14 results in Irish Culture and Colonial Modernity 1800–2000
Chapter 5 - The breaker’s yard
- David Lloyd, University of Southern California
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- Irish Culture and Colonial Modernity 1800–2000
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Summary
In the sealed hotel men are handled
as if they were furniture, and passion
exhausts itself at the mouth.
Medbh McGuckian
I
The Northern Irish prison struggles, which to a large extent anticipated and set a pattern for political prison struggles that are ongoing in the era of the war on terror, were in every respect a phenomenon of modernity, though of a modernity whose forms have shifted and modified in the faltering era of neo-liberalism. As a philosophy which, like nineteenth-century political economy, was at once economic and political and envisaged a particular form of state, neo-liberalism rose to dominance coincidentally with the Troubles in Northern Ireland, in the wake of the fiscal crisis of the early 1970s. If its economic prescriptions face crisis in our own moment, it has not failed to bequeath to the present its political and security apparatus, shaped as these were around the passage from a hegemonic welfare state to a state of privatization and forced expropriation. The previous chapter explored the contrapuntal emergence in the course of Irish anti-colonial struggles of a modern penal system with its disciplinary architectures and of the strategies and tactics of resistance conditioned by its various architectural forms, from the prison camp to the cellular jail. But the story of Irish political imprisonment and resistance is also part of the larger story of the emergence of the modern state and, in and through the recent Troubles, of the emergence of the new British and, increasingly, of the global ‘strong state’.
The H-Block prisoners consistently transformed the terms of their imprisonment, inverting the confined interior of the jail into a metaphorfor the condition of Northern Ireland as a whole and the jail itself into a space of regained freedom. The ghettoes of Derry or Belfast were, for them, spaces analogous to those they inhabited within the larger colonial apparatus of surveillance and regulation of movement. This was not a merely rhetorical claim, but one that recognized the ways in which modernity replicates the disposition of space across diverse architectural domains. Prisons may be seen, as they are in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, to represent the quintessential form of the modern disciplinary apparatus. But it is important to recognize that the prison, for all its appearance of specialization of function and spatial hermeticism, is in most respects continuous with other forms and terrains of discipline that emerge within the capitalist state. It aligns not only with factories and barracks and schools, as Foucault so thoroughly demonstrates, but with the modern city itself, as a site of biopolitical organizing of the population under conditions of regulated movement, surveillance and architectural rationality. The cellular seriality of the prison block, after all, intimately resembles in miniature form the serial array of urban housing along straightened boulevards or the terraced dwellings of new industrial cities. What I will suggest in this chapter is that the primary icon of modernity, the city, with its crowds, its streets, its movements and its flâneurs or detectives, has been displaced within our later modernity by the site that was always its shadowy counterpart, the prison, with its inmates, its corridors, its cells and its interrogators. The segmented, regular spaces of the ‘lettered city’ that represent the ideal order set against the through-otherness of the clachan’s oral space, give way here to the numbered enclosures of coerced speech and pained bodies.
Preface and acknowledgements
- David Lloyd, University of Southern California
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Summary
On one of the last occasions that she was able to leave home, my mother decided to come to a lecture I was giving on the Irish Famine, a lecture that would become the first chapter of this book. Settled at the front of the lecture hall, she asked me once again:
‘What are you lecturing on?’
‘On the Famine,’ I responded.
‘How’s that?’ she queried. ‘You weren’t there, were you?’
‘No,’ I acknowledged, ‘but I’ve read a lot about it.’
‘Is that right?’ she said. ‘But then, I wasn’t there either.’
She hesitated.
‘Or was I?’
It would be easy to dismiss that query as the quirk of an ageing person’s failing memory. But then, it seems to me now to mark a proper uncertainty, an uncertainty as to the extent to which a past we did not live still marks us, marking us through stories heard and unheard, through – perhaps above all – apprehensions and reflexes that may not even be the matter of relation or record. Before anything we have read and thought, and even before anything we may wish to acknowledge, an inarticulate stratum of attitudes and responses shapes, like an unseen geological formation, the ways we are in the world.
