READING IN THE DARK: IRISH LITERARY IDENTITY

Abstract

In other words, social, ideological, political and cultural concerns have taken predominance over the literary. Above all, it boastfully stresses its capacity to branch into numerous corridors, fables and fantasies. [...]tradition is given a double sense - it is both a framework within which to articulate one's personal experience and one within which one should start a dialogue with it. In it, the boy concludes, the real pain awaits for him (as he puts it, the more he knew, the more trouble it took him to know). [...]his search in a dither of light and dark becomes more adamant and troublesome. 2.2.4 "Bad history" On his journey through the labyrinth, the boy would be occasionally seduced by the richness of tradition, led astray under the spell of a treasure of Irish stories and myths, fantastic stories about fantastic beings. [...]these tricks of imagination, this twofold use of tradition, of language and of the inherited literary expressions and techniques may be considered a prominent feature of the Irish literary identity as embodied in Deane's novel.

Headnote

Abstract: The concept of literary identity is here used to emphasize the ways in which the author of a literary work can use the storage of the traditional techniques at his disposal to symbolically illuminate the social, historical, cultural and intellectual phenomena of his time. These techniques, which are part of the author's art, become the means of constructing his literary identity.

The result is the profound expression of an individual experience of a certain social and cultural history. The novel "Reading in the Dark" (1996) by Seamus Deane illustrates such an experience.

Key words: identity, Irish tradition, literary identity

1. Introduction. Discussing literary identity

The present paper deals with two questions: What gives a certain literary work its distinct quality within the world of literature? and How can we know that the story is Irish (apart from relying on extra-literary data)? The answer to the latter does not focus on the "national" identity as constructed in literature (Powell 2004:3), but on "literature" as a set of tendencies that we relate to the Irish literary legacy. This implies forms, structures and modes created in the course of Irish literary history that surface in contemporary literary works such as the autobiographical novel Reading in the Dark (1996) by the prominent Irish author Seamus Deane.

2. Seamus Deane and the Irish literary identity

The expression "Irish literary identity" almost always means "the identity of Ireland or Irish people" as constructed in literature. Rarely does it deal with "a kind of literature as written in Ireland or by Irish people". The explanation for this partly lies in the overwhelming insistence on the ideological concepts of identity and its various sub-forms (national, gender-related, racial, political, colonial, local, etc.). In other words, social, ideological, political and cultural concerns have taken predominance over the literary. Thus, literature, for much of its history an ancilla to history, ideology or politics as well as a "construction worker" of identities, now is estimated as a too long, too demanding, or even too risky and dangerous kind of cultural programming, acceptable only in its shorter and ideologically (assumed) harmless forms. Therefore, its "identity" - its aesthetic quality - is much too often disregarded or pushed to the margin. In this paper, however, this identity is seen in terms of the peculiarities of the literary tradition in Ireland.

2.1 The concept of literary identity

If we accept the concept of literary identity as a set of tendencies which make one literary tradition distinct from others, we can then make another point: our focus is on the concept of "tradition" rather than on "nationality". More exactly, we presume that authors were bom within a certain cultural and social ambience, that they have mastered their trade and ways of articulating their thoughts and feelings within a certain literary framework and that they have constmcted their literary identity by using the features of their literary legacy. It is the legacy that they choose from and build upon. The act of choosing makes their literary identities an open, dynamic and "open to negotiation" literary creative space. Relying, as T. S. Eliot stated, on his "historical sense", an author has not only "the whole of the literature of Europe", but also "the whole of the literature of his own country" (Eliot 1973: 505) at his disposal. This can serve as a general framework, a map of literary history, a storeroom of impressions, phrases, images and experiences. It is the material for a new work of art (that will, following Eliot (1973: 506), in its turn, have an impact "on all the works of art which preceded it"). It begins to exist when the author starts a dialogue with his social, cultural, political, as well as literary inheritance.

2.2 Irish literary identity

In Reading in the Dark (1996), there is true wealth of fictional forms and tellers of tales. One of them is the narrator's aunt, Kathie, the proponent of the original authentic oral storytelling skill. She is the one to delineate the main body of the identity framework, which has, in this novel, the form of a "labyrinthine plot" (Deane 1996:62). She tells the stories to her cousins, the children of the given family, but even when her listeners grow up, she would still tell stories of a different kind, like a true seanchai, a storyteller and historian in early Ireland, a prominent public figure and keeper of collective memories. Therefore, Kathie stands for the framework outline, a large set of stories which have found, in one way or another, their place in Deane's novel, in itself a mixture of detective, Gothic, ghost, black humour, thriller, horror, grotesque prose genres. The novel is shaped to accommodate this variety: it consists of a series of vignettes, short stories and even shorter ones inserted in them, anecdotes and reminiscences, often given an enclosed form and ending with effective exit lines. The patchwork of stories is unified by the voice of the nameless narrator ("the boy"), who carefully marks the dates of the personal and communal events referred to in the novel.

