Declan Kiberd, INVENTING IRELAND

 [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]

Lu Yun, THE VALLEY WIND

Living in retirement beyond the World, 
Silently enjoying isolation,
I pull the rope of my door tighter
And bind firmly this cracked jar.
My spirit is tuned to the Spring-season;
At the fall of the year there is Autumn in my heart.
Thus imitating cosmic changes
 My cottage becomes a Universe.

[Fourth Century A.D.]


Translation by Arthur Waley, 1946 (From: Chinese Poems, London and New York, Routledge, 2005, p. 89).

Hai Da, PRETTY MAID

[Yin and yang in Soho (2014). Foto Rb]

Cina 2014. Titolo originale: 一个温州的女人 (A woman in Wenzhou). Con Liu Xiaowei, Ma Lingyan, Ma Yue, Shi Lan, Zhang Hongjie, Zhang Wen, Zhu Yuwen

Tra i nostri modelli cinematografici, un che polemici contro la spettacolarità vuota ed eccessiva, ci sono i film che puntano sulla lentezza dettagliata e con budget contenuti, sull’umanità e il rapporto interpersonale caratterizzati da valori positivi e sulla rappresentazione dell’autenticità.

La protagonista di questa pellicola dice a un certo punto a un altro personaggio, riflettendo sul divorzio da un marito che ha fatto i soldi, non la ama e ha avuto un figlio da un’altra con cui l’ha tradita, la rivuole solo per dare alla figlia una madre, ora che l’amante non sta più con lui: “Non avevo niente quando l’ho sposato, ma ora ho qualcosa di più, ho mia figlia”. Accettazione del destino? Pensiero positivo a tutti i costi? In parte, e in parte coraggio di guardare avanti.

Anche, però, la battuta successiva: “Credo di essere rimasta, tutto sommato, una persona di campagna”. Nella Cina dello sviluppo troppo rapido e sconvolgente, come notavamo anche in un’altra occasione, c’è, se non nostalgia, preoccupazione per la rottura dal mondo contadino, che qui si prospetta meno come fatica e lavoro che come tradizione e paesaggio, con modalità, insomma, prettamente postindustriali.

Su simili coordinate leggiamo anche la solitudine degli anziani, altro motivo di questo film, superata in questo caso dalla solidarietà, dall’amicizia e da una comprensione umana che sana ferite profonde.

La storia è quella del rapporto di crescente rispetto che si crea tra il Professor He, anziano e rimasto vedovo, e Chunzhi, la collaboratrice familiare procuratagli dalla figlia che lavora negli Stati Uniti. In realtà, fin dal principio, Chunzhi ha cercato di introdursi nella casa di un docente con la speranza che questi possa aiutarla, adoperando il proprio prestigio e le conoscenze, a trovare una buona scuola per la figlia a Beijing. Quando il Professore si rende conto di essere stato usato, ha una reazione negativa: manda via Chunzhi, decisione drastica, dovuta anche alla delusione, all’essersi esposto emotivamente, al fatto cioè che progressivamente si era aperto con la coinquilina al punto da raccontarle del suicidio della moglie, aiutato da lei a superare il senso di colpa per non aver saputo intuirne la depressione. C’è da qui in poi un’evoluzione in positivo di tutti i personaggi. La figlia di He torna a casa per occuparsi di lui, che però la fa tornare in America, recandosi al paese di Chunzhi per scusarsi, rinvitandola a rientrare nella capitale e dando alla figlia di lei una lettera d’iscrizione a una scuola pechinese. Chunzhi decide di non riprendere la relazione col marito. Nel finale, un omaggio alle ultime scene di La strada verso casa di Zhang Yimou, il Professore insegna una poesia ai bambini del paese. Il finale non ci dice se He resterà dunque lì, o se questa è una situazione temporanea prima che Chunzhi si trasferisca a Beijing con la figlia.

[Roberto Bertoni]  

Angelo Pini, "PENDE LA SILENZIOSA FUGA"

[Faceless escape. (Foto Rb)]

 

 

pende la silenziosa fuga degli alfabeti nuovi

ignoti a lei, brutale taglia e scuce la mia faccia

dai suoi vocabolari

per questo custodisco versi

perchè nell'avanzare del tempo

non vada fuorimoda il dizionario estraneo

che prolunga abusivamente nei ricordi

l'essere stato un passaggio contrario

Andrew Milner, SCIENCE FICTION AND THE LITERARY FIELD

[Extraterrestrial (Dublin 2013). Foto Rb]

Andrew Milner, Science Fiction and the Literary Field. Science Fiction Studies, 38.3, 2011, pp. 393-411

Milner builds on Bourdieu’s theory of the arts and literature [1], by expanding in the direction of science fiction.

He adapts Bourdieu’s concept of “literary field”, with poetry as the sector most independent from financial and social pressures, and prose as the most dependent.

In designing the science fiction field, Milner takes into account not only fiction but also drama, and, within his revised science fiction specific literary field, he assigns varying positions to science fiction within mainstream literature, and to the peculiar science fiction avant-garde constituted by sub-genres such as new wave, cyberpunk and so on.

In his conclusion, he comes to “two axioms. The first is that science fiction is a sub-field of the general literary field, with a structure homologous to that of the wider field that simultaneously constructs and is constructed by, produces and reproduces the science fiction selective tradition. The second is that the boundary between the science fiction field and the canonical ‘literary’ field takes a form loosely analogous to that of a membrane - that is, a selective barrier, impermeable to many but by no means all elements - located in the overlap between the science fiction restricted field and institutionalized bourgeois science fiction. From the canonical side, this impermeability tends to allow science fiction to enter the canon, but not to return to science fiction; from the science fiction side, movement is normally permitted in both directions”.

It seems to the present writer that, while constituting an interesting account of science fiction complexity, this way of re-defining science fiction is rather a recapitulation of pre-existing definitions than a totally new approach. 

Milner's conclusion cited above is certainly valid in general. However, in the last two or three decades, due to the restructuring of genres within the contexts of late modernity, science fiction, once it made it into canonical literature, did not necessarily have to be prevented from going back to non canonical status. Science fiction would rather appear to come and go from the traditional literary canon, and to challenge, and influence, canonical definitions of literature.

In the subsequent volume Locating Science Fiction [2], Milner continues and expands his exploration of this genre, supported by Bourdieu, Jameson and Suvin as his main theoretical references.

[Roberto Bertoni]

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[1] P. Bourdieu, Les règles de l'art: genèse et structure du champ littéraire, Paris, Seuil,‎ 1992.

[2] Liverpool University Press, 2013.