply a matter of the fittest discourse to tell the tale, Molloy’s cognitive gymnastics are hardly surprising. While Homi Bhabha argues that nation is simply a product of narration, the Irishman Terry Eagleton recalls the stamina of the highly charged tank. The gaping morass over which agreement is sealed marks the site of segregation, the space of silence and the internment/interment of Ireland’s voice. The bedevilling preoccupation of the subject psyche is to steady its nerve against the fearful fall, never to flinch or lose balance. But again, who gives ‘a tinker’s curse about being off [his] balance?’ (Beckett, 1979 edn, p. 69). The Irishman Molloy does. The rising crisis erupting from the interface of reactionary and visionary thought compels us to the often-inadequate framework of tense agreement. These sporadic treaties are of the linguistics of power, the unexhilarating though compelling steps towards resolution, stammered contracts in the delivery of discourse. A CULTURE OF SILENCE An inheritance of intentional silence and anonymity long pursued in Ireland stamps its elusive character onto the national narrative, a parchment edited sporadically through the loaded statement of contract and agreement. A deep fear underlies that silence and an equally uneasy tension hovers round statement and agreement. An undulating pattern of concealment and revelation is easily discernible in chronicles of Irish, as of world events. The oftendisjointed voice of the nation therefore presents itself as an edited and erratic presentation of history. Again the gaping morass over which agreement is sealed does not deflect fear. Molloy, Mahood and sundry Malones do indeed give a fiddler’s curse about being off balance. What if we fall into the morass of the unknown, and what unspoken phantoms might greet us there? Beckett packages his subjects in the

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tortured and tattered garb of the anti-hero whose negotiation of reality describes the turbulence of meaning. Molloy’s eccentric response to that reality is vividly portrayed in the very involved and rigid ceremony he conducts with the pebbles he distributes ‘equally between [his] four pockets’ (Beckett, 1979 edn, p. 69) in an intricate attempt to suck his sixteen stones consecutively. This elaborate juggling exercise engages the immediate symmetry of his physical and intellectual presence in the studiously conducted ritual. Molloy encircles his selfhood in a wheel of pockets linking body and clothes in his careful strategy. Two trouser pockets relay the bounty to the two pockets of his overcoat, while his mouth serves as a personalised pouch implicating his very person in the process. His mind-boggling success in this task is a kind of sorcery in itself, where he indulges in the possibility of absolute control. Molloy juggles the runes of the world. Propelled along various and often strange journeys of discovery, the motion of culture erupts occasionally into a cartwheel of self-command and detachment. Revolving the objects of his rigid attention around his body in a concentrated cycle of order, Molloy wheels the pursuing reader in a similarly cyclical attention to the wayward pebbles, much as I am doing with this audience. Mastering the object of consciousness in this manner is a kind of silence too, allowing time-out from the pursuit of identity. This is a mechanism mirroring the bureaucratic embargo on speech as witnessed in recent Irish history where the government legislated for silence as part of its controversial Offences Against the State Act (1939) rather than allow republicans to speak. It was offensive to government to hear the voice of history. A silencing of the national unconscious was at play here, where the painful want of identity drove governments to resort to antics as absurd as Molloy’s recourse to ritual. Engaging us in the involved and absorbing antics described above, Beckett’s narrative heightens an awareness of a pivotal discontinuity in meaning and interpretation. Silence, amnesia and uncertain identity feature in Molloy’s absurd antics, and in an unerringly familiar context. The elaborate rituals to which he is compelled reflect the trappings of inadequate expression and the compulsion to control arising from a heightened experience of repression. The troubling feature of Beckett’s work is that the Irishman Molloy’s predicament bears striking resemblance to the national context. The recycling and compulsive ritual to which Molloy is reduced suggests something of the universal speaker’s condition, constrained

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as we are within the inadequate though necessary straitjacket of language. His particular cultural context however is distinct and universally familiar. Oral impediment and arrested narrative are familiar themes in most cultural contexts. Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart (1973) demonstrates the repeats and returns to which tribal Africa was compelled; the narrative throwbacks of a potential discourse struggling for existence. ‘[T]he art of conversation ...’ (Achebe, 1973 edn, p. 4) was highly regarded among the Ibo tribe, where the ‘great talker’ (Achebe, 1973 edn, p. 4) was the pride of the colonised Ibo. It is striking of course that Achebe furnishes his hero Okonkwo with a speech impediment. The narrator tells us that he ‘had a slight stammer and whenever he was angry and could not get his words out quickly enough, he would use his fists’ (Achebe, 1973 edn, p. 12). Impeded expression intensifies and ferments until it erupts into an urgent and aggressive force for change, a transition packaged in the baggage of condition or victimage, but in actuality a serious symptom of change. Impediment here symbolises the broader disjunction or gaping morass in meaning that agreements seek to seal and conceal. Homi Bhabha in his Nation and Narration refers to ‘a strange forgetting of the history of the nation’s past: the violence involved in establishing the nation’s writ’ (Bhabha, 1990, p. 310). He goes on to demonstrate just how much forgetting is required of any nation in order to sustain itself as such. He even exposes how it is necessary for such cultural identities to remember to forget. The repetitions and recycling story of Ireland’s struggle, on the other hand, indicate a desperate dependence on memory. That clinging recourse to memory and repetition indicates a struggle to grasp and hold onto an embryonic discourse. After all, how can a nation remember to forget, as Bhabha would have it, when the national inheritance is one of silence. In order furthermore for one to meet what Edward Said calls the ‘obligation to forget’ (Bhabha, 1990, p. 310) a discourse must exist in the first place. The gaping morass recorded in the roaring silences of Ireland’s discourse hosts its own story: history’s desperate insistence on expression. The parchment of Irish history emerges as another ground of conflict, where statement and silence are strategically deployed as weapons of conflict. Silence is used against the interrogating empire, while statement is of those stammered contracts in the delivery of voice. Ours has been a discourse at war, where syllable and silence are unleashed according to their military merit. Expression, like knowledge in conflict Ireland, has been on a

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need to speak basis. The critical consequence of the war of words has been that the pattern has been inhaled into the Irish psyche. Discourse is no longer a matter of the fittest narrative to tell the tale; our discourse now must re-establish itself as an instrument of vision. This pattern and experience will be shared by many an emergent nation arriving out of military engagement and it is well to note that, while strategic silence and strategic expression were for long the gift of the revolutionary insurgent, they hoard the symptoms of another trauma. The loaded silences and agreements accompanying conflict project vivid tensions onto the sphere of language. Our statements of recent decades have been of tense agreement, and our silences have been the equally tension-loaded fortresses against oppression; altogether we developed a very uneasy tone. Silence and statement go to form linguistic patterns at every level, where words and spaces fall in at an easy pace to allow for the logical transmission of meaning. In the conflict scenario, those words and spaces fall in as strategically deployed agencies of struggle, and the sad and bitter tales that go to tell our story form the ensuing regimental chorus. This tense discourse patrols the silent gap where memory is interned. The crescendo of conflict marks a similar pitch in the national psyche, where intervals emerge which allow for the emergence of memory. The traditional statements, treaties and agreements through which ideology makes passage, often mark moments of divergence in the ideological journey. The consensus of agreement often produces appendages to a given narrative, as for instance in the matter of the Treaty of 1921 in Ireland. Historical chapters prior to that time were ones engaged in the struggle for the Republic on the model of the French Revolution. Post-Treaty Ireland was absorbed in the struggle for a united Ireland. The crescendo that is the military cessation is a silent moment of remembrance for the miscarried Republic. In Nation and Narration Homi Bhabha demonstrates just how much forgetting is required of any nation in order to sustain itself as such. Ireland and its politicians are renowned for nothing if not amnesia – witness the evidence of the stately good from prime ministers Jack Lynch to Charles Haughey, heroes on the domestic political stage, whose only answer to prosecution was to state their inability to remember. The detail of these dramas are largely irrelevant to this study, though the evident silences and obscurities ghosting Irish history make pressing visitation on the regular contexts of Irish government.

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A particular example that facilitates an observation of the often enthralling dynamics by which meaning operates was vividly foregrounded in the in mid-1990s Ireland when a Taoiseach or chief publicly denied knowledge. The chief’s denial emerged as no less convincing as the desperate last minute defence of the informer Todd, and neither after all held court against Emmet’s loaded silence. Albert Reynolds denied knowledge of accusations of sex abuse as mounted against one Father Smith – knowledge which, as subsequently emerged, the attorney general had already passed on to his office. The heavy traffic of documentation harassing the offices of government was accused of overtaking the chief and somehow escaping his trusted administration. The head of government and his offices apparently didn’t know what information went where in a state that meticulously administered it’s file on subversion. An overpowering glut of information scurried in and throughout the corridors of power at this time. This hectic freight in knowledge not only caused the chief to quit, but so too did it bewilder and exhaust the attentive surveillance of the observing public. Knowledge indeed is a bothersome and even dangerous commodity, and not to be allowed out alone. The emergent national discourse of the time is again predictably unimportant to this study and starkly insignificant against the powerful proclamations and speech of times and events outlined at the onset of this book. Court-martialled for his part in the Rising which led to the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, Thomas Mac Donagh had the following to say: The Proclamation of the Irish Republic has been adduced in evidence against me as one of the signatories; you think it is already a dead and buried letter, but it lives, it lives. From minds alight with Ireland’s vivid intellect it sprang; in hearts aflame with Ireland’s mighty love it was conceived. Such documents do not die ... (O’Connor, 1999, cover) Placed along Robert Emmet’s command to silence, ‘let no man write my epitaph until Ireland is free’, it is easy to see why silence is the easy sell in Irish culture. Whatever the shortfall and entreaty surrounding the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of some 80 years past, there is little equation between the energies unleashed in 1921 and the statements of the dubious inheritors of the national discourse. For this reason, and as has become obvious to the civilian

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surveillants of Irish culture, vision is quartered and billeted in another place. While Irish republican history is weak on statement and signature, a disposition sadly impacting on the national discourse, the consolation for the interpreter is that there are few and but loaded statements to address. The tradition of intentional silence in the historical context therefore starts to make cognitive sense. The rare documents of ideological value are clear and easy signposts towards an irrefutable end. STEPPING STONES Again the Treaty features as the clearest indicator of the thrust and direction of the troubling passage to the political stage of today. Many republicans could not accept the Treaty and those like Ernie O’Malley in command of the Second Southern broke away from GHQ and Dáil Éireann. In The Singing Flame O’Malley remarks: the full text of the Articles of Agreement was published in the Irish papers. I was in East Limerick and the paper reached me the following morning. The five Irish delegates had signed the articles and had returned to Ireland to recommend them to the Irish people. They had signed under Lloyd George’s threat of ‘immediate and terrible war’ on the Irish people. I cursed loud and long. (O’Malley, 1997, p. 41) ‘The officers and men I met seemed dazed. Some had been crying, their eyes were swollen. We awaited the arrest of the delegates. They had no authority to sign without first referring the matter to their Cabinet’ (O’Malley, 1997, p. 43). Such was the pitch and passion of events in certain quarters of the Irish Republican Army in the immediate aftermath of the Treaty, when yet again uncertainty and fear prevailed. To the assistant chief of staff’s proposals for the organisation of the army of the emergent Free State, O’Malley warned that any attempt to recruit from the IRA would lead to serious tensions. ‘You’ll have to fight in our area if you are false to your oath’ he said in response to the chief, and ‘That’s where you’ll meet with immediate and terrible war’ (O’Malley, 1997, p. 44). In April 1922 Ernie O’Malley and others of the anti-Treaty IRA attacked and occupied the Four Courts in Dublin. Two months later saw Ireland in the throes of Civil War. The soldiers of the Four Courts, O’Malley reasoned, were to the front of republican resistance and a fight with the British, he supposed, ‘would probably unite the

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Staters and Republicans’ (O’Malley,1997, p. 80). The IRA executive decided that an attack on the British in the north, with a two-day warning, would inevitably lead to the British making an advance attack. Then chief of staff Liam Lynch, however, was not in favour of the project and the proposal was defeated at a specially convened army convention. An incident occurring soon after casts telling inferences onto the context of recent military relationships between the British army and the IRA. On 22 June 1922, the former chief of the imperial general staff was shot dead by two London Irishmen. While it was initially thought to have been an operation directed from the Four Courts, O’Malley identified the director of operations to be Collins himself, administering to events through the agency of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the still extant body from which the IRA evolved. O’Malley’s deduction here indicates the complex diversity of interpretation abroad in relation to Collin’s military and political aspiration. Referring to Collins as a ‘steeping stoner’, O’Malley goes on to ponder ‘[w]hether Collins, for he was the dominating factor in the acceptance of the articles of Agreement, wished to break with England eventually, is hard to say’ (O’Malley, 1997, p. 85). What these works devoted to the inspection of Ireland in the early 1920s facilitate is a bifocal view of events on the ground, with the clear implication that the vision, however historical, was of multiple origins and diverse intention. Pre-empting today’s context, outside influences factored in events at home. Like others before him, Harry Boland carried the Irish question to America and he was another, if less visible, player in the cause of Irish freedom. In effect, he was symbolic of the absence of certain and unanimous agreement as to what the leadership was about, emanating from the equally complex interpretation of aspiration at grassroots. Only the tireless examination of the Treaty and contradiction of the time will decipher the precise nature of the ideological backdrop. As stated earlier, contradiction and inconsistency are often demonstrated in ideology where a surprising competition for authority arises in the bunkers of vision itself. Power and authority comprise a unique mixture in the context of both earlier and very recent grounds of conflict in Ireland, and the undeniably historical moment of the 1981 hunger strike vividly portrays the deeper influences at work here. The voluntary and soul-felt commitment of the visionary insurgent portends a unique and thus vulnerable relationship with power, in that the volunteer

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is the born warrior without a frame. While loose knowledge takes its own unnerving toll on its players, the unframed warrior bodes more immediate terrors. Outside the school of standard military training, the voluntary army paves a forum of its own. In the received pronunciations of empire-speak what else would such an army be dubbed but terrorists, since that was the empire’s perception of the Irish, from Spenser’s weighty evaluation to Thatcher’s deadly serious report. Reporting on the aspect of the Irish in Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland (1596), the civil servant Irenius refers to the ‘terrible yell’ and ‘immoderate wailing[s]’ of a ‘barbarous people’ who know ‘that if the worst befell them, they shall lose nothing but themselves, whereof they seem surely very careless, [and who] like all barbarous people are, very fearless of death’ (Spenser, 1970 edn, p. 561). O’Malley’s vision of a British attack on Ireland during the occupation of the Four Courts exactly mirrored the vision of some supporters of the 1981 hunger strikers. A fight for validation featured not just in the prisoners’ proclamation of political status, a proclamation carried forth in the military context overall. The focus on validation indicates the level of counter propaganda in the national and broader international contexts. Just as the Treaty forced a revolutionary project to divert into a struggle for a united Ireland, so too did counter-propaganda succeed in usurping military strategy in a search for validation. This deadly fight for validation was part of the tragic conflict for truth. REVOLUTION AND REACTION Empire wrote and proclaimed itself to the school of battle, while Ireland held that ground before its conception. Forget not the boys of Kilmichael, Those gallant lads stalwart and true, Who fought ’neath the green flag of Erin And who conquered the Red, White and Blue. The Boys of Kilmichael (traditional song) A point of interest in Peter Hart’s The IRA and Its Enemies refers to the republicans’ efficiency on the ground of conflict; ‘The Kilmichael ambush delivered a profound shock to the British system’ … ‘Kilmichael showed that the I.R.A. could beat British officers in the field’ (Hart, 1999, p. 21). On 28 October 1920, elite members of the

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IRA led by Commander Tom Barry made serious inroads on the British presence in Ireland, and to an extent that imploded upon the equally eruptive terrain of latter-day South Armagh. A particular ambush upon British military forces in the game ground of republican Armagh engaged empire’s military elite with all the audacity of Kilmichael. Kilmichael became the rallying force of outposts from India to Egypt, while the German army focused its studies on the event during the Second World War. These factors are a subject too of Toby Harden’s Bandit Country (1999). Harden describes how the sophisticated progeny of Sandhurst were outwitted by a gifted IRA unit. The fight for a fight that has always plagued the warriors of the might-be Irish revolution, has largely been scuppered by the terrifying absence of vision and of empire at any level. Transcending the military academy hosting the soldiers of empire, the volunteer applied to the academy of vision, taking the fight to the Conference Party of Conservatism itself. The absence of vision ultimately thwarts the military dynamic that is the essence of empire, while the adrenaline of vision finds no quarter with such decline. Again, in the context of vision and conflict, imperialism is about the dried up ground of the past, and vision is about the very thwarted pastures of the future. The negotiating or conference table for these dynamics has not been modelled, though many are the eccentric attempts that have been submitted to that end. Dublin’s cultural tourism industry paves a path to the historically loaded floors of Dublin Castle. Among the majestic exhibitions on display is one dubiously celebrated table. This round table was made by a non-political prisoner around the time to which reference is made above, and offered to the Queen of England. The majesty declined the gift for obvious enough reasons and not least because it upheld less tangible statements of indigenous culture and combat. The table – for all the world to see – is engraved with images, symbols and colours from the black magic tradition. It is no less absurd to expect clear negotiation at the table and meeting place of contrary ideologies than it is to anticipate agreement between reaction and revolution. Colonialism engages interchangeably with confluence and segregation at many complex levels. Overriding those relationships and antipathies is the universality of art and culture. The most uncomfortable relations between revolution and reaction mirror the segregation between the makers and writers of history. This confluence of disparate agencies recalls recent dynamics of prison

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protest where years of disagreement and agitation were applied to the goal of achieving political status. The desperate want of validation instigated segregation or diversions along the ideological journey itself. The revolutionary thrust was diverted in the modern Irish context, when ten men died to penetrate the revisionism that was part of the legacy of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. While it was heroic for Tom Barry to do his worst in the context of early nineteenth-century conflict, Bobby Sands and other hunger strikers were the demonised terrorists who had to assert their patriotism in the most tragic terms. The veil of silence and amnesia that falls over the Irish psyche as a result of strained agreements bequeaths painful complexes upon the broader progeny. Legislating for silence the Irish government played the game of empire, knowing that those who contested the colonial adversary would be targeted at the most complex levels. Those levels extended from the realms of conflict to the depths of cognition. Empire attempted to penetrate the subject psyche at the most intimate levels, endeavouring to undermine the pride of a people. CULTURE AND COLONISATION Very few aspects of Irish culture remained aloof from conflict. The revolutionary thrust in Ireland as elsewhere, however, was never going to be a linear process. Something of the external and indeed universal conduits to Irish rebellion will be introduced in the next chapter, where Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902) facilitates an appreciation of the wider agencies involved. Based on Casement’s voyage and engagement with Irish insurrection, Conrad’s work demonstrates how Ireland’s road to independence incorporates a vast and often disparate range of influences – foreign conflicts and revolutionary engagements like the Vietnam War. Nevertheless, while the art, literature and music of the island was confiscated at deep levels by the colonial experience, an alternative mode of engagement was accessed through creativity, and those refraining from conflict penetrated alternative modes of expression. These fellows of the revolutionary thrust were the makers of music or the dreamers of dreams; compulsive and key players whose genius lay in the capacity to access an empowered past to pre-empt the future. The challenge to the artist of any discipline in this particular chapter of Irish history must be to access and recall the empowering momentum of the precolonial past. This facility was the gift of Máire Bhuí Ní Laoire, the Cork poet writing of rebellion a hundred years before Collins

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entertained the notion of terrible war. Treaty in early nineteenthcentury Ireland was the stuff of oath and hell was not hot enough to melt the tense and very disagreeing relations between coloniser and dispossessed in rural Ireland. Rí na bhfeart go lagaidh iad, gan chlú, gan mheas, gan rath, gan séan I dtinte teasa a measc na bpian gan foiseamh go deo! (Brennan, 2000, p. 39) Ní Laoire’s poem, The Battle of Keirmaneigh, describes armed engagements between local militia troops and a secret brigade of Catholic tenant farmers called The Whiteboys. This secret organisation took armed action in protest against the payment of tithe rents for the upkeep of the Protestant church. The landlords enforcing the administration of this exorbitant rent were seen to be the immediate agents of British imperialism in Ireland. Guilty by association, the Protestant religion was immediately plunged into the terrible conflict between coloniser and target. Running with the hounds of empire, Protestantism too met with predictable disdain. O King of Great Deeds, may they be cast down into fires of heat, In the midst of pain, without remission for all eternity, Without reputation, without honour, without success, without Prosperity. (Brennan, 2000, p. 41) Máire goes on to praise Jesus himself for Cork’s capacity to chastise a cult: ‘Nár ghéillriamh do Chríost, ach puimp agus póit’ (Whose God was pomposity and not the Christ I’m told) (Brennan, 2000, pp. 39–42). Sectarianism isn’t the effigy of the modern troubles but another of the diversions and symptoms of ideological incompatibility. Recalling the fate of Morrison’s Todd in The Wrong Man, messengers are shot in the deadly traffic of cognitive agencies. A hundred years before the signing of the Treaty, desperation epitomised living conditions in Collins’s Cork. Exorbitant rents, along with the economic depression arising from Napoleon’s defeat, took a fierce toll on the Catholic population of rural Ireland. As agencies of empire, Protestantism and landlordism assumed the authoritarian aspect of bureaucracy. As another Cork man Father M. Collins phrased it, ‘The tithe proctor was above the law, and the tithe

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payer outside it’ (Brennan, 2000, p. 35) – a remark reminiscent of latter-day Ulster where a Protestant bureaucracy administered the destructive will of empire while the rest operated from beyond orthodox arrangements of power and retribution. The Protestant landlords of early nineteenth-century Ireland selected the grand juries, local magistrates and tithe proctors, and were a law unto themselves. Outlawed by that frame and school of law and order, the indigenous poet or warrior unleashed fearsome bile on the messengers of empire. The depth and ferocity with which active and semantic disdain expressed themselves in conflict Ireland hold energies of their own. Terrible power and strength is conferred on emotion of this pitch and often edged with precocious foresight. ‘Beidh cathracha á stríochadh agus tinteacha á lasadh leo-Tá ab cairde fada díolta agus an líonrith, ina gcomhair’ (Brennan, 2000, p. 39). Prophetic enough were the words of Máire Bhuí Ní Laoire and even in the context of the northern Troubles. ‘Cities will be razed, fires will be flamed, Payment is due, the reckoning has come’ (Brennan, 2000, p. 42). Jacques Derrida does, after all, pose crucial implications for the progress of the national discourse and the present indeed is significantly imploded with the story of the past. Within the framework of the colonial epoch, Ireland has repeatedly had recourse to a recycling of the song or story of victimage. For want of access and recourse to the empowering dynamic of the pre-colonial experience, the nation allows its present to reabsorb the victim package hosted in those sad, bitter songs, poems and stories that go to tell our tale. While valuable in itself as a register of Ireland’s pain, an appendage to that same recycling record must be the subtle sense of inferiority that is the outcome of oppression. Exchanging thoughts with a gifted singer of Ireland’s story, Séamus Mac Mathúna, I gathered again something of that sad feature of our historical experience. Sharing with the singer an initial and rather romanticised draft of this book, Mac Mathúna reminded me that the warriors of sound are of the ordinary though gifted stuff of the people. The plight of the ground-down subject and ferrier of narrative recurs again in the aspect of art. Throughout the terrain of colonised culture there lurks the unwholesome face of oppression. The powerful thrust and momentum in the gift of our dancers, musicians and warriors of every school, is stalked by that same repressive spectre. Through the most vibrant and stalwart of tunes

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flows the relentless plight of the Croppy or the betrayed. The Croppy is the fighting ferrier of the baggage of colonialism. Sensing that our music could be a conduit through which the empowering thrust of pre-colonial Ireland might make passage to the national narrative, I visited one stronghold of the cultural discourse. Behind the ramparts of city and sea stands Monkstown’s Culturlann na hÉireann, the Comhaltas or traditional music headquarters in Ireland. Hosting ghosts of the national memory, such fortresses conduct the beat and tone of the Irish psyche. An early namesake of today’s musician, scholar and monk Séamus Mac Mathúna translated the sixth-century manuscript Bran’s Journey to the Land of the Women (Mac Mathúna, 1985, p. 1). Chieftain and hero of that narrative, Bran Mac Febail, walked one day in the grounds of his castle, domain or estate, only to fall into a most mesmerising and altered state: ‘o-cualai a ceol iarna chul ... [a]ndonecad tara essibi iarna chul’ (he heard music behind him and wherever he turned around ... it was still behind him the music was’) (Mac Mathúna, 1985, p. 2). Nothing in the dynasty of his sensory or intellectual authority could control the stalking sweetness of sound. Drained and drunken with the sheer binde or sweetness of ceol, the king yields to the mesmeric state. Poetry and music have propelled generations in Ireland and driven we remain, compelled by an ancient tune that has never gone away. What does the music say and to what does it call? Given the stunted and thwarted progress of the national narrative, it is conceivable that our music and culture could indicate the mode through which we might tell the way forward. Rescuing the speechless and unspeakable moments of history, music notes and mediates between various dimensions of standard meaning. Frustrated for want of expression, the passions and drives of that elaborate cognitive system seek refuge in the musical context, borrowing a voice from the milieu of sound. A kind of schism is apparent in this interaction, as a want emerges in discourse. What is written and voiced in the language of music and poetry is but a ghost of itself in the narrative context. Meaning lusts after its lost familiar, seeking to reclaim that identity for the people’s prose. Surveying the composed oratory of lyrical and musical traditions, language begs a crucial question. By what gift does the sound dance freely and how should our discourse sing? Wishing to tune into the empowered past, I applied to Mac Mathúna as medium. Séamus had neither difficulty nor hesitation in referring me to musical compositions that spoke to him of the same

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theme of the far away, alternative and nevertheless familiar past. Probing further, I asked him to translate the sound into a personification of the artist and audience of that time. Anthropological interpretation was hardly to be expected, though his preliminary caution against romanticising the musician threw the Yeatsian quandary to mind; can we indeed ‘tell the dancer from the dance’ (Martin, 1969, p. 180) and is the music an expression of the player’s soul or conversely the projection of an aspiration? Do the will and birthright of the player spill into his art, or does creativity merely describe the dream? The resolution of these questions has pertinent implications for narrative at all levels, particularly within the context of the current chapter of Irish history and politics. Are subjects of meaning and makers of music wilful and willing agencies of ideology or are we mere traffickers in dream and aspiration? Mac Mathúna put paid to any doubts on the matter when he described the ethos of the very gifted musician. The spiritual commitment of the highly tuned artist or warrior in any field allows for the recognition, retrieval and delivery of identity. Citing two pieces as the focus of his demonstration, Séamus illustrated both the integrity of the music as vehicle of history and the integral nature of tradition itself. Exposed initially to Gol na mBan san Ár (traditional ballad) I listened for the distance of time and absence; echoes of that absent voice bunkered in the silence and anonymity of Irish discourse, echoing Ní Laoire’s later summons and prediction. The present and presence of ancient themes revisiting the studio spoke of relentless spirit and intention. Noting the strange though familiar tones, the musician identified the intriguing integrity of the absent and the other. The lost and decomposed is but an erased presence, obscured though never deleted. Mac Mathúna tuned and mediated to the absent and displaced past. The love song hosted in the politically loaded song Roisín Dubh (traditional ballad), though obscured in its altered aspect, is no more lost than the absent past. Again, like the Tipp-Exed error or the deleted file, the redocumentation of song and theme serves as register of the however edited original. Recalling a discourse dumped in the safe bunkers of silence and anonymity, the distant and strange emerges as a retrievable identity and the editing insignia mark the thumbprints of history. CALLING THE TUNE The course of Irish music reflects something of the national story, in that altered and altering themes revisit the cognitive terrain.

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Instrument and tune record the recomposition of a previously arranged structure. In the musical context structure therefore is perceived as just that, a disciplined though growing arrangement, documenting the changing though familiar expression of identity. The dynamic of change is boldly registered in this school, where movement is marked, while the facility to move and to change is celebrated. Music notes the surviving memories and changing representation of history. It furthermore ferries the loaded intention of an early arrangement, in that the inherent artistic facility to cause change and movement has greatly impacted on what is expressed in our time. Art, like knowledge, is a loaded and wilful agency, an expression of the will. Fermenting and activating a relentless momentum, the poetic prophecy of the dreamers of dreams and the makers of music are at one. Through such mediums, vision penetrates awesome borders, transcending the sterile bunkers of past, present and future. The will and birthright of the Irish is conducted and co-ordinated in this rhythmic dynamic. The recording studio of Culturlann na hÉireann throws initiation by fire and Mac Mathúna reconvened our conversation with a presentation of Caoineadh Mhuire (traditional ballad) or The Keening of Mary of which Pearse remarked that he had many times seen women sob as they repeated or listened to the lament. I can confirm the patriot’s synopses and indeed identify with an additional comment of his when, remarking upon the listener’s/singer’s readiness to empathise with grief of distant times, Pearse notes the human capacity to reconcile the unseen with the seen. Again on literature, he remarked on the artistic facility to reveal the splendours of the world to vocalise its silent music. The shared exchange of unseen sound and stammering story could fire the fuse to a national discourse. While oppression factors crucially at tonal and thematic levels, the co-ordination and composed aspect of traditional play indicates the stalwart tenacity of a surviving people. A calm and resilient community of participants uphold and sustain the emerging arrangement. Though music, like meaning, harbours drives and compulsions of a complex and involved kind, both modalities are organised along highly disciplined lines. The very intensity and power of the drives and intentions trafficking through these channels reinforce a consideration for coherence and order. The anxious and urgent energies straining at the borders of discourse are controlled and governed by the institution of meaning. Relative confidence is indicated in the arrangements and understandings by

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which music is conducted, where due intimacy with the practice inspires an empowering faith. The contorted rituals by which the reasoning subject negotiates the chaos of meaning, as illustrated by Beckett, infers a contrastingly healthy prognosis for the subject at play. The subjection inherent to standard logic is dramatised through the absurd antics to which meaning subjects his outlandish company Molloy, Malone and Mahood. The juggling, heaving consciousness of this party engages in various strategies and patterns designed to cope with its raw response to the straitjacket of meaning. Molloy applies his entire ingenuity to devise a system of handling and hosting his cognitive arena. The pebbles with which his reason is cast are carefully spun to inscribe his total capacity, with mouth and pocket co-operating in shared commitment to the desired equilibrium. Malone devotes a lifetime’s demise to the rigorous exercise of the same undertaking, employing the heaving and contracting muscle of his mental faculty to the awesome task of controlling an erratic world. Mahood calls meaning to account through the scrupulously ordered language of arithmetic, totting the chaos into predictable summations of experience while Moran mounts the challenge of life as mechanically as he rides his bike. The subject at play, however, answers the challenge through a different tune as arranged and delivered by a less defensive understanding. This understanding is one which eludes the straitjacket of binarily structured meaning. Faith in the rejuvenating beat of its own processing arrangement permits certain sovereignty to the subject of the musical tradition. Like the spider projecting the thread of its own path, the road will rise with the emerging tune. In the contest for issue and identity the Comhaltas or company strides on the ground of its own making. However encumbered by the baggage of oppression, the Croppy remains confident of his standing as core player. Less liberating characteristics of domination and colonisation govern the narrative tradition of linguistic and interpretative structures designing and epitomising official culture. Fundamental to that cultural arrangement is the binary system of hierarchies enframing meaning in something of a cognitive straitjacket. However harnessed to the wiles and rhythm of the gift, the poet or player on the other hand has the bold confidence of the faith. While Mahood scrambles for a tot and summation of identity, the artist plays with chaos, oblivious to the former’s terror and fear even of what Mahood perceived as the sounds of men. The frame within which the artist delineates an

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identity is a moving and processing one, such that he forever arranges and directs his own safe passage. An empowering independence is assured the Comhaltas or bard at play, who strides assuredly on the home ground of a sovereign creativity. Bold faith in the shared passage and delivery of the artistic gift empowers the process by which the frames of poetical and musical arrangement move. This empowering confidence in a sovereign passage and process infers much for process and arrangement at national level. Shedding something of the oppressive baggage of subjection, the nation must take bold hold of its own process. Locked into the repeating and recycling cognitive institution, history is thwarted from issuing the rest of its tale. As demonstrated by the bolder players on the post-colonial stage, the gifted warriors of every faith have things to say. The binary structures dogging narrative, where identity is framed against its projected other, sustain a tyrannical and oppressive dynamic. The polar and polarised opposition upon which meaning is based conquers identity by turning it against itself. This polarised structure is one of the subtler inheritances of colonisation and one which thwarts and undermines our delivery at every pitch. The long dreamt of voice so hard played for thrusts urgently at the borders framing identity against itself. It calls to the bardic sovereignty of the Comhaltas, to a musical adaptation for the people’s prose and to the bold faith of the key player. We have the players to call the tune, agus go n’éiri an bothar leo.

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The players are placed to call the tune, and the integral nature of that rhythm is documented in the rare proclamations constituting Ireland’s stunted, though vibrant, discourse. ‘Who fears to speak’ bears an intuitive propensity to silence, and for reasons already outlined. The strategic silence of republicanism will never break while its underlying rationale remains, and factors fundamental to that reasoning have not gone away. The rhythm of accord therefore must certainly be long-strung and the road to justice a minefield primed with silent and secluded possibilities. Silence and seclusion visit the house of language in every context, making conspicuous presence during the state of heightened consciousness that accompanies the historical moment. This learned silence arrived out of prolonged conflict, and Ireland’s discourse becomes strategy in a war of words, where the linguistics of power address the logistics of combat. This chapter speaks of a kamikaze pact in meaning itself, the booby-trapped nature of language in the field of negotiation, and the Trojan Horse visiting the field of contest in the heightened moment of historical change. In the loud silence of military cessation, the discourse of negotiation reveals the strategic dynamics involved, tactics often reflected in narratives of power. Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness and indeed the story of Roger Casement indicate a boobytrapped and deadly propensity to self-destruction in meaning at many levels. Conrad’s novel describes a kind of suicide-pact within cognitive relations, where subject and object of meaning are seen to be at once interdependent and mutually destructive. As this chapter will describe, the story of Casement is reminiscent of one of the many theories surrounding the death of the earlier patriot Wolfe Tone. It has been said of the latter that he took his own life rather than be hanged like a criminal. Whether or not this is an accurate portrayal of events, the concept of controlling one’s downfall or death is strong in the history of conflict. Lives have been strategically sacrificed in the pursuit of ideals, with the singular clause that the life is often relinquished under the command of the individuals themselves. In war the emphasis is upon taking casualties while 41

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simultaneously denying the opponent of those takings, by whatever means. When isolated from the relevant command structure, as in the case of the imprisoned Wolfe Tone or republican hunger strikers, the contest for casualties goes on and the targeted prisoners undermine the enemy objective by taking command of their own casualty value in the currency of power. This is a subtler version of the practice of kamakaze war and is indicative of the depth of conflict within meaning itself. The relentless play and replay of discourse in the field of negotiation exposes the tactical manoeuvres of the key players. Negotiating teams, like all players for power, are resilient voyagers, ready for scuttle from launch to finish. Peripheral to the play are the linesmen and navigators who instinctively facilitate the throw of play, carefully assuming the costume of neutrality. These compulsive enthusiasts sometimes fall in at the middle ground, booby-trapped between the shoulders of the dangerous contest. That vestige of neutrality is regularly shorted and short-circuited in the kit of the referee, the understated though resilient double agent. The typical referee is the outsider, and one with compelling interests in the game. Roger Casement’s life and death epitomise the most auxiliary role in a deadly serious quest. The contest for power takes many a hostage and will sink more, for all the facility to scuttle the mission or to call a finish. Along the sweltering Congo swamps a ghastly silence falls and the jungle trees lie lifeless like a thousand funeral palls, and dark skinned men are heavy with a fear they cannot name when their gentle friend is led to death with mockery and shame. The Lonely Murlough Shore (traditional ballad) The dark heart of slavery has finally been broken. Mandela walks off Robin Island and the Irish Republican Army steps out in close procession, spilling delightfully onto the streets and outback of Ireland. To return from that tomb is a resurrection in itself. Africans and Irish step out from suspended assembly, onto the ground of harvest as tides of change sweep large regions of the world. To ride the tides towards change is to navigate for arrival and the entire

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passage is protracted and circuitous, a strategy at sea, tossed and turned by the tide of events. A lonely wave is beating on the rocky Antrim shore and the sighing winds are keening o’er the waters of the Rohr the sea birds sweep to Heaven with a loud and piercing wale as the passing knell of one who dies in a lonely English jail. (Traditional ballad) STALKING KNOWLEDGE The dark and ghastly passage of entombment in whatever context has its own fascination. ‘And the river was there – fascinating – deadly – like a snake’ (Conrad, 1993 edn, p. 13) exclaims the seafaring Marlow and narrator of Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness. At the helm of the narrative, Marlow launches a voyage of discovery from the banks of the Thames to the dark heart of oppression in the colonised Congo. The destination and subject of his mission takes him to the station of the earlier voyager Kurtz, an emissary for colonial exploits in the far-flung empire. Conrad’s novel tells the adventure story at the heart of darkness and of meaning itself. This is a journey acutely reminiscent of the story of slavery, or of imprisonment on the most archaic terms, and rubs shoulders with the various drives unleashed in the pursuit of power and the hunt for knowledge. The kinds of experience touching the lives of the characters included in these chapters amount to nothing less than the most unnerving encounters with power and knowledge. To steer the lonely and fascinating voyage of meaning is to exercise the challenge and desire attendant on that deadly process where creativity and a kind of annihilation converge. The interaction of creativity and destruction as demonstrated in Morrison’s The Wrong Man is explored at the most chilling depths in Conrad’s work. ‘Ough!’ (Conrad, 1993, p. 13) exclaims Marlow, with all the disgusted absorption of one engaged with the compulsion to know. The compulsion to know is a crucial dynamic in the empire of meaning, where the cognitive ground is quarried at a ferocious rate. That compulsion also factors in the dynamics of resistance as depicted in the intelligence-centred strategy of Michael Collins, who penetrated the security files of Dublin Castle, subsequently assassinating key members of British intelligence in Ireland.

