ANMELDELSER - Anglo Files

ANMELDELSER
..................................................
I
dette nummer er følgende bøger anmeldt:
Hanna and Edward
Broadbridge: New England - Crucible of the United States. (Munksgaard)
Dorrit Faber m.fl.: Introduction to English Legal Language. (Handelshøjskolens Forlag)
Margrethe S. Mondahl
og Lisbet P. Svendsen: Oral communication - in a foreign language. (distribution: Munksgaard)
Alex Klinge: Mastering English. A student's workbook and guide.
(Handelshøjskolen i København)
Forsidefoto: The three sisters" of fotograf Kirsten Klein

REDAKTIONELT
•............S....................................
Med tre Nobelpriser indenfor de seneste
par år, en fredsaftale langfredag i år og en
stadig fremadspringende „Celtic Tiger",
finder vi det oplagt i redaktionen at fokusere
på Irland netop nu. Vi har forsøgt at
anlægge forskellige vinkler på Irlandsproblematikken.
Således indleder vi med en
række artikler om Irlands historie og den
aktuelle situation, hvorefter kirken, filmen
og litteraturen behandles. Vi gør opmærksom
på, at Engelsk Institut ved Aarhus
Universitet netop har udsendt et temahæfte
om Irland: Ireland. Towards New Identities,
hvorfor vi henviser vore læsere til nr. 29 af
The Dolphin med henblik på identitets
-problematikken.
Det er en særlig glæde at kunne præsentere
Kirsten Klein på forsiden af vort nummer
om Irland. Denne danske kunstner har
om nogen indfanget den irske sjæl og ,,The
Celtic Twilight", og til de, der gik glip af
hendes udstilling på Sophienholm i sommer,
kan vi henvise til hendes værk: En
hymne til Irland - Land of Spirit. Kirsten
Klein har selv udvalgt billedet specielt til
dette nummer. De fotografier, der er indsat
mellem artiklerne er fra engelsklærerforeningens
kursus i september i år i Irland.
De er fortrinsvis fra en rundtur til THE
MURALS i Belfasts katolske og protestantiske
kvarterer, hvor det er svært at se,
hvordan fredsaftalen kan realiseres.
Historien er fortsat omdrejningspunktet
i den irske bevidsthed og i sit kulturkritiske
essay Reinventing Ireland gør Declan Kiberd
op med de mange myter i den irske selvforståelse,
idet han tager udgangspunkt i
fredsaftalen i år. Ved at foretage et historisk
rids tegner Kiberd et sociologisk nutidigt
billede af en republik, hvor den stigende
velstand ses som årsagen til den overvæl-
1
dende opbakning omkring fredsforslaget.
Luke Gibbons behandler Bloody Sunday
som et nationalt traume. Med Seam us
Deanes roman „Reading in the Dark" som
eksempel viser Gibbons, hvordan der stadig
er stof i det irske kollektive ubevidste for
kunstneren at tage fat på.
Patsy McGarry dokumenterer den stigende
sekularisering i det irske samfund, og
der er tankevækkende oplysninger om tab
af tro og tillid til præstestanden og et drastisk
fald i kirkegangen i republikken.
Til gengæld blomstrer irsk film, og Luke
Gibbons leverer en gennemgang af centrale
filmatiseringer med Michael Collins som
omdrejningspunkt for irsk selvransagelse.
Vi har valgt at bringe novellen KOREA af
John McGahern. Denne forfatter har netop
været i landet, han er aktuel med TV-filmatiseringen
af hans roman Among Women i
Storbritannien og Cathel Black har mester
fortolket novellen om de skjulte trau-
mer efter borgerkrigen 1922 - 1923 i filmen
Korea.
Professor Lars Ole Sauerberg har læst
den nyere irske litteratur, og han opstiller
og kommenterer en kanon på 9 værker.
Dermed er der intet sagt om alle de andre
læseværdige litterære tekster, som er præsenteret
af bladets øvrige bidragsydere.
Vi ønsker læserne god fornøjelse og hvor
der har været påfaldende tavshed i forbindelse
med de nye fagbilag i gymnasiekredse
er der fra universiteterne lagt op til en
spændende problematisering af nedprioriteringen
af den postkoloniale læsning. Mon
ikke det åbne brev til fagkonsulenterne
skulle kunne få faggrupperne til at debattere
i bladets spalter?
Redaktionen
-ligt

ANGLO
Deadline for kommende numre:
Medlemsblad for
Engelsklærerforeningen for Gymnasiet & HF
The Danish Association of Teachers of English
15. januar Tema: Nyere Britisk Litteratur
Har du stof, der knytter an til temaet eller andet, kontakt da snarest redaktionen.
Obs. Hvor det er muligt, vil vi meget gerne have artikler, debatindlæg mm. på diskette.
Husk at vedlægge print og husk at angive, hvilket program der er anvendt! Kun et
dokument pr. diskette. Undlad at anvende orddeling. Jo mindre teksten er formatteret,
des bedre. Vi opfordrer til, at artikler max. fylder 5 sider å 2.000 anslag.
adlines: 15/1 - 1/3 - 1/5 - 1/9 - 1 /1 1
Webadresse: www.en.gymfag.dk/anglowww
daktion: Ide Hejlskov Larsen, Willemoesgade 74, 1. mf. tv., 2100 København Ø
• Tlf. & fax 3526 5520
e-mail: hejlskov@humcenter.ou.dk
Ole Juul Lund, Sankt Jørgens Vej 16, 4000 Roskilde
• Tlf. & fax 4632 8020
e-mail: oil@post.tele.dk
Margit Nordskov Nielsen, Strandboulevarden 31, 2. tv., 2100 Kbh. Ø
• Tlf. & fax 3538 9462
e-mail: margit_nordskov@fc.sdbs.dk
Mette Weisberg, Sønder Allé 5, 8000 Århus C
• Tlf.: 8613 0062
Fax: 8613 5562
e-mail: weisberg@post3.tele.dk
Layout og sats: Jan Steensen, Mossøbrå 5, 8660 Skanderborg
• Tlf.: 8657 9219
Fax: 8657 9245
e-mail: andrico@post3.tele.dk
Adresseændring! Bedes meddelt til kassereren (se indersiden af omslaget), som sørger for omadressering
af bladet.
ISSN 1395-881X
2

Indhold
Nyt fra bestyrelse og udvalg 4
Vibeke Hansen: Formandens beretning 1998, 4
Declan Kiberd
Luke Gibbons
Patsy McGarry
Luke Gibbons
Irene Allerslev Jensen
Lars Ole Sauerberg
John McGahern
Ida Klitgård
Henriette Stavis
Indkaldelse til generalforsamling 5
Til og fra fagkonsulenterne 9
An open letter to the fagkonsulenter in English 9
TEMA: Irland 12
Reinventing Ireland 12
History without the Talking Cure: Bloody Sunday as "Modern Event" 28
Losing Faith 33
Projecting Ireland: the Recent Resurgence of Irish Cinema 36
Ny irsk litteratur 42
The Reactive Imagination. New Irish Fiction 50
Korea 55
Irsk universalitet - Desmond Egans poesi 58
Time Symbolism in the poetry of W.B. Yeats 64
Debat og fokus på 71
s Gymnasium: Kommentarer til debatten "Engelsk som sprog eller fag?" 71
s Gymnasium: Anbefaling af teoretisk tekst til højniveau 74
Undervisningsstof 75
l Tornøe: Dead or Alive? En baglæns læsning of James Joyces "The Dead" 75
Bits & Bytes 80
Claus Pindstrup: Anmeldelse af Encyclopedia Britannica CD-ROM 1998, 80
Chat- rummet 83
Birte Lunau Nielsen: Ireland and the Troubles in Northern Ireland 83
Anmeldelse af bøger 86
Møder og kurser 89
Noteservice 94
Temanummeroversigt 96
Adresser 97
3

FRA BESTYRELSE
OG UDVALG
Formandens beretning 1998
Af Vibeke Hansen, formand for Engelsklærerforeningen
En af hovedopgaverne for foreningen i
1998 har været etablering af en ny udvalgs
med et Gymnasieudvalg som pen-struktur:
dant til det eksisterende HF Udvalg, med et
Fagdidaktisk Udvalg som udløber af tidligere
Skriftligt Udvalg, men med et bredere
og mere omfattende sigte, med bevarelse af
Internationalt Udvalg, idet international
orientering i sagens natur må være et kerne
sprogfaget engelsk, og med et
-område for
IT Udvalg til at varetage et andet stort
kerneområde, hvor faget engelsk har en
central placering
En anden hovedopgave har været at få
beskrevet og fastlagt forretningsgange i
foreningsarbejdet, især på kursusområdet
og i bestyrelsens samarbejde med regionssekretærerne.
Regionerne
Regionssekretærerne spiller en vigtig rolle i
forbindelse med den regionale kursus
Hvis ikke der var dette net -afholdelse. af
regionssekretærer til at tage slæbet med de
regionale kurser, ville der hurtigt komme til
at mangle en vigtig brik i det samlede billede
af efteruddannelsesmuligheder: de regionale
kurser.
Men også for Engelsklærerforeningens
bestyrelse udgør regionssekretærerne et
meget væsentligt forum: til drøftelse af faglige
problemstillinger, udviklingstendenser
4
og muligheder. Derfor ser vi hver gang frem
til det årlige augustmøde med regionssekretærerne,
hvor vi til vores store glæde ser et
talstærkt fremmøde, og hvor vi oplever
hvert år at kunne hente inspiration til det
fremtidige arbejde.
Kursusarbejdet
Kurser har der, som sædvanlig, været mange
af, og arbejdet med at oprette kurser, og
planlægge omkring praktiske forhold, samt
ikke mindst at afvikle kurser udgør en væsentlig
del af bestyrelsesmedlemmernes
arbejde. Også på bestyrelsesmøderne bruger
vi meget tid på at holde hinanden orienterede
om kursusafviklingen og diskutere
forhold omkring kursusoprettelse m.v.
Vi har med spænding studeret den længe
ventede rapport fra udvalget om "Efteruddannelse
af gymnasie- og hf-lærere", der
udkom i juni måned og kan til vores glæde
konstatere, at udvalget anbefaler, at "de
faglige udvalg og de faglige foreninger fortsat
spiller en central rolle i planlægningen af
lærernes efteruddannelse". Samtidig anbefales
det, at samarbejdet med universiteterne
formaliseres med oprettelse af et fagligt
kontaktorgan til drøftelse af alle spørgsmål
om efteruddannelse — et initiativ, der,
hvis det "lander" rigtigt, kan lette vores
arbejde med efteruddannelse en hel del og
måske åbne mulighed for nye typer af

efteruddannelsesaktivitet.
Under kursusområdet hører arbejdet i
Fagligt Udvalg, hvor to af bestyrelsens
medlemmer sammen med fagkonsulenterne
foretager endelig indstilling til Gymnasieafdelingen
om oprettelse af kurser med
tilhørende kursusbudgetter. Samarbejdet
her kører smidigt med en veletableret praksis
og fremgangsmåde og med en fin forståelse
for sammen at skulle løfte en opgave,
hvor der skal tages overordnede hensyn
til helheden samtidig med at udgangspunktet
ligger hos græsrødderne.
GymSprog
GymSprog dækker over samarbejdet mellem
alle fremmedsprogsfagene i gymnasiet
og på HF. I dette regi er der i år blevet arbejdet
med planlægningen og tilrettelæggelsen
af en konference, der finder sted i Middelfart
den sidste weekend i november.
Emnet for konferencen er "Sproglig Kom-
FRA BESTYRELSE OG UDVALG
Indkaldelse til generalforsamling
petence". Det er håbet for denne konference,
der er rettet mod samtlige sproglærergrupper
og altså også dansklærere, at
det fælles arbejde kan resultere i en fælles
strategi vedr, skriftlig fremstilling.
SprogSam
Mødeaktiviteten i år har været begrænset
grundet udskiftning af henholdsvis folkeskolernes
og handelsskolernes repræsentant.
Der har dog været enkelte møder mellem
repræsentanter for engelsklærere, der
underviser på seminarierne og Engelsklærerforeningen
for Gymnasiet og HE Formålet
med disse møder er gensidig information
om ministerielle udmeldinger for
skoleformerne, oplysning om igangværende
forsøg og interessante pædagogiske tiltag
for de forskellige niveauer, hvor engelsk
indgår.
Den fælles konference om IKT i
engelskundervisningen, der afvikles den 1.
Der indkaldes til generalforsamling i Engelsklærerforeningen for Gymnasiet og
HF fredag d. 29. januar 1999 kl. 16-17.30 i Odense Congress Center, Ørbækvej,
Odense.
Dagsorden ifølge vedtægterne. Sager, der ønskes optaget på dagsordenen, skal
være formanden i hænde senest 4 uger før generalforsamlingen.
Der er 4 bestyrelsesmedlemmer på valg: Gitte Vest Barkholt, Claus Pindstrup og
Jens Erik Engelbrett ønsker alle at genopstille som kandidater til bestyrelsen; Jørgen
Bissenbakker genopstiller ikke. Der skal vælges 1 suppleant til bestyrelsen.
Forslag til kandidater skal være bestyrelsen i hænde senest 4 uger før generalforsamlingen.
På bestyrelsens vegne
Vibeke Hansen

og 2. december '98 i Jelling, har pæn tilslutning
fra medlemmerne.
Fagdidaktisk Udvalg
Efter sidste generalforsamling blev der nedsat
et Fagdidaktisk Udvalg på 8 medlemmer
(nuværende og tidligere medlemmer af bestyrelsen,
samt af tidligere Skriftligt Ud
har været afholdt 2 møder i ud-
-valg). Der
valget alene, samt et enkelt møde med fagkonsulenterne
i anledning af "forsøget",
dvs, forsøg med ændring af skriftlig eksamen
på B niveau. Det er den ændring, der
bl.a. er blevet diskuteret med fagkonsulenterne
på en række møder over hele landet
her i efteråret.
Fagdidaktisk Udvalg har udarbejdet et
kommissorium for sit arbejde (aftrykt i
#108 af Anglo files, september '98), hvor
det bl.a. præciseres at udvalgets opgave er
at bidrage til at udvikle arbejdet med mål og
midler i engelskfagets forskellige discipliner
i gymnasie- og HF-undervisningen, samt at
følge med i og formidle relevant forskning
på området. På fremtidige møder vil udvalget
gå i gang med konkrete diskussioner
såsom spørgsmålet om, hvordan vi skaber
progression fra start- til slutniveau, vægtningen
mellem litterære tekster og andre
tekstarter, det skriftlige arbejdes placering i
forhold til hele pensum, brugen af IT i undervisningen,
kanonbegrebet, hvad er "britisk"
litteratur. Der er mange presserende
problemstillinger, hvilket også de forskellige
debatindlæg i nærværende nr. af Anglo files
vil bevidne.
Gymnasieudvalget
Som en pendant til foreningens HF-udvalg
blev der ved konstitueringen efter sidste
generalforsamling oprettet et udvalg, der
skulle se på, følge med i og kommentere de
tiltag, der måtte komme vedr, den forventede
gymnasiereform. Samt evt, selv
komme med indlæg i bladet, som kunne
FRA BESTYRELSE OG UDVALG
6
sætte en debat i gang om forsøg, nytænk
er holdt ét møde. På dette
-ning, o.a. Der
diskuterede udvalgsmedlemmerne et muligt
kommissorium, men da en del af dette udvalgs
arbejde kan siges at være en overlapning
af det arbejde, der foregår i Fagdidaktisk
Udvalg, og da der også lægges hurdles
ud for udvalgets arbejde, når konferencer
om gymnasiets fremtid har et så begrænset
deltagerantal, at udvalget ikke kan få en
repræsentant med, så kan det være at det
ene møde, der hidtil har været holdt, bliver
en enlig svale. Men først den kommende
generalforsamling med derefter følgende
diskussion af arbejdsopgaver i bestyrelsen
kan vise dette.
HF- udvalget
Udvalget har haft meget lav mødevirksomhed
i forgange år, men lægger netop nu op
til at tage fat omkring resultaterne af HFforsøgene
på de 2-årige kurser. Endvidere
følger udvalget med stor opmærksomhed
udviklingen på VUC området med udgangspunkt
i et stærkt ønske om at fastholde det
sammenlignelige niveau til gymnasieområdet.
IT Udvalg
Efter sidste generalforsamling blev det besluttet
at oprette et IT udvalg udfra et ønske
om at skabe overblik over og sammenhæng
mellem forskellige initiativer, hvori
engelsk indgår med anvendelse af IT.
Indtil videre har udvalget ikke kunnet
mødes pga. travlhed, men gruppen har arbejdet
på at fastlægge et kommissorium ad
elektronisk vej. Ironisk nok har netop dette
vist sig at være problematisk, idet
SkoleKom to gange i sommerens løb har
ryddet klienternes mail-bokse!
Udvalgets medlemmer arbejder imidlertid
på forskellig vis på IT-siden i foreningen:
med Anglo files hjemmeside, med undervisning
på IT-kurser, som webmaster på

foreningens hjemmeside og med etablering
af hjemmeside i forbindelse med udlandskurser.
Sidstnævnte er sket både på "eget"
initiativ i forbindelse med Globekurset i år,
og dels på Gymnasieafdelingens foranledning
i projekt med UNI-C i forbindelse
med Irlandskurset.
Anglo files
Efter en kort periode med kun 3 redaktører
er Ole Juul Lund indtrådt i redaktionen.
Bladet er udkommet i sædvanlig fin stil
med de planlagte 5 numre pr. årgang, nemlig:
#105 fra februar'98 med temaet "Blair's
Storbritannien", #106 fra april, med temaet
"Sydafrika", #107 fra maj om "Rytmisk
musik", #108 fra september er det traditionelle
"Eksamensnummer ", og endelig er
der nærværende nummer #109, der har
temaet "Irland". En del af numrene knytter
an til afholdte kurser, men ganske mange
har temaer, hvor redaktørerne må ud og
opsøge stoffet/skribenterne. Vi modtager
også en del uopfordret materiale, og en del
af dette aftrykkes i bladet, der udkommer i
omkring 1500 eksemplarer, og jo er det
vigtigste sted for al debat om vort fag.
Kassererens bemærkninger.
Som meddelt i Anglo files #108 blev en del
medlemmer slettet i september pga. manglende
kontingentindbetaling. Siden da har
en del af disse meldt sig ind igen, og der er
kommet nye til, således at vi nu er 1590
medlemmer - altså en lille stigning i forhold
til sidste år, hvor der var 1547 medlemmer.
Af dette års registrerede medlemmer har
1324 opgivet deres cpr. nr. I november sendes
en diskette til Told & Skat med disse
cpr. nr., samt oplysninger om kontingentstørrelse.
Der er 1409 medlemmer ansat
ved gymnasier, HF-kurser og VUC'er med
fuld tid, som derfor har betalt fuldt kontingent
på 350,- for 1998. 161 medlemmer har
betalt halvt kontingent, enten på grund af
FRA BESTYRELSE OG UDVALG
7
ansættelse på under halv tid, eller fordi de
er studerende, pensionister eller ansat ved
andre skoleformer. Der er 10 nye medlemmer,
hvis kontingent endnu ikke er registreret
og 10 medlemmer der, uvist af hvilken
grund, har betalt det, der er kaldt 'divergerende
kontingent'. Det dækker kontingentindbetalinger
fra 200 kr. til 400 kr.
På et kursus for nylig blev kassereren
spurgt, hvad foreningens penge egentlig går
til. Vedkommende var ikke selv medlem,
men ville gerne vide, hvad de mange
kontingentkroner bliver brugt på. Den største
post på budgettet er nok medlemsbladet,
både trykning og distribution. Af andre
poster kan nævnes udsendelse af information
til alle skoler, en til to gange om året,
diverse små og store redskaber, der er nødvendige
for bestyrelsesmedlemmernes
virke, medlemsskab af f.eks. Nordic-
Canadian Association, som udsender et
tidsskrift et par gange om året og som ind
til deltagelse i konferencer på Århus -byder
Universitet en gang om året, og meget mere.
Men der går også en ret så stor del til
mødeaktivitet. Bestyrelsesmedlemmerne
deltager i diverse udvalg og sammenslutninger:
GymSprog, SprogSam, HF-udvalg,
Gymnasieudvalg, Fagdidaktisk Udvalg, ITudvalg,
Internationalt Udvalg, m.fl.
Det koster naturligvis foreningen penge
til rejseomkostninger m.m., ligesom det jo
også koster noget, når vi sender repræsentanter
til møder og konferencer arrangeret
af universiteterne eller andre instanser.
Vi gør dette for at kunne få ideer til kursusvirksomhed
for medlemmerne: vi møder
interessante foredragsholdere, der kan
bruges til regionalkurser eller internatkurser,
eller som vi gerne vil have til landet for
at holde foredrag ved generalforsamlingen
o.l.
Endvidere opfylder vi ved denne virksomhed
en vigtig mission som sparringspartnere
for GYA og GL, idet vi, jvf. vore

formålsparagraf, arbejder på at "følge og
fremme" engelskfaget og dets udvikling.
Og a propos kursusafholdelse, så er det
jo sådan, at alle engelsklærere under GYA
kan deltage. Også ikke -medlemmer! De
deltager på den måde i arrangementer, der
ofte er udviklet og kommet i stand via aktiviteter,
der betales af medlemmernes penge.
Men når der er ministerielt tilskud til kursusvirksomheden,
kan der principielt ikke
skelnes mellem medlemmer og ikke -medlemmer.
Hvorfor så være medlem? Ja, for det
første får man medlemsbladet. Her får man
de meddelelser, der er nødvendige for at
kunne følge med i fagets udvikling. Og man
får fagkonsulenternes kommentarer og ministerielle
oplysninger om ændringer o.a.
Man får kollegers bidrag til bladet i form af
gode ideer, inspirerende artikler, m.m. Og
man kan læse anmeldelser af nyt undervisningsmateriale.
Samt naturligvis holde sig
underrettet om kurser.
Og for det andet så kan man deltage i de
faglige kurser - vel vidende, at de er lavet af
kolleger for kolleger. Og det er vel ikk' så
ringe endda?
Regnskabet for 1998 er slet ikke opgjort
endnu. Men det ser ud til, at der igen i år vil
være penge på bogen, når året gøres op.
Når kontingentet alligevel foreslås fastsat til
henholdsvis 350 kr./175 kr., skyldes det de
FRA BESTYRELSE OG UDVALG
nye regler for tilskud til kurser. Vi må desværre
regne med at nogle kurser, især
generalforsamlingskurset og det årlige kursus
med regionssekretærer, ikke vil kunne
løbe rundt "ved egen kraft ". Da disse kurser
er en væsentlig del af foreningens arbejde,
må vi se i øjnene, at vi kun kan gennemføre
dem ved at sikre et evt, underskud
af foreningens midler. Det har man før
måttet ty til i tilfælde af beskedent deltager
og relativt høje omkostninger, så det
-antal
er ikke en ny foranstaltning. Men det er
første gang vi allerede i planlægningsfasen
forudser nødvendigheden af en sådan
"underskudsgaranti". Ellers er princippet
klart nok: at kursernes økonomi og foreningens
økonomi vedrører adskilte kasser
med hvert sit regnskab.
Derfor foreslås det, at kontingentet igen
for 1999 fastsættes til kr. 350,-/kr. 175,- ,
og der vil blive sendt girokort ud til medlemmerne
umiddelbart efter generalforsamlingen.
I følgeskrivelsen til girokortet vil
man blive opfordret til at meddele, om man
har en e-mail adresse. Kassereren har fået
mulighed for også at registrere denne oplys
som så kan komme med ved næste
-ning,
udsendelse af medlemslister. Og man er
naturligvis fortsat velkommen til at oplyse
cpr. nr., hvis man vil kunne trække kontingentet
fra i skat.

