Topics

Global war is one of the defining features of twentieth-century experience, and the first global war is the subject of one of this period’s topics, “Representing the Great War.” Masses of dead bodies strewn upon the ground, plumes of poison gas drifting through the air, hundreds of miles of trenches infested with rats—these are but some of the indelible images that have come to be associated with World War I (1914-18). It was a war that unleashed death, loss, and suffering on an unprecedented scale. How did recruiting posters, paintings, memoirs, and memorials represent the war? Was it a heroic occasion, comparable to a sporting event, eliciting displays of manly valor and courage? Or was it an ignominious waste of human life, with little gain to show on either side of the conflict, deserving bitterly ironic treatment? What were the differences between how civilians and soldiers, men and women, painters and poets represented the war? How effective or inadequate were memorials, poems, or memoirs in conveying the enormous scale and horror of the war? These are among the issues explored in this topic about the challenge to writers and artists of representing the unrepresentable.

Another of the twentieth century’s defining features is radical artistic experiment. The boundary-breaking art, literature, and music of the first decades of the century are the subject of the topic “Modernist Experiment.” Among the leading aesthetic innovators of this era were the composer Igor Stravinsky, the cubist Pablo Picasso, and the futurist F. T. Marinetti. The waves of artistic energy in the avant-garde European arts soon crossed the English Channel, as instanced by the abstraction and dynamism of Red Stone Dancer (1913-14) by the London-basedvorticist sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. Other vorticists and modernists include such English-language writers as Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Mina Loy, who also responded to the stimulus and challenge of the European avant-garde with manifestos, poems, plays, and other writings. This topic explores the links between Continental experiment and the modernist innovations of English-language poets and writers during a period of extraordinary ferment in literature and the arts.

Another of the defining features of the twentieth century was the emergence of new nations out of European colonial rule. Among these nations, Ireland was the oldest of Britain’s colonies and the first in modern times to fight for independence. The topic “Imagining Ireland” explores how twentieth-century Irish writers fashioned new ideas about the Irish nation. It focuses on two periods of crisis, when the violent struggle for independence put the greatest pressure on literary attempts to imagine the nation: in the aftermath of the Easter Rising of 1916 and the later outbreaks of sectarian violence from 1969 (known as the Troubles) in Northern Ireland. How do poems, plays, memoirs, short stories, and other literary works represent the bloodshed and yet the potential benefits of these violent political upheavals? Do they honor or lament, idealize or criticize, these political acts? And how do these literary representations compare with political speeches and treaties that bear on these defining moments in modern Irish history? “Imagining Ireland” considers these and other questions about literature and the making of Irish nationality, which continue to preoccupy contemporary writers of Ireland, Northern Ireland, and the Irish diaspora.

1. Representing the Great War

2. Today we know it as World War I, but those who lived through it called it the Great War. At first, the war was predicted to last only a few months and to result in a resounding success for the British Empire and its allies. But as the years passed and the casualties mounted into the millions, it became clear that this conflict was quite different from its predecessors. With nearly nine million soldiers killed (one in five of those who fought) and survivors afflicted with prolonged physical and mental suffering, the war marked a sea-change in the course of military and political history. It also represented a challenge to anyone wishing to give meaning to the enormity of the death toll and the futility of trench warfare. Soldiers living in rat-infested and water-saturated trenches fired machine-guns at unseen soldiers in other trenches; when they went “over the top” into no-man’s-land, they became completely vulnerable. The use of the term “Great War” suggests the challenge of representing something so new and awful, so vast and traumatic.

3. Once it became clear that both sides had settled into their trenches, which stretched from Switzerland to the North Sea, people naturally wondered what had gone wrong. Patriotic poems and songs from previous wars, such as Henry Newbolt’s “Vitaï Lampada” (1897-98), linked the British soldier’s fighting prowess with his moral superiority, fairness, and skill.  World War I also elicited representations that blurred the line between war and athletics,  such as Jessie Pope’s jingoistic poem “The Call” (1915) and the recruiting poster “The Army Isn’t All Work.”  But as soldiers’ expectations of a just, valorous, sporting war gave way to hideous, anonymous carnage, characteristic expressions of irony emerged. For soldier poets such as Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, irony proved a useful means of representing the gulf between expectation and reality, the murderous war and the unsuspecting nation, the soldier’s comrades in the trenches and the unseen enemy across no-man’s-land. Bitterly ironic statements such as Siegfried Sassoon’s “A Soldier’s Declaration” helped call attention to the rage and bewilderment of the trench soldier; but their chilly reception by an equally bewildered reading public reinforced cultural divisions. Some readers at home condemned the war poets’ attacks as unpatriotic, and opinion remained divided between those who had fought and knew, and those who preferred not to know.

4. Some poets also disliked the soldier poets’ graphic and caustically ironic depictions of the war. In the words of W. B. Yeats in his 1936 preface to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, the bitterness of war poets was an unconstructive “passive suffering.” Yeats refused to include in his anthology combatant poets such as Owen and Sassoon. He preferred in poetry a more active heroism, such as that he invented for the speaker of “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death.”

5. As casualties from both the Allied and Central Powers ran into the millions, military tactics became increasingly desperate. These included the deployment of mustard gas, submarine attacks on shipping lines, and howitzer shelling and zeppelin bombings of cities miles behind the front lines. Such tactics signaled a breakdown of the rules of warfare in favor of indiscriminate killing of both the soldiers and the civilians they protected. Civilian artists now found they had an authentic, lived experience of war they could express. The involvement of millions of women in the war effort, such as those depicted in the poster “We Need you, Redcross,” eroded the distinction between civilian women and the men who went off to save the country. Munitions, factory, and textile jobs were vacated by enlistees and quickly filled by women for whom the war represented an economic opportunity. Although recruiting posters such as “Women of Britain say—GO!” associated women with the English countryside that valiant soldiers ought to defend, poems such as Jessie Pope’s “War Girls” represent women as empowered by the challenge of their wartime jobs.  Frustrated by the war’s length and carnage, some poets, such as Sassoon and Ezra Pound, allude disparagingly to the women and the civilization soldiers were supposedly protecting. Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, for example, refers to Britain as “an old bitch gone in the teeth.”  

6. Because of its massive scale and controversial impetus, monuments to the war often indicate the difficulty of representing it. Commemorative physical structures tend to look like a mixture of massiveness and stripped-down, minimalist gestures, as if trying to speak volumes and remain silent at the same time. The Menin Gate and the Cenotaph of Whitehall both stand in mute remembrance of a massive loss that can barely be imagined, much less represented. The spareness of the Cenotaph, meanwhile, allowed two contemporaries to draw different conclusions about its significance: Henry Morton’sHeart of London records his impression of the monument as a symbol of unity and communal reverence, while Charlotte Mew cannot help but notice, in her poem “Cenotaph,” how incongruous this great static symbol of grief appears in the middle of a degraded mercantile hub. Like the divergences between jingoists and satirists, soldiers and civilians, feminists and antifeminists, these differences over war memorials reflect competing views over how to represent a war that ultimately defies representation.

Text and context

Sir Henry Newbolt, “Vitaï Lampada” (1897-98)

Sir Henry Newbolt, a childhood friend of Douglas Haig (later to command World War I’s British Expeditionary Force), wrote the following poem, which became popular early in World War I, in the late nineteenth century. Its equation of warfare with cricket, of valor with sportsmanship, represented an ideal of rugged bravery and an expectation that wars could follow game rules that many British soldiers and generals followed. These expectations proved completely inadequate to the realities of trench warfare. The poem’s title, which means “The Torch of Life,” is taken from the Latin poem De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things) by Lucretius, where it refers to a torch handed off in a relay race.

 

There’s a breathless hush in the Close to-night—
   Ten to make and the match to win—
A bumping pitch and a blinding light, 
   An hour to play and the last man in. 
And it’s not for the sake of a ribboned coat, 
   Or the selfish hope of a season’s fame, 
But his Captain’s hand on his shoulder smote—
   “Play up! play up! and play the game!'”

The sand of the desert is sodden red,—
   Red with the wreck of a square that broke;—
The Gatling’s jammed and the Colonel dead, 
   And the regiment blind with dust and smoke. 
The river of death has brimmed his banks, 
   And England’s far, and Honour a name, 
But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks: 
   “Play up! play up! and play the game!'”

This is the word that year by year, 
   While in her place the School is set, 
Every one of her sons must hear, 
   And none that hears it dare forget. 
This they all with a joyful mind 
   Bear through life like a torch in flame, 
And falling fling to the host behind—
   “Play up! play up! and play the game!'”

Jessie Pope, “The Call” (1915)

The following poem is perhaps the best-known example of Jessie Pope’s jingoistic war poems, exhorting young men to enlist and save England, or be labeled cowards. Her reputation was such that Wilfred Owen originally entitled “Dulce et Decorum Est” as “To Jessie Pope.”

 

Who’s for the trench— 
Are you, my laddie?
Who’ll follow French—
Will you, my laddie?
Who’s fretting to begin,
Who’s going out to win?
And who wants to save his skin—
Do you, my laddie?

Who’s for the khaki suit—
Are you, my laddie?
Who longs to charge and shoot—
Do you, my laddie?
Who’s keen on getting fit,
Who means to show his grit,
And who’d rather wait a bit—
Would you, my laddie?

Who’ll earn the Empire’s thanks—
Will you, my laddie?
Who’ll swell the victor’s ranks—
Will you, my laddie?
When that procession comes,
Banners and rolling drums—
Who’ll stand and bite his thumbs—
Will you, my laddie?

Jessie Pope, “War Girls” (1916)

Like her poem “The Call,” Jessie Pope’s “War Girls” gives voice to jingoistic patriotism. But the language and action of the poem also revel in the opportunities for empowerment that the war has created for women: they are “no longer caged and penned up,” but tackling “jobs with energy and knack.” 

 

There’s the girl who clips your ticket for the train,
And the girl who speeds the lift from floor to floor,
There’s the girl who does a milk-round in the rain,
And the girl who calls for orders at your door.
Strong, sensible, and fit,
They’re out to show their grit,
And tackle jobs with energy and knack.
No longer caged and penned up,
They’re going to keep their end up
Till the khaki boys come marching back.

There’s the motor girl who drives a heavy van,
There’s the butcher girl who brings your joint of meat,
There’s the girl who cries ‘All fares, please!’ like a man,
And the girl who whistles taxis up the street.
Beneath each uniform
Beats a heart that’s soft and warm,
Though of canny mother-wit they show no lack;
But a solemn statement this is,
They’ve no time for love and kisses
Till the khaki soldier boys come marching home.

 

W. B. Yeats, “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death”

The Irish airman in this poem is Major Robert Gregory (1881-1918), only child of Yeats’s friend Lady Augusta Gregory. He was killed on the Italian front. In elegizing him, Yeats focuses on the “lonely impulse of delight” that drove him to enlist in the British Royal Flying Corps and distinguishes his heroic solitude from patriotic duty and other common motivations.

 

“An Irish Airman Foresees His Death”

I know that I shall meet my fate 
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public man, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balance all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.

W. B. Yeats, from Preface to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936)

In 1936, as editor of a leading poetry anthology, Yeats made the controversial choice of excluding all of the World War I combatant poets, even though he had set himself the goal of including “all good poets who have lived or died from three years before the death of Tennyson [1889] to the present moment.” The following is his explanation.

 

XV

I have a distaste for certain poems written in the midst of the great war; they are in all the anthologies, but I have substituted Herbert Read’s End of a War written long after. The writers of these poems were invariably officers of exceptional courage and capacity, one a man constantly selected for dangerous work, all, I think, had the Military Cross; their letters are vivid and humorous, they were not without joy—for all skill is joyful—but felt bound, in the words of the best known, to plead the suffering of their men. In poems that had for a time considerable fame, written in the first person, they made that suffering their own. I have rejected these poems for the same reason that made Arnold withdraw his Empedocles on Etna from circulation; passive suffering is not a theme for poetry. In all the great tragedies, tragedy is a joy to the man who dies; in Greece the tragic chorus danced. When man has withdrawn into the quicksilver at the back of the mirror no great event becomes luminous in his mind; it is no longer possible to write The Persians, Agincourt, Chevy Chase: some blunderer has driven his car on to the wrong side of the road—that is all.

If the war is necessary, or necessary in our time and place, it is best to forget its suffering as we do the discomfort of fever, remembering our comfort at midnight when our temperature fell, or as we forget the worst moments of more painful disease. Florence Farr returning third class from Ireland found herself among Connaught Rangers just returned from the Boer War who described an incident over and over, and always with loud laughter: an unpopular sergeant struck by a shell turned round and round like a dancer wound in his own entrails. That too may be a right way of seeing war, if war is necessary; the way of the Cockney slums, of Patrick Street, of theKilmainham Minut, of Johnny I hardly knew ye, of the medieval Dance of Death.

Siegfried Sassoon, “Finished with the War: A Soldier’s Declaration”

Siegfried Sassoon’s declaration of war against the war appeared in theBradford Pioneer on July 27, 1917. In disgust with the war, he threw the ribbon of his Military Cross into the sea. Thanks to the help of his friend Robert Graves, Sassoon was declared to have shell shock instead of being court-martialed. The British army placed him in a hospital at Craiglockhart, near Edinburgh, for the duration of the war.

(This statement was made to his commanding officer by Second-Lieutenant S. L. Sassoon, Military Cross, recommended for D.S.O., Third Battalion Royal Welch Fusiliers, as explaining his grounds for refusing to serve further in the army. He enlisted on 3rd August 1914, showed distinguished valour in France, was badly wounded, and would have been kept on home service if he had stayed in the army.)

 

I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it.

I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that this war, upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purposes for which I and my fellow soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them, and that, had this been done, the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation.

I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust.

I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insecurities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.

On behalf of those who are suffering now I make this protest against the deception which is being practiced on them; also I believe that I may help to destroy the callous complacence with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realize.

 

July, 1917.                                                       S. Sassoon.

 

Ezra Pound, from Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920, 1921)

During World War I, Ezra Pound was an American émigré in London and the impresario behind imagism and vorticism in England. After many of his friends were killed in the trenches, including the poet-philosopher T. E. Hulme and the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, he described his postwar activities in the following terms: “1918 began investigation of causes of war, to oppose same.” Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, from which the following two excerpts are taken, is one result of Pound’s war-guilt investigations.

 

IV

These fought in any case,
and some believing, pro domo, in any case. . .

Some quick to arm,
some for adventure,
some from fear of weakness,
some from fear of censure,
some for love of slaughter, in imagination,
learning later . . .

some in fear, learning love of slaughter;
Died some, pro patria, non dulce non et decor . . .
walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men’s lies, then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits,
home to old lies and new infamy;
usury age-old and age-thick
and liars in public places.

Daring as never before, wastage as never before.
Young blood and high blood,
Fair cheeks, and fine bodies;

Fortitude as never before

Frankness as never before,
disillusions as never told in the old days,
hysterias, trench confessions,
laughter out of dead bellies.

V

There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization,

Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid,

For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books.

 

Charlotte Mew, “The Cenotaph (September 1919)”

Charlotte Mew supported herself during World War I by publishing poems and stories in London periodicals. The following poem appeared shortly after the unveiling of the Cenotaph in Whitehall.

 

Not yet will those measureless fields be green again
Where only yesterday the wild sweet blood of wonderful youth was shed;
There is a grave whose earth must hold too long, too deep a stain,
Though for ever over it we may speak as proudly as we may tread.
But here, where the watchers by lonely hearths from the thrust of an inward sword have more
slowly bled,
We shall build the Cenotaph: Victory, winged, with Peace, winged too, at the column’s head.
And over the stairway, at the foot—oh! here, leave desolate, passionate hands to spread
Violets, roses, and laurel, with the small, sweet, tinkling country things
Speaking so wistfully of other Springs,
From the little gardens of little places where son or sweetheart was born and bred.
In splendid sleep, with a thousand brothers
               To lovers—to mothers
               Here, too, lies he:
Under the purple, the green, the red,
It is all young life: it must break some women's hearts to see
Such a brave, gay coverlet to such a bed!
Only, when all is done and said,
God is not mocked and neither are the dead
For this will stand in our Marketplace—
              Who’ll sell, who’ll buy
              (Will you or I
Lie each to each with the better grace)?
While looking into every busy whore’s and huckster’s face
As they drive their bargains, is the Face
Of God: and some young, piteous, murdered face.