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In the terms outlined by Foucault in his Discipline and Punish (1979) the pursuit of information makes surveillants of the agents of power and this is a strategy extending from systems of government to business. Marlow’s exclamation, however, projects unpalatable connotations onto knowledge itself rather than upon the ruthless and typically exploitative operations of those systems engaged in its accumulation. There is nothing inherently dangerous about knowledge – even a little of it – but there is something deadly about the serious play of egos thrown onto the field of contest. Ego is an area of interest in the consideration of what I perceive to be the empire of power, a concept that rubs sides with knowledge so often as to taint the latter with a perceived ruthlessness, as if meaning were loaded with inherent intention. As outlined in the last chapter, knowledge is the currency of meaning and both entities factor vitally in the dynamics of power. Again it’s not a question of the integrity of that knowledge, but the often-uncomfortable way it is procured. The ground down subject is the conduit for volatile material in the aspect of erratic drives racing through meaning. The more dynamic and powerful that ferrying subject, the more vulnerable to debilitation, in a context where opposed egos clash, a notion developed in another of Conrad’s works, The Secret Agent (1907). The interpretation of empire and colonialism in the context of the work delivered here revolves around the deeply complex and yet infinitely familiar contest for dominance or mere survival that surrounds conflict at every level. The severe thrashing of ego is a paramount agenda in the contest for power and the various fates of Casement and subsequently of Collins are rich examples. Roger Casement was demonised for a suspected or real alternative sexuality. There has also been media speculation suggesting that Collins signed the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 for fear of exposure in relation to an affair he held allegedly with a member of the British aristocracy. The implication was that it was not the threat of immediate and terrible war that forced Collins to sign the Treaty, but the disclosure that he was the father of an illegitimate son by a married upper-class woman. However, as we recall from the previous chapter, Collins stated in the Irish Republic in 1922, ‘The British would not, I think, have declared terrible and immediate war upon us’ and ‘there was not and could not have been any personal duress’. Ego is commonly a hostage to power and the compulsion to access the unknown drove Marlow’s predecessor Kurtz to death. This was a

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fate not dissimilar to the finale played out by the despised aspect of the informer in Morrison’s novel. Todd represents the ill-trained ego playing on the field of power, the place where ruthlessness and survival contest for dominance. The relentless Kurtz, obsessed with the desire to accumulate knowledge, broke under that colonising momentum. Living the luminous moment of the cognitive idol, Kurtz expired under the same scorching exposure. Ego is the Achilles heel at the crux of power, and fattens on the enforced supplication of the subject colony. Playing his all to that field of contest, Kurtz exposed the dangerous apparatus at the core of power struggles. Like Casement, these power-loaded individuals personify the likely fate of the ego or subject in the crossfire of energies at work in the pursuit of dominance. Empire learns from the biographies of various life stories and pre-empts the threat to its own history. Power can seriously damage health; in fact it can kill. In the event where an entire culture and ideology banks on power, it emerges that such a dynamic is its own undoing. Knowledge at its most serious and integral pitch amounts to truth and is the concern of this review of Kurtz, Casement and empire. Empire dies for fear of knowledge pitched at the level of truth, and Conrad’s narrator Marlow commissions the epitaph. A primary lesson emerges from this outcome, the play with power is an endless recourse to defence. To be at the front is to watch your back, a simple and primary lesson that both Kurtz and Casement totally ignored and that empire clocked and practised to the point of obsession. Thus the lust for information and the insatiable preoccupation with The Black Diaries. In July 1910 Roger Casement sailed out from Southampton bound for the Amazon where he was to spearhead a commissioned inquiry into atrocities committed through White Rule. A prolific writer, he recorded his observations in diary form, a habit that led ultimately to one of the longest controversies in Anglo-Irish relations. The socalled Black Diaries were the subject of long-standing debate as to their authenticity. Containing what were perceived to be strong pornographic references, these documents used to slander Casement, until recently were the subject of much speculation. It was strongly argued that the diaries were British forgeries designed to undermine the anti-imperialist content of Casement’s reports of events on the harsh ground of the colonised outback. Conrad’s novel The Heart of Darkness is commonly identified with the voyages, discoveries and narratives of Roger Casement. Whatever the verdict on the conspiracy theory around The Black Diaries, Conrad’s novel indicates that empire took cognisance from and researched the self-annihi-

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lating propensity of its own dynamic. The threat to its ego suggests itself in the various fates of its elusive subjects and empire pre-empts the threat, cutting its loses to pieces. The colonising intent of empire takes its agents to the coalface and heart of meaning itself and this was its field of research. Marlow was the figurative agent dispatched to this inquiry, much as Casement was dispatched to his own brief. The anchored site on the Thames at which the narrator recites the story of Marlow’s engagement with Kurtz is, from launch to end, distinct from the floating narrative’s unfolding journey. While recollecting his early travels from anchored base, Marlow’s recital incorporates himself as travelling observer and chronicler of events. As such he, in apparent proximity to Kurtz, occupies a central role in the drama. He procures for himself a portion of that deadly cognitive challenge while linking the site of narration with the uncoiling drama. The resting yawl or vessel from where this mobile history is delivered launches the story and foretells the expedition of the narrative. This ship is the anchor from which the narrative is sent and through which it is navigated. His involvement at both delivery and dramatic levels of the story places Marlow in a simultaneously creative and yet subject role. He tells a story within which he is a key participant, complicating the aspect of his own identity. By a circuitous route, narrative authority and literary subjectivity overlap to create a mutually entwined and chameleon identity deeply reminiscent of the intangible character Roger Casement. Marlow’s role in The Heart of Darkness overlaps strikingly with Casement’s brief as commissioned investigator of events in the farflung empire. Casement’s identity, however, is more complex, hosting ambiguity at the most fundamental levels. At once commissioner for empire and subversive reporter, he emerges as the quintessential secret agent. This secret agency reveals itself in the lives and times of key players discussed in this chapter. Commissioned to colonise on the other hand, Kurtz was destroyed by his assignment as agent of empire. The wilderness of unconquered ground takes no prisoners and the agent is lost. A ‘knowledge came’ to Kurtz, and the wilderness ‘had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know’ (Conrad, 1993 edn, p. 82). The awareness recoiled on the enquirer – ‘fascinating – deadly’ (Conrad, 1993 edn, p. 13) – like the snake of river beckoning Marlow from the banks of the Thames. The terror, as identified by Rex Taylor, ‘created by a force uncertain of the measure of its strength’ (Taylor, 1961, p. 11) was not conceived on the streets of

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Dublin in the early twentieth century, but travels along the entire voyage and dynamic of empire. The outcome of research into its own annihilating dynamic did not teach empire to stay at home, or to take a graceful exit. Rather, it focused colonialism on the project of disciplining terror, diverting fear to the plains of knowledge itself. Fear of uncertain strength gives way to fear of uncertain knowledge, a volatile energy shrouded in conspiracy. ‘Who fears to speak’ (O’Bradaigh, 1983, p. 17) of Irish history, fears to know in the imperialist context as presented by Conrad. While Irish governments legislated for silence rather than hear the national voice, imperialism usurped the cognitive ground, outlawing thought in a context where knowledge becomes the fearsome villain. The terror of a force uncertain of the measure of its own strength, as described by Rex Taylor in the context of Dublin 1921, is as nothing compared to empire’s terror in the face of certain knowledge. Conrad was swift to identify the nervous manoeuvres of empire in the face of oncoming knowledge and exposure. His literary overlap with the story of Casement connects directly with issues represented in The Secret Agent where the furtive Mr Verloc masquerades as a shopkeeper. Verloc’s ‘ostensible business’, from which he launches more elusive pursuits, doubles as a makeshift military base. The shop, ‘a square box of a place’ (Conrad, 1992 edn, p. 45), deceptively suggestive of mediocrity, houses more of the volatile energy represented in The Heart of Darkness. ‘In the daytime the door remained closed, in the evening it stood discretely but suspiciously ajar’ (Conrad,1992 edn, p. 45). From this ‘grimy brick’ construct, Verloc’s nephew Stevie carries a primed bomb which detonates prematurely costing the youth his life. Stevie is the weak character in the plot who represents the vulnerability of the subject in power relationships, the other Achilles’ heel in the field. The deployment of vulnerable and raw subjectivity is crucial to Conrad’s plot and demonstrates the dynamics of power and meaning. The characteristic dynamics of domination and colonisation inherent to power is present also in the traditional interpretative structures which design and epitomise official culture. Fundamental to that cultural arrangement is the binary system of hierarchies where power deploys subjectivity in the ruthless pursuit of dominance. Stevie is the personification of subjectivity shattered between two opposing drives in meaning: its tendency to create a structure and thereby sponsor order and a commensurate tendency towards closure and annihilation.

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THE BOOBY TRAP The compulsion to know is double-edged. The secret agents and surveillants of the powerful are deployed like high-tech security equipment, modern adaptations of the principles of control outlined by Foucault. The Victorian buildings currently housing high security prisoners in England, for instance, have been installed with the kind of surveillance equipment enabled to see, hear and record the movements and possibly the speech of the inmates. That same technique now operates openly in the streets of capital cities and not only in regions of conflict. At its most compounded and intensive level, this kind of surveillance is an attempted siege on the ego, or rather an effort to thwart its development or to banish it to the regions of the unconscious as a kind of hidden self. The Casement connection is stark in respect to Conrad’s work and indeed with regard to the themes shared between all three works, The Heart of Darkness, The Secret Agent and The Wrong Man. Negotiating for the formation of an Irish legion from Irish prisoners of war in Germany, Casement managed instead to secure a shipment of arms for an anti-imperialist insurrection in Ireland. Twenty thousand rifles were launched on a ship bound for Ireland and on the German stipulation that the vessel be scuttled in the event of capture. Casement travelled separately by U-boat, arriving at the deserted Banna Strand where he was captured by British forces and processed for court martial on charges of treason. The vessel disguised under the Norwegian flag was led for inspection to Queenstown, a Cork port currently known as Cobh, where the helmsman scuttled the vessel along with its volatile cargo. In effect, Casement booby-trapped his cargo against seizure, a tactical strategy compatible with his military background and arguably a key to the secrecy of his agency in the field of conflict. Casement’s brief and project represents the stressed site of subjectivity. Ferrying primed energy, the subject often doubles as a vital switch with the potential to ignite or disarm entire systems. A kind of narrative circuit is involved and one reminiscent of Casement’s booby-trapped cargo vessel and the deadly crossfire in The Wrong Man. These are the volatile circuits of knowledge represented by Conrad’s pre-empting yawl launching the floating narrative and Stevie’s premature bomb. That circuitous and uncoiling cognitive relationship is as complex and ambiguous as the character of Roger Casement, in that it epitomises the overlapping and intertwined nature of power itself. The power of empire and the volatility of the

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subject meet in the aspect of Casement. At once representative of that power and its commissioned subject, he is the ferrier of subversion. Recalling again the aspect of the vulnerable Stevie, Casement held the power to blow the establishment he represented and this he did through the very ambiguity of his role. In effect Roger Casement booby-trapped his very identity, rather than be taken by any would-be assailant. The fact that it became at all possible for his writings to be used in evidence against him is ironic and served to make of him a potentially volatile baggage for agency on any front. Beset by depression, Casement explains in a diary insertion dated February 1915 how he had stopped recording his experiences ‘when it became clear that I was being played with, fooled and used’. He added that he ‘did not wish to record the misery [he] felt, or to say the things [his] heart prompted’ (Inglis, 1993, p. 308). Yet, as Brian Inglis in his biography Roger Casement (1993) comments, he was in fact writing all the time. Casement’s participation in conflict engages his very ego in a committed, though dangerous, engagement with power. The Heart of Darkness is associated also with the film Apocalypse Now, a representation of the dynamics of power and ego during the America–Vietnam war, one of those moments when the commissioned military machine blew the very system by which it was deployed. Another of those circuitous relationships emerges here and one foregrounding the crux at the heart of meaning. The tyrannical deployment of the conscript ultimately empowered that subject to throw the switch or edit the message of empire. In engaging with the subject, as did Marlow from the anchored base, meaning inhales subjectivity, ‘rubbing sides’ (Conrad, 1993 edn, p. 78) with the accompanying vulnerability. This is an experience depicted through the story of Kurtz, reminiscent of Casement’s journey and not unknown among American conscripts in the Vietnam war. To go native or to rub sides with the indigenous was potentially to entice accusations of treachery. Meaning therefore is as strong as its highly oppressive arrangement allows its subjects to be, and the measure of its real power presents itself in the many marginalised, silenced and disadvantaged voices it tries so energetically to seclude. Even within the traditionally bleak journey of Irish history, Casement was often the marginalised sojourner. In the context of a potentially postconflict Ireland in the year 2000, Casement marks the site of veiled victimhood. The tyranny of empire grinds down the subject, much as Stevie stumbled under the weight of his deadly baggage. It is just

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this oppressed vulnerability that marks and cultivates a resisting virus in meaning, forever troubling its uneasy relationships. That virus sporadically arises in the form of critical outbreaks that somehow stumble like Stevie upon the means of overthrow and insurrection. Annihilated by the explosives he carries, Stevie becomes the involuntary, if unwilling, Kamikaze. This inadvertent detonation of the agent’s project describes the minefield of meaning where the subject is empowered to booby the system at a given moment. The Kamakaze is the walking booby-trap and the courier of suspect packages. THE BIG IDEA Proposing a difference between colonists and conquerors, Marlow says that what redeems colonialism is ‘the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; an unselfish belief in the idea – something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer sacrifice to’ (Conrad, 1993 edn, p. 8). Ideas therefore would appear to be a grander expression of the most fundamental lessons dispatched through meaning and stumbled upon by the struggling subject or courier of dispatches from diverse quarters. As some veteran Irish republicans put it, Irish history makes a nice story. However, it wasn’t a linear process, but a spiralling and often circuitous one more like that river Marlow describes as ‘fascinating – deadly – like a snake’ (Conrad, 1993 edn, p. 13). Events emergent on the international front, and notably in the Vietnam war context, made serious inroads on Irish political history since 1969 where again, as in post-French Revolutionary days, the grand idea of rebellion filtered over onto mainland Ireland. The Vietnam war also alerted America to the dynamic of failure, or to the capacity of the ground down and defeated subject to detonate the project of imperialism. The lesson of failure therefore tells of the power of the oppressed and alerts the relevant authorities to the booby-trapped nature of its entire system. The very intensity of dramatic action world-wide as in the three novels, far from undermining the attention to image or idea, manages to fortify and cultivate an overall preoccupation with the ideational. The idea which can, according to Marlow, be ‘set-up, and bow[ed] down before’ (Conrad,1993 edn, p. 8) is recollected later on his arrival at Kurtz’s station when it was explained to him how the indigenous population would crawl approaching his tent. That residence was surrounded by ‘heads on the stakes’ which did not

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leave Marlow ‘so shocked as you might think’. In fact Marlow adds that ‘[t]he start back I had given was really nothing but a movement of surprise. I had expected to see a knob of wood there, you know. I returned deliberately to the first I had seen – and there it was, black, dried, sunken.’ The ‘dry lips showing a narrow white line of the teeth, was smiling, too, smiling continuously at some endless and jocose dream of that eternal slumber’ (Conrad, 1993 edn, p. 81). For all the grotesque horror of these ‘round knobs’ of death, it is the prospect of what thought or idea may have aroused such an incongruous grin that most occupies Marlow. Gazing through the spectre of skulls surrounding Kurtz’s tent, it is as if death itself were the enlightened agency equipped to see beyond the cognitive frame. A deadly enlightenment marks the moment of eclipse for such awestruck subjectivity face-set against the threshold of a grand idea iconised in the flamboyant Kurtz, and somehow remembered in divergent archives as ‘the Ghost of Roger Casement’ (McHugh, 1966, p. 334). Conrad portrays ideas as vitally motivating and elusive agents, which manifest themselves in powerful and often overwhelming ways. The consuming and fascinating impact of ideation upon thinking individuals like Kurtz is, however, portrayed as a form of annihilation. A virus exists in meaning therefore, where creativity assumes a destructive capacity as evinced in The Secret Agent when the ground down subject stumbles and blows the entire system. Ideation emerges as not only a potentially annihilating force, but is also seen to house its own demolition. A self-destructive drive exists in meaning where its compulsion to tyrannise and subject leads to the erection of those treacherous cognitive switches so bedevilling its path. The cognitive institution, being no stronger than the subject it deploys and debilitates, is in a constant state of self-destruction. The oppression of the subject amounts to the simultaneous debilitation of meaning, and the annihilation of one causes the demise of the other. Conversely, the vulnerable subject’s attempt to resist the tyranny of meaning leads to its own annihilation. The obscure heart of meaning transacts a very oppressive relationship, which forms the nucleus governing cognitive life and death in a desperate and all consuming suicide pact. Writers, philosophers and all those engaged in the analysis of meaning are distanced from and constantly in pursuit of that absent power. They are the labourers grafting through endless dark and obscure terrain in search of the next ground of meaning. Such an arrangement for long sustained a notion of a lord of meaning or of

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omniscience itself. Kurtz’s quest in the wilderness, with his vivid debilitation, personifies the annihilating consequences of breaching the gulf and bridging the distance between launch and arrival of meaning. Kurtz reached the idea or the empire of meaning and died as if possessed by an unfathomable truth, an experience again reminiscent of the fate of Roger Casement. The terror ensuing from his and Stevie’s breach of the vital structures of meaning unleashes an incapacitating horror of the great idea, freezing meaning into the limiting frames of its institution. Perceived in such a way, the system of standard meaning emerges as a sub-text, institutionalised and locked into repetitious and rigid cognitive circuits, and as vulnerable to manipulation as The Black Diaries. The darkness and horror depicted through the heads on stakes, and representative of the grossest crimes of white rule, is camouflaged by an overwhelming fascination with ‘the idea’ (Conrad, 1993 edn, p. 82). Again those crimes, as reported by Casement in his role as commissioner, are deflected onto an overwhelming preoccupation with his sexual orientations as depicted in the so-called Black Diaries. The young Russian sailor in The Heart of Darkness, with his clown-like dress, poses as a version of the king’s fool, incorporating chilling insights in a nonsensical and submissive package. That volatile package recalls the dangerous proximity of knowledge and vulnerability personified in Stevie. Referring to Kurtz and the sailor, Marlow states that ‘[t]hey had come together unavoidably, like two ships becalmed near each other, and lay rubbing sides at last’ and the sailor said, ‘[w]e talked of everything’, ‘[e]verything! [e]verything! … Of love, too’, and Marlow goes on to say, ‘[i]t appears their intercourse had been broken by various causes’ (Conrad, 1993 edn, p. 78). Issues of sexuality present themselves in the sailor’s and Marlow’s fascination with Kurtz. Eve Sedgwick’s book Between Men (1985) has significant bearing on relations between men like the sailor and Kurtz, and deals broadly with homophobia and homosexuality, and in a piece relating to ‘the Homophobia of Empire’, she traces references to homosexuality in various Victorian novels as they relate to empire. She states that ‘[i]n short, the most exploratory of Victorians drew the borders of male homosexual culture to include exclusively, the Mediterranean and the economically exploitable Third World’ (Sedgwick, 1985, p. 183). Deflecting taboo onto the other, empire simultaneously projects that ‘terror of its own uncertain strength’ as identified by Taylor (1961, p. 11). This disengagement and distance from the homosexual identity recalls the rigorous detachment from the subject in the transaction

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of meaning. The dissolution of hierarchical cognitive relations so dreaded and resisted by meaning is reminiscent of the taboo against those sexual relations based on anything but the duality and hierarchy of heterosexuality. Such intimate relations grounded on the equality and proximity of a shared gender again threaten the institutionalised meaning of sexuality. The horror encountered and voiced by Kurtz before his death recalls Stevie’s fate and the fearsome encounters with ideation displayed in Conrad’s works. Again, creativity is juxtaposed against its annihilating history. The inventive cognitive source, like the anchored ship or homely shop, is crucially knit together with its transitory subject. The agency of that subject, however, stumbling and struggling uncoils its inventive source by telling the adventure story of meaning. In Kurtz’s cognitive world the horror emerges from that same intangible place foregrounded in The Secret Agent: ‘the idea’ (Conrad, 1993 edn, p. 82). The various strategies in these works for dealing with perceived reality indicate a fundamental struggle at work in relation to meaning. The idea of homosexuality and of going native is used as a place to hang the fear framed in social taboo. The ultimate aspiration of empire here is to target knowledge, the idea behind, as the focus of fear. ‘Who fears to speak’ is significantly less colonised than that which fears to know and it emerges that empire operated an even more thorough programme of occupation upon its own agents. As ruthless administrator of exploitation, colonialism was ever mindful of possible treachery and its entire strata was loaded with such possibilities. The booby-trapped identity referred to with respect to Casement is the personification of empire. A preoccupation with the intangible and distant idea in Conrad’s work, at the expense of a material and often very shocking reality, suggests a kind of amnesia and implies a crucial coping mechanism. Towards the end of The Heart of Darkness, Marlow suggests that he saw, either literally or metaphorically, the image of Kurtz, a notion recalling Yeats’s line; ‘the ghost of Rodger Casement is knocking at the door’ (McHugh, 1966, p. 334). Marlow says, ‘I saw him clearly enough then. I shall see that eloquent phantom as long as I live’ (Conrad, 1993 edn, p. 108). The cognitive rearrangements required to forget what is apparently there while seeing what is not, reflects the rearrangement of meaning inspired by Conrad’s works when the institution of meaning is perceived as a kind of subtext while the marginalised voices are perceived to uncoil its deadly story. For Marlow even Kurtz’s existence manifested itself in a most ephemeral way. ‘The

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man presented himself as a voice. Not of course that I did not connect him with some sort of action’. Marlow perceived his subject as being gifted and the gift that ‘stood out pre-eminently, that carried with it a sense of real presence, was his ability to talk, his words’ (Conrad, 1993 edn, p. 66). This novel deals with the power of narrative to persuade, colonise and even annihilate its subject. PARTITIONIST THOUGHT Every historical moment is important for its potential to deliver, and climactic moments are often interpreted and responded to in anticlimactic terms. If anything, the attempt to speak the terms of negotiation accentuates the deep silence at the heart of republican discourse. On the verge of historical moments, vision tends to speak in tongues. Ireland has not wanted for its grand moments and its discourse is the ultimate expression of ambiguity. On the verge of another such historical moment, tension is expressed and expelled in the apocalyptic terms of the poetry, song and dance of war. Unfortunately these mantras are used in the wrong way. These proclamations are misused where their potential power is ignored, when they are deployed as alternatives to silence. These are the deadly Declarations and ones deeply consistent with the compelling expression of Máire Bhuí and her ilk. We have absorbed ‘the border’ as instinctively as a child procures the ways of language. Logic or meaning is transmitted through the interaction of silence and voice. The spaces and words that carry language mirror the borders and bases that enable conflict. Language expresses itself in partitionism, in that we speak different languages that hold and express our particular and often exclusive story. If an entire chapter of an indigenous culture is based on partition, then the language of its people will express the same. The Irish national discourse has become a weapon of war and a journey of conflict. The deadly, if repetitious, Declarations are statements of intent, largely undermined, and with consequences reminiscent of the booby trap and the Kamikaze. In the case of Ireland’s discourse, the Trojan Horse is the agency involved, where the gift of empire-speak manages to undermine the Irish voice, as much as it undermined the voices of its various erstwhile subjects. The dynamics of silence and anonymity, as discussed in the first chapter, have facilitated the safe passage of vision. Our deadly serious statements of intent are lost to us when we shrivel them into the mantra or spot on the wall, where we use them merely as shields

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against an interrogating world. When we use our statements of intent to hide behind, they add up to little more than the sad and bitter tales that go to tell our story. Reminiscent of the dark or blackened diary of defamation projected upon the life and times of Casement is the equally disturbed epitaph surrounding the lives of people like Erskine Childers and Wolfe Tone. Coming from a similar background, Childers absconded from the politico-cultural backdrop of empire to undertake something of the troubled state of subjectivity. Befriended by Collins in the revolutionary time of 1916 to 1922, Childers like Boland, Barry and others of the anti-Treaty mould, met a troubled fate, one reminiscent of the travellers lamented in the traditional poem Annach Chuain. The poem laments the loss of newly weds whose marriage garb was that of their waking, ‘is é gleas a bpósadh a bhí a dtorramh’, a notion peculiarly reminiscent of the fate of Erskine Childers. The ardent anti-Treatyite Childers was executed for possession of a weapon given to him as a marriage gift from his old friend Michael Collins, the key signature of that agreement. There are deep connections between the passions of ideology and the passions of friendship and comradeship. Nothing expresses this reality more than the Collins–Childers experience, where the marriage gift was the seal of death. Power awards some deadly gifts and friendship is often the dubious beneficiary, much as subjects like Stevie deliver their own suspect packages to the corridors of power. The strained forum of negotiation exposes the depth of conflict at the heart of meaning, where the process is primed for demolition from every quarter. Language absorbs the tactics of war and the discourse of negotiation will manoeuvre accordingly. TROJAN FORCES Erskine Childers died of a deadly gift, another fatal greeting upon Irish history. This is the story of the Trojan Horse and again the confluence of historical moment and other factors impacted seriously in Ireland as in many an outback. The interesting factor for this study resounds around the ways in which meaning itself holds a peculiarly contradictory, conflicting and militaristic aspect. Marx and many others have identified this feature over decades. It is important, however, to name and place variously identified perceptions in the real life and lives of the human condition. The human condition is complex and, as indicated through the lives of the differing individuals introduced in these pages, bio-

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graphical evidence often tells the story of history and indicates the journey ahead. The story of Childers, like that of Casement and Kurtz, strikes at the most humane level of comradeship, a story of serious trouble where the loving greeting emerges as the sentence of death. This is the modern story of the Trojan Horse, where the gift of life and love delivers the story of annihilation and betrayal; a tale dramatised in heightened terms in the Danny Morrison novel, where the commissioned betrayer conducts the movement of creative annihilation. The element of surprise, however, is often lost in the context of negotiation. Surprise and the unexpected are told in terms of the suicide pact in meaning. The booby trap enlisted in orthodox methods of war and negotiation enlists the Trojan Horse that too often visits the aftermath with gifts of Trojan consequence. Conrad displays an astute capacity to detect in a given concept a precisely opposing and surprising meaning, as evinced in his detection of potential danger in the clearly vulnerable subject. Marlow looks beyond the very actual and atrocious actions of his subject in order to listen to his voice and read his idea. In a similar juggling of opposites, Conrad launches a narrative voyage from the very anchored and resting deck of the Nellie. His seditious vendor in The Secret Agent is deployed in very striking activities in order that Conrad can again pursue and investigate ideology. Images and events are rearranged in a most blatant fashion as highlighted by Marlow’s displacement of fear on sight of the gruesome skulls. A similarly masterful operation appears to have been conducted on Casement’s diaries. The thorough control of meaning allows the empire of reason to perform elaborate cut, copy and paste operations on identity at all levels. This is particularly evident in the Anglo-Irish context where empire-speak has installed itself into the Irish psyche such that our language of resistance actually reinforces the concepts we most wish to eradicate. Fearful of speech at the outset, we shrivel our statements of intent into repetition where our mantras sustain the terms of colonisation. Irish republicans not only signed up to the border in 1921, but reinforced that concept through the language of unification, where we divert our discourse and our energies into the assemblage of what has forever been intact. Britain planted a border in the Irish psyche such that we see little else. This is the Trojan Horse of empire in Ireland, where the national consciousness identifies itself against the concept of boundary and at so deep a level that we have absorbed the notion as reality. Not only did

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Britain deflect the Republic, but it even persuaded us that it had scuttled the top of the island. Discourse is of the deadliest weapons of war and the history of relations between these islands is the narrative evidence to prove it. In 1916 it was proclaimed that the children of the nation held the rights and duties of the newly named Republic. Five years later, as described in the last chapter, Collins approached the negotiating table in the mindset of a soldier, presuming to challenge the outcome with the barrel of a gun. Empire was a little too cute for this contest. The strategies of war are not always those of negotiation and the might of the gun makes difficult passage to that of the pen. What is achieved through conflict, however, is not lost to the pen. Materials of warfare whatever the operation are subject to ambush. With this factor in mind, all sides adapt themselves accordingly, swallowing a programme of security that is an essential feature of negotiation. Anglo-Irish relations provide the ultimate ground for the study of this particular programme in that both sides of the conflict are vitally tuned to issues of defence. Language, as already outlined, is an issue of security in the conflict situation, has always been, to the point where silence and anonymity became crucial ingredients of the Irish psyche. The lives and myths surrounding many of our patriots now haunt the stage upon which we negotiate and the stories of those lives have telling impact on how much will be said. Another life story of compelling consequence was that of Harry Boland, friend to Michael Collins, and ultimately a serious rival in the ideological context of civil war Ireland. During the War of Independence, de Valera sent Boland as special envoy to the United States. A man peculiarly lost amid the gathering of Irish patriots, Boland was the understated patriot of Irish history, unnoticed in his time and of the less noted of our time. The concept of the border is a loaded one, in that it has the capacity to withhold and withstand. December in Dublin, in the year 2000, Clinton speeds past the river Liffey. Waiting tediously at a nearby bus stop, an old lady calls to the president in the high poetry of Liberty Dublin, cursing his presence for the obstruction to traffic. Mr Clinton did not visit that hardship on her, but like Máire Bhuí of old, she maintains her borders as emblems of mistrust. The Liffey between her and the entourage recalls the borders of the mind, the symbolic obstacle to freedom and simultaneously the barrier against the reality of oppression. Irish republicans in particular have shrivelled the song and dance of empowerment into the safety of

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silence and repetition; mantras that shield us against what we could not trust. We have eaten, drank and sang the border for so long that it has become part of our psyche. This implanted border has colonised our silence and our voice. The border became a safety net, the comfort blanket against the impending challenge. In effect we leaned on a psychological wall while we found the drive towards revolution. Empire dies for Irish freedom. Conrad concerns himself with the issue of narrative power and persuasion. Connected with the matter of persuasion is that of sexuality, and Sedgwick’s Between Men devotes some space to the concept of hypnosis, equating it with the power Dickens perceived to be involved in heterosexual love where a man imposes his will over ‘the figure of a proud woman forced to embody the meaning, to enact the will – even though she knows it is not hers – of a sufficiently focused man’ (Sedgwick, 1985, p. 188). The hierarchical and conflict-ridden nature of the relations described here recall those between a demanding and repressive authority and a withholding subject. Connections at a deep level between knowledge, power and sexuality emerge through Conrad’s work. Again, fear and uncertainty as identified by Rex Taylor form the currency around which these energies are monopolised. The pillar of empire, Casement became the living mast upon which these agencies were hung. Until his eventual illness and weakness Kurtz, like Casement, influenced the minds of others like the Russian sailor, his employers, the tribal people and his ‘Intended’ (Conrad, 1993 edn, p. 103) bride. Marlow’s refusal furthermore to allow Kurtz’s ‘papers’ to be claimed by the colonial merchants suggests a deep suspicion of their hypnotic power, a precaution reminiscent of the intrigue around The Black Diaries. However, of Kurtz Marlow says that [t]he wilderness had patted him on the head, and, behold, it was a ball – an ivory ball, it had caressed him, and lo! – he had withered; it had taken him, loved him, embraced him, got into his veins, consumed his flesh, and sealed his soul to its own by the inconceivable ceremonies of some devilish initiation. He was its spoiled and pampered favourite. Ivory? I should think so. (Conrad, 1993 edn, p. 68) Kurtz’s relationship with the wilderness is perceived as deviant and unorthodox. His passionate exchange with the meaning of this cultural terrain is deemed inappropriate. The taboo evident in this relationship recalls the homophobia discussed by Sedgwick.

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COGNI-PHOBIA Kurtz arrives at and is touched by this subject station and as a symbol of colonising authority this is an unpalatable outcome within the culture of the cognitive institution which sponsors his ideational excavations. A kind of cogni-phobia exists in the standard institution of meaning where certain engagements and exchanges are deeply resisted. It is therefore in the best interests of such a phobic authority to cultivate prevalent and widespread fear of those unwanted structures and connections. By one of its ingenious sleights of hand, meaning projects its own in-built and deadly viruses onto the many feared and marginalised cognitive relationships forever threatening its boundaries. Again that fear addressed in Rex Taylor’s work emerges, and nowhere more strikingly than in the discourse of negotiation, and little wonder, given the unnervingly charged nature of that minefield. As succinctly as empire manages to deflect taboo onto the other, so too does it manage to project that fear onto the ground of knowledge, where meaning itself assumes the aspect of taboo. The subject, however, as the Englishman Spenser noted, is fearless in delivery and seldom flinches against the tides of truth. The colossal appetite of empire absorbed its own project, devouring itself in its own propaganda. The rhythm and agreement that escaped the structures of post-modern Ireland salvage something of an ancient fearlessness. This again is the rhythm of the Comhaltas or the company at serious play. The smashing of ego is crucial to the assumption of power. Of Casement it is noted how ‘they stripped [him] of [his] manners’ (‘The Lonely Murlough Share’, traditional ballad). Casement’s tortured ego is in question and, being of Empire, he had ego to lose. The subject on the other hand has neither ego nor discourse, but holds the freedom of the life sentence with the open-ended tariff. The focused mission of the empire is to break even the auxiliary participant in revolution. A mission of post-colony is to reclaim our discourse, our history and our people. Ah gentle Roger Casement you enlist us in your death They have tried to blight you from our minds but we will not forget, Your cause will be triumphant when slavery’s night is ore Your bones shall rest; your last request On the rocky Murlough shore.

