Interpretive Calisthenics

OK, groan away -- so I can't resist a bad pun once in awhile in my titles! It gets worse when you survey the other options I was considering: Northern Ireland's Calorific Politics; Calumny and Sectarianism; In the Cal-Zone; A Cal to Arms (actually, a serious title invoking Hemingway -- A Farewell to Arms -- would actually be relevant to this novel, and would also pick up on the sentiments in Sam's recent post and rhyme with U2's refrain "I will sing a new song" from their song "40"). Anyway, maybe you'll have your own bad puns to add to the list!

To more serious matters: we have a lot still to talk about in regards to MaLaverty's novel, so the pressure will be on to traverse a diverse assortment of passages on Monday. To that end, maybe some of you would care to deposit an observation or two in these parts to get us started, and to help me think about what we need to cover on Monday. It goes without saying, of course, that we'll need to deal with the novel's concluding scenes, but what else? Speaking (above) of "singing a new song," it's interesting that Cal, although remembering (during that church service) how his mother used to sing rebel songs, finds that such songs don't speak to him the way American rhythm & blues do (links to The Commitments, too, probably). As I invoke mothers, I remember that one of the last phrases I wrote on the board last Wednesday was "absent mothers," a detail in Cal that connects this novel with The Heather Blazing (and that connects Cal with Eamon), and perhaps even with Amongst Women: it's very poignant when Cal remembers his mom (see p. 78, for example), and it both reminds us of the masculinist nature of the Troubles and the kind of incomplete vision of society that was featured in Toibin's women-less vision of Irish society (and the Irish body politic). The absence of women figures deeply in the psyche of some of our individual characters, and also has implications for the national psyche. I would also imagine we'll want to think/talk about the cottage that Cal ends up using as a refuge on the Morton farm: and perhaps that suggests linkages with one or more of our previous (con)texts. And so much more, surely. Hopefully, too, ILL will manage to get a copy of the film version to me by Monday so that I can show you a scene or two. Until then: happy weekending!

The futility of terror

I'm the last person to condemn taking up arms in opposition to tyranny.  Among my personal heroes are such men and women as Vercingetorix, Boadicea, William Wallace and George Washington.  However, I believe terrorism is both tactically unsound and morally bankrupt.
It seems to me that the unchivalrous methods used by terrorists only serve to firm the will of the enemies.  When old men and women are drug from their beds and murdered, when bombs kill random, innocent civilians, it's easy for the other side to feel justified in fighting you.  When your bombs are killing children of your own people, they no longer feel the need to support you.
Gandhi, for all his faults, had the right idea on how to fight an empire like the British.  While his tactics would not have worked against the Soviets or the Chinese, he was able to convince the Brits that the right thing to do was to give India back to the Indians.  I think that similar tactics are the only thing that would free the five Celtic nations from English imperialism.

The Goal is Soul

I hope your week proceeds productively apace and that the music lingers in the air after our film viewing. I wanted to create this thread in order to invite more comments on The Commitments. It seems like I appreciate and enjoy the film more and more every time I see it. We talked very briefly about the generational theme in the film: Roddy Doyle was about 30 when he wrote the novel, and although he's in his early 50s now we can still think of him as someone associated with the "new" Ireland (away from the constricting ideologies and narratives of the past) and as one of the most important Irish writers of his generation. We see this generational slant, of course, in the movement towards music and away from the commitments to state and church (Elvis above the Pope, right). We might say it rejects traditional Irishness (and thus the pieties of state affiliation), as well, in the music the characters adopt (and this strikes me as different from another music-laden Irish tale, Joyce's "The Dead," when the appearance of "The Lass of Aughrim," a traditional ballad with connections to the west of Ireland, seems to be valorized at the end, at least relative to the earlier dinner conversation about opera and the classical tradition): the audition scene at Jimmy's apartment was telling in this regard, as what we saw there was a bunch of aspiring Irish musicians who were all over the musical map in terms of the traditions and identities they were peddling. In this sense, the novel and film seem to be making an argument against single, univocal, essential identities, which of course were the cause of so much trouble and pain in twentieth century Ireland (we'll be all-too-familiar with this after our upcoming unit on the Troubles).

Hybrid identities find an apt metaphor in soul, too, which we know to be a kind of fusion of gospel, blues, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll. In The Black Atlantic, the important contemporary theorist Paul Gilroy offers some useful passages on this kind of blending, especially when he discusses the discourse of authenticity and the need for an "anti-anti-essentialism" that might allow us to move beyond old and narrow ways of thinking about identity into "wider, as yet uncharted, worlds." Soul is an interesting metaphor, too, in terms of Irish identity. There seems to be no soul in Joyce's Dublin at times, and Gabriel Conroy recognizes at the end of "The Dead" that the fire has gone out of his soul. Contemporary Irish literature often defies our tendency to think of the Irish as being all about soulful rebellion by time and again (at least through the 1980s and early 1990s) depicting a void at the heart of Irish society. That's why these musicians and young people in the film are so symbolically important, representing as they do a new direction into the future. I'm reminded, too, of Bono, who has often ended live performances of U2's song, "Beautiful Day" with the impassioned refrain, "the goal is soul!" So, we appreciate the uplifting and efficacious effect of music-making in The Commitments, and we take comfort in the fact that even though the band self-destructs at the end, each member seems to emerge as a stronger person.

Identity Crisis

Well, this is my first time posting to our ENIR360 Blog and I am not really sure what to talk about.