The fact that the novel takes the form of connected yet short sketches, written in the first person, evokes an oral rather than written tradition; it resembles a set of storytelling sessions, with the narrator as a teller of tales. The modem seanchai tells us a story, let's say, about his own growing up {Bildungsroman) in the atmosphere of the Troubles, in the Northern Ireland city of Derry. Only this time we are not sitting in a circle round him, but in our homes, holding his book in our hands, with the lights on. It would be, he claims, a completely different thing to try to read it in the dark.

2.2.1 Reading in the dark

Another thought-provoking aspect of Deane's literary technique is suggested in the very title of the novel: "reading in the dark". It implies an apparently impossible situation: the story is not meant for any "daylight reading". The lights should go out - the way they go out for the narrator when his elder brother orders him to turn them off and go to sleep - and the narrator finds himself "reading" the texts illuminated by the inner light of his curious and imaginative mind.

In the darkness, the daylight versions are doubted, explored, questioned. In the darkness, the mind begins its search for truth. In other words, the narrator intrudes into the treasury of seanchai or Aunt Kathie, gets involved in a labyrinthine plot, his family story burdened with family secrets (Ross 2007), and from there, he starts his search for a way out. His investigation is an archetypal quest for truth (or part of the Romantic tradition of self-discovery) (Ross 2007). By "reading in the dark" or interrogating the nature of the fictions gathering in and around him, the boy tries to get the primary cause or, symbolically, the Original Sin that had led to his family's curse, deaths, losses and suffering - the final melancholy. In other words, he tries to find the Original Story most probably hidden in the maze of many versions.

2.2.2 Strange little alliances

Another important tendency present in Deane's novel, concerning literary identity, is the following: the traditional framework with its labyrinthine structure is used here not only to block or captivate the process of getting to the truth/solution/exit ofrfrom the story, but also to open up its numerous renderings and possibilities. Above all, it boastfully stresses its capacity to branch into numerous corridors, fables and fantasies. Thus, tradition is given a double sense - it is both a framework within which to articulate one's personal experience and one within which one should start a dialogue with it.

The questions posed by the narrator show how many tales are just ornaments created by "strange little alliances" (Deane 1996:189) people make up in their heads, trying to assert their versions of reality in conversations and thus prove their points, pretending they are in the know). While "reading" the stories, the narrator detects superstition, delusion, falsehood, at places where the truth is wished for. His mother gives an explanation: much of what is produced as a story is stemming from the country people's need to explain everything in personal terms, to always find some blame somewhere and to "storify" it.

Mother does it, too, in her construct of one family mystery, the death of the narrator's uncle Eddie, an IRA member. Her story "cancelled all others" (217); with all the witnesses silenced or in exile or dead, the boy's search for truth becomes a difficult endeavour. He has to revise his relationship with Mother as his cognitive process is unfolding and as he is trying to create logical connections between the many stories. This is an emotionally painful process, exerting pressure on the participants in the quest. It is filled with the iconography of the Roman Catholic dogma, with the dominant metaphor of infernal fire as punishment for sin, especially when it comes to the main actor of the family story, Mother. It is in her that the fire is most often "burning, burning, burning" (219)

2.23 Choice of pain

An intense religious experience shaping some of the stories could be seen as another marker of Irish literary experience. The boy can interpret his family past in terms of personal/collective fall, sin and remorse. Without it, he would not be able to "read" his mother's story. He feels her pain, he recognizes in her wailing the same cries as in the mythical banshee, yet, he relentlessly proceeds with his search.

Instruction comes from the school assigned work on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order. In meditating upon the assignment, the boy leams the importance - life-shaping and life-sustaining - of the concept of choice. But this is not an ordinary choice: it is the one we would make just before dying, the boy leams. In it, the boy feels, there lies the true meaning of adulthood, maturity and responsibility. In it, the boy concludes, the real pain awaits for him (as he puts it, the more he knew, the more trouble it took him to know). Thus, his search in a dither of light and dark becomes more adamant and troublesome.