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The Inquisition: A View of the Present State of Ireland

Spenser’s studied critique in A View of the Present State of Ireland is a protracted report of a wayward Irish colony. The narrator Irenius’s position as British civil servant and would-be surveillant of the less civil Irish subject is that of medium or messenger between two worlds, an appointment pre-empting the brief of the double agent. In his review and portrayal of the Irish temperament, this royalist emissary demonstrates a particular insight into unruly servitude. Mingling in and operating from the arena of power while stationed at the heart of a subject colony, Irenius like Casement partakes of an uncomfortable intimacy with both realms. Commuting from the homeground of empire to the vantage point of subjectivity, he unravels the intricate knot of agencies posted within relations of power, much as Marlow unravelled the web of intangibles surrounding the lives of Kurtz and Casement. The agent of empire Irenius is commissioned to enquire into and report on the state of Ireland. A kind of inquisition is in question and this notion of the view or enquiry is central to the story of political developments in Ireland. While it was Spenser’s mission to review the present state of Ireland in the context of previous centuries, the stage and possibilities for the twentieth century are the concerns of this study. In the heightened atmosphere of July 2000 when the remaining prisoners in Long Kesh jail were released under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, the lust for information again presented itself in the aspect of sundry academics and surveillants knocking at the coalface of republican silence. Interviewed with regard to the current chapter of Irish politics and responding to a query as to his personal thoughts on Margaret Thatcher’s survival of the Brighton bombing, one interviewee reflected upon the dubious advantages of that outcome. Commenting on the currency of Thatcher’s response to intimate encounter with conflict, the interviewee addressed himself to the post 1984 politico-cultural context. While in literary and diverse contexts this era speaks to many forums, in the Irish context the passage is documented in politically loaded formulae like the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985. This 60

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Agreement and subsequent versions are documents central to the processing of negotiation between these islands, in a programme continuous with the however troubled Treaty of 1921. The survival of empire, whether in the context of the Downing Street bombing, the Brighton bombing or any other such attack, is seen by some to be auspicious enough in certain respects. The point is a crucial one, though the aspiration for most of us must be the typically incongruous: that the round table of empire be banished from Ireland and yet live to carry on the civil servant Irenius’s role. There is a kind of win-win syndrome at play in certain conflict situations. For instance, unwelcome imperialist surveillants like Irenius wear two caps and are double agents at many levels. While his inspection of the state of the colonised subject is clearly an intrusion on the national psyche, the surveillant nevertheless sends back important messages through the corridors of power. These are loaded messages that ultimately bring both parties to the table of negotiation, where civil service takes on another meaning altogether. This is the concept of creative annihilation with a different emphasis, an unlikely confluence nevertheless astutely intuited by Edmund Spenser, and subsequently exposed by Samuel Beckett. In fact it emerges that this kind of awareness is abroad at diverse levels and poles of the political landscape. The IRA greeting to Thatcher on her survival of the bomb attack on the Tory party conference in 1984 was to the effect that the enemies she had made in Ireland ‘would only have to be lucky once’ (An Phoblacht, 1984) while she would need to be lucky all the time. Empire was made acutely aware of the annihilating potential of the subject and of the virus of demolition operating through its system. Spenser realised this threat long before and at the deepest level. The story or account of his angst in relation to a neighbouring colony seems precocious in the light of the prolonged war between these islands. It appears precocious because his report and account was based on his immediate surveillance of the state of seventeenthcentury Ireland. This apparent pre-emption of future events is often recognised in the aspect of familiar turns of events, as if history somehow repeats itself. In fact two histories unfold themselves in the relationship between England and Ireland: one the story of war and the other the story of vision. This two-pronged passage reinforces that sense of familiarity where both appendages deliver the ideological outcome from alternative perspectives and at different times.

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The story and programme of vision has been systematically interrupted by more sophisticated forces, while the revisionist and reactionary version drove Ireland to war. The pursuit of the Republic has rhythmically been thwarted by the rewriting or deflecting of that project. Empire-speak occupies Irish discourse and infiltrates the national consciousness, upon which it debunks its own complex baggage. A kind of angst is projected from the dark heart of empire and planted into the ground of colony, where it mobilises itself in the aspect of an oppressive boundary in the subject psyche. The pursuit of the Republic is thus interrupted by that projected boundary and the concern becomes that of eradicating this border. The visionary story of revolution therefore is routinely subjected to revision. Identifying the subject as carrier of the virus of subversion, empire creates its own antidote. The facility to obstruct the ideological thrust is the antidotal virus of colonialism. Empire is long practised at this kind of subversion, and the surveillance of the subject colony is central to tactical projections and directions at the dead hand of empire. Keen surveillance of events in Ireland is evident in the appetite for information that declares itself at every historical moment of history. Against the backdrop of this intelligence, an alternative agency operates on a consistent basis. By an interesting if not, as Said puts it, ‘perverted logic’ (Said, 1993, p. 286), it emerges that conflict is internalised not just by nations and individuals, but on the ideological ground too. In the context of this study of Spenser, it becomes clear why it is that empire lives and dies for Irish freedom – a win–win status echoed in Prime Minister Thatcher’s survival of the Brighton bomb. To give the British service and its agencies their due, it emerges that Spenser in his time perceived that same unlikely confluence. This is a thesis compounded not just in the enquiry reported in that author’s view of the state of Ireland, but one echoing through the analyses of today’s statesmen and negotiators. Delivering this year’s memorial lecture commemorating the death of volunteer Joe McManus, Gerry Adams attacked the destructive role of the securocrats operating at the ‘dead hand of the British system’ (Adams, 2001, p. 2) The Sinn Féin president referred to ‘those within the British military, intelligence and permanent government, those faceless men and women who for thirty years have shaped the institutions and laws and security agencies to suit their needs and goals’ (Adams, 2001, p. 3). Mr Adams identified these invisible agencies as major obstacles to the current peace process, focusing on

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their stranglehold over British policy within that process. These faceless surveillants, however, are not exclusive to the last 30-year chapter of Irish history, but the legacy of a prolonged programme of inquiry into the state of Ireland. In the context of Spenser’s particular inquisition or view of the state of seventeenth-century Ireland, it was the conduct and general gait of a dissenting race that absorbed the attention of the civil servant Irenius. The rebel Irish identity as expressed in the aspect and apparel of the Irish subject is the focus of close scrutiny and intended alteration. This view confirms a grave administrative thrust to see through and beyond the occupied subject onto the horizons of ideation itself. The focused objective of colonialism is not only to plant borders in the state of mind and nation, but to project subversive boundaries onto the ideological ground of the future. This is a notion investigated in the previous chapter where a kind of cogni-phobia was detected in Conrad’s narrative. Empire’s fear of loose knowledge and of exposure translates into a strategy of attack. In fact it would appear, as implied by his difficulties with the ‘Irish mantle’ (Spenser, 1970 edn, p. 69), that a transparency facilitating thorough insight is the cloth in which Irenius would wrap the subject. The legacy of this tactic presented itself in the strip-searching policy of British governments with respect to republican prisoners. Responding from the heart of empire to Irenius’s reports, Eudoxus remarks that ‘men’s apparel is commonly made according to their conditions, and their conditions are oftentimes governed by their garments’ (Spenser, 1970 edn, p. 69). The offending cloak, symbol of seclusion and a dominant feature of indigenous dress, represents a distinct and conscious identity. The discretion and concealment heralded in the mantle furthermore registers reticence as a dominant feature of that identity. SECLUSION According to Eudoxus’s reasoning, conditions surrounding the Irish subject make for such a secretive disposition while cultivating that same quality of condition in the surrounding context. The subject’s reserve demonstrates a propensity to identify and be conscious of the self and the particular characteristics accompanying that identity. Since such a highly sequestered disposition frames that identity, by Eudoxus’s rationale it must be assumed that strongly enquiring and invasive influences in those surrounding conditions impact upon Irish culture. Something in the gaze of the surveying empire inclines

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Irish subjectivity towards its secluding apparel and the subject is aware of a want and need in the oppressor which keeps it forever the focus of the latter’s colonising scrutiny and attention. Indeed since, as Irenius argues, garments are perceived to govern accompanying conditions, subjectivity in all its concealing apparel must in turn reproduce its fundamental identity in the conditions of the surrounding world. The rebel subject therefore, as eloquently symbolised by the colonised Irish, intensifies and perpetuates the enigma identified earlier as a culture of republican silence. The surveillance fuelling cognition is empire’s endeavour to come to terms with the baffling character it cultivates through the reserved subject. The dominant challenge therefore of the coloniser, as undertaken by the imperialist envoy Irenius, is one of managing and controlling the very seclusion and silence that hails subjectivity. This is a project that has met considerable success given the silence and anonymity of the rebel Irish. The subject, clad in the apparel of self-concealment, perpetuates that obscured selfhood throughout the surrounding conditions. A kind of anonymity is procured, the subject shielded behind a distinct identity, as represented by the national dress – the Irish mantle. These features have lodged themselves in the Irish psyche, costing us copious chapters of the national discourse. The apparently contradictory concepts of anonymity and identity are linked here, where anonymity is used to protect an underlying nationality. Increasingly absorbed in the attempt to counteract that elusive movement of resistance, Irenius’s project is driven by the call to enquiry. In fact his own identity is increasingly moulded by the drive towards investigation. The emerging surveillance intensifies, compounding the very enigma which the cognitive authority seeks to undress and reveal. The manipulation and reorganisation of the subject is crucial to the ‘proper’ arrangement of the surrounding conditions and culture. In fact what Irenius perceives to be vital to the manipulation of those conditions is the displacement of the subject consciousness or identity so instrumental in the emergence of culture. The face of the reclusive Irish subject incites and provokes investigation. While the colonised Irish erect an obscure and elusive quandary resisting surveillance, the cognitive output of meaning is the detecting energy of invasive occupation. The coloniser/colonised context bears deep resemblances to relations of meaning. The transparency in which the empire wishes to clothe its subject is the required antidote to its existing cloaked

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identity and the essential prelude to the thorough occupation of the subject. In so agitating for the eradication of the subject consciousness symbolised by the mantle, Irenius threatens the very fine distinction defining the reality of the subject. It is just such selfawareness that sustains the entities commonly perceived as reality and life itself. The civil and loyal servant Irenius threatens the enlivening consciousness at the root of meaning, and his programme of surveillance hosts the unthinkable possibility of the death of the subject. Travelling across the corridors of power, this narrative courier is well aware of the nuances and tensions resident in the broad cognitive domain. Knowing the importance of his own role as narrative surveillant, Irenius is equally conscious of the importance of the ferrying subject in the perpetuation of meaning. That cognitive ferrier, weaving the thread of Ireland’s identity, employs ‘the mantle in travelling, because there be no inns where meet bedding might be had so that his mantle serves him then for a bed’ (Spenser, 1970 edn, p. 69). The aspect of the sheltered traveller marking out a national discourse is one making sure passage through time as witnessed in the words of a contemporary statesman and writer. Recounting his travels through the Leitrim countryside, the Sinn Féin president remarks: [O]n these trips I used a greatcoat an ex-peeler who used to come in to the Duke of York had left behind him. I rolled my sleeping bag in the coat in a fairly light back pack and then if I had to sleep out I used the coat as both a ground-sheet and an over-sheet. (Adams, 1996, p. 86) Irenius’s own subject position informs him of the vulnerability of the overtaxed subject under the burden of its awesome cognitive message and of its anxious hold on even that threatened identity. Discussing the origins of ‘coignye and livery’ (Spenser, 1970 edn, p. 34) he states that ‘livery is also called the upper garment which a servingman weareth, so called I suppose, for that it was delivered and taken from him at pleasure’ (Spenser, 1970 edn, p. 34). Coin and livery, along with the abrupt loss of power, are familiar emblems on the modern Irish stage as evinced for instance in Ireland of the mid1990s. Traffic in sensitive knowledge led to a Taoiseach’s or chief’s resignation during an eruption of contesting claims as to who had access to what knowledge at a given time. Challenging his libellous

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portrayal at the hands of the British media as a Gombeen man, the former head of state Albert Reynolds was given a penny in compensation. Again, knowledge proves to be the currency of power, where Taoiseachs are felled at pleasure in the traffic of unruly information. While Irenius’s investigations allowed him to note the nuances of the Irish subject, Mr Adams has equally telling observations to make on the issues of enquiry, anonymity and the identity of empire. Again speaking at the McManus commemoration, he noted how the Saville inquiry into Bloody Sunday has been subverted by ‘the dead hand of the British system – of the securocrats’ (Adams, 2001, p. 2). He identifies these securocrats as those who demanded and secured ‘anonymity for the British soldiers who killed people in Derry streets twenty-nine years ago’. He spoke of how these same invisible agencies ‘now can’t find thousands of British Army photographs of the period which would provide essential evidence’ (Adams, 2001, p. 2). Empire throws a mantle of silence over its history and the garb of anonymity covers grave propensities in both the ground of colony and the heart of empire. VIRUS IN THE SYSTEM A deadly power shielded by the cloaked consciousness of subjectivity unnerves the cognitive mainstream which compounds its oppressive governance with a drive to dissolve that threat. Irenius knows that the weight of meaning’s heavy dependence upon the oppressed subject cultivates an annihilating virus capable of triggering the demise of the status quo. Unable to deliver the inordinate and impossible demands of the mainstream, the subject is debilitated, thereby undermining the entire cognitive constitution of which it is part. It is the subject’s consciousness of its own deadly capacity which so troubles the insightful Irenius, whose own subject position as agent of empire puts him on intimate terms with such nuances and capacities. The subject intuits the cultural significance of the Irish mantle and the primed forces it shields, its own obstructive potential within meaning. This is an insight indicated by Gerry Adams in his unbridled fascination at the sight of Ted Furey’s topcoat. Referring to the traditional Irish musician Furey, Gerry Adams remarks: ‘[h]e turned up in Belfast quite a few times, and his duffel coat hung in our coal shed in the Murph for ages after he left it behind him’ (Adams, 1996, p. 87). Highly intuitive observation from both colonising and rebel agencies report surveillance of a most precocious kind. Patterns emerge where incidents and contexts recur

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historically, with the stories of empire and colony engaging at complex levels. In effect, these ideological thrusts have been involved in prolonged and hard-nosed negotiation over centuries and the ensuing dynamic visits the current political context. In fact, for all its conflict-ridden aspect, the however erratic confluence of empire and colony are crucial to the revolutionary thrust. Recalling the mutual estrangement symbolised by border and secluding mantle, the contrary dynamics involved here speak variously to revolution and reaction. It is no surprise that Irenius’s agenda would amount to the dissolution of subject self-consciousness as enfolded in the cloak and dagger enigma of anonymity. It is no less logical to expect that agenda to recur in the heart empire itself, as evinced in Adams’s call for an inquiry into Bloody Sunday. Invasion and death are the surveillant’s response. The outcome of Irenius’s colonising agenda should he succeed, however, would involve the death of the very subjectivity upon which meaning relies. The annihilation hosted in the vulnerable subject, along with the latent sabotage consequent upon its annihilation, presents a volatile prospect to meaning. What Irenius detects in his role as surveillant is the potential destruction of meaning itself. In view of the near misses that were the Brighton and Downing Street bombings, Irenius’s intuition was highly astute and no more so than the intuitive observations of the rebel Irish colony. The disarming or decommissioning of the rebel subject is therefore the safest outcome for empire. Irenius’s trafficking across those corridors of power hosts an alarming play upon the most volatile of cognitive agencies. The signals emanating from Irenius’s and Spenser’s politico-cultural narrative send a serious and deadly message to the heart of meaning. What the empire of meaning sees on looking through its surveilling lens at the wild Irish subject is the crux of its entire raison d’être. The disarming or death of the subject would lead to the annihilation of meaning, while the maintenance of the subject ensures meaning’s ongoing vulnerability to that overtaxed and perilous subject. What meaning is confronted with in the face of its tormented courier is its own death. This is the win–win syndrome turned round, and epitomised in core statements of politicians on the brink of negotiation. In the early 1990s British military intelligence came to an evaluation to the effect that while the IRA had not won the war, the British had not been able to defeat them. There are many complex reasons why empire could not defeat the subject. To

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annihilate the colony against which empire defines its own identity would be suicidal. The project for empire must be to disarm the loaded virus of subjectivity running through its system. DRIVEN TO DEATH The story of meaning bears strong similarities with the dynamics of power and empire. Ideology, like meaning, is the stuff of knowledge, the currency of power. There are no lengths to which colonialism will not stretch itself in the pursuit of that currency. Empire drives itself to death in search of power. The crux of meaning’s engagement with death is compounded by the fact that it is just that fascinating and ‘ideal’ cognitive state that it seeks to own. The fascinated want evident in both empire and meaning is detected by the colonised, and the subject, in its sensitivity to the scrutinising gaze of meaning, compels it to the cloak of seclusion. Indeed, the many cloaks and vestments ordaining the identities of so many of the pillars supporting the cognitive and moral hierarchies of Ireland are similarly responsive and initiating agencies. Something in the condition of Irish culture in turn initiates and responds to such mantled identities. It follows that a want or compulsion behind the gaze emerging through that culture drives these pillars behind the lines of mantle, identity and consciousness. Subject and authority recognise these wants, drives and compulsions in their exchanging gazes and indeed some planted English ‘grow to be as very patchocks as the wild Irish, yea and some of them have quite shaken off their English names and put on Irish, that they might be altogether Irish’ (Spenser, 1970 edn, p. 11). Mutual recognition of this kind, however uncomfortable, is at the essence of negotiation and was as much a feature of the Collins–Lloyd George exchange as it was to the core of Irenius’s estranged relations with the wild Irish. The subject’s internalised knowledge of such shared compulsions and inclinations compounds a reclusive and secretive selfhood already on intimate terms with meaning. The various mantles, masks and manacles of imperial or national power are attempts to control the drives, urges and wild inclinations of its own subjectivity. The recurring presence in Irish culture of uniform and vestment indicates an unruly subjectivity and energy at large as voiced through the ‘terrible yell’ (Spenser, 1970 edn, p. 54) and the ‘immoderate wailing[s]’ (Spenser, 1970 edn, p. 56). Our uncertain credentials as saints and scholars implies therefore a less disciplined propensity. Indeed the ‘upper garment’ (Spenser, 1970 edn, p. 34) of identity

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‘delivered’ throughout the cognitive constitution is infinitely wilful and precarious, and even meaning itself must strain painfully to contain its own wayward notions of identity and what it wants to be. Recklessness in the face of death is, according to Irenius, a striking feature of the Irish who know ‘that if the worst befall them, they shall lose nothing but themselves, whereof they seem surely very careless, [and who] like all barbarous people are, very fearless of death’ (Spenser, 1970 edn, p. 28). The cloak, or symbol of identity and self-consciousness, is entwined in Irenius’s account of this indifference to death. He tells Eudoxus of his observations on ‘the wearing of mantles and long glibs’ (Spenser, 1970 edn, p. 50) saying that ‘their mantle serveth them when they are near driven, being wrapped about their left arm instead of a target, for it is hard to cut through it with a sword’ (Spenser, 1970 edn, p. 52). The light garment adapted by the subject in its own defence taunts Irenius with its uncaring play on death. Meaning trembles in the face of the possibilities unleashed by such deadly engagements, while simultaneously applying a Faust-like pursuit of knowledge or power. The transparency with which Irenius seeks to dress the subject denotes his compulsion to know and control that entity. It would appear that empire seeks what, in the French judicial system, is called the inner certainty, or complete knowledge of the subject. Plundering thus in the minefield of subjectivity, Irenius leads the house of meaning through volatile cognitive terrain, even onto the face of death itself. The role of this commuting courier extends to that of medium between the real and surreal plains through which power and meaning dare to thread. The many surprising appearances and hauntings occurring in narrative are incidents of the uncontainable cognitive urges discussed above. The fascinations, obsessions and compulsions which propel meaning emerge before it in the often unscripted behaviour of subjectivity. The mantles, vestments and cloaks worn on the various planes of the moral and cognitive hierarchies attest to the subject’s perceived need for discretion. The mantle furthermore attempts to withstand something of the invasive and tormenting knowledge shared between meaning and the sensitive subject. The proper presentation of the subject becomes the compelling business of its nervous surveillant who, thwarted by the obscuring mantle, is denied the inner certainty of the subject. By definition, that failure to secure inner certainty jeopardises the identity of empire itself. Rex Taylor’s reference, when speaking of the occupying

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forces on Dublin streets in 1921, to ‘the terror of its own uncertain strength’ (Taylor, 1961 p. 11) is recalled here. Knowledge of colony or the other is required in order for the coloniser to know its own identity; an altogether different meaning when everything is on a need to know basis. Those ferrying agencies are what meaning depends upon for the delivery of its ideas and the pursuit of its ideal. The cloak makes of the subject a bipartisan and even bilingual entity hoarding inclinations, meanings and silences of its own. Knowledge is the reflection of meaning and it is ironically just that heightened cognitive state that facilitates meaning’s unnerving agenda. The ultimate awareness pursued by meaning is the promise of complete knowledge and self-consciousness. Meaning, however, pursues the impossible in its drive towards complete self-knowledge since it is in the nature of knowledge to extend forever beyond. Meaning traces and scrutinises its own reflection through the subjects which demonstrate and enact its story. What it sees when it looks into its reflection through these subjects is its own vulnerability and death, and yet it is just that death or beyond that meaning perceives as its hope of self-knowledge. From there it weaves a cloak of its own against which to erect its self-consciousness. Heightened cognitive awareness drives meaning to death, and the annihilating dynamic of meaning is equally self-annihilating. Power’s exclusively heightened relationship with knowledge informs it of the presence of a particular and elusive idea and that knowledge is of death itself. Aware of the fundamentally annihilatory composition both of its subject and its self, meaning is the conscious participant in a dance with death where all quietly exalt that reclusive profile of ideation. The mantle’s multiple application confirms it as a crucial appendage of the subject’s identity. Its facility to seclude, which so torments Irenius, is an ongoing reminder of the other face of the subject. The cloak’s application at the site of battle flaunts the very intimacy with death which meaning tries to seclude. This mantle furthermore confirms the subject’s awareness of that reclusive profile, aggravating a drive to erase such knowledge through the dissolution of the subject consciousness. Unself-consciousness to the point of transparency is thus demanded of subjectivity, a disposition amounting to self-alienation. This alienation or absenting of consciousness was a common strategy in the face of intensive strip-searching, where both the experience and the self were blanked. The transparency of subjectivity conveyed in heightened elusiveness and intangibility is most manifest in

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narratives of power. Elusive absence thus becomes the consciousness of subjectivity when, in a drive to de-cloak it, meaning gets under the skin of the subject to occupy its consciousness. Its colonising instincts compel it to implant itself in subjectivity, absorbing and undermining the subject’s separateness and very identity. This is the same imperialist drive underway in the matter of the attempted governance of the Irish traced in Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland. Meaning, like power, harbours within its ranks an agency which can kill it and yet the ranks of subjectivity are essential to its survival. The subject capers with death, living alongside it and securing it as its most vital attribute. A terrible power or beauty exists in this grave feature of subjectivity, a beauty which meaning has difficulty in aestheticising. Its colonising instinct for power does, however, allow meaning to perceive death, not as closure and finale, but as additional cognitive terrain. But it is in this pursuit of the ideal or death that a departure emerges between its pure lust for power and another desire. Meaning perceives in death something of itself, much as the subject recognises its reticent familiar on the shrouded plains of the ideal. History’s pursuit of ideology as personified in the subject’s inclination to the ideal or the big idea is re-enacted in meaning’s compulsion towards death. The conduct of the subject in its constant straining after its ideal identity or ideological vision is repeated in the deathly inclinations of meaning overall. The entire pattern strongly suggests the existence both of an alternative subjectivity on the plain of the ideal, and an alternative meaning on the plain of death. The cloak or symbol of consciousness worn by the unbroken Irish subject enables it to direct its deadly capacity at will. That consciousness has also been a mark of its life. Meaning’s contrastingly serious and reverent treatment of death indicates a crucial difference between the position of the subject and that of its cognitive authority. The cognitive version of the coat of identity is still in the weaving and its source has lain traditionally in the death which meaning nurtures for its very consciousness. Meaning takes its cloak off the wall of death, looking there for the consciousness that defines its reality. This schism in power, between its living reality and its meaningful end, attests to an essential movement and interaction between both. Colonialism pursued this deadly cloak for dear life, suggesting that empire is indeed already dead. Nevertheless, it is from the belly of death itself that it knits up its consciousness, as implied in Irenius’s nervous

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attention to the mantle as a mark of subject self-consciousness and implement of war. In attempting to detach its cloak or identity Irenius sanctions the death of the subject. However, that death is postponed by the plantation of an alternative consciousness and by such a colonising system the life and labour of subjectivity is sustained, a process mirrored on the material level by the Earl Strongbow, [who] having conquered that land, delivered up the same unto the hands of Henry the Second, then king, who sent over thither great store of gentlemen and other warlike people amongst whom he distributed the land and settled such a strong colony therin. (Spenser, 1970 edn, p. 47) POWER AND THE ABSENTEE The empire of meaning lives off the demise of subject consciousness, extending itself into the vacuum of the evicted identity. Infinite traffic in and displacement of identities and self-consciousness is thus the hallmark of absentee meaning, the voice of which always speaks from beyond, after and outside of the evicted consciousness. While engaged compulsively in this pattern of survival, empire is nevertheless troubled by a want of a cloak or identity of its own. Living off debilitation, death and colonised cognitive terrain, it amounts to a bloated archive of death and annihilation. Thoroughly immersed in death, its source and issue frame it into a grim and enigmatic entity, an intangibility often projected onto its malleable subjects. Quoting the Scythians, Irenius states: ‘they were once every year turned into wolves, and so it is written of the Irish’ (Spenser, 1970 edn, p. 59). Dracula, Frankenstein and Faust are sanctioned expressions of such narrative intangibility. While ideology weaves its mantle or identity with the stuff of annihilation, difficulty with aestheticising the emerging apparel is evident in its refusal to don the coat and name of death. Its dogged resistance to such a reductive and nihilistic identity stresses meaning’s wilful and analytical nature. By implication, therefore, the death ferried through its constitution is an expression of that vitality. Death is one of the most intimate and personal messages conveyed and ferried through meaning, being the stuff of its immediate and wilful consciousness. Annihilation and death are the arteries through which ideologies perpetuate themselves and death as such has been the life and consciousness of meaning. The gowns,

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vestments and mantles proclaiming the hierarchies of knowledge, morality and power, all hover relentlessly around the theme of death. It is the however dubiously promised outcome and climactic event. The ‘spirit’ is projected onto death’s enigmatic plains, while the prospect of ultimate knowledge is deferred to its awesome moment. Death attends the transactions of power whose price and tariff is life itself. The compelling desire for ultimate knowledge drives meaning to the door of death, the domain of unknown and uncolonised cognition. As players in the scramble for knowledge, readers and writers of narratives, histories and theses all beat a well-worn track to that same enigmatic terrain. Dabbling in the intimacies and intrigues of meaning is an engagement, however dressed, with death. An ‘intemperate’ and ‘immoderate’ (Spenser, 1970 edn, p. 56) urge commutes through the arteries and constitution of meaning secluded in the mantles, gowns, vestments and uniforms which attempt to govern and constrain it. This tantalising urge is the subject’s escape from under the suicide pact knit into its engagement with meaning whereby the annihilation of one triggers the death of the other. The death at large in the immoderate cognitive dynamic described by Irenius is the enlivening will of consciousness in its deep desire to know. The pages of these chapters are the mantles attempting to govern the appearances, presences and ‘immoderate wailings’ (Spenser, 1970 edn, p. 56) threaded through its maze and, like Theseus in the Cretan labyrinth, lurching compulsively towards the monster’s den. To answer the maze is to become the thread and undertake the shape and structure of the enigma. The desire and pursuit of knowledge permits a similar undertaking when the gown is donned and death brushed behind its discipline. The mantles and threads of these chapters offer this thesis as an alternative interpretation of the grand narrative of meaning which might on a less cheerful analysis read like a morose suicide note. The drives, desires and compulsions colouring the deadly riddle of meaning are in fact of the very pulse and breath of consciousness and life. There is, in Yeats’s words, ‘a terrible beauty’ (Yeats, 1977 edn, p. 391) abroad though its aesthetics are ill-defined. The blood, pain and tears frolicking irreverently along the ‘embroidered cloths’ (Yeats, 1977 edn, p. 176) of meaning are of the deathly thread which nevertheless guides the subject through its hazardous cognitive terrain, and this task forms a significant part of this writing.

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If history records the rhythm and beat of the Irish nation, then Michael Farrell’s novel Thy Tears Might Cease navigates us through that overwritten recital. This novel is a register of the national psyche, an index to conflict. Farrell’s text is an overture to the story of colonisation. The very structure of the work pre-empts the tone of the national chorus and stands as a catalogue of obstructed potential and thwarted vision. Farrell’s extensive narrative is an appropriate introduction to Irish history, where ideas and ideals have met constant opposition. The story of Ireland, like that of Martin Mathew Reilly, is one of restriction and this work describes the dynamics involved. Martin is an orphan, raised by his aunt and uncle in rural Ireland. He reaches early manhood in the 1920s, another period of conflict and civil war as already visited in the earlier piece on Michael Collins. The question of his origins and past tantalise the boy, and in a way that reflects something of the country’s pursuit of its original identity. This tale reflects the search for a biography – an odd narrative context in that the story describes the very search for a story. That peculiarity reflects the national context in that Ireland’s narrative is largely a research into its own national discourse. Irish history is idiomatically loaded with expressions of that pursuit. A certain want is apparent in both scenarios and in a way that mirrors the human condition where alienation is the common lot of the individual. Sensing an absence from a partially displaced identity, the subject relentlessly pursues the means to self-knowledge. Like the orphan Martin, Ireland searches for the sources that will deliver its nationhood. Irish culture is an expression of its own partially displaced identity, the essentially split aspect of its history. Heightened awareness of that split history foregrounds the question of origin and issue. The question of legitimacy arises in relation to the boy’s heritage, and in a time and place where highly conservative values are dispensed at the joined hands of church and state. Origin and end are themes central to narrative and these themes are prominent in this novel where the orphan child grows to the cloth of the national elders. Without the national sovereignty that confirms the identity of place, the elders provide uneasy 74

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foundations for emergent generations. For all the servility to church and state, the Irish remain in pursuit of a legitimate identity. The boy inherits the legacy of an ideological quest and with the pursuit of the Republic come other less liberating hand-me-downs of history. Irish history and culture offer cold comfort to the researching youth, since for want of its nationhood the place too is lost for a name. Martin’s story mirrors that of the country at large, and indeed something of the nature of narrative, where history is packaged from start to end as a compact passage of information. Though Irish history makes a powerful story, we recall that it was never a direct or linear narrative. The apparatus of language and orthodox meaning is applied in order to administer a linear framework to history, and the story of reality is chronicled through distinct and isolated blocs of meaning. Beckett sought to transcend these restrictive boundaries in meaning by accessing an alternative narrative style. The notion of such a transition has not filtered onto the national context where interpretation is administered around the requirements of source and end. Martin’s angst regarding his own biography mirrors a similar unease at national level and the very legitimacy of the nation and individual is at stake. There are complex and not so complex reasons for that state of play and this chapter is about unravelling much of that scenario. At the outset it is worth pointing out that regular blind spots have been lodged on the historical path – consolidations and power blocs that recur intermittently on the ideological plain. Various origins have been offered to the Irish in an attempt to provide legitimacy at historical and ideological levels. The marriage of church and state in the early 1920s is the obvious example in modern times. It emerged, however, that neither of these parenting blocs appeased the peoples’ want of an historical source. Like Martin, the subject reflects back on a previous generation, sensing prior regenerations of the ideological thrust. The ideological elders are called up in the aspect of rudimentary slogans revisiting the narrative plain at a high velocity. The familiar culture of silence and concealment in the national context amplifies the sound of slogan and chorus to the extent that they assume the stature of a narrative. Elaborate repetition in Ireland’s discourse expresses a compulsion to call out and stand out from the crowded bunkers of silence. The narrative described below is the voice of the oppressed, the stammered utterance of recycled resistance. The rebellious feats of long-gone heroes are registered here in rhythm and song. While these signs and slogans of rebellion call up

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Said’s warning against leaving the ‘historical world for the metaphysics of essences like negritude, Irishness, Islam, or Catholicism’ (Said, 1993, p. 276), Michael Farrell’s novel stresses an altogether different dilemma. The story of young republican Martin Reilly personifies the obstructed expression of a colony, where the record of oppression is infinitely repeated. On constant rewind, the national voice repeats itself in a litany of pain. Deflected from the delivery of its potential for want of a free run at the national discourse, the nation forever turns in on itself. The narrative is delivered on the wave of song and slogan: ‘And true men, like you men, are plenty here today’ (Farrell, 1963, p. 58), ‘Hibernia in Tears’ (Farrell, 1963, p. 32), and ‘Who fears to speak of ’98’ (Farrell, 1963, p. 57). That idiomatic mode describes the beat of Ireland’s discourse and captures the repetitive rhythm of the national psyche. Ireland’s discourse is a chorus of repetition – the indigenous chant of an isolated people with nowhere to turn but to the insular world of resistance. This turning inward is another symptom of oppression, where the logistics of colonisation cited language as target. It was necessary for the British empire not only to supplant the indigenous tongue, but also to impact upon the psychology behind the Gaelic culture, and at a very deep level. The concept of inquisition, as dealt with in the last chapter, describes this tactic where empire sought and continues to seek access to the Irish psyche. The intelligence strategy adopted by Michael Collins only scraped the surface in terms of the psychological occupation identified in this study. A deeply serious infiltration remains to be supplanted in Ireland and one which has left us lacking in the discourse of victory. One of the major ways in which imperialism demonstrates the capacity to colonise mindsets presents itself in the very difficulty of the colonised in naming the enemy. This is an issue touched on in the work of Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiflin – The Empire Writes Back (1989). The all-consuming aspect of oppression creates the resistance of silence, and to so colossal an extent as to project an unnamable shadow over the assailant. The unnameable feature of colonisation is not simply to say that the coloniser is unspeakable. In James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898), the ghost story rendered by the fireplace is introduced as a tale that was beyond everything ‘for general uncanny ugliness and horror and pain’ (James, 1992 edn, p. 116). Beckett addresses the awesome ‘unnamable’ (Beckett, 1979 edn, p. 382) in meaning. The relationship between Ireland in the twenty-first century and the culture of colonisation occupying our history is

