Misanthropy Read online

  You have none left alive,

  No family nor friends,

  Not a jot or a jive

  Do you own.

  He should flee a world become a desert for a life with her among the ‘fairy race’.31 Bardic misanthropy, however, is specific in kind. Its specificity is determined by what I shall call an incomplete, failed or blocked identification. The bard knows what he values, but can no longer discover any feature of the human world around him that corresponds to it. If he has any repository of value, it is a historical past which has categorically and abruptly disappeared, flown with the Flight of the Earls, a past which is ghostly, spectral, vanished, at best a murmur of disembodied voices. Physically, materially, in every sense, he is left belonging nowhere.

  On the one hand, then, logically enough, the bards excoriate what Ó Rathaille calls ‘the alien hordes in land and townland’ and the Annals of Connacht the ‘evil, false band’:32 the invader, his violence, vengefulness, greed and perfidy, his destruction of their schools of learning, their way of life, their vocation itself, since they can no longer be the poets they were. In this aspect of their art, they reflect what, by the 1640s, had unsurprisingly become ‘a general revulsion against all things English’,33 lamenting the catastrophe that has engulfed them and their culture, their departed leaders, the desolation of their territory. In ‘No Help I’ll Call’, Ó Rathaille cries out:

  Our land, our shelter, our woods and our level ways

  Are pawned for a penny by a crew from the land of Dover.34

  In his account of an Ireland beset by slaughter, famine, deportation, bribery, false testimony, press-ganging and the desecration of monasteries and churches, Éamann an Duna slides from Gaelic to English in order to convey his impression of the invaders in their words, or rather, words of theirs that are seared into his mind:

  Transport, transplant, no mheabhair ar Bhéarla,

  Shoot him, kill him, strip him, tear him,

  A tory, hack him, hang him, rebel,

  A rogue, a thief, a priest, a papist.35

  But this again does not itself amount to misanthropy. By contrast, when Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin mourns the plight of Ireland ‘among blackguards’, it is no longer clear which side he means.36 Here the failure of identification is inseparable from a multiply directed strain in post-Kinsale poetry which qualifies it as properly misanthropic. For if the bards excoriate the English, they also repeatedly and indeed more frequently turn on their own. When the bards curse, and they do, they are as likely to curse the Irish as the English. In Brian Ó Cuív’s phrase, they repeatedly express ‘shame and contempt for the Irish chiefs who had abandoned their heritage and submitted’.37 Thus Séathrún Céitinn’s ‘News from Ireland’ accuses the nobles of failure and neglect of their duties, and An Bard Ruadh launches a barrage of ‘extraordinarily vituperative’ attacks on the most important Irish families.38 But they equally revile the uncouth and uncultivated classes who now increasingly hold sway, attacking them, above all, for their abject surrender. According to Dáibhí Ó Bruadair, they are wearing English clothes, aping English ways, speaking an upstart version of broken English, and no longer respecting either learning or poetry. Ó Bruadair says as much in ‘The Poet Laments His Learning’:

  O it’s best to be a total boor

  (though it’s bad to be a boor at all)

  If I’m to go out and about

  Among these stupid people.39

  Out of this kind of grasp of the historical situation comes the ‘Páirlement Chloinne Tomáis’, a Swiftianly savage prose satire on the rise of the new uncultured classes who have come to prominence with the disappearance and death of the old aristocracy. These pretentious figures are tamely servile to their English overlords and pathetically mimic them. They are ‘off to the fair, any hour of the day’, cutting a dash in their beavers, ‘tan riding boots and thin polished spurs’, while the poet now works in the fields or does odd labouring jobs.40 Alan Harrison asserts that the comic satire of the ‘Páirlement Chloinne Tomáis’ leaves its mark on Irish writing to this day.41 It does so partly as a misanthropic colouring. The poet now sets his teeth against ‘the great world’, as Tadhg Rua Ó Conchúir calls it, which sees the truth and justice that he urges upon it as mere ‘idiot noise’.42 This is increasingly what Ó Rathaille calls the bards’ ‘bitter vision’.43 If on the one hand, as various bardic epigrams suggest, it would be hard for Christ to show ‘a snug Saxon that didn’t mangle [His] law’, on the other, ‘the men of Ireland have swelled of late with ostentatious pride’, and ‘loss of learning’ has ‘brought darkness, weakness and woe … amid these unrighteous hordes’.44 The vision is one that easily takes on a religious dimension. Thus in the ‘Summary of the Purgatory of the Men of Ireland’, Ó Bruadair can detail the monstrosity of dispossessions, transplantations, confiscations and transportations of Irish to the West Indies as slaves, yet insist that Ireland has been damned by the sins of its ‘churls’ or ‘rabble’.45 Not surprisingly, the bards were more and more inclined to prophesy impending doom. At least one author took the onset of plague in 1649 as a divine punishment of the Irish. At the extreme end of this, Feircheirtne File predicted not only the further evils to befall Ireland, but also the birth of the Antichrist and the end of the world.