One consistent theme that cannot be exhausted is the crisis of the Irish Identity. In every book or poem we have read or movie we have watched, there is a main character struggling for placement in their profession, their country and even their own family. As we learned with Bernadette Sweeney, placement and language are crucial in Theatre, especially Irish theatre, but what is it about this Irish placement (separation!)- on the stage or in reality that makes "being" Irish, Catholic, an Irish woman so different than just being...me-An average American girl- who can literally, trace her background to anywhere (Okay, maybe not anywhere, mainly to the Volga Germans in Russia and County Cork in Ireland)? Are our characters running from something, or merely running toward it? What is "it"? My thought is that the "it" is their identity. They are running from themselves and toward themselves; running from what they were- heading toward what they will be.

Questions I have:
What was the Irish Identity before present day?
What is it now, and where is it headed?
What did it mean to be Irish back in the day vs. What it means to be Irish now?
Is the struggle for identity different for men and women?
-What about children?- We see how Michael in Fools of Fortune turns out- and Imelda too. Is that the product of being Irish, or the product of an average dysfunctional family? How do we determine the difference?
*What is so special about the Irish Identity that sets it apart from other Identities?

Boland's Momentous Transit

Well, we have a chance to collect ourselves this week, a chance to take a break from the reading, to get ready for Northern Ireland and the Troubles next week ... but, more importantly, for the moment, a chance, with our film viewing of The Commitments (1991), to laugh a little, to sing a little, and to root for Jimmy Rabbitt and his North Dublin underdogs. My favorite moment, I think, is when the band, knowing at this point that they've got something special going, slow things down to perform "The Dark End of the Street": it's powerful stuff, for sure. Anyway, I hope you all enjoy it. Take notes, raise questions, store away some observations, and we'll plan to discuss the film during the second half of class on Wednesday.

All that said, I have to admit I feel loath to leave Eavan Boland, Object Lessons, and those poignant poems. You heard Feist's new song "Graveyard" before our last class, in part because I was so moved by that chorus "bring them all back to life," thinking that it worked so nicely with Boland's project of trying to recover individual women and women's voices from the "suggestive hinterland of pain" (OL 127). Our vantage point puts us on the near end of what Boland refers to as "a momentous transit," one that "inevitably changes our idea of measurement, of distance, of the past as well as the future. And as it does so, it changes our idea of the Irish poem, of its completion and authority, of its right to appropriate certain themes and make certain fiats" (126). Be thinking about precisely what she has in mind with that transit, and what her specific role is in moving it along. I like this book so much because it teaches us a lot about Irish poetry, Irish nationalism and history, the self-questionings of the aspiring poet (especially the aspiring female poet), and about poetic subject matter and truth, generally. She starts out working for "the clear line, the pure stanza" (218) and ends up pursuing "the dial of a washing machine, the expression in a child's face" (193). I wish we had had to time to talk about another of her many turning points: the observations she makes about Chardin's paintings and what message they hold for her poetry. Late in the text, too, she struggles very honestly and searchingly with her relationship to feminism, lured at times by feminism's promise "to ease her technical problems with the solvent of polemic" (245), but aware as well of the dangers of "separatist prescriptions" (243).

Anyway, there's so much more to cover and to be said relative to this material; to that end, do feel free to leave a lingering thought or two in this space (especially those of you who did not get a chance to weigh in during class with a quote or moment that was suggestive and important for you), to keep the conversation alive.

Lughnasadh Dance

This is a relatively modern song about the festival around which our current text is centered.  Set to a ceilidh dance tune, it tells the tale of Lugh, the establishment of Lughnasadh and his son CúChulainn.

Placing McGahern and Toibin

We can't possibly gather up all the remaining loose ends from the past few weeks, of course, but as we move away from this early-semester focus on the contemporary Irish novel I do find myself thinking continuously about space (not surprisingly, since this may be the most dominant analytical category in contemporary Irish and Northern Irish literature). To that end, I wonder if any of you thought about any connections between the symbolic power of McGahern's/Moran's Great Meadow and Toibin's/Redmond's Cush? Is there a paper idea in that possible link, I wonder? Both invoke rural Irishness (in different ways, I guess) and both probably gesture towards the restrictions of limited economic possibilities (we'll see this in Friel's play, too); both become sites of reaffirming identity, of finding a kind of sanctity in the idea of home, of creating an antidote to the experience and connotations of the city. Remembering the Montague poem, too, I guess we can expand all of this into that common tension between tradition and modernity/change. But clearly there's ambivalence on both sides of the equation ...

All of this takes me even wider afield, too, to think of the diasporic condition of the Irish, the dominance of emigration and exile in their root condition. Whether it's evidenced in novels like the ones we've just read, in Joyce's Gabriel Conroy who, at the end of the "The Dead," realizes "the time had come for him to set out on his journey westward," to contemporary Irish musical artists like U2 who must, through touring, continuously confront the contrast between home and away, between traditional and international/hybrid notions of Irishness, etc. (lyrically, too, one thinks of "Where the Streets Have No Name": "I want to run / I want to hide / I want to tear down these walls / That hold me inside": that could nearly be a theme song for some of those Moran children!).

Anyway, I just thought I'd toss that out there! I hope you're enjoying Dancing at Lughnasa. Don't forget to have a look at Professor Sweeney's book, Performing the Body in Irish Theatre, if you get a chance (it's available online as an electronic text via the library's website).