2.2.4 "Bad history"

On his journey through the labyrinth, the boy would be occasionally seduced by the richness of tradition, led astray under the spell of a treasure of Irish stories and myths, fantastic stories about fantastic beings. The Irish national mythology, with the Book of Invasions, set up a pattem for some archetypes. Since they are too numerous to be listed here, we can name only a few that can rightfully be considered markers of Irish literary identity. For instance, no one ever dies in the story about the settlement of Ireland. Wave after wave of newcomers come and defeat the natives only to be themselves defeated by another wave of warriors. But none of them ever dies or ceases to exist in any way: they are merely transferred to another place, a mound, lake or river, where they continue to exist, as underground creatures, "good or bad fairies", as Aunt Kathie calls them. Likewise, people mostly disappear rather than die. In the Irish legends about places, there exists the Field of the Disappeared, the place where all creatures, who dare step on it, disappear. Even the birds avoid flying over it. But, again, the fact that they disappear does not mean that they are dead. As ghosts or shadows, they haunt the living, coming from the mid-air. This is, as mentioned in the novel, because of the "bad Irish history." By creating their strange alliances, country people have produced a plethora of heroes, martyrs, saints - romanticized victims of their whimsical, violent and cruel ways that translated facts into fiction, history into pseudo-history, and the actors into ghost-like creatures, protagonists of different stories. "Bad histories" easily lead to "cruel births", a phrase that policeman Burke uses when talking about the Civil War and Northern Ireland.

In the narrator's story, the "cruel birth" of his "bad history" refers to the chronologically first murder of an Irish journalist, killed by the police forces. He is symbolically named Neill, which is not only the name of the mythological founder of Ulster, Neill (of the Nine Hostages), but also of one of its most prominent dynasties, O'Neill. This marks the beginning of the sectional conflict and starts a series of violent acts as well as a series of stories.

Also haunting is the ghost of Eddie, who is never actually present in the story, but only takes the form of shadow gunmen, like IRA men in general. Symbolically, his story is alive, so much so that the boy is, at one point, almost labelled an informer, just like his uncle. And, in general, the stories about informers, betrayal and guilt, are archetypal for Irish prose.

Probably the most vivid example of a ghost-like presence is the story about the IRA executioner. On the surface, it is like a folk fantasy about the misfortune of a man named Larry, who suffered a sexual encounter with a she-devil in the form of a fox. She apparently destroyed his reproductive organs so that Larry is doomed to bachelorhood, loneliness and utter alienation from society. This is the "daylight version" of the story about the "man who had sex with the devil" (130), fit to be considered a true folk fantasy. But the dark version reveals Larry as the executioner. He then appears as an embodiment of death-in-life, of the man standing in the street dressed like a dead body in the coffin - the assigned role of executioner prevents him from being either completely dead or alive (Deane 1996:173). Executions, killings, epidemics, conflicts, and many other elements of the "bad history" are shifting their shapes in the collective memory as stories and tales. The most prominent example may be another archetype taken from mythology, the shape shifter.

2.2.5 Shape shifters

Having undergone a story-telling treatment, an executioner may become a man possessed by a she-devil. A man who has been killed may turn into a ghost and go on living like a ghost. The transformation is made possible because, as mentioned above, country people create stories to avoid the truth that can destabilize their lives. This process involves covering up for their own wrong choices and mistakes which, when made in small communities, cannot possibly pass unnoticed. Instead, they affect everyone's life, which makes it indispensable to shift their shapes into fiction. This is a devilish thing, the boy concludes. A shape disappears and reappears as a silhouette or a ghost, to haunt individuals or the whole community.

2.2.6 AislingDeane's political-patriotic Oedipus

The book the boy is reading when ordered to tum off the lights is The Shan Van Vocht, written by James Murphy in 1889. Its subtitle is "A Story of the United Irishmen". It introduces an incarnation of the mythical goddess also appearing in many Irish dream visions or aisling, one of the early mythological medieval forms in Irish literature. She is presented as a domineering woman - Mother or queen, maiden, hag (usually collective representations of Ireland) - calling upon young men to fight for her and thus restore her freedom and unity. The boy has such a dream vision of his own mother. Yet, the myth also has it that the demanding queen, Mother or Ireland, sends its young sons to death. She turns out to be destructive, manipulative and unforgiving. In the novel, Mother is the one who hides the truth, manipulates the lives of her family members and finally detaches herself from her own son when he discovers the truth. In many ways, this is an Oedipal story. Its main charcater also strongly reminds us of William Faulkner's young man, Quentin Compson, who, similarly, tries to discover the truth about the fall of the American South. In Deane's novel, as in Faulkner's, the ancient myth is also read as symbolic of a collective rather than individual experience. Father dies in ignorance and shame, Mother preserves her family through secrecy and lies. Son finds out the truth but, following his mother's wishes, he has to bury it, which is the most painful thing of all: his final decision concerns Father, who must never discover the truth. It would have destroyed his illusion about Mother (that is, Ireland), but it would have restored his dignity and helped him die honourably and in peace with himself.

That is how the novel ends, in silence, at the point where it starts, the landing on the family's home staircase, a place of encounter with the family ghosts. There is also a small window, through which one can see the sky and the cathedral in which the Father's body is lying in the coffin. Therefore, it is up to him to decide, after all, to spare his Father's troubled soul further pain.

