“The
poet is like that Prince of Clouds, who soars above the/
archer and the hurricane:
Great Auk/ Brought down to earth, his gawky, gorgeous
wings impede his walking”
(“The Albatross” Ciaran Carson)
Taking
an unflinching look at the ambiguous portrait of a country
whose past is rooted in the ‘experience of incongruity’
typical of postcolonial societies, the cultural critic
David Lloyd perspicaciously scrutinises Irish history,
producing an unsparing analysis of its antinomies and
contradictions. According to the Brazilian Literature
professor Roberto Schwarz, this experience comes into
being when dependent cultures seek to address their issues
according to intellectual mythologies developed somewhere
else and whose bases are utterly distinct from the place
that they are transplanted to. Thus, this process is one
of the features that enable a particular social structure
to be reflected in cultural formation as an artistic paradigm.
In spite of the fact the author does not seem to be acquainted
with Schwarz’s theories, the Brazilian author’s insightful
remarks bear comparison to Lloyd’s mainly because the
author, grounded in a postcolonial outlook, examines how
the residual features of pre-colonial formation are out
of joint with modern ideas of cutting-edge advances and
state-of-the-art techniques. In other words, he is referring
to the manner in which modernisation has forced its way
into post-colonial Ireland and, therefore, forged an incomplete
fractured society and industrial system. In his words:
The
failure of the modern state to fulfil even its quite
limited emancipatory promises: the promise to counter
the accumulative greed of capital with some semblance
of just distribution of its goods; the promise of that
security it offers to private property might in some
degree be balanced by the welfare offered to its citizens
in the various forms… the promise that it would sustain
and respond to a critical and participatory citizenry.
(p. 8)
In
an acutely critical tone, Lloyd summons his readers to
approach discreet points in Irish history when it was
actually possible to envision the uncertainties brought
about by the modern, especially imperialistic, attitude.
According to the author these moments of multiple temporalities
are of the upmost importance, since they show how Irish
times are orchestrated by the rhythm of agrarian and industrial
capitalism. With the intention of offering his readers
a broader view on how utopian promises turned to dust
at the height of their project, the author examines key
moments: the Irish famine and its victims, James Joyce
and medievalism, James Connolly and national Marxism and,
finally, Allan de Souza photographs. Through a precise
analysis of such motives the critic seems to be ‘brushing
history against the grain’, as Walter Benjamin, one of
the most prominent critics of the Frankfurt school of
knowledge, would have suggested. Nevertheless, his intentions
are likely to go beyond that, for he effectively states
that his aim is to do justice to the past in its successes
and disappointments. Therefore, the writer wishes to develop
a conceptual historical point of view that would open
up ‘the diverse and divergent human and natural ecologies’
(p. 9) that are in abundance in society. One of the features
he uses to do that is the notion of ruins and the multitudinous
layers of the Irish political scene.
As
a running theme throughout the book, and ingeniously exploiting
the theme of ruins, David Lloyd makes a pun with the idea
of runes - the characters of ancient alphabets that also
had the function of foretelling a person’s destiny or
casting spells. Through this analogy, the author embraces
the concept of ruins, as an ancient landmark of a past
that is still latent and current in the reality of the
present, and by doing so he transforms history, and the
memory of a traumatic event that refuses to become the
landmark of nostalgia, into a rune that can guide somebody’s
outlook to a more compensatory future. The main issue
the author takes with traditional studies regarding this
subject is that anthropologists and historians do not
consider the mythical effect as an important factor in
the critical potentiality of ruins. However, following
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, the scholar comprehends
the myth as the return of a past that is still haunting
the present – it is the return of spectre-victims to settle
unfinished business.
When
Lloyd highlights the theoretical legacy of the myth in
the light of the Dialect of Enlightment, he also
points out what he considers to be its major flaw: the
schism between human and natural instances in the emancipatory
project of humankind. In the light of such observations,
the author proposes the viewpoint that the archaic structures
that entailed the harmonious coexistence of nature and
humanity – and which were very much present in the ancient
world – are of the upmost significance in understanding
contemporary post-colonial resistance. As an example,
he recalls the culture of the clachan, where
a collective mode of farming did not entail unfair hierarchy
and division of property among huge landowners. Nonetheless,
already establishing a line of thought that will be improved
upon in the first chapter, the writer mentions that this
different form of living was destroyed by what is believed
to be the Achilles heel of Irish history: the Great Famine.
