Misanthropy Page 19
Seen in this light, Swiftian misanthropy thrives on the hole in the middle between England, Anglo-Ireland and Gaelic Ireland. It means he can ultimately declare no allegiance to any of them. The elevated position of the colonist as opposed to the colonized writer is in some sense an empty one, as the bards’ sense of prestige is for them after Kinsale, the emptiness being doubled by the fact that they (the colonists) are not compelled to occupy it. The Anglo-Irish misanthropist can have no truck with civilization, because it reveals its underside as barbarism. But he can also have no proper truck with what he takes to be the barbarism of the other, because it is apparently irredeemable. The brutality of England and Anglo-Ireland makes any identification with them impossible. But equally identification with the defeated is impossible, precisely because of the effects of defeat on them.
The same kind of multiple displacement, of an Irish problematics of identification, is evident in Goldsmith. Primrose, Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield, is a displaced version of an Irish ingénu, at sea in an English world of hard-nosed mercantilism and ruthless economic pragmatism. That is the gist, for example, of his fleecing over the sale of his horses. Primrose is certainly – it is a critical cliché – a benevolist and sentimentalist. But not only is there persistent irony at his expense; the series of disasters to which he is exposed towards the close of the novel more or less confirm the misanthropic perspective against which he has intently defended himself, and which is the obverse of his own. That perspective is articulated in a character, Burchell, who keeps on trying to tell Primrose the truth that he must learn, to the point at which Primrose must admit that ‘every day [Burchell] seemed to become more amiable, his wit to improve, and his simplicity to assume the superior airs of wisdom’.64 Goldsmith is displacing an Irish and colonial problematic and projecting it as a dispute of the English with themselves.
In Goldsmith’s earlier work, The Citizen of the World, the displacement is still more concrete and glaring. The Citizen of the World is composed of colonial letters – not, however, Irish ones, but letters from a Chinese philosopher visiting England, to quote the subtitle, ‘to his friends in the east’.65 What the Chinese philosopher encounters, like Primrose, is an English misanthropist, the egregious Man in Black. The Man in Black particularly accompanies him round Westminster Abbey, where the philosopher learns that, in the Man in Black’s phrase, you get an honoured place by ‘gaining battles, or by taking towns’.66 The one tomb in the Abbey over which the Man in Black explicitly pauses, as embodying his case, is that of Monck. As we have seen, Monck was notorious for his exceeding ruthlessness in Ireland. So, too, later in the book, Goldsmith launches a savage attack on the system of Penal Laws: ‘When once the work of injustice is begun’, says the philosopher, ‘it is impossible to tell how far it will proceed. It is said of the hyena, that, naturally, it is in no way ravenous, but when once it has tasted human flesh, it becomes the most voracious animal of the forest, and continues to persecute mankind ever after’.67 The one system of Penal Laws of which Goldsmith’s readers could conceivably have been markedly aware was the Irish system. But, in Goldsmith’s text, what we have is a Chinese talking about Japan. The displacement is self-evident. Or take our philosopher on the Daures, a subject people of China. On the one hand, we are told, ‘the barbarous ceremonies of this infatuated people’ make them intractable: ‘Are these men rational, or are not the apes of Borneo more wise?’ Yet at the same time the philosopher deplores the fact that they are subject to abuses of authority, ‘unlicensed stretches of power’, and incapable of demanding restitution: ‘These provinces are too distant for complaint, and too insignificant to expect redress’.68 It is this kind of knowledge that draws the philosopher close to the Man in Black. Goldsmith was nearer Swift than is sometimes supposed, not least in his more or less unconscious sense of the impossibility of identification.
Here we might turn to a very late example of the Anglo-Irish tradition, if it is any longer describable as that, the tradition at its last gasp, Samuel Beckett. That misanthropic sentiment is a feature of Beckett’s work is hardly disputable. One might begin with Hamm (in Endgame), afraid that humanity might start up all over again from a flea, and proceed to collect a long list of instances. It is not difficult to find evidence of a Beckettian double-directedness in voices that call down a plague on all houses and are capable of sounding ironical if not scathing equally about power and powerlessness. We might also cite Beckett’s recurrent concern with the figure of the tramp, the outcast, the abject victim, a figure brought low, with distinctly superior-sounding, vestigial memories of an abandoned learning. This might make Beckett’s Molloy or Malone seem remote from the abject Irish victim. But it also makes them seem close to the bards after Kinsale, who fitfully continued with the bits and scraps of a now futile erudition, the remnants of a world that was still in some sense theirs, the afterlife of an eminent but shattered tradition.