H. V. Morton, from The Heart of London (1925)

Henry Morton began work as a journalist and descriptive writer of vignettes for the Daily Express after reporting the discovery of Egyptian king Tutankhamen’s tomb in the 1920s. The following passage displays several of Morton’s impressions of the Cenotaph.

 

“The Cenotaph”

TEN-THIRTY A.M. in Whitehall on a cold, grey February morning.

There is expectancy at the Horse Guards, where two living statues draped in scarlet cloaks sit their patient chargers. A group of sightseers waits at the gate for the high note of a silver cavalry trumpet, for the click of hoofs on the cobbles and a shining cavalcade beneath an arch: the pageantry that precedes that silent ceremony of changing a guard that ‘turns out’ for no man but the King.

Laden omnibuses go down to Westminster or up to Charing Cross, and, as they pass, every passenger looks at the two Life Guards in their scarlet glory, for they are one of the sights of London that never grows stale. Taxicabs and limousines spin smoothly left and right, men and women enter and leave Government offices: a Whitehall morning is moving easily, leisurely, elegantly, if you like, towards noon.

And I walk on to Westminster, and, in the centre of the road, cream-coloured, dominant, stands the Cenotaph.

*

More than six years ago the last shot was fired. Six years. It is long enough for a heart to become convalescent. Sharp agonies which at the time of their happening seem incapable of healing have a merciful habit of mending in six years. A broken love-affair that turned the world into a pointless waste of Time has ended in a happy marriage of six years. A death that left so much unspoken, so much regret, so much to atone for, falls in six years into its pathetic perspective a little nearer Nineveh and Tyre.

I look up at the Cenotaph. A parcels delivery boy riding a tricycle van takes off his worn cap. An omnibus goes by. The men lift their hats. Men passing with papers and documents under their arms, attache and despatch cases in their hands—all the business of life—bare their heads as they hurry by.

Six years have made no difference here. The Cenotaph—that mass of national emotion frozen in stone—is holy to this generation. Although I have seen it so many times on that day once a year when it comes alive to an accompaniment of pomp as simple and as beautiful as church ritual, I think that I like it best just standing here in a grey morning, with its feet in flowers and ordinary folk going by, remembering.

*

Westminster Abbey 1920

I look up to Charing Cross and down to Westminster. On one side Whitehall narrows to a slit, against which rises the thin, black pencil of the Nelson column; on the other Westminster Abbey, grey and devoid of detail, seems etched in smoke against the sky, rising up like a mirage from the silhouette of bare trees.

The wind comes down Whitehall and pulls the flags, exposing a little more of their red, white, and blue, as if invisible fingers were playing with them. The plinth is vacant. The constant changing trickle of a crowd that later in the day will stand here for a few moments has not arrived. There is no one here.

No one? I look, but not with my eyes, and I see that the Empire is here: England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India . . . here—springing in glory from our London soil.

*

In a dream I see those old mad days ten years ago. How the wind fingers the flags. . . .

I remember how, only a few weeks ago, as a train thundered through France, a woman sitting opposite to me in the dining car said, ‘The English!’ I looked through the window over the green fields, and saw row on row, sharply white against the green, rising with the hill and dropping again into the hollows—keeping a firm line as they had been taught to do—a battalion on its last parade.

The Cenotaph and no one there? That can never be.

*

War Office 1922

Look! Near the mottled white and black of the War Office far up Whitehall a platoon of Guardsmen come marching. They swing their arms and stride out, carrying their rifles at a perfect ‘slope.’ They are young, the ‘eighteen-year-olds’ we used to call them in 1918 when they were called up to form the ‘young soldiers’ battalions. I remember how frightened some of them were at this thing that had happened to them, and how often, when one was orderly officer padding round at night, a boy soldier would be crying like a child in the darkness at some harshness, or, in a wave of homesickness.

The old recipe has worked with the Guards! On they come, a platoon of tough Irish soldiers, their solemn faces grim and set under their peaked caps, their belts snow white with pipeclay.

They approach the Cenotaph:

‘Platoon!’ roars the sergeant. ‘Eyes—right!’

He slaps his rifle butt, and the heads swing round.

‘Eyes—front!’

*

The Cenotaph stands there with a wind pulling . . . pulling like fingers touching the Flag.

Exploration

1. War has often been described in metaphors drawn from games, and during World War I British troops sometimes even kicked a ball to the opposing side as they launched an attack. But for many World War I soldiers, these metaphors seemed to distort the futility, anonymity, and mass death of modern combat. Compare the view of war as sporting event in Henry Newbolt’s “Vitaï Lampada,” Jessie Pope’s “The Call,” and the recruiting poster “The Army Isn’t All Work” with the skeptical critique of such representations in Wilfred Owen’s poem “Disabled” (NAEL 8, 2.1977).

2. Recruiting posters represented the war as public duty and patriotic defense, as does a poem such as Jessie Pope’s “The Call.” But compare Pope’s poem and World War I recruiting posters with Wilfred Owen’s poems “Dulce Et Decorum Est” (NAEL 8, 2.1974), which addresses Pope toward its end, and “Disabled” (NAEL 8, 2. 1977), which echoes in its last lines a 1914 recruiting poster that asked, “Will they never come?”

3. In his preface to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse and in his poem “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death,” Yeats represents war as potentially heroic and ennobling. Contrast this view of war with depictions of the war’s fruitless waste and suffering in Siegfried Sassoon’s “A Soldier’s Declaration” and Wilfred Owen’s “S.I.W.” (NAEL 8, 2.1976). How do you explain these differences?

4. The Great War offered many new job opportunities for women that had long been denied them. According to Jessie Pope’s poem “War Girls” and the recruiting poster “We Need You, Redcross,” what forms of empowerment does the war afford women? Contrast the role women play in these works with the association of women with the defended nation in the poster “Women of Britain say—GO!” and Siegfried Sassoon’s “Glory of Women” (NAEL 8, 2.1962).

5. Artists, photographers, and writers attempted to convey the horror of trench warfare. Compare the trenches as seen in this topic’s paintings and photographs. What are the advantages and limitations of each medium? Compare, in turn, these visual representations of the trenches with a poem, such as Rosenberg’s “Break of Day in the Trenches” (NAEL 8, 2.1967), Sassoon’s “The Rear-Guard” (NAEL 8, 2.1961), or Owen’s “Strange Meeting” (NAEL 8, 2.1975–76). What can the written work convey that the visual representation cannot, and vice-versa?

6. “Modernism” is the term many scholars now give to the artistic movement dominant from just before World War I to the outbreak of World War II. 

   1. Compare the pre-war Imagist poems of H. D., T. E. Hulme, and Ezra Pound to the war poetry of Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, and Siegfried Sassoon. What differences do you notice in form and content? How would you explain these differences?

   2. To what extent can we see the impact of the war and its aftermath in modernist works such as T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, especially sections I and III, or Ezra Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, in particular parts IV and V?

1. The war as seen on the “home front” and on the battlefront was quite different. What contrasts can you find between how the war is represented by soldiers and by civilians? Concentrate on one or two of the soldiers in theNAEL section “Voices from World War I,” such as Owen, Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, Robert Graves, and David Jones, and one or two of the civilians who wrote about the war, such as May Wedderburn Cannan, Pope, Charlotte Mew, Yeats, or Pound. How might you also complicate these distinctions?

2. Once the scale of the Great War’s casualties became clear, many writers sought to assign blame for the tremendous loss of life. They attributed responsibility for the war to politicians, religious authorities, fathers, women, and a bankrupt civilization. Examine who is blamed for the war and why, in various works, including Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Sassoon’s “‘They’” (NAEL 8, 2.1960) and “Glory of Women” (NAEL 8, 2.1962), and Owen’s “Dulce Et Decorum Est” (NAEL 8, 2.1974) and “S.I.W.” (NAEL 8, 2.1976). How do these works attack, ironize, question, or taunt the people and institutions seen as guilty for the war?

3. Public memorials and national monuments serve as focal points of public mourning, and often create controversy both because of what they represent and what they omit. The Whitehall Cenotaph in London was designed by Sir Edward Lutyens in 1919 as a simple, temporary structure, but when public demand proved overwhelming, it was recast in Portland marble and made permanent in 1920. “Cenotaph” means “empty tomb,” and Remembrance Day in England is still celebrated around the Whitehall Cenotaph. Over time, this official monument has come to symbolize all those who died during the war, not just those whose bodies were never identified. 

   1. Read Charlotte Mew’s poem “Cenotaph” and Henry Morton’s journalistic account. In what ways do these two texts differ in their attempts to represent the memorial and to interpret its significance? 

   2. Like literary texts, public monuments provide meaning for events, and they create cultural memories that may or may not be accurate historical representations. Compare the illustrations of the cenotaph with the pictures of the Menin Gate, which is located near the cemeteries for the Battle of Passchendaele and bears the names of over 54,000 British soldiers killed in trenches nearby. What does each monument represent and how does it do so? Also compare Sassoon’s poem “On Passing the New Menin Gate” (NAEL 8, 2.1963). What differences do you see between the memories created by the Menin Gate, the cenotaph, and Sassoon’s poem?

1. Women writers represented the war in ways that were sometimes jingoistic and patriotic, sometimes conflicted and discordant. 

   1. Reread the last six lines of Charlotte Mew’s “Cenotaph” and consider how Mew’s poem ends with a series of discordant images. Describe the poem’s tone and its effect on Mew’s representation of the cenotaph. Contrast Mew’s poem with Pope’s “The Call.”

   2. How and why are women blamed for the war in poems such as Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley and Sassoon’s “Glory of Women” (NAEL 8, 2.1962)?

   3. Modernist experiment

The early part of the twentieth century saw massive changes in the everyday life of people in cities. The recent inventions of the automobile, airplane, and telephone shrank distances around the world and sped up the pace of life. Freud’s theory of the unconscious and infantile sexuality radically altered the popular understanding of the mind and identity, and the late-nineteenth-century thinkers Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche in different ways undermined traditional notions of truth, certainty, and morality. Theoretical science, meanwhile, was rapidly shifting from two-hundred-year-old Newtonian models to Einstein’s theory of relativity and finally to quantum mechanics.

At least partly in response to this acceleration of life and thought, a wave of aggressively experimental movements, sometimes collectively termed “modernist” because of their emphasis on radical innovation, swept through Europe. In Paris, the Spanish expatriate painter Pablo Picasso and the Frenchman Georges Braque developed cubism, a style of painting that abandoned realism and traditional perspective to fragment space and explode form. In Italy, the spokesperson for futurism, F. T. Marinetti, led an artistic movement that touched on everything from painting to poetry to cooking and encouraged an escape from the past into the rapid, energetic, mechanical world of the automobile, the airplane, and Marinetti’s own “aeropoetics.” Dadaists such as the Frenchman Marcel Duchamp, author of the ready-made Fountain (1917), a urinal, began a guerilla campaign against established notions of sense and the boundaries of what could be called art. In music, meanwhile, composers such as the Frenchman Claude Debussy and Russian-born Igor Stravinsky were beginning experiments with rhythm and harmony that would soon culminate in the outright atonality of composers such as the Austrians Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg.

In England, this outbreak of modernist experiment influenced a loosely interrelated network of groups and individuals, many of them based in London. In anglophone literature, “modernism” more nearly describes an era than a unitary movement. But what connects the modernist writers—aside from a rich web of personal and professional connections—is a shared desire to break with established forms and subjects in art and literature. Influenced by European art movements, many modernist writers rejected realistic representation and traditional formal expectations. In the novel, they explored the Freudian depths of their characters’ psyches through stream of consciousness and interior monologue. In poetry, they mixed slang with elevated language, experimented with free verse, and often studded their works with difficult allusions and disconnected images. Ironically, the success of modernism’s initially radical techniques eventually transformed them into the established norms that would be resisted by later generations.

Among the earliest groups to shape English-language modernism were the imagists, a circle of poets led initially by the Englishman T. E. Hulme and the American Ezra Pound, in the early 1910s. Imagist poetic doctrine included the use of plain speech, the preference for free verse over closed forms, and above all the creation of the vivid, hard-edged image. The first two of these tenets in particular helped to shape later modernism and have had a far-reaching impact on poetic practice in English. Shaped by Asian forms such as the haiku, the imagist poem tended to be brief and ephemeral, presenting a single striking image or metaphor (see “An Imagist Cluster” in NAEL). Pound soon dissociated himself from the movement, and the imagists—including the poets H. D., Richard Aldington, and John Gould Fletcher—continued to publish their annual anthology under the leadership of the American poet Amy Lowell.

Pound, meanwhile, went on to become a literary proponent of vorticism, an English movement in the visual arts led by the painter and writer Wyndham Lewis. The vorticists championed energy and life over what they saw as the turpitude of European society and sought to tap into or create the concentration of energies they dubbed a “vortex.” After having published only one issue of their now notorious journal Blast, the vorticists suddenly found their often violent rhetoric and their ambivalence about English national identity at odds with the real violence of World War I and the wartime climate of patriotism. The second issue of Blast—published behind schedule and dubbed a “war number”—declared the vorticists’ loyalty to England in the fight against German fascism on aesthetic grounds. It also announced the death in the trenches of one of the movement’s leading lights, the French-born sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. This loss and the general dispersal of the vorticists mark a major turning point for English modernism.

As modernism developed, the flashy, aggressive polemics of Lewis and Pound were replaced by the more reasoned, essayistic criticism of Pound’s friend and collaborator T. S. Eliot. Eliot’s Waste Land and James Joyce’s Ulysses were technically innovative and initially controversial (Ulysses was banned in the United States and Great Britain), but their eventual acceptance as literary landmarks helped to bring modernism into the canon of English literature. In the decades to come, the massive influence of Eliot as a critic would transform the image of modernism into what Eliot himself called classicism, a position deeply rooted in a sense of the literary past and emphasizing the impersonality of the work of art.

In the post-World War II period, modernism became the institutionally approved norm against which later poetic movements, from the “Movement” of Philip Larkin to avant-garde Language Poetry, reacted. Nonetheless, the influence of modernism, both on those artists who have repudiated it and on those who have followed its direction, was pervasive. Joyce, Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and other modernists provided compositional strategies still central to literature. Writers as diverse as W. H. Auden, Samuel Beckett, Derek Walcott, and Salman Rushdie have all, in one way or another, continued to extend the discoveries of the modernist experiment—adapting modernist techniques to new political climates marked by the Cold War and its aftermath, as well as to the very different histories of formerly colonized nations. Like the early twentieth-century avant-garde in European art and music, meanwhile, literary modernism has continued to shape a sense of art as a form of cultural revolution that must break with established history, constantly pushing out the boundaries of artistic practice.

Texts and context

F. T. Marinetti, MANIFESTO OF FUTURISM

Let's Murder the Moonshine: Selected Writings, translated by R. W. Flint and Arthur A. Coppotelli (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Classics, 1991).

Italian poet and propagandist F. T. Marinetti wrote and published his manifesto, ironically, before any such futurist art existed, and his manifesto remains one of futurism’s most important and enduring works. In it, Marinetti calls for the destruction of the past as entombed in museums and celebrates the speed of modern technology.

 

1. We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness.  

2. Courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry.  

3. Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap.  

4. We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath - a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace. >> note 1

5. We want to hymn the man at the wheel, who hurls the lance of his spirit across the Earth, along the circle of its orbit.  

6. The poet must spend himself with ardour, splendour, and generosity, to swell the enthusiastic fervour of the primordial elements.  

7. Except in struggle, there is no more beauty. No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece. Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack on unknown forces, to reduce and prostrate them before man.  

8. We stand on the last promontory of the centuries!... Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.  

9. We will glorify war - the world’s only hygiene - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.  

10. We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.  

11. We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicoloured, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervour of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.

It is from Italy that we launch through the world this violently upsetting incendiary manifesto of ours. With it, today, we establish Futurism, because we want to free this land from its smelly gangrene of professors, archaeologists, ciceroni and antiquarians. For too long has Italy been a dealer in second-hand clothes. We mean to free her from the numberless museums that cover her like so many graveyards. 

Museums: cemeteries!... Identical, surely, in the sinister promiscuity of so many bodies unknown to one another. Museums: public dormitories where one lies forever beside hated or unknown beings. Museums: absurd abattoirs of painters and sculptors ferociously slaughtering each other with color-blows and line-blows, the length of the fought-over walls! 

