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CHAPTER 1
Introduction
READING INSTITUTIONS
This book in essence began in 1985, the year when very altered circumstances provided a sharp, shocking and prolonged access to the bigger picture that is free thought. Free thought thrives in the most surprising contexts, even those settings most geared towards the thwarting of the cognitive and ideological thrust. The background and origin of these chapters emerge from MA and PhD theses on the themes of power, control and the structures of language and orthodox meaning. These overlapping themes are the unsurprising intellectual focus arising out of prolonged imprisonment in Victorian conditions, the near worst that British imperialism could conjure against an ever rising resistance in Ireland. Much was learnt from this experience, and the learning continues through the release process and after. This narrative too was released under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, with the ensuing delivery of a story that connects through the familiar enough voices of historical and literary figures, those who in former or in fictional terms have touched the same intimate relationship with power, control, trouble and freedom in various and at diverse periods.
While political prisoners in the modern era faced condemnation and sentence at every level, some of the historical figures visiting these chapters faced the same and call now from the death vaults of time; seeking to have a personal voice in the edited story we call history. That edited account has marginalised even the most renowned figures, obstructing and eclipsing their vision. The book that emerges here with the deliverance from imprisonment carries whispers of these eclipsed voices. The politicised of today is the medium to the past and the unfinished ideological journey is ghosted by the presence of many a thwarted and obstructed statement sentenced to incompletion and eclipse. In the confines of long-term oppression and repressive surveillance, the voice is obstructed in the terms outlined in the work of Michel Foucault. Everything is seen and heard from the centre of control and power, and much is dumped for safekeeping in the bunkers of silence and anonymity.
From an analysis of the institution of power and control emerges a rapport with the process of release, and visiting the overall narrative are the voices of the long-serving Casement and Collins and the for long silent Tone and Emmet. Various advisors are invited to this narrative panel; all tutors in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire, 1974). When I was released from prison this book came with me. Voices from Tone, Emmet, Devlin, Casement, Collins, Sands, Farrell and many an elusive other came to call like Rain upon the Window Pane (McHugh, 1966, p. 334) and mediated between the stunted narrative of imprisonment and the outside. It's hard to deliver the awarenesses gathered in such a restrictive setting and but for the various historical and fictional characters flitting in and out of the narrative, the story might never have been told. Samuel Beckett was the major interpreter and medium between the fortresses of restriction and the larger picture. Again, as with all these characters, his fortitude and vision was inspirational and so like Mahood, Malone and sundry Mollys, the story emerges:
I can't go on, I must go on, I know so I'll go on. (Beckett, 1979 edn, p. 382)
POWER, CONTROL AND IDENTITY
Meaning is at once an expression of the variously most empowering and annihilating dynamics, an improbable merger personified and borne out through the undulating fortunes of the literary and actual subject. Distinct and serious interests relating to the operation of power and control are prime energies relentlessly driving the thinking process behind this and earlier research towards a doctoral degree. That sustained predilection towards the study of power, while hardly unique in itself, is perhaps particular for an enduring critical experience colouring the actual analytical approach adopted for this work. Intimate access to the circumstances of the dramatic subject as permitted and enhanced through the reading encounter facilitated bountiful engagement with the mores and propensities exchanged between subject and meaning.
While it is flagrantly the case that issues of cognitive control and sovereignty are the propellants compelling and charging this research, it is useful to note that the critical practice and mode with which it is coloured is marked with an habitual sensitivity to the reader's creative input. The selection of fiction as a vehicle for conveying and expounding this excavation is partly fortified by certain comments of Jacques Derrida. In a discussion of '[i]nstitutions and Inversions' (Culler, 1987, p. 153) Derrida is quoted as saying, 'the present in general is not primal but rather reconstituted' (Culler, 1987, p. 164). Derrida's concept of a reconstituted present brings together the issues of history, narrative and the construction of meaning. The dichotomy between past and present dissolves under this notion since the present can be shown to be an arrangement drawn up out of already existing cognition. Furthermore, the perceived gap between fact and fantasy is likewise undermined by this disruption of the realistic fundamentals inherent to the notion of presence or the present. If the present or presence is a reconstitution, then such reality is substantially a product of its binarily opposed other, i.e. the past and absence, just as fantasy overlaps with what is perceived as realism. The very concept of fiction or imaginative construction raises the matter of otherness, a recurring term for a crucial feature in the study of sub-culture. Otherness here refers to the common concept of things outside of and detached from one's self, in a rigid arrangement where each self or subject is perceived as a singular and separate identity. Identity is delineated in response to preconceptions as to who, where and what is other and this arrangement is fundamental to the emergence of conflict and resistance. The typical narrative, by its very inclusion of select elements of language and creativity, consigns otherness to invisibility and silence. The meanings of given linguistic signs and cognitive images rely on their being understood to be different from, or other than, the surrounding world of ideas and identities. The structures around which language and meaning are organised work in this way. Ideas are told, heard, thought and even dreamt about, and subjects are defined against the identities of other subjects, ideas or signs. Identities are framed in terms of either their similarity to or difference from others. The very sense of self emerges out of the images selected and borrowed from an old stock of memorised ideas, and identity rests on the discourse we select from a bank of linguistic signs, in order to shape that image. The formation of identity therefore is linked in and around/about otherness.