In
the first chapter of the book Lloyd has the objective
of renewing the ordinary use of the notion of trauma in
the interpretation of post-colonial sites. To him, it
is essential to go beyond a common psychoanalytic use
of trauma - the silence of the victim as the desire to
forget his or her sorrows. In this sense, it is necessary
to ‘indicate… what is to be produced of an apprehended
loss and its perpetuated damage to a subject whose very
condition is a transformation’ (p. 25). Thus, while mapping
the formation of Western subjectivity from the Romantic
philosophy of Schiller to the disenchantment proposed
by Baudelaire, the writer believes that it is fundamental,
in the interpretation of the Famine, to overcome melancholy,
for it is within the fractured post-colonial individual
that there is potential for renewal and recovery. Without
entering the debate between melancholy and nostalgia,
- a division that could have been made by the critic,
since Walter Benjamin explains thoroughly that melancholy
is the feature that enables subjectivity to make past
and present connections - he analyses Sean Crowley’s report
on the Irish famine, as recorded in the Folklore Commission.
Carefully applying the pragmatic parameters mentioned
above, he views the allegory as a central literary device
to trace the naturalisation of the tragedy as the will
of God. Even though the author sees melancholy as a negative
point, what should be accounted for is that Benjamin’s
Angel of History is melancholic in the sense that it wishes
to go back and wake the dead. This is the very same procedure
Lloyd that puts into practice in the second chapter of
the book – even though he denies it vehemently.
Notwithstanding
our disagreement with the author in terms of melancholy,
the second chapter ought to be recognised as a new ground
for post-colonial studies mainly because it turns to the
concept of the sublime, as conceived throughout philosophy,
in order to demonstrate how the imperial mentality represents
and reproduces images of the famine as a catastrophe,
or even a necessary evil, that enabled Ireland to reach
its cutting-edge economic system based on international
capitalism. With regard to scholars who have produced
ground-breaking studies on the matter, such as Chris Morash
and Margaret Kelleher, the author demonstrates how clachan
farming was transformed into guilt, as, owing to that,
the population received the famine as a form of punishment
for their savage acts.
Along
these lines, it can be perceived that this was highly
convenient for Britain since it facilitated more comprehensive
control of the empire and avoided major rebellions. Furthermore,
instead of being lost within the feeling of the inexplicability
generated by the sublime, the post colonial Irish individual
is haunted by a spectre of the dehumanisation of the victim
which justifies his or her tragic fortune. Accordingly,
between the ghost that ‘seeks redress for the injustice
of its negation’, or the ‘ghost of hopes that are the
afterlife of lost imaginary futures’, the author calls
for a ghost that acknowledges the Imperial ideology and
displays its prejudices and manipulations, like a widow
refusing to mourn and forget. This is less associated
with Adorno and Horkheimer (1972) and more with Benjamin
(1996), for this is the premise of the philosopher when
he wishes to remind us that civilisation is forged at
a barbaric expense. All in all, this does not diminish
the brilliance of the chapter, which is followed by another
that examines the central theme of James Joyce: the epiphany.
Once
more, going against progressive notions of a heroic modernity,
Lloyd does not hearken back to the avant-garde
movements of the beginning of the twentieth century, but
to the medieval teaching of Saint Thomas Aquinas whose
theory helped him to develop the form of his narratives.
In order to buttress his claim he associates the rise
of capitalism with the end of the Middle Ages and the
pursuit of new markets and lands. As a stance that ‘designates
at once the possibility of development and the failure
of that development to occur’ (p. 82), the capitalist
mentality dissociates itself utterly from medieval society.
Nonetheless, the point that the author seeks to address
is that those seeds of resistance are actually what feed
the failed promises of the modern age. Consequently, the
main argument of this specific part of the volume is that
Joyce falls back on a special kind of magical aura typical
of medieval times in order to expose how they are intertwined
with the movements of capital. In short, the writer’s
plurality has to do with his perception of Irish history
as a disjunctive time that constantly disinters buried
pasts anew – such as the objects analysed in the epiphanies.
Contrary
to the mainstream criticism that dismisses James Connolly’s
Celtic Marxism as anachronous and out-of-date, the fifth
chapter of the book is dedicated to his theoretical insights
that are still relevant to the contemporary world. For
the most part, Lloyd’s analysis on Connolly’s treaty are
deeply involved with his material and historical examination
of Ireland, which refused to correlate aristocracy and
nationality – such was the view at that time – and to
his reservation as to whether material expropriation was
the right path to reproduce Irish stereotypes. In the
critic’s words Connolly’s
Version
of national Marxism, far from representing a model outmoded
by transnationalism, is embedded in the longer history
of colonial capitalism and offers the possibility of
alternative histories and alternative futures that might
sidestep the logic of developmental historicism. (p.
126)
To
sum up, Lloyd, through the lens proposed by his reading
of Walter Benjamin, takes his readers through a quick
exhibition of the photographs taken by Allan de Souza
and makes a quite definite point about history and culture.