That one should make an annual pilgrimage, just as one goes to the graveyard on All Souls’ Day - that I grant. That once a year one should leave a floral tribute beneath the Gioconda >> note 2, I grant you that... But I don’t admit that our sorrows, our fragile courage, our morbid restlessness should be given a daily conducted tour through the museums. Why poison ourselves? Why rot? 

And what is there to see in an old picture except the laborious contortions of an artist throwing himself against the barriers that thwart his desire to express his dream completely?... Admiring an old picture is the same as pouring our sensibility into a funerary urn instead of hurtling it far off, in violent spasms of action and creation. 

Do you, then, wish to waste all your best powers in this eternal and futile worship of the past, from which you emerge fatally exhausted, shrunken, beaten down? 

In truth I tell you that daily visits to museums, libraries, and academies (cemeteries of empty exertion, Calvaries of crucified dreams, registries of aborted beginnings!) are, for artists, as damaging as the prolonged supervision by parents of certain young people drunk with their talent and their ambitious wills. When the future is barred to them, the admirable past may be a solace for the ills of the moribund, the sickly, the prisoner... But we want no part of it, the past, we the young and strong Futurists! 

So let them come, the gay incendiaries with charred fingers! Here they are! Here they are!... Come on! set fire to the library shelves! Turn aside the canals to flood the museums!... Oh, the joy of seeing the glorious old canvases bobbing adrift on those waters, discoloured and shredded!... Take up your pickaxes, your axes and hammers and wreck, wreck the venerable cities, pitilessly! 

The oldest of us is thirty: so we have at least a decade for finishing our work. When we are forty, other younger and stronger men will probably throw us in the wastebasket like useless manuscripts - we want it to happen! 

They will come against us, our successors, will come from far away, from every quarter, dancing to the winged cadence of their first songs, flexing the hooked claws of predators, sniffing doglike at the academy doors the strong odor of our decaying minds, which will have already been promised to the literary catacombs. 

But we won’t be there... At last they’ll find us - one winter’s night - in open country, beneath a sad roof drummed by a monotonous rain. They’ll see us crouched beside our trembling aeroplanes in the act of warming our hands at the poor little blaze that our books of today will give out when they take fire from the flight of our images. 

They’ll storm around us, panting with scorn and anguish, and all of them, exasperated by our proud daring, will hurtle to kill us, driven by a hatred the more implacable the more their hearts will be drunk with love and admiration for us. 

Injustice, strong and sane, will break out radiantly in their eyes. 

Art, in fact, can be nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice. 

The oldest of us is thirty: even so we have already scattered treasures, a thousand treasures of force, love, courage, astuteness, and raw will-power; have thrown them impatiently away, with fury, carelessly, unhesitatingly, breathless, and unresting... Look at us! We are still untired! Our hearts know no weariness because they are fed with fire, hatred, and speed!... Does that amaze you? It should, because you can never remember having lived! Erect on the summit of the world, once again we hurl our defiance at the stars! 

You have objections? - Enough! Enough! We know them... We’ve understood!... Our fine deceitful intelligence tells us that we are the revival and extension of our ancestors - Perhaps!... If only it were so! - But who cares? We don’t want to understand!... Woe to anyone who says those infamous words to us again! 

Lift up your heads! Erect on the summit of the world, once again we hurl defiance to the stars! 

Blast Manifesto

Published in July of 1914, the first issue of Blast began with a lengthy, two-part manifesto signed by members of the vorticist group. It was drafted by Wyndham Lewis with help from Ezra Pound and involved the collaborative work of other members of the group. The manifesto stakes out the vorticist position through a series of aphoristic statements of principle, along with lists of people and things to be either “blasted” or “blessed.” The manifesto’s extravagant typography, influenced both by the futurists and by contemporary advertising, is one of its most striking features.

Wyndham Lewis, The Cubist Room

The English painter and writer Wyndham Lewis uses a review of a 1914 exhibit of contemporary art for the journal The Egoist as an opportunity to lay out a brief manifesto of modern English painting, namely vorticism, and to define the competing movements, cubism and futurism, for an English audience still becoming acquainted with them.

 

Futurism, one of the alternative terms for modern painting, was patented in Milan. It means the Present with the Past rigidly excluded, and flavoured strongly with H. G. Wells’ dreams of the dance of monstrous and arrogant Machinery, >> note 1 to the frenzied clapping of men’s hands. But futurism will never mean anything else, in painting, than the Art practised by the five or six Italian painters grouped beneath Marinetti’s influence. Gino Severini,>> note 2 the foremost of them, has for subject matter the night resorts of Paris. This, as subject matter, is obviously not of the future. For we all foresee in a century or so everybody being put to bed at 7 o’clock in the evening by a State Nurse. Therefore the Pan Pan at the Monaco will be, for Ginos of the Future, an archaistic experience.

Cubism means, chiefly, the art, superbly severe and so far morose, of those who have taken the genius of Cézanne as a starting point, and organised the character of the works he threw up in his indiscriminate and grand labour. It is the reconstruction of a simpler earth, left as choked and muddy fragments by him. Cubism includes much more than this, but the “cube” is implicit in that master’s painting.

To be done with terms and tags, post impressionism is an insipid and pointless name invented by a journalist, which has been naturally ousted by the better word “Futurism” in public debate on modern art.

This room is chiefly composed of works by a group of painters, consisting of Frederick Etchells, Cuthbert Hamilton, Edward Wadsworth, C. R. W. Levinson, and the writer of this foreword. These painters are not accidentally associated here, but form a vertigineous but not exotic island, in the placid and respectable archipelago of English art. This formation is undeniably of volcanic matter, and even origin; for it appeared suddenly above the waves following certain seismic shakings beneath the surface. It is very closely-knit and admirably adapted to withstand the imperturbable Britannic breakers which roll pleasantly against its sides.

Beneath the Past and the Future the most sanguine would hardly expect a more different skeleton to exist than that respectively of ape and man. Man with an aeroplane is still merely a bad bird. But a man who passes his days amid the rigid lines of houses, a plague of cheap ornamentation, noisy street locomotion, the Bedlam of the press, will evidently possess a different habit of vision to a man living amongst the lines of a landscape. As to turning the back, most wise men, Egyptians, Chinese or what not, have remained where they found themselves, their appetite for life sufficient to reconcile them, and allow them to create significant things. Suicide is the obvious course for the dreamer, who is a man without an anchor of sufficient weight.

The work of this group of artists for the most part underlines such geometric bases and structure of life, and they would spend their energies rather in showing a different skeleton and abstraction than formerly could exist than a different degree of hairiness or dress. All revolutionary painting to-day has in common the rigid reflections of steel and stone in the spirit of the artist; that desire for stability as though a machine were being built to fly or kill with; an alienation from the traditional photographer’s trade and realisation of the value of colour and form as such independently of what recognisable form it covers or encloses. People are invited, in short, to change entirely their idea of the painter’s mission, and penetrate, deferentially, with him into a transposed universe as abstract as, though different from, the musician’s.

I will not describe individually the works of my colleagues. In No. 165 of Edward D. Wadsworth; No. 161 of Cuthbert Hamilton; Nos. 169 and 181, of Etchells; No. 174 of Nevinson, they are probably best represented.

Hung in this room as well are three drawings by Jacob Epstein, the only great sculptor at present working in England. He finds in the machinery of procreation a dynamo to work the deep atavism of his spirit. Symbolically strident above his work, or in the midst of it, is, like the Pathe cock, a new-born baby, with a mystic but puissant crow. His latest work opens up a region of great possibilities, and new creation—David Bomberg’s painting of a platform, announces a colourist’s temperament, something between the cold blond of Severini’s earlier paintings and Vallotton. >> note 3 The form and subject matter are academic but the structure of the crisscross pattern new and extremely interesting.

Wyndham Lewis.

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, “Vortex Gaudier-Brzeska”

The sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska was one of the most promising members of the vorticist group. Written from the trenches of France during World War I, his contribution to the second issue of Blast was tragically published alongside a notice of his death in combat. In his “vortex,” he continues to champion vorticist ideas of vitality and abstraction in spite of the violence of war around him.

 

Vortex Gaudier-Brzeska
(written from the trenches)

Note.—The Sculptor writes from the French trenches, having been in the firing line since early in the war.
                In September he was one of a patrolling party of twelve, seven of his companions fell in the fight over a roadway.
                In November  he was nominated for sergeancy and has been since slightly wounded, but expects to return to the trenches.
                He has been consistently employed in couting and patrolling and in the construction of wire entanglements in close contact with the Boches.

 

                    I HAVE BEEN FIGHTING FOR TWO MONTHS and I can now gauge the intensity of life. 
                    HUMAN MASSES teem and move, are destroyed and crop up again. 
                    HORSES are worn out in three weeks, die by the roadside. 
                    DOGS wander, are destroyed, and others come along. 
                    WITH ALL THE DESTRUCTION that works around us NOTHING IS  
CHANGED, EVEN SUPERFICIALLY. LIFE IS THE SAME STRENGTH, THE MOVING AGENT THAT PERMITS THE SMALL INDIVIDUAL TO ASSERT HIMSELF. 
                    THE BURSTING OF SHELLS, the volleys, wire entanglements, projectors, motors, the chaos of battle, DO NOT ALTER IN THE LEAST the outlines of the hill we are besieging. A company of PARTRIDGES scuttle along before our very trench. 
                    IT WOULD BE FOLLY TO SEEK ARTISTIC EMOTIONS AMID THESE LITTLE WORKS OF OURS. 
                    THIS PALTRY MECHANISM, WHICH SERVES AS A PURGE TO OVER-NUMEROUS HUMANITY. 
                    THIS WAR IS A GREAT REMEDY. 
                    IN THE INDIVIDUAL IT KILLS ARROGANCE, SELF-ESTEEM, PRIDE. 
                    IT TAKES AWAY FROM THE MASSES NUMBERS OF UNIMPORTANT UNITS, WHOSE ECONOMIC ACTIVITIES BECOME NOXIOUS AS THE RECENT TRADES CRISES HAVE SHOWN US. 
                    MY VIEWS ON SCULPTURE REMAIN ABSOLUTELY THE SAME. 
                    IT IS THE VORTEX OF WILL, OF DECISION, THAT BEGINS. 
                    I SHALL DERIVE MY EMOTIONS SOLELY FROM THE ARRANGEMENT OF SURFACES, I shall present my emotions by theARRANGEMENT OF MY SURFACES, THE PLANES AND LINES BY WHICH THEY ARE DEFINED. 
                    Just as this hill where the Germans are solidly entrenched, gives me a nasty feeling, simply because its gentle slopes are broken up by earthworks, which throw long shadows at sunset. Just so shall I get feeling, of whatsoever definition, from a statue, ACCORDING TO ITS SLOPES, varied to infinity. 
                    I have made an experiment. Two days ago I pinched from an enemy a mauser rifle. Its heavy unwieldy shape swamped me with a powerful image of brutality. 
                    I was in doubt for a long time whether it pleased me or displeased me. 
                    I found that I did not like it. 
                    I broke the butt off and with my knife I carved in it a design, through which I tried to express a gentler order of things, which I preferred. 
                    BUT I WILL EMPHASIZE that MY DESIGN got its effect (just as the gun had) from a very simple composition of lines and planes.

 

Mina Loy, “Brancusi’s Golden Bird”

The English-born poet and artist Mina Loy became involved with nearly every important avant-garde movement of the early part of the twentieth century—from surrealism and Dada to futurism—as she moved between the metropolitan centers of London, Paris, Florence, and New York. In the following poem, she describes a work by Constantin Brancusi, the Romanian-born French sculptor who was one of the pioneers of abstract art. The poem was published facing a picture of Brancusi’s sculpture in the same issue of the literary journal The Dial that also published T. S. Eliot’sThe Waste Land.

Brancusi’s Golden Bird1

The toy

become the aesthetic archetype

As if

some patient peasant God

had rubbed and rubbed 5

the Alpha and Omega2

of Form

into a lump of metal

A naked orientation

unwinged unplumed 10

—the ultimate rhythm

has lopped the extremities

of crest and claw

from

the nucleus of flight 15

The absolute act

of art

conformed

to continent sculpture

—bare as the brow of Osiris3— 20

this breast of revelation

an incandescent curve

licked by chromatic flames

in labyrinths of reflections

This gong 25

of polished hyperaesthesia4

shrills with brass

as the aggressive light

strikes

its significance 30

The immaculate

conception5

of the inaudible bird

occurs

in gorgeous reticence . . .

1. Constantin Brancusi (1876–1957), French

(Romanian-born) pioneer of abstract sculpture,

whose bird statues became icons of modernism in

the arts. His nonrepresentational aesthetic was so

revolutionary at the time that U.S. customs officials

wanted to tax his sculptures as raw material

rather than works of art.

2. The first and last letters of the Greek alphabet.

In the book of Revelation, Jesus repeatedly identifies

himself as the alpha and the omega.

3. God of the Egyptian underworld; symbol of the

indestructibility of life.

4. Excessive sensitivity.

5. Catholic doctrine that, from the moment of her

conception,

Exploration

1. Compare the fractured shapes and distorted perspectives of Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (NAEL plate C-17) with an anglo-modernist text, such as T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land (NAEL 8, 2.2295) or James Joyce’s Ulysses (NAEL 8, 2.2200-39). What does modernist writing have in common with the visual arts of the time?

2. Compare the formal experimentation undertaken in Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) with that pursued by Picasso or Eliot. In his review of Stravinsky’s piece, Eliot calls Stravinsky “the greatest success since Picasso” and describes Le Sacre as fusing the modern and the prehistoric: it “seems to transform” primitive rhythms “into the scream of the motor horn, the rattle of machinery, the grind of wheels, the beating of iron and steel, the roar of the underground railway, and the other barbaric cries of modern life; and to transform these despairing noises into music.” Is this strategy similar to or different from the ones pursued by Picasso and Eliot inThe Waste Land and Les Demoiselles d’Avignon?

3. The Blast manifesto instances some of the contradictory impulses of modernism: it is populist yet elitist, collective yet individualist, nationalist yet anti-nationalist, authoritarian yet progressive. Explore these and other tensions in the manifesto.

4. Compare the fin-de-siècle advertisements available in the Web Resources section with the visual style of Blast. How does a concern with self-promotion influence both the rhetoric and the style of this manifesto? Why would such self-promotion be important to a movement like vorticism?

5. Much of Blast enumerates various things, people, and ideas that the vorticists bless and blast. Compose your own version of Blast: What would you bless, and what would you blast? What do you learn from this experiment in updating the Blast manifesto?

6. Futurism influenced the vorticists, but the vorticists also declared their difference. Compare the vorticists’ stated aesthetic principles, particularly inBlast, with F. T. Marinetti’s futurist manifesto. Compare also the work of vorticist artists, such as Wyndham Lewis, Edward Wadsworth, and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, with that of the continental futurists, such as Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo Balla, and Gino Severini. What are the differences and similarities between the two movements? Why do you think the vorticists were so eager to distinguish themselves from the futurists?

7. One way in which the vorticists tried to distinguish themselves from the futurists was by criticizing the futurists’ rejection of the past; yet modernist declarations such as Blast often called for as radical a break with the past as did F. T. Marinetti’s futurist manifesto.  Modernist works such as James Joyce’s Ulysses and T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land have extraordinarily complex relationships to the European literary tradition. In what ways do writers like Joyce and Eliot break with traditional literature? In what ways do they make use of or pay homage to it?

8. In his “Vortex. Gaudier-Brzeska,” how does Gaudier-Brzeska attempt to reconcile vorticist principles initially meant to shake up complacency during a time of peace to the very different situation of warfare? How does he use vorticist aesthetics to explain the violence of war, as well as his own reactions to the objects around him?

9. Modernist poetry drew inspiration from contemporaneous movements in the visual arts such as cubism and futurism. The creative use of typography, as well as the emphasis on the image, accentuated the visual element of poetry. At the same time, Ezra Pound’s “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste” (NAEL8, 2.2003) emphasizes the musical qualities of free verse and famously calls for composition “in the sequence of a musical phrase, not in the sequence of a metronome.” Such analogies both to painting and to music proliferate in modernist theories and descriptions of poetry. How do imagist poets such as T. E. Hulme, Pound, and H. D. reconcile these competing demands—the demand for the painterly image, on the one hand, and for the musical cadence, on the other? Does an imagist poem, such as Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” (NAEL 8, 2.2008) or H. D.’s “Oread” (NAEL 8, 2.2008), appeal more to the ear or to the eye?