Chapter 6 - On extorted speech
- David Lloyd, University of Southern California
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- Irish Culture and Colonial Modernity 1800–2000
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Summary
The first stirrings of a general transformation of late-twentieth-century subjectivity, which Sands limned in his vernacular refunctioning of a generic script of modernity, were registered with singular force by an earlier Irish writer, Samuel Beckett. Few critics have engaged with the prominent place assumed by scenarios of interrogation, incarceration and even of torture, both psychological and physical, in Beckett’s later work. Yet from Godot’s Lucky to the unnamed personages of What Where, his plays resonate with the voices of those subjected to the coercion of their speech, as if the figures in these works both literalized and generalized the predicament of the artist that Beckett famously defined, in the aftermath of the Second World War, as the ‘obligation to express’, even where there is ‘nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express’. In the wake of The Unnamable, too, Beckett’s prose work seems overtaken by another scenario, counterpart to interrogation, that of the trial, a scene apparently first sketched in the rather Kafkaesque parable ‘As the Story was Told’. The monological quartet of self-recorders, Molloy, Moran, Malone and the Unnamable, give way to the couple of Texts for Nothing – court clerk or scribe and accused.
At the threshold between the Texts and the late plays stands Beckett’s last long prose work, disintegrative and extreme in its form as in its matter, How It Is (Comment C’est, as it was first published in French in 1961). This work integrates both the scenario of interrogation and that of the scribe-accused in an endless inferno where the tortured become the torturers and the scribe – Krim or Kram – records the ‘extorted voices’ of those who themselves seem to do no more than cite a voice that envelops and enters them where they crawl in the mud. Probably Beckett’s most desolate, unrelievedly abysmal text, one which, unlike the later plays, offers little of the breath-taking formal beauty that counterpoints the misery of their situations, How It Is pushes to the limit his exploration of the condition of what Kant would describe as the pathological subject: the subject that undergoes rather than the subject that is sovereign. It is for that reason that I turn to this text to continue to elaborate the ‘new thing that has happened, or the old thing that has happened again’ in our own time, the emergence of a subject pathologically determined through the imaginary relation to torture.
Figures
- David Lloyd, University of Southern California
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Index
- David Lloyd, University of Southern California
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Frontmatter
- David Lloyd, University of Southern California
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Introduction
- David Lloyd, University of Southern California
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Summary
This is the loop, the pole
Bread travels along.
We have these mouths
damage stretches.
John Wilkinson
With the remarkable consistency that suggests that they are distorted forms of knowledge, stereotypes of the Irish cluster around the things we do with a single orifice, the mouth. They turn on what goes into and what comes out of that singularly labile orifice, and does so to excess. We drink too much and talk too much, at times even too well: we sing and we blather, bawl as we brawl and wail as we grieve. Given to verbal play, we excel in invective; rumour still circulates more rapidly than the daily press, just as subversion was fanned by word of mouth and the Republican ballad. But excess is counterpointed by lack: we starve in the Famine and hunger-strike in prison, and at times relapse into an ambiguous and melancholy silence. Irish silence and the Irish smile – the closed mouth and the disingenuous grin – are construed as dissimulating, subversive, unstable. The paradoxes proliferate: ‘stretched by damage’, Irish mouths are injured by mental and physical privation but they are, for all that, the loose-lipped organs of excess, subversion and an often counterfactual cultural resistance. The history of this Irish orifice is that of multiple attempts to discipline it, taming its excesses and regulating its disrespect for the proper spaces and times of speech and performance, ingestion and utterance. It is the history of attempts ‘to control a strange bodily economy in which food, drink, speech, and song are intimately related’. But it is also the history of the living on of an unruly oral space even in the very architectures and disciplines of modernity, from the pub to the prison cell, and of its resistance to the effort to contain it.