TIL OG FRA
FAGKONSULENTERNE
An open letter to the fagkonsulenter in English
Fra undervisere på Engelsk Institut ved landets universiteter
It has come to our attention that in a
proposal for a new, revised syllabus for the
study of English being prepared by the
Ministry of Education, literature in English
is to be defined as mainly ("fortrinsvis ")
British and American. Quite apart from the
devious ambiguity and general inadequacy
of the adjective "British" (which it would
be distracting to take up for further
discussion at this point), this definition
mainly ("fortrinsvis") disregards, and thus
relegates, the literature of at least half of the
English-speaking world.
This is a retrograde step at a time when
educational institutions everywhere,
including Britain and America, have
abandoned such preferential classifications
for the perfectly good reason that they
misrepresent the historical and geographical
development of English and literature in
that language. The study of literature created
outside the domain of Britain and the
U.S.A. is currently a major area of growth
and development within the discipline.
Whatever the intentions of those who
drafted the current proposal (and these are
not made explicit in the text) its definition
of literature, as at present formulated,
would serve the interests of — and promote
— an imperial prejudice about the canon of
English literature. This is certainly not
avoided, but rather reinforced, by the
insertion of the word "fortrinsvis ".
The proposed definition cannot be
defended as a way of guaranteeing the
representation of earlier English literature
in the syllabus. In fact it only makes this
awkward, as there is a good deal of earlier
English literature (such as the works of
Shakespeare) which it would be
anachronistic to define as "British". The
inclusions of literature from the past could
simply be guaranteed by including a
stipulation that some of the texts studied
should have been produced before a certain
date or within a certain period.
When it comes to the literature of the
twentieth century, which is extensively
studied in the gymnasium, an emphasis on
that produced in Britain and the United
States of America seriously misrepresents
developments in English-language literature
during the period. In the half century since
the Second World War the major growth
and development in literature in English
has occurred outside Britain and America. It
is perfectly reasonable to claim that now,
and for the past generation, literature in the
English language has been predominantly
(fortrinsvis) produced in the half of the
English-speaking world not given priority in
the proposed definition. The situation, at
the end of the century, as a result of
developments which accelerated after 1945,
is precisely the opposite to that denoted by
the phrase "fortrinsvis britisk og amerikansk".
The sources for this go much

further back; the idea of "British" literature
hardly survives the turn of the nineteenth
into the twentieth century. It would be
impossible to defend the definition
"fortrinsvis britiske"-even for the literature
of the first half of this century without
misrepresenting the roles and contribution
of Irish and expatriate writers. Furthermore,
a very large amount of the writing produced
by twentieth century writers who worked
within the borders of Britain (though it is
highly improbable that any one of them
would have accepted the definition of their
work as "British") only makes sense in
relation to (and in dialogue with) writing in
English which transgresses those borders.
Altogether, it is fair to claim that whether
quality, quantity or both are taken into
account, at least half the literature in English
produced since 1900 does not fall into the
categories "British" and "American".
In so far as the teaching of English literature
in the gymnasium draws predominantly on
writings from the present century, the
emphasis conveyed by the words "fortrinsvis
britisk og amerikansk" would do students
of the subject a disservice. It is inevitable
that students educated on the assumption
that literature in English was "fortrinsvis
britisk og amerikansk" will adopt this
assumption, regardless of whether it is made
explicit. They would thus be poorly equipped
with an unbalanced sense of English literature
and inculcated with an imperialistic or neoimperialistic
view of the world. This
inadequate preparation would put them at a
disadvantage in encounters with the Englishspeaking
world where, even in Britain and
America, the idea that literature in English
is "fortrins-vis britisk og amerikansk"
would seem not only quaint but offensive.
This would not matter, of course, if it were
somehow true or reasonable, but literary
history in the twentieth century demonstrates
that it is neither.
TIL OG FRA FAGKONSULENTERNE
10
Danish scholars and educators have made a
notable contribution to the study of this
literary history. The pioneering role of the
English institute at the University of
Aarhus in developing research on English
literatures outside Britain and the U.S.A.
has given Denmark an international
reputation which is sustained and amplified
by work now being produced in all the
Danish universities, where teaching,
curriculum development and research in
literary cultures in the half (or more) of the
English-speaking world not included under
the rubrics "British" and "American" is
part of the programme in English studies.
A national forum for co-operation in the
discipline exists and a centre to develop the
study of "colonial" and "post-colonial"
literatures as part of an integrated approach
to literature is being set up at the university
of Copenhagen. It would be unfortunate if
students and teachers at Danish gymnasia
were discouraged from availing themselves
fully of a body of scholarship for which
Denmark is internationally renowned. The
definition of literature being proposed for
the gymnasium syllabus would have the
effect of formally institutionalising a
rejection of this scholarship.
It might be expected that a new or revised
curriculum for English would define literature
(if it is necessary to define it at all) in a
comprehensive way which acknowledged
(or reflected) its historical and geographical
development. A loose definition, employing
the term "English" standing alone, might
not be objectionable if it were generally
understood that "English" denoted literature
in the English language, but once the term
"American" is introduced "English" has to
be replaced by "British" which unmistakably
(though very clumsily) comes to denote
literature produced within the boundaries
of a particular place and nation. The
problem is that the English language (unlike

1,
1,1art
. i, 00 ArL- 5
f ,
TIL OG FRA FAGKONSULENTERNE
some other languages) has no determinate Copenhagen University:
national boundaries. Any attempt to define Bruce Clunies Ross (lektor),
literature in the English language in terms Martin Leer (lektor),
of national boundaries is therefore open to Eva Rask Knudsen (adjunkt),
well-founded objections and raises the Merete Borch (adjunkt),
spectre of imperialism. Tabish Khair (Ph.D.-studerende),
Ann Langwadt (Ph.D.-studerende),
The literary condition of the English- Charles Lock (professor).
speaking world is such that no part of it
needs to be promoted by being given Roskilde University Centre:
preferential identification in the syllabus. Kirsten Holst Petersen (lektor),
Gymnasium teachers educated in the Lars Jensen (ekstern lektor)
excellent programmes in English at the
Danish universities, supplemented by the Odense University:
in-service training courses and abundance Lars Ole Saurberg (professor),
of educational textbooks available to them, Gillian Eilersen (ekstern lektor)
can be relied upon to present balanced
programmes of literature in English to their Aarhus University:
students. Prem Poddar (lektor),
We hope that you will reconsider the James Bulman-May (ekstern lektor)
proposal.
Down-To-Earth er en overkommelig
sprogbog med alt det, en matematikereller
hf-klasse har brug for: den engelske
grammatik præsenteret på en klar,
pragmatisk måde, med bunker af opgaver
og øvelser, også i synonymer og præpositioner.
112 sider, garnhæftet.
Pris: 108 ekskl. moms.
Forlaget Klim • Ny Tjørnegade 19 • Postboks 1090 • 8200 Århus N.
Tlf: 86 10 37 00 • Fax: 86 10 30 45 • e-mail: klim@post5.tele.dk
11

IEMA ...............................................
Irland
Reinventing Ireland
Al Dec/an Kiberd, Professor of Anglo-Irish Literature at University College Dublin
On the immaculately painted wall of my
local pub, in navy-blue ink written in a neat
copperplate hand, appears a tiny graffito:
"Ulster is British — Let's keep it that way".
Dubliners are born parodists and northern
unionists are so easy to mimic. Right now,
it's such a rum joke that not even the
house-proud publican would want to wipe
the line clean. Besides, he may privately
agree with the sentiment. Not everybody in
the Republic, currently enjoying an
unprecedented affluence, wants to assume
full political and fiscal responsibility for the
war-scarred, battle-weary north. The
"unfinished business" of reunification may
have to wait for a few more decades. These
days, the business of the Republic is
business.
Just two years ago, for the first time in
history, it became clear that the per capita
incomes of Irish citizens were about to
surpass those of Britain. It is a measure of
the new self-confidence that the feat went
largely unremarked and uncelebrated:
people were simply too busy and too blase
to take time out for an exercise in selfcongratulation.
No longer were they inclined
to compare themselves with the British
anyway: all eyes were now focussed on the
European Union and on the convergence
criteria of the Maastricht Treaty which pave
the way for a single market and currency.
The Irish economy, of all economies in
12
western Europe, is by common consent the
one best primed to meet those criteria.
Ten years ago, it seemed that things might
be very different. The emigration was
running at 40,000 a year and the state owed
more per capita to bankers than the debtridden
Mexicans. The Daily Telegraph of
London commented in an editorial on the
Irish election of spring 1988 that "the only
thing now keeping Ireland out of the Third
World is the weather". There were many
commentators in the Republic who seemed
to agree. The country's foremost media
celebrity, Gay Byrne, repeatedly informed
listeners to his morning radio show that
Ireland was "banjaxed", before making
much-discussed phone-calls on air to
flourishing young couples who had recently
emigrated to the United States or Australia.
After six decades of political independence,
the southern Irish were by no means
convinced that their experiment had
worked. The popular mood was best
caught by historian Joe Lee in Ireland:
Politics and Society 1912-85, a jeremiad
which argued that in material terms the
country was worse off than at the moment
of independence when the British left
twenty-six counties in 1922.
Northern unionists had never entertained
doubts on that score. Resolutely British,

TEMA: Irland - kultur, historie og identitet
Dec/an Kiberds book Inventing Ireland (Harvard U.P. 1996) has won
three major literary awards. Reinventing Ireland is the manuscript of a
lecture given to members of the Danish Association of Teachers of
English on a course in Dublin September 9, 1998. It is reproduced
here with special permission from Professor Kiberd.
they could over subsequent decades point
to better roads, better buildings, better
health cover, as palpable benefits of the
British connection in their six counties.
And they had other evidence to prove the
point: in the early 1960s, for example,
Northern Ireland spent more on education
than the Republic, which had three times
the population. The backwardness of the
south was linked in the unionist folk mind
with the priest-ridden nature of its
confessional state.
But change was afoot. In 1972 a popular
referendum removed the special position
reserved for the Roman Catholic church in
the constitution and endorsed the country's
entry to the European Economic
Community. Gradually, the censorship of
books and films was being relaxed and the
laws against contraception and divorce were
liberalised. Even in periods of economic
recession, social services were brought up
to higher and higher levels, not in some
disingenuous attempt to woo unionists into
a united Ireland, but simply because
13
citizens insisted on modern levels of
comfort and social security. Admission to
the EEC in 1973 brought subventions
which helped to develop the infrastructure
of roads and ports, while farming boomed
as wily Dublin politicians learned how to
milk the Brussels secretariat for grants.
Soon, farmers in Northern Ireland were
asking southern politicians to make
representations on their behalf. The northsouth
institutions, which are an integral
part of the current settlement proposals
appeal as much to the pragmatism of
unionists as to the desire on the part of
northern nationalists for a real governmental
expression of their long suppressed identity.
Indeed, the willingness of the Irish
Republican Army to cease fire in 1993 and
the readiness of its political wing Sinn Fein
to promote the current settlement may be
taken as further indications of the new selfconfidence.
The planting of bombs in large
cities and towns was always a sign of
insecurity and grievance: it was a tactic of
men and women who believed that their

TEMA: Irland - kultur, historie og identitet
worries and disabilities were not receiving
due attention. Now the leaders of Sinn Fein
converse regularly with Bill Clinton. Over
the past decade, they have achieved far
more through wily spin-doctoring and
media manipulation than they ever attained
by their links to terrorism. And this has
always been the underlying logic of Irish
history. After all, Sinn Fein's great victory in
the 1918 elections was due not to its
involvement in a campaign of violence but
to precisely the reverse factor: its principled
opposition to the threat of the British
authorities to conscript Irish soldiers into
World War One. The Irish, anything but
fighters by nature, have ever since warmed
to and voted for Sinn Fein in peaceful
mode and turned their backs on the
movement when it resorted to systematic
violence. Gerry Adams and Martin
McGuinness have learned that lesson well.
Today, Dublin is one of the youth capitals
of Europe: students and wandervogels
flock to it as, a few years back, they poured
into Tallinn and Prague. In every other pub,
you will find a barmaid who has come from
Spain to study the works of WB. Yeats or
an au pair from Austria who drifted in three
years ago and has stayed. If you phone
from an American city to book seats at an
opera in Milan or Vienna, your call will as
like as not go through a tele-sales centre in
the Irish capital. The old motto which used
to feature on the walls of Boston pubs —
"Hire the Irish — Before They Hire You"
— is now to be seen and heard on the
banks of the Liffey, for not all Irish students
would deign to work for the rates which
sometimes satisfy the incoming continentals.
House-prices, meanwhile, have gone
through the roof. A three-bedroom semidetached
house in a middling suburb such
as Clontarf would in 1995 have fetched
14
£80,000: now it can go for over £200,000.
With low interest rates, a limited housing
stock and 1980s emigrants returning with
plenty of money, the rise may be set to
continue for some time. More than one
bishop has spoken out about the difficulties
facing first-time house-buyers about the
attendant threat to marriage, as an
institution. Others have regretted that the
new prosperity has not done much to
alleviate the rampant drugs problem or the
incidence of crime, now a feature of rural
as well as urban areas. And though the
unprecedented inflows of immigrants are
generally welcomed by a community whose
memory recalls a time when its "illegals"
desperately needed a similar welcome
elsewhere, an ugly racism has manifested
itself among some mainstream politicians
who should know better. Affluence has
brought its symptoms as well as its solaces.
Ten years ago, not long after the appearance
of that Daily Telegraph editorial, the
novelist William Trevor was interviewed on
BBC television. He was asked to contrast
the Ireland in which he had grown up with
the England in which he then very happily
lived. He surprised his interviewer by
remarking that whenever he returned to
England he was overwhelmed by the sense
of its majestic past, "but when I get out at
Dublin Airport I always think that this
place isn't finished yet. It still has an open
future and I would love to be around in a
few years time to see how it all turns out".
Many outsiders seem surprised by Ireland's
modernity. Irish-Americans, who come
from St. Patrick's Day parades from which
gay marchers are banned, are sometimes
astounded to find a ready welcome for
presentations by homosexual persons in
the Dublin celebrations. Others seem even
more disturbed by the apparent materialism

TEMA: Irland - kultur, historie og identitet
of the new elites, who rise at ungodly hours
and fling themselves into gridlocked traffic
or skip lunch in all-too-familiar attempts to
clinch an extra deal. What, they ask, ever
happened to the ancient land of whitewashed
cottages and rolling hills, the land
that time forgot?
The truth is that that Ireland existed more
in Hollywood than in Hackball's Cross. The
current surge of modernity has been in the
making for over a hundred and fifty years:
and recent scholarly studies, composed in
the spirit of the present moment, have
helped to emphasise the continuing
modernity of the Irish predicament. They
show that, far from being obsessed with
the past, what the Irish really worship is
their own power over it, including (if need
be) their power to liquidate seemingly
sacred traditions.
The speed with which a single generation in
the mid-nineteenth century disposed of the
Irish language is one illustration of that
thesis. For centuries the colonial authorities
had devalued the native culture and sought
(in theory, at least) to replace it with
English: but to no significant effect. The
great majority of people continued to speak
their own language down to the 1840s.
Suddenly, all that changed and, unlike other
emigrant groups bound for the New World,
the Irish did not learn English on arrival in
North America or Australia: uniquely, they
chose to abandon their native tongue and
to learn English in the homeland. Within a
quarter-century after the great famines most
changed languages and thereafter, came to
approach their own cultural past uncertainly,
apologetically. The contemporary poet John
Montague has likened the landscape of his
native county Tyrone, marked by vestigial
Gaelic placenames, to a manuscript in a lost
language:
16
All around us shards of a lost tradition,
The whole countryside a manuscript
We had lost the skill to read,
A part of ourpast disinherited
But fumbled like a blind man
Along the fingertips of instinct.
Why did the Irish in Ireland choose to learn
English? Many explanations have been
given; to prepare their children for likely
emigration; to master the language of
modern commerce; to do well at school
studies. Perhaps the greatest paradox of
nineteenth-century history is that English
became the language of Irish separatism,
the one in which the nationalist case was
put. If Benedict Anderson is right in saying
that print-language creates a nationalism,
and not a particular language per se, then
English was the ideal medium through
which the abstract bonding of people into a
unified movement could be achieved.
Through newspapers, ballad-sheets,
handbills and pamphlets, the very
technology which underpinned nationalism
was available in the English rather than the
Irish language. Even fluent Irish speakers
like Daniel O'Connell, when they addressed
mainly Irish-speaking audiences, chose to
speak in the language of London for much
the same reasons that Arab protestors in
Baghdad today hold up placards in English
rather than Arabic: in hopes that the
sentiments would be received, understood
and acted upon by hesitant well-wishers in
a distant metropolis. Given also the fact
that colonialism has always worked off a
line of demarcation between coloniser and
colonised, and that in Ireland the natives
looked just like the settlers, it may have
secretly suited the English over the centuries
to have most of the natives Irish-speaking.
In that context, the sudden desire of
millions to learn English might be seen as
an attempt to thwart the cultural version of

TEMA: Irland - kultur, historie og identitet
the "colour bar", as an anti-colonial
mechanism in itself (rather than an act of
national apostasy, as it is seen in some
nationalist circles). The awesome
achievement of the people in mastering a
new, difficult language with little institutional
help has never been sufficiently recognised,
even in a modern Ireland which has utterly
failed, with massive institutional support, to
reverse that process.
Yet acceptance of English as the major
medium of Irish nationalism seemed to
undermine the very basis of the separatist
claim, for if the distinctive Gaelic culture
was rapidly evaporating, then the Irish
Question could be treated as one that was
more economic than political in nature.
It was as if the Irish had moved too far too
fast in cultural terms. To give up one
language and learn another would perforce
become one of the defining experiences of
modernity for many persons in the twentieth
century, but for hundreds of thousands of
Irish this happened in the nineteenth. Far
from being a backward-looking people, the
Irish have for the past century and a half
been one of the more future-oriented
peoples of the world. To have begun your
life in a windswept valley of West Mayo and
to have ended it in Hammersmith or Hell's
Kitchen was to have experienced the
deracination and reorientation that would
for so many millions constitute the central
"progress" of the twentieth century. Not
necessarily modern by nature, the Irish
were among the first to be caught in a
modernising predicament. If at times they
evinced a nostalgia for a lost Gaelic past,
they did so as the natural human response
to being hurtled into the future at such
break-neck speed. Those who suffer from
giddiness or motion-sickness may take
some comfort in the rear-view mirror, but
18
to infer that they are fixated upon the past
would be untrue. Yet this is, of course, a
widely-held belief best exemplified perhaps
by that British Airways pilot who told his
passengers in the early 1970s: "we are now
approaching Belfast Airport —please put
your watches back three hundred years".
For such a people modernisation has not
been so much an option as a donne. The
sense of being denied a familiar context
and of being asked to improvise a set of
values in a terrifying open space is
something which links John Montague's
lines with the world of Samuel Beckett's
tramps in Waiting for Godot. On the stage
the tramps are forced to invent a set of
instant traditions: "Yesterday.....In my
opinion....I was here..... yesterday...." They
must also imagine a detailed landscape,
filled with subtle hints as to how they
might behave, when what confronts them
is a blasted, near-empty setting.
The official textbooks of nationalist Ireland
in the decades after independence tended
not to admit much of this. It was easier in a
Brit-bashing mythology to blame the old
enemy for the near-erasure of the Irish
language than to recognise that Irish people
themselves had made the decision not to
speak it. To admit that would, after all,
throw a painfully sharp light onto the
contemporary situation, in which Irish
people still have a choice: either to speak or
not to speak their native language. For an
analogy with the distinct lack of sentiment
with which a mid-nineteenth century
people `dumped' Irish, one has only to
consider the recent collapse in the teaching
authority of the Irish Catholic church.
Through the 1990s it has reeled from one
scandal to another: the revelation that the
Bishop of Galway had a grown-up son by
an American woman, the exposure of

TEMA: Irland - kultur, historie og identitet
sexual abuse of children by paedophile
priests, the uncovering of cruelty in
orphanages run by nuns, and so on. Not
only has church attendance dipped badly
(especially in the cities), but so also has the
obedience of the flock which remains. As a
sign of this, at least one in five children is
born out of wedlock (about 8000 per
annum) and the average family size has
fallen from 4.0 in 1971 to 2.1. The late Fr
Peter Connolly, a gifted literary critic and a
liberal, predicted these trends on Irish radio
in 1980. "When Irish Catholicism goes, it
will go so fast that no-one will know what
is happening", he said, adding that it would
take sociologists years to register the
seismic effects. He may, in saying that, have
been considering the similar shock-effect of
the decline of Irish, for it can be argued
that political nationalism in the later
nineteenth century was what filled the
cultural vacuum which it left in its wake.
One of the many paradoxes of Irish
nationalism is that it never made much
headway in Irish speaking areas, but
20
prospered hugely in places that had been
heavily anglicised.
From the retrospect of today, the history of
Ireland in the nineteenth century reads like
one long exercise in modernisation. As
leader of the movement for Catholic
Emancipation in the 1820s, Daniel O'Connell
was and remains one of the heroes of
British liberalism: his portrait today holds
pride of place in the hallway of the Reform
Club of London. He was the first great
mass-democratic politician of the modern
age, attracting upwards of a million people
to his monster meetings for the repeal of
the Act of Union at historic venues in the
1840s. The nearest modern analogy would
probably be the Live-Aid concerts. It was
partly through his influence that Ireland
experienced the introduction of a streamlined
system of national education in the
1830s, years before the benefits of such a
system were spread across Britain. Similarly,
Ireland enjoyed a modern postal service
some years before Britain. The reasons for

TEMA: Irland - kultur, historie og identitet
such modernisation were obvious enough:
as a colony the country was a laboratory in
which innovations of social policy could be
tested. Some of these were painful in the
extreme, but others were positive and
developmental. Ireland became in fact the
sounding-board for British modernity, the
zone in which the future might be tested. If
things didn't work out well, little harm was
done, but if the experiment bore fruit,
lessons, could be inferred. Not in every
case, however. Some of the most progressive
reforms of the later nineteenth century,
such as the disestablishment of church and
state in 1869 or the dismantling of the
landlord system in the 1880s, have yet, over
a century later, to be fully completed in
Britain.
Hence, the dawning sense among recent
commentators that Ireland is a case of
modernity avant la lettre, modernity before
modernisation. For instance, the Rising at
Easter 1916 against British rule has been
routinely depicted by revisionist historians
as a nostalgic attempt by poets and
playwrights to return to a Gaelic Ireland;
but in point of fact it was really a
contribution to a wider debate about how
best to modernise, how to seize control of
the catastrophic process of modernisation
which, in the previous century, had brought
famines and uprooting. The rebels wanted,
in short, the benefits of modernity and the
liquidation of its costs: and so they
presented themselves as both modern and
counter-modern at one and the same time.
In a sense, nothing could have been more
romantic than the symbolic choice of
Easter and springtime for an attempt by
poets and playwrights to bring back the
Gaelic world: but the date made more
pragmatic than poetic sense, since it was a
public holiday, leaving the colonial
21
administration off-guard and vulnerable, as
the police and military spent their day at the
races. A similar mixture of the poetic and
pragmatic, the past and the future, may be
found in the Proclamation of the Irish
Republic. It began with the phrase
"Irishmen and Irishwomen", thereby
including women in the body politic at a
time when British women still had no vote
but when suffragism was on the rise. Over
fifty women fought as soldiers in the Rising
and one woman, Hanna Sheehy
Skeffington, was appointed to the inner
cabinet in the event of the insurrectionary
government taking power. She would have
been the first female government minister
in the world.
The rebel leader Patrick Pearse summoned
the Celtic hero Cuchulainn to his side, it is
true, but he did so to validate his hopes of
a welfare state "cherishing all the children
of the nation equally". As a vision that had
as much in common with Rosa Luxemburg
as with Cathleen ni Houlihan: and the Irish
modernist who shaped it knew how to have
things both ways. After all, he was the same
man who had studied the educational
methods of Maria Montessori in Belgium
years earlier and imported them to Ireland
with the soothing assurance that they
amounted to no more than a return to the
old fosterage systems of Gaelic Ireland.
Pearse, a man with something new to offer,
chose to present it as a reassuring
restoration.
At much the same time the writer James
Joyce was learning how to gift-wrap
Ulysses, the most subversive narrative of
the age, in the structures of one of
Europe's oldest stories, Homer's Odyssey.
Both Joyce and Pearse relished their
capacity to make the past answer present
and future needs. This was one way of

