Introduction
Modern Ireland and the Primitive Sublime
In 1874, after scandal drove Sir William Wilde from the comforts of Dublin into a kind of internal exile in the west of Ireland, he published a series of articles on “The Early Races of Mankind in Ireland,” in which he insisted that the Irish “trace the footprints of [the] man we have…the vestiges of his language, and the physical and psychological characteristics still attaching to his modern representatives” (245). Wilde’s forceful command presages the concern for and anxiety about the primitive that persists within modern Irish culture. From the latter half of the nineteenth and through the twentieth century, Irish writers highlighted a striking series of encounters with the most ancient elements of Irish culture, identified these elements as primitive manifestations of the indigenous peoples, and uncovered these primitive constructs as an exceptional means of experiencing the sublime. While critics have begun to assert the import and function of Ireland’s modern primitives,1 no critic has yet examined the frisson of delight that such encounters engender within Irish modern culture as a whole. Ireland’s primitive encounters provoke the sublime while relying on internal and troubling markers of cultural fear in order to create it. The experience of the sublime is uniquely related to indigenous Irish primitivisms that twentieth-century writers have endeavored to retain as a marker of cultural distinction within the British Empire. It is the proximity to the primitive, which is itself a term that is highly contingent and always in flux, that seems to mark Irish writing, and thereby serves as a means to separate this indigenous eruption of the form from other twentieth-century configurations of primitive fixations. Unlike the English, for example, who move outside of the confines of their national borders to locate the primitive, the Irish most commonly recognize and encounter the primitive at home.2 Examples of primitivism abound in Irish art, which ranges from experiences of global migrants in Ireland to an Irish drive toward comparative indigeneity with such peoples. Works by Colum McCann, Brian Friel, and Jim Sheridan, to name a few, explore these connections and identify and articulate primitive alterities that reside within modern Irish culture.
McCann’s portrait of destruction in Let The Great World Spin, Sheridan’s portrayal of an African Caribbean man in In America, and Friel’s use of the figure of a returned Irish priest in Dancing at Lughnasa manifest a seemingly relentless drive toward the primitive in Irish writing. The construct of primitivism functions variously as a fanciful imagined nostalgic past, as a peril of the alien and unfamiliar, or as a possible illustration of comparative distinction or relation. The notion of the “primitive” within Irish cultural discourse remains a mutable and conditional construct rather than one of consistency or unity (McGarrity and Culleton 1–2). Sinéad Garrigan Mattar explains simply, “Primitivism is the idealization of the primitive” (3). And, as David Brett finds, “Ireland has stood for the primitive” quite commonly in cultural discourse (30). Yet, within these straightforward assertions, there is a fundamental tension, such as when Garrigan Mattar conceptualizes Irish primitivism of the early twentieth century as a form of “proper darkness” (19). She finds that this “darkness… becomes tantalizingly paradoxical” and then asks “how can darkness be ‘proper,’ in the sense of the morally and socially correct, any more than it can be the ‘property’ of any one social grouping?” (19). She underlines a nexus of possession, identity, and darkness to suggest the unsettled perspectives that create Irish primitivisms; the identification of “primitives,” then, becomes highly subjective and relative to cultural alignments and modes (McGarrity and Culleton 2–3). Garrigan Mattar distinguishes between romantic primitivism evident in well-worn tropes, including, most notoriously, the authentic and pure “Noble Savage” and the modernist primitivism evident in the shifting idealizations of the “brutal, sexual, and contrary” (4). The unique condition of Ireland’s position as a British colony with the contingent independence that partition created refracts multiple visions of primitives within and beyond its borders, often as a peculiarly reflected portrait of Irish culture and art.3 A stunning inversion of the so-called “civilized” in Ireland becomes more acutely evident within twentieth-century artistic and literary experimentation. Widely evident during the modernist literary period’s pyrotechnic aesthetic modes that shift, destroy, and illuminate boundaries and hierarchies within any conventional cultural formation, Irish writing beyond this period also becomes intensely focused on exploring the notions of self and other, of culture and belonging, at home and abroad. My publication with Claire A. Culleton of Irish Modernism and the Global Primitive was a key first step in this endeavor. Yet, the question of the enduring appeal of the primitive remains. What I suggest in Modern Irish Literature and the Primitive Sublime is that the primitive rhetorics within twentieth-century Ireland prevail because of their capacity, or their cogent force, to provoke the sublime. This movement is not merely a casual recognition of Ireland’s primitive indigenous history, but a repeated rhetorical gesture that beckons the primitive sublime, a momentary and
transcendent elation brought about by the recognition of the troubled, ritualistic, and sacrificial Irish past that consistently emerges in the long twentieth century.
This book will not attempt to impose a stable conception of Ireland’s sublime, but rather it will examine its relentlessly unsettled formation(s) and dissipation(s) as they relate to the primitive during the twentieth century. Ireland’s notion of the sublime as it becomes transformed in Irish modernity is distinctively associated with the “dark, uncertain, and confused” elements that distinguish it from mere aesthetic magnificence. In fact, it is this very alienated state of bewilderment and horror in Irish cultural production that ultimately surrenders emotional pleasure in a repeated rhetorical movement that repels and seduces the Irish at once. Jerome Carroll notes that the sublime has “as many interpretations as it has appearances” (171). This notoriously elusive and mutable concept erupts, subsides, and then emerges again in twentieth-century Irish writing. These necessarily plural conceptions of the primitive sublime seem to follow the emerging nation state and its vexed cultural positioning as a former colony that achieves a kind of independence through partition, but remains situated in a challenging cultural nexus due to an enduring colonial legacy. According to Jean-François Lyotard, the sublime is “the only mode of artistic sensibility to characterize the modern” because it serves as an “expressive witness to the inexpressible…. pleasure and pain, joy and anxiety, exaltation and depression” (93). Although Lyotard asserts that this sublime facility emerged after World War II, the cultural turmoil surrounding an emerging Irish nation provoked a sense of sublime terror much earlier. Lyotard’s arguments reside amid the network of theorists of the postmodern sublime which include Gilles Deleuze (“The Idea of Genesis in Kant’s Aesthetics”), Julia Kristeva (Powers of Horror: an Essay on Abjection) and Fredric Jameson (Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism). Yet, Lyotard’s conceptions of the brutality of the interiority of the sublime are most prescient for this study of Ireland’s modern primitive sublime. The notion of the sublime as evident in the primitive specifically in Ireland has been recently established by Luke Gibbons’s Edmund Burke and Ireland, in which Gibbons chronicles his colonial sublime around the subaltern revolt against imperial authority. Gibbons reclaims Burke for Irish cultural discourse as an important if problematic figure given his writing against the French Revolution. Gibbons does not attempt a facile recuperation but rather engages with the nuanced complexity of Burke’s aesthetic vision as it relates to Ireland’s colonial position.
The long history of the sublime reaches back to Longinus and his treatise “An Essay on the Sublime,” written in the first century of the Christian era. The intellectual endurance of Longinus’s conception of the sublime as a rhetorical notion reaches from the ancient world through
the Renaissance and up until the advent of modernity. Unsurprisingly, the rhetoric of Longinus’s sublime becomes key during the eighteenth century’s exaltation of both highly stylized expression and reason. Alexander Pope mocks and reveres him at once, Longinus “Is himself that great Sublime he draws” (qtd. In Costelloe 6). The most famed philosophers of the sublime establish dichotomies between the sublime and the beautiful (Edmund Burke) and the inherent relation of the moral sublime (Immanuel Kant). In Irish writing, the conjoining of the primitive and sublime is consequential, even if it often relies on colonial ethnographic notions of culture and meaning. Matthew Rampley finds:
Although the sublime is a recurrent trope in accounts of the “primitive,” a crucial question concerns the limits of sublimity. It therefore becomes urgent to address not simply the obvious racist overtones of Kant, Hegel, and others—this is perhaps the more obvious point of critique—but also the limits of a theory formulated to account for the experiences of the Western subject. (260)
What seems striking, then, for Irish writers is the degree to which they aestheticize the experience of the sublime through encounters with the primitive. They are both the agents as Western subjects and the objects of the primitive gaze as colonized subordinates in the British imperial endeavor.
The European Enlightenment philosophers were often captivated with consideration of the “others” in the emerging imperial systems at the same time as they endeavored to provide a rigorous intellectual framework for consideration of the human condition: social, material, cultural, and scientific. Edmund Burke is most recognized for his importance in the development of visual aesthetics. As Sara Suleri notes, “when Burke invokes the sublimity… he seeks less to contain the irrational within a rational structure than to construct inventories of obscurity…. Such [an obscure] intimacy provokes the desire to itemize and to list all the properties of the desired [or sublime] object” (28). The sublime object therefore relates to both a sense of intimacy and obscurity—of the intensely close and the densely opaque. While the visual remains paramount for Burke’s work, in a discussion of the “Celto-Kitsch,” one critic observes Burke’s import to the development of art reaching into the twentieth century (though he does frame Burke traditionally within the visual approach of spectacle):
The Sublime… a condition of awe and it may be terror before the spectacle of Nature at Her grandest and least humanized, and before
the spectacle of human lives attuned to such grandeur. The concept, as first defined by Burke in his Philosophical Inquiry should be regarded as Ireland’s principle gift to the discourse of art and nature; as subsequently developed by Kant, it is the lynchpin of Romanticism and, some have argued, the founding moment of an important aspect of modernism.
