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.