But I want instead to end with Beckett’s How It Is, a difficult and seemingly abstract work, one still cryptic to us and remarkably if obscurely full of a sense of the cruelty and misery of things. Here the double-directedness and the incomplete identification of the Irish misanthropic tradition are pervasively in evidence. One problem with understanding How It Is is that it is not obviously best read in linear fashion, like a novel. It is composed of three parts; that we should initially approach them in orderly sequence is understandable. But we should also read it from the second part, ‘with Pim’, outwards, because the second part is quite distinct from the first and third. This world is perhaps Hell, or part of its Empire: that is a claim one might exactly make of the world of the second part of How It Is. That is what it says about ‘how it is’. At the centre of Part 2 is an image of horror: the apparently unending torture of one man, apparently named Pim, by another, seemingly called Bom. That this image has at least some of its roots in the colonial Irish relation, particularly that of the seventeenth century, is likely. Take for example the significance of the mud in which the figures flounder. When the Tudor and Cromwellian planters dispossessed the inhabitants, forced them off their land, they often did so quite literally and pitilessly, in acts of what Bom calls ‘sadism pure and simple’.69 The Irish were driven out into rain-swept landscapes to fend for themselves as best they could. Mud had diverse associations for Beckett, not least the trenches of the First World War. When he owned a small house near the Marne, he described himself as ‘struggling’ with work in progress in his ‘hole in the Marne mud’, or ‘crawling up’ on it from ‘a ditch somewhere near the last stretch’.70 It is nonetheless hard if not impossible to imagine that he was unaware that the image of one man on top of another, hammering him into the mud, was a resonant one in Irish history. Swift was certainly conscious of it, referring to the Yahoos as having a custom ‘of wallowing and sleeping’ in the mud.71 Often enough, the dispossessed Irish had been hunted down into the mud. Mud became their element. Writing in 1847, Alexander Somerville remarked on the so-called Irish ‘troglodytes’ who lived in mud holes in the bleak wet desert of the Bog of Allen, and whom he described as ‘living where the worms live, in holes of the earth; crawling as the worms crawl’.72 They had been there for at least two centuries.
Pim, we are told, is Bom’s ‘unbutcherable brother’ (HII, p. 82). In one of their aspects, the two are variants on the Biblical pairs of Cain and Abel and, more distantly, Jacob and Esau, in both of which the Irish found figures for the colonial relation. Bom thinks Pim may be speaking a foreign tongue, indeed, is ‘perhaps a foreigner’ (HII, p. 62), ‘a thing you don’t know’ (HII, p. 80). At one point, he notes that he has had ‘hardly a word out of [Pim] not a mum this past year’. ‘Mumming’ meant acting, as in the open-air seasonal folk-plays of the medieval mummers. But it had also come to mean aping the colonist, his language and ways, possibly with all the more reason because ‘mumming’ itself had not been indigenous to Ireland, but an Anglo-Norman introduction. Bom is the ‘bad master’ (HII, p. 79). Beckett makes ironical
reference to his noble name and possibly noble lineage. Bom’s tones on occasions are those of the boisterous, self-assertive colonist, particularly when he speaks of his pride in his ancestry: ‘The Boms sir you can shit on a Bom sir you can’t humiliate him a Bom sir the Boms sir’ (HII, p. 67). So, too, the barbarism latent in the civilizing project is flagrantly at stake: ‘From left to right and top to bottom as in our civilization I carve my Roman capitals’, says Bom, of his work on Pim’s body (HII, p. 77). For Irish nationalists, Imperial Rome was long a trope for Imperial Britain. But the passage that seems most peculiarly evocative in this context comes when Bom reflects on Pim’s as
that life then said to have been his invented remembered a little of each no knowing that thing above he gave it to me I made it mine what I fancied skies especially and the paths he crept along how they changed with the sky and where you were going on the Atlantic in the evening. (HII, p. 80)
From historical erasure and oblivion (‘that life … invented remembered a little of each’) to colonial appropriation (‘he gave it to me I made it mine what I fancied’) to the figure ‘creeping along’ paths by the Western seaboard, the fate of so many of the dispossessed Irish who had been chased there, to mass emigration (‘where you were going on the Atlantic in the evening’), the words summon up residues of a historical scenario that the Bom-Pim relation represents and replicates. So, too, that grimly, violently capitalized sentence in the book – DO YOU LOVE ME CUNT (HII, p. 99) – expresses the final, exquisitely perverse, obscenely wrong colonial demand.