10. Mina Loy’s poem “Brancusi’s Golden Bird” offers a striking example of the interrelations between avant-garde visual art and modernist literature. Compare Loy’s poem with Brancusi’s bird sculpture. How does she approximate the abstraction and other qualities of Brancusi’s work in her poem? Are there notable differences as well between these visual and poetic works of art?

11. Despite the importance of women such as H. D., Amy Lowell, Virginia Woolf, and Gertrude Stein to modernist literature, women writers in English produced few manifestos of the kind that drove movements like futurism and vorticism. In fact, these avant-garde manifestos were sometimes misogynistic; F. T. Marinetti’s futurist manifesto directly scorns feminism. How does Mina Loy attempt to adapt a futurist-style rhetoric to a pro-feminist program for social change in her “Feminist Manifesto” (in NAEL 8, 2.2015)? How do her social goals connect with and break from those outlined by Marinetti? How does her manifesto differ from the Blast manifesto?

    1. Imaging Ireland

Easter 1916 to the Troubles

Europe’s former colonies struggled often violently for political sovereignty as nation-states. Ireland, Britain’s oldest former colony, was one of the first to fight for its independence in the first half of the twentieth century. In addition to the creation of a new government, Ireland’s struggle for independence entailed creating new ideas about Irish national identity through literature and the arts. This Norton Online Topic explores how twentieth-century Irish writers attempted to re-imagine Ireland, particularly during two periods of crisis: in the aftermath of the Easter Rebellion in 1916 and the later outbreaks of sectarian violence from 1969 (known as the Troubles) in Northern Ireland.

The 1916 Easter Rising grew out of Irish political and cultural nationalism and the desire for political sovereignty in Ireland. The growing resentment over the British control of Ireland led a secret revolutionary group known as the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) to plan to take over Dublin on Easter Sunday, April 23, 1916.

On the day after Easter, Monday, April 24, 1916, a group of Irish leaders (including Thomas Clarke, Padraic Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh, and James Connolly) and about 1,600 Irish rebels, both men and women, took over several buildings and streets in the center of Dublin. On the steps of the General Post Office in Dublin, Pearse issued a Proclamation of Ireland’s independence from British rule, announcing the birth of the Republic of Ireland and the institution of a provisional government. Five days later, with much of Dublin’s city-center in ruins and aflame, the leaders were forced to surrender to a much larger British military force. In the ensuing weeks, fifteen of the leaders of the Easter Rising were executed by firing squad. At the time of the Easter Rising many Irish people were skeptical of the rebels’ efforts to force the British Empire from Ireland. But after the swift execution and mass imprisonment of the Irish rebels, the public became more fervently nationalist, opposing the British presence in Ireland. As a result, the leaders of the Rising became martyrs within the public imagination.

The Easter Rising challenged modern Irish writers to re-imagine the Irish nation and national identity. Irish writers criticized the tyranny of British colonialism and shared the hope for an independent Ireland. Yet they also depicted the dangers of Irish nationalism, including its connections with armed violence, with cultural exclusion and racism, and, especially, with the ethic of blood sacrifice. In different ways, both W. B. Yeats’s poem “Easter, 1916” and Sean O’Casey’s play The Plough and the Stars ask skeptical questions about a violent Irish nationalism, even as they imagine an Ireland free from colonial rule.

Many Irish writers have figured the Irish nation as a woman to be fought for, as in the Easter 1916 Proclamation: “Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom.” Since the rise of feminism in the 1960s, contemporary Irish women writers such as Eavan Boland (NAEL) have attempted to revise this image of Ireland as woman—both to bear witness to real Irish women’s oppression and to criticize how the long history of British colonialism has limited Irish conceptions of gender and nationality.

Though Ireland gained national independence in 1922, the island of Ireland is not politically united. The twenty-six counties that comprise most of the island form the Republic of Ireland; the largely Catholic Republic (called only “Ireland”) is fully independent from British rule. The six counties forming Northern Ireland are still under British control, and they constitute a separate political entity. Northern Ireland is also religiously divided between a Roman Catholic minority and an Ulster Protestant majority, and Ulster Protestants have historically had more political and economic power than Northern Irish Catholics. The combination of political and economic inequality and religious differences between these two groups has contributed to the waves of political and sectarian violence, or Troubles, since the late 1960s.

The Troubles began when civil rights marches by Northern Irish Catholics for equal housing, voting, and economic rights were forcibly broken up by the Northern Irish police, or Royal Ulster Constabulary. On Sunday, January 30, 1972, during a demonstration against the unlawful imprisonment of Catholics, British soldiers fatally shot thirteen unarmed demonstrators and wounded another fourteen. “Bloody Sunday” inflamed Northern Irish Catholics and led in the 1970s and ‘80s to increased armed conflict between Catholic and Protestant paramilitary groups, frequent bombings, the deployment of more British troops and tanks to the streets of Northern Ireland, and the illegal internment of Catholics suspected of paramilitary ties. By the 1990s, however, political leaders from both sides (including Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein and John Hume of the Social Democratic and Labour Party) began a series of talks to end the conflict in Northern Ireland. With the help of other Northern Irish leaders, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and U.S. President Bill Clinton, these talks culminated in the Good Friday Agreement on April 10, 1998. This document effectively gives Northern Irish people the power to implement and run their owngovernment apart from Westminster, London. The following month, the people of Ireland and Northern Ireland overwhelmingly passed by referendum the Good Friday Agreement. Despite the passing of the Agreement and the IRA announcement of a ceasefire in 1994, the political climate in Northern Ireland remains tense.

Like earlier modern Irish writers, contemporary Northern Irish writers have also felt compelled to respond to the Troubles in order to re-imagine Northern Ireland. The frequency and intensity of the Troubles have placed new pressures and raised new questions for Northern Irish writers. How, for instance, can a Northern Irish writer illustrate the disturbing nature of political violence without sensationalizing it? Can literature effectively offer consolation in the face of such atrocities? How can national unity and inclusiveness be imagined amidst ongoing cultural, political, and religious divisions? In works that range from elegy to farce, these are among the questions grappled with by writers of different political and religious communities, including Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Michael Longley, Fiona Barr, and a London-born writer of Irish parentage, Martin McDonagh.

The bloody events of the 1916 Easter Rising and the Troubles in Northern Ireland, both historical outgrowths of British colonialism, have had a lasting impact on how Irish and Northern Irish writers imagine the nation. Irish writers such as Yeats, James Joyce, and O’Casey were among the century’s earliest postcolonial subjects to forge, question, and critique the meaning of the Irish nation and national identity. Yeats and Joyce have influenced postcolonial writers from countries that gained independence later in the century, such as Salman Rushdie (India), Derek Walcott (St. Lucia), and Chinua Achebe (Nigeria). Contemporary Irish, Northern Irish, and Irish diaspora writers such as Heaney, Longley, Muldoon, Boland, Barr, and McDonagh continue to make sense of the still-present history of British colonialism, the fact and meaning of sectarian and political violence, and they sometimes even glimpse hope for peace and reconciliation.

“Easter 1916 Proclamation of an Irish Republic”

In 1916, members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (forerunners of the Irish Republican Army) decided they would wait no longer for long-delayed British legislation to grant Ireland Home Rule. A force of about 1,600 rebels mounted what would come to be known as the Easter Rising. They took over key buildings, centered on the General Post Office on O’Connell Street, Dublin. On Easter Monday, Padraic Pearse, head of a Provisional Government of the Irish Republic, read from the steps of the General Post Office the following proclamation that he and his colleagues had written.

The proclamation, a revolutionary political document for its time, announces the birth of a sovereign, self-determined Irish Republic based on the ideals of liberty and equality for all Irish people, both men and women. It also invokes the rebel-leaders’ ethic of blood sacrifice. 

 

ANONYMOUS

Easter 1916 Proclamation of an Irish Republic

Poblacht Na h-Eireann
The Provisional Government
of the
Irish Republic
To the People of Ireland

IRISHMEN AND IRISHWOMEN: In the name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom.

Having organised and trained her manhood through her secret revolutionaryorganisation, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and through her open militaryorganisations, the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army, having patientlyperfected her discipline, having resolutely waited for the right moment to revealitself, she now seizes that moment, and supported by her exiled children inAmerica and by gallant allies in Europe,>> note 1 but relying in the first on her ownstrength, she strikes in full confidence of victory.

We declare the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland and tothe unfettered control of Irish destinies, to be sovereign and indefeasible. Thelong usurpation of that right by a foreign people and government has notextinguished the right, nor can it ever be extinguished except by the destructionof the Irish people. In every generation the Irish people have asserted their rightto national freedom and sovereignty; six times during the past three hundredyears they have asserted it in arms. Standing on that fundamental right andagain asserting it in arms in the face of the world, we hereby proclaim the IrishRepublic as a Sovereign Independent State, and we pledge our lives and thelives of our comrades in arms to the cause of its freedom, of its welfare, and ofits exaltation among the nations.

The Irish Republic is entitled to, and hereby claims, the allegiance of everyIrishman and Irishwoman. The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty,equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens, and declares its resolve topursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and of all its parts,cherishing all of the children of the nation equally, and oblivious of thedifferences carefully fostered by an alien Government, which have divided aminority from the majority in the past.

Until our arms have brought the opportune moment for the establishment of apermanent National Government, representative of the whole people of Irelandand elected by the suffrages of all her men and women, the ProvisionalGovernment, hereby constituted, will administer the civil and military affairs ofthe Republic in trust for the people.

We place the cause of the Irish Republic under the protection of the Most HighGod, Whose blessing we invoke upon our arms, and we pray that no one whoserves that cause will dishonour it by cowardice, inhumanity, or rapine. In thissupreme hour the Irish nation must, by its valour and discipline, and by thereadiness of its children to sacrifice themselves for the common good, proveitself worthy of the august destiny to which it is called.

Signed on behalf of the Provisional Government:

THOMAS J. CLARKE

SEAN Mac DIARMADA P. H. PEARSE JAMES CONNOLLY	THOMAS MacDONAGH EAMONN CEANNT  JOSEPH PLUNKETT

 

Sean O’Casey, The Plough and the Stars, from Act 2

Irish playwright Sean O’Casey (1880-1964) had been involved with the Irish Republican Brotherhood before becoming disillusioned with it. During the first run of his play The Plough and the Stars at the Abbey Theatre in 1926, members of the audience rioted in protest of O’Casey’s critical representation of participants in the Easter Rising of 1916 and of a prostitute seeking business. In the play’s second act, set in a pub months before the Rising, a magnetic orator is overheard offstage; the “voice” uses phrases drawn from the speeches of the leader of the Easter Rising, Padraic Pearse. Pearse’s stirring nationalist language is juxtaposed with the Dublin vernacular of nationalist followers, antinationalist skeptics, and a prostitute. In the course of the play, which continues during the Rising itself, O’Casey questions the meaning of the Easter Rising, which disrupts and renders tragic the lives of the play’s ordinary characters, some of whom are killed despite their being innocent bystanders.

 

ACT II

A commodious public house at the corner of the street in which the meeting is being addressed from Platform no. 1. It is the south corner of the public house that is visible to the audience. The counter, beginning at back about one-fourth of the width of the space shown, comes across two-thirds of the length of the stage, and, taking a circular sweep, passes out of sight to left. On the counter are beer-pulls, glasses, and a carafe. The other three-fourths of the back is occupied by a tall, wide, two-paned window. Beside this window at the right is a small, box-like, panelled snug. Next to the snug is a double swing door, the entrance to that particular end of the house. Farther on is a shelf on which customers may rest their drinks. Underneath the windows is a cushioned seat. Behind the counter at back can be seen the shelves running the whole length of the counter. On these shelves can be seen the end (or the beginning) of rows of bottles. The barman is seen wiping the part of the counter which is in view. rosie is standing at the counter toying with what remains of a half of whisky* in a wine-glass. She is a sturdy, well-shaped girl of twenty; pretty, and pert in manner. She is wearing a cream blouse, with an obviously suggestive glad-neck; >> note 1 a grey tweed dress, brown stockings and shoes. The blouse and most of the dress are hidden by a black shawl. She has no hat, and in her hair is jauntily set a cheap, glittering, jewelled ornament. It is an hour later.

barman [wiping counter]. Nothin’ much doin’ in your line tonight, Rosie?

rosie. Curse o’ God on th’ haporth, >> note 2 hardly, Tom. There isn’t much notice taken of a pretty petticoat of a night like this. . . . They’re all in a holy mood. Th’ solemn-lookin’ dials >> note 3 on th’ whole o’ them an’ they marchin’ to th’ meetin’. You’d think they were th’ glorious company of th’ saints, an’ th’ noble army of martyrs thrampin’ through th’ sthreets of paradise. They’re all thinkin’ of higher things than a girl’s garthers. . . . It’s a tremendous meetin’; four platforms they have — there’s one o’ them just outside opposite th’ window.

barman. Oh, ay; sure when th’ speaker comes [motioning with his hand] to th’ near end, here, you can see him plain, an’ hear nearly everythin’ he’s spoutin’ out of him.*

rosie. It’s no joke thryin’ to make up fifty-five shillin’s a week for your keep an’ laundhry, an’ then taxin’ you a quid for your own room if you bring home a friend for th’ night. . . . If I could only put by a couple of quid for a swankier outfit, everythin’ in th’ garden ud look lovely –

barman. Whisht, till we hear what he’s sayin’.

Through the window is silhouetted the figure of a tall man who is speaking to the crowd. The barman and rosie look out of the window and listen.

the voice of the man. It is a glorious thing to see arms in the hands of Irishmen. We must accustom ourselves to the thought of arms, we must accustom ourselves to the sight of arms, we must accustom ourselves to the use of arms. . . . Bloodshed is a cleansing and sanctifying thing, and the nation that regards it as the final horror has lost its manhood. . . . There are many things more horrible than bloodshed, and slavery is one of them!*

The figure moves away towards the right, and is lost to sight and hearing.

rosie. It’s th’ sacred thruth, mind you, what that man’s afther sayin’.

barman. If I was only a little younger, I’d be plungin’ mad into th’ middle of it!

rosie [who is still looking out of the window]. Oh, here’s the two gems runnin’ over again for their oil!

peter and fluther enter tumultuously. They are hot, and full and hasty with the things they have seen and heard. Emotion is bubbling up in them, so that when they drink, and when they speak, they drink and speak with the fullness of emotional passion. peter leads the way to the counter.

peter [splutteringly to barman]. Two halves . . . [To fluther] A meetin’ like this always makes me feel as if I could dhrink Loch >> note 4 Erinn dhry!

fluther. You couldn’t feel any way else at a time like this when th’ spirit of a man is pulsin’ to be out fightin’ for th’ thruth with his feet thremblin’ on th’ way, maybe to th’ gallows, an’ his ears tinglin’ with th’ faint, far-away sound of burstin’ rifle-shots that’ll maybe whip th’ last little shock o’ life out of him that’s left lingerin’ in his body!

peter. I felt a burnin’ lump in me throat when I heard th’ band playin’ ‘The Soldiers’ Song’ >> note 5 rememberin’ last hearin’ it marchin’ in military formation with th’ people starin’ on both sides at us, carryin’ with us th’ pride an’ resolution o’ Dublin to th’ grave of Wolfe Tone. >> note 6

fluther. Get th’ Dublin men goin’ an’ they’ll go on full force for anything that’s thryin’ to bar them away from what they’re wantin’, where th’ slim thinkin’ counthry boyo ud limp away from th’ first faintest touch of compromisation!

peter [hurriedly to the barman]. Two more, Tom! . . . [To fluther] Th’ memory of all th’ things that was done, an’ all th’ things that was suffered be th’ people, was boomin’ in me brain. . . . Every nerve in me body was quiverin’ to do somethin’ desperate!

fluther. Jammed as I was in th’ crowd, I listened to th’ speeches pattherin’ on th’ people’s head, like rain fallin’ on th’ corn; every derogatory thought went out o’ me mind, an’ I said to meself, ‘You can die now, Fluther, for you’ve seen th’ shadow-dhreams of th’ past leppin’ to life in th’ bodies of livin’ men that show, if we were without a titther o’ courage for centuries, we’re vice versa now!’ Looka here. [He stretches out his arm under peter’sface and rolls up his sleeve.] The blood was BOILIN’ in me veins!