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more complex in that we have been planted with a psychological virus which expels critical symptoms. Part of the prolonged experience of oppression emerges in the tension between contrary cultures – the diametrically opposed positions of reaction and revolution. The shadow obstructing the clear capacity to name the empire is another of the blind spots referred to above. The extent and depth to which colonialism has affected Ireland has bequeathed a series of blockages in the national psyche where we have difficulty in seeing the integrated path. Imperialism has so entrenched itself in the home offices of Dáil Éireann and in Irish culture that obstacles arise in sighting its location and framing its boundaries. Colonisation presents itself in diverse political contexts throughout the world and this study concerns itself with the internal and external dynamics involved. The uncertainty of impaired vision at ideological and cultural levels prompts us to look for the villain everywhere. This fundamental unease reinforces the already tense relations that structure identity, where one word takes its meaning from its established difference from an other. That identity is by definition associated with the difference central to the relationship between these two islands – Ireland and England. The way of colonialism is to forcibly take the ground of the other, aggravating already negative exchanges with the target culture. Those negative relations feed into the oppositional relationship between one subject and what Said calls the other. Aiming to plant and insinuate itself upon that target culture, the coloniser actually reinforces the alienation separating itself and the rest. The difference that is central to the structure of language and meaning is fundamental to this conflict-ridden arrangement and the difference here is as distinct as the image of the two mortals bestriding the crucifixion scene. DOING THE JOINED-UP WRITING A crucifying remnant of the relationship between the British empire and the rest insinuates itself onto the narrative that is described as Irish history – the repetitive and recycled story of the split. Twentyfirst-century Ireland is the time to do the joined-up writing on Irish history and place a signature on a discourse of our own. This task is awesome in its difficulty. The tight and self-conscious language we have fallen upon for generations is vividly portrayed in Michael Farrell’s novel Thy Tears Might Cease and the progress of that discourse is laborious and slow. The intellectual aptitude of a nation

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was thwarted at a deep level, such that our obstructed thoughts have been compressed to the point of explosion. Some of these eruptions have been action-based, as with the insurrection in 1916. Others are expressed in the often wonderful voice of poetry and song. Such eruptions arise at moments of heightened historical consequence. Pearse pronounced his deadly serious intentions before the 1916 Rising, proclaiming a Republic that has been continuously pursued up to a century since. Recently, Telefís Éireann, the Irish national broadcasting machine, presented a programme shredding Pearse as a poetic nationalist fanatic with a born death wish as the driving force behind his extraordinary sacrifice and his powerful narrative. In the twenty-first century, and 20 years after the death of ten hunger strikers, the national network again elects for revisionism. In 20 years from now they may apply the same treason to the ten young people who defied empire two decades ago. Revisionists are major players in the ideological contest and the strategy of the split is their trump card. The complex pattern of repeat and recall outlined in Farrell’s novel describes the disjointed and split aspect of Irish history where the syntax of the ideological narrative is disrupted at a sophisticated level by the return of displaced information. The repetition of chorus and slogan is at once a symptom of that disjunction and a camouflage for a gaping silence when slogan and chorus revisit narrative at such a velocity as to cover the vacuum. Revisionism at home has contributed substantially to that split. The difference or split that administers the delivery of meaning expresses itself in the difficulty of naming a given phenomenon. The trouble with naming and calling out the empire is not related to fear, insubordination or hate. The difficulty is with sighting the location of empire because it has planted itself comprehensively upon the Irish psyche. The challenge relates to the very deep level at which the Irish understand the dynamics involved. Republicans for instance know the extent to which British colonialism has planted its agency abroad, and most critically its agency in Ireland where the face of empire looks out from Irish governments. This again is where the matter of legitimacy and origin arise. We have been so comprehensively planted and colonised that relations are strained all round, and that strain tells itself onto the deepest levels of Irish culture, on artistic, linguistic and ideological levels. The obscurity of art, whether through poetry, satire or song, grows out of different sources. It comes both from the strategy of security

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that relates to the long-standing culture of silence, and also from oppression. Our language and discourse, the avenues through which all people exercise the gift of thought, was occupied with no less consequence than the occupation of the soil from which we earned our bread. Tiocfaidh ar Lá or Our day will come was the first breath of narrative fresh air in decades and even that statement wasn’t originally our own. Borrowed from the voice of Martin Luther King, the comment addressed the future and signified a transition from the tone of victimage to the statement of intent. Nevertheless, the quotations, poems and remarks applied in the representation of the republican Martin Reilly exist in essence as compact instalments of information with premonitional overtones. Like so much narrative from the oral tradition, such sayings are presented as long-established truths carrying the authoritative though formidable weight of history itself. The predictive aspect of these truisms, as confirmed in the progress of the novel’s plot, projects a similarly pre-empting aspect onto history. Whether through processes of repetition, recollection or insightful prediction, the narrative history represented in Farrell’s text assumes an informed and precocious tone. History is presented here as an intuitively precognitive narrative. The inference therefore is that discourse is a cognitively loaded agency – an energy which authority endeavours strenuously to contain. The apparently predictive quality of discourse recalls the visionary aspect of the historical moments referred to in the first chapter, where moments of heightened politico-military significance like the Rising were perceived to shape the future in powerful ways. Vision, like discourse, is a loaded agency which usually meets resistance from the status quo. Nevertheless, any attempt to administrate over the visionary momentum further essentialises or hardens those energies. The author/ity’s compulsion to control the power, textual and otherwise, moving through its system reinforces that dynamic in the ideological context. History is hyphenated with sporadic moments of conflict when the norm is interrupted by the agency of change. Narratives and histories operate on just such a basis, when singularly framed meanings are differentiated against binarily opposed otherness. In the linguistic context, the otherness or difference is the agent of change, where the meaning proffered in one word is altered on engagement with the next. The simplest and most apt demonstration of such a cognitive engagement in the context of this work is the familiar comment ‘Brits out’. The pithy remark dissolves the

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meaning of one word on its introduction to the next; the very threat of decolonisation threatens the substance of the word empire. The loaded maxims bequeathed from chapter to chapter of Thy Tears Might Cease, recalling the essences and essentialisations postulated in Said’s analysis, are imploded readings of emerging reality. A certain foreknowledge is intoned in that scenario. The premonitional signals flooding through our discourse infer a kind of determinism. The synopses of past events, focusing on unfinished purpose, revisit Martin’s story with the resilient vibrations of those signals. Those rising truisms and slogans occupying the face of history are crucial expressions of identity and purpose. A kind of paranoia suggests itself as part of this culture – a dispersed version of the fear discussed in the first chapter and recalled here in the difficulty identified in the challenge to sight the location of the enemy. While Said warns against the danger of essentialisation – for fear of turning one people against another – the diverse aspect and range of the enemy promotes the inclination to cling to the narrative of slogan and repeat. To dissolve the however dangerously essentialised definition of the other implies the dissolution of the self. It is, after all, through such memorised essentialisations of familiar identity and aspiration that heroes, subjects and identities form images of what is self and other. Furthermore, it is the ceaseless exclamation of unrealised aspiration forming the theme of both textual and historical narratives that identifies the motivating energy and drive of the nation. Vision calls up the question of source, origin and history. The issue of source is foregrounded in relation to narrative and characterisation in the early illustration of the hero’s musings on the subject of his own origin. From his youth Martin has been encouraged to note and record his life story in a diary given to him by his grandmother. It is regularly suggested to him that there are things he doesn’t know about his own history and that, quite simply, he must work it out himself. The notion of some hidden and unspeakable history awaits his discovery. This scenario vividly resembles the Irish politico-cultural context, where much remains silent and invisible in the story of the nation. The silence and anonymity strategically adapted by republicanism took its model from the hiddeness lodged in the broad cultural context. Various revelations in relation to church and state corruption exposed in recent decades unfold something of that veiled seclusion. It is clear, however, that the more intuitive contemporaries of unscrupulous

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clerics and embezzling politicians were aware of this corruption and elected for silence rather than confrontation. Relations between church and state in Ireland have been of a deviant enough nature and that complex relationship, along with the public silence that allowed its development, are issues identified in Michael Farrell’s work. As outlined at the outset of this chapter, various origins have been offered the Irish in an effort to appease the national appetite for origin. The marriage of church and state was sighted as one such cultural backdrop and each parenting source has proven inadequate to the task and, in ways indicated above, important evidence of that dubious parentage presents itself in the theme of recent media reports. In the 1970s Captain James Kelly of the Irish Free State Army – along with Charles Haughey, subsequently the Irish prime minister – was charged in relation to a gun-running conspiracy. As it turns out, this was no conspiracy but an operation sanctioned at the highest level of government. As with many another incident in Irish politics, however, those implicated inevitably denied all knowledge and to this day, fail to remember the facts. Again, the traffic of documentation haunt chiefs and ministers. To quote the Evening Herald of, unlucky for some, Friday 13 April 2001, the editorial opens with the following thought: ‘It’s not just students of history who will be eager to see the latest round of documents released under the Nation Archive’s 30-year rule.’ Former minister for justice Des O’Malley is currently accused of suppressing key evidence in relation to the arms trial emerging from the attempted gun-running incident. Thirty years ago, in the immediate aftermath of the street agitation of 1969, Charles Haughey, Captain Kelly and others were tried for an attempt to provide guns for the protection of the nationalist minority in the six Counties. All accused were acquitted of the charge, though it emerges that O’Malley suppressed key information in relation to the incident. Today O’Malley denies knowledge of file S/7/70 of the national archives, currently accessible to the public on the conclusion of the 30-year rule central to the Freedom of Information Act. What the suppressed information indicates is that government authorities knew of the intended gun-running and as the Evening Herald points out, had the trial heard this information ‘it could have cast doubt on the prosecution’s case that the attempts were illegal’. This question of what was legal and illegal recalls Martin Reilly’s question as to the legitimacy of his heritage and reflects similar inquiry at national level.

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SPLIT An embryonic split at the heart of the Free State government was postponed by the silencing of the national voice and for decades those implicated harvested the smell of cordite hanging over the event. Fianna Fáil was perceived to be the Republican party and the Provos were the illegitimate terrorists who served the time. The story of the ultimate split in modern Irish history – the story of Collins – recurs here, though Collins was the source and origin of Fianna Fáil’s immediate competitor for power – Fianna Gael. Two weeks after Collins was shot, it is said that weapons were imported into South Armagh and at the behest of Michael Collins. Collins signed the Treaty that has bequeathed a deadly split onto the ideological path of Irish history. Fianna Gael is the inheritor of this pro-Treaty stance, while Fianna Fáil is the remnant of those who rejected that path at the time. The IRA is the body which penetrated the entire ideological confusion to continue the battle for the Republic proclaimed in 1916. These are also the people who imported weapons, used them and were ostracised by governments indigenous and abroad for doing so. The gun-running effort of the 1970s was perfectly legitimate, as legitimate as the identical operations of the IRA over the past 30 years. The difference is that the Free State government couldn’t do the time. Again, as with the matter of Collins, Casement and others, the event is not the crucial point, but rather the very splitting outcome. Reminiscent of the story of the croppy, Irish governments rejected the offspring, the Irish Republican Army which was, after all, only assuming the clothes of the elders. Between church and state, Ireland is having an uneasy if not dysfunctional delivery and the whole truth of the matter will doubtless go to the grave, along with the likes of the now seriously ill and former Taoiseach Charles Haughey. Looking again to the notion of authority, paternal or governmental, the matter of identify is crucial. The orphaned child or invalidated nation calls to the previous generations, and tunes into the rhythm of the ideological thrust. Inside the overall story of the life of Martin Reilly, this same subject or hero of the novel sees fit to research and chronicle his own history as if to indicate a need or want of narrative representation. His having to seek out a narrative of his own demonstrates an inadequacy in the available surrounding textual and national discourse which fails to competently proclaim the subject. He has carefully recorded receiving the name ‘Mathew

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from my father, that was his name, he was Aunt Mary’s brother. I don’t know where I have Martin from. My father and mother are dead’ (Farrell, 1963, p. 31). This brief inscription on the second page of Martin’s diary and appearing on the third page of Farrell’s novel is an acutely defined outline of his already essentialised story of himself which he extends back as far as ‘The Wild Geese’ and rounds off with the pithy salute ‘God Save Ireland’ (Farrell, 1963, p. 31). The introductory part of this diary, with its missing information, marks a point at which he and the reader realise there are absences in his tale, the remaining story skirting the available, basic knowledge of the subject. These unprocured details, of which we are vividly aware, form secluded sub-tales. Those sub-texts are nevertheless linked to the mainstream narrative by our heightened consciousness of their existence in the form of the endless traffic of idiom, rhyme and subnarrative populating this text. The want of such unprocured detail about his own life sets off Martin and the reader in their pursuit, a mission occupying the thematic space of the novel. The fixation with source and end evident in narrative indicates a want or lack in the discourse of self. Again, history is not a linear narrative, but rather a pattern of spiralling moments of heightened vision and enormous consequence. As outlined in the first chapter, historical moments like the Rising, for instance, are about the future and various historical incidents, however camouflaged under revisionism and silence, return inevitably to deliver their message. The Official Secrecy Act (1911–89) in Ireland secluded various incidents of crucial importance in the Irish political context. Only this week Justin Keating who was a Labour TD (member of parliament) at the time of the arms trial in 1970 is quoted in the Sunday Business Post (22 April 2001) as stating his belief that the Gardaí and military intelligence in Ireland were ‘heavily penetrated by British agents’. He suggested also that the British had probably had sleepers in place over a long period of time. In the light of this kind of emergent information, the Dublin Monaghan bombings and criminalisation policy directed against the IRA begs exposure. Keating expressed the view that, in his opinion, ‘Haughey, Blaney, Luukx and the two Kellys were unjustly accused. Putting them on trial was a dreadful injustice.’ Astonishingly, these same accused were among those who subsequently imprisoned and sought to criminalise the IRA for doing what they had tried and failed to do. The process of revisionism, or the rewriting of history, involves a simultaneous silencing and overwriting of the story. The national

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narrative is obstructed by this means, and the repeats and recurrences evident in discourse mark the moments where the truth erupts onto the surface of the narrative. The completion of the 30year prohibition on free access to certain government files fostered the current eruption where various journalists and researchers are focused on the emerging details. The silence and revisionism that went to edit the delivery of knowledge at the time of the arms trial were a matter of political expediency. In a manner similar to the experience of Martin Reilly, certain ideas were hinted to the general public, while the loaded details were obscured. Charles Haughey and the Fianna Fáil party gained political credibility as the Republican party on the strength of this notion that they were assisting the oppressed nationalist community of the six counties. The hope was that they would supplant the republican movement in the eyes of the nationalist population of the island. The kind of revisionism applied to the strategy of supplanting the other is facilitated by the very structure of language. The literary/linguistic product itself is born of other sometimes secluded cognitive energies and depends for definition on the surrounding world of ideas and images. The very structure of language works in this way. Discussing Said’s analysis of orientalism, Aijaz Ahmad probes that feature of language when he says that ‘[t]his idea of constituting Identity through Difference points [to]’, what he calls, ‘a necessity which arises within discourse and has always been there at the origin of discourse’ (Ahmad, 1992, p. 182). The notion of a necessity or want in discourse recalls the want or absence plaguing and driving Martin’s pursuit of a personal narrative and infers similar patterns of pursuit and distress within the national context. Ahmad recounts Said’s analysis where the cause of the kind of inferiorisation of the other at work in representation is ascribed to colonialism and imperialism. The subject is described in terms of its estranged relationship with some diminished or idealised other as we talk, tell, hear or dream about things across a gap or distance, however minimal. Novels such as Thy Tears Might Cease dealing with the experience of colonisation provide illuminative territory in which to investigate this notion. Martin’s early compulsion to pursue his own missing narrative personifies a broader narrative search for an oppressively absent discourse at community and even national level. The infinite repeats and recollections punctuating Ireland’s discourse are constant reminders of other absent or displaced agendas. Important ideological chapters spill down the

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blind alleys of history where blind spots have lodged sporadically in the national consciousness. In the stillness of the cessation we penetrate the haze to review the ideological landscape. The concept of displaced agendas is acutely expressed on review of the current historical chapter, with its heightened focus upon the unification of Ireland. Now in the silence that differentiates cessation from conflict, we have time to recall the earlier goal of a socialist republic. ACUTE AMNESIA Issues of memory and amnesia arise here where the relentless repetition central to the Irish voice expresses a desperate compulsion to memorise and cling to what remains extant on the historic-cultural level. Without a memorised bank of linguistic images, however essentialised, a nation cannot shape its identity. The constricting and colonising system of meaning actually intensifies the drive to contain and memorise existing images when a given narrative is under threat or underdeveloped. Homi Bhabha in Nation and Narration refers to ‘a strange forgetting of the history of the nation’s past: the violence involved in establishing the nation’s writ’ (Bhabha, 1990, p. 310). In order nevertheless to meet an obligation to forget, a narrative must exist in the first place. Farrell’s hero, harassed and encumbered as he struggles with an elusive personal history, embodies one articulation among the broad wave of oppressed voices pursuing and memorising in order to build a narrative. Recalling the obscurity surrounding the Black Diaries of Casement’s day, today’s media attention revolves around the so-called Berry Diaries. Peter Berry was secretary at the Department of Justice at the time of the arms trial. The entry from the Berry Diary for 17 October, published in Magill magazine, indicates that he had informed the then Taoiseach Jack Lynch that Captain Kelly had attended a meeting at which IRA personnel were in attendance. This meeting related to the gun-running event and the implication was that the Taoiseach knew of and facilitated events. Amnesia overtook Irish politics from that period on and Berry states: ‘I did not have a hundred per cent recollection of my conversation with the Taoiseach as I was a bit muzzy and bloody from the medical tests.’ Jack Lynch himself incurred critical amnesia sometime later and that unfortunate condition has plagued Irish politicians to this very day. Again, the currency of knowledge has travelled from hand to hand in innocuous brown envelopes while the handlers sustain no recollection of the transactions. Remembering to forget is a major strategy of revisionism in Ireland and at every level and turn of the

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country’s affairs. This theme is heavily engaged in Thy Tears Might Cease, where the concept of ‘sources unknown’ pervades the entire theme of the story. What is of equal importance in the context of this chapter is the need to attend to the amnesia and absence in that narrative. As already indicated, to memorise and to remember are not the same, and the story of young Martin Reilly demonstrates the authorities’ capacity to control and administer memory on the personal and national levels. This controlling practice takes many forms, from the familial and psychological to the legislative. We recall how an Irish government legislated for silence in the form of Section 31 of the Offences Against the State Act. The imperialist authorities, however, conducted a far more thorough operation, using the familial or parental factor to psychologically displace the national identity. Mother England so absorbed us in resistance that we scarcely remembered what we were about in the first place. Farrell’s novel deals adeptly with these issues and this is the right moment in Irish history for us to examine the matter in depth. The ‘turning inward’ discussed above was reinforced by the governmental legislation for silence and a suppression of the national psyche was at stake. The implication must be that there is something that the nation does not wish to address and the words of Bobby Sands towards his latter days identifies that something. I quote from one of the last ‘Comms’ he wrote: ‘When the Irish people have to show the desire for freedom, it’s then we’ll see the rising of the moon’ (Sands, 1998, p. 239). Suggesting as it does that the Irish do not show that desire, the sight they refuse to look at is that of their own slavery. Empire remains comfortable in the awareness that a subject place lacks the heart to look at its own oppression and the sad and bitter songs and stories that reinforce our victimage further dilute the possibility of empowerment. How can one state victory if one has only the language of defeat. In view of that heightened perception of the role of memory and chronicle, the subject’s urgent search for narratable memoirs is intensely valid. A crucial feature of these maxims and memoirs is that same essentialisation alluded to by Said, in that their very selfcontained standing – as inherited and accredited truisms – exudes the aspect of the neutral, independent and anonymous wonder. Consider an incident when Martin says, ‘[p]ossibly Mullins isn’t a bad bastard really’ and, on seeing Norman’s reaction, adds, ‘[i]t’s really a quotation’. A kind of simultaneous claiming and disclaiming

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of that statement takes place as the declared quotation is exposed as neither the possession of Mullins nor Martin. As an extension of this uncertainty, Aunt Kathleen reinforces the developing theme of Martin’s mysterious origins when, further down the same page, she quotes from The Winter’s Tale saying, ‘and streaked gillyvors/Which some call nature’s bastards’. The noncommittal and evasive tone of the comments, responses and anonymous wonders issuing from those around him indicate pockets of insight which incite Martin to pursue and detect his story. The claiming and disclaiming notion is reminiscent of the very confused state in which revisionism has left modern Irish history. The confusion is written into the face of youth – the ‘X-generation’ (Pierse, 2001, p. 3) left to excavate the truth from awesome and abruptly released gluts of misinformation. State authorities in Ireland have left a generation of cultural and ideological orphans, with as much concern and curiosity about their history as Martin Reilly’s quest for biography. The traffic in claimed and disclaimed knowledge is a kind of overwriting of events where the truth is secluded under a scattering of diverse accounts of events. Not only have revisionists rewritten history but they have interred the story under archives of misinformation. To read the disjointed narrative of Irish history is like reading a cryptic crossword, where the absences challenge one to intuit the answers. In their fears for young Martin and their efforts to shelter him from the truth, his guardians create trails of clues which prompt him to search for the missing pieces. While exposed to and enveloped in the rolling narrative of quotes and songs forming the mainstream tale, Martin remains conscious of the existence somewhere of relevant information about his history. The presence somewhere of an absent sub-text relating to his own is continuously reinforced by reminders of information withheld behind the frontline tale. This is the dilemma of today’s youth in many regions of the world, where abrupt change facilitates an opening in which they search and research for the truth. Indeed anonymous wonders like those spiriting in and out of Farrell’s text are the stuff of intrigue and disruption at many levels. Ireland in the year 2000 saw almost all republican ghosts return from various English and Irish prisons. These formerly anonymous absentees heightened the wonder and curiosity of Irish youth, who quarried ferociously in pursuit of information to fill out the vacuum in history. One consequence for youth of this influx of formerly hidden information presented itself in a kind of angst. Whatever grasp the young person

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had on a national biography was deconstructed by the recollections transmitted with the changing times. While the additional insight is healthy for all, difficulty with managing an overflux of information arises. This recalls a feature of Thy Tears Might Cease in the way in which textual and readerly interpreters are provocatively kept conscious of their exposure to a dominating central narrative and to a host of sub-stories ghosting the main tale. A difficulty arises in grasping any history at all. UNHOLY ALLIANCE Michael’s uncle and guardian Mr Reilly exposes the boy to a round of conflicting and suggestive commentary to the effect that he picks ‘up far too many bad, vulgar things’ from too often having his ‘big girl’s eyes poring over a book’, and ‘piano-playing all day’ (Farrell, 1963, p. 35). Since his early years and from the initial pages of Thy Tears Might Cease, both hero and reader are conscious that there is much that is unsaid or only furtively implied in relation to the story of Martin Mathew Reilly. Here the mantle over the hidden Ireland is defrocked. ‘That’s what sent Mat to–’, a remark again followed by a ‘... queer glance ...’ from Mr Reilly himself. The suggestion is that the boy’s father Mat fell out from the orthodox frames of the norm and that knowledge was part of his downfall. Suicide is implied in relation to Martin’s father and the veil of silence surrounding that suggestion throws Martin into turmoil regarding his very origins. In Ireland of the 1920s, to parent a child outside of wedlock bore a weight of taboo similar to that relegated to those who take their own life. To create another life outside of the norm was as punishable as to take life one’s own life within that system. The controlling hands of church and state took a poor view of independence of any sort, and chastised the rebellious deed in no small measure, as evinced in the denial of military funerals to those involved in militant republicanism in Ireland. Those born out of wedlock, those who died before baptism, and those who took their own lives were outcasted by church and state and the IRA were told to excommunicate themselves from their own church. The liaison of church and state threw quicksand along the path of the emergent generations and, in terms of those who gave their lives for freedom, threw limestone over the bodies of their own people. In 1976 Frank Stagg died on hunger strike in Brixton jail. His objective had been to secure repatriation to Ireland where he would serve the remainder of his sentence. His body was taken by the Irish government officials of

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the time and buried under limestone. Silence and invisibility in the Irish context strikes at the deepest levels of Irish history. The historical and religious references scattered throughout the opening pages and populating so much of the overall novel again allude to diverse and recurring voices intermittently visiting the central narrative and transmitting themselves through that medium. Played from the same ideological deck, these diverse tunes nevertheless represent the scattered nature of that ideological base. The compressed or, as Said would have it, essentialised songs and slogans expressing that ideology highlight the routinely split feature of Irish history. Furthermore, the frantic traffic of these diverse and sometimes dissenting voices scatters the focus so that the nation loses its grip on the original plot. ‘Hibernia in Tears’ (Farrell, 1963, p. 32) and ‘holy Mary, pitying us’ (Farrell, 1963, p. 33), themes central to Irish national narrative, nevertheless adapt this visiting and transmitting conduit in their insistent propensity to return and recur throughout the novel. The hectic freight of diversified and split narratives aggravates the grinding and debilitating impact of the mainstream tale of oppression. The reinforced sense consequent on this, of being both dominated by a core narrative and ghosted by input from the marginal and alternative directions, has the oppressing effect of styling a ground down subject with a weak grip on any narrative. That uncertain grasp, like the dis/claiming quality of the abundant quotations in the work, is personified in Martin’s very unessentialised ideological grip. Martin Reilly is the visionary youth, politicised in a vacuum of ambiguity as to his very origins. He is subject to a kind of invisible interrogation process where the individual identity is accosted at a terrible depth. This describes the difficulty of transition, a challenge bequeathed to youth and marking all moments of serious change. The bombardment of information unsettles the boy’s grip on his identity in a way that reflects the state of play at national level. The interrogation process similarly unsettles the individual grip on the self, prompting a temporary split in consciousness where the bewildered subject wonders what is real and what is unreal. The explosion of formerly silenced information that marks the period of the peace process in Ireland has caused uncertainty in relation to the continuity of the ideological path, where the bewildered youth wonders what is real and what is integrated in Irish republicanism. While revisionists traditionally opted for silence in order to rewrite history, they have attempted to administer the inevitable release of information to

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their own end too. Revisionists remain key players in the ideological contest and the strategy of the split is their trump card. While pursuing the republican goal, Martin’s politics are not framed in any formal orthodoxy. His submergence between dominant and marginal narrative fields dispenses a kind of split identity on the hero. The notion of the split self is so central to views of identity that much art and literature is sadly preoccupied with the concept. Literature frequently sustains the illusion that human identity is divided in two, as though that identity consisted essentially of a subject in a state of internal, polarised opposition to the self. The type of elusive and hyper documentation climaxing in the intriguing demotion of the Irish prime minister in 1995, and in the current inquiry into the arms trial, was already at work in the fictional life and times of his countryman Reilly. Traffic in sensitive knowledge at government level led to trials and resignations during eruptions of contesting claims as to who had access to what knowledge at a given time. Not only did the hectic freight in information and documentation push chiefs to amnesia and decline, but so too did it bewilder and exhaust the attentive surveillance of the observing public. Again, the anxious intrigues erupting perennially in the Irish house of parliament pertains to the relationship between past and present. This kind of power struggle is reinforced and dramatised in Thy Tears Might Cease by the tendency of the past, through the recurring songs and quotes of the work, to incessantly repeat and regurgitate its memorised rhymes in the narrative space of the present. Typically, the dramas of far flung times spirit their way back onto the current agenda. Echoes of Wilde and Behan grace the British judiciary through the affidavits of Albert Reynolds in the Old Bailey and Haughey in the arms trial, as they attempt to catch up with the mass of scurrying and elusive documentation which went to rewrite the nation’s prospects. However ideologically loaded Martin’s emerging history, his basic position as a vulnerable orphaned child subject within the Reilly family circle needs to be examined. Indeed, a feeling of vulnerability is created round the hero throughout his youth, as demonstrated by the constant references to his odd ways and his ‘big girl’s eyes poring over a book’ (Farrell, 1963 p. 35). Such involvement in the literary is, by implication, risky at the least, suggesting a fundamental vulnerability at large in the relationship between meaning and subjectivity, a notion heavily investigated throughout this study. The interface of knowledge and

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politics marks the quarrying ground of revisionists, and heavy traffic in knowledge when information moves and interchanges at a hectic pace often dislodges the intellectual grip. This pattern mirrors the process of interrogation – the essential context in which knowledge is quarried. The psychological and emotional displacement of identity itself is the surest route towards persuasion and is often the tactic applied in the oppressive extraction of answers from the reticent subject. If this method is perceived to produce results on the individual, then the tactic can be extended to reduce leaders and even nations to supplication. The chief, administering the governing principles of all that is deemed meaningful, is in turn visited and undermined by the lawless wave of serial documents and counter-evidence erupting through the Dáil or house of parliament. Again in Farrell’s text, as with incidents at cabinet level, the polarised and competing fields of narrative in the work oppress the hero in his search for missing narrative and origin. The dominant and dominating mainstream statement pours its repeating and rhyming verses over Martin, while his peers suggest to him the presence of more of his story elsewhere. His search for the hidden insights and clues about that uncertain identity is even further undermined by the exhausting struggle between dominant tale and tantalising alternative. The profound silence and absence that marks Irish history is abruptly overtaken by sporadic and hectic traffic in information and both conditions undermine the capacity to grip the truth. As indicated already, revisionism in Ireland was used to deflect the truth and the suggestion is indeed that there is something that the Irish do not wish to look at. Bobby Sands’s comment recurs with precision in relation to twentieth-century Ireland when he wrote: ‘When the Irish people have to show the desire for freedom, it’s then we’ll see the rising of the moon’ (Sands, 1998, p. 239). By implication the Irish have not arrived at that desire and Edward Said’s work throws some light on the obstacles to that rising desire. As Said puts it in Culture and Imperialism, the child’s innocent ‘acceptance of subordination – whether through a positive sense of common interest with the parent state or through inability to conceive of any alternative – made empire durable’ (Said, 1993, p. 11). It is not merely a matter of Irish governments and individuals failing to imagine an alternative, but a matter furthermore of their being unable to look at their ideological dispossession. The cognitive connections and relationships of Thy Tears Might Cease expose the obstacles in the way of the subject’s pursuit of an alternative.

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Domestic relationships such as those demonstrated in the Reilly family strikingly reflect the wider workings of might in and between societies, meanings and the benches of power. THE STATE OF THE NATION Inferences for the national narrative deduced from Martin’s experience further recommend the subject as accessible indication of the state of the nation. If the Taoiseach or chief can be unseated by the spiralling traffic of unruly information sheets, then the country itself must resound with the turbulence. How can the nation know itself or take its name if even its indigenous author/ities and scribes are forever overwriting its story? Thorough insecurity arises when that uncertain identity is further besieged by the drives and urges of an external agency. The various dilemmas confronting the individual and the nation in the attempt to unleash a narrative of its own are the subject of investigation on the part of theorists like those already referred to above. In a chapter entitled ‘Resistance and Opposition’ Said refers to ‘the partial tragedy of resistance, [as being] that it must to a certain degree work to recover forms already established or at least influenced or infiltrated by the culture of empire’ (Said, 1993, p. 253). Within the culture of empire, the dominant and dominating narrative forces surrounding the vulnerable child Martin perceive him in the manner in which Said says ‘Europeans saw Africa polemically as a blank place’ (Said, 1993, p. 253) assuming its/his ‘supinely yielding availability’ (Said, 1993, p. 254). However, the reading experience in Farrell’s novel demonstrates the difficulties and oppressive consequences of trying, as Said described decolonising Africans as attempting, to ‘reimagine an [identity] stripped of its imperial past’ (Said, 1993, p. 254). While Said celebrates ‘Yeats’s accomplishment in restoring a suppressed history and rejoining the nation to it’ (Said, 1993, p. 286), Thy Tears Might Cease probes the difficulties of such a quest and exposes the dynamics at work in the stripping and suppression of that history. The Yeatsian quest to rejoin the national writ remains to be completed a century later. The challenge of the twenty-first century must be to reintegrate the comprehensively split narrative that is Irish history. The national narrative, fiercely preoccupied with an attempt to dislodge English imperialism from Ireland, is already inscribed with a discourse of resistance. That discourse will inevitably foreground colonisation and occupation in the national psyche. Quoting Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, Said adds:

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[c]olonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it. (Said, 1993, p. 286) The symptoms and side effects of that perverted logic or grotesque turn of events are eminently discernible in Thy Tears Might Cease, where a national identity, already overwritten and revised from within, is further incapacitated by the disempowering weight of a colonising imposition forever to the fore of national consciousness. While the revisionist connotations of Said’s comment are clear, Martin Mathew Reilly’s story dramatises the colonising features of that revisionism. Not only is the nation’s story rewritten and disrupted at home at an awesome velocity, but in addition the nation is besieged by a preoccupation with its colonised history. Preoccupation with our occupied state pronounces itself in the stammering and repeated reference to that dilemma. We are forever calling and pointing to our own disempowerment, such that we reinforce the colonising impact of the culture of empire. What Said calls ‘the culture of Empire’ (Said, 1993, p. 253) has solidly rooted itself in the Irish psyche, impacting on our entire mode of expression. Empire-speak infiltrates and shapes indigenous narrative at all levels, as already demonstrated by the very colonising influences attendant on the entire cognitive institution. Furthermore, the incessant repetition and recycling to which the national narrative is compelled in its drive to shape its history is mirrored by the laborious repetition to which the oppressed resorts in pursuit of a narrative. This repetition is in itself a form of occupation as indicated by the amount of textual space taken up by the songs, quotes and stories in Farrell’s novel, an occupation greatly compounded by the deployment of diverse and multiple narrative ingress. The quotes, rhymes, songs and visions visiting Farrell’s story are the relentless echoes of the dominant theme of Thy Tears Might Cease. Arriving as they do through the byways of idiom and sub-text, these scurrying and elusive voices affect the difference of the alternative, an affectation which this novel unravels and demystifies. Nevertheless, these mock alternatives, whether they be associated with revisionism or with the struggle to erect a memorised narrative, host much of the side effect and record of the colonial experience. However wholesome Said’s warning when he says that ‘to accept nativism is to accept the consequences of imperialism, the racial,

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religious, and political divisions imposed by imperialism’ (Said, 1993, p. 276), the consequences of debunking such narrative influences, or decolonising the national story, could be just as threatening. For instance, it is the vulnerability and unestablished nature of the narrative of the oppressed, i.e. their narrative dispossession, that causes their discourse to cling to repetitions and stabilising truisms. To dislodge that however restricted discourse would be as dangerous as dismantling a ship at sea. The essentialised quality of these compounded sayings has already been alluded to, recalling Said’s warnings on the same subject. How much more essentialised and rigid would those narrative units become under threat of further dissolution? Failing the emergence of an alternative discourse, what would remain without those songs and stories, however bitter and sad their celebration of tragedy? Martin’s tale unfortunately illustrates the very oppressing and undermining consequences of the attempt at reaching such an alternative, and describes the critical moment of political transition. In the current period of the peace process and the cessation, traditional discourse was abruptly put on pause as we look to alternative ways of changing the record. The nation, like the hero, is further submerged into the victim role by the sheer strain of coping repetitiously with a vulnerable narrative, while simultaneously searching for difference. In the face of the revisionist machine, this is a beautiful but terribly draining process. That dilemma perpetuates the existing culture of the victim, so that neither hero nor nation come into their own. The sort of traffic in information and documentation familiar to and typical of all levels of the cognitive hierarchy is, on occasions like those mentioned above, tactically highlighted in the life of a dramatic subject or the affairs of state or leaders. Sensitivity to diverse narrative traffic, as cultivated around the hero of Farrell’s novel, mirrors a timely susceptibility to similar cognitive activity at governmental level. Through a process of selective suggestion and confirmation, Martin’s awareness of lingering and ghosting traces of his own absent story was cultivated such that clues whispered to him from diverse directions, scattering his focus. This was the experience of the baffled public during periods such as the arms trial and the crisis over information in the mid-1990s. Such scattering and disruption of focus is fundamentally geared towards the disorientation of the interpreter and the amalgamation of power. Nowhere might such intrigue be more expected to manifest itself than within the

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structures of government itself. Mainstream authority is capable of disrupting and splitting the ideological grasp of the subject. Withheld knowledge, in conjunction with this theme of the split narrative, raises the notion of a concealed though fundamental departure in history itself, where that grand story is forever absent from itself and present elsewhere. Yet again, Said’s warning is recalled by this idea of division when he urged one to guard against abandoning ‘history for essentialisations that have the power to turn human beings against each other’ (Said, 1993, p. 276). As suggested above, however, it would appear that not only is history already inscribed with such disharmony and dissonance, but the fundamental structures and patterns through which that story of meaning perpetuates itself are conducive to fracture. Language and narrative have a propensity to split and it is in the gift of author/ity to administer and aggravate that tendency. Irish history is predominantly the story of the split and Farrell’s novel demonstrates the dynamics involved. Border and frame are other essential ingredients of language, where meaning relies on differentiation – the gap, space or silence between words. Governmental or cognitive authorities are well positioned to exploit the nature of language and empire-speak is the loudest statement of authorial exploitation. In Ireland a border was erected that created that blind spot where the subject lost sight of the original ideological path. We have spent 30 years split from various other tiers of that path, staring at that visibile boundary while gradually forgetting the beginning of the journey, and accumulating additional splits along the way. The story and dilemma of the Irish is that of Martin Mathew Reilly in that images of something lost whisper to us and incite search and research at many levels. Memory predominates over the concept of history at certain moments and Ireland in the twenty-first century suggests itself as one such period. On review, history emerges often as a record of displaced and suppressed memories – the chronicle of absence and veiled truth. Oppressed hero and ousted leader attest to the saboteur latent in structures of power. As demonstrated in Thy Tears Might Cease, Irish history is loaded with the sort of imperial and colonial dramas that have made an essentialisation of Irish culture, dividing and turning people against each other. To suggest that what Irish identity currently is should be somehow separated from that arrived-at identity, is to continue the work of the oppressor in turning the problem inward on the indigenous history and people themselves.