(Brett 29)
What I suggest is that it is this founding moment of modernism, which as Brett argues was gestured toward by Burke centuries earlier, that becomes critical for Irish writing in the twentieth century in general and its delineations of the primitive sublime in particular.
While the philosophers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries examine the nuances of the sublime and its workings in visual art, the phenomenon of the sublime in literary studies has received too little critical attention. The philosophical underpinnings of the sublime and its link with the primitive provide a nexus for further analyzing the literary engagements with the phenomenon. As one critic points out, there is an enduring tension in the primitive sublime: “For Kant the capacity for sublimating terror into an aesthetic experience is both natural and a consequence of acculturation; the primitive both is and is not capable of experiencing the sublime” (Rampley 260). In Ireland, this fraught negotiation of the primitive as it becomes linked with the sublime suggests the degree to which its depictions navigate, reflect, and refract imperial authority and cultural positioning. Burke himself turns toward the poetic as a means of experiencing the sublime. While this may surprise contemporary readers today, given that Burke’s theories are often associated exclusively with external markers, usually landscapes, Ellen Scheible acknowledges language as central to his theories. “In Burke,” she writes, “words occupy a separate space in our comprehension of the outside world, arguably one characterized by fiction and metaphor, yet they are still able to elicit the ‘ideas of beauty and of the sublime’ brought about by nature and art” (235). She explains further: “Because of the curious position of language in the excitation of emotion associated with the beautiful and the sublime, Burke isolates the effect of words on the senses, which eventually leads him to an analysis of poetry” (235). In the twentieth century, scholars and critics have reasserted the continued presence of the sublime and have expanded on Burke’s poetic conceptions despite his aesthetics as being somewhat out of fashion as antiquated ideas. Yet, more recent thinkers have conceptualized the sublime not merely as an external encounter of the majestic and awe-inspiring that, in Burke’s most well-known form, is also associated with terror; rather, they have expanded it from the conventional external stimulus into a psychological expression of modern interiority. For example, Scheible finds
that for Burke the mind “feels,” rather than “thinks,” the sublime (228). Thus, the eighteenth-century “feeling” mind gives way in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries’ fractured interiority and consciousness. It is the sublime of psychological interiority to which twentieth-century Irish writers seem particularly drawn. The experience of and psychological response to external geographies, however, do afford the catalyst for this movement within Modern Ireland toward the primitive sublime. According to Homi Bhabha, “being in the ‘beyond,’ then, is to inhabit an intervening space, as any dictionary will tell you. But to dwell ‘in the beyond’ is also… to be a part of revisionary time, a return to the present to reinscribe our cultural contemporaneity; to reinscribe our human, historic commonality” (7). A sense of temporal and geographic duality emerges within the primitive sublime. A particularly critical formation for Irish cultural discourse linking the primitive with the sublime can be traced to the Aran Islands, which is a location that is central for the Revivalists. Heather Clark explains the 1896 journey undertaken by Arthur Symons and W.B. Yeats to Inishmore, the largest geographically of the Aran Islands:
The two spent three days wandering among the cliffs and villages, taking stock of both archaeological ruins and island folk alike in their search for the last vestiges of Irish Ireland. Symons published his observations four months later in an article entitled “The Isles of Aran,” in which he described the islands as primeval, primitive and sublime. …He grasped that the island’s allure would always be shadowed by a sense of alienation, “we seemed also to be venturing among an unknown people, who, even if they spoke our own language, were further away from us, or foreign than people who spoke an unknown language and lived beyond other seas” (306).
(30, emphasis added)
The primitive sublime that Symons describes in his essay has enduring consequences for Irish writing through the twentieth century. This notion of belonging amid alienation, of extremes within contained spaces, reverberates from the shores of the Aran Islands and Galway Bay throughout Ireland and even, ultimately as we will see, onto New York harbor. Much like primitivism writ large, the primitive sublime is not a singular, but a plural manifestation. It is not easily reducible to a single framework, but rather transforms within the development of temporal, geographic, political, and psychological networks and perspectives.
The sublime in Irish writing rests upon historical intersections of colonial encounters. This manifestation of the sublime often rests upon
language and rhetorics of politics rather than exclusively space or location. In his work “The Irish Sublime,” Terry Eagleton finds:
If the Irish are the greatest talkers since the Greeks, as Oscar Wilde once remarked with himself well in mind, it is partly because language in a society where print arrived fairly late remains cast in an oral, oratorical mold, partly because discourse is a form of displacement from a harsh social reality, and partly because language in colonial conditions becomes a terrain of political conflict. (28)4
The centrality of language, as Eagleton describes it, for the Irish sublime is profoundly linked with Ireland’s colonial condition. Elsewhere, Eagleton asserts that the Irish Famine was “in Burkean parlance, a sublime event, for the mind-buckling power of the sublime is by no means simply pleasant rhetoric, and if it stirred some to rancorous rhetoric, it stunned others into an appalled muteness” (31).5 While the Famine as a sublime event in Irish cultural history and its enduring memory seems a shocking suggestion even today, Eagleton’s assertion of nationally traumatic events in the nineteenth century as sublime prefigures Ireland’s twentieth- and twenty-first-century cultural horrors that provoke the primitive sublime. There are two dominant and related courses that characterize the primitive sublime and that manifest, subside, and then remerge throughout the twentieth century. In the following chapters, these progressions initially emphasize a sense of Irish indigeneity and the desire for connection amid the colonial world as it becomes increasingly fractured, after the Second World War, into postcolonial and neocolonial frameworks. The turn of the twentieth century saw a profoundly influential movement toward native Irish folklore, literary arts, and cultural performance. While the Rising of 1916 becomes immortalized in Yeats’s encapsulation of the primitive sublime with his refrain of “terrible beauty,” Irish writers begin to question the immortalization and nostalgia so present in the Revival fairly quickly thereafter, especially evident in the Revivalist mockeries of James Joyce in his Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939). During the mid-century period after the establishment of the Free State and the Second World War, Irish writing evidences a pronounced desublimation away from primitive alterities and toward the quotidian difficulties of economic conditions and social repression. With the advent of “the Troubles” in the late 1960s, the primitive sublime reemerges with a powerful surge through the fraught cultural dynamics of the period that ended with the hope of the imperfect, yet enduring Good Friday/Belfast Agreement, which established a difficult peace in the North.6 Finally, what I assert stands as the end of the primitive
sublime manifests in three post-9/11 novels. From then on, the desire for a return to a lost past and the transcendent elation it potentially holds is revealed to be illusory.
The opening chapter of this book, “Performing the Primitive Sublime: the Celtic Revival and Irish Indigeneity,” examines the primitive sublime as it emerges during the literary enactment(s) of Irish indigeneity during the period of the Celtic Revival. Due to the dominance of the stage in the creation of a national identity for the Irish, the essential markers of this predominantly dramatic movement become foregrounded in the analysis. W.B. Yeats, Augusta Lady Gregory, and John Millington Synge are the central and most famed practitioners during this period who set their works either within or as refractions of Irish indigeneity that served as a catalyst for the primitive sublime. These writers foreground the avian in their movements toward transcendence that reflect the unique aspects of their engagement with the markers of the primitive sublime. Surprisingly, these writers gesture toward the work of George Bernard Shaw and his commentary on animal vivisection in his stage play, The Doctor’s Dilemma. Yeats, Gregory, and Synge seek out ways to negotiate between the modern and the primitive as they collapse the boundaries between the two realms. This reliable penetrability seeks to underscore the ways in which these writers make the contemporary and the historical intersect habitually. They venerate the peasantry in their symbolic recuperation of the primitive as they suggest that these figures offer a unique capacity to provoke and reflect upon the experience of sublime rapture. The horror at the root of so many of the dramatic works during this time suggests the appeal of sacrifice and violence that seem to repeatedly emerge. This violence and even terror become a seductive mode of cultural engagement that continually attracts the writerly and the public imagination(s).
The following chapter, titled “James Joyce and the Primitive Sublime: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake,” charts the development of Joyce’s primitive sublime using the intersecting tropes of the desire for/of the feminine and the African other. Joyce’s depiction of his primitive sublime emerges clearly with the transcendence of the final scene of Portrait when Stephen escapes his labyrinth and grows to incorporate Joyce’s increasingly sophisticated and nuanced depictions of both the Irish and African figures in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. For Joyce, the primitive sublime is a reflection of the troubling desire for distinction between and fear of communion with other globalized colonial figures and societies. Joyce is aware of the primitive movement within European literature and cultures from the time of his undergraduate days at University College Dublin. He stakes out bold movements against cultural censorship and finds that confrontations with the primitive at home and abroad help to create a sublime vision of Irish identity. Joyce uses
the Irish in Africa and especially the work of Roger Casement in both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake to suggest both the Irish identification with and desire for distinction from fellow colonized peoples. The depiction of the Paris Colonial Exposition of 1931 in Finnegans Wake provides a lens into the commonality with and desire for African figures that capture a desecration of and longing for them at once. This tension between the two conflicting sentiments creates Joyce’s primitive sublime.