The silhouette of the tall figure again moves into the frame of the window speaking to the people.

peter [unaware, in his enthusiasm, of the speaker’s appearance, to fluther]. I was burnin’ to dhraw me sword, an’ wave an’ wave it over me —

fluther [overwhelming peter]. Will you stop your blatherin’ for a minute, man, an’ let us hear what he’s sayin’!

voice of the man. Comrade soldiers of the Irish Volunteers and of the Citizen Army, we rejoice in this terrible war. The old heart of the earth needed to be warmed with the red wine of the battlefields. . . . Such august homage was never offered to God as this: the homage of millions of lives given gladly for love of country. And we must be ready to pour out the same red wine in the same glorious sacrifice, for without shedding of blood there is no redemption!*

The figure moves out of sight and hearing.

fluther [gulping down the drink that remains in his glass, and rushing out]. Come on, man; this is too good to be missed!

peter finishes his drink less rapidly, and as he is going out wiping his mouth with the back of his hand he runs into the covey coming in. He immediately erects his body like a young cock, and with his chin thrust forward, and a look of venomous dignity on his face, he marches out.

the covey [at counter]. Give us a glass o’ malt,* for God’s sake, till I stimulate meself from the shock o’ seein’ th’ sight that’s afther goin’ out!

rosie [all business, coming over to the counter, and standing near the covey]. Another one for me, Tommy; [to the barman] th’ young gentleman’s ordherin’ it in th’ corner of his eye.

The barman brings the drink for the covey, and leaves it on the counter. rosiewhips it up.

barman. Ay, houl’ on there, houl’ on there, Rosie!

rosie [to the barman]. What are you houldin’ on out o’ you for? Didn’t you hear th’ young gentleman say that he couldn’t refuse anything to a nice little bird? [To the covey] Isn’t that right, Jiggs? >> note 7 [the covey says nothing.] Didn’t I know, Tommy, it would be all right? It takes Rosie to size a young man up, an’ tell th’ thoughts that are thremblin’ in his mind. Isn’t that right, Jiggs?

the covey stirs uneasily, moves a little farther away, and pulls his cap over his eyes.

rosie [moving after him]. Great meetin’ that’s gettin’ held outside. Well, it’s up to us all, anyway, to fight for our freedom.

the covey [to barman]. Two more, please. [To rosie] Freedom! What’s th’ use o’ freedom, if it’s not economic freedom?

rosie [emphasising with extended arm and moving finger]. I used them very words just before you come in. ‘A lot o’ thricksters,’ says I, ‘that wouldn’t know what freedom was if they got it from their mother.’ . . . [To barman] Didn’t I, Tommy?

barman. I disremember.

rosie. No, you don’t disremember. Remember you said, yourself, it was all ‘only a flash in th’ pan’. Well, ‘flash in th’ pan, or no flash in th’ pan,’ says I, ‘they’re not goin’ to get Rosie Redmond,’ says I, ‘to fight for freedom that wouldn’t be worth winnin’ in a raffle!’

the covey. There’s only one freedom for th’ workin’ man: conthrol o’ th’ means o’ production, rates of exchange, an’ th’ means of disthribution. [Tappingrosie on the shoulder] Look here, comrade, I’ll leave here tomorrow night for you a copy of Jenersky’s Thesis on the Origin, Development, an’ Consolidation of the Evolutionary Idea of the Proletariat. >> note 8

rosie [throwing off her shawl on to the counter, and showing an exemplified glad neck, which reveals a good deal of a white bosom]. If y’ass Rosie, it’s heartbreakin’ to see a young fella thinkin’ of anything, or admirin’ anything, but silk thransparent stockin’s showin’ off the shape of a little lassie’s legs!

the covey, frightened, moves a little away.

rosie [following on]. Out in th’ park in th’ shade of a warm summery evenin’, with your little darlin’ bridie to be, kissin’ an’ cuddlin’ [she tries to put her arm around his neck], kissin’ an’ cuddlin’, ay?

the covey [frightened]. Ay, what are you doin’? None o’ that, now; none o’ that. I’ve something else to do besides shinannickin’ >> note 9 afther Judies! [He turns away, but rosie follows, keeping face to face with him.]

rosie. Oh, little duckey, oh, shy little duckey! Never held a mot’s >> note 10hand, an’ wouldn’t know how to tittle >> note 11 a little Judy! [She clips him under the chin.] Tittle him undher th’ chin, tittle him undher th’ chin!

the covey [breaking away and running out]. Ay, go on, now; I don’t want to have any meddlin’ with a lassie like you!

rosie [enraged]. Jasus, it’s in a monasthery some of us ought to be, spendin’ our holidays kneelin’ on our adorers, >> note 12 tellin’ our beads, an’ knockin’ hell out of our buzzums!

 Martin McDonagh, The Lieutenant of Inishmore, scenes 1 and 2

Martin McDonagh was born in London in 1970; his parents were Irish. His 2001 play is about an Irish terrorist fighting to free Northern Ireland of English rule who is utterly indifferent to human suffering but since boyhood has adored his cat. McDonagh plays on the absurdities and incongruities of fanaticism, humorously presenting even scenes of torture and violent bloodshed. The play, the beginning of which is excerpted here, eventually ends in carnage, with corpses, body parts, and blood covering the stage.

 

Characters

Donny, mid-forties. Padraic’s father. From Inishmore.

Davey, seventeen. Slightly overweight, long hair. From Inishmore.

Padraic, twenty-one. Handsome. From Inishmore.

Mairead, sixteen. Cropped hair, pretty. Davey’s sister. From Inishmore.

James, twenties/thirties. Northern Irish.

Christy, thirties/forties. Northern Irish.

Brendan, twenty. Northern Irish.

Joey, twenty. Northern Irish.

The play is set in 1993 on the island of Inishmore, County Galway.>> note 1

 

Scene One

A cottage on Inishmore1 circa 1993. Front door in centre of back wall, a window to its left and right. Exit stage left to a bathroom, unseen, an open area forward right to signify another room. A clock somewhere on back wall along with a framed piece of embroidery reading ‘Home Sweet Home’. Cupboards left and right, a telephone on one of them. A couple of armchairs near the back wall and a table centre, on which, as the play begins, lies a dead black cat, its head half missing. Donny, the middle-aged owner of the house, and Davey, a long-haired, slightly pudgy neighbour of seventeen, stand staring quietly at this cat for a few moments.

Davey Do you think he’s dead, Donny?

Pause. Donny picks up the limp dead cat. Bits of its brain plop out. Donnylooks across at Davey and puts the cat back down again.

Donny Aye.

Davey He might be in a coma. Would we ring the vet?

Donny It’s more than a vet this poor feck needs.

Davey If he gave him an injection?

Donny (pause)     Have this injection, you!

Donny steps back and kicks Davey up the arse.

Davey(almost crying)   What was that fer?!

Donny How many times have people told you, hairing down that bastarding hill on that bastarding bicycle?

Davey I didn’t touch the poor fella, I swear it! In the road I saw him lying . . . !

Donny In the road me arsehole!

DaveyAnd I wasn’t hairing at all, I was going slow. And a black lump ahead in the road I saw, and what the devil’s that, I said to meself. . .

Donny After you’d rode over him, aye, and then probably reversed!

Davey Ahead in the road, I’m saying, and don’t be slinging reversed at me.

Donny I’ll be slinging what I like!

DaveyAnd I was off me bike be that time anyway and just wheeling it along, and when I saw it was Wee Thomas didn’t I scoop him up and run him into you as quick as me legs could carry me?

Donny The first thing the books say is don’t be moving an accident victim till professional fecking help arrives, and a fool knows that!

Davey Well, I don’t be reading books on cats being knocked down, Donny!

Donny Well, maybe you should, now . . .

Davey Because there are no such books!

Donny . . . And maybe Thomas would still be with us then.

Davey A car it must have been clobbered him.

Donny No cars have been down that road all day, and when do cars ever come down that road? You’re the only bastard comes down that lonely road and why? Because you’re a cowshite eejit with nothing better to do than roar down roads on your mam’s bicycle for no reason other than to feel the wind in that girl’s mop o’ hair of yours!

Davey If you’re insulting me hair again, Donny Osbourne, I’ll be off right this minute. After going out of me way to bring your cat in to you . . .

Donny After squashing the life out of me cat, and he isn’t my cat at all . . .

Davey So as not to let the oul flies be picking the meat off him. A favour I was doing you.

Donny It’s a favour now! With half of that cat’s head poking out of the spokes of your wheels, I’ll bet, and it’s a favour you’re doing me!

Davey stares at Donny a moment, then darts out through the front door.Donnygoes over to the cat and strokes it sadly, then sits in the armchair stage left, looking at the cat’s blood on his hands. Davey returns a few moments later, dragging his mum’s bicycle in through the door. It is pink, with small wheels and a basket. He brings it right over for Donny to see, raises its front wheel so that it’s almost in Donny’s face, and starts slowly spinning it.

Davey Now where’s your cat’s head? Eh? Now where’s your cat’s head?

Donny (depressed) Scraping it off on the way wouldn’t have been a hard job.

Davey There’s no cat’s head on that bicycle wheel. Not even a stain, nor the comrade of a stain, and the state of Wee Tommy you’d have had lumps of brain pure dribbling.

Donny Put your bicycle out of me face, now, Davey.

Davey Poor Wee Thomas’s head, a bicycle wouldn’t do damage that decent. Damage that decent you’d have to go out of your way to do.

Donny Your bicycle out of me face, I’m saying, or it’ll be to your head there’ll be decent damage done.

Davey leaves the bike at the front door.

Davey Either a car or a big stone or a dog you’d need to do that decent damage. And you’d hear a dog.

Donny And you’d hear a car.

Davey (pause)     You’d probably hear a big stone too. It depends on how big and from what distance. Poor Wee Thomas. I did like him, I did. Which is more than I can say for most of the cats round here. Most of the cats round here I wouldn’t give a penny for. They’re all full of themselves. Like our Mairead’s cat. You’d give him a pat, he’d outright sneer. But Wee Thomas was a friendly cat. He would always say hello to you were you to see him sitting on a wall. (Pause.) He won’t be saying hello no more, God bless him. Not with that lump of brain gone. (Pause.) And you haven’t had him long at all, have you, Donny? Wasn’t he near brand new?

Donny He isn’t my fecking cat at all is what the point of the fecking matter is, and you know full well.

Davey I don’t know full well. What . . . ?

Donny Only fecking looking after the bastard I was the year.

Davey Who were you fecking looking after him for, Donny?

Donny Who do you think?

Davey (pause)     Not . . . not . . .

Donny Not what?

Davey (with horror)     Not your . . . not your . . .

Donny Aye.

Davey No!

Donny Why else would I be upset? I don’t get upset over cats!

Davey Not your Padraic?!

Donny Aye, my Padraic.

Davey Oh Jesus Christ, Donny! Not your Padraic in the INLA?!

Donny Do I have another fecking Padraic?

Davey Wee Thomas is his?

Donny And was his since he was five years old. His only friend for fifteen year. Brought him out to me when he started moving about the country bombing places and couldn’t look after him as decent as he thought needed. His only friend in the world, now.

Davey Was he fond of him?

Donny Of course he was fond of him.

Davey Oh he’ll be mad.

Donny He will be mad.

Davey As if he wasn’t mad enough already. Padraic’s mad enough for seven people. Don’t they call him ‘Mad Padraic’?

Donny They do.

Davey Isn’t it him the IRA wouldn’t let in because he was too mad?

Donny It was. And he never forgave them for it.

Davey Maybe he’s calmed down since he’s been travelling.

Donny They tell me he’s gotten worse. I can just see his face after he hears. And I can just see your face too, after he hears your fault it was. I can see him plugging holes in it with a stick.

Davey (dropping to his knees) Oh please, Donny, I swear to God it wasn’t me. Don’t be saying my name to him, now. Sure, Padraic would kill you for sweating near him, let alone this. Didn’t he outright cripple the poor fella laughed at that girly scarf he used to wear, and that was when he was twelve?!

Donny His first cousin too, that fella was, never minding twelve! And then pinched his wheelchair!

Davey Please now, Donny, you won’t be mentioning my name to him?

Donny gets up and ambles around. Davey stands also.

Donny If you admit it was you knocked poor Thomas down, Davey, I won’t tell him. If you carry on that it wasn’t, then I will. Them are your choices.

Davey But it isn’t fecking fair, Donny!

Donny I don’t know if it is or it isn’t.

Davey I knew well I should’ve up and ignored the bastard when I saw him lying there, for if a black cat crossing your path is bad luck, what must one of the feckers lying dead in front of you be? Worse luck. I killed Wee Thomas so, if that’s what you want to hear.

Donny How?

Davey How? However you fecking want, sure! I hit him with me bike, then I banged him with a hoe, then I jumped up and down on the feck!

Donny You hit him with your bike, uh-huh, I suspected. But an accident it was?

Davey An accident, aye. A pure fecking accident.

Donny Well . . . fair enough if an accident is all it was.

Davey (pause)     So you won’t be mentioning my name so?

Donny I won’t be.

Davey Good-oh. (Pause.) When’ll you be informing him of the news?

Donny I’ll give him a ring in a minute now. He has a mobile.

Davey He’ll be furious.

Donny I’ll tell him . . . I’ll tell him Wee Thomas is poorly, I’ll tell him. Aye . . .

Davey Sure he’ll know he’s more than poorly, Donny, when he sees them brains bubbling away . . .

Donny He’s poorly but there’s no need to be rushing home, I’m saying . . .

Davey I’m with you now, Donny . . .

Donny Do you get me? He’s just a tadeen off his food, like, I’ll tell him. And in a week I’ll say he’s going downhill a biteen. And in another week I’ll say he passed away peaceful in his sleep, like.

Davey You’ll be letting him down easy.

Donny I’ll be letting him down easy.

Davey You won’t give him the bad news all at once. You’ll do it in stages, like.

Donny The last thing we want is Padraic roaring home to a dead cat, now.

Davey Oh Donny, that’s the last thing in the world you’d want.

Donny That’s the last thing you’d want too. You’re the bastard brained him, you’ve admitted.

Davey goes to say something but doesn’t, just squirms.

Donny Eh?

Davey Aye, aye, I am the bastard . . . (mumbling) for feck’s sake . . .

Donny I’ll give him a ring now, I will.

Davey (mumbling)  Give him a ring now, for your fecking self, aye, ya feck.

Donny stands there biting his bottom lip. Davey goes to the door and picks up his bike.

Davey Drove on a-fecking-head I should’ve, I knew! I’m too kind to little things is my fecking trouble!

Donny picks up the telephone, staring at the cat.

Donny Oh Wee Tommy, you poor beggar. As fecked up as you are, it mightn’t be long till we’re just as fecked up as you if that lube turns up. Just as fecked up? Twice as fecked up is more like.

Davey Three times as fecked up probably, Donny, or maybe four times?

Donny Be fecking off home you, ya cat brainer.

Davey I will. And I’ll be braining some more cats on me way home, cos it’s me fecking hobby now, so it is.

Donny (absently)  Don’t be braining any more cats, now.

Davey sighs, rolls his eyes to the ceiling and wheels his bike out. Donnystarts dialling a number slowly, sadly. Fade to black.

 

Scene Two

A desolate Northern Ireland warehouse or some such. James, a bare-chested, bloody and bruised man, hangs upside down from the ceiling, his feet bare and bloody. Padraic’s idles near him, wielding a cut-throat razor, his hands bloody. Around Padraic’s chest are strapped two empty holsters and there are two handguns on a table stage left. James is crying.

Padraic     James? (Pause.) James?

James (sobbing)   Wha’?

Padraic     Do you know what’s next on the agenda?

James I don’t. And I don’t want to know.

Padraic     I know well you don’t, you big feck. Look at the state of you, off bawling like some fool of a girl.

James Is a fella not supposed to bawl so, you take his fecking toenails off him?

Padraic (pause)   Don’t be saying ‘feck’ to me, James . . .

James I’m sorry, Padraic . . .

Padraic     Or you’ll make me want to give you some serious bother, and not just be tinkering with you.

James Is toenails off just tinkering with me, so?

Padraic     It is.

James Oh, it’s just fecking tinkering with me toenails off is . . .