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The border, divide or split at the core of the political theme of this and so much literature on Ireland very emphatically foregrounds this notion. History itself, as already indicated, carries its own inherently discordant and fractured baggage which is thoroughly ruptured by claim and counter-claim voiced in the various subjects at governing and ground level. The silence of the cessation facilitates the space in which we can hear and read again the original ideological story. We can remember another voice, recover a discourse and penetrate the blind spot to see a way forward. The recovery of a discourse that tells the ideological journey is a major step in the process of decolonisation. In the relative quiet of these times we have the opportunity to harvest our past and turn it into victory. The discordant and disrupted nature of history allows for the plantation of those blind spots secluding elements of the ideological journey. Sporadic eruptions of truth are harvested in the aspect of memorisation as fostered by the abundant quotes, songs and sayings in the text. The meanings stashed in predominating and foregrounded slogans throw the remaining part of the story into seclusion. Two narrative packages recur consistently throughout the chapters of Thy Tears Might Cease. ‘Who fears to speak of ’98’ (Farrell, 1963, p. 57) acts as a counter-narrative to the equally insistent ‘God Save the King’ (Farrell, 1963, p. 203). Not only has each narrative theme a ready audience in the relevant cultural affiliation, but so too do they have definite referents in all eras and in all recurrences in this novel. For Martin ‘the past was really very near’ since ‘[a]fter all, Bunker Hill and 1798 were only a little more than a hundred years ago’. ‘But the future was different and the time until March was an age’ (Farrell, 1963, p. 58), a perspective asserting the immediacy of the relationship between these historical narratives named above, and the unrealised aspirations that are their referents. What of the massive gaps in between? This work undertakes the challenge to look into the gaps of silence and anonymity between vision and slogan. Chapters of selected story and history obscure the integral nature of history. The challenge is to alter the tone of the national discourse and train the national voice for victory. The stammered repetition of the story of victimage further disempowers the speaker. Indeed, as this study of Ireland’s discourse illustrates, our speech empowers and feeds into the culture of empire. Homi Bhabha speaks of Lyotard’s concept of ‘narrative inversion’ (Bhabha, 1990, p. 300), where the referring agent is perceived to speak from the referent’s position. By an absurd stroke of cognitive inversion

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the voice behind each of the two dominant narrative packages above speaks assertively for the referent. However incomprehensible to that speaker, the emerging narrative actually confirms and reinscribes the meaning of its often-estranged referent. Celebrating the however glorious defeat of Bunker Hill during the 1798 Rebellion through its rhythmic and recurring recollection in song, by yet another perverse turn of events, reinforces empire. This is the analysis outlined by coauthors Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiflin in The Empire Writes Back. Something about the unfinished business of these songs sustains their relevance throughout times and pages as both narratives accompany the hero right throughout his story. In as much as they go on to prove that the ‘true men, like you men, are plenty here today’ (Farrell, 1963, p. 58) as in former days, they assert also that the culpable empire and king are indeed saved and in full voice, however counteracted by the narrative of resistance. In today’s culture of imperialism, the king’s voice and will are carried in the security strategy of securocrats. Our relentless attachment to slogan and silence infers a similar ethos at other quarters of the pervading cultural context. The fact that the resistance song celebrating the men of Bunker Hill is still sung confirms its partial failure as counternarrative attempting to debunk the empire. On the other hand, the song of resistance has salvaged the rudiments of the national discourse. It remains for us to see through the blind spots in history to look to the ideological source. Ireland, like many other colonies, was so immersed in resistance to empire that our focus was displaced and our voice submerged in the sad songs and bitter tales of resistance. As a strong and vibrant country, our song ought to have been one of joy. The ethos of victimage that has been planted in the Irish psyche thwarts the national voice. In our youth we see age and we place blindness on the path of vision and so ‘Only Our Rivers Run Free’ (O’Connell, 1982). Singing or writing back to the empire, the subject narrative delivers and perpetuates the tyranny of that oppressor in a process that indicates a surprising inversion of cognitive traffic. While the story, history or song should emerge in the aftermath of the relevant actual event, the opposite is shown here in operation. Narrative engenders and administers real manifestations of power and powerlessness. ‘What good is youth when it’s ageing, what joy is in eyes that can’t see’ (O’Connell, 1982), says the song, indicating an inclination to self-disempowerment on the part of the colonised. Usurping kings, on the other hand, are confirmed and chiefs denied

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through the intriguing agency of discourse. The split story of the divided nation is woven in the pattern of recurrence taking place between the various entrances of repeated narratives of resistance. Failure to get informed of and alter some narrative patterns at national and individual level is to acquiesce to a fatalistic belief that reality amounts to inevitable and predictable responses to the whims and drives of discourse. The accumulating and mounting alienation accompanying that conflict can be measured by the recurring demand etched into the Irish psyche for counter-narratives of resistance. Each era of this return marks a further splitting of the national story, just as each repeated chant refines and channels Martin into a distilled focus upon just this resistance theme. The loaded slogans and truisms occupying much of Farrell’s novel suggest a determinism in discourse, and the historical moment is seen to be about the future rather than the past. Similarly in the field of language, what one says of events impacts on the outcome, since discourse has the facility to empower or disempower at will. A kind of cognitive inversion is addressed at the start of this chapter where historical narrative was ascribed with the faculty of appearing to deliver the actuality. The historical moment of the Rising and the precocious proclamation of the Republic launched a lonely furrow of an ideological thrust, cutting the intellectual edge for generations. By a contra-process of inversion, the whole ideological journey in Ireland was overwritten and split, and displaced visions were forced to assume identities in their own right. What Lyotard describes as narrative inversion is a fundamental asset to revisionists. The complex network of referents, referees and repeat in language has facilitated a comprehensive scattering of the ideological story. At times and occasions of narrative inversion we can be part of either another narrative, or of that same narrative being met from another direction. Such experiences recall the kind of déjà vu scenario demonstrated by Martin’s response on meeting his aunt, Kathleen. We’re told that [i]n that moment he was sure that once before he had thus stood beneath this tall window with that hand upon his shoulder in a gauntlet glove and the dean hovering in the background. Awed by the tricks of Time, conjuring impossibilities in Long Dick’s room, he stared and stared. (Farrell, 1963, p. 137)

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A page later Martin tells his aunt that he thought he had seen her before, though she asserts ‘[b]ut you couldn’t remember? You were only a baby’ (Farrell, 1963, p. 138). Her response implies that he and she have indeed seen each other before, though it would appear impossible that he should have a recollection of the event. As metaphorical representation of both referring agent and referent, this later meeting marks a kind of symbolic return, circuit or inverted narrative address. That notion is very pronounced in the novel, in that the foregrounding of the grossly illogical sense of the already seen or read permeating the novel’s core narrative is a kind of flaunting of its essential oppressiveness. As noted earlier in this chapter, in the throes of its relentless pursuits, meaning drives itself with annihilating impact against cognitive resistance, arriving sporadically at a cul-de-sac and sense of déjà vu of its own making. That ruthless purpose manifesting itself in unfathomable repetition and familiarity cultivates a sense in which the subject and even the reader is to be burdened by a persistently recurring history. While being gradually ground down under the task of excavating and discovering their story, the hero and the nation have to cope with diverse influences. THE POLITICAL UNCONSCIOUS Untold passages in the culture of empire also impact on the story of vision and consist of a kind of political unconscious, which the coloniser bears down on its subject races for them to absorb. The negativity and shame long veiled by the dominant colonial narrative is thus fed into the struggling voices of the oppressed, translating itself into the protesting and lamenting narrative package in which the nation has been framed. Mirroring Martin’s life story, we variously accept and reject our inherited historical package, even the disheartening notion that history repeats itself. Mirroring also his guardians’ concealment of much of Martin’s history, the very essentialised and contained quality of the national story similarly depicts an impulse to express on some level, while simultaneously hoarding its secrets from its children. The joined hands of church and state legislate for silence and foster revisionism. By another one of those incidents of perverted logic the unseated subject, like the colonised nation, actually assumes the symptoms and debt of the coloniser. In having to so compress its discourse into memorisable frames of meaning, the national narrative extends itself to a point of maximum tension. The result is that the disposition of this colonised

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nation is like that of a defensive, highly controlled party with things to hide and symptoms of guilt to negotiate, and in the light of that condition today’s turbulence in relation to the arms trial calls for diagnosis. The colonising bloc has projected its negativity onto its colonised subject who, however vindicated, bears the burden, a scenario unleashing another chapter of the narrative of the split. Small wonder among such involved intricacies that the procurement of an adequate narrative should cause the nation such a terrible and beautiful challenge. The compressed packages of information stored in the songs and quotes strewn throughout the text again come to mind in the concept of the party and the individual as stores of information, fermenting into ‘essentialisation’ (Said, 1993, p. 276) and slogan. The intensity of the drive for control demonstrated in the sort of containment involved in any essentialisation of meaning is accelerated by the nation’s want of a discourse. This unease at the level of the national narrative is represented on the personal level in Thy Tears Might Cease in the form of a protection motif revolving around Martin’s guardians’ apparent desire to shelter him, and on a political level by the silence and subterfuge surrounding the world of political intrigue. As already outlined, the hero and nation are ground down under ceaselessly rendered packages – truisms, quotes and repeated themes. However, the protection motif isn’t simply a matter of his guardians’ engagement in an attempt to defend Martin from a manipulative narrative, or the defensive silence of leaders. It is after all Martin’s own story that is withheld from him, just as history is withheld from the national forum. Oppressed vision and story are expressed in the recurring quest for source, origin and lineage. There are latent and not so latent references to homosexual tendencies in Farrell’s book and there is an incident where a priest abuses Martin. In the latter part of the novel this priest thinks he is being haunted when Martin turns up years later in the middle of the night. ‘In the name of the cross! Who are you? What are you?’ (Farrell, 1963, p. 462), exclaims the indicatively named Father MacTaggarty, an appellation after all not a prayer removed from Mac An tSagairt and susceptible to translation as ‘father of the priest’s son’. This incident recalls the crisis that brought Reynolds down when charges of sexual abuse were taken against one Father Smith. It emerged that various individuals again obscured the facts in relation to events and once more the issue of legitimacy and the truth came under strenuous scrutiny at public and private levels.

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The divide between truth and untruth, vision and revision visited the Irish focus at a deep level and reminded the public of various other contexts in which belief came into doubt. Uncertain credentials at the highest levels of church and state unsettled the comfortable culture created by revisionist Ireland in the mid- to late twentieth century, and in the early twenty-first century the issue of legitimacy arises all over again. A dubious parentage is implied in this juxtaposition of paternity and unorthodox issue, a hierarchical departure acknowledged only in whispers immersed in the gowns and vestments of the norm. Indeed within the national narrative itself, as recently illustrated, there are things formed and formless, said and unsaid, claimed and disclaimed as a matter of course, and this scenario is accepted by all. Again those anonymous wonders documented through equally accepted and accredited maxims, quotes and truisms unleash their stealthy and wizardly influence at all levels of cognitive and institutional power. These recurring cognitive flashes spiriting in and out through the narrative of history shape and disrupt structures of power as vividly dramatised by the ousted chief, defamed clergy and injudicious judges visiting the national narrative in the mid-1990s and troubling the comfortable culture of Ireland revised into the early twenty-first century. The hero of this tale of nation and narrative is the enigmatic issue of turbulent foundations – the implied sins of the mother and father of democracy revised. A dysfunctional fostering of authority developed in Ireland, where church and state took the queen’s crown and sold generations to the culture of the croppy. The angst of uncertain identity at national level is not soothed by the ritualistic celebration of enigmatic relations between church and state. Again, ambiguous paternity spirits a canopy over the cultural vacuum gaping from the mouth of Irish historical discourse. Within the rigid and reactionary frames of that orthodox cognitive heritage, the implications of such enigmatic parentage are indeed awesome. Small wonder that, like Martin, the nation struggles with its narrative baggage and that the national voice balks at the mocking ‘Unnameable’ (Beckett, 1979 edn, p. 382) lurking in and out of our history. The tyrannous and impossible rule of orthodox meaning in all its self-styled legitimacy would make so-called ‘bastards’ (Farrell, 1963, p. 241) of us all. Nevertheless, echoes of a regenerating ideological thrust implode onto that system. Those echoes call relentlessly to the Irish, like the rhythm of a familiar tune – unmanageable and fearless chords in The Rhythm of Time (in Sands, 1998).

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The French and American revolutions of the 1700s were crucial influences on emerging republicanism in Ireland. Inspired by these events the United Irishmen, the organising force behind the 1798 Rebellion, was formed. This is the insurrection celebrated throughout the chorus of repeat in Farrell’s Thy Tears Might Cease as outlined in the last chapter. In 1798 Wolfe Tone accompanied a company of French soldiers to Ireland with a view to liberating the country. A high-ranking officer in the defeated French forces, he was arrested, illegally court-martialled and sentenced to death. It is said that he took his own life rather than accept English justice, in a context pre-empting latter-day protests for political status. Again, the repetition and recycling of certain themes is seen to recur throughout Irish history. Wolfe Tone’s application to the French, along with the impact of both revolutions on Ireland, remind us yet again that Irish history is not a linear narrative, but one which speaks to diverse political contexts. While eighteenth-century Ireland addressed itself to French and American events, other cultural contexts have impacted on Ireland in recent times. Chinua Achebe’s works Things Fall Apart and Anthills of the Savannah deal with the politco-cutural context of Africa. As the Yeatsian quote confirms, Irish writers impacted on African discourse, just as the politics of South Africa influence the current political context of Ireland. While traffic in ideation and language between countries and continents has been busy over the generations, movement at indigenous levels has been jammed; rammed into culde-sac and repetition. The déjà vu incident identified in the last chapter illustrated the depth at which this repetition impacts, where not only was Martin subject to the infinite recycling of slogan and chorus, but so also he was visited by an obscure though familiar image from far gone times. Achebe’s work attests to the commonality of the recycling and revisiting aspect of history at international level. The African like the Irish experience is seen to reflect similarities with other regions where oppression and colonialism have taken root. Two considerations predominate both Achebe novels: cognitive dis102

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continuity in meaning and impeded issue. These themes factored crucially in the last chapter where the very split nature of meaning and history were seen to thwart the emergence of Ireland’s national discourse. Such disjunction, with the subsequent obstruction of ideology, is demonstrated not only in the sense in which it is shown that Things Fall Apart, but in the question also as to whether or not things are ever complete. All meanings are thwarted ones which, when finally perceived, recognised and understood, are already at the threshold of eclipse and beyond sustained interpretative grasp. Interpretation is often a matter of a fleeting recognition of familiar concepts, a notion reminiscent of the déjà vu incident in the last chapter where Martin believes he was in ‘Long Dick’s room’ (Farrell, 1963, p. 137) at some point in the past. His aunt asserts that he couldn’t have remembered, since he was only a baby. He did remember however. A kind of symbolic return or inverted narrative was suggested in the context where meaning drives itself with annihilating velocity against various blocs of resistance, to arrive regularly at cul-de-sac and déjà vu. As with historical moments like 1798, the 1916 Rising and the 1981 hunger strike, these rare events mark the occasion of heightened, though very fleeting, awareness. Part of the challenge to unravel the national discourse must involve the unpacking of these incidents of vision. ‘I am standing on the threshold of another trembling world’ writes Bobby Sands and ‘may God have mercy on my soul’ (Sands, 1998, p. 239). Further down the same ‘Comm’ he writes in terms acutely reminiscent of his predecessor Wolfe Tone. Conscious of his impending death on hunger strike, Sands wrote: [F]oremost in my tortured mind is the thought that there can never be peace in Ireland until the foreign oppressive British presence is removed, leaving all the Irish people as a unit to control their affairs and determine their own destinies as a sovereign people, free in mind and body, separate and distinct physically, culturally and economically. (Sands, 1998, p. 239) Almost two hundred years earlier at his own court martial, Wolfe Tone addressed the court in the following terms: From my earliest youth, I have regarded the connection between Ireland and Great Britain as the curse of the Irish nation and felt convinced that while it lasted, this country could never be free

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nor happy. My mind has been confirmed in this opinion by the experience of every succeeding year and the conclusion which I have drawn from every fact before my eyes. (Boylan, 1997, p. 129) In that same ‘Comm’ Bobby Sands writes, ‘I am a political prisoner. I am a political prisoner because I am a casualty of a perennial war that is being fought between the oppressed Irish people and an alien, oppressive, unwanted regime that refuses to withdraw from our land’ (Sands, 1998, p. 219). Again in his address, Tone has the following to say: After a combat nobly sustained, a combat which would have excited the respect and sympathy of a generous enemy, my faith was to become a prisoner. To the eternal disgrace of those who gave the order, I was brought thither in irons like a felon. I mention this for the sake of others. (Boylan, 1997, p. 130) Not only do idiom and chorus repeat and pre-empt the same familiar themes through novels such as Thy Tears Might Cease, but so too do these messages surface routinely along the entire narrative of Irish history. However inconceivable a notion for most historical analysts, to the republican of today events of 1798 are as familiar as the more recent tragedy of 1981. As young Martin Reilly in the last chapter puts it, ‘[a]fter all, Bunker Hill and 1798 were only a little more than a hundred years ago’. ‘But the future was different and the time until March was an age’ (Farrell, 1963, p. 58). The return of absent memory is lodged in the incidents of repetition and recall. The relentless return of familiar narrative evident in Irish history is a feature identified also in other cultural contexts where oppression has featured at an intensive level. ARRESTED DISCOURSE Oral impediment and arrested narrative, the other side of relentless repetition and slogan, are vital components of Achebe’s stories. This author’s demonstration of human misery impacts at such a heightened level as to project the subject’s suffering onto the plains of otherness, equating representation and the other with the notion of an elusive though haunting narrative. Achebe’s novels Anthills of the Savannah and Things Fall Apart demonstrate that the repetitions and returns delineated by the signs bordering otherness are the narrative throwbacks of a potential history stammering and

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struggling to exist. The grotesque personal suffering represented here is reminiscent of the pained lot of the cognitive subject. By a process of negative empowerment, that otherness is assigned an intensity of pain culminating in disturbing expressions of discontinuance, the cognitive version of the kind of physical dismemberment that took place in the Tuthsi–Hutu conflict. In Things Fall Apart, Okonkwo arrests and stems the stride of his own life in suicide while the people of The Anthills of the Savannah are left to the pitiless ‘eye of madness’ cast over the ‘incinerated world’ (Achebe, 1987, p. 30) of Africa. These two works convey the process by which ideological dismemberment and disjunction are spun up with all the malignant momentum of an ideological cleansing, where the voice of the alternative is exiled, as explicitly demonstrated in the legislated silence that thwarted the growth of Ireland’s national discourse. The issue of the forfeiture of one’s own life in the face of an intensely oppressive regime is the story also of Tone and Sands. Of the 1981 hunger strike the latter writes, ‘it has been forced upon me and my comrades by three and a half years of stark inhumanity’ (Sands, 1998, p. 219). While it is unclear whether or not Tone actually took his own life, both patriots were clear about their political intentions and the lengths to which they would go in order to pursue their goals. Bobby Sands writes, ‘I have considered all arguments and tried every means to avoid what has become the unavoidable’ (Sands, 1998, p. 239) and Tone in his final comments from the dock states, ‘I have spoken and acted with reflection and on principle and am ready to meet the consequences, whatever be the sentence of this court, I am ready for it.’ He goes on to say that the members of the court martial ‘will surely discharge their duty. I shall take care not to be wanting to mine’ (Boylan, 1997, p. 130), a comment often interpreted as Tone’s own intention to thwart British justice and deprive the enemy of the privilege of executing him. In effect Wolfe Tone’s address undermined the authority of the court martial. As an adjutant general in the French army, the British court martial was illegitimate and outside its brief with respect to this defendant, who dissolved the power of the court by admitting to the charge. Tone remarks that he did not mean to give the court martial the trouble of bringing judicial proof to convict him legally of having acted in hostility to the government of his Britannic majesty in Ireland – I admit to the fact’ (Boylan, 1997, p. 130). While addressing the ‘President and gentlemen of the court martial’ the implication was that Tone would be the author of his own end

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and purpose. In line with the growing tendency towards silence, the subversion of a foreign authority developed in republican circles in the policy of refusing to recognise the courts. Again the displacement of authority occupies Achebe’s work. ‘His Excellency’s might’ (Achebe, 1987, p. 2) in Anthills of the Savannah is brittle enough, seeming only very provisionally his, as if his authority were on loan from someone or someplace else. Even the Commissioner for Information, on his own admission, has ‘very little information’ (Achebe, 1987, p. 117), again starkly and ironically proclaiming his misfired title and miscarried knowledge. In fact it emerges that the foregrounded characters of the novel have in common a certain vulnerability which prompts notions of possible sophistication and power existing at some other location in the work. The drama at the forefront of the novel therefore expresses an absence and discontinuity which implies the very real existence of that other missing power somewhere. Modern Irish history refers repeatedly to an absent past and the pursuit of that missing power, while Tone’s day saw a more distinct reference to concurrent events overseas. Again in his address he states, ‘That Ireland was not able of herself to throw off the yoke I knew. I therefore sought for aid wherever it was to be found.’ I remained faithful to what I thought the cause of my country and sought in the French Republic an ally to rescue three millions of my countrymen. Attached to no party in the French Republic, without interest, without money, without intrigue, the openness and integrity of my views raised me to a high and confidential rank in its armies. I obtained the confidence of the executive directory, the approbation of my generals, and I venture to add, the esteem and affection of my loyal comrades. (Boylan, 1997, p. 130) Ireland 2001 and the twentieth anniversary of the 1981 hunger strike sees republicanism reconnect with the powerful rebellion of ten more of the republican lineage. Two decades is five minutes in the discourse outlined by Martin Reilly, where 1798 seemed like last month while Christmas withheld itself like the aspiration of a lifetime. Revisionism, or the rewriting of history, often relies on our tendency to regard the past as inferior to the current moment and Heidegger throws interesting analysis on this notion when he states that man or ‘the strangest of all beings is what he is because he harbours such a beginning in which everything all at once burst

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from perabundance into the overpowering and strove to master it’. He comments on history’s inability to preserve the power of the beginning which, he argues, is consequently ‘emasculated and exaggerated into a caricature of greatness’ (Heidegger, 1979, p. 155). Again, as with the unpacking of historical moments delivered to date in this book, something familiar and of importance rings from Heidegger’s comments, something that speaks directly to the Irish historical context. While revisionism shreds our history, the typically ostracised voice of republicanism listens closely to that Rhythm of Time and history. The split is the trump card mounted against that reflecting remembrance, throwing memory back onto repetition. Though republicanism has never suffered ideological split, it has been thwarted at sophisticated levels by the agency of a heavily implanted discourse. That discourse was a key feature in the plantation of Ireland where the ideological path was obstructed and deflected onto border and cul-de-sac. The recurrence of déjà vu and memory indicate the condition of survival in republicans. Again, and in tune with Yeats’s apocalyptic concern that things fall apart, Heidegger has interesting comments to make on the movement and directions inscribed in meaning. He goes on to say that man ‘is without issue because he is always thrown on the paths that he himself laid out, he becomes mired in his path, caught in the beaten track and thus caught he compasses the circle of his world’ (Heidegger, 1979, p. 157). Writing at another period of rising insurrection in Ireland, Yeats felt tremors of change in that circle and his angst related to the possible outcome of that eruption. Inevitably, that enclosed and inner circle will project its own ripple and ricochet, the outback and memory of the rest, and the rest is what joins up the national narrative in whatever geographical context. Twenty-first-century Ireland reconnects with the heightened moment of the hunger strike 20 years ago. Things Fall Apart opens with the recollection of the hero’s original contest 20 years previously with the standing champion ‘Amalinze the Cat’ (Achebe, 1973 edn, p. 7) in the fiercest fight since the town founder tackled ‘a spirit of the wild’ (Achebe, 1973 edn, p. 8). Okonkwo’s victory on that occasion in turn resurrects the founder’s success in order to heighten the glory. Persistent recall and recourse to the original and the past coincides with the directional trend of these works, where meaning leans strategically on the rear ground inclining and swelling its ranks from behind, from the rear with the force of the already known and named. A sophisticated and vital

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process of projection is perpetuated on this basis and manifests itself in the systematic reinvention of the past in the form of newly created otherness – a pattern of pre-emption reminiscent of Wolfe Tone’s early but familiar insistence on political status. The preemptive feature recalls Derrida’s comments on discourse and indeed the occasional citings of voice in Irish history confirms a pattern of foresight, where proclamation and address are seen to anticipate the future. Against the backdrop of his tribe’s interpretative style, Okonkwo’s system of thought is relatively similar to that of the colonialists who came to conquer them. Early introductions to the villagers describe a spiralling, indirect discursive stream among the Ibo, for whom ‘the art of conversation is regarded very highly’. On the same page the narrator tells of the ‘great talker’ Okoye who ‘spoke for a long time, skirting round the subject and then hitting it finally’ (Achebe, 1973 edn, p. 4). STAMMERED DELIVERY Okonkwo, however, is shown to have no taste for indigenous rhythms of speech and thought. A high degree of internal repression reminiscent of the structures of binary thought has shaped him into a direct and aggressive communicator, a process echoed in his negotiation of language. The narrator says that ‘[h]e had a slight stammer and whenever he was angry and could not get his words out quickly enough, he would use his fists’ (Achebe, 1973 edn, p. 2) relating meaning to the antagonism and repetition involved in engagements with power. Impeded expression intensifies and ferments until it erupts into an urgent and aggressive force for change, a transitional agency often deflected into the baggage of condition or victimage. By a process of negative association therefore, potentially radical vehicles of change are undermined and disguised as odd or ailing exceptions, reminiscent of Beckett’s unwieldy threesome Molloy, Malone and Mahood. Negative empowerment at the political level has seen the glorification of the individual, only to subsequently shred the character in scandal and ridicule as in the case of Roger Casement. Achebe’s work traces the passage of ideation as it breaks apart. Things Fall Apart and the hero hosts the onset, development and malignant peak of a passage that deconstructs the system of his entire world. Okonkwo is the agent of his own dissolution and death and similarly the procreator of his own issue, however impeded by reinvention and repetition. Rejecting his father and dis-

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continuing his own history, he comes again, but from the dispersed seed of dissident and exploded reason – a second coming of another era in meaning. Irish history is loaded with second comings in a pattern where patriots of earlier times return in the legacy of the historical moment. The discursive overlap between one era and another as presented in the statements of Tone and Sands is the outcome of a thwarted but insistent ideological thrust. Okonkwo, on the other hand, rejects what he perceives as the weak ways of his father, inclining instead to a disposition compatible with the culture of empire. ‘[S]o meek and tame and unaware of the deathly power of gold’ (Sands, 1998, p. 239), the Ibo are colonised and in his anxious determination to deny his native culture, Okonkwo becomes obsessed with control to the point where he terminates his own life. Again, the notion of creative annihilation arises where the subjects, Okonkwo, Sands or Tone, are driven with annihilating velocity to the verge of cognitive eclipse, ideologically aware but denied a voice. While inciting the eruption of the historical moment, colonial oppression inhaled at such a deep level thwarts the agency of change. The subject’s potential as catalyst and agent for change is an issue also in Anthills of the Savannah where the reader comes to ask with Beatrice, ‘[w]hat must a people do to appease an embittered history?’ (Achebe, 1987, p. 220). The relentless invasion and oppression occupying the histories of colonised cultures creates a self-perpetuating dynamic of resistance, where forces of man and nature weave a culture of conflict. The scorching eye of the sun burnt marks of oppression and resistance onto African culture. Since the arrival of the Normans to Ireland in 1169, until the time of the 1798 Rebellion, the social, religious, political and cultural life of the Irish was under prolonged assault and a series of rebellions, risings, civil and national wars has occupied Irish life ever since. Beatrice looks to history as the story of Africa’s misery, and with the implication that history was in fact a wilful agency unleashing its bitter cause on the emerging generations. Again, Heidegger’s analysis bears on the context. Criticising the application of natural science to ‘man’s being’, Heidegger remarks on the basic misconception ‘underlying such modes of thought’, ‘that history begins with the primitive and backward, the weak and helpless’. He argues that ‘[t]he beginning is the strangest and mightiest. What comes afterward is not development but flattening that results from mere spreading out’ (Heidegger, 1959, p. 155). So what Beatrice and others in the novel

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interpret as a vengeful history amounts to the fallout of eruptions in power. What Heiddeger calls flattening out presents itself as a fallout of conflict and oppression in both cultural contexts discussed here. This is what Yeats anticipated as things falling apart, a premonition of a second coming of a mighty beginning with its own inevitable fallout. This spreading out is enabled through the falling apart of meaning, and the ensuing dispersal extending reason to its ultimate capacity describes its gradual expiry into cognitive incompleteness and eclipse. By analogy, if the powers of the day are unreassuring, then the search for signs of strength gets directed, however irrationally, to the domain of the ‘weak and helpless’ (Heidegger, 1979, p. 155). Analyses in the mid-1980s of similar fallout as lodged in the margins, edges and otherness reflect this search for power and meaning at locations beyond core and mainstream venues. This reemphasis implies an absence of convincing power in the traditionally foregrounded places. Since the power at the very foregrounded, governmental section of the dramatic arrangement is so mediocre, the pursuit of strength is directed towards the background, distant horizon of the text, the domain of the oppressed in a pattern reflecting Okonkwo’s own recourse to ‘original struggle’ (Heidegger, 1979, p. 62) in challenging times. The more troubled the times, therefore, the greater the recourse to the past, accelerating the flow and return of repetition and slogan. What becomes veiled behind the blind spots of border and repetition is the very process of revolution where a spiralling movement of change at ideological level is obscured in a cul-de-sac. The revolutionary dynamic identified in the title Things Fall Apart whispers from the unspoken implication that the centre cannot hold. Not only is centralised, core power inaccessible to most, but it is furthermore uncertain and discredited, as eloquently demonstrated in the discredited church–state bloc in Ireland. The repression upon which the governing authority in Anthills of the Savannah is based instigates an inherent uncertainty at even its most senior manifestations, so that ‘His Excellency’ (Achebe, 1987, p. 2) himself looks uncertainly back on the basis of his authority. In fact, the introduction to each main character in that novel refers to the immediately subordinate or supporting person or feature involved in their role, as if there were a fundamental unease shared by all in relation to the base upon which their meaning and lives are built. His Excellency’s role in the capital’s government buildings is launched

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against the backdrop of his ‘Commissioner for Information’ (Achebe, 1987, p. 2) on the first page, and his ‘Director of the State Research Council’ (Achebe, 1987, p. 14) in the opening lines of chapter two. At the start of chapter three, ‘Chris called Ikem on the telephone’ (Achebe, 1987, p. 26), securing his services while in the sixth chapter Beatrice is introduced in an attitude of fear for Chris’s safety. From the start, an insecurity is seen to permeate the lives and times of the plot and each looks to what they already know, hold and understand, acquiring an increasing preoccupation with history and reinforcing an already held reverence for story as what the Ibo tribe of Things Fall Apart perceive as ‘chief among his fellows’ (Achebe, 1973, p. 124). The angst of the individual reflects a broader politico-cultural unease where histories tell of the uncertain pursuit of the credentials of nationhood. While Beatrice perceives history as a record of the drive and dynamic of an embittered ideological thrust, it also records the clinging aspiration for source. By another one of those difficult if not perverted turns of logic, the oppressed are split between the conflict-ridden dynamics of history, thrown along the volatile thrust of the national story, while compulsively returning and rebounding on itself in pursuit of origins. This is the tense narrative circle identified by Yeats. The centre cannot hold Yeats declares and things fall apart, a fear demonstrated in the recycling activity of the oppressed subject, clinging nervously to a volatile narrative dynamic. Ireland likewise holds tight to the roller-coasting traffic of the national narrative, unnerved into an insecurity that has us grasp furiously at the fundamentals of our history. Clinging to what has been a conflict-ridden story, the already oppressive context of colonisation is reinforced by such intimate relations with the past. In effect, the pain and strain of an oppressive past is forever repeated and aggravated by our deep dependence on that narrative, and for the Irish as for the Ibo story is ‘chief amongst his fellows’ (Achebe, 1987, p. 124). The absent story is the record of an ongoing and revolutionary process of which history is an edited account. Like Okonkwo in the other novel, the poet Ikem in Anthills of the Savannah engages most manifestly in the field of meaning and facilitates a kind of second coming or return of history itself. Between the secretary’s ‘look of awe’ on the second page of chapter three at discovering she had spoken to the ‘Editor of the Gazette’, and Ikem’s journey in the midday heat, an indented passage is opened out, releasing a vivid account of the gruelling weather. The passage

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emerging here, a ‘Path of Ikem’, is one through which the reader glimpses another road leading back through the folds of this man’s history and power. Three pages later, his ‘Hymn to the Sun’ (Achebe, 1987, pp. 1–210) reinforces an awareness of some other cultural input into the narrative. The novel ferries and gradually unleashes a shadow text, the underground work of which the actual novel is a visible part. This resembles the current situation in Ireland where the quiet of the cessation allows for the recollection of voice. The presence haunting the narrative is one of oppression at diverse levels where conditions governmental and natural militate against the oppressed and legislate for atrocious suffering. Conditions in the outback of the Abazon represent both a temporal and cultural gap where geography and weather thwart life itself. Achebe’s novel describes the return of the repressed other, or that which lies with the impeded, the invisible, the silenced and the anonymous. These are what Yeats describes as ‘Second coming[s]’, cognitive and historical entities outside the power arrangements which sustain the status quo. Things Fall Apart incorporates and foregrounds this otherness through its narrative undertakings. The novel comprises stories in and around stories, many in the tribal fashion, where proverb and maxim are used like spells in a way that dictates the tone of their message. The Umuofian language is intensely ritualistic, demonstrating a reluctance to organise itself around the subject/object pattern of binary thought. The addressees of this novel are not directly spoken to and there exists a subtle regard to some additional other presence or hearer of Achebe’s tale. The sub-authors and orators in the work relate to their peers via these proverbs and tales as if speaking from some present, though invisible, source of wisdom and fact. That source is spun out of the conjuring and ‘spelling’ at work between visible and invisible presences in and around narratives. This is a pattern more typical of musical arrangements of rhythm and chorus than of the binary structures of language. In like fashion, history and meaning have recourse to recall and recollection in the creation of cognitive momentum and Achebe’s novel moves from the stilted structures of language to assume something of the musical arrangement or movement. Ireland has looked to its poets and musicians, the Comhaltas at play, in order to unpack much of the nation’s writ and to trace the movement of its vision. In Anthills of the Savannah a prominently backwards gaze permeates the novel. This text houses two authorities, with one