This book’s next chapter, “Mid-century Malaise and Desublimation in Samuel Beckett, Flann O’Brien, Kate O’Brien, and Edna O’Brien,” identifies and analyzes the representations of desublimation in Irish writing of the period. These disappointments are related to the realities of independence and its associated conservative political movements that insisted on placing Irish women in the domestic sphere and squashing progressive social ideas. The reaction to independence within becomes complicated due to the peculiar position of the Republic as officially neutral and the North/ Northern Ireland being subject to repeated German bombing campaigns due to its position as a part of the United Kingdom. The period after the Second World War was one of large scale decolonizing movements across the globe. In Irish writing the newly bipolar world amid the collapse of European empires is reflected in an increasing outward migration, often to London, a sense of entrapment at home especially acute for women and artists, and the emergence of an anxiety related to the intersection of globalized “others” and the Irish “self.” Ireland’s tenuous cultural position of a newly independent nation that is also a former colony, a part of which remains part of the United Kingdom, creates a sense of profound malaise and disappointment. What seems most salient, however, within this dynamic bricolage of global change and increasing intersection is the virtually complete disappearance of the primitive sublime in Irish writing. The Celtic Revival’s privileging of indigenous Irish expressions of primitivism and its capacity, indeed relentless drive, to provoke the sublime, all but evaporates. The Revival became a subject of ridicule in the midcentury. The concerns that manifest in Irish writing from the late 1930s to the early 1960s relate to social suppression and the troubling immanence of cultural provincialism. In Samuel Beckett’s Murphy, the hero is caught in an urban labyrinth and wishes after his death to have his ashes flushed down the toilet of Dublin’s Abbey Theater during a performance. In Flann O’Brien’s often overlooked drama, Faustus Kelley, the hero sells his soul not for starving peasants as in Yeats’s Countess Cathleen but rather for his own political advancement and seat in the Dáil, the Irish Parliament. In O’Brien’s novel, At Swim-Two-Birds, the hero seems caught in webs of narrative circuitousness and self-regard that mock the Celtic Revival and Irish history. In Pray for the Wanderer, Kate O’Brien’s novel of suppression and censorship, she shows the dangers for an artist in attempting to
live freely while in Ireland. While Kate O’Brien makes her protagonist figure male, Edna O’Brien’s Country Girls Trilogy, foregrounds the feminine perspective overtly and shows the dangers inherent in Ireland for women as subjects of an oppressive state. In the final novel of O’Brien’s trilogy, the enduring anxiety of others reemerges profoundly as a threat to cultural exclusivity and an opportunity for cultural exchange. The peculiar form of Irish independence creates a state reliant on censorship and suppression that is unable to stop cultural exchange and increasing intersection.
“The Living Dead: the Resurgence of the Primitive Sublime in the late Twentieth Century,” the penultimate chapter, analyzes the reemergence of the primitive sublime from the late 1960s through the late 1990s. This chapter examines the rapture of Ireland’s primitive sublime related to the reanimation of the Irish corpus from bog and isle to negotiate the specter of political and familial violence within the primitive affiliations manifest in Ireland’s broad Viking and Atlantic world histories. Three writers, Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, and Brian Friel foreground the troubling connections that rely on primitive alterities drawn from within but profoundly engaging others abroad as they manifest in Irish culture. Heaney’s bog poems offer up victims of Iron Age human sacrifice to comment upon his contemporary victims as reanimations of the Troubles in The North/ Northern Ireland. Eavan Boland uses frameworks from across the Atlantic world to foreground the very notion of a colony and to examine how the dead necessarily rise again in a postcolonial nexus of cultural interchange. Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa suggests the complexity of the Irish position with his characterization of a priest, “gone native,” who returns to the rural Donegal of 1936 to suggest a moving affinity with colonized peoples and their practice of sacrifice and possession. These writers use the trope of the undead and the practice of reanimation amid the postcolonial world to provide a scathing critique of the enduring costs of colonial violence and to revel in the productive cultural intersections of the globalized world. The avatars of the undead serve as manifestations of the primitive sublime as the resurgence becomes linked with the Irish self even as it confronts unremitting violence and recognizes another period of lamentable and uncomfortably familiar sacrifice.
The final chapter, titled “Primitive Sublime Terror: Writing New York after 9/11 in O’Neill, McCann, and Tóibín,” examines Irish artistic production set in New York City and published in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. These works reflect on the Irish position in New York City during the period both before and after the events of 9/11. Jim Sheridan’s 2002 film, In America, serves as a starting point to suggest how the Irish in New York rely upon depictions of the other to reflect the Irish self in the wounded cityscape. The novels, Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn, Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin, and Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland,
express the horrors of the twenty-first century through the examination of the Irish in New York beginning in the mid-twentieth century. Brooklyn uses the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust to comment upon the intersection of the Irish in New York in a subtle movement of cultural occlusion and unknowing. McCann’s novel, Let the Great World Spin, goes back and forth between the early 1970s, the American experience in Vietnam and the aftermath of the Towers’ collapse, and even to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, to suggest the ways in which the primitive sublime erupts during a tense moment of cultural change. Netherland, Joseph O’Neill’s novel, diagrams New York after 9/11 using both a Dutch banker and a Trinidadian entrepreneur as exemplars of cultural intersection that reveal the tense awe of the primitive sublime encountered through another but reflective of the self in the early twenty-first century. Finally, A Ghost in the Throat, Doireann Ni Ghriofa’s translation of and reimaged response to the eighteenth-century Irish language poet Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill’s“Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire” or “Lament for Art O’Leary” suggests a pivot away from the primitive sublime in a moving examination of personal and cultural loss.
Notes
1 See both Marianna Torgovnick’s Gone Primitive and Sinéad Garrigan Mattar’s Primitivism, Science and the Irish Revival for further reading.
2 For further reading, see Maria McGarrity and Claire A. Culleton’s introduction to Irish Modernism and the Global Primitive.
3 For a discussion of primitivism as an “inversion of the self,” see Michael Bell’s Primitivism (80).
4 Eagleton continues, “The term “blarney” is a political one: it derives from the sixteenth-century Earl of Blarney who when called upon to make his submission to Elizabeth I is said to have responded with such a torrent of rococo rhetoric that nobody could work out whether he was submitting or not. If language is important in the colonies, it is among other things a remarkably convenient way of hiding one's thoughts from one’s masters” (28).
5 Eagleton further explains, “Christopher Morash has suggested that the great silence which followed in the wake of the Famine has been somewhat overplayed; but the historian Brendan Bradshaw maintains that only one academic study of the event occurred in Ireland between the 1930s and 1980s” (31).
6 This Agreement is known both as the Good Friday Agreement and the Belfast Agreement in the North/Northern Ireland. I am choosing to note both terms to acknowledge and include the perspectives of all communities in Belfast.
References
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Performing the Primitive Sublime
The Celtic Revival and Irish Indigeneity
The emergence of the primitive sublime in modern Ireland becomes most acutely evident on the public stage. While esteeming the peasantry often becomes a performative trope—even a cliché—during the Celtic Revival, it is imperative to highlight the enduring effect of such fundamental markers. While numerous Irish writers of the period engage with these images, three writers, W.B. Yeats, Augusta Lady Gregory, and J.M. Synge, are at the center of this endeavor. As the period’s most lauded writers and those most well known for their engagement with Irish indigeneity, they often relied on native Irish characterizations to aver the primacy of an indigenous nation and ethos that was seen as less compromised or even unadulterated by British Imperialism (McGarrity and Culleton 1–4). These writers deploy the primitive not only as a form of cultural recuperation and celebration but they also revel in a fraught dynamic of a recurring tension that surfaces within Irish culture, the appeal and delight of sacrificial horror. Yeats’s Countess Cathleen, who agrees to sell her soul to the devil for the peasantry, Yeats’s and Gregory’s portrait of blood sacrifice in Cathleen Ní Houlihan, Synge’s study of reported patricide in his Playboy as well as his ethnographic history of The Aran Islands all represent cultural homecomings that engage with death and create moments of terror for the viewer and reader. The terror, however, does not horrify but engages the Irish public imagination. In fact, the notion of blood sacrifice and suffering resides at the center of Irish modernism. In these critical moments of cultural formation, the primitive eruption strikingly associated with images of the avian creates Ireland’s enduring sublime rapture.
