Werner Huber (Paderborn)

'Pig's Back' and 'Enchanted Isle': Irish Autobiographers and their I/Is/Ire/land

[...] my most endemic pride in my own country was, for some years, founded on a mistake: my failing to have a nice ear for vowel sounds, and the Anglo-Irish slurred, hurried way of speaking made me take the words "Ireland" and "island" to be synonymous. Thus, all other countries quite surrounded by water took (it appeared) their generic name from ours. It seemed fine to live in a country that was a Prototype. England, for instance, was "an ireland" (or, sub-Ireland)-an imitation. Then I learned that England was not even "an ireland," having failed to detach herself from the flanks of Scotland and Wales. Vaguely, as a Unionist child, I conceived that our politeness to England must be a form of pity. In the same sense, I took Dublin to be the model of cities, of which there were imitations scattered over the world. (Bowen 1971, 12)

At this point a digression into the realm of national psychology might not come amiss. It is worth noting that exactly twenty years before Elizabeth Bowen, in 1922, Ernest Jones, disciple and biographer of Freud, read a paper before the British Psycho-Analytical Society entitled "The Island of Ireland: A Psycho-Analytical Contribution to Political Psychology." Jones maintained that the way in which geographical insularity influences the mentality of islanders can be investigated on the level of subconscious associations. Particular complexes, as Jones claimed, "to which the idea of an island home tends to become attached are those relating to the ideas of woman, virgin, mother, and womb" (Jones 1951, 98). With island nations these associations carry an especially high emotional charge-or, as the Irish professor in Aidan Higgins's novel Lions of the Grunewald suggests, "'the smaller the island the bigger the neurosis'" (Higgins 1993, 191). The transformations this mythical deep structure can achieve are innumerable, and to illustrate this point it may simply suffice to recall the legion of myths and stories that have accrued round Mother Ireland, Cathleen Ni Houlihan, Roisin Dubh/Dark Rosaleen, the Hag of Beare, the Sean Bhean Bhocht/the Poor Old Woman, the Silk of the Kine, and the eponymous Irish goddesses Fodhla, Banba, and Eire.

According to Jones, the archetypal myth, the collective metaphor of Mother Ireland as national allegory, is determined by the idea of the island as the "womb of a virgin mother" (Jones 1951, 98). Jones goes on to isolate the cluster of uterine associations contained in this central metaphor. What he calls our "womb phantasies," "our deepest feelings about birth, death, and mother" (Jones 1951, 107), has correspondences in three different categories of islands as they are represented in Irish mythology and folk belief: (1) the Fortunate Isle, the Island Paradise, which corresponds to the period of complete gratification during intraÄuterine life; (2) the island of birth and rebirth, most directly a maternal image; (3) the abode of the dead, the Isle of the Blessed, the Land of the Young.

To return to the realm of etymology - Gillian Beer, in an article on Virginia Woolf, England, and the island topos, not only stated the obvious when she pointed out that "the concept 'island' implies a particular and intense relationship of land and water," but also drew attention to the fact that the word 'island' "is a kind of pun" (Beer 1990, 271). While the origins and meaning of the second part of the word are obvious, the first part can be traced back to Old English ea/ieg (Gothic *alwa, Latin aqua) denoting 'water.' In strictly rhetorical terms the compound "island" as 'water-land' could thus be called an oxymoron, a paradox even. A binary structure of this sort could in turn be seen as running parallel to the psychological polarization of the island idea in the birth/death dichotomy. And this would furthermore prepare us for the often ambivalent responses from Irish writers who are obsessed with the island character of Ireland and who utilize it as a structural metaphor for wider issues of individual and national importance.