  Cecile O’Rahilly informs us that bardic poetry repeatedly, specifically blamed the ‘disunity and treason’ of the Irish for their misfortunes’.46 But this is also the theme of the massive, three-volume, anonymous history of the Confederate Wars of the 1640s, the Aphorismical Discovery of Treasonable Faction, even more than bardic poetry. On the one hand, within a few pages, the Aphorismical Discovery can call up a world of English atrocities: pillage and destruction, massacres, including those of women and children, wanton plunder, casual arson, casual executions, English faithlessness and breach of promise and an extraordinary hatred, as in the case of Coote. It records Irish men and women being hunted, ‘like deeres, and other savage beastes’.47 But it reserves its most poisonous venom for the Irish parliament, the Irish Supreme Council, Irish commissioners, chief clerks, judges and attorneys – ‘the greatest knaves and chettingest rogues’ – and, above all, Irish factionists and traitors and their ‘plusquam diabolicall proceedings’:

  O enemies of God, King and kingdome, of truth, justice and loyaltie and friends to all treacherie, misbelife, periurie, disloyaltie … O poore nation, O more weake than goshlings that forbears such an inevitable fate, that to the present acte is annexed, but nothinge will be done – och, och.48

  Certainly, there are heroes here and there, and men of integrity. But they are doomed figures in a gathering darkness who hardly counterbalance what the writer otherwise describes as the ‘refuse of human nature’.49 Again and again, the Aphorismical Discovery tells the story of what it takes to be the systematic betrayal of the best, broadening the vision out at moments to include other histories of national failure and devastation, from Greece and Rome to Burgundy and Switzerland.

  If, then, the chronicler of the Aphorismical Discovery more or less takes it for granted that the English are appalling beyond measure, it is in fact his own side that attracts his most virulent disgust, and by far the larger proportion of it. True, it is the Old English that he most anathematizes – the assimilated English who had already been in Ireland for centuries but who, in his view, are now betraying the Gaelic Irish. But beyond this there is rage and despair at the lack of any ‘coniunction and union of the nation’ that would save the Irish from ‘their everlasting destruction’.50 In the Aphorismical Discovery, as in other contemporary histories and as in the bards, one sees the original colonial trauma already involving the failure of all identification and thus unfolding as self-rending, self-castigation, divisions beyond repair, and therefore as misanthropy.

  As Harrison suggests, the poetry that emerged out of the decline of the Gaelic order was subsequently hugely influential in Ireland for at least two centuries,51 and indeed more. It was so, not least, in the case of this mi
santhropic strain. The dream of redemption from abroad that was initially focused on the earls who disappeared in 1607 shifted to the Stuart royal family and the Stuart king over the water. From this emerges the late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century aisling (dream-poem). The bards had sometimes declared that their only hope now lay in love: only the woman could matter, could save the poet from dereliction and despair, wholesale loathing of the world. They also repeatedly thought of Ireland as a violated woman, ‘our mild, bright, delicate, loving, fresh-lipped girl’, as Aogán Ó Rathaille put matters, now in the hands of ‘that black, horned, foreign, hate-crested crew’.52 The aisling formalized the theme: the poet has a dream-vision of a beautiful woman who represents Ireland, tells him of her plight as a deserted spouse and yearns for her rightful husband, one of the Stuart pretenders. After the collapse of Stuart hopes in 1745, the misanthropic strain in the aisling grew still bleaker. As Murray Pittock points out, in later aislings, even the dream woman of the vision becomes a rotten, corrupted harlot.53