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power shadowing another such that the chief characters find themselves haunted by their own estranged and displaced history. The narrative behind the frontal tale and that ghosting power already mentioned is no less than the penetrating force of story. ‘Recalling-Is-Greatest. Why? Because it is only the story that outlives the sound of war-drums and the exploits of brave fighters’ ... ‘[I]t is the story that owns us and directs us’ (Achebe, 1987, p. 124). There is a suggestion here of a history behind history, the notion of a ghosted set of memories and meanings behind the narrative mainstream. This, in my view, alludes to the visionary thrust of which history is merely a review. The reference also suggests a dual and conflicting dynamic in meaning, a conflict which is actually a dynamic for change. This agency for change erupts sporadically onto the ideological plain which makes abrupt presence onto history, the edited version of its story. In the Irish context, history commonly assumes the place of ideology, as if the foregrounded chronicle of events were the sum of total truth. Achebe’s work represents the relationship between the ideological thrust and the his/story that ‘outlives the sound of war drums’ (Achebe, 1987, p. 1240). If recalling or story amounts to anything more potent than inevitable repetition and reissue, it does so through Ikem. His gift is that of playing one recollection or history off another, equipping the reader to assess the truth among clusters of ambiguity and contradiction, where narrative entities move to and fro in often contrary directions. Having repressed his father’s attributes of gentleness and laziness, Okonkwo’s restricted speech flow intensifies the force, aggression and potency of a different pattern of meaning from the meandering variety of his peers. Thwarted continuity with recurring reabsorption feature in both instances, however, and the two cognitive systems come close together in this text. Apparently meaningless comings and goings feature just as strongly in Anthills of the Savannah where the story of Sam’s futile attempt to consolidate his illusory powers is shadowed by another tale of Ikem’s truth, the path of Ikem which provides an ironic commentary on the main story. That dual narrative context resembles the Irish context, where revisionism cut, copied and pasted ideology into a narrative called history. Revisionism’s reaction to the various battles, invasion, rebellions and insurrections was to cast regular obstacles along the ideological path, throwing the blind spot of boundary and border upon the path of vision. Echoes of an original quest declare themselves through the chorus and repetition

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of narratives like Martin Reilly’s, where the 1798 Rebellion and the Proclamation of the Republic of 1916 conduct that vision onto the ground of the present. While history is an edited record of the ideal, its repetitious nature actually highlights the ways in which empirespeak and revisionism have diverted from the original task. BORDER AND LAST FRONTIER This is the dual and apparently contradictory narrative illustrated in Anthills of the Savannah. This ironical commentary manifests itself in powerful ways, for instance in Ikem’s poetry, which draws upon the vivid actuality of grotesque human suffering endured behind the lines in the Abazon. Chris observed, while passing the ‘WELCOME TO SOUTH ABAZON’ (Achebe, 1987, p. 208) sign, how amazing it was that ‘provincial boundaries drawn by all accounts quite arbitrarily by the British fifty years ago and more sometimes coincided so completely with reality’. This comment not only attends to the power of discourse where borders are perceived to exist where there are none, but suggests also a particular power in the very notion of borders. While Chris’s observation on the subject throws some question over the question of the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign, his comment further suggests an easy alliance between language and border where the word and concept reflect borders of the mind, as evinced in the Irish context. The concept of boundary is a loaded one in that it reinforces the sense of an unfinished narrative. As already identified, things do fall apart, and clearly the stories of colonised places is one of incomplete histories, where empire carefully focused us on resistance and border, deflecting the visionary thrust. The dramatic personae are all aware of some ominous power being conducted at another remove from the drama into which they have been immediately cast. Chris observes the inscriptions on a bus and the narrator tells us that [t]he Christian and quasi-Christian calligraphy posed no problem and held no terror. But not so that other one: Ife onye metalu, a statement unclear and menacing in its very nonconclusiveness. What a man commits ... Follows him? Comes back to take its toll? (Achebe, 1987, p. 203) This message carried on the back of a bus recalls the kind of looking behind referred to earlier in relation to the central characters of the

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plot. Chris interprets the inconclusive message to mean that the guilty suffer for whatever wrong they’ve done in a former life. This, and the novel generally, is indeed dealing with the resurrection of a narrative which had some unfinished telling to do. Anthills of the Savannah deals with the return of history, a theme deeply relevant to twenty-first-century Ireland. As official investigation into fraudulent activity at government level in this country indicates, even the revisionists are in the process of shredding their ideological package to unravel the truth. An ideological unfolding is happening at every level of Irish politics at this moment. Anthills of the Savannah depicts the haunting presence of a buried history and the text is like the mound created by the underground and invisible vitality driving an ongoing process. The eerie and almost apocalyptic tone of some of Ikem’s writing portrays him as a prophet-like figure or messenger of a coming, if elusive, power. From Ikem’s hymn to the sun, Chris read, ‘[a]nd now the times had come round again out of story land. Perhaps not as bad as the first times, yet. But they could easily end worse’ (Achebe, 1987, p. 33). The highly serious tone of his writing so presents itself as literary that Achebe, the actual author of the novel, seems to give way under the prophet’s force. Like the process of history, the path of Ikem breaches the boundaries of actual author/ity to unleash another power onto the literary stage. An alternative author haunts and gradually permeates the narrative arena, becoming part of this historical reading event. By a similar process, various narratives, like those included in these chapters, make regular if repetitious appearances on the face of Ireland’s discourse, intermittently foregrounding the original ideological journey. Nowhere is that journey more concisely outlined than in Bobby Sands’s The Rhythm of Time (in Sands, 1998). Far from seeming to colonise Achebe’s writing space, Ikem emerges from behind the actual author, as if lending him power and support from the rear, beneath or at another remove from the text. Africa is recognisable for its ‘back that is bent’ (Achebe, 1987, p. 134) by the poet Diop, but the structures of ideation at work in this novel reshuffle the usual chronological order upon which history is based. With the reorganisation of chronology, and the consequent resurrection of history, comes a symbolic unfurling of that ‘back that is bent’, and a redirection of the cast’s attention from behind to ahead. This is the redirection suggested by Sands in his ‘Comm’: ‘When the Irish people have to show the desire for freedom, it’s then we’ll see the rising of the moon’ (Sands, 1998, p. 239). The unpacking of

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historical moments which is part of this study has the power to unfurl the Irish national discourse and energise the dynamic required to construct the republic. What was regarded as the backwards Abazonian terrain becomes a way forward and the refuge to which Chris runs from the current central government. Curiously enough, the shadowing and elusive power long sensed by the reader leads increasingly back towards the oppressed. That mysterious power is the gripping desperation of Ikem’s wild savannah. The reappearance and revival of the past in the culture of the present recalls Heidegger’s comments on history’s inability to preserve the power of the beginning which, he argues, is consequently ‘emasculated and exaggerated into a caricature of greatness’ (Heidegger, 1979, p. 155). Address often occurs via these masks and there exists a subtle regard to some additional presence or hearer of Achebe’s tale. This attention to an absence implies a conscious awareness of some shortcoming or diminution of present power in meaning. That indirectness is exemplified in the early incident where Okoye visits Unoka in an attempt to collect some cowries owed him. Having remonstrated initially over who would break the kola, Okoye finally ‘said the next half dozen sentences in proverbs’. Unoka’s reply opened with a request to ‘[l]ook at that wall’. There is a conscientious attention to some extra presence beyond that of subject and object in dialogue. ‘Look at these lines of chalk’ said Unoka and Okoye saw five groups of perpendicular lines, representing debts, and ‘each stroke is one hundred cowries’ (Achebe, 1973 edn, p. 5). Addressees are reached in a round about way and the participants in any given discourse are connected through a maze of spiralling channels of communication. The debtor then goes on to invoke the support of invisible witnesses and venerated wisdom saying, ‘[o]ur elders say that the sun will shine on those who stand before it shines on those who kneel under them’. ‘Each group’ represented a debt, and ‘each stroke’ stood for a hundred cowries. He owed ‘that man a thousand’ and he would pay his ‘big debts first’ (Achebe, 1973 edn, p. 5). This ritualistic and indirect answer to Okoye’s request is spun out of the conjuring at work between visible and invisible presences in and around narratives. While that ceremony around words lends a powerful tone to Umuofian discourse, the equally disjointing hesitation coded in Okonkwo’s stammer empowers his already emerging cognitive departure. Heidegger states that ‘[a] beginning can never directly preserve its full momentum; the only possible way

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to preserve its force is to repeat, to draw once again more deeply than ever from its source’ (Heidegger, 1979, p. 191). The hero’s stammer symbolises the repetition that Heidegger argues can ‘deal appropriately with the beginning and the breakdown of the truth’ (Heidegger, 1979, p. 191). Okonkwo’s stammer recalls the troubled repetition evident in Martin Reilly’s voice and in Ireland’s national discourse. The breakdown of truth throws the nation into stammered repetition in an effort to sustain an intimate engagement with a thwarted vision. The unfurling of that stammered voice, like the unfurling of the bent back of Africa, signals a reconquest of the ideological ground. As with Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness woeful actualities are distanced and cordoned off into the realm of concept, history or primitive mystique. Describing the deadly heat of the Abazon, Ikem recounts how ‘[f]irst the pigs fried in their own fat; and then the sheep and goats and cattle choked by their swollen tongues’ (Achebe, 1987, p. 31), proceeding then to describe the grotesque human suffering one is reluctant to address. The very horror and fear engendered by such despair is an alienating factor and again the notion of cognitive and geographical boundaries emerge, where othering and oppression are key instruments in the manipulation of the truth. Interned and isolated behind the walls of a Victorian English jail, Giuseppi Conlon died a prisoner, framed on charges with which he had no connection. In terms as striking as Ikem’s description of the deadly fate of the wildlife under the scorching eye of the midday sun, Gerry Conlon describes the terrible fate of humankind at the hands of British colonialism. Recounting his experience as a framed prisoner in English jails in the Sunday Business Post of 17 May 2001, Mr Conlon describes the death of his father Giuseppi. ‘The most terrifying nightmares are the ones about my father, watching him struggle for breath. And turning blue. And dying.’ As noted above in relation to the drought-ridden regions of Africa, desperate actualities are cordoned off and naturalised behind fortresses of law and order. In a telling insight into that established order, an English judge had the following to say in relation to the reopened trial of a similarly framed group of prisoners, the Birmingham Six. On the question of their innocence he said that to arrive at the conclusion that they had been wrongly convicted would be to admit to the existence of an appalling vista of justice, of an order prohibiting a verdict of innocence. The law and order assigned to the establishment of the truth, manipulates and edits that narrative

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to sustain the established order of the status quo. What the judge proclaimed to be a likely vista of justice was an analogy for the idea that things fall apart. To admit to the men’s innocence pre-empts the awesome thought that the centre of power, the establishment itself, cannot hold. SPELL-BINDING LANGUAGE The challenge of resistance at physical and narrative levels has been the subject’s response to the oppressor’s established order of the day. The warrior spirit assumed by Okonkwo is the subject’s proffered stance against that fearsome challenge. The sceptical regard in which Okonkwo holds language leads him to associate it with an often negatively portrayed womanhood or agbala, meaning untitled. To be without a title, name or legitimacy therefore is the highest insult. It is ironical that language, the very instrument through which name and title is bestowed, is the target of this particular insult, suggesting conflicting appreciation of the dynamics of language. The narrator says of Unoka that ‘[h]is love of talk had grown with age and sickness. It tried Okonkwo’s patience beyond words.’ Similarly, we read that ‘[t]he greatest obstacle in Umofia’, Okonkwo thought bitterly, ‘is that coward, Egonwanne. His sweet tongue can change fire into cod ash. When he speaks he moves our men to impotence. If they ignored his womanish wisdom five years ago, we would not have come to this’ (Achebe, 1973 edn, p. 178). Again, the notion of language as potentially creative and simultaneously restrictive arises. Power is linked with the male and paternal authority while restriction is nominated the female role. Along with issues of gender and paternity, language with its borders and frames comes in for close scrutiny in Achebe’s work. With its recycled package of repetition and recall, discourse is seen both to restrict and to enable the agency of change. This recalls the conflicting regard for story as chief or most powerful dynamic in the emergence of sometimes vengeful and disappointed histories. While history is often the edited record of thwarted ideology, it is also the vehicle of memory. Black Kilmainham, Dr Trevor Poor Ann Devlin, never never

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Black Kilmainham Robert Emmet Hangmen wear A cruel helmet. (Pete St John, 1978) So goes the Dublin street song heard from children at play in the Irish capital. The rhyme refers to the little known story of Ann Devlin, an Irish patron of Robert Emmet’s insurrection in 1803. The tragic story of a woman who spent three years in solitary confinement in Kilmainham jail, only to die in desolation and poverty in the Thomas Street region of Dublin, haunts the present in the aspect of obscure memories like those installed in the children’s chorus. These recent echoes record the historical events of the 1806 Insurrection. Dr Trevor was the prison governor of Kilmainham, Robert Emmet was executed and his housekeeper Ann Devlin tortured and imprisoned. Issues of gender and oppression feature strongly in Things Fall Apart. The female changeling Ezinma incurs the anger of her father during the search for a token linking her to the spirit world, in a cycle of death and rebirth which allows her to elude his control. Ezinma, who he calls a ‘wicked daughter of Akalogoli’ (Achebe, 1973 edn, p. 1973), is symbolically reborn when her ‘yi-uwa’ is found, just as her father was reborn when he rejected his father. Second comings arise at regular intervals throughout history, as with the image of Ann Devlin ghosting the children of Dublin streets a century after her death. While Okonkwo’s angstridden response to the ‘womanish wisdom’ (Achebe, 1973 edn, pp. 1–178) pre-empts the attitudes and modern ways of the colonist, that very heightened prioritisation nevertheless keeps the rejected tribal discourse on the agenda. What he repressed with his father survived in his own person. Similarly, the power of Amalinze the cat and that of the wild past originally suppressed by the village founder remained in tribal discourse. Cordoning the patron Devlin behind the boundaries of Kilmainham ultimately unfurled her story into street song and memory, pre-empting a second coming in the aspect of her twentieth-century namesake Bernadette. Street song, chorus and imagery of diverse kinds serve as vehicles of memory, and the founder’s battle with the wilds in Things Fall Apart recalls another of Heidegger’s remarks. He states that man or ‘the strangest of all beings is what he is because he harbours such a beginning in which everything all at once burst from superabun-

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dance into the overpowering and strove to master it’ (Heidegger, 1979, p. 155). The masks and masquerades described in Things Fall Apart resurrect and recall the fierce battle when ‘the founder of their town engaged a spirit of the wild for seven days and seven nights’ (Achebe, 1973 edn, p. 1) repeating that overpowering beginning. However, as those masks, choruses and masquerades imply, there are other presences and meanings shadowing the main players in narrative and history generally. The street song or masquerade is an appropriate symbol of this limited ability to represent. The rather theatrical representation of masquerading power, as personified in His Excellency, is an acknowledgement of other, however elusive, powers at large amongst the Anthills of the Savannah. As already noted, the deliberate absence of power from the frontline dramatic agenda actually engenders and cultivates the absent quality of a presence or power which permeates the novel in a less tangible form. The characters’ grip on what is behind or supporting them realises a defensive dependence upon history or the already known, finished and enclosed – the dead. An historical or cultural line of defence is set against the erupting power of the other until Ikem’s channelled narrative returns the repressed history. As noted already, Chris’s arrival at the border of the Abazon revealed a fundamental and beautiful truth. The ‘searing accuracy of the poet’s eye was primed not on fancy but fact’ (Achebe, 1987, p. 208) observed Chris and it is striking that it is the creative form of poetry which so conveys the facts. That very desolate and bleak reality is what created the fiction and unreality of the government’s verdict on the ‘fine’ weather. Where oppression exists revisionism will be rampant, as evinced in the proactive rewriting of the facts during periods of conflict and recession in Ireland. To sustain a distancing otherness between itself and a painful reality, the elite had to cultivate as much unreality and fiction as possible. In that notorious channelling of Ikem’s passage into the drama, he complains extensively about ‘the weatherman on television reciting mechanically the words of his foreign mentors’ who say ‘it will be fine all over the country’ when they ‘have been slowly steamed into well-done mutton since February’ (Achebe, 1973, p. 27). The path of Ikem is the straight line of a returning truth or history. A circle is identified by Heidegger when he states that man ‘is without issue because he is always thrown back on the paths that he himself has laid out, he becomes mired in his paths, caught in the beaten track and thus caught he compasses the circle of his world’

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(1979, p. 157). The recycling momentum of Irish as of other histories forms a circle of stagnated vision which is occasionally penetrated by poets and patriots. In view of the constricting feature of repetition, Okonkwo’s stammer implies the discontinuity or lack of issue discussed by Heidegger. By his own standards Okonkwo is in fact without issue, and Ezinma’s infancy, marked as it was by a cycle of death and rebirth, reinforces Okonkwo’s sense of having been cheated of that succession. The only one of his offspring with the disposition required to succeed him in his role was by her gender rendered ineligible for that position. The prevalence of child mortality in the novel reinforces this issuelessness. The marked loss of Irish youth, as witnessed in the deaths of patriots from Robert Emmet to the ten hunger strikers, confirms this notion. The question as posed by Heidegger inevitably arises therefore as to whether or not repetition does in fact deal ‘appropriately with the beginning and breakdown of truth’ (Heidegger, 1979, p. 191) and whether indeed [r]ecalling-Is-Greatest (Achebe, 1987, p. 124) as the Ibo would have it. History’s recall and return to the beginning or the past reinforces the border between the self and issue. Boundaries mark the point of return and no return, reinforcing the ascription to them of exceptional influence when the signpost at the Abazon marked a point of distinction in the landscape. What marks the difference between the 26 counties and the rest in Ireland are a series of British spy posts, while the landscape remains perfectly integrated. The Irish nevertheless speak of the border as if commenting on the Shannon estuary or the Mountains of Mourne. The cognitive concept has implanted itself with the sureness of a natural entity. While criminalisation, normalisation and revisionism have been strategically deployed in Ireland, a certain naturalisation has occurred also. The naturalisation of what is entirely alien is a process conducted by military and narrative means, with the might of empire imposing the context while spinning out its cultural presence through the spelling and conjuring of language. The borders installed through the agency of imperialism thwart the advance of the subject’s narrative, sending history back onto the path it has already made and reinforcing that subject’s propensity to essentialise a familiar cognitive ground. Thus, and as already identified, the Irish have spent the last three decades resisting the wall of empire while suspending the construction of the Republic. Without issue, the subject is arrested, with the border marking a point of dismemberment and separation. These disjunctions and

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splits are the tools of imperialism and of the colonising strictures of binary thought. In an attempt to dispossess the other of the ideological ground, colonialism cultivates extensive illusions of separateness. Thwarted issue, as symbolised by boundaries or border is, for all the implied sterility, a most potent instrument of oppression. It is no wonder therefore that the sign at the entrance to the Abazon, identifying yet another point of disjunction and marking the provincial boundaries drawn by the British 50 years ago and more sometimes coincided so completely with reality. A question arises as to whether or not the ultimate demilitarisation or removal of the military installations from the border in Ireland will be enough to remove the cultural concept from the Irish psyche. Should the British establishment come to judge that they could demilitarise and yet sustain that border of the mind, then they will be in a good position to demilitarise. Training for victory among the Irish is therefore more than simply a matter of uniting the country and far more to do with integrating the ideological journey. Doing the joined-up writing on the national discourse is a prerequisite to that challenge and recalling the original issue or vision is the prerequisite to unleashing that narrative. Clearly imperialism with its paraphernalia of boundary and limitation initiates a sterile and disempowering pattern of repetition in its narrative and territorial subjects. So while the nation seeks to recall the ideological issue, borders and restriction inhibit the process of delivery. The birth of the Republic is therefore impeded at many complex levels. The conflict-ridden nature of language has its own contrary impact on the delivery of vision and in recalling the issue, history too withholds the future just as the maturity of the child subject is resisted by the parenting authority. While the historical moments occupying much of the analysis in these chapters are seen to relate largely to the delivery of the future, history has also a contrary role in subverting that issue or future. The border or the split is again a trump card in both the revision of the facts and in the thwarting of the ideological thrust. That vision, however, whether dumped in the safe quarters of silence and anonymity, or projected onto the grand ideal, nevertheless remains vibrant in the national psyche as evinced in its repeated recollection in song and story. The call and lure of vision has never gone away. Again, as Okonkwo’s obsessive rejection of the father kept Unoka on the agenda, so history projects an image of the subject’s potential reality, a tantalisingly elusive promise not lost on that heavily challenged

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messenger. This matter of displaced potential is again dramatised in the theatrical illustration of the absence of power among His Excellency’s governing elite. Such a disjunction between arrested development and projected potential is another of the factors contributing to the divided and disjointed ‘issue’ of history and a less visible chapter in the story of the split. Heidegger tells us that being hurls man into a ‘breaking-away which drives him beyond himself to venture forth towards being, to accomplish being’ (1979, p. 163). Man, like history, lurches towards a projected yet withheld potential, driven by increasingly divisive alienation and angst. That angst becomes terror as the subject, like Okonkwo, thrusts compulsively against the impossible challenges of meaning, even onto the threshold of death where issue is undermined at the outset. This is a feature occupying most of Irish history. Ikemefuna was killed by Okonkwo, his foster father, while Nwoye was as altered by Okonkwo’s disposition as the latter was by that of his own father. Again Okonkwo was exiled because he accidentally killed another’s son. Ireland has had its own civil strife with sibling conflict and death. Okonkwo and Nwoye were the two sons left alive and both, one way or another, were absorbed into the colonialist culture. Where Martin Reilly inherited the ideological legacy of a hundred years, inheriting the genetic memory of the nation, Okonkwo’s rejection of indigenous culture cost his issue in this respect. Okonkwo in effect was an instrument of colonialism and a fervent if unconscious revisionist. Achebe himself, educated in the international university mode, has absorbed dominant elements of foreign cultural discourse as foregrounded in the Yeatsian title Things Fall Apart, and introductory epilogue. Achebe, like Yeats, absorbed the colonialists’ language to a degree of excellence, and indeed Okonkwo’s history illustrates the predictable patterns of repression in people and groups where habits of evasion and association trace the pursuit of identity. Nevertheless, even the evaded is housed in the subject, just as Okonkwo hosted the repressed father Unoka. However, while the subject culture can house its repressed parent past, the issue of the future is problematic, as symbolised in the cycles, returns and repetitions of the plot. Yeats’ meditation on a second coming is therefore a consistent inclusion in the narrative, as personified in Okonkwo’s and Ezinma’s rebirth. Okonkwo and the father he hosts form a collection which again recalls Heidegger’s work. He states that ‘[t]he conflict of opposites is a gathering, rooted in togetherness, it

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is the logos’ and ‘[m]en are forever with the logos [permanent gathering], yet forever removed from it, absent though present’ (1979, p. 149). The tight and repressive structures of binary logic, with its borders and frames, facilitate the control of presence and absence, a system personified by Okonkwo. In fact binary thought would seem to amount to the methods and effects of repression, as unfolded in the historical experiences of the hero himself. A self-perpetuating control mechanism is at work in this binary system where irrupting power, or even ‘overpowering power’ (Heidegger, 1979, p. 149) can hold its overpowering in check making it all the more terrible. Both these novels trace and investigate terrible manifestations of power and control while simultaneously expounding the importance of spelling out the otherness locked into the silences and spaces of narrative. These awesome manifestations have already been unleashed onto these chapters through the unruly wailings of Beckett and the voices of Spenser, Farrell and Conrad. The gulfs, spaces and splits negotiated by the overtaxed subject are the corner stones of what amounts to a very sophisticated and repressive system of meaning. It is in the gift of otherness to provide a path out of those interlocking relations of power and violence. The dreamers of dreams and makers of music in Ireland had applied their gift and poets and patriots like Pearse, Tone, Emmet and Sands identified their own gifted capacity as revolutionary agents of change. Throughout Anthills of the Savannah invisible presence is acknowledged, whether through ambiguity of discursive style or the pre-emption of perceived potential. With that preoccupation comes a kind of dramatisation of the creation of meaning itself. On creating the oppressed of the north in Anthills of the Savannah , the central governing power simultaneously creates the power of that oppressed group. This is a mirror image of events in Ireland, where Dublin governments were complicit in the agenda of empire. The ‘looking back’ on the part of the key agents of the novel symbolises this dual process and the reader too participates by looking elsewhere for the might of the text than to the stage immediately set before us. As outlined in the last chapter, the unholy alliance of church–state authority in the 26 counties has for long lacked credibility, while governing authorities in the six counties has for long been exposed as masquerade. In the African context described in Anthills of the Savannah, it is the returned ‘spirit’ of the poet Ikem which initially leaks that oppressed absence back into our consciousness and he himself symbolises a compulsive return of the subject to the site of

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the oppressor. Ikem is the Martin Reilly of the African context and both parties had their energies partly usurped in the preoccupation with empire, driving their resisting focus to death. While Bobby Sands similarly lost his life in that focused resistance, a crucial change emerged with the hunger strike period. From that historical moment emerged an intimate awareness of history, and vision as ever-present though often hidden beats in The Rhythm of Time. From the early 1980s in Ireland, the integral nature of the ideological path became clearer and it remains for the Irish as a whole to proclaim that integrated vision. Again significantly Heidegger states that ‘[l]anguage – what is uttered and said and can be said again – is the custodian of the disclosed essent. What has once been said can be repeated and passed on’ (1979, p. 185). Language therefore has a dubious gift for exercising the stunting and disempowering repeats of history, and even the poet’s pursuit of an alternative is thwarted by that cognitive rhythm. The governing core suppresses a people, who in turn pursue that core as if by an irresistible drive. The demonstration to the palace in Anthills of the Savannah represents this inclination to go to the tyrant as if to find a cure for the pain inflicted. Thus oppression sustains the representation and inclusion of the oppressor. The self depends on othering therefore, and the style of self may similarly reflect itself in its other. The intense evil of hunger and pain, as endured by those living in the savannah, was the other selected by the governing caucus in its formation of self/identity and hunger has been a terrible and compelling feature of Irish history for generations. How much horror one can create might hideously reflect in a flattering way to the type of vacuous self personified by Sam and his governing elite. The inflicted pain and grotesque misery described calls forth the kind of intensity and might associated with omnipotence, or ultimate ‘governing power’ of death. Thus having selected to be othered by such a grave and fearsome foe, His Excellency and his circle perceive and identify themselves as figures of substance. By analogy it is opportune for British, Irish and diverse governments to brand rebellion as terrorism. British imperialism in Ireland has attempted to criminalise every rebellious feat in this country, while labelling patriots from Tone to Sands as terrorists. Death and imprisonment has been their repeated strategy in the colonisation of Ireland – another of the recurring features in the history of these two islands as notoriously registered in Ann Devlin’s imprisonment in Kilmainham and the attempted assassination of

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her namesake Bernadette. Repetition and cul-de-sac feature in each of the cultures of opposed parties in conflict and discursive exchanges have sustained that pattern. Unpacking the Irish national discourse must involve the release of certain baggage which empirespeak has lodged in the Irish psyche, allowing that material to return into the consciousness of the colonising culture from where it emerged. This must be demilitarisation at its best. Debunking the empire in this fashion will make room for the memory and recall rising up in the Irish national psyche, permitting the unobstructed passage of vision and the ultimate delivery of the Republic as outlined in the Proclamation and defined in the constitution of the First Dáil. The Republic and the constitution of its provisional government, the context within which the controversial issue of a just peace can be settled, has been eclipsed for decades. The crucial message of the hunger strike period lay in its capacity to retune the Irish to the ‘rhythm of time’ (Sands, 1998, p. 177) and to the integrated story of its vision, hailing the desire for freedom and The Rising of the Moon.

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The place is Dublin and the time, the latter part of the year 2001. IRA volunteers are given state funerals in the capital city. Eighty years ago Kevin Barry and nine comrades were buried in the grounds of Mountjoy prison; their lives and life projects entombed in bunkers of invisibility. The attempt to seal over the facts of our history has always verged on the absurd. The spirit of freedom, however, is more than just an innocuous or romantic idea, ghosting current events like a phantom. Finally the same government establishment that legislated for prolonged silence in this country had to answer to the past and the bodies of the volunteers were exhumed and reinterred in fitter ground. As the old Irish adage tells it: ‘The dead arose and appeared to many’ – breaching bunkers of silence and anonymity at fundamental levels of Irish history. The terror identified by Rex Taylor with regard to the issues of consent and agreement are recalled here; ‘who fears to speak’ of the 1798 Rising or of the Emmet Insurrection of 1803 fears also to speak of the current historical chapter. The fear of Treaty and Agreement, consensus and consent is only starting to be addressed. As with Achebe’s Africa, negotiations are sometimes carried through ritual and eighty years very late, we live to see an enormous ritual in the reburial of these patriots. The reinterment of Barry and his nine comrades bears something of the aspect of the Easter Rising of 1916, with its overlapping themes of death and resurrection – glorious failure and ultimate triumph – a core pattern in Irish history. Oh what glorious pride and sorrow, fills the name of ninety-eight. (Keegan Casey, 1982, p. 8) More than the remains of Barry and his nine comrades were exhumed at this time. Theirs were only some of the marginalised voices and revised stories of a past that for long has ghosted the ongoing political process. ‘The ghost of Roger Casement is beating on the door’ (McHugh, 1966, p. 334) and much spirit visits the grounds 127

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of conflict and negotiation in modern Irish history. The public lined the streets for the twentieth anniversary of the ten hunger strikers. In the same year of 2001 the public came out again for the historic funerals of Barry and his comrades – ‘The Forgotten Ten’ (An Phoblacht, 2001) of modern Irish history. In a curious turn of events, the tens and thousands of history revisit the present with a gravity befitting the historical moment. And come tell me Séan O’Farrell where the gathering is to be. (Keegan Casey, 1982, p. 8) Dublin Castle, the year 2003. There’s a great Gathering of the Clans and the call sounds out RSVP to (RIPs) Tone, Emmet, Devlin, Casement, O’Malley, Collins, de Valera, Mairéad Farrell – and Bobby Sands. All confirmed. Around and round that circular table, the talk went on – and on. Nearly all did time and so they made great remarks of the origin of the peculiar furniture – sources unknown. The thing offered to her ladyship Victoria – the thing of the first chapter. Do you remember? That round table made by the unknown social prisoner and offered to the Queen of England. Around the queer table, with its images of phantom and the occult, sat this rare assembly, and the talks began. ‘Do you remember,’ says Emmet, ‘the day the Red Coats came in and raided our house Ann?’ ‘I’ll never forget that lonely Banna Strand,’ cried Casement. ‘What about the year of the French – the Liberty, Equality and Fraternity,’ called Tone. ‘I’ll never forget that reinterment two years ago,’ says Barry. ‘Between coffins and corteges, the boys and meself didn’t know whether we were coming or going.’ ‘The grub was rough in Dartmore,’ sighed de Valera! ‘Mother Ireland get off my back,’ rounds Mairéad Farrell. ‘I didn’t do much time,’ remarked Collins, ‘And weren’t you the cute whore?’ shouts O’Malley. ‘Will you mind your language!’ warns Ann Devlin. ‘Whist – say nothing,’ chirps Emmet ‘young Bobby is going to give us a song’. The two Roberts were very close. Death to every foe and traitor, Whistle out the marching tune and hoorah me boy for freedom ’tis the rising of the moon. (Keegan Casey, 1982, p. 8)

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‘You’re after skipping a verse there,’ says Dev, but they all ignored him. It was young Emmet’s call. He was two hundred years dead, fair play to him, and it was his anniversary. It was a night of remembrance and they all recalled whatever they remembered not to forget. Personally I suspected there were things the Clan actually remembered to forget and, after all, I was taking the minutes on the day. At the time of Harry Boland’s phonecall, Mahood was writing the budget and Malone got a puncture on the way to the office. Beckett, the headcase, went to France for the season and left us all in a heap. You see Sam wrote the Trilogy into a nightmare. Eventually the other two lads had nervous breakdowns. Mahood never got off the bike and Malone developed autism, counting his way out of consciousness. I kept the stones with me the whole time, crystallising the madness into something bordering control and order. The subject ploughs a lonely furrow indeed. I’m Molloy by the way and I’m from Tipp myself. Meself, Malone and Mahood hung out together in the last century. We were as thick as thieves, in more ways than one and, like The Keening Marys (Mac Mathúna, 1990) we shared the terrifying challenge of life. Except we couldn’t sing a note. In fact, we could hardly talk. The times weren’t right for learning, never mind writing minutes. It all began of a Monday morning. I got a call on the mobile about ten o’clock. I was sure it was the Corporation but it wasn’t. It was your man Boland ringing from America. I was excited about hearing from him for he had a message from Godot for Samuel Beckett: ‘When you’re in Dublin again will you give Molloy a shout – I’ve greater things in mind for you.’ Sam, it turns out, had been charged with writing up the state of the nation. ‘You’re in charge Molloy; I’m stuck in the airport.’ I rang Sam but of course he ‘broke up’ – ‘say nothing and tell nobody my address’. But Boland rang back next day demanding the Beckett Report. The Beckett Brief was to be on Harry Boland’s desk in three weeks. The same Beckett was consumed with years of The French and some say he was never quite right anyway. Christ if we’re waiting on Godot, we’ll be here a while. It’s time to fumble with the task on hand – to the proceedings. This book emerges from a heightened awareness of the institutional framework through which meaning operates, and nobody after all knows more about it than Beckett groupies like Molloy, Malone and Mahood. Sure they were all institutionalised at one time or another.