TEMA: Irland - kultur, historie og identitet
coping with the onset of modernity: the
both/and philosophy which refused the
either/or option and chose instead to see
both past and future as complementary
rather than opposed categories. By this
means, Joyce was able to fuse the methods
of nineteenth-century realism with the
magical qualities of oral literature, devising
in the process that very Magic Realism
which has swept the post-colonial world.
Its wisdom was close to that of the old
Connemara woman who, surrounded by
her gadgetry of phone, fridge and vacuumcleaner,
was asked by an American
anthropologist whether she really believed
in fairies. "I do not, sir", she told him
sternly, "but they're there anyway".
The effect of British policy had been to
turn Ireland into a crucible of modernity.
Friedrich Engels had predicted as much
when he wrote in a letter to Karl Marx that
the British wanted "to make the Irish
strangers in their own country". That was
in fact a formula for the transformation of
the entire island into a sort of Bohemia, an
experimental zone in which all human
relationships might be redefined. Small
wonder, then, that John Millington Synge
should find on the Aran Islands just the
sort of commune which he thought had
fallen forever on the left bank of Paris with
the defeat of the radicals of 1871.
Radical thinkers in Britain as well as
continental Europe had always been
responsive to this quality. Marx, for
instance, had repeatedly spoken of Ireland
as the key to revolution in Britain only if
colonial rule in Ireland were broken could
socialists expect the wider collapse of
imperialism and with it of chauvinist ideas
in Britain itself. By seeking national rights
the Irish would be thoroughly international
in effect. For a real revolution to occur, said
22
Marx, the aristocracy had to be overthrown
and that was more likely to be achieved in
Ireland, "the Achilles heel of empire".
James Connolly, the socialist leader of the
Citizen Army in the 1916 Rising, put the
same idea more colourfully when he wrote
that "a pin in the hand of a child can pierce
the heart of a giant".
The international left had no doubts about
the modernity of the 1916 Rising. "The
misfortune of the Irish", lamented Lenin,
"was that they rose too soon" (surely the
only occasion in human history before the
emergence of the Celtic Tiger when that
accusation has been levelled at them), but
he added as an important qualifier "before
the revolt of the European proletariat had
matured". Had they waited for another year
or two, their revolt might have called forth
repression at home, leading to mutinies by
Irishmen in the British ranks and copycat
reactions among other war-weary troops at
the front. The rebels might have created a
world-historical precedent.
James Connolly was well aware of these
potentials when he threw in his lot with the
nationalist Pearse, but he was not fetishist
of the past. Warning that past-worship
might serve only as a cover-up for the
mediocrity of the present, he said that a
neglect of living issues might "only succeed
in crystallising nationalism into a tradition,
glorious and heroic indeed, but still only a
tradition". He, too, was an Irish modernist,
aware of the need to present his anarchosyndicalism
as a restoration. In Labour in
Irish History he argued that social would be
a return to the old Gaelic system of
landholding, except that on this occasion it
would be the state rather that the chieftain
holding land in the name of an entire
people. That representational tactic —
what Terry Eagleton has called "the archaic

TEMA: Irland - kultur, historie og identitet
avant-garde" — has been a feature of Irish
modernists ever since. When Mary
Robinson confounded overseas opinion by
being elected President of Ireland in 1990,
few of those surprised had noticed just
how careful she was to package her radical
blend of feminism, Third Worldism and
social democracy in the style of a
headmistress of a rather high-toned girls'
finishing school.
Nowadays, Mrs Robinson as United
Nations' Commissioner of Human Rights
is carrying her social democratic mission to
other parts of the globe. In their attempt to
renovate a national consciousness, the Irish
have often found themselves embarked on
a campaign to liberate others. It was those
two jocular socialists, Oscar Wilde and
Bernard Shaw, who decided that "saving
Ireland" might necessarily involve saving
England from the deforming effects of
British imperialism. Wilde announced that
England was the most fully subjugated of
British colonies and said that the land of
Milton, Blake and Shelley would never be
free until it had made itself into a republic.
Shaw agreed, arguing that "Home Rule for
23
England" was one of his core policies:
when asked by bemused Londoners what
the words Sinn Fein actually meant, Shaw
joked "it is the Irish for John Bull". These
ideas have been taken up in recent times by
the Two Tonys of British Labour. The
radical MP Tony Benn has argued for an
English Parliament in a new republic, while
the more moderate Prime Minister Tony
Blair has made a step or two in the "Home
Rule" direction by sanctioning
administrative assemblies for Scotland,
Wales and — under the terms of the Irish
settlement — for Northern Ireland.
Mr Blair also appears to have studied other
elements of Irish political science. His
emphasis on "community" values is a
striking echo of Eamon de Valera's
philosophy, not least in its attempt to
transcend the left-right ideological
oscillations which over the past three
decades in Britain have seen each
government party unpicking the work of its
predecessor. The constitutional claim on
the six counties of Northern Ireland which
de Valera wrote into the 1937 document is
now being dismantled as "irredentist", but

TEMA: Irland - kultur, historie og identitet
Dev's care for a healthy environment has
found more than an approving echo in the
manifestoes of the Green Party. The
current period of affluence has witnessed a
wave of films, autobiographies and novels
which are critical of the censoriousness of
de Valera's Ireland: but when compared
with the ideological fervour unleashed in
other nominally `Catholic' countries of
Europe of the 1930s and 40s, the Irish
repression may seem rather mild. An
economy retarded by the long concussion
of colonialism and freedom struggle could
still not cherish all children equally in those
years: but, nevertheless, real advances were
made. The semi-state industries provided a
model of mixed state and private enterprise:
and Irish radio made the first live broadcast
of a sporting event in the world. The religious
orders filled the gaps left by a less-thanadequate
state in caring for the poor, and if
some priest and nuns abused their trust,
the great majority served their society well.
Ireland was the first English-speaking
country in this century to decolonise, the
first to walk in darkness down a nowfamiliar,
better-lit road. Compared with
many other post-colonies, it avoided some
of the major pitfalls of independence:
within a decade it had achieved the orderly
democratic transfer of power between rival
parties recently split by civil war; it assumed
an authoritative voice at the League of
Nations and, later, the UN; and it was as a
society bound together by a high degree of
social consensus. Unlike post-imperial
Britain, it accepted a fully democratic form
of the state with a written constitution
which recognised modern notions of
citizenship and rights.
In the past five years the numbers at work
in Ireland have risen by over 150,000, a
24
transformation unprecedented in scope
since the foundation of the state. If that
trend continues, numbers at work in the
Republic could go from 1.1 to 1.6 million
within a decade. The wealth-creating sector
is ever-increasing, while the ratio of those
dependent on the wealth-creators is
dropping fast. The major failure in the
earlier decades of independence was the
inability of people to create jobs. In those
years, it was often the young, able-bodied
and skilled who emigrated, leaving a high
dependency-cohort of children and old
people behind. What was lacking, in short,
was a sufficiency in numbers of that middle
generation which in healthy societies
enables change and progress, acting as
valuable mediators between the very young
and very old.
Now, however, the demographic trends are
moving in the opposite direction, as
ordinary people have the confidence to set
up businesses and invest cash in promising
enterprises. The earlier years of the infant
state had been characterised by an
obsession (honourable, in itself) with public
office: the holding of a state post became
the be-all and end-all of many lives, what
the Irish now had in place of the old
aristocracy of inherited wealth and land.
This served to spawn a `state class' which
lived only to hold office and which made a
fatally absolute identification of the private
and public interest. Like the old gentry, the
new class often regarded merchants or
business people as crass, even uncivil, and it
favoured classical learning as an
apprenticeship for public service ..... rather
than science or technical subjects. A job in
the civil service was as prized a prospect in
independent Ireland as it would later be in
post-colonial India or Africa.
Only in recent years have intellectuals

TEMA: Irland - kultur, historie og identitet
awakened to the fact that the setting-up of
businesses is hardly an immoral, anti-social
activity but, rather, the very essence of a
republican democracy. It may be that the
slowness to come to that realisation was
itself a consequence of the fact that among
the republicans who left Ireland in 1923,
after losing the Civil War, were quite a
number who made good in the US business
world. Their successors are, these days,
often witnessed returning to endow special
chairs at Irish universities.
Even the Irish National Organisation of
the Unemployed now actively encourages
members to set up small enterprises. That
tradition of material self-help is of recent
vintage. In the 1980s inflation ran as high
as 20% but for most of the 1990s the price
of money has fallen massively. In the early
1980s for every 100 working there were 220
people dependent, a ratio of 2.2. Now that
figure hovers at 1.6 and will drop further,
perhaps to 1.3. This generation has
inherited some modest wealth (the first
fruits of independence), but also the urge
to spend as well as to save. So, with fewer
dependents and greater liquidity, people
believe that this economic recovery may be
of real depth and duration. It is as if the
promise of the words Sinn Fein (the Irish
for `ourselves', betokening self-reliance) is
at last being achieved.
Why did it take so long? Wherever the
emigrants of earlier days went, they won
praise for their industry and application.
Many made fortunes in consequence, and
were left wondering why at least some of
those at home could not seem to do the
same. But the state which emerged in 1922
was a powerful apparatus for the
discouragement of enterprise. Those who
assumed control of it were exhausted after
years of war and had little energy left with
25
which to reimagine the national condition,
to shape new administrative forms more
suited to the Irish personality. Worse still,
the Civil War of 1922-3 (fought with almost
theological rigour not over Northern
Ireland so much as over an oath of
allegiance to the Crown) had further
depleted energies, inducing in the new
government an excessive caution. "We were
the most conservative revolutionaries in
history", said the young minister for justice,
Kevin O'Higgins. The state apparatus
remained unmodified since British days and
it condemned many citizens (as it was
designed to do) to live like an underground
movement in their own country. In the
largely rural society which emerged, a
political elite inserted its members as
"fixers" between the poor and the forces of
social authority. Since most of the poor had
little reason to accept, much less love, the
new state, a job of convincing had to be
done to win for it a certain assent — and
thus emerged de Valera's Fianna Fail party
out of the ashes of a lost Civil War.
Founded in 1927, it soon enough
recognised the state and was elected to
govern in 1933, acting thereafter as a buffer
between individual and state, rather in the
manner of the Congress Party of India.
In doing this, Fianna Fail won over to the
state a whole range of persons whose
loyalty might otherwise have been withheld
— Irish speakers, landless labourers,
Protestants, small farmers, women. As
happened also in India, and as happens
wherever ordinary people lack faith in their
ability to secure their rights, this middle
group of fixers fed off various forms of
insecurity — the insecurity of a fragile new
state about the loyalty of its people and the
insecurity of many people about the
viability of the state. The death-knell for
that social class was sounded in the recent

TEMA: Irland - kultur, historie og identitet
Payments to Politicians Tribunal in Dublin:
for in today's Ireland a self-confident
people regard such fixers with derision, an
attitude signalised by the relatively low pay
awarded to politicians. Clientelism of the
kind that brought Charles Haughey to
power in the 1970s and made him a `kept
man' of a few business moguls is now a
dead letter, as people deal directly and
confidently with state agencies themselves.
Fianna Fåil's current leader, Bettie Ahern, is
at once a more pragmatic and effectual
leader than Haughey: the `settlement' deal
which he signed with Tony Blair will allow
the current Sinn Fein movement to enter
constitutional politics just as Fianna Fail
did in 1927.
The new generation might be described as
the first truly republican generation in the
nation's history: liberal on questions of
personal freedom and morality, self-reliant
but socially compassionate on economics,
and perhaps a little traditionalist on
questions of culture. Unlike the earlier
generation of republicans who fought the
Civil War, it has no problems with the state
as such, merely with its scale and with the
distribution of its forces. Its assurance may,
f
however, have roots older than it realises,
for it is in most ways the full flowering of
the "Sinn Fein " ideal which animated the
Irish renaissance. In cultural terms the
period from 1890 to 1922 was arguably the
most vibrant in Irish history. Movements
such as the Gaelic League (which initiated
the industrial parades, as well as the
language revival campaign), the Co-
Operative movement among farmers, the
Abbey Theatre and Local Government
Reform were all based on the notion of
self-help, as a response to the failure of the
parliament at Westminster to deliver a
promised Home Rule Bill in 1893. A
people long frustrated simply took power
unto themselves.
Their self-belief was awesome. Artists like
John Millington Synge or James Joyce
thought nothing of writing about their
country in foreign languages for French or
Italian readers. To consider Joyce in a
cramped Triestine apartment surrounded
by noisy young children embarking on the
immense cathedral-like undertaking of
Ulysses is to salute a truly heroic inner
conviction. To find anything remotely
comparable in the current period, one
might cite the case of the young Seamus
Heaney, brave enough to trust his
developing poetic gift when the more
logical career-move for a Catholic farmer's
son-turned-college-graduate might have
been to opt for a safe, steady, lucrative
profession. But it was courage of that kind
that led, eventually to a Nobel Prize.
For Heaney, as once for Joyce, writing has
been a way of seizing power, a real
alternative to insurrectionary violence in a
colonial setting. Yet even in Ulysses, Joyce,
at the height of his powers, wondered why
so many of his compatriots seemed to have
lost their self-belief in the previous century.
Did the famines of the 1840s wreak more

TEMA: Irland - kultur, historie og identitet
havoc than earlier hungers because of some
prior loss of cultural assurance? And
wherein was that loss to be found — in the
erasure of Irish or in the collapse of the
cultural codes associated with it? Or was
the matter not simpler — a case of
pervasive poverty grinding everybody
down? Once established in materially
successful societies overseas, the Irish
tended to prosper. Joyce, reading those
signs, emigrated for a better life. A
convinced materialist, he concluded that
you cannot stage a national revival on
culture alone — a view borne out (for all its
high-achieving writers) by the early history
of the new Irish state. Nor can you revive a
nation by economics alone, he would have
added, though economics provides a
necessary basis on which to build.
Joyce's generation had the cultural selfbelief
to confront an empire. The current
generation seems possessed of real
economic acumen. "If those two forces can
be combined in the reinvention of Ireland,
they may come together as a constellation,
releasing entirely new energies in culture
but also in politics. Then the immense
talent for formal experiment to be found in
so much Irish literature may manifest itself
also in shaping better, more appropriate,
forms for society: and the "unfinished
business" of the Irish Renaissance may
generate hybrid models of political identity
which could in time offer basis for the
resolution of other, seemingly intractable,
conflict of identity in different parts of the
world.
If, as they are likely to do, Irish people both
south and north endorse the current
settlement terms, the nationalists among
them (and they are the great majority) will
be abandoning a longstanding republican
dogma which held that Britain had no
27
legitimate presence in Ireland. The payback,
of course, is that the British are finally
admitting that West Belfast is not quite as
purely British — despite Margaret
Thatcher's claim to the contrary — as
Finchley. But the importance of the vote
shouldn't be underestimated: for the sake
of peace, the Irish are abandoning an
ancient territorial claim which, in their
bones, most of them still consider to be
just. The speed and intensity with which
they have liquidated a two-centuries-old
republican tradition, stretching back to
Wolfe Tone and the United Irish rebels of
1798, are awesome. But they are matched
by the comprehensive way in which, over a
century ago, the Irish abandoned their
native language and, in the past decade,
they have rejected the teaching authority of
the Catholic hierarchy.
It is now becoming clear why James
Connolly inserted the word "only" before
the phrase "a tradition". Far from being a
sentimental or nostalgic people, the Irish
may well be the pragmatists of the modern
world.

TEMA: Irland - kultur, historie og identitet
History without the Talking Cure: Bloody
Sunday as "Modern Event"
Af Luke Gibbons
Luke Gibbons is Director of the M.A. programme in Film and Television Studies at Dublin
City University, Ireland. He is co-author of Cinema and Ireland (1987), a contributing editor
to The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (1991), and his most recent publication is
Transformations in Irish Culture. He is at present working on a new book, The Colonial
Sublime: Edmund Burke and Irish Romanticism.
Yes, speech is a species of action. Yes, there
are some actions that only speech can
perform. But there are some acts that
speech alone cannot accomplish. You
cannot heal the sick by pronouncing them
well. You cannot uplift the poor by
declaring them rich.
- Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
In Seamus Deane's novel Reading in the
Dark, the young boy at the centre of the
story discovers a dark truth about family
history, but also something else in the
process: that the truth does not set you
free, but may cast a shadow over the rest of
one's life. The boy learns of the secret in
question from his dying grandfather, a
harrowing story of death and betrayal that
poisons his relationship with his parents
but which he cannot confide to either of
them. He suspects that his mother knows
but also cannot break the silence:
She wasn't going to tell any of it.
Nor was I. But she didn't like me
for knowing it. And my father
thought he had told me everything.
I could tell him nothing, though I
hated him not knowing. But only
my mother could tell him. No one
else. Was it her way of loving him,
not telling him? It was my way of
loving them both, not telling either.
But knowing what I did separated
me from them both.' )
Crushed by the weight of a truth beyond
telling, the young boy aches to share the
burden of knowledge, but to little avail.
Stories are entangled with the deepest
emotional ties, and can only be divulged
through them.
Nothing could be further from the talking
cure of therapeutic cultures, the belief that
language can heal the wounds of history,
whether at a personal or a political level.
For the young boy - and, it might be
suggested, for much of Irish culture - words
are more likely to unsettle the sedimented
terrors of the past, raising ghosts that were
better laid to rest. It is not so much language
itself that is the problem, but words that
are insensitive to the nuances of time,
1) Seamus Deane, Reading in the Dark (London: Jonathan Cape, 1996), p. 187. Subsequent page
references in parenthesis.
28

TEMA: Irland - kultur, historie og identitet
person and place. In the therapeutic
encounter, stories are detached from their
emotional setting, and told to an impartial
spectator with whom one has a professional
rather than a personal relation. In a city
such as Derry, however, still suffused by
oral culture and memories of the dead,
such impartiality is at a premium. The truth
is only as good as the person you hear it
from, or relate it to, as if the shock
absorbers of intimacy and affection are
necessary to cushion the blow.
It is in this sense that life experiences seem
to be lodged in the body, or even the walls
of homes, where they are passed on to the
next generation like the familiar mannerisms
of loved ones. `I knew she was getting
stranger', the young boy observes ruefully
of his mother in Reading in the Dark, `she
was telling herself a story that only appeared
now and again in speech' (145). In the wake
of a more public trauma such as Bloody
Sunday, restless memories drift through the
streets like the smell of cordite, something
almost inhaled with one's upbringing. In
Margo Harkin's short documentary, The
Bloody Sunday Murders (1992), a young
woman, Maureen Shiels, faces the camera
in the position normally occupied by an
authoritative (i.e. impartial) television
presenter, and begins to tell the story of the
events of January, 30, 1972. `I want to tell
you the truth about Bloody Sunday,
because to know the truth about Bloody
Sunday is to know why there is still a war
here'. But having staked her claim to this
high ground, the narrator then proceeds to
throw a question mark over her credibility
as an objective narrator, or even as a
first-hand witness: `I was two years old at
the time, but like everyone else in the
community I lived with the memory of it.
The memory is still as raw today as it ever
was'. While the documentary proceeds to
interview relatives of the dead, some still
with audible tremors in their voices, the
main focus of the narrative is on the
subsequent generation, people of her own
age, who were raised in the shadow of the
event. The question is left open whether
the massacre was planned in advance, but
that is only because the whitewashing of
the atrocity by the Widgery Tribunal in
effect amounted to placing an official,
retrospective seal of approval on the murder
of fourteen innocent civilians. As Maureen
Shiels puts it in her address to the camera:
`People in our area did not wait for the
Widgery report to find out the truth. They
waited to find out if he would tell the truth'.
Bloody Sunday belongs to that distinctive
category of twentieth-century phenomena
which Hayden White refers to as `modern
events', occurrences which have `been
symbolically orchestrated to represent the
aspirations of a whole community'. 2) The
symbolic component is essential to our
understanding of these events for, as
Maureen Shiels' remark above implies, the
representation or telling of the story is
indistinguishable from what happened. The
horrific events of Bloody Sunday took
place in the full glare of publicity, in the
presence of journalists, photographers,
broadcasting and film crews, not to
mention the 20,000 participants on the
march. As White argues, so far from
guaranteeing a more comprehensive or
2) Hayden White. `The Modernist Event' in Vivian Sobchack, ed., The Persistence of History:
Cinema, Television and the Modern Event (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 32. All subsequent
references in parenthesis in text.
29

TEMA: Irland - kultur, historie og identitet
exhaustive account of what happened, the
fact that `modern events' are subject to
such overwhelming coverage precludes any
prospect of a complete, objective picture:
The very precision and detail of the
imagistic representation of the event
are what threw it open to a wide
variety of interpretations of `what
was really going on' in the scene
depicted .... the photo and video
documentation of such accidents [i.e.
authenticating, chance details] is so
full that it is difficult to work up the
documentation of any one of them
as elements of a single `objective'
story. (23)
There is an irresistible urge to discover one
more photograph that will finally reveal the
telling detail - whether the elusive local
figure photographed by Fulvio Grimaldi
was in fact a gunman, or whether the nail
bombs found on Gerard Donaghy can
clearly be shown to have been planted after
his death. But as White observes in relation
to the relentless poring over the visual
evidence in the Rodney King trial, no
photographic detail, no matter how
graphic, ever speaks for itself, but is only as
good as its framing narratives. `Sight is
often deceived, hearing serves as guarantee',
as St. Ambrose warned in antiquity. The
visibility of so many other cameras in
photographs of the dead and the wounded
on Bloody Sunday hold out the prospect
not of a complete or comprehensive
picture, but of an endless proliferation of
perspectives - indeed, of the impossibility
of eliminating perspectives, in the sense of
particular, selective angles of vision, in the
first place.
The animus directed against the Widgery
Tribunal in The Bloody Sunday Murders is due
not simply to its skewed perspective and
blatant partisanship, but that these were
projected as the magisterial vision of the
law, the so-called disinterested and neutral
pursuit of British justice. This charade was
maintained despite the fact that Widgery
was reminded in his briefing by Edward
Heath, the then Prime Minister, that they
were fighting `not only a military but a
propaganda war'. 3) `Widgery arrived for the
hearings', the documentary accordingly tells
us, `in a British army helicopter, and
accompanied by British army lawyers. He
stayed in a British army base outside
Derry'. The grotesque conclusions drawn
by the Tribunal, and their vindication in the
British press (`Army can be proud', ran a
headline in The Daily Express), are then
contrasted with the muted voices of those
who came under fire on that fateful Sunday
but were given no public hearing.
The extent to which these voices were
vanquished did not become apparent until,
in his assiduous researches into the evidence
collected for the Widgery Tribunal, Don
Mullan came across more than 500 eyewitness
accounts collected by the Northern
Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA)
and National Council For Civil Liberties
(NCCL). Widgery apparently had a look at
fifteen of them before dismissing the rest
out of hand. As Seamus Deane observes in
the course of an interview in The Bloody
Sunday Murders, the subsequent verdict
arrived at by the Widgery Tribunal thus
perpetrated not only an injustice but the
3) Don Mullan, Bloody Sunday: Massacre in Northern Ireland (Colorado: Roberts Rinehart,
1997), pp. 7, 28, 46.
30

TEMA: Irland - kultur, historie og identitet
legal humiliation of an entire community.
This perhaps helps to throw light on one of
the more puzzling aspects of Government
censorship throughout the Northern
conflict both in the Republic of Ireland and
Britain, namely, the zealousness, amounting
to farce at times, with which the actual
voices of the republican movement were
policed and kept off the airwaves.
During the production of Margo Harkin's
documentary, this prohibition was still in
force, so viewers are presented with the
anomalous spectacle of a republican
spokesman, Raymond McCartney, speaking
in dumb-show while his voice was expertly
dubbed by an actor. But why attach such
importance, amounting virtually to magical
power, to the actual voices themselves?
After all, no such interdiction was placed
on the reporting of direct speech in the
print media, as if the written word was
somehow less incendiary than its spoken
counterpart. For that matter, the
exploitation of a loophole in the law which
enabled the practice of dubbing allowed the
information relayed by McCartney, down to
the specific words he used, to be conveyed
over the airwaves. So again, why go to such
lengths to gag the actual voices of those
representing almost half of the nationalist
community? The fact that it was not
information or content that was at stake,
but the grain of the voice itself was made clear
by the ludicrous extremes to which Section
31 of the Broadcasting Act was enforced by
the Irish broadcasting service, Radio Telefis
Eireann (RTE). On one occasion, a caller
to a phone-in programme on gardening
inquired about growing mushrooms, but
was immediately cut off on the grounds
that he was a member of Sinn Fein, the
political wing of the republican movement.
It may have been, of course, that to the
ever-vigilant controllers, the discussion of
mushrooms came across as a thinly veiled
allegory about the most effective means of
keeping people in the dark.
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that
the objective of such legislation, and the
blithe indifference of official enquiries to
the voices of the victims, was not simply
one of social control but the systematic
humiliation of a whole section of the
population. As Seamus Deane's novel
powerfully attests, it is by the very grain of
the voice that the inner life of a community
defines itself, not so much what is said as
who says it, and with what resonances, to
whom. For the great Russian critic, Mikhail
Bakhtin, the voice was uniquely the site of
community, for it not only addressed
another in an immediate, face-to-face sense,
but also reverberated with the echoes of
countless others who have helped to shape
and fine tune our words.) In the light of
this, one can see how the muting of the
4) For Bakhtin, the ineluctable social address of the voice is clear from the fact that `everything
that is said, expressed, is located outside of the "soul", of the speaker, and does not belong only
to him. The word cannot be assigned to a single speaker. The author (speaker) has his own
inalienable right to the word, but the listener also has his rights, and those whose voices are
heard in the word before the author comes upon it also have their rights ... the word is a drama
in which three characters participate (it is not a duet, but a trio) '. Mikhail Bakhtin, `The
Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology and the Human Sciences: An Experiment in
Philosophical Analysis', in Speech Genres and Other Essays. trans. Vern W. Mc Gee (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1986), pp. 121. Bakhtin was not saying that the characteristics of the
voice only apply to speech in the strict sense; certain kinds of writing, for example, the
`dialogical' narration of Dostoievsky's novels, also possess these properties for him.
31