3. Conclusion. Shape-shifting stories

Deane's novel is full of Irish markers: shape-shifters, prophets or paedophiles (Crazy Joe or "insane in the head", illuminati), aisling, banshee, informers and traitors, devils and executioners. In addition, they are subjected to critical revision, together with some well-known general European myths and their American counterparts. In Ireland, they take on a specific significance when understood in the context of the Irish literary and cultural tradition.

Carefully hiding her own guilt in the family tragic history and flirtatious with her choices, Mother (Ireland) prefers the world of lies, kitschy pathetic stories and fantastic fables, strange alliances made allegedly for her interests. This choice makes two of her "heroes", father and son, fail: one dies as a figure of shame, the other leaves home as a frustrated hero. All this takes place in even more frustrating circumstances: street fights in Derry, explosions and killings, police and counterpolice actions, in addition to an already tense atmosphere in schoolrooms and churches. What the boy discovers at this moment of "bad history" is merely his own doom.

This discovery turns him into a mythical hero, this time a searcher for truth. He enters the labyrinth of fictional creations and tries to find a liberating truth or exit from the maze of the collective and personal stories, filled with all sorts of strange creatures which are obstacles to finding the truth; yet, they are the mounds that hide Irish never fully dead skeletons. They are Druid spells, the fantasies blurring the seeker's views, yet they are the guidelines showing him the way to the truth. They are the fields in which the living disappear into myths; yet, they are the places where they reappear as possible signs of hidden truths. They are fictionally incarnated as caves, fields or even the ancient throne of wishes as well as of assassinations; yet, they are the places where the hero, following their thread, leaves traces of himself and his own troubled questing soul. They are the great works in which the truth-seeker feels confused and scared yet, not failing to appreciate their beauty. This ambivalent attitude is, in essence, a test of his own initiation into manhood.

The truth-seeker, the boy, enters the labyrinth determined to question its iconography, mythology and fantasy. He gets out of it in silence, with a sort of religious feeling of leaving the innocent to God's care, and with the sympathy for the guilty cherished in his heart. Silence is a feature of ghosts and ghost-like cultures. His life, like that of so many others, is now buried in it. Even when the noise starts, the real noise of the Troubles given by street fights, bomb explosions, and media reports, the family silence covers up the truth. The mysteries are buried. The secrets are buried - the destroyed rose garden (also symbolic of Ireland) is paved to cover up the family feud. The only visible signs are shadows, silhouettes, "swellings inside. When the boy decides not to say anything to his father about his mother's sins, and her father's sins, he also turns into a ghost - another martyr, another manipulated young man, another silent son that Mother (Ireland) has given birth to.

Seamus Deane, the creator and interrogator of stories, enters the labyrinth taking on the voice of the boy, starting his long-day's-joumey through the maze, from the periphery of its literary, fictional and mythological aspect, to its core comprising a far more profound and universal view of man and his doomed community. In other words, he starts from his own initial digressions, insertions and wrong choices, becoming more and more sure of himself, of his own single story line, like his own hero, the boy. Also, like the boy, he incessantly poses questions and doubts and subverts the literary while, at the same time, creating it.

Yet, unlike the boy's, Deane's story confirms his refusal to remain silent very much in the manner of the old Irish bards, whose tongue was often virulent, sharp and lashing. In autocratic societies, this kind of talks was regarded as subversive and it was often severely punished. To avoid punishment, the bards were habituated to double-talking, relying on their wit, shrewdness and wisdom, to code their repertoire of poems and stories in rich allegories and extended metaphors. Building a story upon story, "opening their endless possibilities in the dark" whose "echoes and echoes" never really ended, they refused "gliding away into the darkness of absolute silence" (Deane 1996:221). The duality of their literary procedure, imposed by many years of oppression, colonialism and violence, or, in other words, the coded truth, is a significant legacy, creating painful, troublesome yet impressive works. To sum up, these tricks of imagination, this twofold use of tradition, of language and of the inherited literary expressions and techniques may be considered a prominent feature of the Irish literary identity as embodied in Deane's novel. For his characters as well as ancient bards, obviously, silence was not all. But talking was. So many other literatures, of other countries, of other authors, have yet to understand that.

References

References

Deane, S. 1996. Reading in the Dark. London: Vintage Books.

Eliot, T. S. 1973 (1919). 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' in F. Kermode and J. Hollander (eds.). Modern British Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 505-511.

Powell, K. T. 2004. Irish Fiction. An Introduction. New York, London: Continuum.

Ross, D. W. 2007. 'Oedipus in Derry: Seamus Deane's Reading in the Dark' in New Hibernia Review, 11/1, Earrach/Spring. [Online]. Available: http://www. academia. edu/796908/Oedipus_in_Derry_Seamus_Deanes_Reading_in_ the_Dark [accessed 2013, April 14].