The present book is about a range of Irish bodily practices, about the formation and disciplining of the Irish body at disjunctive but subterraneously intersecting moments. But while it analyses a certain set of bodily practices, it does so through the one that is uniquely privileged in relation to the Irish, the mouth. The mouth organizes the perception and articulation of the Irish body to an unremarked but nonetheless striking extent, as for psychoanalysis the penis organizes psychic comportment both temporally and in terms of the spatial distribution of the apperceived body. Likewise, and like the penis in its symbolic status as the phallus, the mouth performs a double role, being the site simultaneously of actual practices and of symbolizations through which the motions and functions of the other members or organs are endowed with meaning. Thus, for example, it is obvious that Irish violence has always been associated with Irish drinking and Irish rhetoric, whether invective or subversive speech. The flying fist and the loose lip are an inseparable couple. Less apparently, however, Irish violence is already an effect of the oral space whose recalcitrance to modern disciplinary institutions was always coded as unruly and insubordinate. Even before it erupted as an act considered violent, Irish orality appeared from the perspective of the colonial state to be a manifestation of violence that determined how specific Irish practices were read.
Chapter 1 - Irish hunger
- David Lloyd, University of Southern California
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Summary
The language used by some writers on the subject of the potato would not be more adequate, if, as Judge Longfield somewhere remarks, potatoes ate men instead of feeding them.
J.E. CairnesI
The story of the Great Hunger or the Irish Famine is all too well known. But even at the risk of redundancy, it is still worth rehearsing what appear, after the upsurge of research of the last decade or so, to be the facts of the case. The Famine, which commenced in 1845 with a failure of the potato crop and recurred over large parts of the country until 1851, was the greatest demographic catastrophe in European history. At least one million people died of starvation and a further million left the country, inaugurating a trend of massive emigration that continued unabated until nearly the end of the last century. The Famine was thus directly responsible for the disappearance of at least one-quarter of the population, estimated in the British census of 1841 at 8.1 million. The vulnerability of the Irish population to such a subsistence crisis was occasioned by the very abundance of the potato, which was capable of remarkable reproduction on poor and marginal land, with the result that a family could subsist for almost the whole year on the yield of a one-acre plot. Dispossessed by settler colonialism of the more fertile lands and driven onto the bogs and mountainsides, the Irish poor had developed what is now understood to be a sophisticated and ecologically inventive means of survival on the basis of the potato crop. They had succeeded time after time in reclaiming marginal land in the most inhospitable regions of the island, especially along the western seaboard. Despite regular but generally short-lived and localized failures of the potato crop, the success of the Irish in cultivating this root had enabled both a high rate of population increase and the progressive subdivision of land-holdings. This system of potato cultivation on small, rented plots, combined with occasional labour on larger farms for low wages or for payment in kind, was known as cottierism.
Several factors contributed to the subdivision of holdings. Principal among these had been the expropriation since the seventeenth century of agricultural land by large landowners who tended, through the medium of the infamous ‘middlemen’, to extract increasingly high rents in a system that became known as ‘rack-renting’. By the mid nineteenth century, the picture of the absentee landlord living in London on rents extracted from an increasingly penurious Irish peasantry was complicated by a new tendency towards ‘improvement’, or the rationalization of agriculture along capitalist lines. Improvement envisaged the consolidation of land-holdings into larger farms on the English model, the concomitant enclosure of all but the most marginal wasteland, the turn to less labour-intensive grain farming and grazing, and the eviction of the small-holding tenants. These landless tenants in turn placed further pressure on the dwindling areas of cultivable land, with the consequence that the highest rural population densities were concentrated on the poorest land. Two further factors facilitated this peculiarity of Irish demographic patterns: first, both the paucity of capital required by the cottier, who needed only to purchase or borrow seed potatoes and a spade to lay down a crop, and the relative ease and informality with which a family holding could be subdivided enabled early marriages and child-bearing. Early marriage and high rates of reproduction were the norm in pre-Famine Ireland to an extent almost unimaginable from the perspective of the highly conservative rural society that rapidly developed after 1850. Second, there persisted, in adapted forms and principally in the more impoverished areas of the western seaboard, an older Gaelic system of communal land-holding known as clachan or rundale. This form of land-holding ensured that most tenants would have access to a variety of land types, from the higher reaches of the mountain where a few sheep might be grazed to the more fertile patches where potatoes or, on occasion, oats could be cultivated. Given the high degree of subdivision, the clachan system came to entail patchwork patterns of land-holding within which pieces of any family’s holdings could be scattered in tiny plots across a neighbourhood without apparent logic and certainly without any attempt at consolidation. The clachan, though confined to certain specific regions of Ireland, came nonetheless – as we will see more fully in the next chapter – to symbolize the irrationality of Irish ways to colonial improvers oblivious to the actual inventiveness and sophistication of its practices.