TEMA: Irland - kultur, historie og identitet
voice results not just in the destruction but
the degradation of those who are consigned
to silence.
The intrinsic relation of the voice to
humiliation and shame is clear from its
central importance in the language of
apology and expiation, and the renewal of
sundered relationships. Transgressions that
threaten the deepest social ties - loss of
face, shame, defamation, insults - can only
be redressed through the voice, and its most
subtle cadences and intonations. An apology
must always assume a first-person voice,
and can never be delegated to another:
hence its essentially oral nature, and
performative power as a speech act. As
Nicholas Tavuchis explains:
It is not surprising, therefore, that
although an oral apology may be
supplemented by the written word
and symbolic tokens of conciliation,
the latter, by themselves, are rarely
considered to be sufficient or
satisfactory. . . There is, quite
simply, nothing as effective and
unsettling as having to address in
person someone we have wronged,
no matter how much a culture
stresses writing, print, or electronic
communication to the detriment of
speech.')
With this in mind, it is possible to outline a
crucial difference between the `talking cure'
in therapy, and what might be seen as the
`theatrical' basis of oral culture, and its
attendant discourses of redress and apology.
The former requires a spectator; the latter
an audience. In therapy, the speaker is
relieved; in apology, the person spoken to is
the beneficiary. Apologies are not given,
but are accepted. The contrite words of the
offender do not constitute the transaction,
but rather their ratification by the injured
party. This points, therefore, to an essential
element of apology: it gives a voice back to
the victims, allowing them to have the final
say.
It is in this respect that the callous dismissal
by Lord Widgery of over 500 testimonies is
on a continuum with the original crime
itself. Bloody Sunday is not just about an
horrific event which happened over twenty
five years ago, but the subsequent
institutional erasure of the victims, their
relatives, and the wider community of
which they were a part. Crucially, apologies
do not require the arbitration of third
parties - independent tribunals, courts of
enquiry, legal eminences - to establish the
facts, for it is not the disinterested pursuit
of knowledge that is the problem. As
Maureen Shiels emphasises, people already
know what happened: what is required is
that those responsible tell the truth, and
acknowledge the voices of the victims. This
is no talking cure, but the basis of dialogue,
enabling people, however belatedly, to have
an active speaking part in their own history.
Notwithstanding the attrition of history, no
words, according to Bakhtin, are ever wholly
lost: `there are great masses of meaning, but
these will be recalled again at a given
moment in the dialogue's later course when
it will be given new life. For nothing is
absolutely dead: every meaning will
someday have its homecoming festival'. ) •
5) Nicholas Tavuchis, Mea Culpa: A Sociology of Apology and Reconciliation (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1991), p. 23.
6) Mikhail Bakhtin, Esthetika, cited in Michael Holquist, Dialogism: Bakhtin and his World
(London: Routledge, 1990), p. 39.
32

Losing Faith
TEMA: Irland - kirken
Af Patsy McGarry, Correspondent for Religious Affairs at The Irish Times
The Catholic Church is booming worldwide - but
not, as Religious Affairs correspondent Patsy
McGarry reports in an article on the Irish Church
- in "Catholic" Ireland.
Never in its history has the Catholic Church
had more followers worldwide, nor has it
ever had more young men training for the
priesthood. Contrary to what people might
think, given the battering the church had
taken in Ireland over the recent years, from
a broader perspective it is an organization
at high tide.
So where does Ireland stand in this
landscape of a booming Catholic Church ?
A dramatic view of where trends are leading
is presented in a play recently staged at
Dublin's Gate theatre. In Joe O'Connor's
THE WEEPING OF ANGELS, three
elderly women sit in a room. It's some time
in the future and they are awaiting death.
They are believed to be the last nuns in
Ireland.
Theirs is a bleak and poignant scenario -
but far-fetched surely ? It would not appear
so. According to Joe O'Connor the play
was inspired by THE DEATH OF
RELIGIOUS LIFE, a book by the
33
Redemptorist priest father Tony Flannery,
published here earlier this year, which
addresses the sorry situation of Ireland's
religious as we come to end of this
millennium.
One of the more striking features of the
Irish Catholic Church at the moment is
both ageing and declining in number.
Nowhere is this more manifest than in the
religious orders.
The great majority of religious Ireland
today are aged over 60. For instance in
Mount St Joseph, Roscrea, the average age
of the monks is 73. Recruits are few and in
some cases, not even encouraged, such is
the gap between youth and age.
This has had inevitable consequences. An
example can be gleaned from an IRISH
CATHOLIC report of October 1997
which related that some Masses at the
Augustinian priory in Callen, Co Kilkenny,
had been cancelled due to a shortage of
priests. The prior, Father Henry McNamara,
is quoted as saying that the average age of
Augustinians in Ireland is now over 60, that
the order has had just one ordination this
year and that it has had just one seminarian
over the past eight years.
As a result of this the Augustinian student
house in Dublin has closed and the order
has withdrawn priests from teaching staff
at schools around the country. At Callan,
where the Augustinians have been since
1230, Father McNamara said they were
now "surviving on a wing and a prayer".
Tracing the background to this decline,
the Dominican priest Father Gabriel Daly,
writing in the July/August edition of
RELIGIOUS LIFE REVIEW 1997, said it
began with changes made at Vatican 2,

which "quite simply disposed of the view
of religious life as a higher and more
perfect way of life than that of ordinary
Christians".
A glance at the figures underlines this. In
1970 there were 7,946 priests in religious
orders in Ireland, by 1996 that number had
almost halved. In 1970 there were 18,662
nuns, by 1996 that was down by a third. In
1970 there were 2,540 religious brothers, by
1996 that had dropped by three-fifths.
The collapse of seminarian numbers
across the board among religious has been
dramatic. In 1970, 261 young men entered
seminaries for the religious orders in this
country. In 1996 that number was down to
39. For nuns the drop was even worse. In
1970, 227 young women entered novitiates,
by 1996 that was down to 19. But it is the
religious brothes who have suffered most.
In 1970 they had a total of 98 entrants - in
1996 there was just one.
The rapid decline has brought with it
some unexpected problems for the orders.
As Father Flannery says "traditionally,
religious in Ireland were not well off. They
lived frugally ... now things have changed".
TEMA: Irland - kirken
34
Religious are finding themselves in
possession of large properties, which they
no longer require. So, of late, the property
pages regularly carry advertisements for
large tracts of land, usually already serviced,
zoned for building, and owned by religious
orders.
"How can people, vowed to a life of
poverty, deal adequately with this type of
situation ?" asks father Flannary. What they
are doing is investing the money to care for
their ageing population. "Over the next 30
years or so religious communities will have
large expenses and little income". It could
be said, he continues, that in this whole
area "religious have become wize in the
ways of the world".
But he wonders whether: "all of this
careful and sensible husbanding of money
is another indication of a loss of spirit, or
maybe even a loss of faith in the Person
who told us to learn from the lilies of the
field, and not to worry about tomorrow".
Where diocesan, or secular priests are
concerned, the situation, while very
worrying, is not quite so grim.
Speaking at a function in Dublin towards

the end of September 1997 the Archbishop
of Dublin, Dr Desmond Connell said:
"Perhaps for the first time in our history,
sufficient numbers of young men are not
coming forward to answer the needs of the
church. Earlier that week it had been
disclosed that Clonliffe College, the
seminary for the Dublin archdiocese, had
had no entrants at all this year - while at
Maynooth there were just 21 entrants, the
lowest intake in its history.
Already some rural dioceses are having
problems in ensuring that weekly masses
are said in more remote parishes. Masses
have had to be cancelled in some places,
due to shortage of priests.
In 1970 there were 3,944 diocesan priests
in Ireland. In 1996 that figure was 3,638, a
drop of just 306 over the 26-year-period, -
which when one takes into account the
significant number who left the priesthood
over the same period is quite impressive.
Dr Connell puts the decline down to a
number of factors: smaller families, the
weakening of family support for one who
seeks to test a vocation, the impact of the
scandals of child sex abuse, the fear of
permanent commitment to to the celibate
life, the abandonment of the ministry by
some priests, the concentration on career
opportunities and competition in the
educational system, the aggressive
worldliness fostered by so many influences
about us. But the root cause of the crisis he
traced to a loss of faith.
Traditionally, he said, the faithful "showed
a religious respect for priests and held the
pristely office in high esteem... the presence
TEMA: Irland - kirken
35
of a priest brought with it a sense of the
sacred". Priests were now, however,
uncomfortable in a world that no longer
understood or respected them. It was not
surprising, therefore, he said" that priests
begin to conceal their presence in society
when they fe 1 that being recognized for
what they are_ able to provoke resentment
or even hostility".
Just how seriously the Dublin diocese is
taking this can be measured by the fact that
it is holding an information day at Clonliffe
College as part of a recently-launched drive
to encourage vocations. It's part of a
bigger publicity campaign called. WHO
ARE THE MEN IN BLACK?
Inevitably some of this. disenchantment
with the church is reflected in a fall-off in
Mass attendance. Surveys indicate that in
1973/74, 91 per cent of Catholics in the
Republic attended weekly Mass. A survey in
1997 showed that the figure is down to 54
per cent. Mass-going in Dublin - as low as
10 per cent in some disadvantaged areas - is
significantly lower now than is the case in
rural Ireland.
However, figures for those who describe
themselves as Catholic in this State are still
very healthy. The last census which included
a question on religious affiliation was in
1991. Then, approximately 92 per cent of
the population in the republic was Catholic.
But there had also been a surge in the
number of those who described themselves
as having "no religion" or came within the
"not stated" religious category, a trend that
must worry a church used to the
unwavering faith of the Irish people.•

Though intended as a humorous aside, this
remark highlights an aspect of contemporary
Ireland that is often lost in recent accounts
of its economic success story as the "Celtic
Tiger" of Europe. Ireland is ranked among
the thirty most developed nation-states in
the world, experiencing unprecedented
growth in the 1990s. The resurgence of
Irish cinema in the past decade is a product
of this boom, as the Irish government
highlighted the audio-visual industry,
among other specialist sectors, as a target
area for investment and employment
creation. But if Ireland is a first-world
country, it is also a culture with a thirdworld
memory.
Historically, it enjoys the invidious
distinction of being a colony within
Europe, and that this troubled past extends
into the present was made abundantly clear
by the national furore over the release of
Neil Jordan's Michael Collins in late 1996.
For some critics, Jordan's film marked a
turning point in contemporary Irish culture
in that it finally laid the ghosts of the War
of Independence (1916-1922) and the Civil
War (1922-1923) to rest. Michael Collins
was the tarnished hero who accepted
(however reluctantly) the partition of
Ireland, and his rehabilitation in a historical
TEMA: Irland - filmen
Projecting Ireland: the Recent Resurgence
of Irish Cinema
Af Luke Gibbons
In one striking sequence in Roddy Doyle's novel THE COMMITMENTS,
adapted subsequently for the screen by Alan Parker, the street-wize
impressario Jimmy Rabbitte compares the Irish to the blacks of Europe,
and working class northside Dubliners to the blacks of Ireland's capital
city.
"Say it loud, I'm black and I'm proud..."
36
epic was interpreted as signalling the end of
the aspiration for a united Ireland. Ireland
was now free, in keeping with its "tiger
economy" status, to escape the iron cage of
the past, and join its European partners in
a brave new post-nationalist era. Other
critics of Michael Collins were not so
optimistic, however, and viewed the film as
a thinly disguised allegory of the unresolved
contemporary conflict in Northern Ireland.
Collins' tragic death in the final scenes of
the film - with its powerful dirge -like
accompaniment of the traditional ballad
"She Moved Through the Fair" - removed
any trace of an upbeat Hollywood ending,
thus ruling out any easy narrative closure to
the centuries old national question. History,
on this reading, was still unfinished
business, the nightmare, in James Joyce's
words, from which Irish people are trying
to awake.
As the epic sweep of Jordan's film indicates,
Irish cinema is at its most distinctive when
it captures the contrasting currents of past
and present, modernity and tradition, in
Irish history. On the other hand, there are
diverse images of urban realism, youthful
energy and sexual transgression in films
such as Pigs (Cathal Black, 1984), the Oscar
winning My Left Foot (Jim Sheridan, 1989),

Into the West (Mike Newell, 1992, scripted by
Jim Sheridan), The Miracle (Neil Jordan),
1991), and in the Roddy Doyle trilogy The
Commitments (Alan Parker, 1991), The Snapper
(Stephen Frears, 1993), and The Van
(Stephen Frears, 1996). On the other hand
there is the persistence of the past, the
different manifestations, historical and
contemporary, of the protracted national
conflict: Maeve (Pat Murphy, 1981), Angel
(Neil Jordan, 1982), Cal (Pat O'Connor,
1984) the Oscar winning The Crying Game
(Neil Jordan, 1992), In the Name of the Father
(Jim Sheridan, 1993), Some Mother.'r Son
(Terry George, 1996), Michael Collins (Neil
Jordan, 1996), Bogvoman (Tom Collins,
1997), and in the highly-acclaimed short
film, After '68 (Stephen Burke, 1993), and
The Visit (Orla Walsh, 1992).
"Romantic Ireland is dead and gone"
But , of course, the past is not always
viewed through a glass darkly. For much of
its history, Irish cinema was, in fact, imbued
with the nostalgia of "romantic Ireland",
ranging from the pastoral idyll of TheQuiet
Man (John Ford, 1952) to the more sombre
primitivism of Robert Flaherty's classic
Man of Aran (1934), the windswept epic
naturalism of Ryans Daughter (David Lean,
1971) and the Irish-American "thatched
cabin to log cabin" saga of Far and Away
(Ron Howard, 1992). Alternating between
images of the garden or the wilderness,
these films presented the Celtic periphery
as a haven of stage-Irish or colonial
stereotypes, a refuge from the pressures of
progress and modernisation.
As if to dispel the lingering mists of the
Celtic Twilight, one of the animating
impulses in the resurgence of Irish film
since the 1970s has been the deconstruction
of these romantic myths, uncovering a
harsh, hidden Ireland under the official or
TEMA: Irland - filmen
37
postcard versions of the rural past. "Happy
Homes for Ireland and for God" reads the
lifeless banner over the stage in Pat
O'Connor's award-winnig drama: The
Ballroom of Romance" (1982), but in this bleak
dance-hall blighted by loneliness, late marriage
and emigration, the local community
shuffles through its paces in the knowledge
that even entertainment offers no respite
from the all pervasive emotional paralysis.
In the claustrophobic small town world of
Neil Jordan's compelling new film, The
Butcher Boy, set in the early 1 960s, the
armageddon of the Cuban crisis and the
fantasy world comics impinge on the
impressionable mind of a young boy,
Francie Brady. Crushed by the forces of an
overpowering Catholic Church, a callous
community and a dysfunctional family, the
film charts the transformation of a young
Francie into a small-town Raskolnikov.
It is as if the extremities of life charted by
Dostoivsky have found their way to the
mediocrity of the Irish midlands.
More than any other feature of the social
landscape, the faultlines of the traditional
Irish family, as enshrined in the ideology of
faith and fatherland, have been relentlessly
exposed in recent Irish cinema. Every
Irishwoman, it is said, is faced with the task
of coming out from under the shadow of
"Mother Ireland", but cinematic
representations of women have certainly
provided a variety of roles which cut across
the conventional "virgin mother" role
model. Almost every variation on the
family is depicted. Outcast or defiant single
mothers feature in Reefer and the Model Qoe
Comerford, 1988), Hush-a-Bye Baby, December
Bride (Thaddeus O'Sullivan, 1990), The
Snapper, The Playboys, (Gilles Mackinnon,
1992). After '68, and The Sun the Moon and
the Stars (Geraldine Creed, 1996); children
with missing mothers, absent fathers or

indeed with two fathers feature in Traveller
(Joe Comerford, 1981) , December Bride, Into
the West, the Miracle and Bogtvoman ; the
traumas of crisis pregnancies and abortion
feature in Hush-a-Bye baby, The Truth about
Claire (Gerard Stembridge, 1991), and The
Visit, and the ravages of alcoholism and
domestic violence are dissected in The
Ballroom of Romance, Guiltrzi, Into the West.,
The Butcher Boy, and the visceral Roddy
Doyle/Mike Winterbottom television
drama, Famiy (1994)
In many of these films, as the director Jim
Sheridan has remarked, fathers have been
portrayed in a negative light and, as if to
compensate for this fall from grace, the
1990s have witnessed the emergence of the
"good father". Hence the gallant Dessie
Curley (Colm Meaney) in The Snapper, who
ends up reading gynaecology books to help
his daughter through her pregnancy, and
the sensitive stoicism of Giuseppe Conlon
(Pete Postlewaite) in The Name of the Father.
TEMA: Irland - filmen
38
Male sexuality is depicted in a different
light in a number of films which explore
parodic or dissident versions of the family.
"Maybe we should settle down" jokes
Michael Collins (Liam Neeson) to his soul
(and bed) mate Harry Boland (Aidan
Quinn) in Neil Jordan's eponymous film
when they encounter a rural wedding - Just
the two of us" replies Boland. This theme
of homoerotic bonding underlies Michael
Collins, Pigs, and I went Down, and is given
more overt homosexual expression in Reefer
and the Model, and The Crying Game.
Whether depicting the changing attitudes
towards male or female sexuality, one of the
recurrent trends in Irish films is a constant
blurring of the boundaries between the
private and public spheres, the personal and
the political. Hollywood's conversion of
complex political conflicts into essentially
personal or "human interest" dramas
devoid of their specific local or historical
circumstances facilitates its so-called
universal appeal, but also provides the
narrative formula for happy endings. By
isolating a "private" zone - love, family,
self-development - free from the divisions
of public life, films are in a position to
provide imaginary solutions for real-life
social problems having to do with class,
race, nation, or gender. In Irish culture,
however, the historical convergence of the
Catholic Church and State saw to it that
even affairs in the bedroom threatened
affairs of state, as was made painfully
evident in the highly controversial political
referenda on abortion and divorce in the
1980s and 1990s. Love stories are where
problems begin rather than end in Irish
cinema, which is why such powerful
explorations of gender in Pat Murphy's
pioneering feminist films Maeve (1981) and
Anne Devlin (1984) still carry such farreaching
political resonances.

The inability of the personal to compensate
for the political is evident in Michael Collins,
where the charismatic hero is actually shot
on his wedding day, the action intercutting,
in a manner reminiscent of Francis Ford
Coppola's The Godfather, between his
impending assassination and his bride-tobe's
shopping for her wedding dress. At the
other end of the emotional spectrum, the
reign of domestic terror and misogyny
perpetrated by an army officer in Gerard
Stembridge's Guiltrip is bound up with his
military and macho persona as a
representative of state power. In
representations of the Northern Ireland
"love across the barricades" stories are
invariably doomed from the outset, as in
Cal and Nothing Personal, or are given an
ironical twist as in The Crying Game.
The portrayal of the mother figure/
maternal love as a refuge from the attrition
of politics is a familiar trope in Hollywood,
and forms the basis of the ambivalent
happy ending of the major international
release Some Mother's Son, in which a
mother opts out of involvement in
republican politics by signing her son off
the H-block hunger strikes in the early
1980s. By contrast, in Tom Collin's
d, o n i^,g 60
k,., o. ,. _. rccmoutc. . ' o to net to
a^,^xs Ufl S v jael'87
w' BEl,r odoa 158wC ti'
12, 16r 1,
TEMA: Irland - filmen
39
Bogwoman, made on a much smaller budget
with a more indigenous narrative style, the
story moves in the opposite direction. A
young mother who has kept her distance
from "The Troubles" finally shows her
personal resolve, not by stepping outside
politics but by immersing herself in the
struggle, taking her place on the street with
other women during a riot in Derry's
Bogside.
Hollywood or Europe?
What is at stake here, perhaps, is not just
different ways of telling stories, but the
capacity of Irish films themselves to
withstand the ineluctable pressures of
Hollywood. Though situated in Europe,
Ireland, as an English speaking country, is
particularly vulnerable to incorporation
within the American culture industry, and
for this reason state involvement in the film
industry along European lines has become
increasingly important in building up a
strong production base. The first Irish Film
Board, however, lasted for merely six years
(1981 - 1987), and though operation under
a total budget of approximately 3 million, it
played a key role in funding 10 feature
films, 20 shorts/documentaries, and 15
experimental shorts the Film Board was

abolished by the new government which
came to power in 1987, and replaced by a
tax regime, section 35 of the Finance Act
(1987). This allows for substantial tax
write-offs for both corporate and individual
investors and has been modified and
updated in recent years to enable the
economic advantage to accrue more to the
producers of a film. No more than 60% of
a film's budget can be raised in this manner,
and 75 % of the production of the film (or
10% if a co-production) must take place in
Ireland. This latter provision is aimed at
employment creation, and it is estimated
that the audio-visual industry accounts for
approximately one third of the 20,000
people working in the cultural sector in
Ireland. Overall, approximately 85% of
Irish film funding was raised through
section 35, amounting to over 100 million.
the biggest coup for this tax initiative was,
no doubt, attracting Mel Gibson to film
Braveheart in Ireland (with the Irish army as
extras), which raised 10 million through
TEMA: Irland - filmen
40
Section 35 funding, and contributed 13
million through goods and services to the
Irish exchequer.
But while Braveheart may have made a
valuable contribution at an economic level,
the Scottish storyline hardly exemplified
the critical engagement with the self-images
of a culture that constitutes a truly Irish
national cinema.
To this end, a new minister for Arts, Culture
and the Gaeltacht, Michael D. Higgins, reactivated
the Irish Film Board in 1993 with
a budget of approximately 3 million per
year, along with a series of other measures
such as the expansion of the television
independent production sector, membership
of Eurimages and the establishment of
an Irish language television station, Telefis
na Gaeilge. To date 37 features, 17
documentaries and a considerable number
of shorts have benefited from the Film
Board funding, especially at the critical

developmental level, and through substantial
production loans.
This revitalized financial and institutional
infrastructure has helped to place film at
the centre of contemporary Irish culture. It
is as if popular culture - film, rock music,
traditional music and dance - are re-casting
Irish identity at the end of the twentieth
century, just as literature did at the end of
the last century. In this respect, there is
TEMA: Irland - filmen
perhaps a historical irony in the fact that
James Joyce opened the first cinema in
Ireland (the Volta in 1909).
The passage of a major contemporary
writer, Neil Jordan, from literature to film,
suggests that were Joyce living today, he
might also be involved in making the kinds
of Irish film which today are projecting
new images of Ireland onto the world stage.
I forbindelse med Engelsklærerforeningens kursus i Dublin 5-12. september 1998 er der
på adressen mmm.uni-c.dk/irland oprettet en hjemmeside, der bl.a. indeholder:
• Et ret omfattende antal link til forskellige aspekter af Irlands kultur.
• Kursusprogrammet udbygget med supplerende materiale: link, tekster og billeder.
• Elektroniske konferencer (for kursusdeltagerne).
• Praktiske oplysninger om kursus.
Irlands-kurset dubleres i september 1999, og hjemmesiden vil indtil da være til rådighed
og inspiration.
Hjemmesiden er det første af to samarbejdsprojekter mellem bl.a. GYA og en faglig
forening med henblik på at udvikle modeller for brug af fjernundervisning i forbindelse
med efteruddannelse af gymnasielærere.
Webmaster: leiffrederiksen@rysensteen.dk
41

Ny irsk litteratur
TEMA: Irland - litteraturen
Af Irene Allerslev Jensen, Århus Akademi, forfatter til "Identity in a Changing World"
Irland er et samfund, hvor forandringerne
inden for de sidste par generationer har
været større og hurtigere end i de fleste af
de øvrige europæiske samfund, fordi oprettelsen
af det selvstændige Irland fulgtes af
en periode med isolation, der havde til formål
at fastholde eller måske snarere udvikle
et gælisk agrarsamfund.
For at nå dette mål forsøgte ledende politikere,
frem for andre de Valera, at begrænse
Irlands kontakt med omverdenen, og denne
situation varede egentlig til op i 60'erne.
Herefter voksede kontakten til omverdenen
generelt, men især udbyggedes kontakten til
det øvrige Europa, da Irland blev medlem
af EU i 1973.
Jeg vil i det følgende omtale noget af den
irske litteratur, jeg har arbejdet med i undervisningen
inden for de seneste år. Jeg vil
ikke forsøge at give en litterær analyse af
den, men forhåbentlig vil en kort præsentation
af værkerne give et indtryk af, hvorledes
de reflekterer et samfund i forandring.
Med enkelte undtagelser vil fokus i denne
artikel være på unge og yngre forfattere
med den ulempe, at mange væsentlige forfattere
vil blive forbigået. Her tænker jeg
især på forfattere som William Trevor, Julia
O'Faolain, Mary Lavin, Kate O'Brien,
Brian Moore, og ikke mindst John
McGahern. Også blandt de unge forfattere
har jeg af pladshensyn måttet udelade mange,
som for eksempel: John Banville, Anne
Enright, Dermot Healy, Maeve Kelly, Colum
McCann, John MacKenna m.fl. I det store
og hele har jeg kun medtaget ét værk pr.
forfatter, selvom andre af deres værker lige
så vel kunne have været medtaget.
42
For overblikkets skyld vil jeg gruppere teksterne
efter nogle af de temaer, de behandler,
selvom denne fokusering på temaer slet
ikke tilgodeser teksternes kompleksitet, og
mange af teksterne naturligvis rummer flere
temaer.
Novellen er ofte blevet fremstillet som Irlands
"nationalgenre", men i løbet af de
sidste årtier er der udkommet en række
irske romaner uden hvilke billedet af det
"moderne" Irlands litteratur ville være helt
ufuldstændigt. Mange romanforfattere har
tilsyneladende uden skrupler udgivet enkelt
af deres romaner i tidsskrifter og
-kapitler
aviser, og jeg mener, at mange af romanerne
kan læses med forskellige ekstensive
læsemetoder, eller i uddrag, hvis man ikke
mener at kunne arbejde med dem i deres
helhed i undervisningen.
Daniel Corkery definerede i Synge and Anglo-
Irish Literature (1966) irskhed som bestående
af tre vigtige elementer: den religiøse
bevidsthed, irsk nationalisme og jorden, og
disse elementer var også fremtrædende emner
i irsk litteratur i første halvdel af dette
århundrede. Emigration var af indlysende
grunde et vigtigt emne, der fortsat behandles
litterært. Irlands tætte kontakt med
Europa og USA og urbaniseringen af det
irske samfund har betydet, at vii højere
grad nu i irsk litteratur genfinder de emner,
som er centrale i det øvrige Europa og
USA, således emner af mere almenmenneskelig
karakter, blandt andet en optagethed
af spørgsmål vedrørende identitet og moral.
Mange irske forfattere har naturligvis beskæftiget
sig med Nordirland, men af pladshensyn
inddrages denne litteratur ikke her.