Creation, as already indicated, is about making an other. The negotiation of such creativity and of identity among the constraining trappings and rigid structures of standard meaning does however involve making an other even of the self. An assimilated perception that existence consists of separate, single entities locked in opposition to other single subjects is the axis around which normal structures of thought and language revolve. The other selves that don't conform to the normal standard, or that are cognitively problematic, are secluded in silence and invisibility. Furthermore, as already noted, we think, talk, hear and dream about things and thinking about the self is no exception. As such, an inevitable gap exists in the subject, arising from the attempt to assume an identity. This gap is aggravated by the fact that thought patterns are organised against a sustained notion of pairs in opposition, where one meaning is distinguished against a binarily located other. The belief in an either/or structure extends to the definition of identity, which is understood as one of two scenarios. One is either a self or an other, with deviance being framed against that same structure. Alienation likewise is understood as an other in exile from a self which is divided in two. The self splits in order to mobilise the emergence of its identity within the constraints of the system of meaning accepted as normality where one talks, writes and thinks about oneself. Alienation thrives on this internal distancing, and the consequent sense of being partially absent from one's self cultivates a guilt-ridden notion that we create our identities behind our own backs. The misinterpretation which passes for understanding means that people unconsciously live double lives in which fiction truly has a role.
The notion of the split self is so central to human identity that much art and literature is sadly afflicted with the concept. Literature frequently sustains the illusion that human identity is split in two, describing the self as consisting essentially of one in a state of internal, polarised opposition. Despite the multiplicity of selves going to form the human identity, we lock ourselves between the safety nets of self and other, life and death, here and there, one word or the next. What of the selves and ideas eclipsed in between, in silence and invisibility, as intuitively confirmed when Mahood exclaims; 'it will be the silence where I am ...' (Beckett, 1979 edn, p. 382). The either/or pattern at work in the relationship between past and present is analogous with the tension between all the binary pairs sustaining traditional understanding. Usually one of each couple loses the battle for dominance and is relegated to the suppressed or marginalised role. Oppression depends heavily on this system of polarised thinking. Sometimes neither side predominates and then narrative becomes negotiation. Quite often, with sufficient attention, readers will note that the structure of a literary plot repeats on the dramatic level the same binary pattern at work in language itself. The great intensity of that conservative system of thinking becomes evident then and it's clear that this system reinforces itself with use. Thus the task of unravelling the maze and dissolving that condensed institution of meaning and its languages emerges in all its daunting immensity. Stories can demonstrate how silence becomes something of an attractive semblance of control and order for the oppressed, in the chaos and strife of the battle to secure a place on the tightrope of meaning. Space and silence suggest a kind of rest period for the ground down subject where the machinery of standard meaning might be metaphorically switched off, or toned down at least. Sometimes oppression leads to a voluntary submergence into silence and invisibility, as if the oppressed were forming a sub-culture or space of their own. This space proffers them an illusion of identity, while further proclaiming their marginalised state. Such displacement is mounted against the oppressive backdrop of the binarily structured system co-ordinating normality. Thorough and tortuous probing of that loaded space yields cognitive intimacy, often of a disturbing hue.