The development of an ideology and aesthetic celebrating indigeneity was as the core of the Abbey Theater’s mission of cultural appreciation and promulgation. It arose in Ireland after the land dispossession of the mid and late nineteenth century: from famine, exile, and most acutely perhaps, the enduring colonial occupation. The Gaelic League had a profound influence on the cultural elites of the day, even if they were mocked by some (see, for example, James Joyce’s “Cyclops” in Ulysses) or somehow seen
as less than the hyphenated plural identities of their Anglo-Irishness. For these authors, social class and language were primary markers. Yet, these markers would not apply to the most ancient elements of Irish cultural memory, real or imagined. As Mark Williams notes of the Revival’s focus on cultural recuperations through literature, “a significant dimension of this process was the tendency for writers of the time to represent Ireland as a repository of mystery and uncanniness, as strange to itself as to the outsiders [Protestant Ascendancy figures], and as a result, the search for Irish identity in the literatures of the period often quarries the unusual and the phantasmagoric” (292). Williams suggests that this process engages the close rather than far time period as a mean though which “to negotiate a contested and recently traumatic history” (292–93). The primitive relics of the past, objectified in the bodies of the dead that rise to the surface, and enter the present are suggestive of the rise of archeological evidence and interest in the immediately preceding period. According to Máirín Ní Cheallaigh: “the attention … to the remains of the prehistoric Irish past may therefore have been an attempt to replace narratives of poverty and sudden death with accounts of past glory that were attached to places that had endured for centuries, if not millennia” (83). She posits the appeal of the apparent cultural magnificence of Celtic Ireland that had been lost and forgotten. She finds that “the success of their efforts led eventually to the incorporation of archaeology into the heart of later-nineteenth-century nationalism” (83).1 The emergence of the prehistory of Ireland as a central nexus through which the primitive sublime would circulate and intersect during the Revival period is fundamental to the development of the burgeoning performance and understanding of national identity. Yet the source of Ireland’s imagined past rests not only amid the archaeological, but the spiritual. In this movement toward the spiritual or transcendent, the tension between the land and air, ground and flight, seems to be negotiated within reoccurring images of the avian. Critics have sourced the fairy and folk lore of Celtic Ireland to its medieval literary culture that prized supernatural elements and evoked a pre-Christian mythic system full of gods and goddesses, heroes, heroines, and indigenous spiritual figures of many kinds (Williams 297). Mark Williams asserts that the new field of anthropology in the late nineteenth century contributed a key notion to the Irish understanding of its pre-Christian culture that would have critical import in the ways that people would examine the peoples of the past: essentially framing human development from the primitive “state” to a “a more developed one, with a corresponding shift on the religious level from a belief in a spirit-world to a pantheon of deities, leading eventually to monotheism.” (297–298). What this movement suggests for the Revivalists becomes fundamental to understanding their view of Irish spiritual practice and myth: “folklore was debased myth, a residue of old beliefs
left clinging, barnacle-like, to the flanks of a culture as it hauled itself up the shire to a higher stage of development” (297–98). The primitive sublime then derives from an interest both in archaeology (Cheallaigh 83) and growing interest in medieval texts as remnants of Ireland’s pre-Christian myths and supernatural elements (Williams 297–98). These traditions that related to the mythos of early Ireland were particularly appealing to ascendancy figures who were increasingly marginalized within Ireland given the growing cultural and political movements against colonial occupation (Williams 298). For the Revivalists, the dynamic tension between their imagined mythic past, often symbolized in the grounded landscape, and their efforts to commemorate it through a supernatural spiritual element, reveals a recurring incarnation in images of flight and the avian.
The Revival’s focus, particularly that promulgated by Yeats, Gregory, or Synge, would not be overt resistance to British occupation, but rather the development of cultural knowledge and pride. A discernable reconstitution effort—what Kevin Whelan terms “radical memory”—would endeavor to bring the forgotten Irish past into the contemporary moment to serve several purposes of cultural pride and encourage artistic endeavors of understanding and representing that past. Whelan explains, “the creation of an Irish radical memory that sought to escape the baneful binary of modernization and tradition—the Hegelian view that all that is lost to history is well lost” (60). While radical memory allows for the imaginative spectacle that would draw in audience(s), it also critically enables a focus on Irish pre-history, particularly the tales and myths set before the AngloNorman invasion of the island many centuries before the Revival. Whelan asserts plainly, “radical memory deployed the past to challenge the present, to restore into possibility historical moments that had been blocked or unfulfilled earlier” (Whelan 60).2 The Revivalists would reveal the common British colonial binary of either/or, of tradition/modernity as facile, esthetically uninteresting, and ultimately false. The very malleability of these forces, in fact, provides a catalyst for the enchantment at the heart of the primitive sublime and the performance of Irish identity. Though, attempts to create an adoration or love of the indigenous in a National Theater, often simultaneously develop a counter modal. As Nicholas Grene notes of Irish theater, “there lurk the heroic aspirations, the sublime destructiveness supposed to be its antithesis” (57), which strikingly captures the tension between the love of the mythic/heroic and its presumed opposite: destruction. Yet, what emerges in Irish writing of the Revival is not the replacement of love or generation with hate or destruction; rather, Irish writing of the period merges these contradictory impulses into the primitive sublime commonly symbolized through the avian. Creatures of flight who can also reside on the ground seem uniquely positioned to symbolize such apparent contradictions and encapsulate a possible unity despite them.
The concept of “radical memory” supports the infrastructure necessary for the public performance of the primitive sublime. The sublime encounter that becomes ritualized on stage delights and horrifies at once. Its repetition in the public sphere transforms the structure of struggle not only on stage, but emerges ultimately as a material struggle in the streets. This struggle, of course, became actualized in the Rising of 1916, the subsequent unrest, the Anglo-Irish War, and the Civil War. In this very litany, the progressive nature of linear history becomes reinscribed to suggest the emergence of an independent Ireland as ultimately inevitable.
Yet, linearity and the time are both concepts that the Irish performance of the primitive sublime seeks to question. Several critics comment on the notion of permeability of temporal categories in Ireland, an island apart where the past and present commonly merge.3 This notion developed out of the Victorian era’s cataloging process of all matter, which attempted to order the Empire, or the Globe, through a system of knowledge management that attempted to capture, preserve, and display British global mastery. “A[n Irish] culture where temporality is disrupted, a society in which past and present are somehow coeval, or where time is understood as being other than simply linear are so prevalent as to be almost invisible,” according to Conor Carville, who further explains, “Perhaps the most obvious examples are those Victorian evolutionary schemas in which Ireland is seen as primitive, occupying a position that lags behind England on some national timescale of development. In the same period the Irish body and identity were each seen as arrested: either trapped at a previous evolutionary stage, or permanently stalled in childhood” (“Keeping that wound green” 45–46). Carville’s assertion highlights the relentless appeal to the past that somehow seems to emerge in the present. The call of the past for Irish writers and artists at the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century reflects the very practical realities of functioning in a colonial zone of domination. The politics and positions of many of these practitioners were in some ways markers of their social class, religious affiliation, and gender. Those whose identities reflected their subaltern status were drawn to question cultural norms in the present day, while those whose identities reflected the power structure in Ireland (namely, the Protestant Ascendancy whose families and fortunes would seem to call for an allegiance to the British status quo), were drawn to concepts, markers, and ideas that predated the modern Empire. What better area to celebrate indigeneity and belonging than to venture into the remote past, into an era commonly before the written word was widely available, for a celebration of a culture whose laws and norms could be deployed to question the present and suggest a powerful link to a heroic indigenous past?
The peculiar, but overt link between primitivism and terror within the Irish theater and the Revival more broadly seems momentarily, and surprisingly, highlighted in the work of George Bernard Shaw. While certainly not
considered a Revivalist, his work does reveal the salient cultural currents during the Revival and evinces the primitivism so dominant during the period. The Doctor’s Dilemma, George Bernard Shaw’s drama, written in 1906, made its stage debut at the Abbey in 1917, creating a sensation when it appeared. Focusing on the enduring questions of the medical profession related to costs and treatments, the dilemma at hand is whether someone who is a bad person (i.e. a serial philanderer) deserves to be saved. It also underscores the contemporary debate regarding vivisection, the dissection of live animals.4 In a section of Shaw’s preface of the play, entitled “The Primitive Savage Motive,” Shaw negotiates between civilization and savagery, between the modern and the primitive, between the native and the other, using terms of “cruelty” drawn in relief via animalistic vivisection:
I say civilized motive advisedly; for primitive tribal motives are easy enough to find. Every savage chief who is not a Mahomet learns that if he wishes to strike the imagination of his tribe—and without doing that he cannot rule them—he must terrify or revolt them from time to time by acts of hideous cruelty or disgusting unnaturalness. We are far from being as superior to such tribes as we imagine. It is very doubtful indeed whether Peter the Great could have effected [sic] the changes he made in Russia if he had not fascinated and intimidated his people by his monstrous cruelties and grotesque escapades. Had he been a nineteenth-century king of England, he would have had to wait for some huge accidental calamity; a cholera epidemic, a war, or an insurrection, before waking us up sufficiently to get anything done. Vivisection helps the doctor to rule us as Peter ruled the Russians.
(xliii)
Shaw initially locates modern identity in relief against a troublingly “orientalist” savagery, but ultimately finds that it is intimately partnered with the primitive aspect of humanity, not merely of the other, but of the self, again drawn in terms of the animal vivisection debates of the day. The public performance of this dance of identity posits the “Mahomet” as the “civilized” in an inversion of the “orientalist” expectation. Shaw posits the use of terror, his “huge accidental calamity,” as a means through which to “advance” a people, a troubling delight in grotesquerie and of the sacrifice of animals in service of “higher” beings, both animal and human. Shaw’s vivisection debate seems to gesture toward the animalistic in general if not the avian in particular as a means though which to resolve the tension and contradictions of the period.