Fattigdom og emigration
Frank McCourt (f. 1930) indleder Angela "s
Ashes: A Memoir of a Childhood, 1996, således:
"My father and mother should have
stayed in New York, where they met and
where I was born. Instead they returned to
Ireland when I was four....When I look
back on my childhood I wonder how I
survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable
childhood: the happy childhood is hardly
worth your while.."
Frank McCourt tilbragte sin barndom i
et slumkvarter i Limerick i 30'erne og beskriver
sin barndom, der var domineret af
sult, sygdom, død og afsavn, i et samfund,
der var hierarkisk opbygget og styret af
meget faste regler, og som fastholdt de fattige
på deres plads i samfundet.
Kirken behandles generelt meget kritisk,
og menneskelig indsigt og varme beskrives
kun hos enkelte præster. Børnene blev i
kirken og i skolen indpodet en stærk
syndsbevidsthed, og den unge Frank var
plaget af frygt for fortabelse, samtidig med
at tro og overtro i andre situationer kastede
et næsten magisk skær over hans hverdag.
Trods faderens totale svigt af familien i
økonomisk henseende, beskriver Frank
McCourt også fuldkomne øjeblikke alene
sammen med faderen, når denne fortæller
sønnen om Irlands historie, om de irske
helte som Cuchulain, eller når han hjælper
TEMA: Irland - litteraturen
43
børnene med lektierne og beder sammen
med dem, inden de går i seng. Da McCourt
var 19 år gammel emigrerede han til USA.
Selvbiografien er i mange henseender den
klassiske historie om fattigdom og emigration,
men med fokus på drengens lige intense
oplevelse af glædelige, tragiske eller
absurde begivenheder, giver den et langt
mere levende og varieret billede af et begivenhedsrigt
barndoms- og ungdomsliv, end
vi får i traditionelle socialrealistiske beretninger
med et politisk budskab.
Eddie Stack (f. 1951) beskriver i Time
Passes (fra The West, 1990) håbløsheden i de
små, isolerede samfund, der mistede mange
af de unge på grund af arbejdsløshed og
den generelle udsigtsløshed.
Selvom novellen formentlig foregår i
60'erne, beskriver den konsekvenserne af
arbejdsløshed som næsten lige så alvorlige
som dengang, hvor emigration betød udvandring
uden udsigt til gensyn.
I novellen kommer de unge mænd hjem
til jul på deres årlige besøg fra arbejdspladser
i London, og disse besøg imødeses med
store forventninger både af forældre og
kammerater. I nogle få dage blomstrer byen
op, men snart mister heltene noget af glansen,
de drikker for meget, kommer i klammeri
og bliver smidt ud af værtshusene.
Når julen er ovre, står der igen grædende

mødre og resignerede fædre på stationen
for at sige farvel. For kammeraterne, som
hele tiden "truer" med også at tage arbejde
i England, går årene, og pludselig er det for
sent at "tage båden".
Hvor exil tidligere var en fysisk lokalitet, for
eksempel England eller USA opfattes det
nu i højere grad som en psykisk tilstand.
Joseph O'Connor (f. 1963) skriver således i
forordet til Ireland in Exile, Irish Writers
Abroad, 1993: "And you meet your friends
the night you get home, the people who
stayed behind. You talk to them about
what's happening and there's loads of
news. Some of them are getting married to
people you haven't even met, because you
don't live in Ireland any more.....Some of
them have had kids....You don't really know
what these scandals and gobbets of gossip
are, about which people are laughing so
knowledgeably as they sip their pints, but
you laugh too, because you don't want to
be left out.. .And sometimes there are rows,
as the night wears on, because you don't
keep in touch as much as you should, and
they resent you a bit for going away, and
you resent them a bit for staying, although
you can't put your finger on why......You are
home in Ireland, but you are not home
TEMA: Irland - litteraturen
44
really. London is still in your head or New
York, or Paris. But you're in Ireland.....You
close your eyes and try fight back the almost
overwhelming urge to be somewhereanywhere-else.
And you realise in that moment
that you really are an emigrant now.
And that being an emigrant isn't just an
address. You realise that it's actually a way
of thinking about Ireland."
Antologien Writers in Exile rummer tekster
af Joseph O'Connor selv, Harry Clifton,
Colum McCann, Michael O'Loughlin,
Aidan Hynes, Helen Mulkerns, Emma
Donoghue, Martin Meenan m.fl. Alle forfatterne
var på udgivelsestidspunktet bosiddende
i udlandet.
Bridget O'Connor (f. 1961) beskriver i sin
korte novelle Postcards (fra: Here Comes John,
1993) en mors forsøg på at holde fast på
sin sidste datter ved at holde hende borte
fra skolen. Hendes mand og de øvrige børn
er alle emigreret, og novellen lægger ikke op
til en konflikt mellem moderen og datteren
om dette spørgsmål. Den konflikt er ikke
længere aktuel, for det er givet på forhånd,
at datteren rejser. "And they went away on
boats and planes so I am the only one left
now. And one day I will go, though my
mother does not know this yet. There are
things you must do first. You need money
to leave and exams if you are to get on."
Novellens fokus er derfor på moderens
følelser for de emigrerede og for den sidste
datter og på hendes psykiske tilstand, mens
hun bevidst/ubevidst forsøger at forsinke
denne datters afrejse.
Kønsroller
Nuala O'Faolain's Are You Somebody, 1966,
med undertitlen The Life and Times of Nuala
O Faolain giver et billede af det irske samfund
fra 50'erne op til i dag. Bogen rummer
en autobiografisk del og en samling
artikler om det irske samfund. Artiklerne

lev først udgivet i The Irish Times, som hun
fortsat skriver for.
I billedet af moderen beskriver Nuala
O'Faolain mange kvinders situation i 40ernes
Irland. Moderen var ikke tilfreds med
rollen som husmor og mor, men var tvunget
til at forlade sit job, da hun blev gift på
grund af "the marriage bar", forbuddet mod
gifte kvinders beskæftigelse, bl.a. i den offentlige
sektor. Virkelighedsflugt og spiritus
blev moderens "løsning" på sit dilemma.
For den unge Nuala (f. 1940) gav Irland
selv i 50'erne helt andre muligheder. Hun
beskriver 50'erne som en intellektuel stimulerende
tid, men uden lighed mellem mænd
og kvinder. Kvindens rolle i det litterære
Dublin i 60'erne beskrives således:
"Women either had to make no demands,
and be liked, or be much larger than life,
and feared. It wasn't at all easy to be formidable
and also desirable."
Professionelt er Nuala O'Faolains liv
anderledes end det liv, det store flertal af
kvinder også i hendes egen generation fører
med hensyn til uddannelse og arbejde (jobs
ved radio, tv og på universiteter i England
og Irland, og nu som fast skribent ved The
Irish Times).
Selvom selvbiografien beskriver et liv,
som kunne synes meget specielt, præget af
mange muligheder, professionel succes,
perioder med psykiske problemer og alkoholisme,
viser den enorme respons, der har
været på bogen, at det er lykkedes for forfatteren
gennem det personlige at give et
rammende billede af sin samtid.
Novellen After the Match, 1991 (fra Strong
Pagans, 1991) af Mary O'Donnell (f. 1954)
er en ironisk kommentar til de endnu traditionelle
mands- og kvinderoller, her i Rugbymiljøet.
Samtidig med at hovedpersonen
foragter glorificeringen af rugbyspillerne og
deres træner, hendes egen mand, bliver
TEMA: Irland - litteraturen
45
hendes uafklarethed med hensyn til sin
egen rolle tydelig i slutningen af novellen:
"And the season was over. Her husband
would gradually shed his inattention. He
would be hers again in a limited way. He
might want her, might learn that she was
more than a sanctuary of peace. He might
actually desire her. That was what mattered."
Da hun forsøger hun at gøre sig fri, bliver
det ved at imitere mændenes adfærd.
For mange kvinder i Irland i 60'erne blev
Edna O'Briens romaner en åbenbaring,
hvoraf den første The Country Girls udkom i
1960. For første gang beskrev en kvindelig
forfatter åbent kvinders seksualitet og den
dengang hyppigt forekommende konsekvens,
uønsket graviditet og illegale aborter.
Bogen blev forbudt, en skæbne, der overgik
også senere romaner af samme forfatter.
Edna O'Brien (f. 1932), der fortsat er meget
produktiv, har gennem hele sin karriere
haft forholdet mellem mænd og kvinder,
forældre og børn i fokus. Sidstnævnte emne
behandles i novellen What a Sky (fra Lantern
Slides, 1990), hvor den nu midaldrende datter,
bosiddende i London, besøger sin far
på et plejehjem i Irland. Gensynet bringer
pinefulde erindringer fra barndommen tilbage,
men herigennem også indsigt i egne
identitetsproblemer.
Selvom mange kvinder benytter muligheden
for abort i England, er en provokeret abort
for de fleste ikke ukompliceret. I Maeve
Binchy's Shepherd's Bush (fra: London Tran
1978), præsenteres vi på abortklinik-sports,
ken for to forskellige kvindetyper med to
forskellige holdninger til mænd og abort:
fortælleren, en ung irsk pige, og hendes
stuekammerat, Hell, fra Australien. Samtidig
belyser novellen i skildringen af veninden,
Celia, der har formidlet kontakten til
klinikken, nogle af de problemer, der er
forbundet med at være emigrant, selv når

emigrationen ikke er en økonomisk nødvendighed.
Joseph O'Connor (f. 1963) har i Mothers
Were All the Same (fra True Believers, 1991)
behandlet de samme emner humoristisk,
denne gang set fra en ung mands synsvinkel.
Roddy Doyle (f. 1958) har i sine romaner:
The Commitments, The Snapper, The Van, Paddy
Clarke Ha Ha Ha og den seneste: The
Woman who walked into Doors, 1996 fremstillet
mange sider af livet i 80'erne og 90'erne:
arbejdsløshed, uønsket graviditet, ægteskabsforlis,
vold i hjemmet. De første romaner er
meget humoristiske og optimistiske, men
de senere giver et barsk billede, specielt af
forholdet mellem mænd og kvinder. Doyles
romaner er gode eksempler på vanskeligheden
ved at gruppere tekster efter emner.
Der kunne i lige så høj grad fokuseres på
det miljø, der beskrives, og derfor drages
sammenligninger med McCabes og Bolgers
romaner, der behandles i et senere afsnit.
Tro og religiøsitet
Bernard MacLaverty (f. 1942) fokuserer i
The Beginnings of a Sin (Fra: A Time to Dance,
1982) på tro, synd og kirkens tab af autoritet.
For drengen, Colum, har præsten Father
Lynch været en faderskikkelse og repræsenteret
noget ophøjet og ufejlbarligt,
indtil han ser ham beruset, og senere erkender,
at præsten indirekte opfordrer ham til
at skjule denne viden. Præsten forsøger at
forklare Colum noget om menneskets
syndefuldhed, men for Colum har mødet
med voksenverdenens virkelighed været for
stort et chok til, at denne oplevelse kan føre
til øget indsigt.
I novellen The Break (fra:The Great Profundo,
1987) af samme forfatter opsøges hovedpersonen,
Kardinalen, af sin gamle far,
mens han er i gang med at forberede et
TEMA: Irland - litteraturen
46
oplæg om kirkens rolle.
Faderen ønsker, inden han dør, at fortælle
sønnen om sit syn på religion: "Frank,
there is no God. Religion is a marvellous
institution, full of great, good people - but
it is founded on a lie. Not a deliberate he - a
mistake". Denne erkendelse nåede han
uden sorg frem til mange år tidligere, men
holdt den for sig selv på grund af kærlighed
til sin hustru og af hensyn til sin søns karriere
i kirken.
Den usikkerhed, som Frank, Kardinalen,
havde i sin ungdom med hensyn til troen,
men som han i et professionelt vellykket liv
har undertrykt, har i de senere år manifesteret
sig i en uforklarlig, fundamental træthed.
Da han igen bliver alene, er det umuligt for
ham at fortsætte sin teoretiske diskussion af
kirken som institution. Da ligheden mellem
far og søn betones flere steder i novellen,
lægges der op til den fortolkning, at sønnen
når til samme erkendelse med hensyn til
religion, som faderen netop har afsløret.
Moral og identitet
Ita Daly (f. 1944): The Lady With the Red
Shoes, 1975 (fra: The Lady with the Red Shoes,
1980).
Den mandlige hovedperson i novellen
finder sin samtid overfladisk og vulgær. På
McAndrews hotel, hvor han tilbringer sine
sommerferier, hersker de "gamle" værdier
stadig, og han kan trække sig tilbage hertil
når som helst. En hjemvendt emigrant, en
midaldrende dame med røde sko og en lidt
støjende adfærd, bliver udsat for nedværdigende
behandling på hotellet. En pludselig
forståelse af, hvorfor kvinden har valgt
netop dette "kultiverede" sted, fremkalder
først medlidenhed, men derpå en erkendelse
af, at han selv lever på en illusion, og
at hans værdier ikke længere har betydning i
samfundet: "I wanted to go to her, to tell
her, explain to her that it didn't matter any
more - the world itself was disintegrating.

She should realise that places like
McAndrews weren't important any longer,
people only laughed at them now."
Colm Toibin (f. 1955): The Heather Blazing,
1992.
Hovedpersonen, dommeren Eamon, er
et produkt af sin barndom, der er præget af
isolation og tab. Han lærer ikke at forvente
noget fra andre, og han undgår at involvere
sig emotionelt i sager eller personer af angst
for at blive skuffet. Hans fars identitet var
stærkt knyttet sammen med begivenheder i
Irlands historie. Eamon, derimod, føler sig
uden ståsted; på én og samme tid ønsker
han og viger tilbage fra at udforske sin historie.
Det er karakteristisk, at han har tendens
til at glemme begivenheder, der kunne
være med til at danne hans identitet.
Som advokat ønsker han til enhver tid at
være neutral og retfærdig, hvilket også
aftvinger respekt, men i en sag af moralsk
karakter, bliver han usikker: "How hard it
was to be sure! It was not simply the case,
and the questions it raised about society
TEMA: Irland - litteraturen
47
and morality, it was the world in which
these things happened which left him
uneasy, a world in which opposite values
lived so close to each other." Da han ikke
er nået frem til sin personlige opfattelse af
moral, søger han at finde svarene i lovene
og forfatningen.
Først chokket over hustruens død igangsætter
en udvikling hen mod større åbenhed,
og der antydes i slutningen af romanen
en mulighed for, at han i fremtiden vil turde
involvere sig i sit eget liv.
Patrick McCabe (f. 1955) beskriver livet i en
lille provinsby, et tema, som i irsk litteratur
er særdeles velkendt, men i McCabes romaner
har det fået en særlig drejning. I Carn
(1989) giver han en ironisk og besk kommentar
til småbylivet med dets begrænsninger
for den enkeltes udfoldelsesmuligheder,
og i The Dead School (1995) fokuseres på et
barskt og voldeligt undervisningssystem.
Hovedpersonen Francie Brady i The
Butcher Boy. (1992), er i det ydre en munter
fyr, der vokser op i en lille by i begyndelsen

af 60'erne. Han vokser op i en familie, der
slet ikke fungerer: faderen er håbløs alkoholiker,
og moderen har store psykiske problemer.
I baggrunden kører radioen med
beretninger om voldsomme begivenheder i
den store verden, og drengens hoved er
fyldt af tegneseriefigurer, af billeder fra
cowboyfilm, og af slagertekster. Hans eneste
holdepunkt i den virkelige verden er
hans bedste ven, Joe. Det bliver en traumatisk
oplevelse for ham, at han og hans familie
beskrives som "pigs". Undertrykkelsen
og hykleriet i byen og på opdragelsesanstalten,
forældrenes død, og endnu vigtigere
tabet af Joe, får Francie til helt at miste orienteringen
og evnen til at skelne virkelighed
fra fantasier og hallucinationer. Hans raseri
og vanvid fokuseres på Mrs Nugent, som
den, der første kaldte familien "pigs", og
som samtidig repræsenterer den
familiemæssige sikkerhed, han aldrig har
haft. Fortælleteknikken er stream of
consciousness, hvorved læserens synsvinkel
fastholdes hos drengen. Francies psykiske
udvikling og desperate handlinger synes
helt uundgåelige, når hans situation tages i
betragtning.
Det urbaniserede samfund
Dermot Bolger (f. 1955) beskriver i The
Journey Home, 1990, en ung mands udvikling
og giver samtidig en meget direkte kommentar
til det urbaniserede Irland.
Hovedpersonen Francis' forældre er indvandret
fra landet, og de forbliver landsbyfolk
hele deres liv. Francis derimod tiltrækkes
af den tilsyneladende spænding på bunden
af Dublins natteliv: "Dublin was
moving towards a violent crescendo of its
Friday night, taking to the twentieth
century like an aborigine to whiskey.
Studded punks pissed openly on corners.
Glue sniffers stumbled into each other,
coats on their arms as they tried to pick
pockets. Addicts stalked rich-looking
TEMA: Irland - litteraturen
48
tourists..". Francis forsøger kritikløst at
efterligne sin helt, Shany, "my other self,
afraid of nothing", og hans identitetsløshed
understreges af hans accept af et nyt navn:
Hano.
Det irske samfund, der skildres i romanen,
er gennemsyret af korruption og vold,
og der er en uhellig alliance mellem erhvervslivet
og politikerne. På flugt fra politiet
efter mordet på den forretningsmand,
der er skyld i Shany's død, ser Francis/
Hano sig selv som en mand med en mission:
"I wanted to kill every one of them, to
destroy that family who corrupted
everything they touched."
På bogens sidste sider giver Bolger et
dystopisk billede af det moderne Irland,
styret fra Bruxelles, mens det meste af den
irske befolkning er trængt tilbage til skovene:
"Woods like this have sheltered us for
centuries. After each plantation this is
where we came, watched the invader
renaming our lands, made raids in the night
on what had once been our home. Ribbonmen,
Michael Dwyer's men, Croppies,
Irregulars. Each century gave its own name
to those young men. What will they call us
in the future, the tramps, the Gypsies, the
enemies of the community who stay put?"
I en helt igennem dystopisk novelle The
Hairdresser (fra: Different Kinds of Love, 1987)
beskriver Leland Bardwell (f 1928) et
klassedelt samfund i en ikke så fjern frem
Det politiske system og det traditionelle
-tid.
familiemønster er brudt sammen, og vold
og kriminalitet hersker i alle dele af samfundet.
De velstående borgere påtager sig intet
ansvar, men forskanser sig bag pigtråd, og
også de fattigste mister enhver form for
menneskelighed. Novellen er et skarpt angreb
på den egoisme og menneskeforagt,
som Leland Bardwell ser brede sig i 80'erne
og 90'erne. Leland Bardwell har behandlet
de samme problemer i artiklen Tallaght II

(fra: Invisible Dublin, 1991. Ed. Dermot
Bolger). En sammenstilling af disse to tekster
giver mulighed for en interessant sammenligning
mellem de to forskellige genrers
virkemidler.
Julia O'Faolain (f. 1932) giver i novellen
Rum and Coke, 1995 (fra: Phoenix, Irish Short
Stories 1996) et humoristisk, ironisk billede
af hykleriet i det politiske liv. Hovedpersonens
far, der er senator, optræder som en af
samfundets støtter, afholdsmanden, forkæmperen
for familien og imod enhver
form for prævention, umoralsk litteratur
m.m., alt imens han selv bedrager sin kone.
Sønnen bliver først meget forarget, men
overtager ved faderens pludselige død uden
samvittighedsproblemer ikke blot sin fars
gravide elskerinde, men også hans holdninger
og opførsel.
Dermot Bolger (f. 1959): Father's Music,
1997.
Londonmiljøet der beskrives, karakteriseres
ved støj, vold, kriminalitet og generelt
fravær af moralske værdier. Hovedpersonen
Tracey, der har haft en omtumlet barndom
og ungdom, møder på The Irish Centre en
irsk gangster, Luke Duggan, der fascinerer
og frastøder hende. Sammen med ham begiver
hun sig ud på en rejse til Irland for at
opsøge sin far. Denne søgen efter sine rødder
bliver også en flugt fra politiet og ender
med Lukes død.
Tracey er frugten af et kortvarigt kærlighedsforhold
mellem sin mor og en omrejsende
musiker, som i sin ungdom fik ringe
anerkendelse i et samfund, der først senere
ville vedkende sig sin oprindelige musik.
Det lille, isolerede samfund i Donegal,
hvor Tracey møder sin far, er i modsætning
til storbymiljøet præget af stilhed, hjælpsomhed
og skønhed, og ved romanens afslutning
vælger hovedpersonen, i modsæt-
TEMA: Irland - litteraturen
49
ving til sin mor, faderen og de værdier, h
står for.
Det er bemærkelsesværdigt hvor få ekser
pier, der er på, at handlingen i noveller ol
romaner henlægges til bymiljøet i en tid,
hvor masseindvandringen fra land til by
tilendebragt, og hvor en tredjedel af Irlan
befolkning bor i Dublin. Christopher Mu
ray (University College, Dublin) gjorde vf
konferencen "Refocusing Ireland" (Århu
Universitet, 30-32 okt. 1998) opmærkson
på, at det samme gælder i irsk drama i da€
Hvor bymiljøet er i centrum, fremstilles c
hyppigt som en ødemark, præget af misbrug,
kriminalitet, rastløshed og tomhed,
mens landet betragtes med nostalgi og
fremstår som noget smukt, uvirkeligt, næsten
magisk, der kan tjene som "lægemiddel"
til at helbrede det "moderne" bymen
neskes krise.