  In the nineteenth century, the Irish misanthropic tradition finds various points of transmission: Thomas Furlong, for example, in both his translations of the bards and his own poetry. His first poem was precisely entitled ‘The Misanthrope’. It is Furlong, too, who allows us to see again how clearly the bardic theme of the lovers’ flight from the world was misanthropic, on the one hand, and related to conquest, on the other. In one poem, the speaker declares that he wishes that ‘my love and I/From life’s crowded thoughts could fly’, like the misanthropes of the French tradition under the Ancien Régime. But here the retreat is supposed to be a place ‘where no stranger should intrude/On our hallowed solitude’,54 ‘the stranger’ being an Irish term for an English colonist. More obviously, there is James Clarence Mangan, for whom, Joyce wrote, life was surely ‘a heavy penance’, because ‘he reads so truly the lines of brutality and weakness in the faces of men that are thrust in upon his path’.55

  What is remarkable, however, is not the fitful persistence of the tradition in the century of Daniel O’Connell, Catholic Emancipation, Parnell and the Home Rule movement – after all, the Famine seemed to some not only to rewrite the tradition of misanthropy all over again, but to do so in the same reversible terms, contempt both for the enemy and, given the nightmarishly extreme forms of conduct to which starvation drove people, for one’s own – but its persistence after 1922 and Irish independence. And yet it is arguably after 1922 that the Catholic Irish tradition produces what are perhaps its finest specimens of misanthropic art, notably in Flann O’Brien and Patrick Kavanagh. O’Brien co-founded the magazine Blather, which aimed to achieve ‘entirely new levels in everything that is contemptible, despicable and unspeakable in contemporary journalism’ in a manner commensurate with everything contemptible, despicable and unspeakable in contemporary Irish life, to wit, ‘graft and corruption … cant and hypocrisy … humbug and hysteria’. ‘In regard to politics’, the editorial continued, ‘all our rat-like cunning will be directed towards making Ireland fit for the depraved readers of Blather to live in’, adding with a flourish, ‘a plague on all your parties, legal and illegal’.56 Once again, we return to the absence or impossibility of identification, as is confirmed by setting O’Brien’s The Third Policeman and The Poor Mouth alongside each other. On the one hand, The Third Policeman is a vision of unending hell, in which the protagonist is condemned to perform the same loop, caught up in a lunatic logic – that O’Brien treats the lunacy hyperbolically and indeed surrealistically does not change the point; it rather enhances it – determined by the power of State and Church presented as (it would seem) beyond appeal. On the other hand, The Poor Mouth, with what Anthony Cronin calls its ‘unrelentingly bleak view of human existence’,57 describes an Irish peasantry not without humour but categorically unavailable to redemption or progress. So too O’Brien’s contemporary and friend Kavanagh hated the early twentieth-century Anglo-Irish-dominated Literary Revival as ‘a thoroughgoing English-bred lie’ but, in stripping away the fancy romantic costumes in which the Revivalists dressed up the Irish peasantry, could not but suggest that what he then revealed was deeply depressing: ‘Rapscallions of hell’, as the priest calls the peasants in Tarry Flynn, ‘curmudgeons of the devil that are less civilized than the natives of the Congo. Like a lot of pigs’.58 Kavanagh’s mindset changed late in life.59 But like O’Brien – fascinatingly, both of them tended to cast themselves in the old role of the bard – the younger Kavanagh is left revolving in an empty space that inclines him to pronounce a plague on all houses and produce a generalized excoriation.60 To some, at least, this position actually takes O’Brien as far as Manichaeanism. Cronin for example suggests that, for O’Brien, ‘this world was perhaps Hell, or part of its Empire’.61 O’Brien himself referred to the possibility that ‘the awesome encounter between God and the rebel Lucifer’ had, despite all we have been told, in fact ‘gone the other way’.62