Yeats and his fellow Revivalists counter Shaw’s animalistic superiority and hierarchies even as they deploy related rhetorics that are associated with cultural memory and identity. In contrast to Shaw, whose work evinces
a current debate in the language of the “primitive other,” Yeats’s project relies on the more typical Revivalist tension between the indigenous Irish ancient and modern that manifests as the primitive sublime.5 Even for pacifist Yeats, the tensions of the before and the now, a creative form of radical memory, are often associated with a violent release.6 Denis Donoghue, on Yeats’s early poetry, notes that “there is no hope, only a dream song addressed to eternity, the state of heroic loss made permanent, idea, essential. History and the ‘despotism of fact’ are sublimed away” (32). Yeats suggests that immortality is entrapment, a mesh or net that will ensnare as surely as an awakening dream. The violence of entrapment and sacrifice seems to operate within a nexus of loss, a transcendent vision of the avian, a highly personal longing that is reaching beyond the self into a collective vision. Yeats’s vision is highly attuned to both historical paradigms and mythic systems, yet he does not merely mimic events, characters, and narratives, but rather deploys and reimagines them for his works (Donoghue 86).
Yeats’s gesture toward the pre-Christian and thus more singular nation allows him to avoid the divided religion and politics of his contemporary moment. The ancient gods and myths in general were of great interest to Yeats, but what seems more critical is his focus on a specific set of images of transcendence, flight, terror, and sublimity. Mark Williams, parsing an Irish god that would be deployed by Yeats, explains that “fashioned from kisses and with a mysterious song that hinted at unattainability, Aengus’s birds could be taken to gesture towards the erotic… Aengus/Angus made numerous appearances in the History, and the birds were repackaged both as his permanent accessories and as metaphors for the impalpable force of romantic love which he had come to personify” (349). The transformation of an ancient Celtic myth/god to Yeats’s contemporary purposes reflects both the larger cultural dynamics of Ireland, and Yeats’s own individual beliefs; these personal and political shifts merge in repeated dramatic and poetic works against imperialism of the British state and the poets’ independence of thought in terms of religions, notably his occult spiritualism that rejects Christianity (Williams 433). Yeats’s theosophy in this context indicates not merely an independence of mind but also critically an anti-imperial endeavor. Yet, this marker of independence also has a personal link for the poet when, per Williams, “the Anglo-Irish Aengus emerges as an ambiguous product of individual and collective influences, arising from but also obscuring the Óengus of early Irish saga.” He continues: “In the hermetic circles in which Yeats moved, he came with great rapidity to personify everything that was best in the native mythology… by morphing into a god of love he emphasized the delicate feeling in a mythology which was not short on bloodthirsty or sordid moments” (360). For Yeats, however, the momentary appeal of the erotic succumbs ultimately to the bloodthirsty. This blood sacrifice becomes linked to terror and the primitive sublime.
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for Kaige, the policeman, insisted on roaming about the verandah and kitchen, mainly occupied in consuming our tobacco. Had Debe not been our servant, he would undoubtedly have been summoned by his wife, and, this being his fifth offence in this direction, he would have been sent a prisoner to Thursday Island. To show his penitence he wore all day a black kerchief round his head; while, to smooth the ruffled feelings of his wife, he bought from us (out of his next week’s wages) some yards of red twill which he presented to her.”
Mr. Bruce has informed me by letter that early in 1899 Jimmy Rice and Debe Wali had, for them, a serious quarrel. It happened in this wise. Pedro, a Manila who had married Jimmy’s wife’s daughter by a former husband, D. Pitt, had given Jimmy a small cutter. Jimmy’s wife considered the boat was given to her as a present for her daughter’s sake, so she began to “boss” the boat and crew. Debe was captain, while Jimmy remained on shore to cook the bêche-demer.
Jimmy’s troubles now began in earnest. First his wife thought that, as she was owner of the boat, it was beneath her dignity to cook for Jimmy, and told him when he asked for his breakfast or dinner to go out and eat filth. Poor Jimmy asked Bruce for advice.
Shortly afterwards the “fish,” as bêche-de-mer is colloquially termed, they obtained was demanded by Pedro, as owner of the boat. This Jimmy gave him. Then the crew wanted their wages. Jimmy said he had nothing to give them, that they were all his friends, and had promised to work for nothing to clear the boat. Debe Wali said no; he wanted wages. Jimmy and his wife had a bad time of it, so the latter went to the Mamoose and summoned Jimmy for wages.
The police then told Jimmy he was summoned; and great was the clatter of tongues and mutual abuse. Debe ran into his house and brought out a big rowlock of a boat, and stabbed Jimmy in the chest with it. Of course it did not do Jimmy the least harm, but he commenced shouting “Police! police!” knowing well enough that the police were standing by and witnessing the whole affair. Of course
the police had to arrest Debe. Next day there was a cross-summons in the court—one for wages, the other for assault.
We have here an interesting example of the confusion that arises in the transition between one economic condition and another. Formerly communal labour was the rule. If a well had to be sunk or a house built, all friends would lend a hand, a feast with the concomitant excitement being a sufficient immediate reward, the reciprocity being, of course, fully recognised. Pedro’s loan of a boat on the hire system of purchase is well understood. Before the white man came it was customary for the Torres Straits Islanders to purchase their canoes on what was virtually the three years hire system. The crew demanding wages belongs to the new economic custom introduced by the Europeans.
Pedro, the owner of the boat, was drowned in the hurricane that swept across Northern Australia in March, 1899, and Jimmy had to pay D. Pitt the balance due on the boat.
The new Erub (Darnley Island) church was to be opened in September; and when the Murray Island contingent was about to start to take part in the festivities, Finau could not get a passage for himself or family unless he went with the Murray Islanders; so he asked Jimmy to lend him his boat. Jimmy said he could not lend it.
Two months afterwards Jimmy’s cutter went to Garboi sandbank to fish, and the crew slept on shore the first night. When they awoke next morning no cutter was to be seen; she had parted her chain in the night and had drifted away. So poor Jimmy lost his boat and all his labour, and the worst of it is, he has the haunting fear that it was the direct act of God because he did not lend his boat to the South Sea teacher when he asked for it. All the people assert this is the true explanation of his loss.
Jimmy is a happier man since his wife has ceased to be a boatowner, as she now condescends to roast yams and cook fish for him. Debe and he are as good friends as ever, and are always plotting how they can get as many shillings as they can for the least amount of work, and on the whole they succeed very well.
Debe is now the proud father of a pretty little daughter, and devotes a good deal of his time to nursing it. Occasionally he has a row with Kaima, his wife, when he considers she is not doing the nursing in a scientific manner. Then he generally takes the management of the baby for a time, but the infant does not fail to proclaim when it is Debe’s watch on deck.
On Friday, August 4th, 1899, there were two earth tremors on Murray Island. I cannot do better than transcribe Mr. Bruce’s vivid description of the occurrence. “I had just sat down to lunch when the iron roof and the verandah floor made such a clatter that I could not at all make out what was wrong; about five minutes later there came another and stronger shock. I jumped up and went on the verandah.
“There was a great crowd of men playing hockey on the sand beach in front of the house, and at first I thought some of them had been larking on the verandah, but when I went out everything was quiet. They were sitting down; not a word broke the deathlike stillness. I thought at first they were resting after their game, but even then they never sit still. I asked, ‘What’s wrong’? Then some of them came up and said, ‘Why, ground he jump up and down all the same as sea’!
“Then it struck me at once what had happened. I asked them how they felt when the shock came. They said the whole beach was heaving like the sea so that they could not stand. Some said they felt sick and wanted to vomit; others said everything looked blurred and indistinct, and men’s faces were all distorted when they looked at them.
“I was sorry I was in the house at the time, as I should have liked to experience the sensation. I should think each shock must have lasted about two minutes, with an interval of five minutes between them.
“After evening school I saw some of those who had been to their gardens on the top of the hill. From their description the earthquake was felt worse up there. Pasi told me he was sitting down on the ground nursing the baby when the first shock came, and he and the baby commenced to bob up and down, and he felt as if he were
sitting on something that was giving way with him. When the second shock came, the coconuts on the trees were bobbing up and down, everything was trembling and swaying; a bucket on the ground opposite him was jumping up and down. He thought it was the devil, and that he was bewitched, so he got up and called his wife to come away. Soon they met other frightened people running home. Pasi said he was ‘very glad to hear all man feel him all the same as myself.’
“No doubt the people received a great scare. They were going about in quite a subdued manner for a few days. When Sunday came they were told by Finau that God was angry with them. God has been very angry with them here this year; they were told the same after the hurricane took place. But then I remember the Princess Alice disaster on the Thames was referred to in the same manner by Mr. Spurgeon at the Tabernacle; so we cannot wonder at the coloured teacher attributing all disasters to the wrath of an offended Deity.
“I had rather an amusing reason given to me why the cyclone of the 4th and 5th of March (1899) happened. There was a crowd of boats anchored in the bay, and a South Sea man wanted to hold a service on the beach, but very few went to hear him pray. Whilst he was praying, some unregenerate nigger had the impiety to play on his concertina. That day the hurricane came. The men who told me this thoroughly believed, since the praying South Sea man had asserted it, that God had sent the hurricane because of that man playing the concertina.