So Part 2 of How It Is appears to offer a rather stark identification of the colonial disaster and Beckett’s position relative to it, as contrasted with the obfuscation or allegorization of the colonial situation more common within the Anglo-Irish tradition, as in Swift and Goldsmith. But it is not possible to sustain the point. The materials I have picked out from Part 2 are mixed with others that adulterate them, thin them out, leave them only as a set of sometimes faint and ambivalent traces. This in itself represents a new late turn within the Protestant Irish tradition, in that Beckett puts, not so much the identification itself as the question of identification or, more precisely, of the incompleteness, impossibility or failure of identification, right at the centre of How It Is. Identification with the colonized is at stake, but also more largely, identification in the sense in which we associated it with the bards: where if anywhere can I conceivably imagine myself belonging (any more), as taking my stand? In other words, at the heart of How It Is there is a fleeting identification from which Part 2 intermittently retreats, and about which Parts 1 and 3 are, in complex and differing ways, reticent and evasive. Perhaps Bom’s most revealing moment comes when he declares, ‘How I can efface myself behind my creature’ (HII, p. 58). With an irony characteristic of Beckett, How It Is declares its meaning through what is in large measure a process of such self-effacement, as is clear if we now turn to Parts 1 and 3.
Part 1, ‘before Pim’, is dominated by a set of procedures by which Bom both approaches or sidles up to Pim, edges towards an identification of colonial atrocity, and backs away from it. Beckett manages the relations between these procedures with consummate subtlety. There are at least four discourses at stake in Part 1, two pointing in one direction, two in another. On the one hand, there is a Bom already anticipating a confrontation with the atrocious particularity of Part 2 and thinking forward to ‘the words of Pim his extorted voice’ (HII, p. 23), to the work of extortion itself. This tips over into a classic misanthropic discourse, as when Bom refers to those who have ‘sought refuge in a desert place to be alone at last and vent their sorrows unheard’ (HII, p. 14). But there are also two other Boms. One thinks of himself as not a ‘monster of the solitudes’ at all, but as belonging ‘above in the light’ (HII, pp. 8, 14). He projects, fantasizes or appears to recall a life lived there. This Bom is still endowed with learned references – Malebranche, Heraclitus, Milton, Dante, Haeckel, Klopstock; he will not appear again, after Part 1 – though their very slightness indicates the tenuousness of his purchase on them. He can exclaim, sardonically, ‘The humanities I had my God’ (HII, p. 33). Alongside him, however, there is a Bom inclined to subsume his predicament under a pompously generalized rubric, or what he calls the ‘great categories of being’ (HII, p. 15). This Bom thinks in terms of ‘vast tracts of time’ or ‘the joys and … sorrows of Empires’ (HII, pp. 7, 13), ‘abject abject ages each heroic’.73 He thinks of the mud as ‘primeval’ (HII, p. 12). He seems remote from the horror in which he will participate in Part 2, though, in a way, he is clearly already disposed to find alibis for or extenuations of it.
Part 3, ‘after Pim’, returns to the four discourses in Part 1, if in rather different versions. First, there are gruesome flashbacks to Part 2. Secondly, there are bleak abstractions from the vision of Part 2 into a generalized misanthropy, a world given over to darkness and death, to the ‘great shears of the black old hag older than the world born of night’ (HII, p. 114). Thirdly, there is Bom’s refuge in a (now extremely meagre) version of his ‘humanities’ and a pathetic, fleeting, clearly hopeless resort to ‘the humming bird known as the passing moment’ (HII, p. 111). Fourthly, the ‘categories of being’ reappear. But to the retreat into the generality of the categories, Bom adds two further strategies, which dominate the last part. The first is that he generalizes the tormentor-victim relation. All are tormentors, all victims. But Beckett knows very well that this notion is a fantasy and a subterfuge. Part 2 is altogether fixated on a one-way relation, Bom as tormentor, Pim as victim, which has at least some of its roots in the colonial relation, and from which the tormentor–victim system can only seem like a specious, self-protective extrapolation.