The thesis being developed here will be concerned with the issue of how literary consumption, and all reading and writing, function as instruments for thought, and with the narrative process as the site of logic. That logic or system of interpretation is one based on a programme of ascendancy; of the subordination of one category to another in a binarily arranged system of hierarchies. I want to use the literary field to research the feasibility of a different form of cultural operation where readers, writers and thinking people break out of the straitjacket of either/or. The question arises as to whether or not readers can avoid being stifled and silenced by the context, and how writers and readers avoid colonising silences, others' and their own. Binary pairs, composed on gender, class, cultural or any antagonistic bases, tend to split into polarised categories with one grouping replicating the structured pattern of the other. As such, even opposing parties sustain and reproduce each other's basic composition. With that, there is a characteristic of domination and colonisation inherent in traditional linguistic and interpretative structures. That thinking style prevails to such an extent as to design and even epitomise official culture. In questioning how writers/readers avoid colonising silences, internal and external to themselves, the objective is to probe that dominant system, often through more marginalised voices.
The intention is to investigate the possibility of processing alternative outcomes while throwing light on the paraphernalia of narrative power affecting the fortunes of all its participants. Various critical predilections answering to the call of 'deconstructionism' (Culler, 1987, p. 17), and similar theoretical consolidations, venture alternatively liberating engagements with the literary text, and response-orientated criticism postulates the notion of open or closed work variously facilitating or constraining the creative liberty of the reader. Such concepts are not the quarry of this book, the nucleus of which thrusts the reader to the coalface of conflict at many diverse levels.
Not surprisingly, colonialism has provided an expansive interpretative plane against which to assess the relations of power being negotiated in and by language. Furthermore, the material contest for land, and the zealous attention to boundary crucial to colonialism, facilitates an examination of how individual and community identities are constructed on the narrative level. How an account or image is packaged can be as telling as the plot itself, and how that narrative is received can indicate the flashpoints and nuances which trace that narrative structure. As already discussed, no text can realise its cognitive harvest without the participation of the reader, who learns, errs, winces or weeps at the points crucial to the emergence of the narrative. All readers are responding ones, consciously or not, and they therefore form some part of the drama being studied and come somewhat under the writer's command. The ensuing implication for the critical role is mirrored by a similar dissolution of the writer's perceived authority, when the creative input of the reader is taken into account. Novels and their authors do after all depend upon interpretive reaction for the timely realisation of dramatic effect. The question of authority is therefore part of reading, since the interpreter works without clearly given and delineated validation. Similarly, because it is the fate of individual readers to respond to and trace out the nuances and workings directing their interpretative experience, the question arises as to where such a lone traveller goes for validation of their analyses. That same sensitivity to the issue of power revolves around authorship. Assuming validation does occur, and even though the authorial role is an establishment in itself, the reading critic, like the oppressed, often has difficulties establishing a discourse.
This is just the notion explored through Farrell's Thy Tears Might Cease (1963). Many of today's literary theorists such as Edward Said and Homi Bhabha have commented upon the sort of issues arising out of post-colonial endeavours to retrieve an identity 'stripped of its imperial past' (Said, 1993, p. 254). While Said questions the merits of nationalism in the latter work, and Homi Bhabha extensively examines the issue in his Nation and Narration (1990), there is perhaps a need to explore and experience what it is to be that postcolonial community with its feelings of difference, for all its existence in 'Overlapping Territories' (Said, 1993, p. 1). While yet being infiltrated by the culture of empire, the particular cultural baggage with which such post-colonies have been packed is an identity of its own equally warranting representation. Most evident in post-colonial narrative is the struggle to speak at all.
OBSTRUCTED DISCOURSE
The occupation of Ireland, a theme pursued in Farrell's novel, brought together a number of factors, from the militant to the linguistic. These are themes which enmesh themselves in history so as to become parts, however divergent, of the emerging cultures of each involved polarised group. The selective silences which Said traces in his analyses of colonial writers are parallelled by what he calls the 'Resistance Culture' (Said, 1993, p. 252) of the oppressed. However, the ultimately resisting hero of Michael Farrell's novel, Martin Mathew Reilly, had indeed initially epitomised the child's innocent 'acceptance of subordination – [which] through a positive sense of common interest with the parent state or through inability to conceive of any alternative – made empire durable' (Said, 1993, p. 11). Martin's own unorthodox brand of republicanism and his mixed cultural and class affiliations are expressed in just such an intermittent 'sense of interest with the parent state' (Said, 1993, p. 11). He furthermore personifies on the personal level the artist's dilemma, which Said describes as the theme of Yeats's work in the 1928 period:
... how to reconcile the inevitable violence of the colonial conflict with the everyday politics of an ongoing national struggle and also how to square the power of the various parties in the conflict with the discourse of reason, persuasion, organisation, and the requirements of poetry. (Said, 1993, p. 284)
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Rising of the Moon"
by .
Copyright © 2003 Ella O'Dwyer.
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