Chapter 3 - Counterparts
- David Lloyd, University of Southern California
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Summary
I
The post-Famine Irish landscape offered a melancholy vista. The division of large parts of a once densely populated land into small farms and isolated homesteads perpetuated the silence that followed on mass death and emigration. As many have noted, the Irish rural scene that is so often taken to be traditional was in fact the product of the latter half of the nineteenth century, as both the British administration and Irish nationalists struggled over the fate of the land and the intractable differences between Irish and English relations to land and property became encoded as marks of the antagonism of Celt and Anglo-Saxon, colonized and colonizer. Even in the wake of land settlements predicated on the idea that security of tenancy would develop a capitalist sense of property and work, Irish material and cultural formations swerved away from the norms assumed in English notions of modernity and ‘improvement’. The enclosure of the Irish commons and the destruction of the clachan eventually took forms that were not anticipated by British political economists or administrators at the time of the Famine. Ireland’s economy remained predominantly agricultural, but deviated from the pattern of landlord, capitalist farmer and labouring proletariat that Charles Trevelyan and others had hoped to induce. The small family farm rather than the large capitalist enterprise emerged as the dominant form of land-holding, while grazing rather than grain production became the principal agricultural activity. In cultural terms, the most striking impact of the Great Hunger and of the post-Famine emergence of these small family holdings was the institution of primogeniture and its concomitant effects: an economically prudent emphasis on late marriage on the part of the oldest son and high rates of migration or emigration on the part of younger children. Gone was the simple subdividing of rented plots or the expansion of cultivation onto more and more marginal land; gone with them the early marriages and high rates of reproduction. The Irish population remained, in consequence both of massive emigration and of late marriage, astonishingly stable for well over a century, scarcely ever exceeding four million and eliciting gloomy speculation on the ‘vanishing Irish’. Notoriously, these new social conditions helped to produce a singularly conservative and sexually inhibiting form of Catholicism, which emphasized celibacy and modesty and the increasing segregation of the sexes into separate spheres.
Notes
- David Lloyd, University of Southern California
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Bibliography
- David Lloyd, University of Southern California
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Chapter 4 - ‘Going nowhere’
- David Lloyd, University of Southern California
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Summary
I
The events surrounding the struggle of Republican prisoners in Northern Ireland for political status, from the mid 1970s to the hunger strike of 1981, have a logic to them that unfolds with a seemingly inexorable fatality. In the wake of violent police reactions to the Civil Rights movement of the late 1960s, conflict in Northern Ireland rapidly escalated from street protests into organized armed struggle. The British Army initially responded to the conflict in a framework based on colonial counter-insurgency campaigns it had fought elsewhere in the post-war period, including Malaysia, Kenya and Cyprus, campaigns in turn partly shaped by previous insurgencies in Ireland. Among the strategies adapted from those ‘low-intensity’ campaigns was internment, implemented in Northern Ireland in August 1971. Numerous suspected Republican activists were incarcerated, including some who were neither paramilitaries nor, in many cases, politically involved at all. Most internees were subjected to ‘in-depth’ interrogation, a practice examined in the following chapter, and committed to extended incarceration without trial. The number of internees eventually reached more than 2,300.