Padraic     James Hanley, don’t keep going on about your stupid fecking toenails! The way you talk it sounds as if I took off a rake of them, when it was only two I took off, and them only small ones. If they’d been big ones I could understand, but they weren’t. They were small. You’d hardly notice them gone. And if it was so concerned you were about the health of them toenails it would’ve been once in a while you cleaned out the muck from under them.

James Well, you’ve saved me that job for good now anyways.

Padraic     If I hadn’t been such a nice fella I would’ve taken one toenail off of separate feet, but I didn’t, I took two toenails off the one foot, so that it’s only the one foot you’ll have to be limping on and not the two. If it had been the two you’d’ve found it a devil to be getting about. But with the pain concentrated on the one, if you can get hold of a crutch or a decent stick, I’m not sure if the General Hospital does hand them out but they might do, I don’t know. You could phone them up and ask, or go in and see them would be the best thing, and make sure them toes won’t be going septic at the same time. I didn’t disinfect this razor at all, I never do, I see no need, but they’d be the best people to ask, sure they’re the experts. You’ll probably need a tetanus jab too, oh there’s no question. I do hate injections, I do. I think I’d rather be slashed with a razor than have an injection. I don’t know why. Of course, I’d rather have neither. You’ll have had both by the end of the day. What a bad day you’ve had. (Pause.) But, em . . . I have lost me train of thought now, so I have.

James You’ve lost your train of thought? Uh-huh. As slow as that fecking train is, and you’ve lost it?

Padraic (pause)   The next item on the agenda is which nipple of yours do you want to be saying goodbye to. The right or the left?

James No, now. Come on, now . . . !

Padraic     Be picking, I’m saying! Whichever’s your favourite nipple I won’t be touching that fella at all, I’ll be concentrating on the other. I’ll be giving him a nice sliceen and then probably be feeding him to ya, but if you don’t pick and pick quick it’ll be both of the boys you’ll be waving goodbye to, and waving goodbye to two tits when there’s no need but to wave goodbye to one makes no sense at all as far as I can see. In my eyes, like. In fact it’s the mark of a madman. So be picking your nipple and we’ll get the ball rolling, for I have better things to do with me time than to be hanging around warehouses cutting your nipples off, James Hanley.

James (crying)    But I’ve done nothing at all to deserve nipples off, Padraic!

Padraic     Oh, let’s not be getting into the whys and wherefores, James. You do push your filthy drugs on the schoolchildren of Ireland, and if you concentrated exclusive on the Protestants I’d say all well and good, but you don’t, you take all comers.

James Marijuana to the students at the Tech I sell, and at fair rates . . . !

Padraic     Keeping our youngsters in a drugged-up and idle haze, when it’s out on the streets pegging bottles at coppers they should be.

James Sure, everybody smokes marijuana nowadays.

Padraic     I don’t!

James Well, maybe you should! It might calm you down!

Padraic     Be picking your nipple, I’m saying!

James Paul McCartney says it should be outright legalised! He says it’s less bad than booze and it cures epileptics!

Padraic     Say goodbye to them both so.

James He has statistics, Padraic!

Padraic approaches him quickly with the razor.

James The right one! The right one!

Padraic takes James’s right tit in his hand so that the nipple points out, and is just about to slice it off . . .

Padraic     Grit your teeth, James. This may hurt.

James (screaming) No . . . !

. . . when the cellphone in Padraic’s back pocket rings loudly.

Padraic     Will you hang on there a minute, James . . . ?

Padraic answers the phone, idling away from James, who is left shaking and whimpering behind him.

(Into phone.) Hello? Dad, ya bastard, how are you? (To James.) It’s me dad. (Pause.) I’m grand indeed, Dad, grand. How is all on Inishmore? Good-oh, good-oh. I’m at work at the moment, Dad, was it important now? I’m torturing one of them fellas pushes drugs on wee kids, but I can’t say too much over the phone, like . . .

James (crying)    Marijuana, Padraic.

Padraic     They are terrible men, and it’s like they don’t even know they are, when they know well. They think they’re doing the world a favour, now. (Pause.) I haven’t been up to much else, really. I put bombs in a couple of chip shops, but they didn’t go off. (Pause.) Because chip shops aren’t as well guarded as army barracks. Do I need your advice on planting bombs? (Pause.) I was pissed off, anyways. The fella who makes our bombs, he’s fecking useless. I think he does drink. Either they go off before you’re ready or they don’t go off at all. One thing about the IRA anyways, as much as I hate the bastards, you’ve got to hand it to them, they know how to make a decent bomb. (Pause.) Sure, why would the IRA be selling us any of their bombs? They need them themselves, sure. Those bastards’d charge the earth anyways. I’ll tell ya, I’m getting pissed off with the whole thing. I’ve been thinking of forming a splinter group. (Pause.) I know we’re already a splinter group, but there’s no law says you can’t splinter from a splinter group. A splinter group is the best kind of group to splinter from anyways. It shows you know your own mind (Whispering.), but there’s someone in the room, Dad, I can’t be talking about splinter groups. (To James, politely.) I’ll be with you in a minute now, James.

James shudders slightly.

Padraic     What was it you were ringing about anyways, Dad?

Pause. Padraic’s face suddenly becomes very serious, eyes filling with tears.

Eh? What about Wee Thomas? (Pause.) Poorly? How poorly, have you brought him to the doctor? (Pause.) How long has he been off his food, and why didn’t you tell me when it first started? (Pause.) He’s not too bad? Either he’s poorly or he’s not too bad now, Dad, he’s either one or the fecking other, there’s a major difference, now, between not too bad and fecking poorly, he cannot be the fecking two at fecking once, now, (Crying heavily.) and you wouldn’t be fecking calling me at all if he was not too bad, now! What have you done to Wee Thomas now, you fecking bastard? Put Wee Thomas on the phone. He’s sleeping? Well, put a blanket on him and be stroking and stroking him and get a second opinion from the doctor and don’t be talking loud near him and I’ll be home the first fecking boat in the fecking morning. Ar, you fecker, ya!

Padraic smashes the phone to pieces on the table, shoots the pieces a few times, then sits there crying quietly. Pause.

James Is anything the matter, Padraic?

Padraic     Me cat’s poorly, James. Me best friend in the world, he is.

James What’s wrong with him?

Padraic     I don’t know, now. He’s off his food, like.

James Sure that’s nothing to go crying over, being off his food. He probably has ringworm.

Padraic     Ringworm? Is that serious, now?

James Sure, ringworm isn’t serious at all. Just get him some ringworm pellets from the chemist and feed them him wrapped up in a bit of cheese. They don’t like the taste of ringworm pellets, cats, so if you hide them in a bit of cheese he’ll eat them unbeknownst and never know the differ, and he’ll be as right as rain in a day or two, or at the outside three. Just don’t exceed the stated dose. Y’know, read the instructions, like.

Padraic     How do you know so much about ringworm?

James Sure, don’t I have a cat of me own I love with all my heart, had ringworm a month back?

Padraic     Do ya? I didn’t know drug pushers had cats.

James Sure, drug pushers are the same as anybody underneath.

Padraic     What’s his name?

James Eh?

Padraic     What’s his name?

James Em, Dominic. (Pause.) And I promise not to sell drugs to children any more, Padraic. On Dominic’s life I promise. And that’s a big promise, because Dominic means more to me than anything.

Padraic (pause)   Are you gipping me now, James?

James I’m not gipping you. This is a serious subject.

Padraic approaches James with the razor and slices through the ropes that bind him. James falls to the floor in a heap, then half picks himself up, testing out his weight on his bloody foot. Padraic holsters his guns.

Padraic     How are them toes?

James They’re perfect, Padraic.

Padraic     You admit you deserved the toes at least?

James Oh I did. The toes and an arm, really.

Padraic     Do you have money to get the bus to the hospital?

James I don’t.

Padraic gives the confused James some change.

Padraic     Because you want to get them toes looked at. The last thing you want now is septic toes.

James Oh d’you know, that’s the last thing I’d want.

Padraic     I’m off to Galway to see me cat.

Padraic exits.

James (calling out)     And I hope by the time you get home he’s laughing and smiling and as fit as a fiddle, Padraic!

Pause. Sound of a distant outer door banging shut.

(Crying.)   I hope that he’s dead already and buried in shite, you stupid mental fecking bastard, ya!

Blackout.

Fiona Barr, “The Wall-Reader”

Fiona Barr, born in 1952 in Derry/Londonderry, depicts a young mother who reads political murals for pleasure while strolling her child through the streets of Belfast. “The Wall-Reader” illustrates Northern Ireland’s tense political environment, where seemingly harmless and everyday activities such as walks, conversation, and pleasure reading can instigate the threat of violence and lead to flight and exile.

 

‘Shall only our rivers run free?’ The question jumped out from the cobbled wall in huge white letters, as The Peoples’ taxi swung round the corner at Beechmount.

      ‘Looks like paint is running freely enough down here,’ she thought to herself, as other slogans glided past in rapid succession. Reading Belfast’s grim graffiti had become an entertaining hobby for her, and, she often wondered, was it in the dead of night that groups of boys huddled round a paint tin daubing walls and gables with tired political slogans and dichés? Did anyone ever see them? Was the guilty brush ever found? The brush is mightier than the bomb, she declared inwardly, as she thought of how celebrated among journalists some lines had become.

      ‘Is there a life before death?’

      Well, no one had answered that one yet, at least, not in this city.

      The shapes of Belfast crowded in on her as the taxi rattled over the ramps outside the fortressed police barracks. Dilapidated houses, bricked-up terraces, splintered chaos and amputated life, rosy-cheeked soldiers, barely out of school, and quivering with high-pitched fear. She thought of the thick-lipped youth who came to hi-jack the car, making his point by showing his revolver under his anorak, and of the others, jigging and taunting every July, almost sexual in their arrogance and hatred. Meanwhile, passengers climbed in and out at various points along the road, manoeuvering between legs, bags of shopping and umbrellas. The taxi swerved blindly into the road. No Highway Code here. As the woman’s stop approached, the taxi swung up to the pavement, and she stepped out.

      She thought of how she read walls – like tea-cups – and she smiled to herself. Pushing her baby in the pram to the supermarket, she had to pass under a motorway bridge that was peppered with lines, some in irregular lettering with the paint dribbling down the concrete, others written with felt-tip pens in minute secretive hand. A whole range of human emotions splayed itself with persistent anarchy on the walls. Messages: ‘Ring me at eight, don’t be late’; declarations: ‘Two bob and she’s yours’; exclamations: ‘Man. Utd. are fab’; political jabs: ‘Orange squash – great’, and notes of historical import: ‘3rd Tank Regiment wuz here’. Oh how she longed to linger under the bridge taking each wall in turn, studying the meanest scrawl, pondering sensitivity, evaluating character, identifying subconscious fears, analysing childhoods.

      ‘One could do worse than be a reader of walls’, she thought, twisting Frost’s words. >> note 1 Instead, though, the pram was rushed past the intriguing mural (‘murial’ as they call it here) with much gusto. Respectable housewives don’t read walls!

      Her husband had arrived home early today because of a bomb scare in work, as he explained. Despite the bombings which had propelled Northern Ireland onto the world’s screens and newspapers, most people regarded these episodes as a fact of life now; tedious, disruptive at times and only of interest when fatalities occurred. The ‘Troubles’ as they were euphemistically named, remained for this couple as a remote, vaguely irritating wart on their life. They were simply an ordinary (she often groaned at the oppressive banality of the word), middle-class, family – hoping the baby would marry a doctor thereby raising them in their autumn days to the select legions of the upper-class.

      Each day their lives followed the same routine – no harm in that sordid little detail, she thought. It helps structure one’s existence. He went to the office, she fed the baby, washed the rapidly growing mound of nappies, prepared the dinner and looked forward to the afternoon walk. She had convinced herself she was happy with her lot, and yet felt disappointed at the pangs of jealousy endured on hearing of a friend’s glamorous job or another’s academic and erudite husband. If only someone noticed her from time to time, or even wrote her name on a wall declaring her existence worthwhile, ‘A fine mind’ or ‘I was once her lover’. That way, at least, she would have evidence that she was making an impact on others.

      That afternoon she dressed the baby and started out for her walk. ‘Fantasy time’ her husband called it, ‘Wall-reading time’, she knew it to be. On this occasion, however, she decided to avoid those concrete temptations and, instead, visit the park. Out along the main road, she pushed the pram, pausing to gaze into the hardware store’s window, hearing the whine of the saracen as it thundered by, waking the baby and making her feel uneasy. A foot patrol of soldiers strolled past, their rifles, lethal even in the brittle sunlight of this March day, lounged lovingly and relaxed in the arms of their men. One soldier stood nonchalantly, almost impertinently, against a corrugated railing and stared at her. She always blushed when she passed troops. ‘Locked up in barracks with no women’, she had told her husband. (He remarked that she had a dirty mind). Hurrying out of the range of his eyes and possible sniper fire, she swung downhill out onto Stockman’s Lane and into Musgrave Park.

      The park is ugly, stark and hostile. Even in summer when courting couples seek out secluded spots, like mating cats, they reject Musgrave. There are a few trees, clustered together, standing like skeletons ashamed of their nakedness. The rest is grass, a green wasteland speckled with puddles of gulls squawking over a worm patch. The park is bordered by a hospital which has a military wing guarded by an army billet. The beauty of the place is its silence. It has only this. And here silence means peace. Horror, pain, terror do not exist within these railings. Belfast is beyond their boundaries, and past the frontiers of the eagerly forgetful imagination.

      The hill up to the park bench was not the precipice it seemed, but the baby and pram were heavy. Ante-natal self-indulgence had taken its toll – her midriff was now most definitely a bulge. With one final push, pram, baby and mother reached the green wooden seat, and came to rest. The baby slept soundly with the soother touching her velvet pink cheeks, hand on pillow, a picture of purity. The woman heard a coughing noise coming from the nearby gun turret, and managed to see the tip of a rifle and a face peering out from the darkness. Smells of cabbage and burnt potatoes wafted over from behind the slanting sheets of protective steel.

      ‘Is that your baby?’ an English voice called out. She could barely see the face belonging to the voice. She replied yes, and smiled. The situation reminded her of the confessional. Dark and supposedly anonymous, ‘Is that you, my child?’ She knew the priest personally. Did he identify her sins with his ‘Good morning, Mary’, and think to himself, ‘and I know what you were up to last night!’ She blushed at the secrets given away through the ceremony. Yes, she nervously answered again, it was her baby, a little girl. First-time mothers rarely resist the temptation to talk about their offspring. Forgetting her initial shyness, she told the voice of when the baby was born, the early problems of all-night crying, now teething, how she could crawl backwards and gurgle. In fact all the minutiae that unite mothers everywhere.

      The voice responded. It too had a son, a few months older than her child, away in Germany at the army base at Münster. The voice too talked with the quiet affection that binds fathers everywhere to their children. The English voice talked out from the turret as if addressing the darkening lines of silhouettes in the distance beyond the park. Factory pipes, chimney tops, church spires, domes all listened impassively to the Englishman’s declaration of paternal love. The scene was strange, for although Belfast’s sterile geography slipped into classical forms with dusk and heavy rain-clouds, the voice and the woman knew the folly of such innocent communication. They politely finished their conversation, said goodbye and the woman pushed her pram homewards. The voice remained in the turret, watchful and anxious. Home she went, past vanloads of workers leering out past the uneasy presence of foot patrols, past the Church.

      ‘Let us give each other the sign of peace’ they said at Mass. The only sign Belfast knew was two fingers pointing towards Heaven. Life was self-contained, the couple often declared, just like flats. No need to go outside.

      She did go outside, however. Over the weeks the voice had become a name, John. It had become a friend, someone to listen to, to talk to. No face, but a person removed from the city’s grotesqueries and colourlessness. She sat on the bench, the pram in front, the baby asleep, listening, talking, looking ahead at the hospital corridors stretching languidly before her. He talked of his wife, and the city he came from. In some ways, remote as another planet, in others as familiar as the earth itself. Memories of childhood aspirations grown out of back-to-back slum, of disappointment, the pain of failure, the fear of rejection in adolescence. Visions of Germany, Teutonic efficiency and emotional hardness; Malta and Cyprus, exotic, crimson, romantic, legendary, the holiday brochures come to life.