“That is the kind of God they like to have described to them, and no other. Really the South Sea teachers know the kind of God to depict to the native far better than the white missionary does; his God of Love is beyond their comprehension. They look as if they believed in Him, but converse with them, and you find the God of Wrath is their ideal of what God is. He takes the place of Bomai, etc., which they have lost.
“At the opening of the new church at Erub, in September, all the South Sea teachers from the Torres Straits were gathered together.
Captain H⸺ had just come across an article in a newspaper, written by some German scientist, that a comet was to appear in the heavens some time in October, and that it would strike our planet on the 5th of November. The Captain described the comet to the Erub Mamoose, who in his turn told the assembled teachers, and they, not unnaturally, went to Captain H⸺ for further information. The Captain, nothing loth, gave them what they wanted, with a practical illustration of how the comet would act when it came in collision with the earth. He got a ball of paper and a stick, making the latter violently strike the ball of paper, which flew some distance away. ‘That,’ said he, ‘is the way our world will go, and I know that Old Nick is preparing his fires for a lot of you fellows now.’
“The teachers held a meeting, and arranged that when each teacher went home to his station he was to appoint three weeks of special prayer, and to beseech God not to allow the comet to destroy the earth. Finau arrived here full of it, and the people with him arrived equally full of influenza through living in over-crowded houses in Darnley.
“On Sunday I went as usual to church. At the close of the service Finau told all the people to remain, as a special service was to be held; so I remained along with the rest.
“After a short interval Finau told them about the comet, and that a very wise man had written in the newspaper that the world was shortly to come to an end. This was true. He then read from the Gospel of Mark, chapter xiii., from which he proved that this was the time all these things were to happen, because this wise man said so in the newspaper.
“He kept on until he had all the people in a proper state of fear. Then he directly referred to me that I knew it was all true, and would happen. I said ‘No.’ He took no notice, but told them that in three weeks’ time, on the 5th of November, if God did not hear their prayers, they would all be destroyed.
“After praying he invited anyone to stand up and pray and speak on the subject of the comet. Immediately all the Murray Herschels and Sir Robert Balls were on their feet, one after another,
expounding on comets and their destructive powers, and they also finished up by saying, ‘Oh, it’s true! That wise man said so in the newspaper.’ The subject suited them immensely.
“After they had all had their say, which occupied nearly two hours, Finau told them from that day until the 5th of November there were to be special prayers, asking God to rebuke the comet and make it go another road away from the earth. They would all know in three weeks’ time whether God had heard their prayers. If He did not destroy the world then, that would be a sign that He had heard them, and was pleased with them; but if the comet destroyed the earth on the 5th of November, then they would understand that God was angry with them, and wished to destroy them as a punishment.
“He then again referred to me as knowing it to be true. I had to get up and speak (it was the first time I ever did so on church matters). I told the people that I had not heard anything about this comet, and that they were not to be afraid; that even if there was a comet, it was not likely to interfere with our world, and even if it did, I thought no harm would arise from it. They would all find, on the 5th of November, Murray Island would be quite safe, and everyone would be going about their work as usual. I might as well have said nothing; but there was so much sickness about (mainly influenza) that I thought this frightening of the people would have an injurious effect on them.
“The 5th of November came round, and nothing extraordinary happened. So Finau appointed the 6th to be a day of thanksgiving to God, because He had heard and answered their prayers by turning the comet away from the earth.
“Thanksgiving took the form of prayers in the morning, feasting and games in the afternoon. So you may be sure I had a good time of it in school that Monday afternoon with the noise of the thanksgiving outside and the inattention of the children inside.
“You people in England ought to be truly thankful that we have such effectual fervent prayers in this part of the world. I think this answer to prayer is quite as good as any I read in Mr. Stead’s Review of Reviews last year. All that was wanting to make the wise
man in the newspapers and Finau’s predictions perfect was to have had the earth tremors introduced in November instead of August, and then what a tableau!
“Captain H⸺ is delighted at the good work he considers he has done in stirring up the people to such a time of prayer. In his last letter he says he has been the means of leading these South Sea teachers and the natives to more earnest prayer through fear than has ever been done by any individual in the Straits before.
“The Mamoose and Pasi left for Erub to attend the memorable opening of the church a fortnight earlier than the general public, but before starting the Mamoose left strict orders with the sergeant if anyone made a storm of wind while he was away to find him out and have him punished. No sooner did he start than it blew ‘old boots’; no boat could leave the island, and the Mamoose had a terrible passage.
“Kadud, the new Sergeant of Police, came to me and told me he was looking out for the person who had made the wind, as the Mamoose had given him strict orders to have him punished by a fine. One day he came, saying he had found a dry coconut leaf stuck in the creek at Kiam, and thought he would find the party. Another day he would find a similar leaf and a shell stuck in the sand on the beach. Kadud was getting furious, and all the time it was blowing a hurricane. The storm lasted four weeks, so that the majority of the people from Murray Island were late for the opening ceremony.
“For months they tried to find out the miscreant; Wali, being a church member now, is past suspicion. It would make you laugh to hear how seriously the Mamoose and Kadud talk when I ask them if they have found out who it was that made the ‘big wind.’ ‘Oh no,’ they reply; ‘by-and-by we shall catch him.’
“Mappa, a Murray Islander—one of the L.M.S. teachers—is here at present on a six months’ leave of absence; he is a shrewd, sharp fellow, but a thorough native. He brought with him a young fellow named Wai from his station at New Guinea, another sharper, who has already a great reputation on Murray Island of being able to make, injure, and kill, and Mappa backs him up. Tuk is the form of
sorcery he is supposed to practise, and the Murray people are terribly frightened of it; they tell me the New Guinea men are very powerful in tuk, and from Kiwai they can kill a whole village full of people on Murray Island, nearly a hundred miles away.
“Wai first began practising on William, the deacon, who lives at Dio. He went with some others to Dio, and showed William two sticks of tobacco, and said ‘Tuk.’ William began to shake when Wai told him to go and look in his box and see if he had lost any tobacco. William, still trembling, got his key, looked in the box, and said, ‘Yes.’ Wai held up the tobacco, and said, ‘This is it.’ William replied, ‘Yes, that’s it.’ Wai exclaimed ‘Tuk,’ and the two sticks of tobacco disappeared, much to the astonishment of the crowd. William pressed a present on Wai, to secure himself against tuk. When William told me about the affair I nearly exploded, trying to keep serious, and endeavouring to sympathise with him. Wai is a smiling, comedian-faced young fellow; he comes along to see me every other day, and to have a smoke. Ulai and Mappa, a good pair, are always extolling Wai’s great powers.
“A fortnight ago Mappa, who is taking Finau’s place, the latter having gone on a visit to Mabuiag, had a crowd round him after a Friday morning’s service, and used some strong language about some men who had not attended church and about Kadud, who owns a well at Kiam, about which he and the South Sea teacher have a dispute.
“A woman named Deau went and told these men that Mappa was speaking ill of them. They hurried along to the church compound, Deau along with them. She then asked Mappa to repeat what he had said, and told him he was bad man, that he thumped the pulpit with his hand when preaching to them, and then went home and thumped his wife. Mappa then began to tell her she was a bad woman, a Samaria kosker—that is, a woman of Samaria. Deau could not stand that, so she went to the police and summoned Mappa for swearing at her by calling her a Samaria kosker. Mappa then threatened the whole of Deau’s friends that he and Wai would put tuk on them all. They were in a great panic; the sergeant, Kadud, was nearly white when he came to see me, with some of the threatened people, and
asked if they could not arrest Mappa. They all declared that Mappa had learnt tuk in New Guinea, and could destroy them all if he chose.
“Mappa was summoned for slandering Deau, and dismissed on this count; next he was charged with threatening the people. The witnesses all held that when Mappa went back to New Guinea he would destroy anyone he chose by using the sorcery of tuk. It was tuk, tuk, and nothing but tuk. I asked Mappa if he had threatened the people with this, and he said he had, and that he was angry. I asked him if, when he went back to New Guinea, he or the Fly River men could shoot tuk to Murray Island. He said they could, but he was not sure about himself. I warned him to think about what he was saying, and if he really believed that Wai could do such a thing. He hummed and hawed, and said ‘No.’ That was all I wanted in order to quiet the fears of the people, so I asked Mappa to tell the Mamoose and the people that the Fly River men could not injure them, and that neither he nor Wai knew tuk. He told them so, but at the same time they did not believe him, and would rather have heard him say that he and Wai were au kali tuk le (very big tuk people). Mappa was dismissed from court, and advised not to practise tuk any more whilst on his holidays. The whole tuk affair has been very amusing. Mappa and his wife are now teaching the Murray youths New Guinea dances, so that they may beat the Dauar men on New Year’s Day.”
In a letter dated September 30th, 1900, Mr. Bruce gave us the later history of some of our friends, and as it illustrates the social life of the Murray Islanders in a very interesting manner, I do not hesitate to print the greater part of it for the benefit of my readers.