The theory has been advanced that the close identification between personal and national aspirations may be the single most defining feature of Irish autobiography, especially in the 20th century (Reilly 1981; Kenneally 1989). If we accept this theory and if we remember the words of Ernest Jones about the ways in which Irishmen and Irishwomen express their political

The linking of self and nation implies that Irish autobiographers have recourse to allegoric representations of their country as the "central metaphor" of the self. One half of Jones's argument, i.e. a female archetype as national allegory, is covered or supported by some of the more obvious strategies Irish autobiographers are fond of employing. Examples can be picked more or less at random. George Moore in his introduction to Hail and Farewell says that he is writing for Banva (Banba) as Mother Ireland's amanuensis, as it were, and in his record of the Irish Renaissance, which is intertwined with his life-story, he is doing just that. In the autobiographies of W.B. Yeats and Sean O'Casey blows are struck for Cathleen Ni Houlihan. She also looms large in James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) - for example, as the peasant woman at the half-door in Davin's story or as the ethereal girl with emerald associations, the Celtic muse, whom Stephen Dedalus beholds on Dollymount Strand. Not to mention the most obvious example of all - Edna O'Brien's Mother Ireland, in which the author's life-story is connected with an 'oversexed' national allegory of Ireland's history as a history of violation and forced possession.

In comparison with such instances of national allegory, 'island' imagery, 'island' motifs, and 'island' topoi may, at first sight, appear to be less obvious in Irish autobiographies, but only falsely so. George Moore, early on in Hail and Farewell, describes what could be termed an archetypal experience of Ireland's island nature. Moore, on his self-appointed mission to strengthen the cause of the Irish Renaissance, is returning to Ireland by sea and eagerly awaiting the first glimpse of his native land:

But I do remember myself on deck watching the hills now well above the horizon, asking myself again if Ireland were going to appear to me small as a pig's back or a land of extraordinary enchantment? It was the hills themselves that reminded me of the legend -on the left, rough and uncomely as a drove of pigs running down a lane, with one tall hill very like the peasant whom I used to see in childhood, an old man that wore a tall hat, knee-breeches, worsted stockings, and brogues. Like a pig's back Ireland has appeared to me, I said; but soon after on my right a lovely hill came into view, shapen like a piece of sculpture and I said: Perhaps I am going to see Ireland as an enchanted isle after all.
(Moore 1985, 107)

In many cases, the double vision of Ireland as either a pig's back or as an enchanted isle or as both serves as an objective correlative. It mirrors the highly ambivalent responses of Irish writers to their mother country. These responses - most superficially on the immediately biographical level - result in exile and return and are themselves images of the double expectations of rejuvenation/paradise and/or (spiritual) death.

Born a Catholic, Moore turned agnostic at the age of 16, and later, in 1903, toyed with the idea of publicly declaring himself a Protestant as a way of demonstrating against the anti-nationalism of the Roman Church (Moore 1985, 436, 458, 669-670). The Boer War is for once the catalytic moment, the excuse for Moore to leave England - imperialist England with its culture marked by sheer brutality and crude materialism - for Ireland, only to realize that Irish culture has been utterly ruined by Catholicism and is now beyond repair. This insight is foreshadowed by an imitation of Wagnerian leitmotifs so typical of Moore's style when early on in Ave a variation is played upon Moore's original formula and an aggressive substitution of paradigms takes place. In conversation with Yeats, Moore proclaims, "I looked forward to finding Ireland a land of endless enchantment, but so far as I can see at present Ireland isn't bigger than a priest's back" (Moore 1985, 116).

It is highly significant that Moore's final valediction takes up the words from Catullus with one significant change - the substitution of 'mother' for 'brother': "ATQUE IN PERPETUUM, MATER, AVE ATQUE VALE" (Moore 1985, 644). Thus, his farewell from 'Mother Ireland' shows how strongly Moore relies on the matter of Ireland as well as the allegorical and structural associations of its island character for the reconstruction of his personal history and identity.