On account of the counterproductive politicizing effect of such mass intrusions, predominantly into Catholic and nationalist communities, British policy-makers increasingly turned to using the courts as a means of convicting and confining those suspected of terrorist offences. Whereas internment indirectly recognized the colonial nature of the conflict, use of the court system began the gradual effort to recast it as a law-and-order problem. Nonetheless, between 1972 and 1975, as a result of a hunger strike by Republicans, paramilitary prisoners were granted ‘Special Category’ status. Effectively recognizing the political motivation of their offences, and therefore the political nature of the conflict, Special Category status allowed for the segregation of prisoners in separate compounds according to their ideological and organizational affiliations and for free association within the compounds. These conditions permitted education and training to take place alongside sporting and other recreational activities. The prison regime of the camps at Long Kesh, colloquially known as the Cages, also recognized the command structure of the paramilitary organizations. In 1976, however, the British government radically changed its counter-insurgency policy in Northern Ireland, and decided to regard all terrorist acts as ordinary crimes rather than as politically motivated offences. The policy of ‘criminalization’, which belonged with a larger strategy of seeking to ‘normalize’ life in Northern Ireland and to cast the violence as an apolitical question of law and order, was clearly designed to delegitimate the IRA and other paramilitary groups and to deny the colonial roots of the conflict. Men convicted in the special or Diplock courts from 1976 were to be incarcerated as ordinary criminals in the purpose-built Maze Prison at Long Kesh, a complex of cellular blocks that became known as the H-Blocks on account of the way in which the wings were arranged around a central administrative ‘bar’. Women were held in the older cellular prison at Armagh where they were, as in other female prisons, allowed to wear their own or civilian-type clothing.
Contents
- David Lloyd, University of Southern California
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Chapter 2 - Closing the mouth
- David Lloyd, University of Southern California
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Summary
I
Sinéad O’Connor’s still haunting track, ‘Famine’, opened with the uncanny sound of a dog howling. The sound remains uncanny for several reasons. It is impossible to tell if the howl is of hunger, grief or some condensation of the two; it is difficult to determine whether the sound we hear is actually a dog’s howl or a human imitation of the sound, a difficulty which in itself opens the uncanny domain where the human and the natural converge and mimic one another; this animal lament accentuates the absence or the silence of what properly should be the sound of human mourning: it is as if the field of human society itself has been decimated to the extent that all that remains of its domestic and affective fabric, for which the memory of the dead is an indispensable thread, is this anguish of the domestic animal on the verge of reverting to its wildness. ‘Mouths biting empty air’, these sounds of dogs howling insist disturbingly on the question as to what issues from the empty mouth, what speech follows the horrors of famine, what mourning can work through the memory of mass destruction.
These are, of course, among the themes that Sinéad O’Connor pursued, insisting on the repression of the memory of the Famine in subsequent Irish culture, connecting this with our deeply embedded habit of disavowing the personal and cultural damage that is in part the legacy of our colonial past, and demanding that we learn to grieve in order to heal. In relation to this demand, her stated understanding of herself as a contemporary ‘keener’ was entirely apposite and invoked a motif that we will return to later. In its demand for accountability to and mourning of the victims of the catastrophe, ‘Famine’, indeed, pre-empted the upsurge of historical and cultural work that responded to the 150th anniversary of the Great Hunger. The enormous volume of new and nuanced research of the last decade-and-a-half has enriched and complicated our narratives of the Famine era, but even now it would be too soon to say that new knowledge or richer understanding has finally laid our ghosts to rest, allowing us to move on, satisfied that in mourning we have worked through and out the damage of a colonial past. For ghosts are not merely the tattered remnants of our unpacified history, the unquiet afterbirths of historical trauma. They may also represent the survival, in unexpected times and places, of unexhausted possibilities, of potentials that exceed the confines of common sense or verisimilitude. Their manifestation is often in those strangely familiar motifs, excessive and recurrent, that are contained in but not by the historical record and to which we give the name of the uncanny.
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