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Mahood was crippled with the bike, Molloy was ground down gradually with an accumulating pack of stones, and Malone didn’t know if he was dead or alive. Beckett’s trilogy of awkward individuals are regularly commissioned to report on events of historical matter. Many are the awkward individuals fumbling with that administrative task and as Beckett would have it: ‘You must go on, I can’t go on’, I know so ‘I’ll go on’. (Beckett, 1979 edn, p. 382). The Irish national discourse has been submerged in a culture of victimage, a condition aggravated by prolonged silence and anonymity. While for long we have been rendered invisible through one means or another, we’ve also incurred difficulties in seeing. Patterns and processes of institutionalised interpretation factor in this blindness. As outlined in previous chapters, revisionism has projected certain blind spots onto the historical horizon, obstacles to vision that conceal the bigger picture. Empire, through its agencies of revisionism and censorship, flung a border across the national perspective, impeding vision and obstructing the national discourse. As Beckett’s eccentric fellowship indicates, difficulty arises in even telling the way forward. For republicans of the calibre hosted at the Gathering of the Clans, the challenge is to reconstruct the various historical moments of vision in order to resurrect and integrate the ideological journey. For Beckett’s Molloy the challenge is less complex, though no less difficult. He simply has to learn to speak. That is, he has to learn to co-ordinate the many scraps of information and awareness he holds, and deliver them in a comprehensible fashion through words. The problem was that his sight was somewhat obstructed. He often relied on his sense of an object rather than on a sure vision. He’s getting on now and he can’t keep dragging the stones around much longer. And besides, he saw what happened to his mates. Mahood collapsed recently trying to cycle up the Hill of Howth and Malone was heard choking out the numbers one to a hundred backwards, and in out-and-out Roman numerals. Malone was the one who was always going to be the Pope when he grew up. Molloy thought he might be losing it. There was a time Malone could have done all that standing on his head. With the two boyos written off, Molloy was left to write up Beckett’s half-finished translation of The Present State of Ireland – the state of the nation, and he was feeling the pinch. There was nothing

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for it, however, for Boland was like a madman looking for the completed draft, which was already, he roared, near ninety years overdue. So it was off to the archivists who were meeting, Molloy knew, for the Emmet anniversary and this is how he fell in with the Clan. And they were a wild, unwieldy body; fascinating, deadly, like a journey in the dark. In effect Molloy is a kind of medium, and a feckless one at that. He’d stop at nothing to ignite the fires of memory. Like Theseus and the riddle of the maze, he somehow knows that the ideological thread is the only means through which he can trace an answer to the absurdity of his surrounding world; The maze taking him to the Minotaur’s den – Dublin Castle – well before dark. Having spent years locked in the company of Malone and Mahood, it is a matter of some transition falling in with the likes of Casement, Emmet and the others. De Valera kept breaking into bouts of Irish. Beckett had never given the three lads anything but a bit of broken English and a few smatterings of French that were good for nothing except when Wolfe Tone was in a mood to reminisce on his time with Napoleon. As far as Molloy could see, the only thing this bunch of dead and alive patriots had going for them was that they could thrash out a lively debate and, when it came to partying, they let all hell loose. ‘Songs and stories, heroes of renown,’ rounds Barry, ‘hasn’t it a catchy tune?’ Molloy reckoned that if a dead man could sing in tune, he could surely co-ordinate his speech. So the living and the dead joined forces, Molloy taking the minutes – more like the centuries – of memory recorded in song, and the unseemly chorus thundering out for all their worth, in the hope that Molloy would finally write up the state of the nation. Sam Beckett had declined an invitation to the Gathering. ‘If they were still struggling at all that stuff after nine hundred years, he was damned if he was going to feck about with it at this stage. Besides he wasn’t even dead and he wondered what kind of lunacy he had written into Molloy to say he’d hang about with such a queer clientele.’ But as this unearthly entourage demonstrated, you’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t. Molloy was under pressure here – stressed out and not altogether hopeful that anything much would come of the whole thing, except that at least young Emmet would enjoy his anniversary. And he was a nice young – old fella; it was hard to date any of them; and besides, the other Robert – the Belfast lad – gave a lovely rendering of The Rising of the Moon.

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The song was the rallying call for the get-together; a sort of warning chime that periodically sprang out from the group – for the event must close at the rising of the moon. Molloy knew he must out at moonrise or forever linger in the land of the living dead. But the moon song fascinated Molloy as he had never seen, nor even met, anyone who had witnessed the so-called rising of the moon. What could it mean? He only ever saw the curvy arc that looked over the horizon at late evening. It was something like a Buddha’s belly only turned upwards, like a fat man lying on his back. The archivists – God help us – said there used to be another side to that turned-up belly and Tone himself saw it in a vision. It was probably no more than an old wives’ tale. But Molloy was used to eccentricity. Beckett ran a whole course on it in his early days. ‘Who knows, who can tell, this could be heaven or this could be hell?’ (‘Lisdoonvarna’, 1981 in Moore, 2002). Those are the words of another song, Molloy recalled; a nice lively number that was out in the late last century. But there was something comforting about that moonsong. Molloy learnt it at his uncle’s knee, that was Mahood’s Da. They were all related the Beckett bunch and some of them had a streak of the rebel in them. Anyway, Molloy was starting to remember, to recall some of the words and the tune was appealing: ‘For the pikes must be together at the rising of the moon’. (Keegan Casey, 1982, p. 8) Molloy could see it now, the image of the moon looking out from Monaghan town and over the horizon to South Armagh. It was like a curve of revelation looming out from the straitjacket of language – those cursed lines – sentences they call them. Beckett had blinded them with all those structures; words like soldiers standing in a row – an army of data that closed ranks against the likes of Molloy. It was the frontline of power in a war of attrition where meaning was supposed to consist only of what was served up by the scribes and gobshites of Radio Telefís Éireann (RTE), the national broadcasting organisation. Molloy could never get the hang of it and he always reckoned there was something more going on than anyone was tuned into. What, he wondered, if there were other parts to the moon? What if Tone was right? What if the moon was round like a football – a great big slíther like the one used in the Dublin–Tipperary hurling final years ago? Or round – like! Ach! sure the world could be round for all we know about it – them feckers in RTE would never

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tell us anyway. What then if the moon is round and if it maybe – moves – like the ball in the football final, only in a way that escaped the eye – either superslow or superfast. It might move round and round, or round and not just around. It might make shapes, revolving in spirals, with all sorts of things happening that we can’t see. How would Mahood have counted all that; a movement beyond reckoning? A hectic process of revolution defying gravity and escaping the sight of the eye. It’s out of sight altogether, thought Molloy, and yet he remembered. He remembered something about vision. It was Harry Boland on the phone, talking to someone from the States. Yeh, he was going on about Tone – your man of the Clan. Harry said that Wolfe had an uncanny edge – a twenty-twenty plus vision that allowed him to spot a thing where most of us saw close to nothing. Whatever about the capers of the moon, Molloy was certain that there were other things going on, if you could only get under the skin of the matter; if you could get down under the horizon of lines, language and borders, to see if there were other sides to the moon. But he was in the dark, stuck with the walking dead, waiting in trepidation for the rising of the moon. And he was a dead man walking unless he saw it. If there was something else going on down there, he thought, and if it was a moving and changing thing, then weren’t we well blinded all these years? Whatever the case, Molloy had a hunch that these hairy old archivists would know. After all, they had come over from the far side. He was half reluctant to bring it up in case they’d think him a bit misty and give him the by-ball altogether. Then he remembered Mairéad Farrell earlier asking Casement something about his writing. ‘Roger,’ says she, ‘how’s the Diary coming along?’ ‘Slowly Mairéad,’ says Casement, ‘it’s a thorny issue. There’s nothing black and white about it.’ No sooner had Molloy recalled this than over he slides to Casement’s side of the table. ‘Mr– sorry Sir Casement, how do you manage to make head nor tail of all those words, with their thick, stiff messages? Wouldn’t you far prefer to sing a song or somehow throw the lines and sentences up into the air to see what lands first; to see if you could get a peek in between the scattering and find out what’s hidden behind. And do you think furthermore that there’s another side to the moon, another half beneath the line of the border – sorry – horizon?’ ‘It’s Roger to you Molloy,’ says he. ‘Language – sentence – now’s there’s a thing,’ says he. ‘Sentence,’ roars Sands. ‘Between myself and Mairéad, we did more time than the lot of you put together.’ ‘Quite

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so my boy,’ says Casement, ‘and if I was British, it’s the women I’d watch. Language indeed! Conrad wrote about me you know; about power, control and all that, and really there’s nothing black and white about it.’ He went on then to talk about colonisation, as if we needed to hear about that; about power, control and what he called ‘the structuration of meaning’. We were all a bit pissed off by the end of it. ‘Language,’ says Casement, ‘is fundamentally structured around a complex web of so-called binary relationships, where black is opposite to white, orange to green, Brits opposite to Irish, and the left opposite with the rest. This form of institutionalised meaning is inadequate at many levels. Far from allowing for the grey area of the other, this system facilitates the “cut, copy and paste” that is the stuff of revisionism where the visionary journey is shredded at the editor’s desk. History is perceived to be a circular journey. As edited version of the ideological journey, history highlights a given set of events, recording them into familiar episodes in the national psyche. What the historian is not so good at, is recording “the rest”. What of the revolutionary motion that language is not well equipped to represent, the movement that relies for representation on the organisation identifying itself by that very concept. The Republican Movement sustains the memory and awareness of the revolutionary development that has occurred in Ireland over the last 900 years. While largely steering the change and movement that is the revolutionary process, republicanism too has had its vision restricted for want of the language of victory. Revolutionary motion is not always visible, even to its agents and the blinding structures of institutionalised meaning conceal the evidence of progress.’ ‘Revolutionary motion,’ rings Molloy, ‘The moon. In the name of moving balls, is there another side to it? Is it round? Does it move at all?’ ‘Don’t be daft. Old Wolfe used to ramble on about all that. The moon,’ says Roger, ‘is as triangular as the nose on your unfortunate face. Does it move though? There’s the thing.’ ‘Yes,’ says Casement ‘it’s moving alright,’ he droned and on he went. ‘The moon on the horizon can be in constant motion for all the eye can see against the straitjacket of the historical record. In Ireland, the linear concept of the border is the structural barrier to the cultural and ideological thrust. This is the political entity that marks

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the horizon of our vision, casting a blind spot over the revolutionary dynamic.’ ‘Enough said,’ rounds Molloy. ‘From where I’m standing, the border is the above and beyond; the frontline challenge forever at the top of the agenda. They never stop talking about it down in Malone’s, the cousin’s pub.’ ‘It’s up there,’ said Molloy, ‘with all the big issues,’ he roared, ‘and the twenty-six county gaze is locked in that direction,’ and on went Molloy for the worst part of an hour. ‘Like so many factors impacting on the politico-historical context, this boundary has lodged itself not only in Irish history, but in the Irish psyche too. We speak of “the border” as if commenting on a natural geographic structure like the Shannon estuary or the Mountains of Mourne, and this is the spectre stamping the nationalist perspective throughout the country. The border is the spectre and phantom haunting the entire politicocultural context. For republicans “down here” in the twenty-six however, the situation gets more complex because England to the right is the immediate challenge and obstacle to freedom. With eyes up and eyes right, we have little vision “left” for the rest, that is, the very ground from where we make our analysis. In fact “the Left” has been lost in this cross-eyed perspective, where the ideological ground was forgotten, confused and locked in the past. The trick is to harvest that past and create the infrastructure for the future.’ He scanned the room for reactions, only recovering his flow before Dev managed to steal the ground. The late president had a habit of that. ‘Memory,’ Molloy continued relentlessly, ‘is the lens through which we in the South see the ground we’re standing on and we look at the present through images of that past, and at the expense of a concrete vision of the future. The history of the twenty-six counties is not only a record of times past, but the return and reinvention of that past in the present. The spectre of an absent identity looks up and over the phantom border, and nationalists above and below stare at that barrier like children locked out from a sweet shop. Like our compatriots in the six counties, the people of the South are alienated from their own voice and people. More than a bit of ground is involved here. The entire intellectual and cultural perspective has been displaced, and our discourse split. From the twenty-six county perspective, the present amounts largely to a regurgitation of the past. That perspective has undergone critical surgery and amounts to a cut, copy and paste of selected memories and historical moments. Many of those moments/memories are of glorious defeat, sometimes

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solidifying into a burden of guilt, as for instance in the signing of the Treaty. At the stroke of a pen, the South was displaced from the people and place of the six counties, while our own people were dispatched to oppression and discrimination. That dispatch was signed, sealed and delivered from the South. We not only lost the ground up there, but we lost the rest, the twenty six as well. From the signing of that agreement, we forgot about the present ground from where we stare variously up to the border and across at an empire. While silence and anonymity were major consequences of the signing of the Treaty, memory suffered in the same way. We forgot what we were originally about and lost the grip on the future. These are traces in a virus of amnesia that has allowed empire and revisionism to steal the ideological ground from where we look at and identify ourselves.’ ‘Touché,’ calls Casement, ‘It’s a remembrance night and I propose a revision course that will revitalise the national memory.’ ‘Yeh!’ says Molloy, ‘but the Irish experience is more complicated. ‘Relentless return to the past reinforces the border between the nation and its potential regeneration or “issue” – what we are and what we are capable of delivering. A border has been flung between the past and the possible future and boundaries mark the point of return and no return, reinforcing the ascription to them of strong influence when boundaries are perceived to exist where there are none. The concept of border is a loaded one in that it reinforces the sense of incompleteness and unfinished business. The story of the colonised place is one of incomplete histories, with empire focusing us on boundary and limitation, while astutely deflecting the visionary thrust. What marks the ground between the six counties and the rest in Ireland are the remaining British spy posts, while the landscape remains perfectly integrated. The border of the mind has implanted itself with the sureness of a natural entity. While criminalisation, normalisation and revisionism have been strategically deployed in Ireland, a certain naturalisation has occurred also. The naturalisation of what is unreal and alien is a process conducted by military and narrative means, with empire imposing the context, lodging its military presence in landmarks and its cultural presence in the language of the border. The borders installed through the agency of imperialism thwart the advance of the future, sending history back onto the path it has made already. The Irish have glared for over eighty years at a border, while suspending the construction of the Republic.’

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‘The Republic is dead; long live the Republic. We haven’t even got rid of the border yet,’ says Ernie and he threw a deadly glance at Dev. ‘Our vision,’ Molloy continues, ‘was arrested, with the border marking the separation. We have done our time on the border, splitting on the very concept. The split is the trump card of imperialism and of its colonising agency – revisionism. In an attempt to dispossess us of the ideological ground, colonialism cultivates extensive illusions of separateness. A thwarted vision as symbolised by the border is, for all the implied sterility, a potent instrument of oppression. A question arises as to whether or not the ultimate demilitarisation or removal of the military installations from the border in Ireland will be enough to remove the cultural concept from the Irish psyche. Should the British establishment come to judge that they could demilitarise and yet sustain that border of the mind, they will be in a good position to demilitarise, leaving a border in the national psych where we would be incapable of grasping the big issue, that is, the concrete vision of the future. Training for victory among the Irish is therefore more than simply a matter of uniting the country and far more to do with integrating the ideological journey. Doing the joined-up writing on the republican ideology is a pre-requisite to that challenge and recalling the original issue or vision is the pre-requisite to unleashing that story.’ Molloy looked down at his watch. It was half past six. He didn’t know he could ramble on so long. ‘Feck,’ says he, ‘sorry lads. It’s only a few hours to moonrising and I haven’t a chapter written yet.’ ‘We missed the Angelus,’ exclaims Ann Devlin. ‘Yes!!’ beams Tone, and ‘Well done son, yourself and Casement are after firing up some good stuff there. Sure that’ll do for The Introduction, and who’ll be reading it anyway?’ ‘Boland will,’ and, ‘it all sounded a bit misty to me,’ says O’Malley. ‘Solid crap,’ added Collins, for once agreeing with him. ‘Micheál, I warned you to watch that language,’ and ‘I thought that was grand boys,’ says Ann, and so it was agreed that they had finally introduced the state of the Nation. ‘Right,’ commands Tone, ‘run down to the basement and log The Introduction.’ ‘Roger General!’ Molloy responds, and off he went with the dispatch. ‘Did someone call me,’ says Casement. ‘You’ve said enough Roger,’ rounds Dev. ‘Let someone else get a word in.’ ‘Wee Molloy doesn’t look a bit well,’ says Mairéad, when he was gone. ‘I worry about him sometimes,’ adds Barry. ‘I worry about the lot of ye when I hear ye rambling on like that,’ grinds Tone. ‘We’re not a bunch of quacks you know. This isn’t a clinic.’ ‘Hold on a

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minute,’ adds Sands, ‘It’s like the Brits talking about “the Irish problem” when in fact it’s a Brit problem. It’s the same thing with Molloy. If he’s sick, it’s the system – the so-called norm, that sickened him.’ ‘You see,’ and he goes on eloquently ... ‘While reality is commonly perceived as a neutral formulation of meaning based upon objectively understood events, the story in fact is not so straightforward. While we here, Emmet, Casement, Barry and the rest are the experts called up to divulge the ideological journey, it can fall to the fictional character to describe the intricacies of the maze of meaning. Not only is meaning organised along highly institutionalised lines reflecting distinct and resolute agendas of its own, it furthermore harbours drives and compulsions of a most complex and involved kind. The very intensity and power of those urges reinforce its obsessive preoccupation with control at every level and location in its constitution, an administration organised around a despotic arrangement of binary structures. Molloy and company are driven to absurd measures in the attempt to trace the passage of meaning. Authority over the passions trafficking through its system is facilitated by the tightly knit laws and clauses forming the institution of meaning. Such rigorous monopoly amounts to systematic self-control on the institutional model. The draconian oppression required to discipline its impassioned nature instigates the application of the most tyrannical and vigorous governance throughout the cognitive system. An unruly subjectivity in meaning strains that governance to capacity in an engagement with the most compelling and tantalising energies, which ultimately undermine the delineating influence of cognitive structures. The standard story of meaning, with its assumption of objective neutrality, is disrupted by the stresses and tensions of the anxious and urgent drives straining at its borders. Such contradiction between its packaged profile and passionate identity manifests itself in the responses and reactions of meaning’s active subjectivity. Beckett’s trilogy documents the strains and tensions of such conflicting inclinations, manifesting the dilemma in the person(s) of Molloy, Malone and Mahood. The juggling, heaving consciousness of this threesome engages in various strategies and patterns designed to cope with its raw response to the impact of meaning. Molloy applies his entire ingenuity to devise a system of handling and hosting his cognitive arena. The stones with which his reason is cast are carefully spun to inscribe his total capacity, with mouth and pocket co-operating in shared commitment to the desired equilibrium. Malone devotes a

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lifetime’s demise to the vigorous exercise of the same undertaking, employing the heaving and contracting muscle of his mental faculty to the awesome task of controlling an erratic cognitive world. Molloy’s juggling antics, with the heaving rhythm of Malone’s calculated labours, pre-empt the illustration of the ultimate strategy of control inherent to language itself.’ ‘The system and it’s bloody language,’ exclaims Sands. ‘Watch it,’ says Ann and Bobby smiled and carried on. ‘The recourse to and recall of metaphor and image as practised in language recalls the dexterous handling of wayward rune and contracting dynamic. Mahood’s scrupulous challenge to the messages and generalisations transmitted through meaning foregrounds the explicitly unquestioned and habitual nature of language as prime cognitive administrator. Once acquired, the linguistic technique of word and sign is as self-perpetuating and automatic as riding Moran’s bike, the trick being to remain heedless of the actions and interactions involved. Mahood, however, pesters himself relentlessly with the absurdity and illogicality of meaning and language, forever questioning and researching the sense of his own thinking processes. His difficulty in securing a balanced equilibrium on the cognitive tide is therefore heightened, a strain causing him to grasp erratically at the frames and forms of language. Caught between an intense sensitivity to the absurdity and a simultaneous sense of that complex system, his consequent insecurity causes him to study and scrutinise it until he develops an exhausted passion for silence. Silence would defuse the entire volatile chaos into colourless and contourless control and stands furthermore for the ultimate dissolution of binary structures as realised through the subject’s engagement with its “own story”. Mahood of course “must go on” until, like another word, he is found, “until they say me”. Hazarding the challenge to open his hushed story he, like Theseus, becomes its tyrannous author, thereby undermining the delineations defacing his history. The “strange pain” of the subject before the threshold of his story is an aggravated symptom of the dreadful stress and tension in which he is submerged. For all his labours as vital bearer of meaning’s message and agenda, Mahood’s sole prospect and aspiration is to “go on”, questioning the silence that cannot answer him, since “in the silence you ...”, you “simply don’t know”’ (Beckett, 1979 edn, pp. 71–392). ‘You better catch yourself on here,’ shouts Collins, ‘or you’ll have Pearse down on us in a flash.’ ‘Yes well, that was a bit dense,’ says

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Mairéad. Bobby took a reddner; embarrassed to death. He was always a terrible deep thinker and the whole atmosphere sent him into the realms of the surreal altogether. ‘What the hell was all that about?’ blurted O’Malley, and poor Bobby cringed altogether. ‘Yera cheer up and give us a bar of a song Bob,’ says Emmet, and there we were again – staring and bleating at The Rising of the Moon. And come tell me Séan O’Farrell, tell me why you hurry so … (Keegan Casey, 1982, p. 8) ‘Stopagaí, stopagaí,’ says Dev, ‘a bit of ciúnas. Micheál will give a recitation.’ ‘I will in me arse,’ says Collins, and Ann Devlin nearly hit the roof. ‘Sorry Áine,’ says Mick, ‘I lost the run of meself there for a minute. Will you not give us a turn yourself?’ ‘I’m not a singer and I know nothing about poetry,’ she says. ‘But there’s something about what that Molloy and young Bobby were saying that put me in mind of that Greek story about the Minotaur and The Riddle of the Maze. It must be the thoughts of that jail where you died Robert in the last century.’ ‘It’s only twenty years ago,’ Mairéad intercepted. ‘Anyway, give us the tale about the maze and the mortar, Minotaur or whatever you call it.’ ‘Well,’ starts Ann, ‘history, as you well know, is a discreet and edited record of those disappointed, though endorsed, aspirations of meaning and it is that apparently objective and neutral package that passes for reality. Sensitive attention to the flow and fortune of that record unveils its frustrated project and attests to reality’s however unrealised aspirations to a greatness iconised in its cognitive ideal. The journey of the narrative subject reflects that of the elusive ideal projected from the visionary ranks of meaning as it exudes its rich intention in the ideational packages carried by the subject through the lonely furrows of history. The grand ideas radiated by meaning are inadequately represented by the system of codes and signs with which the subject is equipped in order to ferry and convey them. The painful consequence of that incapacity is demonstrated by Beckett’s company of subjects. Mahood speaks disturbingly of the schismatic quality of the subject’s dilemma as it wrestles with the maze of meaning. Theseus’s negotiation of the Cretan labyrinth and his conquest over the Minotaur incorporate some of the features involved in relations of power and powerlessness. The Minotaur slept, confident of the labyrinth’s inhibiting capacity, while Theseus approached and killed him. Whether

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Theseus volunteered to become one of the victims to be devoured by the Minotaur or whether the lot had fallen on him, he nevertheless initially had to assume the particular affliction of the doomed Athenians. From there on in, and out again, it was the tension and momentum of just that adverse impetus which motivated and sustained the pursuit of deliverance. Daedalus’s magic ball of thread, gravitating assuredly along a prelaid path, took Theseus through the maze. The thread’s charmed capacity was based on the requirements of just such a complex and vital expedition, and was engendered as a solution to the problematic conundrum of the maze. Again, the motivation for Theseus’s quest emerges from the trial he undergoes, his undertaken affliction, implying the riddle-like arrangement of meaning which, in posing its many enigmas, launches the pursuit and procurement of corresponding replies. Riddles, like all questions, are answered rather than solved. The riddles and challenges of Theseus’s mythical quest recall the less ostentatious though equally complex conundrums embraced by Molloy here. Beckett packages his subject in the tortured and tattered garb of the anti-hero whose negotiation of reality describes the excruciating turbulence of meaning. Molloy’s eccentric response to that reality is vividly portrayed in the very involved and rigid ceremony he conducts with the pebbles he distributed equally between his four pockets in an intricate attempt to suck his 16 stones consecutively.’ ‘Will you do it for us now Molloy?’ roars Emmet. ‘Go on me boko,’ shouts Ernie, ‘the trick with the stones?’ Molloy near died and he excused himself and went to the Jacks. ‘While Molloy is at the Fir,’ says Ann, ‘I’ll give you the score on Beckett. Beckett was always aware of a pivotal and fundamental discontinuity in meaning and interpretation. Participation, however playful in the often absurd though challenging intellectual feats proffered by fiction, foregrounds for our attention the regular and voluntary departure from reality involved in reading. Exchanging one world for a fictional model is the common version of Molloy’s less orthodox performance. His exhaustive exercise with the stones is an attempt to round off what he sensitively encounters as an eccentric or off-centre cognitive world by disjoining and detaching it into manageable parts. Molloy takes his world, perhaps in sixteenths, and touches, smoothes and sucks it for all its stony pleasures. Narratives permit something of the same control and accessibility for the reading and interpretative fold, so that an otherwise massive and magnificent cognitive chaos can be grasped and tasted. The unman-

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ageable mass that is meaning promotes a desperate inclination to sever and sub-divide on many complex levels, as demonstrated through the readings incorporated in this work. Amid the anarchy and complexity of the world of meaning, such rituals and ceremonies are as predictable as the accommodating adaptations ensuing from Molloy’s unbending knee or his impossible quest to suck sixteen stones in a delightfully co-ordinated sequence of cycles.’ It was twenty past eight at this stage and the state of the nation was looking dire enough. Molloy started to get really anxious and decided to leave the room again to try to get his thoughts together and to write up the copious notes taken from Bobby and Anne’s recent reflections. No sooner had he left the room than the archivists started to compare their own notes on his condition. He was the modern man, the quintessential Irish of the twenty-first century – or so Beckett had assured them. ‘Where the blazes did ye dig him up from?’ roared Collins. ‘You’re a fine one to talk. He came on the highest recommendation,’ says Tone. ‘Boland himself commissioned him.’ ‘Harry is too long over there listening to the Yanks. He’s loosing his touch altogether,’ says Collins. None of them knew that it was Beckett who was supposed to write the report on The Present State of Ireland and that Molloy was only drafted in at the last minute. ‘Well this is our gettings,’ says Childers, ‘and anyway, I think we’ve something to go on here. I got a preview of Beckett’s work and I agree with Ann. Like the story of the Minotaur, it has plenty to say about the state of the Irish, nevermind the state of the nation,’ and off he goes ... ‘While neither Beckett nor any of us give a fiddler’s curse ’bout the same stones, Molloy nevertheless conjures with them ceremoniously like a dancer over some fateful runes. His sophisticated ritual over his teasing conundrum recalls again the more dramatic and heroic efforts recorded in Greek mythology. Tracing the path of the maze, Theseus’s guiding thread assumes its structure and shape, becoming that labyrinth, while simultaneously dissolving its riddlelike aspect. In “answering” the riddle of the maze, the thread disarms it, while at the same time taking on its very structure. Like Theseus, in order to find the answer one must become the riddle, whether by choice or by lot. In order then to travel with the answering thread, the subject must be constantly afflicted with the question. In an impossible dilemma, one comes to house both thread and question, compelled to be contaminated with the awesome enigma while

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managing to survive under its weight. To abandon the enquiry or quest therefore would be to lose oneself to its repressive energy. However, survival under that repression extracts the constant vigilance of the attentive surveillant making a way through the deadly labyrinth, an attention no less compelling than that of the juggling Molloy in pursuit of equilibrium and control.’ ‘That’s all Greek to the lads on the ground and what’s so amazing about the Theseus yarn?’ O’Malley asks. ‘In the matter of the maze,’ Childers goes on, ‘the fear is not that the thread will be lost since it is after all just this fibre which managed to make its way through the maze. Neither is the survival of the monitored stones of grievous concern, as witnessed in Molloy’s ultimate discarding of them. The maze, however, amounts to the pre-laid path awaiting that string and so the thread survives as long as the maze exists. Similarly, Molloy’s repeating and recycling ritualistic antics survive in conjunction with the overwhelming cognitive chaos of reality. The thread and the ritual, like the tension of the debilitated subject, will always remain. Numbed by the intensity of its afflicted disposition the subject loses its way on its cognitive journey, a disturbing notion at the core of Beckett’s work when Molloy all-but loses the thread of his own history. Nevertheless, he stumbles and toils exhaustively with the however debilitated remnants of a narrative path, hauling his afflicted baggage through the most tormented passage. Recalling Theseus’s difficult and enigmatic maze, Molloy’s passage and pursuit is entwined in his tortured identity. In order to recall his elusive history he must sustain the tyrannical life of that straying story. At whatever cost to himself in the currency of pain and misery, Molloy is compelled to perpetuate the ever-afflicting and annihilating story of reality. Like the thread assuming and thus perpetuating the ways and turns of the maze, Molloy must juggle with and conjure to the chaos and impossibility that is reality. For all his exertions Beckett’s prodigy knows he will never exercise the degree of command and control ensuring a feast of sequence and order. He persists nonetheless because he has become the chaos and turbulence of reality, as expressed in his absurd and ritualistic dance among the stones. The dance is an exhibition of the disjunction in that maddening and massive world where Molloy abstracts a barely manageable zone or forum over which he enjoys an however afflicted hold. His ludicrous ritual perpetuates and even celebrates that cripplingly oppressive world. Such tolerance is less baffling when it is noted that, having

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absorbed its compelling chaos, Molloy after all lives off that ritualistic relationship. The subject thus survives for the length and duration of the thread or the dance.’ ‘Childers was always a dark horse,’ Ernie mutters. ‘That Damned Englishman,’ (Cox, 1975) moans Collins. ‘What?’ rounds Casement, and the atmosphere grew tense. ‘Bring in Molloy again till we get another look at him,’ calls Dev. And a fine spectre he was by this time – ten to nine on a Saturday night, and he gunning for a pint. ‘Are you still fustering with them stones?’ Mairéad asks kindly. ‘It’s all about control,’ says O’Malley, ‘you see it in the jails.’ ‘Molloy couldn’t do a day. Look at the state of him and we haven’t half finished with him yet.’ ‘He’s as naive as fuck, I can read him like a book.’ ‘Oh Holy God,’ says Ann. ‘I read your stuff Ernie,’ says Dev. ‘What was it again? The Singing Game or something?’ ‘The Singing Flame’ (O’Malley, 1997). ‘Flame’ flamed O’Malley. ‘What do you make of Adams’s stuff – Before the Dawn?’ (Adams, 1996, p. 1). ‘Ed Spenser read it five times I’m told,’ says Casement. ‘Obsessive was Spenser – autistic I’d say – a bit like Molloy and the twenty-first centurians.’ ‘Grand song,’ says Emmet, ‘Night was darkest just before the dawn, from dissention Ireland is reborn?’ And it’s a grand September evening. ‘Danny is a writer too,’ says Mairéad. ‘What was it The Wrong Man?’ (Morrison, 1997). ‘I read that,’ says Emmet. ‘Now there’s a tale of life and earth, chaos and control,’ and he goes on – and on ... ‘The preoccupation with control in meaning not only attests to its relative absence in the subject, but also to its very abundance in that same dauntless agency. Like the wild Irish of Spenser’s report, the cognitively disadvantaged boy in Conrad’s The Secret Agent, or the betrayed and informing subjects of Morrison’s The Wrong Man, it is the ferrier surveilling and handling the explosive cognitive baggage who engages in the self-annihilation and fearless selfdestruction involved in meaning. Molloy wonders whether or not his mother was dead enough to bury before his own birth. His dedication to the dissolution of chaos persuades Molloy that even the ultimate and thing-less subversion of death can be juggled, counted and rounded into order. Spenser had always said that the Irish were reckless in the face of death. He perceives a passage of death where gradually, through various crippling, annihilating and laborious strokes, he can ride the deadly tides of meaning while tentatively staying afloat. As afflicted, disadvantaged and debased anti-hero, Molloy’s unfetching characteristic is the awareness he has stumbled to, by choice or by lot, that his ongoing demise is his major

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asset. The offerings of subjectivity required by the cognitive monster in order to satiate itself can be denied by the subject, who starves the beast, and thus starves itself, to that dangerous and yet controlled capacity.’ Molloy started to nod off. He was thinking about death and a sudden memory flashed through his mind. He remembered that other September evening two years ago when he got another of those wild calls from America. It was Boland. ‘God save us,’ says Harry. ‘Get onto Sam,’ he roars. ‘The airports are closed, the whole continent is down. Is everyone all right there?’ ‘Wake up Molloy,’ shouts Collins. ‘God but he’s dozy.’ Emmet was still going on about Mahood and some unnameable thing Beckett had written about long after his time. ‘Mahood,’ says Emmet, ‘hears his very deafness, so acutely alert is he to the baffling predicament of his cognitive reservation and doubt. The story of history is the story of that awareness and the self-referentiality attendant upon such surveilling sensitivity implies that history is finely tuned to the subjectivity borne through its constitution. The theme of this piece, as of the other two of Beckett’s trilogy, relates to the negotiation of meaninglessness and absurdity, though Mahood’s engagement rings out a less mirthful interaction. Where Molloy’s idiosyncrasies and Malone’s grim resolution incite a heartier response, The Unnameable throws open the flood-gates of pain, taking us to “the door that opens on [our] own story”. Seeking to frame the unnamable something with which he can call, recall and recognise himself, Mahood screeches out for them to say or “try something else”. Belonging neither to mind nor world, he is “the tympanum” wishing desperately to hear. History is the struggling and stammering register of an often desperate cognitive deficit forever to the fore of the enlivening consciousness accompanying interpretation. That chronicle tells the often disillusioning story of the debilitated subjects in its wake, describing in fact the subjectivity of meaning itself. This clowning and frolicking discourse, according to Mahood, keeps “on saying the same thing when they know it’s not the right one”. He feels “nothing of all that” which history repeats and recycles in its baffling yarn and which amounts to the story of the subject’s silence. Without voice or discourse and denied issue as depicted throughout this study, the subject is forever estranged from the cognitive structures it haunts and visits from marginal and occluded positions. Mahood “alone [is] immortal” since he “can’t get born” into a familiar consciousness, while

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“generation after generation” “keep on saying the same old [estranging] thing”’ (Beckett, 1979 edn, pp. 71–382). ‘Now that rings a bell, doesn’t it?’ says Mairéad. ‘We keep on saying the same old things, generation after generation.’ That’s what drove the brothers Malone and Mahood mad – hearing the same old thing over and over, like a flashback on rewind. Molloy himself was near driven too at this stage and he started to get dreadful flashbacks of some garbled conversation between Sam and that other lunatic Yeats – it was one of the worst moments of his life. Molloy would never forget it. He walked in on the two in the middle of a séance one night and they were channelling through to some other God-forsaken entity, discussing you guessed it – not the Trinity but The Trilogy. He could hear Mahood’s name being mentioned a few times, in some kind of a prophetic prognosis of what would become of them all. It terrified him and nothing since would convince him but that everyone was talking about them behind their backs. He could catch them from this end – God knows what they were saying from d’other end. Beckett was going on something like this: ‘The systematic and repetitious movement of history is the broad narrative or story of the conjuring gyres and muscling rhythms of the labouring subject as he harrows the cognitive terrain between launch and arrival. Gradually Mahood/Worm finds his “thickness” and feels the words without a mouth, since, as Beckett again put it, “the words are everywhere”, inside and outside him. Worm’s thickness is felt and gagged against the rhythmic impact of external and internal limits. How far he strains and how deeply he is pained is the measure of meaning and the pulsating energy in between is the masse and life of the labouring subject. “I’m all these words” asserts Mahood, “this dust of words, with no ground for their setting”. In addition he finds that the words come together to say that he “is something quite different, a quite different thing, a wordless thing in an empty place”. However cool a comfort to the quiet listening subject so “like a caged beast born in a cage” or a “cold black place”, that acknowledgement of his difference is at least a sighting of sorts. Inspired by this moment of linguistic recognition Mahood goes on to voice and identify his ever present fear, fear even of “the sounds of men”. He procures a rejuvenating interval then in the comforting security of arithmetic, multiplying by ten or a thousand, until finally brought to “give in” to the notion of an “I”.