“This year we are experiencing the results of a big drought. The north-west monsoon, which generally brings a young deluge with it, has been very mild this year, so mild, in fact, that but for the change of winds we might say we had no ‘nor’-west.’ In December of 1899 we had good rains, which gave promise of a good harvest from the gardens this year; but there has been such a dearth of rain in 1900 that all the garden stuffs died off. First the sweet potatoes went (that is, the vines), for they never got to the length of tubers; then the yams died off, but the people managed to get a few small ones out of the crop. So the people are reduced to coconuts and bananas,
which are fairly plentiful. The natives are perfectly happy, carrying on play night after night, and their boats lying idle at anchor, instead of being at work getting black-lip shell, which has been a splendid price this year, to buy flour and rice for their families. Douglas Pitt’s son did very well with one boat working from here; he cleared £350 in six months with a crew of mainland boys, whilst the Murray men did not clear as many shillings with seven boats which they obtained from individuals to work out and on shares. They kept on getting advances (‘draws’) of calico and tobacco, and do no work.
“Your two ‘curry and rice chefs,’ Debe Wali and Jimmy Rice, both got boats. Debe obtained all the draws he could out of the owner in eight months, and collected about £4 worth of shell to pay about £10 worth of draws. The consequence was, when he went to Thursday Island for more draws the owner took possession of his boat, and he was lucky to get it, because if she had remained much longer at Murray Island she would have broken up on the beach. Jimmy Rice, poor fellow, has not been quite so fortunate as his friend Debe. In the first place, he could not get so many draws out of his man as did Debe, and he had signed before the Shipping Master, with a solicitor to see that all was fair and square. When Jimmy got all the draws he could from the owner of the boat, he and his crew refused to do any work, and they were taken before the Shipping Master at Thursday Island. The Shipping Master prosecuted them in court. All the crew, beside Jimmy Rice and Toik, decided to go to work and finish the time they had signed for. Jimmy and Toik held out, thinking they would be sent back to Murray Island by the steamer, as she was coming out the day following; but they made a mistake, and each of them got two months in jail to work out their time. One of the young Pitts paid for a boat here in four months with a mainland crew, and although the Murray men have these object lessons before them, they seem to be no incentives to make them go and do likewise, which they could easily do.
“Papi has a boat on half-shares from a Manila man named Zareal, a jeweller at Thursday Island. Like the others, Papi was doing no work after getting what he could out of Zareal; but he was lucky enough to find a good pearl in a shell, so he took it to Thursday
Island and sold it for £150, then went flashing about town. Zareal came to know of the pearl, and claimed half of its value for the boat; but Papi objected, and got away from Thursday Island to Murray Island with the cash. Not a bad haul for a Murray man! There is likely to be trouble about it, but I bet my boots Papi comes off the winner.
“You remember old Gasu; his eyes were bad. He is now quite blind; can only tell the difference between night and day. He looks physically well, but takes no exercise whatever, as he tells me he is ashamed to go walking about with a boy to lead him. When I visit him I give him a spin along the road, and he enjoys it immensely. Poor old Gasu! He had not his equal on the island; a thorough, genuine old gentleman, and quite free from all cant, although he had his fears of the ‘White Man’s Zogo’ (the Church) like all the rest.
“The great drought this year has been put down to many causes. Your party came in for some of the blame for taking away the good doioms, so that the rain-makers were handicapped in giving a plentiful supply. But the principal cause for a time was our old friend Debe Wali; he was charged with defiling and throwing down the yam zogo at Dauar, named Zegnaipur—this is the principal yam zogo Debe’s brother, Komabre, and Harry, the Murray Mamoose, were the two head zogo men who prepare it every year. Komabre died last year, and Debe, of course, believes someone was the cause of his death, and the people say that he was angry at the death of Komabre and knocked down the zogo, hence the drought. Mamoose and Pasi came to me to have a talk about it, and wished to know if they could not prosecute Debe in court. I told them they would have to get proof that he had done the injury, well knowing they could get none. Mamoose said he was certain Debe did the thing to spoil the yams and food, and that the law should punish him. I had to cool him off as best I could. The next one accused was Joe Brown. They said, because he has a quarrel with Jimmy Dei, he burnt the coconut zogo at Zeub by wilfully setting fire to the grass, and that he had stopped rain from coming and blighted all the crops. It was very amusing when I asked Debe and Joe confidentially why they had been and gone and done it. A knowing smile stole all over their faces, as much as to say, ‘I’ll teach them to interfere with me!’ Still, they would never
confess to anything, but you could see how pleased they were at the prominent place they held among the people. When I represented to them how they were making me suffer too from having empty watertanks, old Joe said, ‘By-and-by, Jack, you stop; I make him all right; you see your tank full up by-and-by!’ That ‘by-and-by’ means so much to them, and is such a handy phrase I don’t know what they would do without it now!
“In the early part of the year I was pestered by the men who had boats, and also by their crews, coming every day inquiring when the big blow was to be. I told them it was impossible for me to fix any stated time, but they knew we always had strong winds in the northwest. It was of no use, they kept on coming to inquire. At last I asked if anyone had been telling them there was to be a big blow. They said yes, one man told them; but who he was they would not say. Of course it made a good excuse for not going to work, and they made the most of it and let the boats lie up.
“The following is an example of the power zogo men are credited with. After Debe’s and Joe’s reputation was on the wane and being forgotten, Mamoose and Jimmy Dei were in my house one day, and the conversation turned on the everlasting drought, which both were bewailing. I began to twit them about the powers of the rain-makers, trying to bring them out. Mamoose did not like it, and began to converse with his optics to Jimmy (Murray men do a lot of talk on the quiet with their eyes). Jimmy assented, so Mamoose got up out of his seat, looked out of the front door, then out of the back—to make sure there was no one about who would be likely to hear—sat down again, and after sundry ahems Mamoose whispered to me the real cause of the drought. He said the rain-makers were afraid to make rain and prepare the ceremony, in case they might make too much wind along with it, and therefore cause another big hurricane, like that of last March, and they feared the Government would punish them if many lives were lost; besides, Gasu being now blind, he could not see to prepare the zogo properly, and they were afraid to make it! I had to condole with them on the hard luck of having to risk the chances of either a cyclone or a famine, and agreed with them that a famine was the safest, for, as Mamoose said, the hurricane
might smash up the island altogether But I assured him at the same time that the Government would on no account hold them responsible for any damage done by any cyclone in this part of the world. I never heard of any Murray man getting the credit of making the hurricane last year; no doubt they have been afraid to hint at it, and I have no doubt the people give the honour to some of the zogo le for having caused that disaster.
“I had a gentleman living with me for a month or so; he came from New Zealand, and is travelling all round, doing the ‘grand tour of Australia, New Guinea,’ etc. He was grand company, although a very strict churchman and an extreme ritualist. I had no idea colonial high churchmen could be so high! He out-ritualed everything I had ever seen or heard of, but he was one of the good sort who could give and take a joke.
“We had a trip to Dauar one Saturday; went in the whale-boat, and several passengers accompanied us. We had a walk all round, and had a nice day of it. After we had returned home and had had supper, and were sitting talking and smoking, a deputation headed by Pasi, who is Mamoose of Dauar, came to inform me that those who had accompanied us to Dauar had gone on purpose to see the zogo of Wiwar. This is a round stone (sandstone) about the size of a pumpkin; if it is prepared by a zogo man it has the power of causing constipation, and the person affected will die if there is no antidote used in the form of taking off the power of this zogo. Pasi had a small packet in his hand, wrapped up very carefully, like tobacco, in a dried banana leaf. He asked me if I would examine it, and spread it out, telling me this was the cause of the sickness of an old lady named Sibra. She remembered that the last time she had been over to Dauar she had passed the zogo Wiwar, and now knew the cause of her sickness. Her friends had gone over with us to find out if the zogo was prepared; they were to take away the power of the zogo by cleansing it with sea-water, and placing the leaf of a plant called gebi on top of the stone, and pouring water over the stone. Pasi wished to know if the police could apprehend old Lui, as he was the only Dauar man who knew how to prepare the zogo. I asked Pasi how the zogo was prepared; he said, ‘The zogole, after having a stool, placed the
excreta on the stone, using an incantation, in which he referred to the person he wishes to blight.’ To prove the case, the friends went to the stone and found it had been prepared, and brought away a sample of the excreta with them. My visitor could not refrain from laughing, although I warned him to keep serious. Pasi said there was no chance of Sibra’s recovery, as the zogo had been prepared too long. I was giving the old lady medicine, and thought she was going on nicely, but on the Monday afternoon she died. Of course old Lui got the credit of removing her, because they had had a quarrel of words. The friends of Sibra do not consider our law of much account, as Lui cannot be punished, even after the strong evidence they brought to me. When Lui dies, his relatives will charge Sibra’s relations with using a zogo, appropriate to whatever sickness he may have been afflicted with.
“It was too much when Pasi asked my visitor to have a sniff, and tell him if it was the real thing or not. He fairly exploded and roared, and spoiled the whole effect, as I had to follow suit. The deputation did not remain much longer, but carefully rolled up their sacred bundle and left. They are very sensitive to ridicule, and do not like their customs laughed at. The consequence was that they would not for some time tell me anything that occurred of a similar nature. You will perhaps think I ought to rebuke them and advise them not to follow these old customs, but it is of no use doing this, as these are so engrained into their everyday existence that they could not, as yet, live without them. Their disappearance is, I think, only a matter of time.