TEMA: Irland - litteraturen
The Reactive Imagination. New Irish Fiction
Af Lars Ole Sauerberg, professor ved Odense Universitet
An abbreviated version of apaper read at
the conference Refocusing Ireland' at
Aarhus University October 31 1998.
Modern Irish literature can be said to exist
within a double set of frameworks, by some
considered constraints, by others liberating
possibilities: a dramatic history of continual
strife inviting mythologizing and didacticism,
and a literary heritage which, especially in
its Medieval and late 19th - early 20th
centuries periods, has left landmarks of
international standing and which therefore
generates high levels of literary ambition.
The Irish novelist of the 1990s has his
dramatic material right on his doorstep,
supported by an equally dramatic recent
and distant history. The Irish novelist of
the 1990s at the same time contends with a
recent, that is twentieth-century literary
history quite unique in the way it has
explored and problematized fictional
narrative, with James Joyce the master and
Samuel Beckett and Flann O'Brien his two
disciples.
The heritage from the literary father
figures is not so much a question of
choosing between adopting or rejecting
formal models, but rather of relating to a
50
shared national experience of collapse, rift
and disillusionment, which did not come as
a modernist surprise to Irish artists just
after the turn of the century, but rather as a
general affirmation of an existential outlook
all too familiar to the Irish.
The global opening up of national
frontiers politically and culturally has, not
unexpectedly, been met by a corresponding
urge towards a heightened awareness of the
local - the regional. This is evident in the
successful advances of postcolonial studies
in most formerly colonial areas and of the
many vigorous anti-melting-pot movements
in North America. Since the Renaissance
until partition Ireland, for all practical
purposes an English colony, has been split
between an awareness of a British mandate
looking to London as the cultural centre on
the one hand and, on the other, local efforts
to foreground the regional as the truly
national in preparation for desired
independent nationhood. Today's reality is
Irish participation in Western cultural
activities in an increasingly global atmosphere,
as well as an official government policy
committed to regionalism through
bilingualism. On the one hand, then, there
is a regional literature in Gaelic, and, on the
other, a both nationally and internationally
energized literature in English.
In what follows I shall present nine Irish
novels written in English, all of them
having been published since 1990, together
demonstrating the variety of quite recent
Irish fiction.
Robert McLiam Wilson's Eureka Street
from 1996 is a sentimental love story and a
very much up to date satire on governmentsubsidised
castles in the air. But most of all

a tragicomic story about the total
meaninglessness of the Irish troubles and
about an almost completely secularized
society supporting itself by antiquated
religious loyalties, which long ago should
have been realized for what they are, a
completely frozen system of social
differences. Targets here are the IRA, the
Unionists, the terrorists and Orange men
alike. How indeed can one be a human
being in this boundless and fanatical
stupidity? is what Robert McLiam Wilson
asks in a novel which really makes its reader
ashamed to have a good time reading it.
If early twentieth-century Irish literature
excelled either, as in the time of the Irish
Renaissance, in the glorification of great
national emotions, or - so famously in
James Joyce - in the radical critique of a
culture of inertia and a politics of bombast
with no other than verbal initiatives, Wilson
cuts though both stances by focusing on
the individual caught in a political deadlock
to be solved by neither political rhetorics
nor by opting out. This is particularly clear
in the wholly personal consequences of
violence in strongly disciplined and wholly
clinical descriptions which demonstrate the
inadequacy of ideologies and political and
religious dogmatics.
Eoin McNamee's Resurrection Man from
1994 is also set in Belfast and also with
politically motivated terrorism as its main
issue. A 'resurrection man' is one who
procures corpses for medical research,
killing people personally if need be. Victor
Kelly is the resurrection man who on his
own initiative and with a group of friends
form a death patrol in sympathy with some
of the more fanatic protestant organisations
in the Northern Ireland. Their victims are
Catholics, murdered according to no
particular plan or system, but simply in
order to create a situation of terror among
Ulster's religious and social scapegoats.
TEMA: Irland - litteraturen
51
Kelly grew up in Belfast in the 1960s, at a
time when the confrontation between
Roman Catholics and Protestants was well
on its way to assuming civil-war proportions.
But Kelly's terror activities in the beginning
of the 1970s is not part of the growing
political crisis. He has no sense of history,
of politics, or of social conditions. It is the
very nature of violence that appeals to the
young man, who has his models from the
gangster figures made in Hollywood, and
who happens to be raised in a society all to
easily to be mistaken for the virtual reality
of the film screen.
John Banville, author of the brilliant
trilogy of novels about the dawn of
modernism in European cognition - Doctor
Copernicus, Kepler, and The Newton Letter -
explores the nature of deceit, treason, and
stigmatization in his masterpiece of a story
about the rise and fall of an Ulster emigre.
His The Untouchable from 1997 is based on
an actual historical event, the life of the
socalled `fourth man,' long-term KGB
agent for the Soviet Union, Anthony Blunt,
keeper of the Queen's paintings and
respected art critic.
At a point in a series of talks with a
journalist Victor Maskell, the thinly disguised
Blunt, tries to formulate why he chose to
become the agent for a foreign power then,
more than 40 years ago by a frivolous
impulse, an escape from boredom and a
search for variety, wanting a life of action to
sedate the soul. But even that is only part
of a truth which is never fully realized but
has its roots partly in a political, but
strangely enough never full commitment,
partly in some very personal circumstances,
reinforced by complex social factors. But
first and foremost Maskell's choice of
betrayal is an aesthetic matter and it is this
that makes it an interesting companion
story to McNamee's.
Both McNamee and Banville are

concerned with causes that lead to political
events of the greatest importance. In
neither scenario there seems much hope of
rationality as the basis of a stable political
situation. However, recent Irish literature
also seems to have a bid for rationality in
the midst of the nihilistic despair growing
out of self-propelling violence.
Colm Toibin's The Heather Blazing from
1992 is a deceptively idyllic story about the
approaching twilight years in the life of the
Irish High Court Judge Eamon Redmond,
who seems to have experienced fulfilment
in his career as well as in his personal
affairs.
The impression of personal idyll and
professional success is very much a result
of the tone in which the story is told. Most
of it is seen from Eamon's perspective, his
professional disinterestedness is reflected in
a style which deceptively never raises its
voice - a debt to James Joyce's Dubliners is
indicated - and in the compositional
features of an ostentatiously well-made
novel with a quiet progressive rhythm
counterpointed by flash-backs serving to
enhance the tune of the plot. Just as
Eamon has a tendency to ignore problems
which cannot be handled as abstract legal
niceties, the style is carefully designed in the
guarded and non-commital manner of
.)olite and educated dinner conversation.
But the stylistic polish and the aesthetic
ieatness turn out to be deliberate
deceptions. The attentive reader will have
noted how the cliff outside the Redmonds'
summerhouse in Cush near Wexford is
subject to relentless erosion. The
neighbour's house is already undermined
and in the process of falling into the sea.
The Redmonds' will be next.
The novel may be approached in various
ways. One is to see the Judge's professional
dilemmas not as personally moral ones, but
growing out of a specifically Irish situation
TEMA: Irland - litteraturen
52
which calls for stabilizing measures above
all. Only by establishing a reasonably just
legal foundation, reflecting a balanced view
of things - hence the Judge's increasing
interest in drawing on foreign court
decisions - will the state be able to mete out
justice to the individual and to secure the
kind of legal framework which is accepted
by all because obviously raised above
extremist and partisan causes.
We can understand that a national history
of so much oppression and negligence
resulting in miserable social conditions for
those living in Ireland must show a high
rate of emigrants, if that option has been at
all possible. Joyce left his home country
because of spiritual starvation, but millions
have left their home, mainly for North
America or Australia, just in order to
survive.
In Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes from
1996 we have a novel of reminiscence,
telling the story of its author, born in 1930
in Ireland. The country was exceedingly
poor, so the Free State mother and the
Belfast father went to New York with their
two small children in search of a better life.
But the depression-ridden Big Apple did
not offer many openings to low-status Irish
immigrants. A daughter and two twin sons
are born in a miserable tenement apartment
in Brooklyn. While the father lives up to
Joyce's horror model of the drunk and
sentimental Irishman singing his Irish tunes
into one beer mug after another, the
American branch of the familiy decides that
Ireland, after all, is where the family
belongs, and good riddance too is what
they feel. They finance the passage home
for them - after the death of the baby
daughter.
Angela c Ashes is a bitter but not loveless
reckoning with a nation which has seen a
lot, it is true, but has found it extremely
difficult to liberate itself from a sentimental

memory of a heroic past and equally difficult
to rouse itself from it and instead to turn to
an effort to improve on social conditions.
In this novel responsibility is divided
equally between the Catholic Church and
the Guinness family. Humour is the
redeeming feature in this grim existential
limbo which is archetypal Ireland in much
of her twentieth-century literature. Not that
there is much to laugh at while the family is
suffering from the slings and arrows of
outrageous fortune, but when recollected in
tranquillity the situation is different.
Humour, of the sardonic or black varities,
is at the core of twentieth-century Irish
fiction, a necessary literary defence
mechanism against a constantly disturbing
reality.
Modern Irish fiction seldom ventures
beyond its native ground, although its
authors have often done so. An exception
is Joseph O'Connor's Desperados from 1994
which is set partly in the Nicaragua of the
mid-1980s, partly in Ireland.
Desperados is not primarily, for a change, a
book mostly about Ireland and its problems.
It is about sexual and family relations under
strain, a kind of strain recognizable as typical
of Western-style life. It is a story that could
have involved any other European country
and any other Latin American country. The
same principle really applies to Roddy
Doyle's fiction, in which the determinants
are social rather than national.
Roddy Doyle's Banytown Trilogy is perhaps
the best known work of fiction internationally
from a contemporary Irish author. In these
three novels we find characters of the same
well-tempered metal as in O'Connor's
Desperados, people not satisfied with putting
up with the cards dealt them by an ironically
minded fate, but determined to do
something. The tone was changed somewhat
into a more sombre key in the same
author's Booker Prize winning Paddy Clarke
TEMA: Irland - litteraturen
53
Ha Ha Ha from 1993, and in The Woman
Who Went Into Doors from 1996 we have to
do with a novel darkly dedicated to the
exploration of domestic violence.
Doyle's story about Paula belongs in the
domestic-violence sub-genre of the
contemporary novel so well-established
since the breakthrough of confessional and
feminist fiction in the seventies. As such,
the story could have been set anywhere.
What makes it interesting in an Irish
context, is perhaps in the way that Doyle
can be said to have written himself away
from the robust we-shall-overcome
humour of his somewhat romanticised
Dublin working-class environments, which
in turn was Doyle's writing himself away
from the preponderant theme of social and
psychological lethargy and inertia in much
Irish fiction.
Whether the social or the psychological
must be blamed for the development into
insanity of Francie Brady in Patrick
McCabe's The Butcher Boy from 1992 is hard
to determine. What can be reasonably
asserted, though, is that a number of social
traumata are of decisive importance for the
boy's increasing letting go of reality.
In the beginning of the 1960s Francie
grows up in a small Irish provincial town,
where everybody knows one another and
gossips about their knowledge. Francie's
mother is depressive and his father a
drunkard. Francie's own family eventually
breaks up, and Francie is left to the
supervision of the local authority. When he
is apprenticed to the local butcher,
everyone draws a sigh of relief, for he
seems happy and preoccupied in that job.
If the story starts a little in the manner of
Mark Twain about 'Tom Sawyer and
Huckleberry Finn, the signals of the
picaresque soon give way to those of a
Bildungsroman, told in the well-proven
manner of the long flashback as the

protagonist's tells his story. Only in this
case it becomes quite clear that the process
of Francie's growing up rather than
enhancing a meaningful relationship with
reality is of the opposite kind: an increasing
refusal to comply with a reality which seems
to present one with only unpleasant facts.
Actually, the reader has been expecting
catastrophe from the ominous opening
sentence: `When I was a young boy twenty
or thirty or forty years ago I lived in a small
town where everybody blamed me for what
I did to Mrs. Nugent.'
Also concerned with the familiarly
Joycean paralysis-of-the-past theme is
Jennifer Johnston's The Invisible Worm from
1991, in the tradition of the `Protestant
Nation' or `great house' that runs as a motif
through Irish fiction with Elizabeth Bowen
as perhaps the most prominent name. The
studiedly genteel attitude on the part of
Mrs. Nugent in Patrick McCabe's sombre
story has its model in the Anglo-Irish gentry
in their increasingly run-down estates
scattered all over the Irish countryside. So
the title of Johnston's novel, which alludes
to William Blake's famous poem about the
sick rose, is also, while immediately
applicable to what the story is about, in a
larger context, symptomatic of a state of
society and a way of life no longer feasible
nor really socially desireable.
This story about a dark personal history
of incest, repressions and a kind of survival
features Laura Quinlan, a woman in her late
thirties and out of Anglo-Irish landowner
and politician family. In tone not quite unlike
English Anita Brookner's low-keyed but
highly charged fiction, Jennifer Johnston
uses an Irish scenery of general decay as an
effective backdrop for a story universally
human in its implications.
We can see today that James Joyce,
Samuel Beckett and Flann O'Brien have
TEMA: Irland - litteraturen
54
not prevailed as models to be copied in the
compositional techniques of current Irish
prose. The explanation probably being that
the wild narrative and linguistic oats were
sown by those Irish writers a long time
before postmodernism renamed
construction deconstruction.
Contemporary Irish fiction consequently
seems to have escaped the craze for
metafictional and magic-realistic excesses
which has been one of the characteristics of
other literatures in English since the 1960s.
Radically experimenting modernist
techniques were, if not invented then at
least first put into operation long ago by
Irish writers. The Irish writer need not
remind his reader blatantly and constantly
of the precariousness of the fictional
universe. That was a phase in Irish literature
responding to the given circumstances of a
given time. Now the circumstances and
time are different, calling for different
compositional modes. Conventional realism
is the mode of writing preferred by Irish
writers today, but an examination in detail
of any of the works discussed above will
reveal that the contemporary Irish novel
displays a variety and subtlety of verbal
rendition fully capable of meeting the
requirements of the subject matter. If Joyce
is the forefather of modern Irish fiction, it
is the succinct Joyce of Dubliners and The
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, not the
noisier Joyce of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake
who has left a legacy for successful
investment.
Contemporary Irish fiction, last of West-
European literatures to escape censorship,
seems to be truly heading for the
international scene, in terms of broadening
thematic range and of distribution abroad,
in English as well as in numerous
translations.

Korea
Af John McGahern
TEMA: Irland - novellen
Filmen Korea er baseret på novellen af samme navn. Instruktøren er Cathel Black.
Korea skildrer de traumatiske følger af The Civil War 1922-1923. Novellen er bragt i
Anglo files med særlig tilladelse af forfatteren.
Korea
`You saw an execution then too, didn't you?' I asked my father,
and he started to tell as he rowed. He'd been captured in an
ambush in late 1919, and they were shooting prisoners in
Mountjoy as reprisals at that time. He thought it was he who'd be
next, for after a few days they moved him to the cell next to the
prison yard. He could see out through the bars. No rap to prepare
himself came to the door that night, and at daybreak he saw the
two prisoners they'd decided to shoot being marched out: a man
in his early thirties, and what was little more than a boy, sixteen or
seventeen, and he was weeping. They blindfolded the boy, but the
man refused the blindfold. When the officer shouted, the boy clicked to attention, but the man
stayed as he was, chewing very slowly. He had his hands in his pockets.
`Take your hands out of your pockets,' the officer shouted again, irritation in the voice.
The man slowly shook his head.
`It's a bit too late now in the day for that,' he said.
The officer then ordered them to fire, and as the volley rang, the boy tore at his tunic over the
heart, as if to pluck out the bullets, and the buttons of the tunic began to fly into the air before he
pitched forward on his face.
The other heeled quietly over on his back: it must have been because of the hands in the pockets.
The officer dispatched the boy with one shot from the revolver as he lay face downward, but he
pumped five bullets in rapid succession into the man, as if to pay him back for not coming to
attention.
`When I was on my honeymoon years after, it was May, and we took the tram up the hill of
Howth from Sutton Cross,' my father said as he rested on the oars. `We sat on top in the open on
the wooden seats with the rail around that made it like a small ship. The sea was below, and smell
of the sea and furze-bloom all about, and then I looked down and saw the furze pods bursting, and
the way they burst in all directions seemed shocking like the buttons when he started to tear at his
tunic. I couldn't get it out of my mind all day. It destroyed the day.'
`It's a wonder their hands weren't tied?' I asked him as he rowed between the black navigation
pan and the red where the river flowed into Oakport.
`I suppose it was because they were considered soldiers.'
`Do you think the boy stood to attention because he felt that he might still get off if he obeyed
the rules?'
`Sounds a bit highfalutin' to me. Comes from going to school too long,' he said aggressively,
and I was silent. It was new to me to hear him talk about his own life at all. Before, if I asked him
about the war, he'd draw fingers across his eyes as if to tear a spider web away, but it was my last
summer with him on the river, and it seemed to make him want to talk, to give of himself before it
ended.
55

TEMA: Irland - novellen
Hand over hand I drew in the line that throbbed with fish; there were two miles of line, a hook
on a lead line every three yards. The licence allowed us a thousand hooks, but we used more. We
were the last to fish this freshwater for a living.
As the eels came in over the side I cut them loose with a knife into a wire cage, where they slid
over each other in their own oil, the twisted eel hook in their mouths. The other fish - pike choked
on hooked perch they'd tried to swallow, bream, roach - I slid up the floorboards towards the bow
of the"boat. We'd sell them in the village or give them away. The hooks that hadn't been taken I
cleaned and stuck in rows round the side of the wooden box. I let the line fall in its centre. After a
mile he took my place in the stem and I rowed. People hadn't woken yet, and the early morning
cold and mist were on the river. Outside of the slow ripple of the oars and the threshing of the fish
on the line beaded with running drops of water as it came in, the river was dead silent, except for
the occasional lowing of cattle on the banks.
`Have you any idea what you'll do after this summer?' he asked.
`No. I'll wait and see what comes up,' I answered.
`How do you mean what comes up?'
`Whatever result I get in the exam. If the result is good, I'll have choices. If it's not, there won't
be choices. I'll have to take what I can get.'
`How good do you think they'll be?'
`I think they'll be all right, but there's no use counting chickens, is there?'
`No,' he said, but there was something calculating in the face; it made me watchful of him as I
rowed the last stretch of the line. The day had come, the distant noises of the farms and the first
flies on the river, by the time we'd lifted the large wire cage out of the bulrushes, emptied in the
morning's catch of eels, and sunk it again.
`We'll have enough for a consignment tomorrow,' he said.
Each week we sent the live eels to Billingsgate in London.
`But say, say even if you do well, you wouldn't think of throwing this country up altogether and
going to America?' he said, the words fumbled for as I pushed the boat out of the bulrushes after
sinking the cage of eels, using the oar as a pole, the mud rising a dirty yellow between the stems.
`Why America?'
`Well, it's the land of opportunity, isn't it, a big, expanding country? There's no room for
ambition in this poky place. All there's room for is to make holes in pints of porter.'
I was wary of the big words. They were not in his own voice.
`Who'd pay the fare?'
`We'd manage that. We'd scrape it together somehow.'
`Why should you scrape for me to go to America if I can get a job here?'
`I feel I'd be giving you a chance I never got. I fought for this country. And now they want to
take away even the licence to fish. Will you think about it anyhow?'
`I'll think about it,' I answered.
Through the day he trimmed the brows of ridges in the potato field while I replaced hooks on the
line and dug worms, pain of doing things for the last time as well as the boredom the knowledge
brings that soon there'll be no need to do them, that they could be discarded almost now. The guilt
of leaving came: I was discarding his life to assume my own, a man to row the boat would eat into
the decreasing profits of the fishing, and it was even not certain he'd get renewal of his licence. The
tourist board had opposed the last application. They said we impoverished the coarse fishing for
tourists - the tourists who came every summer from Liverpool and Birmingham in increasing
numbers to sit in aluminium deck-chairs on the riverbank and fish with rods. The fields we had
would be a bare living without the fishing.
I saw him stretch across the wall in conversation with the cattle-dealer Farrell as I came round to
put the worms where we stored them in clay in the darkness of the lavatory. Farrell leaned on the
56

TEMA: Irland - novellen
bar of his bicycle on the road. I passed into the lavatory thinking they were talking about the price
of cattle, but as I emptied the worms into the box, the word Moran came, and I carefully opened
the door to listen. It was my father's voice. He was excited.
`I know. I heard the exact sum. They got ten thousand dollars when Luke was killed. Every
American soldier's life is insured to the tune of ten thousand dollars.'
`I heard they get two hundred and fifty dollars a month each for Michael and Sam while they're
serving,' he went on.
`They're buying cattle left and right,' Farrell's voice came as I closed the door and stood in the
darkness, in the smell of shit and piss and the warm fleshy smell of worms crawling in too little
clay.
The shock I felt was the shock I was to feel later when I made some social blunder, the
splintering of a self-esteem and the need to crawl into a lavatory to think.
Luke Moran's body had come from Korea in a leaden casket, had crossed the stone bridge to the
slow funeral bell with the big cars from the embassy behind, the coffin draped in the Stars and
Stripes. Shots had been fired above the grave before they threw in the clay. There were photos of
his decorations being presented to his family by a military attache.
He'd scrape the fare, I'd be conscripted there, each month he'd get so many dollars while I
served, and he'd get ten thousand if I was killed.
In the darkness of the lavatory between the boxes of crawling worms before we set the night line
for the eels I knew my youth had ended.
I rowed as he let out the night line, his fingers baiting each twisted hook so beautifully that it
seemed a single movement. The dark was closing from the shadow of Oakport to Nutley's
boathouse, bats made ugly whirls overhead, the wings of ducks shirred as they curved down into
the bay.
`Have you thought about what I said about going to America?' he asked, without lifting his eyes
from the hooks and the box of worms.
`I have.'
The oars dipped in the water without splash, the hole whorling wider in the calm as it slipped
past him on the stem seat.
`Have you decided to take the chance, then?'
`No. I'm not going.'
`You won't be able to say I didn't give you the chance when you come to nothing in this fool of
a country. It'll be your own funeral.'
`It'll be my own funeral,' I answered, and asked after a long silence, `As you grow older, do you
find your own days in the war and jails coming much back to you?'
`I do. And I don't want to talk about them. Talking about the execution disturbed me no end,
those cursed buttons bursting into the air. And the most I think is that if I'd conducted my own
wars, and let the fool of a country fend for itself, I'd be much better off today. I don't want to talk
about it.'
I knew this silence was fixed for ever as I rowed in silence till he asked, `Do you think, will it be
much good tonight?'
`It's too calm,' I answered.
`Unless the night wind gets up,' he said anxiously.
`Unless a night wind,' I repeated.
As the boat moved through the calm water and the line slipped through his fingers over the side
I'd never felt so close to him before, not even when he'd carried me on his shoulders above the
laughing crowd to the Final. Each move he made I watched as closely as if I too had to prepare
myself to murder.
57

TEMA: Irland - poesien
Irsk universalitet - Desmond Egans poesi
Af Ida Klitgård, ph.d.-stipendiat, Engelsk Institut, Københavns Universitet
NEEDING THE SEA
in September maybe most that time
when the earth begins to take over again
something in me gets bogged down and
cries out for the grace of water
there's no need my friend to remind me
about the countless whose lives are far from such luxury
about starvation and misery the latest holocaust
of those who never got a dog's chance oh
as I write I can hear the scream of
someone being carefully tortured while others
with their only life blindfolded face into
the high cement wall of one military or another
even the thought like that of Chechina becomes
a kind of dying: what the hitcher from the North felt
as he watched the blaze of his cottage
we all know about the houses of hopes blown up blown out
we all bump into the local alcos the druggie
youngsters their adult faces mugged by less than poverty
just off the O'Connell street of our new towns
is the world which so many miss
realised for them you'd wonder through others
do we carry it for this mongol child that
bucketful of abortions in the sluice room?
I need the sea
my being as if on strike soundlessly cries out
to come on it high above the road I
want to stand on that rock which tells no lies and
feel the grassgreen otherness making the mind reel
see the wide slow gathering of a watershadow rising rising up into
the wash the rush the clatter spreading down a beach
hear the strangely comforting clicking of pebbles
I need
to be consoled by the rush of my own smallness
to swim my soul awhile in the pure space let it go adrift
where one wave can hide the shore
at times I need this deep
forgive me
Desmond Egan, Seeeing Double (1983).
58