'Farewell to Ireland' is also an important autobiographical motive for Stephen Dedalus alias James Joyce. It takes a central position in Stephens's triad of "silence, exile, and cunning" (Joyce 1968, 247). Stephen makes it very clear what his negative credo or "nego" implies. In an emotional outburst he delivers his verdict on his motherland using the negative image inscribed by tradition in the double view of Ireland: "'Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow'" (Joyce 1968, 203). Trying to flee from his "Mother," "Mother Church," and "Mother Ireland" seems to be the only option left to him at first. His evocation of symbolic polarities, Dublin vs. the West of Ireland (home of the old Gaelic speaker whose "redrimmed horny eyes" he fears) and Europe vs. Ireland ("an afterthought of Europe"), points in the same direction. As is already evident in Stephen Hero, Europe and exile from Ireland signify first and foremost an avenue to personal and artistic liberation. Having flown by the nets of "nationality, language,

The ambivalence of exile and return, which is structurally derived from the island topos, is nowhere better expressed than in the cryptic sentence with which Stephen tries to explain to his friend Davin the motive for his self-imposed exile: "Told him the shortest way to Tara was via Holyhead" (Joyce 1968, 250). George Moore incidentally seems to have supplied a pre-text for Joyce's often-quoted formula: Musing about one of his acquaintances Moore says, "he is pure Turgenev, and perhaps Ireland is a little Russia in which the longest way round is always the shortest way home, and the means more important than the end" (Moore 1985, 124-125). It is perhaps no coincidence either that Moore literally undertook the trip to Tara, the seat of the High Kings and the centre of power in ancient Ireland. As Moore represents it in Salve, Chapters II-IV, he went there on a bicycle and in the company of AE (George W. Russell), but he also went there at least a second time together with W.B. Yeats and Douglas Hyde in the summer of 1902, when unauthorized excavations taking place at the ancient site received much publicity and caused a public uproar.

Liam O'Flaherty was born on Inishmore, the largest of the Aran Islands in the same year (1896) that W.B. Yeats first visited this group of Islands 'behind' the island of Ireland. (The Aran Islands eventually made their mark when Yeats advised the young writer John Millington Synge to go there and cast around for subjects adequate for a nascent Irish literature in English.) As a point of departure and as a point of return the Aran Islands occupy a central role in the structural pattern of 'exodus and return' that characterizes O'Flaherty's autobiographical

The central autobiographical conflict in Shame the Devil is, as also suggested by Two Years, the conflict within oppositional structures and between antagonistic forces such as self (ego) vs. anti-self (superego), self vs. mask, individual vs. society, the artist's loneliness vs. the desire to 'belong,' to be part of the 'tribe,' the mob. The solution which O'Flaherty presents is rather predictable, but quite rich in geo-psychological associations. It comes to him on an island off the Breton coast: "An islander to his island" (O'Flaherty 1981, 197). O'Flaherty's anti-self personified as a voice and acting as a kind of mediator makes an important proposal for the future of O'Flaherty's career and art: it is imperative that he return to a 'natural,' unalienated life. However, such a return does not necessarily lead into idyllic pastoralism, but to the acceptance of a nature concept that embraces the pitiless fight for survival in all its cruelty and beauty.

[...] I was born on a storm-swept rock and hate the soft growth of sunbaked lands where there is no frost in men's bones. Swift thoughts, and the swift flight of ravenous birds, and the squeal of terror of hunted animals are to me reality.
(O'Flaherty 1973, 11)

When a man is born on naked rocks like the Aran Islands, where the struggle for life against savage nature is very intense, the instinct for self-preservation is strong in him. His character tends towards morbidness and reckless adventure while he is in strong health, but the first sign of sickness makes him cling like a threatened limpet with a fast hold to the rock of life.
(O'Flaherty 1981, 10)

It has often been noted that, following the example set by Stephen Dedalus/James Joyce, 'exile' is a necessary pre-condition for Irish artists, and it may now almost sound like a truism to say, as George Moore did," [...] that an Irishman must fly from Ireland if he would be himself" (Moore 1985, 56) or, in the words of Frank O'Connor, that "every Irishman's private life begins in Holyhead" (O'Connor 1962, 86). In this vein it is rather difficult to underestimate or ignore the island topos as an essential element contributing to the identity of Irishmen and Irishwomen in bios and graphe, in life and life-writing.

Works Cited:

Werner Huber
FB 3: Anglistik
Universität Paderborn
Warburger Str. 100
D-33095 Paderborn