His main point is that it is possible, within the frames
created by the dialectical image, to conceive a future
whose utopian ideals would acknowledge and take on board
the popular modes of memory and knowledge. That is to
say, after rejecting Benjamin’s idea, but recognising
the historical period in which he wrote, he reveres his
critical oeuvre. Perhaps then, the merit of this final
part of the book is to bring to the surface one of the
most brilliant texts by the writer that is not widely
known: the 'Critique of Violence', which exploits how
juridical borders perpetrate a sanctioned violence that,
through its different tonalities, becomes a mythical one.
The photos are indeed a landmark of the ruins not only
of the torn-up landscape of Ireland but of its inhabitants’
fragmented subjectivity.
Whether
revealing hidden histories of the past or raising the
spirits of the famine, the truth of the matter is that
Lloyd’s Irish Times: Temporalities of Modernity
comprehends not only culture and memory, but also history,
with its shadows and illuminations, losses and gains,
and, of undeniable importance, without losing hope that
there is still room for improvement and that the emancipatory
project of modernity must be radically reviewed in order
to offer other alternatives for the present. Indeed, it
is high time for post-colonial critics, following the
footsteps left by the writer, to look more closely at
the body of work left by the Frankfurt critics. Maybe
the final words that best summarise Lloyd’s intent is
Baudelaire’s albatross in the voice of the Northern Irish
poet Ciaran Carson, although its gawky wings impede him
from walking in the land of the living, perhaps in the
land of the dead and their memory there is still hope
of remedying the near future.
Notes
1
PhD student at the University of São Paulo and full-time
researcher, Viviane Carvalho da Annunciação
holds an MA on the theme of exile in the poetry of Seamus
Heaney, and now studies the theme of the city in the poetry
of Northern Ireland.
Authors’
Reply
My
thanks to Viviane Carvalho da Annunciação for her rich
engagement with Irish Times. It is unusual for
me to be invited to respond to a reviewer, especially
when the review is so generous and comprehensive in its
embracing of the book. Yet it does give me an opportunity
to clarify a couple of points that were, perhaps, not
as well expressed in the book as they might have been
and which, therefore, may have given rise to misunderstanding.
Ms.
da Annunciação comments that Irish Times shows
‘how the residual features of pre-colonial formation are
out of joint with modern ideas of cutting-edge advances
and state-of-the-art techniques. In other words, he is
referring to the manner in which modernisation has forced
its way into post-colonial Ireland and, therefore, forged
an incomplete fractured society and industrial system.’
I would like to clarify this issue. My argument throughout
Irish Times, as in my other recent work, is not
that Irish culture is one to which modernisation comes
or on which it is in any simple way imposed, but that
Irish culture is the laboratory and crucible for certain
forms of modernising institutions. In that respect, Irish
society - like other colonial societies - is in fact one
term in a differential structure of modernity: its subaltern
formations are no less an aspect of colonial modernity
than are the police force or national schools. Its cultural
practices that proved recalcitrant or resistant to colonial
projects were indeed targeted for destruction in part
by labelling them as ‘traditional’ or pre-modern. I argue,
rather, that they are moments of modernity whose counter-cultural
force lives on even in the damage that they register.
For
that reason, it is not the case that I believe ‘that it
is fundamental, in the interpretation of the Famine, to
overcome melancholy, for it is within the fractured post-colonial
individual that there is potential for renewal and recovery.’
Rather, as I argue in several essays, we need to rethink
the relationship of mourning and melancholy in the colonial
context. Mourning is understood in Freudian terms as a
letting go of loss, as a moving on into recovery and reconciliation
with the violence of some taking away. Melancholy is usually
understood negatively as the process of unreconciled mourning,
of a refusal to mourn and let go; melancholy is a form
of bad narcissism that clings to unreality or dead relations.
But it can also be understood as a refusal to let go of
the past, a refusal to reconcile to a violence that has
not yet ceased, and a determination to keep open the possible
alternatives to colonial capitalism whose outlines live
on in those damaged but obstinate forms of counter-culture
that persist in colonised societies. To ‘move on’ is to
consign the victims of the past to oblivion and even,
all too often, blame: they did not survive because they
were not worthy of it, or, as Adorno and Horkheimer put
it in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, to survive
is to be mature. However, within that relationship to
the past is an implicit relationship with present violence:
it suggests that those cultural formations that today
are targeted by accumulation or domination are ‘fit to
be destroyed’. The ethical claim of Irish Times is
that such a reconciliation with past violence spells indifference
to the violence of the present, an attitude all too evident
in the lately deceased Celtic Tiger.
David
Lloyd
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