[A sign in Wexford, 2014. Foto Rb]
Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland. London, Cape, 1995
Let us
re-read briefly some of the views expressed in Inventing Ireland, a well known book by Declan Kiberd where a
politically committed post-colonial framework of interpretation is adopted.
According to
Kiberd, on the one hand, the nationalist movement in Ireland “invented” Ireland
in the sense that it “imagined the Irish people as an historic community, whose
self-image was constructed long before the era of modern nationalism and the
nation-state” (p. 2). The Irish revival, including writers such as Synge and
Yeats, insisted on these terms.
However, the
problem of cultural identity is more complex in Ireland. Since Ireland was a
country under imperialism, and also colonized, as Kiberd observes, its culture
was composed of various layers.
One of these
layers was the construction of Irish identity as an English invention, or in
Kiberd’s own words: “If Ireland had never existed, the English would have
invented it” (p. 9). In Kiberd’s interpretation, two aspects were prominent in
the English “invention” of Ireland:
1. “Ireland
was […] patented as not-England, a place whose peoples were, in many important
ways, the antithesis of their […] rulers from overseas” (p. 9) – irrational,
sentimental, violent, and so on.
2. But at
the same time, Kiberd argues, this was a projection of the English unconscious
on Ireland: “In the settlers’ texts”, the colonisers’ actions “represented the
daylight world of civilization and the conscious: and so the native who
stumbled into the settlement and was promptly killed off became a metaphor for
the occupier’s need to negate all illicit desires” (p. 17).
The position
of Irish writers on their own cultural identity, varied. Kiberd, for example,
sees Oscar Wilde as the point “at which all polar oppositions are transcended”
(p. 41). George Bernard Shaw, like Wilde, “was another Irishman who used
England as a laboratory in which he could redefine what it meant to be Irish”
(p. 51). Kiberd calls Joyce’s poetics “mythic realism” (p. 327) and underlines
both his international modernist tendency and his debt to Irish national
culture (p. 355). Flann O’Brian used the English cliché of the Irish in The poor mouth, and yet he represented
English oppression and Irish poverty realistically at the same time: he showed
that “poverty is the inevitable condition of those who have their past identity
taken away” (p. 502).
[Roberto Bertoni]