      She told him of her family, of escaping through books, longing to endure noble pain and mysterious wildness, to experience outrageous immorality, to be as aloof as Yeats himself. To be memorable, she told him, was her awful imagination-consuming desire, even if only to have her name on a wall that would stand for centuries. She told him of Donegal, its vitality and freshness, its windswept, heather-blown beauty, savage waves plummeting and spume crashing onto sheer cliffs and jagged rocks. She tried to paint a picture of the place and tell how forlorn and vulnerable it made her feel, but her expressions were inadequate, her words mere clichés. She felt she had begun to talk in slogans.

      Each week the voice and the woman learned more of each other. No physical contact was needed, no face-to-face encounter to judge reaction, no touching to confirm amity, no threat of dangerous intimacy. It was a meeting of minds, as she explained later to her husband, a new opinion, a common bond, an opening of vistas. He disclosed his ambitions to become a pilot, to watch the land, fields and horizons spread out beneath him – a patchwork quilt of dappled colours and textures. She wanted to be remembered by writing on walls. And all this time the city’s skyline and distant buildings watched and listened.

      It was April now. More slogans had appeared, white and dripping, on the city walls. ‘Brits out. Peace in.’ A simple equation for the writer. ‘Loose talk claims lives’, another shouted menacingly. The messages, the woman decided, had acquired a more ominous tone. The baby had grown and could sit up without support. New political solutions had been proposed and rejected, interparamilitary feuding had broken out and subsided, four soldiers and two policemen had been blown to smithereens in separate incidents, and a building a day had been bombed by the Provos. >> note 2It had been a fairly normal month by Belfast’s standards. The level of violence was no more or less acceptable than at other times. Life has to continue, after all.

      One day – it was, perhaps, the last day in April – her husband returned home panting and trembling a little. He asked if she had been to the park, and she replied that she had. Taking her by the hand, he led her to the wall on the left of their driveway. She felt her heart sink and thud. She felt her face redden. Her mouth was suddenly dry. She could not speak. In huge angry letters the message spat itself out,

TOUT >> note 3

      The four-letter word covered the whole wall. It clanged in her brain, its venom rushed through her body. Suspicion was enough to condemn. What creature had skulked to paint the word? Whose arm, dismembered and independent, had swung from tin to wall to deliver judgement? The job itself was not well done, she had seen better. The letters were uneven, paint splattered down from the crossed T, the U looked a misshapen O. The workmanship was poor, the impact perfect.

      Her husband led her back into the kitchen. The baby was crying loudly but the woman did not seem to hear. Like sleepwalkers, they sat down on the settee. The woman began to sob. Her shoulders heaved in bursts as she gasped hysterically. Her husband took her in his arms gently and tried to make her sorrow his. Already he shared her fear.

      ‘What did you talk about? Did you not realise how dangerous it was? We must leave.’ He spoke quickly, making plans. Selling the house and car, finding a job in London or Dublin, far away from Belfast, mortgages, removals, savings, the tawdry affairs of normal living stunned her, making her more confused.

      ‘I told him nothing’, she sobbed, ‘what could I tell? We talked about life, everything, but not about here.’ She trembled, trying to control herself.

      ‘We just chatted about reading walls, families, anything at all. Oh Seán, it was as innocent as that. A meeting of minds we called it, for it was little else.’

      She looked into her husband’s face and saw he did not fully understand. There was a hint of jealousy, of resentment at not being part of their communion. Her hands fell on her lap, resting in resignation. What was the point of explanation? She lifted her baby from the floor. Pressing the tiny face and body to her breast, she felt all her hopes and desires for a better life become one with the child’s struggle for freedom. How could she invite the trauma of war into this new pure soul? Belfast and innocence. The two seemed incongruous and yet it must be done. The child’s hands wandered over her face, their eyes met. At once that moment of maternal and filial love eclipsed her fear, gave her the impetus to escape.

      For nine months she had been unable to accept the reality of her condition. Absurd, for the massive bump daily shifted position and thumped against her. When her daughter was born, she had been overwhelmed by love for her and amazed at her own ability to give life. By nature she was a dreamy person, given to moments of fancy. She played out historical, romantic, literary roles in her imagination. She wondered at her competence in fulfilling the role of mother. Could it be measured? This time she knew it could. She really did not care if they maimed her or even murdered her. She did care about her daughter. She was her touchstone, her anchor to virtue. Not for her child a legacy of fear, revulsion or hatred. With the few hours respite the painters had left between judgement and sentence she determined to leave Belfast’s walls behind.

      The next few nights were spent in troubled, restless, sleep. The message remained on the wall outside. The neighbours pretended not to notice and the matter was not discussed. She and the baby remained indoors despite the refreshing May breezes and blue skies. Her husband had given in his notice at the office, for health reasons, he suggested to his colleagues. All aunt had been contacted in Dublin. The couple did not answer knocks at the door, carefully examined the shape and size of mail delivered and always paused when they answered the telephone. Espionage and treachery were the order of the day, or so it seemed. It was time for reappraisal, for scrutiny of goals in life and the opportunity for survival. They agreed they had to escape for their lives were at risk now. Touting is punishable by death, tradition has ordained it so. The cause and its victory must be pursued.

      Their cases and tea-chests were packed in the hallway. Old wedding gifts, still unused, library books hopelessly out-of-date, maternity clothes and sports wear, chipped ornaments and cutlery. They cluttered up the place as they awaited the day of departure. An agent was taking care of selling the house and getting a suitable price. A job was promised with an insurance company in Dublin, and their aunt had prepared a room for them. They told no one in the street. They would write later (omitting the address, naturally), enclosing a cheque for milk and bread bills. Every eventuality was covered, every potential loop-hole filled. Their exodus, their little conspiracy, was planned with exactitude and cunning. Then they waited for the night they were to leave home.

      The mini-van was to call at eleven on Monday night, when it would be dark enough to park and pack their belongings and themselves without too much suspicion being aroused. The firm had been very understanding when the nature of their work had been explained; there was no conflict of loyalties involved in the exercise. They agreed to drive them to Dublin at extra cost, changing drivers at Newry on the way down.

      Monday finally arrived. The couple nervously laughed about how smoothly everything had gone. Privately, they each expected something to go wrong. The baby was fed, and played with, the radio listened to and the clock watched. The hours dragged by as the couple waited for eleven to chime.

      She wondered what had happened to the voice, John. Had he missed her visits? Was he safe? Quickly she dismissed him from her thoughts. It was her selfishness and silly notions that had got them into this mess. She never had a great store of moral courage, content to lie down and accept in true Croppy fashion, as her husband always said. She had never been outstanding or bold, having gone along as peacefully as possible. It was her child who had given her strength, life and freedom from her old self. But would they make it?

      They listened to the news at nine. Huddled together in their anxiety, they kept vigil in the darkening room. Rain had begun to pour from black thunder clouds. Everywhere it was quiet and still. Hushed and cold they waited. Ten o’clock, and it was now dark. A blustery wind had risen making the lattice separation next door bang and clatter. At ten to eleven, her husband went into the sittingroom to watch for the mini-van. His footsteps clamped noisily on the floorboards as he paced back and forth. The baby slept.

      A black shape glided slowly up the street and backed into the driveway. It was eleven. The van had arrived. Her husband asked to see identification and then they began to load up the couple’s belongings. Settee, chairs, television, washing machine – all were dumped hastily, it was no time to worry about breakages. She stood holding the sleeping baby in the livingroom as the men worked anxiously between van and house. The scene was so unreal, the circumstances absolutely incredible, she thought ‘What have I done?’ Recollections of her naivety, her insensitivity to historical fact and political climate were stupefying. She had seen women who had been tarred and feathered, heard of people who had been shot in the head, boys who had been knee-capped, all for suspected fraternising with troops. The catalogue of violence spilled out before her as she realised the gravity and possible repercussions of her alleged misdemeanour.

      A voice called her, ‘Mary, come on now. We have to go. Don’t worry, we’re all together.’ Her husband led her to the locked and waiting van. Handing the baby to him, she climbed up beside the driver, took the baby as her husband sat down beside her and waited for the engine to start. The van slowly manoeuvered out onto the street and down the main road. They felt more cheerful now, a little like refugees seeking safety and freedom not too far away. As they approached the motorway bridge, two figures with something clutched in their hands stood side by side in the darkness. She closed her eyes tightly, expecting bursts of gunfire. The van shot past. Relieved, she asked her husband what they were doing at this time of night.

      ‘Writing slogans on the wall’ he replied.

      The furtiveness of the painters seemed ludicrous and petty as she recalled the heroic and literary characteristics with which she had endowed them. What did they matter? The travellers sat in silence as the van sped past the city suburbs, the glare of police and army barracks, on out and further out into the countryside. Past sleeping villages and silent fields, past white-washed farmhouses and barking dogs. On to Newry where they said goodbye to their driver as the new one stepped in. Far along the coast with Rostrevor’s twinkling lights opposite the bay, down to the Border check and a drowsy soldier waving them through. Out of the North, safe, relieved and heading for Dublin.

      She noticed, as the van drove along the Liffey quay that wall messages existed here too. Their meanness saddened her. Wall-reading had been fun, a spur for the imagination, a way to be remembered. All her life she had longed to be remembered through walls, the people’s medium. Now the medium itself was as destructive, as deadening as the concrete it was written on. She had neither the strength of character nor the fine moral fibre necessary to be remembered. Yet, strangely, despite disappointment, she felt glad in a peculiar way and not such an abysmal failure after all. One person, the voice John at least, would deliver her memory to his family and friends, would perhaps pray for her ambitions and maybe even admire her simple-minded ignorance of Belfast’s sordid heart.

      Some days later in Belfast the neighbours discovered the house vacant, the people next door received a letter and a cheque from Dublin. Remarks about the peculiar couple were made over hedges and cups of coffee. The message on the wall was painted over by the couple who had bought the house when it went up for sale. They too were ordinary people, living a self-contained life, worrying over finance and babies, promotion and local gossip. He too had an office job, but his wife was merely a housekeeper for him. She was sensible, down to earth, and not in the least inclined to wall-reading.

Michael Longley, “Ceasefire”

Northern Irish poet Michael Longley, born in Belfast in 1939 to a Protestant family, first published “Ceasefire” in an Irish newspaper just a day before the 1994 IRA ceasefire. Longley distances the immediacy of the Troubles in this poem by imagining a scene from Homer’s Iliad, particularly the moment of reconciliation between Agamemnon and Achilles after the slaying of Hector.

 

Ceasefire >> note 1

I

Put in mind of his own father and moved to tears
Achilles took him by the hand and pushed the old king
Gently away, but Priam curled up at his feet and
Wept with him until their sadness filled the building.

II

Taking Hector’s corpse into his own hands Achilles
Made sure it was washed and, for the old king’s sake, 
Laid out in uniform, ready for Priam to carry 
Wrapped like a present home to Troy at daybreak.

III

When they had eaten together, it pleased them both
To stare at each other’s beauty as lovers might, 
Achilles built like a god, Priam good-looking still
And full of conversation, who earlier had sighed:

IV

‘I get down on my knees and do what must be done
And kiss Achilles’ hand, the killer of my son.’

 

1994

“Declaration of Support” from “The Good Friday Agreement”

“The Good Friday Agreement” was signed by most of Northern Ireland’s political parties in Belfast on April 10, 1998 and passed by referendum by voters in Ireland and Northern Ireland in May. “The Declaration of Support” (the first page of the Agreement) announces a “new beginning” for Northern Ireland by establishing the commitment by both political groups (British Unionist and Irish Nationalist) to self-governance and to resolving political and cultural differences by “exclusively democratic and peaceful means.” John Hume and David Trimble, two principle creators of “The Agreement,” both won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1998.

 

DECLARATION OF SUPPORT

1. We, the participants in the multi-party negotiations, believe that the agreement we have negotiated offers a truly historic opportunity for a new beginning.

2. The tragedies of the past have left a deep and profoundly regrettable legacy of suffering. We must never forget those who have died or been injured, and their families. But we can best honour them through a fresh start, in which we firmly dedicate ourselves to the achievement of reconciliation, tolerance, and mutual trust, and to the protection and vindication of the human rights of all.

3. We are committed to partnership, equality and mutual respect as the basis of relationships within Northern Ireland, between North and South, and between these islands.

4. We reaffirm our total and absolute commitment to exclusively democratic and peaceful means of resolving differences on political issues, and our opposition to any use or threat of force by others for any political purpose, whether in regard to this agreement or otherwise.

5. We acknowledge the substantial differences between our continuing, and equally legitimate, political aspirations. However, we will endeavour to strive in every practical way towards reconciliation and rapprochement within the framework of democratic and agreed arrangements. We pledge that we will, in good faith, work to ensure the success of each and every one of the arrangements to be established under this agreement. It is accepted that all of the institutional and constitutional arrangements - an Assembly in Northern Ireland, a North/South Ministerial Council, implementation bodies, a British-Irish Council and a British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference and any amendments to British Acts of Parliament and the Constitution of Ireland - are interlocking and interdependent and that in particular the functioning of the Assembly and the North/South Council are so closely inter-related that the success of each depends on that of the other.

6. Accordingly, in a spirit of concord, we strongly commend this agreement to the people, North and South, for their approval.

Exploration

1. Compare the Easter 1916 Proclamation with Yeats’s poem about the Easter Rising, “Easter, 1916” (NAEL 8, 2.2031). What are the differences between how the two texts represent the Irish nationalist struggle? What is the significance of these differences? Are there similarities as well?

2. Modern Irish writers supported Irish political independence but asked whether it should come at the price of Irish lives. How does Sean O’Casey represent Padraic Pearse’s call for blood sacrifice? Compare the excerpt from the second act of O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars with the Easter 1916 Proclamation’s injunction that the Irish must “sacrifice themselves for the common good.” How does O’Casey contextualize Pearse’s fiery rhetoric? Is there a relationship, for example, between the prostitute Rosie’s approach to the Covey and the effect of Pearse’s oratory on Peter and Fluther?

3. The rise of Irish nationalism after the Easter Rising placed considerable demands on Irish writers to produce works that remember the Rising as heroic and that support the cause of Irish independence. How do Yeats in “Easter, 1916” (NAEL 8, 2.2031) and Sean O’Casey in The Plough and the Stars remember the Rising? How do they negotiate the demands of Irish nationalism and their own skepticism? What evidence can you find that they perceived Irish nationalism as liberating, constraining, or both?

4. The immediacy and frequency of violence throughout the Troubles have forced Northern Irish writers to ask how to respond to such violence. Is a writer’s role to offer explanation and reportage, consolatory language and expressions of grief, or further questions? Should the violence be represented directly or indirectly, as heroic or wasteful, as necessary or arbitrary? Consider how Northern Irish poets, in particular, respond to the Troubles: see Seamus Heaney’s “The Grauballe Man,” “Punishment,” and “Casualty” (NAEL 8, 2.2825–30), and Paul Muldoon’s “Meeting the British” and “Gathering Mushrooms” (NAEL 8, 2.2869–71). If you were a writer living in the midst of political violence, how would you respond?

5. A visitor to Northern Ireland might notice how much the history of the Troubles is on display through murals on city streets. The protagonist of Fiona Barr’s short story “The Wall-Reader” is fascinated by the murals. But she learns, as have many Northern Irish people, that speaking to people on the other side of the Protestant/Catholic divide can be dangerous. How does Barr suggest both the longing for uninhibited communication and the dangers of speech amid the political turmoil of the North? What is the role of language in both crossing sectarian divisions and in reinforcing them?

6. Martin McDonagh’s play The Lieutenant of Inishmore uses humor in representing the violence of the conflict in Northern Ireland. In the first scenes of the play, how does McDonagh use humorous juxtapositions to draw out the absurdities of fanatical devotion to a political cause? How, why, and to what effect does he include comedy in his representation of torture and strife in the North?

7. Compare how early-twentieth Irish writers, such as Yeats and O’Casey, represent the Easter Rising, with how later twentieth-century writers, such as Heaney or Muldoon, Barr or McDonagh, represent the Troubles. Are there significant continuities and contrasts? What do you make of these?

8.  Many Irish and Northern Irish writers have felt a deep responsibility to represent the nation. Sometimes, though, two different kinds of “representation”—political and imaginative—are at odds with one another for Irish writers. On the one hand, Irish writers speak for the nation through their texts, and critics sometimes read their words as political speech. On the other hand, these texts are artistic creations and imaginative representations, which may not correspond to popular Irish political opinions. Consider how the texts by any of the writers featured here join together, separate, or negotiate their political and imaginative representations of Ireland.