“It is very seldom that houses are burned down on Murray Island, considering the inflammable material they are constructed of, and the carelessness of the people with fire. This year, however, three houses were burned down. The first one belonged to a widow named Nicky. The people were all at one of their night plays, and Nicky’s house was burned, and nothing saved. The play was a long way from Nicky’s place, but it is considered that the spirit of her deceased husband (Arus) was angry with her for her conduct, and burned her house down. It was a serious loss to Nicky, as she has a large family. I spoke to the Mamooses about getting the people to
assist her, and another widow, Anai, whose goods were also all lost in the fire. The poor women had really saved nothing except their petticoats. I gave them a start in goods, and I was really astonished at the manner in which the people assisted; some gave her a camphor-wood box, others half-bolts of calico, plates, spoons, knives, and so forth, so the camphor-wood boxes were well filled with useful articles, and calico galore. All vied in beating each other in the giving line, and of course a ceremony was made in presenting the goods. I only hope the next unfortunate will come off as well, but I fear not, as it is so foreign to the Murray Islanders to give without getting an equivalent in exchange. However, they deserve all credit for the way in which they assisted Nicky and Anai, and ought to make Arus’s lamar (spirit) leave the widow’s house alone in future. The other houses were burned down in the daytime, and all the contents saved.
“This year (1900) has been a fairly healthy year. Up to the present there have been five deaths—two adults and three children. Matey is dead; he was a young man about thirty years old; he died of consumption, I think, and was ill for a long time. I tried to get him to go to the hospital at Thursday Island, but he would not go. There is a Queensland Aboriginal working in the boats at Darnley, who has quite a reputation as a medicine-man. When Matey was very weak he wished to be taken to Darnley to see this mainland boy. He was taken over in a dying state. The mainlander had a look at him and told him, ‘You fellow, you die; no more blood stop along you; two day, three day, you finish!’ This consultation was quite satisfactory to Matey and his friends, so Matey requested them to take him back to Murray Island to die there. They started back with him, and as soon as the anchor was dropped at Murray, poor Matey’s spirit took flight to Boigu (an island to the west of Murray, where spirits are supposed to live in a very happy state without any fears of brimstone).
“Murray Islanders have a great dread of dying anywhere than on Murray, and no people have a greater love of their native land than they have. Since this mainland boy on Darnley gave so good a prognosis in Matey’s case, his reputation has gone up like a rocket, and has not yet come down, several have gone over to consult him.”
The natives of Erub and the Murray Islands frequently used to make mummies of their dead relations. The details of the process are not particularly edifying, and need not be narrated here. The wizened corpse, which might almost have been made of papiermâché, so light was it, was lashed to a bamboo framework. To be made more presentable it was painted red and pieces of mother-ofpearl from a nautilus shell were inserted in the orbits, a round spot of black beeswax serving for a pupil. Finally the mummy was decked with various ornaments. When it was complete and inodorous a final feast would be provided, and it would be suspended in the house. There the mummy would remain, swinging with every breath of wind and turning its gleaming eyes with each movement of the head, until it fell to pieces with old age.
When the body crumbled away word was sent to the friends to come and assist in cutting off the head. A big feast was held, and a man who was skilled in making portrait faces in beeswax on skulls was also present. Later the artist made the wax model of the deceased’s face; anyhow, the length of the nose was accurate, as immediately after death the length of the nose was measured with a piece of wood, which was safely kept for the purpose of securing the right proportion of the imitation nose.
When the face was finished the head was given to the nearest male relative. The men then cried. Later it was taken to the women, who also had a good cry. The inevitable feast followed, at which the artist received a large share of food.
The modelled and decorated skulls of relatives were kept probably partly for sentimental reasons, as the people are of an affectionate disposition, and like to have memorials of deceased friends, but mainly for divinatory purposes.
A duly decorated skull when properly employed became a divining zogo of remarkable powers, and was mainly used in discovering a thief, or the stolen article, or a man who had by means of sorcery made someone sick. But this could only be done by bezam le, or members of the shark clan, who were also members of the Malu fraternity. All who engaged in this hunt went in the early evening to
the zogo house, and one of the zogole took the Main mask and put it on, repeating a certain formula. After leaving the house, the zogole carried the skull in front of him, and all marched with a particular gait till they heard a kind of grasshopper called kitoto, and they rushed in the direction from which the noise proceeded. One particular kitoto was believed to guide the men to the house of the offender. Should the men lose the right direction the kitoto would wait for them to come up, ever and again making its sound, “Sh, sh.” Ultimately they were led to a house, and this must, of course, according to their ideas, be the house of the malefactor
It was of no use for the man to deny the evil deed, for kitoto had found him out; and, moreover, the bezam le were so powerful that it was as much as his life was worth to resist. If he happened to be a bezam le himself he might try to brazen it out among his friends; but if he was an outsider it would be useless, and he would have to pay the fine.
I was naturally anxious to obtain one of these divining heads; even by the time of my former visit they had all been done away with, at least, so I was informed. I had therefore to be content to have a model made for me. (Plate XII., B, No. 2; p. 139.)
First a skull had to be procured—and for other reasons I was very desirous of making a collection of skulls; but it was long before I could obtain any (I am referring now to my former visit), though I constantly said, “Me fellow friend belong you fellow. ’Spose you get me head belong dead man, I no speak. ’Spose you get him, I no savvy what name you catch him, that business belong you fellow. What for I get you fellow trouble?”
Eventually I came across a man who volunteered to get me some, and I promised to give him sixpence per head; or, as I put it to him, “One head belong dead man he sixpence, one head belong dead man he sixpence; you savvy?” and as I spoke I touched and turned down, native fashion, the fingers of the left hand, beginning with the little finger. He understood perfectly.
Next day he brought me a basket of skulls, and he could tell me the names of some of them, too! As he handed out one skull and
mentioned a man’s name, I noticed that the nursemaid of the missionary’s wife, who was standing by, looked rather queer; but as it was none of my business, I took no notice. Later I found that the skull in question belonged to the girl’s uncle! I do not believe she objected to my having the skull, but that the other man should have the sixpence—the money had gone out of the family. When paying the man I ticked off each skull on the fingers of my left hand, and paid for it; but I had not enough sixpences, and so gave him half a crown for five skulls. At this he looked very askance, although I assured him the payment was quite correct. Fortunately Bruce was standing by, and said he would give him five sixpences for it at the store. My friend Baton made me one or two divining heads from these skulls in the “old-time fashion.”
Hearing one day, during my former stay at Murray, that a woman had died, and being grieved at the particular circumstances attending her death, I determined to pay my visit of condolence. After dark I went to the village where she had lived, and found her laid on the beach with her head to the sea, and clothed in her best dress and wearing her new hat, all her fancy calico being laid on the body. The husband was sitting at the head, and close by were several men, women, and children laughing and chattering over their evening meal. Then the brother came up and bent over the body, wailing and sobbing.
Shortly afterwards a canoe was brought to convey the corpse to a more populous village, so that they might have a good cry.
Then I saw one of the most impressive sights it has yet been my lot to witness. It was a beautiful tropical moonlight night, the sand beach being illuminated with soft whiteness by the moon, and countless stars glittered overhead. On one side the strand was bordered by the gently lapping waves of the calm ocean, and on the other by a grove of coconut palms, their grey stems, arising from a confused shadow of undergrowth, topped by sombre feathery crowns, a peaceful adjunct to a scene of sorrow, and the antithesis of the ghastly mockeries of the funeral plumes of the professional upholstery, which have only lately been abolished in England. A small crowd of some twenty or so of us were walking along the
beach with the noiseless footfall of bare feet, keeping abreast of the canoe which, with its sad freight, was poled along by the husband at one end, and the brother at the other. As I saw the black silhouette of the canoe and its crew against the moonlit sky and sea, silently gliding like a veritable shadow of death, and heard the stillness of the air broken by the moaning of the bereaved ones, my mind wandered back thousands of years, and called up ancient Egypt carrying its dead in boats across the sacred Nile—there with pomp, ceremony, and imagery, here with simplicity, poverty, and stern realism.
At length we came to the village, the inclosure of which was covered with family groups, mothers with babies surrounded by their families, and many a little one was laid asleep upon the sand, well wrapped up to keep off the flies.
The corpse was carried to a clear space, and again the gay trappings of life were spread over the dead. An old woman, I believe the deceased’s mother, came to the head, and sitting down, bent over the body and commenced wailing. Then on all sides the cry was taken up mainly by the groups of women who by this time had taken their places round the dead. As one dropped out, another would join in, and so with varying accessions in volume, occasionally dying away to all but silence, the mournful sound continued through the night, rising and falling in weird manner, recalling to my memory the keening I had heard in far-away Kerry eighteen months previously.
Then I left them. The dead one surrounded by a changing circle of weeping women; beyond, the family groups each illumined by its own flickering fire, babies asleep, children playing, adults talking, young men laughing, and a little love-making taking place in the background; and above all the quiet, steady, bright face of the moon impassively gazing, like Fate, on the vicissitudes of human life.