Dette digt om den enkeltes magtesløshed
over for både globale og lokale overgreb på
menneskeheden er skrevet af en nulevende
irsk digter, der af den betydningsfulde
litteraturkritiker Hugh Kenner er blevet
karakteriseret som "The first Irish poet to
have broken free from the need to sound
`Irish'."' ) Som Desmond Egans danske
oversætter vil jeg her gerne introducere et
forfatterskab, der spænder vidt indholdsmæssigt
som kulturelt, mellem det personlige
og det offentlige - og mellem det steds -
lige og det universelle. 2 Egan har begået 13
digtsamlinger i årene 1972-97, oversættelser
af Euripides' Medea (1991) og Sofokles'
Philoctetes (1998), adskillige artikler, bidrag til
samleværker samt en essaysamling, The
Death of Metaphor: Selected Prose (1990). En
Collected Poems, der giver et godt overblik
over det tidlige forfatterskab, udkom i 1983
og er blevet fulgt op med endnu to opsamlinger,
Selected Poems (1992) og Elegies (1996).
Desmond Egan, f. 1936 i landsbyen
Athlone i "the Irish Midlands", besluttede
sig for 11 år siden til at blive professionel
digter efter en længere karriere som gymnasielærer
i engelsk og oldgræsk (debuterede
først som 36-årig). Sideløbende med digt
har han sin egen udgivervirksomhed,
-ningen
The Goldsmith Press, og er nok en af de
flittigste irske forfattere til at tage udenlands
og "optræde" på et hav af konferencer,
digtoplæsninger, årlige turnéer i USA,
internationale lyrikfestivaler, osv. Egan har
modtaget adskillige priser og er blevet oversat
til flere sprog end selveste Seamus
Heaney. Der foreligger endnu ikke nogen
samlet dansk udgivelse af Egans poesi.
Egan er en nutidig bevidst arvtager af
TEMA: Irland - poesien
modernismens imagisme og skriver enkelt
og intenst om det irske landskab (fx
Midland, 1972, Athlone?, 1980, Peninsula,
1992), kærligheden (Leaves, 1974, Snapdragon,
1983), historien (In the Holocaust of
Autumn, 1994, Famine, 1997), politiske begivenheder
(Siege!, 1977, Poems for Peace, 1986),
kunsten og de andre kunstnere (fx Woodcutter,
1978, Seeing Double, 1983) samt de helt nære
ting (eksempelvis A SongforMy Father,
1989, Poems for Eimear, 1994). For tiden arbejder
Egan på en digtsamling om sin taknemmelighed
til musikken og dens udøvende
kunstnere. For mig at se er Egans
absolutte force elegierne, der trods melankolien
over tidens strømmen og de medfølgende
tab altid åbenbarer et vist håb manifesteret
i selve erindringen - det som den
tidligere irske poet Patrick Kavanagh kalder
"the passionate transitory". Kritikeren
Brian Arkins siger om Egans elegiske ideal:
"At the same time, Egan espouses the two
modes in which modern poets write elegies:
they either embrace the traditional motifs
of transcendence and consolation, or they
resolutely refuse these and stoically face the
loss and the sadness."3)
Egan hævder, at den moderne billedkunst
og musikken, dvs, klassisk musik, jazzen og
den irske folkemusik, har været større
inspirationskilder end litteraturen, men
blandt de forfattere, som har gjort størst
indtryk på ham, kan dog nævnes lyrikerne
Patrick Kavanagh, Gerard Manley Hopkins
og Samuel Beckett (som Egan var ven med
i flere år indtil dennes død i 1989 - se digtet
"ECHO'S BONES - FOR SAMUEL
BECKETT", A Song for My Father, 1989),
den russiske Anna Achmåtova, spanske
1) Cf. Hugh Kenners introduktion til Egans Selected Poems (1992).
2) Undertegnede har oversat udvalgte digte samt essayet "The Death of Metaphor", under udgivelse
i det litterære tidsskrift Den Blå Port nr. 46, Forlaget Rhodos, København.
3) Brian Arkins, Desmond Egan: A Critical Study, Little Rock: Milestone Press, 1992, p. 38.
59

Antonio Machado, græske Yannis Ritsos og
de amerikanske digtere John Berryman og
ikke mindst Ezra Pound, som Egan har
tilegnet hyldestdigtene "FOR JOHN
BERRYMAN" og "LATE BUT! ONE
FOR EZRA" (Midland, 1972, og Woodcutter,
1978). Hugh Kenner har tilføjet: "With
Desmond Egan we come to a poet who is
hospitable in a new way to the literary
traditions of Europe and America - in a
way no English poet is." Og Peter van de
Kamp siger i artiklen om Egans "liminal
status", at "[the] universal idiom allows
Egan the liminal equilibrium to speak out
of Ireland without having to present a
uniquely Irish identity." 4)
I denne introduktion vil jeg dvæle lidt ved
spændingen mellem den nære, private oplevelse
og den offentlige politiske sfære. Essensen
i Egans poetik er en blanding af den
Kavanaghske hyldest til intensiteten i "the
ordinary" og "the parochial" (som ikke er
lig med det snævertsynede provinsielle) - i
det lokale findes nemlig det universelle - og
af Ezra Pounds eksperimenterende
imagistiske princip om det enkelte, klare og
tørre billede, der skal præsentere en stemning
i stedet for den overbroderede metafor, der
søger at repræsentere en såkaldt sandhed - et
princip Pound udnyttede til fulde i genopdagelsen
af det japanske haiku-digt. I
"NON SYMBOLIST" beskriver Egan oplevelsen
af, hvad Wordsworth kaldte "spots
of time" netop som en vision af stedets
intense transcendens på foranledning af
blot en lille ubetydelig bevægelse i landskabet.
Idet han jogger hen ad landevejen en
halvmørk decemberaften, sker det:
TEMA: Irland - poesien
that's about it one small moment
which could take the biggest words
even as I crouch here like Wordsworth or
someone
that twilight rises again with the road
everything becomes gravely itself
yielding its secret as things at sunset
a genuine quiet
my footsteps.
Egans digte er ofte typografisk opsat med
to kolonner, hvor højre kolonne i kursiv
skal illustrere et dobbeltsyn eller en slags
mod- eller medstemme/stemning på
hoveddigtet. Denne nyskabelse er efter sigende
inspireret af billedhuggeren
Giacometti og den irske maler Francis Bacon,
hvis billeder udfordrer betragteren til
at skifte mellem to eller flere sæt briller, da
for eksempel ansigter fremstilles fra flere
vinkler på samme tid. I ovenstående digt
finder vi således tilsvarende i højre side en
række poetologiske overvejelser efter hændelsen,
da jeg'et noget provokerende siger:
"Yeats Mallarmé & Co. you're/out the window/
forme at least" og senere "may I always reel
with such/everythings". Symbolismens metaforik
bibringer kun "the splintered/world of
broken glasses/ we want the real thing as sacred/
mood as rich/as an apple or a cup of tea and/
therefore/full of strangeness like aface". Igennem
hele Egans produktion søger han mod at
præsentere en hårfin, men kraftfuld, balance
mellem passion og distance, mellem
det personlige og det upersonlige, i en i
landskabet og stedets iboende metafysik,
som for eksempel i "NETTLES" (Midland,
1972):
when the crows lifted decadent harvest ripening emerald
hung on my view floated away and
4) Peter van de Kamp, "Desmond Egan: Universal Provincialist", i Geert Lernout (red.), The
Crows behind the Plough: History and Violence in Anglo-Irish Poetry and Drama, Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 1991, p. 153.
60

in silences of moon and the night you
thrum with acid power just to produce
that wrinkly toppling crop
sting-fruited fanatically baited
in treacherous luxuriance
waving the bite of each touch
only to guard your nothing
green rash! growth
of graveyards damps and every wilderness
I have seen you sunless one
spread elsewhere spread
down the waste places of the soul.
I den 17 år senere sekvens om faderens
død reducerer Egan råt og brutalt alle overflødige
ord væk og lader i nedenstående
uddrag sidste linje tale for ømheden og
sårbarheden over ikke at få sagt ordentlig
farvel og ikke vide, hvor faderen er på vej
hen efter døden (fra A Song for My Father,
1989). Denne tendens til askese er i det hele
taget stærkt fremherskende i den senere
produktion:
I threw into the glaury sticky grave
one daffodil from the spring of 1985
tossed it out from me saw it bump against a
freshly dug wall
and with it part of myself
my youth the good times the middling since
the matches the trips to Dublin
deals the shop our walks at The Bay
agreements disagreements many and many a
laugh
christmasses and gatherings and our last
weeks
a dying hand
the wet clay of our jumbled loving past
I never saw it land.
De politiske digte i Desmond Egans forfatterskab
er ikke ment som propaganda, men
som en præsentation af ambivalente følel-
TEMA: Irland - poesien
61
ser i og stillingtagen til aktuelle verdens
såvel som irske og ikke mindst
-begivenheder
nordirske spørgsmål. Det lille epigrammatiske
digt "THE NORTHERN IRELAND
QUESTION" (Poems for Peace, 1986) minder
os med gru om den seneste tragedie i
Omagh: "two wee girls/were playing tig near
a car.../how many counties would you say/
are worth their scattered fingers?"
Nordirlandsdilemmaet er ligeledes taget i
behandling i digtene "HITCHHIKER" og
"HUNGERSTRIKER" (begge Seeing Double,
1983.) Ifølge Egan skyldes hele proble
i historien grusomme etniske-matikken
den
udrensning af katolikker i Ulster. Oliver
Cromwells mål var at sende katolikkerne
"to Hell or to Connaught" (den golde,
klippefyldte Vestkyst). Egan har i et interview
udtalt, at det britiske flag overhovedet
ikke burde vejre i Irland.
Udover flere digte til banebrydere for
fred i verden og uskyldigt dømte (Egans
digt til den sydafrikanske Benjamin
Moloise, som blev hængt i Pretoria 1985,
hænger efter sigende på væggen i Desmond
Tutus soveværelse) har han i de senere år
bevæget sig hen imod en lyrik, der på mere
narrativ vis udtrykker patos og irsk solidaritet
med andre folkeslags beslægtede skæbner,
hvad angår udrensning, udstødelse,
evig forfølgelse og fremmedgørelse. I bogen
In the Holocaust of Autumn (1994) sætter
Egan lighedstegn mellem englændernes
koloniale udrensning af katolikker og nazisternes
ideal om Endlo'sung i Europa og beskriver
herudfra en række fælles karaktertræk
irerne og jøderne imellem. Irland,
Danmark og Holland er ifølge bogens noter
de eneste lande i verden, der ikke har
åbenlys antisemitisme på samvittigheden,
og irerne er ofte blevet kaldt "The Lost
Tribe of Moses" på grund af folkets lignende
andenrangsstatus i deres eget land:
the dynasties of steel treated us

my life cut in two
like a chosen people too
surrounded us tried to bury
I cried for years
our wish to be ourselves
made us Marranoss )only one child in
pitch-cappedb) our dreams fourteen
saw to it that our luck disarmed and upon
would run out always their knees
left us the same I must remember
vocabulary of feeling between everything
the
gaps in language
the desperate urge to
laugh instead of weep
the same cranky voice
the tough music.
Irerne havde deres eget holocaust i 1847
med "The Great Famine", som Egan også
har fordømt i den seneste bog Famine
(1997) for at markere, at det samme år var
150 år siden, englænderne udsultede og
udpinte en hel nation under det koloniale
herredømme.
Selvom Desmond Egans mere eller mindre
imagistiske teknik sætter en række begrænsninger
for intellektuel dybde i poesien,
vidner hans vidtspændende repertoire og
engagement om flere lag end først antaget.
Birgit Bramsbåck har bemærket, at "In the
crisis of modern Ireland, poetry has been
secularised - whereas in Egan almost every
poem has a metaphysical aspect". Og Patrick
Rafroidi har påpeget, at Egans sprog
åbenbarer "an acute sense of the fragility of
TEMA: Irland - poesien
things". Trods tab og ødelæggelse, trods
altings strømmen og tingenes forgåen, er
der i Egans poesi altid en tro på transcendens,
på en større platonisk helhed mellem
tingene og sjælen: "Great economy, great
directness, great feeling distinguish Egan's
poetry - but it is his belief in us that makes
him the great poet that he is" (Russell
Murphy, redaktør af The Yeats/Eliot
Review)' ). Forbilledet Patrick Kavanaghs
digt "The Hospital" opsummerer prunkløst
og følsomt ledetråden i Desmond Egans
antisymbolistiske poetik - en poesi der
ifølge ham selv kommer tættere på en platonisk
universalitet mellem det, han betegner
som "this material world of sense perception
with its manifold inadequacies and
the other transcendent world of the Good,
where all these inadequacies are resolved"':
This is what love does to things: The Rialto
Bridge
The main gate that was bent by a heavy
lorry.
The seat at the back of a shed that was a sun
trap.
Naming these things is the love-act and its
pledge,
For we must record love's mystery without
claptrap,
Snatch out of time the passionate transitory.
Litteratur af Desmond Egon
Midland (1972)
Leaves (1974)
Siege! (1977)
Woodcutter (1978)
Athlone? (1980)
Seeing Double (1983)
5) Jøder der måtte dyrke deres religion i hemmelighed.
6) Form for tortur hvor ofret får trukket en slags hætte af glødende tjære ned over hovedet. Ofte
brugt af englænderne til at straffe irske rebeller i tiden omkring det store oprør i 1798.
7) Alle citater fra Egan-kritikere er fra bagsiden af Desmond Egans Elegies (1996).
8) Citeret i Brian Arkins, Desmond Egan: A Critical Study, p. 8.
62

Snapdragon (1983)
Collected Poems (1983)
Poems for Peace (1986)
A Song for My Father (1989)
The Death of Metaphor. Selected Prose (1990)
Peninsula (1992)
Selected Poems (1992)
In the Holocaust ofAutumn (1994)
Poems for Eimear (1994)
Elegies ,(1996)
Famine (1997)
(Alle udgivet af The Goldsmith Press,
Newbridge, Irland.)
TEMA: Irland - poesien
Ireland
Towards New Identities?.
Edited by Karl-Heinz Westarp & Michael Boss
(The Dolphin, Volume 29)
Sekundærlitteratur
Brian Arkins: Desmond Egan: A Critical
Study, Little Rock: Milestone Press,
1992
Hugh Kenner (red.): Desmond Egan, Orono:
Northern Lights Inc., 1990.
Peter van de Kamp: "Desmond Egan:
Univesal Provincialist", i Geert Lernout
(red.), The Crows behind the Plough: Hi.rtoily
and Violence in Anglo-Irish Poe/i3 and
Drama, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1991. •
Novelist Sean O'Faolain, playwright Brian Friel, and poet Seamus Heaney have been highly
critical of the Irish revolutionary generation for its oversimplification of the interstice between
past and present. These post-war writers complain that the nationalists see Irish history as a great
romantic narrative with a tragic beginning and possibly a happy ending.
The present collection of previously unpublished essays by Irish and international writers and
scholars centres on the implications of an intricate conception of Irish history and identity. It
emphasizes both the historical considerations and the literary representations of Irish identities.
The text of the "Good Friday Peace Accord" is included along with individual chapters on the
slow triumph of politics, historical revisionism, uses of the national anthem, on Sean O'Faolain,
on Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, and nationalism and unionism in this decade. The chapters
on literary representation discuss the poetry of Northern Ireland, of John Hewitt and Seamus
Heaney, James Joyce's "modern hells", Samuel Beckett, and the state of Irish theatre.
Apart from essays by such distinguished Irish writers as Tom Garvin, Calm Toibin, Edna
Langley and Fintan O'Toole the collection contains contributions by American, Norwegian,
Swedish, and Danish scholars.
178 PAGES, SOFTBOUND, SIZE 220 x 150 MM. OCTOBER 1998. ISBN 87 7288 380 4
PRICE: 118 DKK / £ 14.95 / $ 19.95 (+ POSTAGE) (PRICE IN DKK DOES NOT INCLUDE
DANISH VAT)
Mail or Fax to: Aarhus University Press, building 170, University of Aarhus, DK-8000
Aarhus, Denmark. Fax no. + 45 86 19 84 33.
63

`Of what is past, orpassing,
or to come. ")
One of the things that is traditionally
associated with Ireland is the characteristic
knotwork decoration that can be found on
anything from Celtic crosses to tourist
souvenirs. The intertwining lines are much
more than mere ornamentation, though,
they interconnect in much the same way
that an Escher etching leads its viewer round
in an eternally closed loop. Celtic knotwork
is, therefore, an ideal starting point in a
discussion of Yeats's time symbolism.
Yeatsian time is fundamentally a cyclical
structure. In Yeats's universe time is an
unceasing process without beginning nor
TEMA: Irland - poesien
Time Symbolism in the poetry of W.B. Yeats
Af Henriette Stavis, Cand. mag., Københavns Universitet
end. In his poetry Yeats represents the
perpetual unravelling of time with symbols
such as the sphere, the gyre, and phases of
the moon. Under the influence of both
Eastern and Western classical philosophy
Yeats gradually developed the belief that
after the death of the physical body the
soul was presented with a choice. It could
either choose to return to the cycles of time
in another incarnation or enter into a union
with God, thus achieving eternity. Yeats
explains his notion of time in A Vision)
where he defines history as the human
record of the passage of time and eternity
as the soul's escape from these temporal
cycles. Eternity and time are, therefore,
contradictory and complementary states
which are defined by the absence of the
other.
In the Yeatsian cosmos the sphere is
symbolic of eternity. In Yeats's work cycles,
gyres, and spirals all radiate from this
symbol. The sphere represents a utopian
state where the whirling gyres converge
into unity. It has been suggested that Yeats
adopted `the ouroboros to symbolize
eternity.'3) In alchemy the ouroboros is `the
dragon' that feeds `on its own tail' and is `an
emblem of the eternal, cyclical nature of the
universe.' 4) It is, therefore, a complementary
1) W.B. Yeats, `Sailing to Byzantium' The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats , ed. Richard J.
Finneran. (London: Macmillan, reprint of 1993), p. 193-94; hereafter abbreviated as CPY.
2) W.B. Yeats, A Vision. (London: Pan Macmillan, reprint of 1992); hereafter abbreviated as A
Vision .
3) Anca Vlasopolos, The Symbolic Method of Coleridge. Baudelaire and Yeats . (Detroit: Wayne
State University Press, 1983), p.169.
4) Stanislas Klossowski, Alchemy: The Secret Art . (London: Thames & Hudson, reprint of 1992),
p. 32).
64

state to the gyres which symbolize time. So
if the gyres were to cease their conflict, the
unity of the sphere would result.
There all the barrel-hoops are knit,
There all the serpent-tails are bit,
There all the gyres converge in one,
There all the planets drop in the suns )
The central symbol of time in Yeats's
poetry is, however, the gyre. The word is
not an invention but a poetic derivative of
`gyration' and can be found in the works of
various British writers prior to Yeats. ) The
concept is not new either; Yeats wrote that
`the first gyres clearly described by
philosophy are those described in the
Timaeus,") and T.R. Henn traces the gyres
back to Plato's Republic, $) and Kathleen
Raine believes they originate from Plato's
Politicus, which is-a latinized name for The
Statesman.') The use of two interlocking
gyres is, however, something uniquely
Yeatsian.
The gyre is Yeats's symbol for the
movement of human history; it is a
bounding line that whirls its way through
space, resulting in a 3-dimensional spiral
whose diameter increases and decreases at
regular intervals. From the apex - which is
the gyre's extreme state of concentration -
the diameter slowly expands until it reaches
its extreme state of expansion at the base.
Viewed from the side, the outline of a 3-
TEMA: Irland - poesien
dimensional gyre looks like a 2-dimensional
triangle. The tip of this triangle represents
the apex, and the base shows the gyre's
ultimate state of extension. Viewed from
above, the gyre looks like a circle with a dot
in the middle. The circumference of the
circle is the bounding line of the extended
gyre, and the dot in the center represents
the apex.
A Gyre
base
apex EIII::
base
Side-view Bird's-eye view
Within the framework of Yeats's personal
philosophy, the gyre usually exists in conflict
with another gyre. The two gyres face each
other `dying each other's life' and `living each
other's death.f') Yeats takes this quote from
the pre-Socratic philosopher, Heraclitus
(540-475 BC), whose central thought is
`panta rei,' which means that `change is the
only reality and that the universe is,
therefore, in a state of flux, or more
precisely, that the universe is flux. ' 11) Yeats
probably encountered Heraclitus' Z) through
Thomas Taylor's Concerning the Cave of
5) CPY. `There', p. 285.
6) A.N. Jeffares, The Circus Animals . (London: Macmillan, 1970), p. 103.
7) A Vision, p.68.
8) T.R. Henn, The Lonely Tower. (London: Methuen, 1950), p. 187).
9) Kathleen Raine, Blake and Tradition . (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), vol. 1, p.305;
hereafter abbreviated as `Raine'.
10) A Vision, p. 68.
11)Raine, p. 303.
12) F.A.C. Wilson, Yeats and Tradition. University Paperbacks (London: Methuen, 1968), p. 59.
65

the Nymphs 1) where Taylor quotes
Heraclitus for saying that, `we live their
death, and we die their life."4) Taylor is
talking about the relationship between body
and soul, but Yeats simply applies this lifedeath
mechanism to the whirling of his
gyres. In the poem, `Byzantium, ' 5> 'deathin-life
and life-in-death' expresses the belief
that mortal life is a delusion, created by the
limitations of the human condition. Yeats
believed that seen in a greater cosmic
perspective human life is a spiritual death.
Yeats is partly indebted to Neoplatonism
for this paradoxical opinion.
By drawing upon Neoplatonic tradition
Yeats is able to define the nature of the
relationship between time and eternity by
likening it to the relationship between body
and soul. Yeats goes on to explain the
image of the two interlocking gyres in
greater detail in A Vision .
A line is a movement without
extension, and so symbolical of time
- subjectivity - Berkeley's stream of
ideas - in Plotinus it is apparently
"sensation" - and a plane cutting it at
right angles is symbolical of space or
objectivity. Line and plane are
combined in a gyre which must
expand or contract according to
whether mind grows in objectivity or
subjectivity.')
TEMA: Irland - poesien
Yeats does not think of time as progressing
from one point to the next. For him time
without extension means that it is without
progression. The line without extension,
therefore, symbolizes time because it, too,
is movement without progression. It is
cyclical, and cyclical time keeps returning to
its point of departure, and its movement is
without destination. What makes Yeats's
time fascinating is that it is a combined
entity of line and plane; it is a combination
of the 2-dimensional line with 3-dimensional
space. The result is a 3-dimensional gyre
which is mechanically complex enough to
symbolize time.
Yeats goes on to identify time with
subjectivity and space with objectivity, and
the movement of the gyre is determined by
its degree of objectivity or subjectivity. In
A Vision Yeats writes that `subjectivity and
objectivity' are to be considered `as
intersecting states struggling one against the
other."') It is the power struggle between
these two states that shapes the central time
symbol in Yeats's poetry - viz, the
interlocking gyres. The conflict between
subjectivity and objectivity is symbolically
recreated by assigning each state its own
gyre and then interlocking the two in such a
way that the apex of one is placed at the
center of the base of the other. Yeats then
re-labels the subjective cone as the
`antithetical tincture' and the objective cone
as the `primary tincture.' a)
13) Thomas Taylor the Platonist: Selected Writings , ed. Kathleen Raine and George Mills Harper.
Bollingen Series. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), vol. 88, pp.297-342; hereafter
abbreviated as `Taylor'.
14) Taylor, p. 303.
15) CPY, pp. 248-49.
16) A Vision, p. 68.
17) A Vision, pp. 70-71.
18) A Vision, p. 73.
66

Interlocking Gyres
objectivity
[primary
tincture]
Human history is symbolized by the
spiralling line which whirls its way through
both gyres. It begins at the central point of
the base of the objective gyre, follows the
spiral up to the apex of the gyre, and then
continues its journey on the subjective gyre
where it spirals from the base to the apex.
The process then starts all over again. The
movement of the gyres is uninterrupted, it
has no destination, and it never stops.
Yeats goes on to divide these time gyres
into various intervals which he calls phases
and bases them on the movement of the
moon. A complete cycle of historical phases
is called a Great Platonic Year," and all of
human history can be assigned a place
within this year, according to the phase and
its position on the gyres. To help the reader
keep his or her bearings, Yeats visualizes
the lunar cycle in a diagram published in A
Vision20> where he also supplies his reader
with a prose explanation of each individual
phase,21) and the whole cycle is summarized
poetically in `The Phases of the Moon.'' )
TEMA: Irland - poesien
The 28 lunar phases are the result of a
process of diversification that started with
the unity of the sphere, proceeded through
the duality of the conflicting gyres, and
ended with the multiplicity of the phases of
subjectivity
[antithetical
tincture] the moon. 23)
When the cycle of moon phases is
superimposed upon a diagram of the two
interlocking gyres, phase 1 (the dark moon)
and phase 15 (the full moon) are placed at
the points of extreme expansion of both
gyres. It is very important that the gyres
and the lunar phases are seen as two
aspects of the same system rather than as
two competing time theories. `Phase 1 and
Phase 15 are not human incarnations
because human life is impossible without
strife between the tinctures.'24> Antithetical
and primary tincture are terms that Yeats
took from Jakob Boehme 25) and used as his
own personal terminology for the subjective
and objective gyres. Yeats explains that `the
antithetical tincture is emotional and aesthetic
whereas the primary tincture is reasonable
and moral.' 26) Thus, phase 1 is the extreme
state of expansion of the primary gyre and
phase 15 is the same for the antithetical
gyre.
After phase 28 the lunar cycle starts all over
again, and it will continue to do so forever
and ever. Escape is only possible if the
gyres converge into the sphere, but for
humans such transcendence is a mere
19) A Vision, p. 204.
20) A Vision, p. 81.
21) A Vision, pp. 105-184.
22) CPY, pp. 163-167.
23) For a detailed description of the individual phases, please, see: Henriette Stavis, Eterni t in an
Hour. Speciale. (Copenhagen, 1997), pp. 86-98.
24) A Vision, p. 79.
25) A Vision, p. 72.
26) A Vision, p. 73.
67

illusion because the human condition is
defined by conflict. Only the cessation of
this conflict would result in eternity which
in Yeatsian terms is a state of harmony
between the primary and the antithetical
gyres.
The truth that eventually reveals itself
beneath the shimmering sea of details is an
intricately cyclical notion of time. The
sphere, the gyres, and the phases of the
moon are all parts of a balanced system of
symbols. Yeats culled the concept of
cyclical time from a variety of different
sources after which he proceeded to make
it his own by developing it into a figure of
interlocking gyres. In a society dominated
by Christian ideology cyclical time is an
unusual idea. Except for the notion of the
week, the Christian view of time is linear; it
begins with Creation and ends with
Apocalypse. To overcome this unfamiliarity
TEMA: Irland - poesien
68
Yeats represents cyclical time in familiar
images such as a spindle, a falcon's flight, or
a set of winding stairs. Yeats coaxes the
reader into swallowing an otherwise bitter
pill by giving an alien ideology a familiar
surface. He eases our entry into his occult
world by not demanding that every reader
is one hundred percent familiar with the
deeper meaning of his symbolism. The
scope of the symbolism is gradually
revealed if the reader agrees to embark on a
journey to seek them. If, however, the reader
chooses not to set out on this metaphorical
journey, he or she will be denied access to
the deeper reaches of the symbolism but
not to the poetry itself. The poetry can
stand on its own and be enjoyed as a
symphony of words and images, because
the surface is as beautiful as the depth is
enticing.