The second ‘additional strategy’ involves mathematical descriptions of suffering, including the ‘tormentor–victim system’. But this strategy is no more convincing than the first. It is demented, and meant to sound demented, demented in the manner of Swift’s projectors in Gulliver’s Travels and ‘A Modest Proposal’. It is the voice of Ascendancy science, of the airiness of Ascendancy reason, the chatter of a voice with no purchase on the incalculable seriousness of the historical world in which it is lodged, but nonetheless concerned both to place and supersede it. We hear the same chatter gushing from the English entrepreneurial adventurers sizing up commercial opportunities in the West of Ireland in the 1850s, when the Famine had cleared the land. We hear it in different, more august and milder forms in the Victorian commentators, from Mill to Carlyle to Thackeray, who sought to bring (a self-appointed) reason to a scene that no English reason could possibly reduce to terms, since it was unable adequately to acknowledge a founding unreason or incur the intellectual debt that unreason imposed. This is the voice of rationalization where the idiom of rationalization is grotesquely, shockingly inappropriate.
How It Is is very much about misanthropic vision and incomplete identification, in that, in Part 2, Bom effectively declares himself, but in Parts 1 and 3 also withdraws from, re-translates or disguises his own self-identification. He can neither admit the truth, that he is an instrument of a fundamental, ineradicable injustice, nor entirely efface his existence as such from the parts of the book that seek to advertise it. How It Is is a deeply disturbing work, in that, most of the time, it is about non-confrontations with the most disquieting levels of historical experience it articulates. This, however, does not make of it a book that alleviates or dilutes Irish misanthropic tradition. Rather, the reverse: the conclusion at which it urges us to arrive is that it is in the very negligence with which we dismiss the misanthropic vision that we may most bear it out. Beckett achieved this with a singular and perhaps inimitable black brilliance. If, to come up with two final quotations, ‘the ancient without end … buries mankind to the last cunt’, and one might as well give up on ‘the old business of grace in this sewer’ (HII, p. 68), on the evidence of How It Is, that is because ‘mankind’ will not confront either the sewer as its own element or its own responsibility
for it, its own complicity in producing it – as was supremely evident, perhaps, in the colonizing race and the colonial classes in Ireland.
One objection at least will remain in many minds: with obvious exceptions, like Swift, the Irish tradition is not essentially misanthropic, because its scope is confined. But this in turn invites a Benjaminian riposte, that certain local and particular histories may be all we need to know, that the truth-value of other perspectives born of power, privilege, wealth, comfort, ease is effectively zero. With the Irish tradition, we recognize that misanthropic discourse need not of itself make universalizing claims. Misanthropy can be local if the local constitutes its only horizon. If a villager who knows of nothing beyond the horizons of his or her village loathes fellow villagers without exception, he or she is in effect misanthropic. Misanthropy turns out to be a local concern presumed to be universal. The argument that the local and particular, whatever our definition of it, is all that can be available to us is not uncommon at the present time. But what if the local and particular indefinitely points a tale of horror? Can we dismiss the victim who insists that such a tale is the only one that finally needs to be told, not least because the victims are always there, they do not go away? On what grounds, exactly? The happiness of the greatest number? Progress?
5
WOMEN, MODERNITY AND MISANTHROPY
It is difficult to see, then, how the case for misanthropy on the basis of the experience of those who have suffered extreme historical damage should make absolutely no appeal to us. How exactly would one dismiss an Irishman or woman who asserted in 1900 that the Irish people had for many centuries suffered gross historical injustice and maltreatment at the hands of a nation that took itself and was taken by others to be one of the world’s great civilized powers, had neither been able to save themselves nor been rescued by anyone else, and therefore had good reason not to think highly of humanity? But I want to pause for a moment and underline the fact that, in the work of O’Brien, Kavanagh and other modern Irish writers, Irish misanthropy persists after liberation from British rule. In O’Brien and Kavanagh, the misanthropy that springs from a history of victimization resists the narrative of ready emancipation from it, refuses to grant it any weight for thought. There is a misanthropy that carries on through the modern drive to emancipation, lingers within, survives, may even be born of and nourished by it. This chapter is about such a misanthropy, and my examples will be modern women.