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?
Good questions all, Katie. They're useful questions to think about in the context of The Commitments, too, I think. How is Irishness understood in the film? What does the emphasis on American soul music contribute in this regard (because it's surprising somehow, isn't it?)? ... Anyway, I'm not sure if we'll draw anyone else into this thread (I'm still working on trying to create some critical mass for this blog), but we'll see!
ReplyDeleteI can't help thinking about the modernist "impasse" that writers like Eliot were up against, which, while early in the 20th century, were the beginnings of a sort of attrition, that lead to frustration from being weakened, but without any real support or drive left from previous generations, either unconcerned with the same issues in the same way as those who would inherit the end of the century, in the same embattled and beaten land. I like the question of whether characters are running away, or toward a kind of destiny. I think it's a lot of both, with the obvious new prospects of America, from an island and continent struggling with even imagining renewal. There's an essay in the new Harper's titled "Conjectural Damage, A History of Bombing," with an impacting photograph of homes on the North Strand in Dublin destroyed in a German bombing raid in 1941, with a bare, wriggled tree in the foreground, black and with similar texture to the gutted rooftops and street rubble with a photographer set up on the sidewalk. After years of conflict and irreparable damage, the defeated masses were left to just stare. Trying to inhabit a witness to this destruction, I can imagine the despair and lack of a certain way to go forth into the future. As many throughout the century continued to cross the pond to greener grasses, the idea of Ireland would be affected (I think) by its dwindling population and lack of faith in a working system. While I mention this November Harper's, another article "Broken Britain," while a scathing assessment of the current state culture, government, and anything else, to me gives a clear impression of the fallout of a damaged system that had so much to do with what Ireland would become today. I would assume a large part of what it means to be Irish today has to do with reclaiming, from a dispossessed parentage, a new identity that honors the old while being a new creation of one's own. If it were industry, manufacturing, instead of "living off the buying and selling of others" to quote Martin Sheen in Wall Street. With an increasing global village it's become more difficult to discern what belongs to who and who came from where. I wonder what an Irish person in 1846 would have thought about myself, rooted in County Tyrone and Northern Germany, living as a 3rd gen. American with very little real knowledge of anything able to survive being passed through only a couple hundred turgid years of change and violence.
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