  Thus the history was not readily to be thought away. Colonial misanthropy is born of a complex defeat, and, in Ireland, persisted well after independence. Indeed, it is only with the ‘Celtic Tiger’ and the Good Friday agreement that Ireland might have seemed properly free of it (though many Irish faces would by now grin sardonically at that idea, too). Certainly, the defeat is military, and the character of the military defeats, the frank terror that the English and Scots visited on Catholic Ireland, is hardly likely to improve one’s view of humanity, even at this historical distance. Nor is English and Scots treatment of the Irish after the defeats, or their subsequent indifference to their historical responsibility (still very much today as it was then, for all the occasional formal apologies). But this is reason for rage, not misanthropy. The defeat of the Irish was not simply a question of conquest and dispossession. It was defeat for an identity. The Tudors avowedly wanted to extirpate Irish culture, which had thitherto been strong enough to assimilate the English, rather than being assimilated by them. The possibility of assimilation ends with Kinsale. There is thus a Kinsale of the battlefield, but also a Kinsale of the spirit. From now on Irish identity itself is split, fissured, set at odds with itself. The bards and the historians are not to be reconciled with the invader or inclined to yield to the cultural transformation he is proposing. But henceforth the sense of identity which fuels the will to resistance is founded on a void. Nothing will underwrite it, which leaves it turning indefinitely in a circle from which there is apparently no release. It is worth recalling, here, that O’Brien considered an alternative title for The Third Policeman: Hell Goes Round and Round.

  *

  However, I have so far only discussed a tradition that is first Gaelic and later Catholic and nationalist Irish. Quite clearly that was not the only tradition. The most famous Irish misanthropist of them all, Swift, was not of Gaelic Irish stock. He was Anglo-Irish and Dean of St Patrick’s, the Protestant cathedral. There was an Anglo-Irish or Protestant Irish tradition of misanthropy, too, or, perhaps better, an Anglo-Irish variant of the tradition. This variant picked up the by now traditional structure of Irish misanthropy, the broken, absent or failed identification, but also slanted or skewed it. Why should one assume, however, that the older tradition in some way conditions the later one? Because, from the seventeenth century onwards, Anglo-Irish writers and scholars took a great deal of interest in the very culture that their people had overridden, derogated, humiliated or destroyed. Swift for example was aware of the bardic tradition, and translated Tadhg Gaelach Ó Súilleabháin and Hugh MacGuaran’s robustly misanthropic ‘The Feast of O’Rourke’, among others. Oliver Goldsmith was clearly aware of the bardic tradition, too. But it is worth turning to Richard McCabe’s great book Spenser’s Monstrous Regiment. Spenser was violently hostile to Gaelic Ireland, and famously wrote a View of the Present State of Ireland, which argued that Gaelic culture must be rooted out and exterminated. What MacCabe shows, however, is that, while Spenser knew no Gaelic, by a kind of process of osmosis, the bards and their traditions enter into The Faer
ie Queene and their marks on it are repeatedly perceptible. Again and again, Anglo-Irish culture turns out to be more intimate with Gaelic Irish literature and culture than it acknowledges, and there are repeated transfusions of the second into the first.

  This is precisely the case with the double-directedness and the failure of identification in the misanthropic tradition. But in the Anglo-Irish they operate in the reverse direction. Anglo-Irish intellectuals cannot conceivably properly identify with Gaelic Irish culture; in so many respects, it is not theirs. Yet at the same time they find themselves repeatedly alienated from things English, from English culture. This may go as far as a pronounced discomfort with the Englishness in themselves, to which they at times add a strain of covert sympathy with the Gaelic Irish in their sufferings. This makes for special forms of satire, special modes of irony and a strange condition of suspension. Swiftian misanthropy and irony, for example, assume a new dimension once seen in this context. On the one hand, Part IV of Gulliver’s Travels famously allegorizes the gulf between Anglo-Ireland and Gaelic Ireland; that is, in the difference between the coolly rational, civilized horses, the Houyhnhnms, and the loathsome, filthy, disgusting humans, the Yahoos. (Declan Kiberd points out to me that the Anglo-Irish are associated with horses, not just because they rode them for pleasure and hunted with them, as the Gaelic Irish did not, but because the Irish thought the new invaders’ accent was so odd that they heard them as making a neighing sound). Though he was capable of producing a work like A Modest Proposal, Swift also shared the later Protestant Irish poet Samuel Ferguson’s ‘inherited fear’ and ‘loathing’ of the Irish helotry.63 But what complicates the picture is that Gulliver repeatedly tells us that the English are no better than Yahoos, that their culture is Yahoo-like in its barbarity. Furthermore, there can be no identification with the Houyhnhnms, not just because they are horses, but because it is clear that, under the civilized surface, they operate an economy founded on slavery and because Gulliver, a man, becomes simply ludicrous when he tries to imitate them.