9. The creation and passage of “The Good Friday Agreement” by Irish and Northern Irish people represented a turning point in the history of the Troubles. Northern Irish writers have also worked artistically to aid the peace process. Compare how Michael Longley’s “Ceasefire” and “The Declaration of Support” from “The Good Friday Agreement” imagine and hope for eventual peace and reconciliation in Northern Ireland.

Connections to NAEL

The Twentieth Century section of Norton Topics Online sheds light on the impact of the First World War and the rise of literary modernism.  A third topic surveys the difficult but, in literary terms, dynamic relationship between Ireland and England throughout the century. 

Suggested uses of Norton Topics Online: The Twentieth Century with The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Eighth Edition (anthology page references for the new Eighth Edition are included below):

Representing the Great War

• Thomas Hardy, Channel Firing NAEL8.2.1877 • VOICES FROM WORLD WAR I NAEL8.2.1954 • A. E. Housman, Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries NAEL8.2.1953 • W. B. Yeats, In Memory of Major Robert Gregory NAEL8.2.2034 • MODERNIST MANIFESTOS NAEL8.2.1996 • W. H, Auden, September 1, 1939 NAEL8.2.2432 • VOICES FROM WORLD WAR II NAEL8.2.2451

Representing the Great War supplements and expands the anthology cluster Voices from World War I.  In addition to shedding light on war poets like Owen and Sassoon, this topic cluster is a valuable companion to the rise of modernism which received a powerful impulse from the shock of the Great War.  The anthology’s coverage of Yeats is augmented with further poetry and prose.  The selections gathered here also serve as a valuable background to the poetry and prose of the Second World War by Auden, Sitwell, and Douglas and others, who wrote in the ambiguous shadow of their famous predecessors. 

The Modernist Experiment

• Oscar Wilde, Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray NAEL8.2.1697 • modernist manifestos NAEL8.2.1996 • Virginia Woolf, The Mark on the Wall Modern Fiction NAEL8.2.2082 • James Joyce, Ulysses NAEL8.2.2087 • Finnegans Wake NAEL8.2.2200 • T. S. Eliot NAEL8.2.2239 • Samuel Beckett, Endgame NAEL8.2.2286 • Salman Rushdie, The Prophet's Hair NAEL8.2.2854 • Paul Muldoon NAEL8.2.2868

The Modernist Experiment offers a selection of key documents and images illuminating the High Modernism of Woolf, Joyce, and Eliot.  This topic also supplements and expands the anthology cluster of Modernist Manifestos, and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s vorticist message from the trenches enhances the study of the aesthetic impact of the First World War.  The texts gathered here will be vital in tracing the intellectual trajectory of modernism, from its origins in the aesthetic movement of the 1890s, exemplified by Wilde, through to its later manifestations in Beckett, and the postmodernism of Rushdie and Muldoon.

Imagining Ireland

• William Butler Yeats NAEL8.2.2019 • James Joyce NAEL8.2.2163 • Brian Friel, Translations NAEL8.2.2475 • Seamus Heaney NAEL8.2.2822 • Eavan Boland NAEL8.2.2848 • Paul Muldoon NAEL8.2.2868 • Anonymous, Proclamation of an Irish Republic NAEL8.2.1618 • Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal NAEL8.1.2462

The Plurality of Worlds considers those scientific methods, philosophies and technologies of the Restoration and the eighteenth century which exerted the most pervasive influence upon people's views of the world and their place in it. Newton's theories of light and Galileo's telescopic observations of the universe are among the readings which provide a background crucial to understanding Pope's idea of man's place in God's vast universe, and Smart's joyous adoration of creation's variety. Cavendish's claim, "I have made a world of my own: for which no body, I hope, will blame me, since it is in every one's power to do the like" (NAEL8.1.1781), reveals the imaginative possibilities of this new sense of a universe that stretched from the microscopic worlds espied by Hooke and van Leeuwenhoek, to the distant galaxies postulated by Wright.

Summary

Notes:

• The roots of modern literature are in the late nineteenth century.

• The war produced major shifts in attitudes towards Western myths of progress and civilization.

• The twentieth century witnessed the emergence of internationally acclaimed voices from the former imperial dominions.

• The years leading up to World War I saw the start of a poetic revolution.

• By the end of the century modernism had given way to the striking pluralism of postmodernism and postcolonialism.

• Samuel Beckett played a leading role in the anglophone absorption of modernist experiment in drama.

Summaries

The roots of modern literature are in the late nineteenth century. Rejecting Victorian notions of the artist’s moral duty, the aesthetic movement widened the bread between writers and the general public. The “alienation” of the artist underlies key works of modernism. The last decades of Victoria’s reign also saw the emergence of a mass literate population. Modernity disrupted the old order, casting into doubt previously stable assumptions about the self, community, and the divine. Freud’s psychoanalysis changed understandings of rationality and personal development. As the influence of organized religion weakened, many writers looked to literature as an alternative.

As terms applied to cultural history, Edwardian (1901-1910) suggestsa period marked by intellectual change but social continuity with Victorian times, while Georgian refers to the lull before the storm of World War I. The war produced major shifts in attitudes towards Western myths of progress and civilization. The 1930s in Britain were called the red decade, for the only solution to economic dislocation seemed to lie in socialism or communism. Victory in World War II was accompanied by diminution in British political power. In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher’s conservative policies widened the gap between rich and poor and between the constituent parts of the United Kingdom. Under Tony Blair, elected in 1997, Scotland and Wales were empowered to elect their own legislative bodies.

In 1914, nearly a quarter of the earth’s surface and more than a quarter of its population were under British dominion. Following victory in the Second World War, Britain lost its empire. The twentieth century witnessed the emergence of internationally acclaimed voices from the former imperial dominions. Migrants to Britain from the Commonwealth brought distinctive vernaculars and cultural identities with them, prompting a large-scale and ongoing rethinking of national identity. In the 1970s and 1980s a younger generation of black and Asian British writers emerged, including Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi and John Agard.

The years leading up to World War I saw the start of a poetic revolution. The imagist movement arose in reaction against Romantic fuzziness and emotionalism in poetry. A new critical movement went hand in hand with the new poetry, and T. S. Eliot was high priest of both. Poets looked back to the Metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century and produced work of much greater intellectual complexity than the Victorians. In the 1950s, poets such as Philip Larkin and Thom Gunn were members of “the Movement,” which emphasized purity of diction and a neutral tone. Leading poets at the close of the century were the Irishman Seamus Heaney and the West Indian Derek Walcott, both of whom combine elements of the English literary tradition with the rhythms of their native lands.

The twentieth-century novel experienced three major movements. High modernism, lasting through the 1920s, celebrated personal and textual inwardness, complexity, and difficulties. High modernists like Woolf and Joyce wrote in the wake of the shattering of confidence in old certainties. The 1930s through the 1950s saw a return to social realism and moralism as a reaction against modernism. Writers like Murdoch and Golding were consciously retrospective in their investment in moral form. By the end of the century modernism had given way to the striking pluralism of postmodernism and postcolonialism.

Although there were major innovations in Continental drama in the first half of the twentieth century, in Britain the impact of these innovations was delayed by a conservative theater establishment until the late 1950s and 1960s. Samuel Beckett played a leading role in the anglophone absorption of modernist experiment in drama. In the shadow of the mass death of World War II, Beckett’s absurdist intimation of an existential darkness without redemption gave impetus to a seismic shift in British drama. The Theatres Act of 1968 abolished the power of censorship that had rested in the Lord Chamberlain’s Office. Wole Soyinka and Derek Walcott, two eminent poets from Britain’s former dominions, helped breathe new life and diversity into English drama.

Meaning of the millennium

1. Damian Thompson, from The End of Time

2. An Anglo-Saxon Monk called Byrhtferth >> note 1 once observed that one thousand, or rather M, should be regarded as a 'perfect number'. Writing soon after the year 1000, he based his argument on the theory that the history of the world had been divided by God into consecutive periods of a thousand years each. But, he added helpfully, "these ages did not consist of perfect numbers of years". Some were longer than others.

3. Confusion about the meaning of the millennium is an enduring feature of Western civilisation, and the predictable reawakening of interest in the subject during the 1990s has done little to clear it up. Most people are aware that there is more to the millennium than the mere passing of 1,000 years. They do not need to be told that the crossing of such a barrier has psychological ramifications, and they may already feel mild twinges of that anxiety and excitement which the [British] media has dubbed "Pre-Millennial Tension." They also know that it is associated with outlandish behaviour on the part of groups labelled "millenarian." But they are often surprised to learn that the Millennium (with a capital "M") is used as a technical term by theologians and social scientists, and that it has nothing to do with the date. Furthermore, very few of those movements which history calls millenarian have been inspired by the years 1000 or 2000.

4. So what, precisely, is a millenarian? Used, in its strictest sense, the word applies to people who live in daily anticipation of the dawn of the "Millennium" described in the Book of Revelation, the last book of the New Testament. This text, otherwise known as the Book of the Apocalypse, is the last and most controversial book of the New Testament: it consists of a series of fantastic visions of the End of Time in which the forces of God and Satan do battle amid scenes of stomach-churning violence and cruelty. Towards the end of the book, the battle ceases for a period of a thousand years, during which Satan is caged and Christ and his saints reign on earth. This is the Millennium, and those believers who expect this thousand-year paradise to dawn at any moment are therefore millenarians.

5. As the study of human behaviour evolved, it became clear that, although belief in an imminent new world seems to result in specific patterns of behaviour, the phenomenon is not confined to literal belief in the Millennium of Revelation. . . . Millenarianism can incorporate the ideas of almost any religion and, indeed, those of secular ideology. Modern sociologists cheerfully apply the word millenarian to groups ranging from Islamic Mahdist >> note 2 movements to Melanesian cargo cults. >> note 3 There is also widespread support for Norman Cohn's suggestion that both Marxism and Nazism represent forms of secular millenarianism. They certainly appear to fit the definition of the phenomenon in the American Encyclopaedia of Religion as "a belief that the end of the world is at hand and that in its wake will appear a New World, inexhaustibly fertile, harmonious, sanctified, and just." (Millenarian conceptions of justice, it need hardly be said, are not those of the International Court of Human Rights.)

6. The history of the past 2,000 years suggests that people who believe that their world is moving inexorably towards a total and miraculous transformation, in which old scores will be settled and the Elect rewarded, will react along broadly similar lines. All millenarian movements are distinguished by the abnormal behaviour of their adherents, which can range from retreat to the wilderness to await the End to acts of unimaginable violence designed to bring it about. Either way, there is a tremendous release of emotional energy which gives these movements a sense of mission. The same patterns crop up in movements separated by vast stretches of space and time. There is a pronounced tendency, for example, for millenarian groups to veer towards extreme attitudes to sexual behaviour, in which sex is either forbidden or to be enjoyed indiscriminately. The millenarian sense of identity, too, is distinctive. It invariably possesses a narcissistic, self-righteous quality - and small wonder, since these groups believe that only they will witness, and survive the End. It is also paranoid. As the American historian Richard Landes argues: "Anyone or any group so instrumental in the final battle must expect the ubiquitous forces of evil to target them particularly." >> note 4

7. The fanatical behaviour of millenarians, therefore, is intimately connected to their distinctive beliefs. But sociologists and historians are often far more interested in why such movements rise than in the (to them) distasteful details of their eschatological >> note 5 fantasies. And this is where they cannot agree. There have been attempts to cast all millenarians in the role of proto-revolutionaries. The phrase "relative deprivation" is employed to describe the economic imbalance leading the dispossessed to develop uncontrollable resentments against the established order which are then channelled not into political activism but into fantasies of invulnerability and escape. There is a school of thought which insists that millenarianism always springs from the clash of cultures, one technologically superior to the other. Another theory focusses on natural and economic disasters, which it maintains are the only phenomena sufficiently disorienting to produce millenarianism.

8. All these theories marshal evidence from widely differing cultures. The disaster school, for example, points to the reappearance of processions of revolutionary flagellants>> note 6 immediately after the outbreak of the Black Death,>> note 7 and to the military defeat and forced migration which preceded the American Indian Ghost Dance. >> note 8 The latter, though, fits equally easily into the theory based on the clash of cultures. The point is that these supposedly rival theories of millenarianism are not always mutually exclusive. And nor, it should be said, are any of them entirely satisfactory. Why were millenarian movements thrown up by drought in late-nineteenth-century Brazil, but not by the infinitely more severe Irish potato famine? By the Tokyo earthquake of 1923 but not by the Second World War? Perhaps the notion of a unified theory of millenarianism is as illusory, and as outdated, as the comprehensive history of historical development.

9. Yet it would be ludicrous to deny that political and economic change cannot be the major factor in producing this strange mind-set. Psychological studies of people caught up in millenarian movements suggest that they do not attract a significantly higher proportion of the mentally ill than conventional religions or political parties. We can therefore hardly escape the conclusion that millenarianism often arises from feelings of deprivation in matters of status, wealth, security or self-esteem. Furthermore, it will tend to spring up during periods of crisis, which, in the words of one commentator,>> note 9 can be "as blatant and acute as the sack of a city or as subtle and prolonged as the passage from isolated agrarian community to industrial megopolis." In other words, it can occur at almost any time, anywhere.

10. The real problem with theories of millenarianism is the narrowness of the concept itself. It is not quite the same thing as apocalyptic belief, which maintains that mankind is nearing the End of the World as we know it, but does not necessarily imagine a violent or sudden change. All millenarianism is apocalyptic (from the Greek word meaning "to unveil"), but all apocalyptic belief is not millenarian: far from it. Classic millenarians, from self-flagellating medieval peasants to Sioux Ghost Dancers, are often people who, if not clinically mad, have reached what George Rosen has called "the wilder shores of sanity." They are relatively easy to distinguish from the population at large, and never more so than at the moment. We see this in the disturbing phenomenon of doomsday cults and sects, which is assuming greater prominence as we approach the end of the second Christian millennium. The world is still trying to make sense of the gas attack on the Tokyo underground >> note 10 by the unquestionably millenarian Aum Shrinrikyo cult. The terrifying prospect of cult members releasing poison gas into the nerve centre of our cities reinforces our image of millenarians as outsiders, alien invaders. It reinforces the comforting and misleading impression that there is no common ground between fanatical millenarians and the rest of society.

Texts and authors

Thomas Hardy

Context

Thomas Hardy's long literary career witnessed and encompassed the most important artistic and literary changes of the modern era. Hardy was born in 1840 near Dorcester, England; before his death in 1928 at the age of 87, the genre of the Victorian novel had flowered and faded, and the erstwhile avant-garde movement known as modernism dominated the English literary landscape. In his ornate, wordy style and his sensitivity to issues of class, Hardy seemed a characteristic Victorian novelist. But his writing increasingly revealed a sensibility and a moral code that seemed to discard the strict Victorian social and sexual mores, and that tended towards atheism and subjective morality rather than an absolutist Christianity. His philosophy was out of place in Victorian England, and presaged the coming social and cultural upheaval of modernism.

Joseph Conrad

Context

J oseph Conrad did not begin to learn English until he was twenty-one years old. He was born Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski on December 3, 1857, in the Polish Ukraine. When Conrad was quite young, his father was exiled to Siberia on suspicion of plotting against the Russian government. After the death of the boy’s mother, Conrad’s father sent him to his mother’s brother in Kraków to be educated, and Conrad never again saw his father. He traveled to Marseilles when he was seventeen and spent the next twenty years as a sailor. He signed on to an English ship in 1878, and eight years later he became a British subject. In 1889, he began his first novel, Almayer’s Folly, and began actively searching for a way to fulfill his boyhood dream of traveling to the Congo. He took command of a steamship in the Belgian Congo in 1890, and his experiences in the Congo came to provide the outline for Heart of Darkness. Conrad’s time in Africa wreaked havoc on his health, however, and he returned to England to recover. He returned to sea twice before finishing Almayer’s Folly in 1894 and wrote several other books, including one about Marlow called Youth: A Narrative before beginning Heart of Darkness in 1898. He wrote most of his other major works—including Lord Jim, which also features Marlow; Nostromo; and The Secret Agent, as well as several collaborations with Ford Madox Ford—during the following two decades. Conrad died in 1924.