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“[T]here is I, on the one hand, and this noise on the other”, an assessment he never doubted. Mahood’s scrupulous and tireless study of each consecutive notion, as ensuing throughout the emerging pages, depicts the relentlessly enigmatic landscape within which he labours after meaning. Who speaks hears and how he “manages” to do so, along with endless other queries and pestering uncertainties, provides the context for the unnamable theme of this work. Applying himself to the conjuring capacity which was the resort of Molloy and Malone, Mahood multiplies his way towards an amount or summed-up self. Having settled upon such basic ground rules, his plight among the tides and conundrums of the absurd becomes less dreadfully incapacitating. Mahood stumbles upon the coping mechanism of structured meaning and language and rides that machine like Moran’s bike. “Going on” to tirelessly and tediously dissect each cognitive item emerging to consciousness, he manages nevertheless to control and cope with the tempestuous flow. The straying particles or “dust of words” [Beckett, 1979 edn, pp. 71–382] bombarding his mind are juggled and managed much as Molloy handled the cartwheeling stones encircling his identity. Language therefore is displayed as another of the many vital, if neurotic, coping devices or side effects of the virus of meaning. Dividing that unruly maze into hundredths, thousandths and millionths, Mahood organises chunks of cognitive material into stilled and caged packages.’ Molloy could see Sam now, gazing and gaping at some straying notion, grabbing the thought and shooting it with some garbled conglomeration of words that threw everything up in the air. Mahood thought he was mad and Malone nearly died at the very sight of him. But Molloy kind of enjoyed Beckett. He felt at home in the vast spaces and silences conjured up by Beckett’s play on words. He remembered it well – the smell of Sam’s pipe. It was like smelling the rising season or the oncoming rain. The memory soothed him. Molloy was nodding off again. ‘Are you still with us?’, roared Dev and Molloy jerked back into a consciousness of the scene around him. ‘I’m a bit concerned here,’ says Dev. ‘It’s nine thirty and, according to the ancients, the moon will rise up shortly. If we don’t get the cursed state of the nation in order, we’ll have to come back here in another hundred years.’ ‘Go mbeidhimid beo ag an am seo arís,’ he adds. ‘What’s the rush.’ says Tone, ‘sure we’ll be a long time dead.’

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But this was the ninth Gathering of the Clans and, to be honest, everyone was a little impatient. There was a great resolve not to let things drift into a tenth century running, with nothing to show but disparate chapters of an ideological journey, which, however ingenious, had not been stitched together. ‘We’re going to sew this up this very night,’ said Collins, ‘I’m not going back without the Report.’ ‘The last paper you took anywhere caused nothing but havoc,’ roared O’Malley. The Treaty dominated the last nine gatherings and there was a ban on raising it at this one. ‘The Treaty of 1921 is not on the agenda this century for the very good reason that our comrades on the ground are currently negotiating Agreement on that whole issue,’ said Sands. But tension filled the room again and Wolfe Tone exploded. ‘What in hell is taking them that long to sort out The Republic?’ They all felt for Wolfe. He had given his life and his considerably long death pursuing the same Republic and it was incumbent upon them all to show results. Molloy was called upon to give an update. ‘What’s the last word from home?’ he was asked, and again he fumbled through the mess of words and rhetoric to show them something, anything, that would make sense. A cloud fell over him and again the thick, stupid slots of meanings came tumbling down around him. All these rigid words falling in like warriors holding the front line. If he could only shift them somehow, blow them away to show the under belly of that rising moon. He pleaded with Tone. ‘You saw it, you know – tell them.’ Casement coaxed him to relax, calm down – ‘Every little thing would be all right’ – and Roger went on to explain for poor auld Tone the very protracted nature of the ideological journey. He quoted one of the bright sparks on the ground: ‘The revolutionary must learn to wait,’ says Casement, ‘I learnt that the hard way.’ and he went on to explain. ‘For all the drive and ingenuity applied by history in the pursuit of its own desired identity, the inaccessible gap between meaning and its ideal remains and that vision is compacted into impenetrable ideals. Ideology is in turn the record of those visions or aspirations, however aloof, just as history is the register of the recurring experience of disappointed endeavour personified in the overtaxed subject. The inaccessible intangibilities of meaning are documented in the enigmatic chapters of ideology. These two grand narratives engage, each animating the other with the energy of an enlivening consciousness commuting between them. Meaning strains towards

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its grand ideal through history, the narrative record of its disappointed subjectivity. Both historical and ideological registers relate in the often tortuous way of life called reality, with the former existing as an image, however shortfallen, of the visions ensconced in ideology. History is the story of the cognitive subject straining after and brushing against an image of the ideal.’ Just then the phone rang. God between us and all harm but it was Beckett ringing in his apologies for missing the Gathering. ‘I see my name is being bandied about here – probably mediating through the good man Molloy.’ Molloy near died but then he needed all the help he could get here. ‘Of Molloy’s condition I’ll say this,’ Beckett remarked, ‘The extensive and recurring spaces and silences in meaning are symptoms of obstruction, repetition and the desire for control. I can attest to a subject history’s attempt to become its ideal. History is condemned like Mahood to travel a middle ground between the great and the weak, juggling measured portions of each in its path. This challenge recalls that of Theseus engaged in the demystification of the maze. In order to answer its conundrum the subject, like the thread, must become the maze occupying the middle ground between its annihilating challenge and its threatened victim. Mahood “must go on”, having no wish to arrive. He is both victim and instrument of an elaborately oppressive cognitive system. The story of his life and times demystifies and answers the great conundrum of meaning, while perpetuating its ever elusive momentum. The dust of narrative on the historical subject is the repeated undertaking of that ancient challenge and the ultimate demonstration of the nature of subjectivity. To answer, solve or challenge the monstrous virus of meaning one must become its subjected carrier and antidote, its afflicted though powerful equal. Subjectivity is therefore not a polarised opposite to power or objectivity, but its “own story”, that of the empowered Mahood submerged into the constitution of meaning itself. At great cost, as dramatised unsparingly by my heroes, the subject undermines and dissolves the binary straitjacket of meaning, answering its absurd riddles and arresting its annihilating agenda. Having extended itself along the maze and absorbed that tortuous structure, the thread becomes the maze. The solution or dissolution of that threatening conundrum would therefore simultaneously eliminate the thread. That deadly pact between maze and subject recalls the equally empowered relationship between history and meaning where the

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fortunes of one dictates that of the other. Becoming its own story, the subject is at one with the forces framing its history. Silence is the image and symbol of this dissolution.’ ‘And what?’ says Collins, ‘we have to wait, hang on in silence? Sure we haven’t heard a word from that lot down there since they got into anti-interrogation mode, afraid to open their mouths in case the Brits would put something in there.’ But he said no more for he knew he was as much to blame because nobody would write a word or sign anything since he came home with that Treaty. The talk had grown very complex and it had something to do with riddles – unsolved questions and mysteries. Factors were locked in opposition against each other, where animosity at one end sustained the equally lodged opposition at the other end. Things were poles apart – separate and cold. Molloy had all but perished under the chilly glare of all those isolated words storming his every waking moment. He simply couldn’t get one word to talk to the next. He could never do it. So he had silenced the whole lot, held his breath and when he was about to choke, he played the stones, swirling them around like a moving circle – the lovely ball winding round and round and saying everything. Molloy juggled his surrounding world into a wonderful spin of predictability and precision. The wheel of stones spoke for him and it was a glorious relief. But by now he was tired of juggling and wanted another wheel that would talk all by itself. The moon, he thought. If it could only move – round and round like a great big beautiful stone. Molloy craved freedom of speech – to be able to talk as smoothly as his ear could trace that lovely tune – The Rising of the Moon. He felt that if only his notion could be confirmed. His notion that there really is another side to the moon. He pleaded with Tone to tell him, once and for all. Tone reflected upon modern human’s blindness, silence and inability to see, say, sign or deliver. ‘You can’t see the full picture Molloy,’ he said, ‘because your mind is always in a state of eclipse. Now you see things, now you don’t. You can’t hold a vision or a focus upon the horizon because you’re forever falling into amnesia. You forget as soon as you learn and you’re silent when you speak. We come here every hundred years to still the picture, bending time in order to create memory. The halfmoon you see is the mark of memory arising and going at once. The moon is not in eclipse. Your mind is.’ God but they all felt sorry for Molloy and the twenty-first-century Irish. So what about The State of the Nation? ‘How many times have I said that when the Irish have the desire for freedom to show, it’s

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then we’ll see the rising of the moon,’ says Bobby. ‘Too right,’ says Tone, ‘they could see it if they fecking well wanted. I’ll be damned if I come back here in another hundred years trying to sell ye the Republic.’ ‘But,’ Molloy cried, ‘I dearly want to see the full moon. There’s nothing I want more than to have the big stone. A big talking, revolving moonstone that would finally make me and everyone free.’ At that Molloy was allowed out to refresh himself and the archivists set about updating their prognosis on The State of the Nation as based on the state of the twenty-first-century human. The diagnosis read as follows: • • • • •

Obstructed speech Semi-literate Impaired vision Acute amnesia Chronic stupidity

Prognosis: The twenty-first-century Irish have uncertain credentials in these areas and it is doubtful whether or not many of them will ever see, sign or speak at all. ‘Yes, but what is the broad evaluation of the subject here?’ Tone asked, addressing the Gathering. ‘Molloy’s clearly The Wrong Man,’ says Collins. ‘Now hold on there,’ says O’Malley, ‘Molloy can speak rightly, he’s hardly shut up in four hours.’ ‘Did anyone see him sign anything?’ asked Collins. ‘Sure he has written up half a report,’ says Mairéad. ‘Nice young man in my book,’ says Casement. ‘Yes but what about his vision? Can he see it?’ shouts Sands. ‘We’ll know soon enough about that,’ says Dev, ‘for it’s near the time. He was told! He has to be out of here at moonrise.’ Molloy must be gone by moonrise or forever hold his peace. No mortal could sit with the dead under the white light and glare of the full moon as it would certainly kill them, so Molloy knew he must scarper at moonrise. Survival therefore depended on his seeing the rising of the moon. He could hear it, sing it and he had come to speak it. But could he for love nor money see it? ‘Well,’ says Dev, ‘if he’s still sitting here in ten minutes, we’ll know he’s as blind as meself and worse than dead. He’ll be gone with moonrise or he’ll be back

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with us in a hundred years. It’s almost the time. On with the shades or the light will blind ye. It’s two or three minutes to moonrise.’ Molloy was wiping his eyes in the bathroom. He was desperate. A heavy depression beset him. He was deeply sad. Young Bobby’s words kept trickling through his mind: ‘When the Irish people have to show the desire for freedom, it’s then we’ll see the rising of the moon’ (Sands, 1998, p. 239). What, he wondered, could be wrong with him and his comrades on the ground? What cursed blindness thwarted them at every turn? He walked painfully back into the room to face the archivists. ‘It’s the time,’ Emmet signalled to Collins. Mick was for Hades and had farthest to go. Suddenly a glaring white light came piercing through the windows at the top of Dublin Castle. It was white, bright, super light – fascinating-deadly! Molloy’s whole life went flashing before him. Choppers – the Peelers – it’s a fucking raid he thought. Images of relentless years languishing in Kilmainham at her majesty’s pleasure came crashing through his mind and finally the flame of freedom came to him. Without as much as a bye or leave, he plunged through the back staircase, flailing and flying. Fright and flight in the cause of liberty. And to the great delight of the living dead, Molloy was gone. Left! He left moving, dancing – throwing shapes, shape-shifting to the rhythm of the rising moon. ‘He sees, he saw,’ roared Tone, ‘the blind, stupid, illiterate Irish of the glorious twenty-first sees’. And the archivists roared, danced and sang – jubilant. AND THERE WAS A GREAT HORRAH FOR FREEDOM AND THE RISING OF THE MOON.

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Bibliography Achebe, Chinua (1973), Things Fall Apart [1958], Heinemann, London Achebe, Chinua (1987), Anthills of the Savannah, Heinemann, London Adams, Gerry (1996), Before the Dawn: An Autobiography, Brandon Book Publishers, Dingle Adams, Gerry (2001), McManus Memorial Lecture, Sinn Féin Publications, Dublin Ahmad, Aijaz (1992), In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, Verso, London Ashcroft, Bill, Griffiths, Gareth and Tiflin, Helen (1989), The Empire Writes Back, Routledge, London and New York Beckett, Samuel (1979), The Beckett Trilogy, Picador, London Bhabha, Homi (1990), Nation and Narration, Routledge, London Boylan, Henry (1997), Wolfe Tone Gill and Macmillan, Dublin Brennan, Brian (2000), Máire Bhuí Ní Laoire: A Poet of Her People, Collins Press, Cork Conrad, Joseph (1992), The Secret Agent [1907], Penguin, London Conrad, Joseph (1993), The Heart of Darkness [1902], Everyman, London Cox, Tom (1975), Damned Englishman: A Study of Erskine Childers (1870–1922), Exposition Press, New York Culler, Jonathan (1987), On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London Eagleton, Terry (1990), The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Blackwell, Oxford Fanon, Frantz (1969), The Wretched of the Earth, Penguin, Harmondsworth Farrell, Michael (1963), Thy Tears Might Cease, Hutchinson, London Foucault, Michael (1979), Discipline and Punish, Penguin, Middlesex Freire, Paulo (1974), The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Penguin, Middlesex Harden, Toby (1999), Bandit Country, Hodder and Stoughton, London Hart, Peter (1999), The IRA and Its Enemies, Oxford University Press, New York Heidegger, Martin (1979), An Introduction to Metaphysics, Yale University Press, New Haven and London Inglis, Brian (1993), Roger Casement, Blackstaff Press, Belfast Keegan Casey, John (1989), Soodlums Irish Ballad Book, Oak Publications, London Kelly, Gerry (1989), Words from a Cell, Sinn Féin Publicity Department, Dublin McConnell, Micheal (1973), Soodlums Irish Ballad Book, London McHugh, Roger (1966), Dublin 1916, Arlington Books, London Mac Mathúna, Séamus (1985), Bran’s Journey to the Land of the Women, Niemeyer, Tubingen Martin, Agustin (1969), Soundings, Gill and Macmillan and the Education Company, Dublin Moore, Christy (2002), One Voice: My Life in Song, Hodder & Stoughton, UK Morrison, Danny (1997), The Wrong Man, Mercier Press, Cork O’Bradaigh, Séan (1983), The Songs of 1798, Elo Press, Dublin O’Connell, Michael (1982), Songs of Resistance, Republican Publications, Dublin 153

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O’Connor, John (1999), The 1916 Proclamation, Irish Books and Media Minneapolis O’Malley, Ernie (1997), The Singing Flame, Anvil Books, Dublin Pierse, Michael (2001), The Spark, Republican Publications, Dublin Regan, John M. (1999), The Irish Counter-Revolution 1921–1936, Gill and Macmillan, Dublin Said, Edward (1993), Culture and Imperialism, Chatto and Windus, London St John, Pete (1978), Kilmainham, Dolphin Disks, Ireland Sands, Bobby (1998), Writings from Prison, Mercier Press, Cork Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (1985), Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosexual Desire, Columbia University Press, New York Spenser, Edwmund (1970), A View of the Present State of Ireland [1596], Oxford University Press, London Taylor, Rex (1961), Michael Collins: A Biography, Four Square Press, Ireland Yeats, William Butler (1977), The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W.S. Yeats [1903], Macmillan, New York

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Index Compiled by Sue Carlton Names in inverted commas refer to fictional characters Abazon 112, 114, 116, 117, 120, 121, 122 Achebe, Chinua 10–11, 26, 102–3, 104–5, 106, 107–17, 119–25, 127 see also ‘Okonkwo’ Adams, Gerry 62–3, 65, 66, 67, 144 Africa 26, 102–3, 105, 109, 117 Ahmad, Aijaz 12, 84 alienation 4, 70, 98, 123, 135 ‘Amalinze the cat’ 107, 119 American Revolution 102 amnesia 7–8, 22, 26–8, 33, 85–8, 90, 150–1 Anglo-Irish Agreement (1985) 60–1 Anglo-Irish Treaty (1921) 14, 28, 44, 61, 148 and consensus 17–18, 19–20, 27, 127 and culture of silence 16, 136, 150 and imminence of war 16, 18–20, 29, 44 and revisionism 33, 136 angst 62, 75, 101, 107, 111, 119, 123 Annach Chuain 55 annihilation 47, 66, 67–8, 72 and creativity 20, 21, 22, 43, 61 anonymity 24, 67, 80, 127, 130 and Anglo-Irish Treaty (1921) 16, 136 colonial imposition 17, 64, 66 Apocalypse Now 49 arrested discourse 104–8 Ashcroft, Bill 76, 97 Banna Strand 48, 128 Barry, Kevin 127 at ‘Gathering of Clans’ 128, 131, 137, 138 Barry, Tom 32, 33, 55 Barthes, Roland 12 ‘Beatrice’ 109–10, 111

Beckett, Samuel 2, 4, 12, 22, 24–5, 138, 139, 141 alternative narrative style 75 and amnesia 8, 10 and creative annihilation 61 cultural context 26 and ‘Gathering of Clans’ 129–33, 142, 146–7, 149 manifestations of power and control 124 unnameable 76, 101, 145, 146 see also Mahood; Malone; Molloy Behan, Brendan 90 Berry Diaries (Peter Berry) 85 Bhabha, Homi 6, 7, 12, 24, 26, 27, 85, 96 binary structures 4–5, 11, 17–18, 40, 79, 124, 138 Birmingham Six 117 Black Diaries (Casement) 45, 49, 52, 58, 85, 133 Bloody Sunday 66, 67 Boland, Harry 30, 55, 57 at ‘Gathering of Clans’ 129, 131, 133, 137, 142, 145 border 56–8, 67, 95–6, 110, 114–18, 121–2, 124, 134–7 Boylan, Henry 104, 105, 106 Boys of Kilmichael 31 Brighton bombing (1984) 60, 61, 67 British Army 30, 31–2 Bunker Hill 96, 97, 104 Caoineadh Mhuire 38 Casement, Roger 1–2, 42, 59, 108, 127 at ‘Gathering of Clans’ 128, 133–4, 136, 137, 138, 144, 148, 151 Black Diaries 45, 49, 52, 55, 58, 85, 133 Conrad and 20, 33, 41, 45–9, 52–3, 58, 134 sexuality 44, 52–3

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Childers, Erskine 55–6, 142–3, 144 ‘Chris’ 111, 114–15, 120 civil service 60, 61 Clinton, Bill 57 cogni-phobia 59, 63 Collins, Father M. 34–5 Collins, Michael 1–2, 14, 21, 30, 55, 82 at ‘Gathering of Clans’ 128, 140, 142, 144–5, 148, 150–2 intelligence-centred strategy 43, 76 and Treaty negotiations 18, 19, 44, 57, 68, 82 colonialism/colonisation 6–8, 32–3, 44, 46–7 and culture 33–7, 39 and ideas 50–4 and inferiorisation 84 internal 8, 10, 76–7 Ireland and 33–7, 76–7, 78, 99–100, 125–6 and justice 117–18 and music 33, 35–7 obstructing national discourse 16–18 and revisionism 93 see also empire/imperialism Comhaltas 36, 39, 40, 112 ‘Commissioner for Information’ 106, 111 conflict 26–7, 33–4, 41–2, 79, 109 Conlon, Gerry 117 Conlon, Giuseppi 117 Conrad, Joseph 43–53, 56, 58, 117, 124, 144 and Casement 20, 33, 41, 45–9, 52–3, 58, 134 cogni-phobia 63 see also ‘Kurtz’; ‘Marlow’ consensus, and consent 17–18, 19–20, 27, 127 control 1, 48, 109, 124, 138, 144 cognitive 2, 22–4 Cork 34–5 creativity 3, 33, 37 creative annihilation 20, 21, 22, 43, 47, 61 criminalisation 83, 121, 125, 136

Croppy 36, 39, 82, 101 Culler, Jonathan 12 culture, Ireland and 33–7, 68, 74, 76, 77, 78–9 Culturlann na hÉireann 36, 38 Daedalus 141 Dáil Eireann 19, 77, 91, 126 de Man, Paul 12 de Valera, Eamon (Dev) 57 at ‘Gathering of Clans’ 128–9, 131, 135, 137, 140, 144, 147–8, 151–2 death 69–73, 125, 127, 144, 145 deconstructionism 5, 9, 12 déjà vu 98–9, 102, 103, 107 demilitarisation 122, 126, 137 Derrida, Jacques 2–3, 12, 17, 35, 108 Devlin, Ann 2, 118–19, 125 at ‘Gathering of Clans’ 128, 137, 140, 141, 144 Devlin, Bernadette 119, 126 Dickens, Charles 58 Diop, David 115 ‘Director of the State Research Council’ 111 discourse 15–16 arrested 104–8 indigenous 11, 17 obstructed 7–8, 16–18 see also national discourse Downing Street bombing 61, 67 Dublin Castle round table 32, 128 security files 43 Duffy, Gavan 19 Duggan, Eamon 19 Eagleton, Terry 12, 16, 24 Easter Rising (1916) 28, 78, 127 significance of 13–14, 79, 83, 98, 103 ego 44–6, 49, 59 ‘Egonwanne’ 118 1803 Insurrection 119, 127 Emmet, Robert 2, 16, 28, 124 at ‘Gathering of Clans’ 128–9, 131, 138, 140, 141, 144–5, 152 death of 119, 121, 129

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Index empire-speak 17–18, 31, 54, 56, 62, 95, 126 empire/imperialism 33, 45–6, 68, 77, 130 and border 122, 136 culture of 92, 93, 99 discourse of 11 and lack of vision 32 see also colonialism/colonisation essentialisations 22, 80, 94, 95, 100 Eudoxus 63, 69 Evening Herald 81 ‘Ezinma’ 119, 120, 123 Fanon, Frantz 16, 92 Farrell, Mairéad 2 at ‘Gathering of Clans’ 128, 133, 137, 140, 144, 146, 151 Farrell, Michael 6, 10–11, 74–6, 79–81, 84–93, 100 manifestations of power and control 124 obstructed discourse 7–8, 77 and repetition 8, 11, 76, 93, 102, 104 and split history 95–6 see also ‘Martin Mathew Reilly’ Fianna Fáil 82, 84 Fianna Gael 82 Fish, Stanley 12 Foucault, Michel 1, 12, 23, 44, 48 Four Courts, Dublin 29–30, 31 Freedom of Information Act 81 Freire, Paolo 2 French Revolution 102 Furey, Ted 66 Gardái 83 ‘Gathering of the Clans’ 128–52 gender, and oppression 119 Gol na nBan san Ár 37 Good Friday Agreement 1, 15, 17–18, 60 Griffiths, Gareth 76, 97 gun-running 81, 82, 85 Harden, Toby 32 Hart, Peter 31 Haughey, Charles 81, 82, 84, 90

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Heideggar, Martin 11, 106–7, 109–10, 116–17, 119–21, 123–4, 125 ‘His Excellency’ 106, 110–11, 120, 122, 125 history 109–10, 111, 116, 118–19, 121, 145 and chance 13–14 as circular journey 134 and grand ideal 149 and ideology 14, 15, 23–4, 71, 113, 123, 148–9 and reality 15–16, 140 and repetition 75–6, 102, 113–14, 146 segregation between writers and makers of 15–16, 24, 32 see also Ireland, history; revisionism homophobia 52, 58 homosexuality 44, 52–3 hunger strike (1981) 30–1, 33, 103, 121, 126 anniversary 106, 128 and revisionism 78, 88–9, 106 Ibo tribe 26, 109, 111, 121 ideas/ideation 3, 50–4, 63, 102, 115, 140 identity 3–5, 77, 84, 123, 138, 143 and anonymity 64 booby-trapped 48–9, 53 displacement of 72, 74, 86, 91 of empire 66 Irish 17–18, 25, 63–5, 68–70, 74–5, 86, 95 meaning and 71–2 and memory 85 postcolonial 6–7, 10, 93 split 89–90 ideological journey 14, 33, 89–90, 96, 98, 122, 148 ideology 23–4, 55, 56, 117, 136 and annihilation 72, 109 and history 14, 15, 23–4, 71, 113, 123, 148–9 and inconsistency 14, 30 Ireland and 75, 82, 97, 98, 125 and power 68

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‘Ikem’ 114, 116, 117, 120, 124–5 path of 111–12, 113, 115, 120 ‘Ikemefuna’ 123 imperialism see empire/imperialism imprisonment 1, 2, 23, 43 indigenous discourse 11, 17 Ingarden, Roman 12 Inglis, Brian 49 inquisition 60–73, 76 internal colonisation 8, 9, 10, 76–7 IRA 29–30, 42, 61, 67, 82, 127 branded as terrorists 31, 125 criminalisation 83 informer 20 and power of volunteers 30–1 reinterment of volunteers 127–8 Ireland amnesia 27–8, 33, 85–8 church and state 75, 80–1, 82, 88, 99, 110, 124 and colonisation 33–7, 76–7, 78, 99–100, 125–6 corruption 80–1 and culture 33–7, 68, 74, 76, 77, 78–9 decolonisation 80, 96 gun-running 81, 82, 85 and historical moments 23, 54, 79, 98, 107, 135–6 history 50, 106, 108, 123 documentation 81, 84, 90 repetition 75–6, 102, 107, 113–14 split 74–5, 77–8, 82–5, 92, 95–8, 100, 103, 137 identity 17–18, 25, 63–5, 68–70, 74–5, 86, 95 and ideology 75, 82, 97, 98, 125 mantle 64, 65, 66, 67, 69–70, 71–2, 88 music and song 33, 35–40, 78, 97, 112, 124 and national voice 22–3, 24, 36–7, 75–6, 97, 101 negotiation 41, 42–3, 54, 57, 61, 127 political unconscious 99–101 republicanism 80, 102, 106, 107, 134, 136–7

and revolution/rebellion 31–5, 48, 50, 62, 75, 107, 109, 134 see also Easter Rising; 1803 Insurrection; 1798 Rebellion and seclusion 63–6, 80 silence 37, 58, 139, 149–50 culture of 16, 21, 24–9, 75, 79 government legislation for 33, 47, 86, 127 in republican discourse 54, 80 and resistance 7, 16, 41 revisionism and 89, 91, 130, 136 through oppression 17 state of the nation 92–9, 130–1, 137, 142, 147, 151 Irenius 31, 63, 64–7, 69, 71–2, 73 civil servant role 60, 61 Irish Republican Brotherhood 30 James, Henry 76 Kamikaze 41, 42, 50, 54, 56 Keating, Justin 83 Keegan Casey, John 127, 128, 132, 140 Keirmaneigh, Battle of 34 Kelly, Gerry 12 Kelly, James 81, 85 Kilmainham jail 119 Kilmichael ambush 31–2 King, Martin Luther 79 knowledge and power 13–15, 20–1, 28, 43–4, 58, 66, 70 search for 43–7, 48, 69–70, 73, 91 Kristeva, Julia 12 ‘Kurtz’ 43, 46, 49, 52, 53, 58–9 and ego 44–5 tent 20, 50–1 labyrinth see maze language and binary relationships 134 of colonialists 123 and control 139 and meaning 3, 4–5, 11, 15, 147 and partition 54–5

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Index and power 6, 15, 98, 118, 132, 133–4 and reality 15–16 and revisionism 84, 125 and security 57 and split narrative 95 Ní Laoire, Máire Bhuí 33–4, 35, 36, 54, 57 ‘Lisdoonvarna’ 132 Lloyd, 12 Lloyd George, David 18, 19, 29, 68 logos 123–4 Lonely Murlough Shore 42–3, 59 Long Kesh prison 60 Lynch, Jack 85 Lynch, Liam 30 Lyotard, Jean-François 96, 98 Mac Febail, Bran 36 Mac Mathúna, Seamus 35, 36–7, 38, 129 MacDonagh, Thomas 28 McHugh, Roger 2, 51, 127 McManus, Joe 62, 66 Magill magazine 85 ‘Mahood’ 4, 22, 24, 39, 108 at ‘Gathering of Clans’ 129–31, 133, 138–40, 145–7, 149 ‘Malone’ 22, 24, 39, 108 at ‘Gathering of Clans’ 129–31, 135, 138–9, 146, 147 Mandela, Nelson 42 mantle 64, 65, 66, 67, 69–70, 71–2, 73, 88 ‘Marlow’ 43–4, 46, 50–1, 52, 53–4, 56, 58 ‘Martin Mathew Reilly’ 7, 74, 79, 81, 96, 101, 106 and déjà vu 98–9, 102–3 and hidden history 80, 88, 91, 94 and ideology 89–90 memory and repetition 8, 11, 75–6, 86–7, 104, 117, 123 and national narrative 92, 93, 94, 95, 101 researching own history 80, 82, 87 Marx, Karl 55 maze 4, 131, 140–1, 142–3, 149–50

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meaning 20–1, 51–2, 138–9 and annihilation 20, 67 and control 144 and differentiation 79, 95 and identity 3, 71–2 and ideology 148–9 and interpretation 103 and language 3, 4–5, 11, 15, 139, 147 maze of 4, 131, 140–1, 142–3, 149–50 and memory 11 music and 36–7 and power 2, 44, 51, 68, 69–71 and reality 9 and subjectivity 49, 64–5 and taboo 59 memory 8, 26, 27, 95, 135–6 and meaning 11 and repetition 8, 26, 85, 104, 107 return of 104 see also amnesia; repetition Minotaur, and maze 131, 140–1, 142 ‘Molloy’ 22, 23, 24, 25–6, 39, 108 at ‘Gathering of Clans’ 129–39, 141–5, 146–52 Monkstown 36 ‘Moran’ 39 Morrison, Danny 20, 34, 43, 45, 48, 56, 144 Mountjoy Prison 127 ‘Mr Verloc’ 47 music and poetry 33, 35–40, 78, 97, 112, 124 narrative inversion 96, 98, 103 narrative power 5, 9, 12 nation and memory 26, 27, 135–6 as product of narration 7, 24 national discourse 27, 28, 59, 65, 126 and culture of victimage 130 and resistance 92 thwarted 16–17, 23, 24, 103, 105 national narrative/story 35–6, 92–4, 99–101, 107, 111

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national voice 22–3, 24, 36–7, 75–6, 97, 101 nationalism 6–7, 10 naturalisation 121, 136 negotiation 41, 42–3, 54, 57, 59, 61, 127 normalisation 121, 136 ‘Nwoye’ 123 O’Connell, Michael 97 Offences Against the State Act (1939) 25, 86 Official Secrecy Act (1911-89) 83 ‘Okonkwo’ 107, 110, 118, 119, 122–3 oral impediment 11, 26, 108, 113, 116–17, 121 suicide 105, 109 ‘Okoye’ 108, 116 O’Malley, Des 81 O’Malley, Ernie 29–30, 31 at ‘Gathering of Clans’ 128, 137, 140, 143, 144, 148, 151 oppression 89, 104, 112, 125, 138 and art 79 and colonisation 76–7, 109, 111 and gender 119 and polarised thinking 4–5, 7, 77 and revisionism 120 slavery 43 oral impediment 11, 26, 104–5, 108, 113, 116–17, 121 otherness 3, 4, 77, 79, 84, 104, 112, 120, 124 partitionism 54–5 Pearse, Patrick 38, 78, 124, 140 political prisoners 31, 104, 117 release of 1, 60, 87 political unconscious 99–101 power 1, 45, 48–9, 110, 124 and ideology 68 knowledge and 13–15, 20–1, 28, 43–4, 58, 66, 70 language and 6, 15, 98, 118, 132, 133–4 meaning and 2, 44, 51, 68, 69–71 of volunteers 30–1 present, reconstituted 2–3, 17, 135

prisons, and surveillance 1, 48 Proclamation of the Republic (1916) 28, 114, 126 Protestantism 34–5 Radio Telefís Éireann (RTE) 132–3 reader, role of 6, 8–12 reality 3, 9, 15–16, 138, 140, 141, 143 see also truth Regan, John 21 repetition 11, 58, 78, 110, 118, 126 and history 75–6, 102, 113–14, 146 and memory 8, 26, 85, 104, 107 and national narrative 93–4, 98 and power 108 and truth 121 see also memory Republic of Ireland, The 18 resistance 92, 98, 109, 118, 125 silence and 7, 16, 41 revisionism 83–4, 85–8, 89–91, 99, 106–7, 121 and Anglo-Irish Treaty (1921) 33, 136 colonisation and 93 and hunger strike (1981) 78, 88–9, 106 and language 84, 125 narrative inversion 96, 98, 103 and oppression 120 see also silence Reynolds, Albert 28, 66, 90, 100 Rising of the Moon 126, 131–2, 140, 150, 152 Roisín Dubh 38 Said, Edward 26, 62, 84, 91 colonialism/colonisation 11, 16–17, 92–4 essentialisation 22, 76, 80, 86, 89, 95, 100 narrative power 12 nationalism 6–7, 10 St John, Pete 119 ‘Sam’ 109–10, 111, 125 Sands, Bobby 2, 101, 109, 124 at ‘Gathering of Clans’ 128, 131, 133, 138, 139, 140, 148, 151

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Index and hunger strike 33, 103, 105, 125, 126 and ideological journey 115 and Irish desire for freedom 91, 152 as political prisoner 104 Saville enquiry 66 second comings 109, 111, 112, 119, 123 securocrats 62, 66, 97 Sedgwick, Eve 52, 58 self 3–4, 63, 80 see also identity; subjectivity 1798 Rebellion 96, 97, 102, 103, 104, 106, 114, 127 sexuality 44, 52–3, 58 silence and control 5, 22–4 see also Ireland, silence; revisionism Sinn Féin 21 slavery 43 Smith, Father 28, 100 Spenser, Edmund 31, 59, 60, 62, 63, 71, 72 and amnesia 8 and annihilating potential of subject 61 and ‘Gathering of Clans’ 144 and Irish mantle 68–9, 73 manifestations of power and control 124 see also Eudoxus; Irenius Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 12 Stagg, Frank 88–9 stammer see oral impediment ‘Stevie’ 47, 48, 49–50, 52, 53, 55 street song 119–20 strip-searching 63 subjectivity 49, 64–5, 66, 67–8, 70–1, 145, 149 suicide 41, 42, 102, 105, 109, 148 Sunday Business Post 83, 117 surveillance 23, 28, 62–4, 66 in prison 1, 48 role of surveillant 15–16, 48, 60, 61, 65, 143 taboo 52–3, 58

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Taylor, Rex 15, 18–19, 21 and fear of unknown 13, 14, 20, 46–7, 52, 58, 59, 69–70, 127 Telefís Éireann 78 Thatcher, Margaret 31, 60, 61 Theseus 131, 140–1, 142–3, 149 Tiflin, Helen 76, 97 Tiocfaidh ar Lá (our day will come) 79 ‘Todd’ 20, 28, 34, 45, 56 Tone, Wolfe 2, 55, 108, 124 at ‘Gathering of Clans’ 128, 131, 132–3, 134, 137, 142, 148, 150, 151, 152 and 1798 Rebellion 102 statement to court martial 103–4, 105–6, 109 suicide 41, 42, 102, 105, 148 Trevor, Dr. 118–19 Trojan Horse 41, 54, 55–8 truth 9, 52, 117, 120, 121 see also reality Tuthsi–Hutu conflict 105 Umuofian language 112, 116 United Irishmen 102 United States 57 unknown, fear of 13, 14, 19–20, 24, 46–7, 52, 58, 59, 69–70, 127 ‘Unoka’ 116, 118, 122 validation 31, 33 victimage 13–14, 130 vision 18, 21, 61–2, 79–80, 122 absence of 32 impaired 151 multilple origins of 30 and music and poetry 112 national discourse and 27, 126 thwarted 100, 117 Whiteboys 34 Whyte, Hayden 12 Wilde, Oscar 90 Worm 146 Yeats, W.B. 7, 9, 11, 53, 73, 92, 146 and ‘things falling apart’ 11, 107, 110, 111, 123