Gotham Note:
Brief Pizza Note, followed by cont’d
11 June 2015
Before resuming the discussion signaled in the heading, I was going to say a few words about pizza, and not only because I’m on a roll in that department, inspired by Suzanne Lenzer’s Truly Madly Pizza to try a topping that never in a million years would I have ordered in the fanciest pizzeria — fennel sausage with balsamico-glazed radicchio (it’s delicious!). I was also wondering (that’s all there is to the brief pizza note) where I would be going, today, with my Ireland problem. I had a fallback angle, but I was rooting about my memories that would support a particular impression of the people of Ireland that seemed fundamental to my resistance to all things Éire. The only memories that emerged, however, were of movies. This was dispiriting, to say the least. It seemed that I wasn’t on a roll in this department.
So it was a miraculous convenience to find, in my inbox this morning, the following note from a friend. I will quote it entire and untouched.
Reading the blog reminded me of this quote
Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.” – Yeats
And that’s all you ever need to know about the Irish!
When will we see you? Can we invite ourselves over?
The writer of this note was unable to attend our Spring Fling, since which not a month has passed, and invitations are already being solicited! This is not the particular impression of the people of Ireland that I had in mind, but it is certainly cheeky!
Ah, but of course that’s not what was so convenient. What was convenient was being reminded of that abiding sense of tragedy, and the irony of being sustained by it when things are going well. Perhaps I spent too many formative years in the Midwest, but Yeats’s remark sounds more like a Polish joke to me. It’s really just a vale-of-tears joke, to be heard wherever Catholics are to be found on their knees. And Yeats! Now, he’s a big part of my Ireland problem. Yeats and Joyce. I can’t bear either of them. All right, the Joyce of Dubliners is a gifted writer; but Maeve Brennan gets to the point more quickly and more searingly. And she does not appear to believe in tragedy. She believes in bad habits. Her Dubliners have a lot of bad habits. If they would only learn how to behave with true charity! That they do not, quite fails to rise to the level of tragedy. And the failure to behave charitably is not peculiar to Ireland. It is a universal blight. Brennan gives us the Irish version.
When Yeats says something worth hearing, I wish that he would just write it out as prose. It seems to be a fact of modern life that “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” This is a useful insight, well put. It doesn’t quite scan, and it’s too aphoristic for modern verse. There is no need to drag in the ceremony of innocence, whatever that is, and whatever it means to drown it. The two lines work much better as prose, without the fuss. As for Joyce: his later work, what he had to say about his later work, and what everybody seems to have to say about him are all redolent of a changing room that has been patronized by ardent adolescents. Many readers (men mostly) find this atmosphere evocative, but all I want to do is shut the door and get the laundry going. My reactions to Yeats and Joyce are a cause of my Ireland problem, not an effect of it.
***
Tragedy. The tragedy of Ireland. Qu’est-ce que c’est? If we asked informed passers-by, my bet is that most of them would point to the English, to the imperial occupation of Ireland that lasted for nearly a thousand years. As tragedy goes, though, I would say that Ireland was an English tragedy. The English were driven to do self-destructive things by the proximity of Ireland to the enemies of England, which might mean simply the enemies of whoever wore the crown. William the Conquerer whipped the English into shape (and how), but his heirs were never able to repeat this harrowing in Ireland. Then, along came the Reformation and its attendant hostilities. Oliver Cromwell’s régime had the terrible idea of expropriating farmland in the north of Ireland and bestowing it upon Scottish Presbyterian settlers. Settlers — a word that ought to give everybody goosebumps. (This was my fallback angle, and I’ll get to it eventually.) The Irish themselves were denied the freedom and scope that tragedy requires. They were merely oppressed. Plus, they were allowed to starve to death in great numbers. Quite a few boarded ships headed west, necessitating the erection of disambiguating cordons about the word “Irish.”
Finally, the Irish Free State arose from the blood of a brief but horrible civil war. How to prevent the recurrence of such excitements, in a largely uneducated peasantry? How do you create civil society overnight? You don’t. You can’t. Your only reasonable strategy is to infantilize the population, just as we do with domesticated animals. As it happened, there was an institution at hand with plenty of experience in the infantilization racket, and it was more than willing to help the new government.
This is why everything about modern Ireland — mid-century modern Ireland — seemed to me to be so colorless, so flavorless, and so prone to self-pity. (Self-pity does not indicate tragedy.) The men were tight-lipped, the women’s mouths were pursed, the whole citizenry a mass of disappointment and disapproval. A preoccupation with the very worst kind of respectability — as those with brains and discipline pulled their way out of the peasantry — precluded charitable instincts, especially toward those who were nearest and ought to have been dearest. Pick up almost any Irish novel, and you’d find a repressive dragon plotting the banishment of some free spirit, or a mean old man with a mattress full of money.
At some point in the 1970s, it occurred to a significant number of Irelanders that they themselves were their own oppressors, and the social tide began to run in the opposite direction, toward, long-story-short, a rejection of ecclesiastical hegemony and the popularly-enacted recognition of same-sex marriage. But I had at just about this time decided to stop paying attention to Ireland. I was simply too ignorant, when I visited in 1977, to notice the shifting breeze. The old Ireland was still what showed. The new Ireland was taking shape in places like Barcelona — where a very similar tidal shift was taking place. It took me a long time to wake up — to wake up and find that my Ireland problem had evaporated.
***
Breathtaking advances in technology, both mechanical and informational, have brought us a world in which the rule of a territory by forces perceived to be alien by its inhabitants is almost certain to produce acts of terrorism. Turn this around, and we have a hard time finding other causes of terrorism. Terrorism, the sudden eruption of lethal violence, is the only weapon that enemies of aliens command, and technology has made the materials of terrorism (bombs, intelligence) far more available than they ever were before.
Who is right and who is wrong? In case after case, the aliens “started it,” by occupying territory that, for one reason or another, threatened the stability of their sovereignty at home. The tragedy of occupation is that the reasons that appear to warrant it also seem to justify it. It is not for me to say that they don’t. But occupation does expose the occupier to the hostility and, ultimately, the terrorism of the occupied. In the modern world, this has the force of the laws of gravity. If, then. Terrorism may not always, may even not often, be effective, but it will always be horrible. And it will always make intelligent people wonder what in hell is going on.
No: the real tragedy of occupation is that it induces a contempt for the occupied. Is anything quite so blinding as contempt? Not the contempt that you might have for a politician who has disgraced himself, but the contempt that you inherit from your elders, contempt that you have never thought about for a moment. I will not speak of the occupation of foreign territories by forces other than the United States, because I don’t know them well enough, but this contempt surfaces repeatedly in the accounts of American servicemen recalling their attitudes to Iraqis and others. This is the contempt that so many American whites seem to have for blacks (who return the favor). It is based on nothing but the most superficial differences. What a nasty surprise it must be to discover that the object of one’s contempt is bright, resourceful, courageous, and, just possibly, right. What contortions of repression and suppression are required to keep this recognition down!
Occupation diminishes everyone concerned. What honest human being requires further convincing? Can’t we think up something better?