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70

DEBAT
..................................................
OG FOKUS PÅ
Kommentarer til debatten om „Engelsk
som sprog eller fag?"
Af engelsklærerne på Midtf ns Gymnasium
Er engelsklæreren et truet folkefærd? Det
påstod Hans Hauge i sidste nummer af
Anglo files (sept. 98) i sit debatindlæg ,,Engelsk
som sprog eller fag og engelsklæreren
som tragisk figur". Og redaktionen opfordrer:
„Hvem bider på den?"
Det gjorde vii vores faggruppe. Måske
også fordi Hauges debatindlæg puffer til
den daglige diskussion af undervisningen,
som i forvejen er en vigtig del af vores indbyrdes
kollegiale snak, og af hver lærers
(selv-)evaluerende indre samtale efter timerne:
Lykkedes det nu i dag? Hvad fik de
egentlig med sig? Af faget? Af sproget?
I referatet af „Engelsk på vej mod år
2000 - en debatdag" (Anglo files, feb. 98)
slutter Nina Nørgaard og Bente Christensen
med en opfordring til en bredere fagdidaktisk
debat: Hvad skal eleverne lære?
Hvilket fagsyn underviser vi ud fra? Hvilke
kompetencer kan faget udvikle hos eleverne?
Hvilken fagdidaktik er den mest hensigtsmæssige?
Vigtige, men også overvældende
spørgsmål at give bestemte og entydige svar
på. I stedet tyr vi til indtryk fra dagligdagens
overvejelser.
I dagligdagen forsøger vi vel efter bedste
evne at lære dem netop de fire færdigheder
71
,,understand, speak, read, express", som H.
Hauge omtaler med tilføjelsen „og viden
om". Og eleverne kommer til os med lyst
og motivation for at lære dette, også på det
,,viderekomne niveau ", som er gymnasiets
opgave i forhold til folkeskolen (bekendtgørelsen).
Men de fleste kommer først og
fremmest med en forventning om at blive
meget bedre til at tale og skrive engelsk.
(De unge har jo, som det er sagt mange
steder, på forhånd et ganske godt „lettere"
sprogkendskab, hentet fra især de
ungdomsrettede medier).
Og hvad giver vi dem så at komme videre
med?
Gymnasiets engelskundervisning bygger
på det synspunkt, at eleverne lærer at tale
mere engelsk ved at læse mere engelsk. Vi er
jo også mange, der mener, at teksten må
være alfa og omega. Dels fordi en opfattelse
af engelsk som tekstfag næsten er indiskutabel,
og dels fordi vi jo grundlæggende
holder af teksterne! Det var måske
også derfor, vi valgte faget! Lærerne altså.
Eleverne vælger faget, fordi de er fascinerede
af den vældige kommunikationsmulighed,
der ligger i faget, og fordi de selvfølgelig
ved, at det i den moderne verden er nød-

vendigt. De vælger det også, fordi de simpelthen
kan lide det, og fordi de via sproget
kan blive en del af andre (medie-?)verdener.
Men hvordan skal sprogindlæring primært
via tekster kunne lade sig gøre, når mange
af vores elever næsten ikke læser tekster ud
over de tekster, de skal læse i skolen? - Vi
skal som engelsklærere forstå vores rolle
som dobbelt: dels at lære vores elever glæden
ved at fordybe sig i tekstlæsningen.
Dels herigennem at motivere dem for at
overføre den skriftlige sprogoplevelse til
den mundtlige sprogudfoldelse. Det har vi
selvfølgelig altid gjort, og det er ikke fordi
dette ikke i sig selv er godt og rigtigt. Men
det er blevet sværere at insistere på teksten
som det afgørende, når de er omgivet af så
megen (medie -)mundtlighed, som de jo
også lærer noget af. Men så at sige i et spor
ved siden af skolens engelskindlæring. Den
kommunikation, som de gerne ville blive
bedre til, bliver i gymnasiets engelskunder
i højere grad end før en kommuni-
-visning
kation på skolens, dvs, på tekstlæsningens,
præmisser. De elver, der er gode og interesserede
tekstlæsere, kan overføre værdien fra
tekst til sprogudfoldelse; det har de altid
kunnet. Men det er som om vi taber de
middelgode og de mindre gode på gulvet på
flere måder: For det første underkender vi
den interesse for sproget, som de kommer
med, som værende „god nok". For det andet
når vi ikke at lære dem de basale sproglige
færdigheder godt nok, fordi vi sætter os
mellem flere stole. De skal jonglere rundt
med færdigheder i tekstlæsning, kulturel
viden, grammatik, samtale om såvel britiske,
som amerikanske, som f.eks. indiske
emner, som teknologiske emner, osv. De og
vi lærere kan godt få fornemmelsen af, at
faget som sprogfag forsvinder i alle tekstmulighederne.
Engelskfagets formålsparagraffer som
DEBAT OG FOKUS PÅ
72
sprogfag betragtet er meget „luftige". Der
er ingen præcise delmål og hverken i undervisningsvejledningen
eller i Anglo files er
der tradition for fagdidaktiske anvisninger.
Man er som sproglærer „alene på herrens
mark" og engelskundervisningen kan nu og
da opleves som følger: man modtager i 1.g.
28 elever, nogle dygtige, andre middel og
andre igen svage. Dem læser man så igennem
1.g, 2.g og 3.g forskellige tekster med -
idet man sørger for at diverse krav til genrer,
emner og perioder bliver overholdt,
man bruger forskellige læsestrategier, man
når den ,,nødvendige" grammatik igennem
... og så regner man ellers med, at eleverne
nok lærer, „det de skal". Det gør de måske
også - men som regel er det de elever, der
var dygtige, da de startede, der også er dygtige
ved slutningen af forløbet. Sammenhængen
mellem undervisning og resultat
kan synes uklar for både lærer og elever og
oplevelsen af progression udebliver ofte.
Følelsen af at gøre fremskridt er en vigtig
del af indlæringsprocessen og vi har spekuleret
på, hvordan den kan fremmes. Kunne
f.eks. en stramning af bekendtgørelsens
sproglige afsnit og udarbejdelse af lister over
,,skills", der skal indlæres i henholdsvis 1.g,
2.g og 3.g. styrke oplevelsen af progression
og af at være på sikker sproglig grund? -
Måske, men det er ikke en løsning vi bryder
os om. „Here tulips bloom as they are told;
unkempt about those hedges blows an
English unofficial rose." Vi holder, som
Rupert Brook, mest af det sidste.
Men gammeldags terperi? Måske er tiden
inde til i et moderat omfang at genoptage
gamle og fuldstændig politisk ukorrekte
undervisningsformer (uden at rødme - nu
er der gået så lang tid, at man kan kalde det
progressivt) som f.eks. overhøring i gloser/
idiomatiske udtryk. Det ville hjælpe elever,
som har svært ved det, til at tage ansvar for
egen læring, og faktisk kan terperi netop

godt have den effekt, at man kan se, man
gør fremskridt. (Det kræver rigtignok, at
man ikke differentierer, for det er jo de
svage elever, der skal slås for at komme
med) .
En betingelse for at kunne komme til at
udfolde sig sprogligt er selvfølgelig at man
kan få plads til det. At man får taletid. Så
når Hauge taler om nødvendigheden af
reduktion, er der i hvert fald et område,
hvor det kunne være hårdt tiltrængt, nemlig
med hensyn til holdstørrelserne. Samtidig
med at gymnasiefrekvensen er steget til det,
Inger Heise har kaldt smertegrænsen, er
klassekvotienten steget fra 24 til 28. Dette
er blevet fremført i debatten gang på gang
som en hæmsko for effektiv undervisning,
med andre ord for kvaliteten af denne, men
da det selvfølgelig koster penge at reducere
antallet af elever pr. klasse, er dette argument
med flid blevet ignoreret ovenfra hele
tiden. For nylig udtalte århusianske gymnasieelever
til Jyllands Posten, at et elevtal på
28 pr. klasse er en af de mest indlæringshæmmende
faktorer overhovedet i gymnasiet
i dag. Når der så fra alle sider, og da
ikke mindst ovenfra, råbes på en forbedret
undervisningskvalitet, bor en naturlig konsekvens
være, at holdstørrelsen begrænses,
f.eks. til de 24, vi tidligere havde. I indu-
DEBAT OG FOKUS PÅ
73
strien, i forskningen, i det private erhvervsliv
ved alle, at kvalitet koster penge - hvornår
accepterer vores arbejdsgivere denne
indlysende sandhed?
Vi er således helt enige med Hauge, når
han taler om nødvendigheden af reduktion.
Hans forslag om at reducere f.eks. alt arne
væk er provokerende, men yderst
-'rikansk
belysende for vores dilemma: Hvis vi vil
give vores elever mulighed for ordentlig
viden om både sprog og tekst, kræver det mere
tid. Hvis vi kunne skære i nogle af områderne
i faget til fordel for større fordybelse
i selve sprogtilegnelsen, så kunne det være,
at også de svage og middelgode elever oplevede,
at engelsk i skolen også var et engelsk,
de kunne bruge aktivt uden for skolen. Måske
skulle vi så fagligt sluge nogle kameler,
måske skulle der være mulighed for, at vi
f.eks. primært læser amerikanske tekster?
Måske skulle Shakespeare blot være en
valgmulighed? I hvert fald trænger vi til en
større bevidsthed om, at vi også skal være
sproglærere. Vi skal ikke smide tekstfordybelse
og tekstviden væk, men det mål, der i
bekendtgørelsen hedder „at tilegne sig engelsk
på et viderekomment niveau" indebærer,
at vi fokuserer mere tydeligt og bevidst
på hvordan man tilegner sig et sprog. Vi tror
ikke, det automatisk kommer, når bare vores
elever læser tekster i skolen.

DEBAT OG FOKUS PÅ
Anbefaling af teoretisk tekst til højniveau
Af engelsklærerne på Midtfyns Gymnasium, v/Hanne Dalgård
Modernity and Self-Identity, Self and Society in the
Late Modern Age.
af Anthony Giddens, Cambridge 1991.
For et par år siden henledte en kollega min
opmærksomhed på en spændende ny bog,
han lige havde indkøbt til skolens samling
af pædagogisk litteratur. Anthony Giddens
er professor i sociologi i Cambridge og
hans bog kommer langt omkring i halv
livsvilkår og psykiske-femsermenneskets
reaktionsmønstre. Jeg synes bogen som
helhed er umådelig spændende læsning, omend
enkelte afsnit var for abstrakte. Men
hvad der er relevant her er at bogen er
særdeles velegnet til at plukke uddrag fra
som teoretisk tekst på højniveau. Selv har
jeg haft stor fornøjelse af at bruge afsnittet
om `The theory and practice of the pure
relationship' (19,2 ns) i forbindelse med to
forskellige særligt studerede emner:
`Relations Between the Sexes' (3.M, 1997)
og `The Individual and Interaction with the
Others'(3.S, 1996).
Hovedtanken i afsnittet er at forhold mellem
kønnene, men også nære venskaber,
som noget historisk nyt er blevet `pure' og
`freefloating' fordi de ikke længere er for-
74
ankrede i økonomisk afhængighed og hensyn
til slægten. Et nøglebegreb er refleksiviteten,
både mellem de enkelte individer og
mellem individet og det omgivende samfund
og dets bombardement af information.
Disse `pure relationships' er mere
skrøbelige end nogensinde før, både fordi
de kun eksisterer i kraft af sig selv, men
også fordi vi stiller større og større krav til
at forholdet `giver os noget'. Og behøver
det at være noget negativt at man forlader
et dårligt fungerende forhold for at søge et
der er bedre?
Afsnittet fungerede fint som støtte og sammenligningsgrundlag
for de forskellige
skønlitterære tekster i begge emnekredse,
og eleverne fandt den meget vedkommende
og aktuel. Sidste gang kom en pige bagefter
og fortalte mig, at hendes forældre var blevet
skilt mens vi læste Giddens, og at hun
havde haft stor fornøjelse af sin nye viden i
mange diskussioner med forældrene! Til
sidst skal det lige nævnes at den sproglige
sværhedsgrad er ret høj, men med rigelig
glossering går det, og eleverne har begge
gange syntes at læsningen var umagen
værd.

UNDERVISNINGSSTOF
................... ...............................
Dead or Alive?
En baglæns læsning af James Joyces "The Dead"
Af Poul Tornøe, Frederiksberg Studenterkursus
For en overfladisk betragtning er superklassikeren
"The Dead" langt fra idealet af
en tekst til engelskundervisningen. Den er
lang, stort set uden handling, og sprogligt
meget krævende. Den foregår på en enkelt
aften omkring århundredskiftet i Dublin og
beskriver en ikke længere helt ung mands
tanker og følelser på et tidspunkt i hans liv
hvor han har fået øjnene op for at det en
dag vil slutte. Den ligger altså umiddelbart
fjernt fra de fleste af vores elevers erfaringsverden
og ligner en tekst der er dømt til at
dø i undervisningssituationen.
Som bekendt går en læser aldrig forudsæt
til en tekst. Men for at et kompli-ningsløst
ceret værk som "The Dead" skal blive levende
i klassen, er det nødvendigt at arbejde
med elevernes for-forståelse og at
aktivere deres forventninger til teksten under
læsningen. I det følgende vil jeg argumentere
for at en læsning der bygger på
den strategi bør starte bagfra i stedet for
forfra.
Falling faintly - faintly falling
Den berømte afslutning er karakteristisk
for novellens prosastil:
"[Gabriel "s] soul swooned slowly as he
heard the snow falling faintly through the
universe and faintly falling, like the descent
75
of their last end, upon all the living and the
dead." (s.725)
Prosaen forvandles til poesi mens hovedpersonen
Gabriel er på vej ind i søvnens
rige. Nøgleordet er "falling". Det er sneen
der falder "faintly" (svagt og utydeligt men
også med association til verbet "to faint"),
og både det bløde snefald og den langsomme,
gradvise overgang fra vågen til sovende
tilstand (the slow swooning of the soul) er
billeder på livets afslutning, "the descent of
their last end".
Ordet "falling" forekommer fem gange i
det foregående afsnit:
"A few light taps upon the pane made him
turn to the window. It had begun to snow
again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver
and dark, falling obliquely against the
lamplight. The time had come for him to
set out on his journey westward. Yes, the
newspapers were right: snow was general all
over Ireland. It was falling on every part of
the dark central plain, on the treeless hills,
falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and
farther westward, softly falling into the dark
mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling,
too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard
on the hill where Michael Furey lay
buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked

crosses and headstones, on the spears of
the little gate, on the barren thorns." (s.725)
Fortidens land
Beskrivelsen af sneen der falder bevæger sig
i rytmiske gentagelser med karakteristiske
variationer ("falling softly ... softly falling").
Geografisk er det en bevægelse fra hotelværelset
i Dublin, hvor Gabriel og hans kone
Gretta overnatter, vestover via "the dark
central plain", "the Bog of Allen" og the
River Shannon med endestation på den ensomme
kirkegård på bakken i Galway på
Irlands vestkyst. Kronologisk er det en rejse
tilbage i tiden fra den voksne Gabriels nutid
til en episode i Grettas liv der ligger mange
år tilbage i tiden. Hovedpersonen i den episode
er ikke Gabriel men Michael Furey.
Umiddelbart forinden har Gretta fortalt sin
mand historien om sin ungdomskæreste,
den syttenårige Michael Furey, som døde
efter at have våget en regnfuld nat udenfor
Grettas hus i Galway. Gretta er overvældet
af de følelser som erindringen kalder frem i
hende, og Gabriel forstår at den historie har
betydet mere for Gretta end han selv nogensinde
har gjort. Først nu begriber Gabriel
hvad det vil sige at elske, og han erkender
overfor sig selv at han aldrig har næret så
dybe følelser for et andet menneske.
Ægtemand og yndlingsnevø
Den dramatiske historie om Michael Furey
får vi først på novellens allersidste sider.
Resten af novellen er i grunden en lang
indledning til dette dramatiske klimaks. Her
fortælles med udgangspunkt i Gabriels tanker
og følelser om det årlige julebal hos
Gabriels tanter, frøknerne Morkan. Læseren
lærer Gabriel at kende som de gamle
tanters yndlingsnevø og en næsten overdrevent
omsorgsfuld ægtemand, men i grunden
er han en kejtet og genert intellektuel
hvis manglende selvtillid gør ham anspændt
UNDERVISNINGSSTOF
76
og selvhøjtidelig.
Det starter så snart Gabriel og Gretta er
kommet indenfor døren hos tanterne med
et klodset forsøg på at konversere stuepigen.
Under lancier'en senere på aftenen
drilles Gabriel af den unge Miss Ivors, hvis
aggressive nationalisme og ligefremme facon
forvirrer ham og gør ham usikker. Efter
dansen flygter han hen i et hjørne af
salen hvor han kan føre en ufarlig samtale
med den gamle Mrs. Malins, "a stout feeble
old woman with white hair" (p.705).
Gabriels følelser for Gretta er en blanding
af ømhed, beundring og mystificering. Han
står og betragter sin kone mens hun lytter
som i trance til en gammel irsk melodi,
"The Lass of Aughrim", som kan høres
svagt bag en lukket dør, og han tænker at
der er "grace and mystery in her attitude as
if she were a symbol of something" (s.717).
I første omgang lykkes det dog ikke Gabriel
at trænge ind i og forstå mysteriet.
Distant music
På vejen tilbage til hotellet efter juleballet
gennemlever Gabriel i tankerne sit liv med
Gretta, og han fyldes af varme og ømhed
for hende. Han genkalder sig ordlyden af en
kærlighedserklæring han engang skrev til
hende, og hans egne ord fra dengang bliver
en parallel til den fjerne musik som kort
forinden havde hensat Gretta i trance:
"Like distant music these words that he had
written years before were borne towards
him from the past. He longed to be alone
with her. When the others had gone away,
when he and she were in their room in the
hotel, then they would be alone together.
He would call her softly: Gretta!" (s.719-
720)
Således følger vi de stadigt kraftigere ud-

sving på Gabriels stemningsbarometer, og
læserens forventninger opbygges parallelt
med Gabriels, kun for at blive punkteret så
meget desto mere effektivt da det viser sig
at de minder "The Lass of Aughrim" fremkaldte
hos Gretta ikke var fra deres fælles
liv men fra oplevelserne med Michael Furey.
Gabriels første reaktion er jalousi og vrede.
Han føler sig afmægtig og ydmyget, men
disse følelser afløses snart af skamfuldhed,
hvor ud af der vokser en ny ømhed for og
medfølelse med Gretta. Hun er ikke længere
den unge pige der forelskede sig så dybt
i Michael Furey, og han selv er heller ikke
helt ung længere. Gabriel og Gretta har
mange års ægteskab og familieliv bag sig, og
skønt de ikke er gamle, ja knap nok midaldrende,
er bevidstheden om livets afslutning
et vilkår for dem, ligesom det er for Gabriels
to gamle ugifte tanter. Gabriel ser atter tilbage
på sit liv, og denne gang føler han at
det har været fattigt:
"One by one they were all becoming shades.
Better pass boldly into that other world, in
the full glory of some passion, than fade
and wither dismally with age." (s.725)
Set i dette lys er Michael Fureys genfærd
ikke længere en trussel men en forbundsfælle
i døden, og oplevelsen fører for Gabriel
til resignation og forsoning med tanken
om døden.
Sneen og døden
Det billede som Gabriel i tankerne forbinder
Gretta med er lyset og ilden. Han mindes
hende stå og kigge ind i en buldrende
smelteovn, i færd med at tørre sit hår ved
ilden osv. Hvor Gretta er, er der lys og
varme, og disse situationer står for ham
"like the tender fires of stars" (s.719).
UNDERVISNINGSSTOF
Gabriel træder indenfor i tanternes hus er
han hyllet i en kappe af sne. Efter dansen
flygter han i tankerne ud i sneen og kulden
til det snedækkede Wellington-mindesmærke.
Billedet af det livløse monument i den
kolde, snedækkede park bliver et modstykke
til varmen, musikken og den glade stemning
i tanternes hus. Referencen til sneen
på mindesmærket gentages næsten ord til
andet umiddelbart før Gabriel skal holde
sin årlige festtale til tanterne, en tale som
har beskæftiget hans tanker hele aftenen, og
som han er nervøs for. I det hele taget tales
der meget om sne denne aften hvor, som
der står at læse i dagens avis, "the snow is
general all over Ireland" (s.718)
Men det motiv der står stærkest i novellen
er døden, fra overskriften til novellens sidste
ord. På væggen hos tanterne hænger
billeder af Romeo og Julie og de myrdede
prinser i Tower. Ved måltidet falder talen på
trappistmunkene på Mount Melleray der
sover i kister "to remind them of their last
end" (s.712). Gabriels egen tale dvæler længe
ved "those dead and gone great ones"
(s.713), og de vers af "The Lass of Aughrim"
som Greta hører handler om kærlighed og
død. Alle disse referencer tjener til at forberede
læseren på mødet med Michael Fureys
genfærd i det spøgelsesagtigt oplyste hotelværelse
hvor novellen slutter.
I de sidste linjer sammenflettes disse to
gennemgående motiver, sneen og døden,
og sneen der falder på levende såvel som
døde bliver det der binder Gabriel og Michael
Furey sammen, den levende og den
døde mand i Grettas liv. Gabriels egen
identitet opløses i en grå skyggeverden på
grænsen mellem vågen og sovende tilstand,
på grænsen mellem livet og døden.
Ord og billeder
Gabriels billede, derimod, er sneen. Da Novellens opbygning, en langstrakt indled-

ving og en relativt kort og meget effektfuld
afslutning, og dens primære sproglige virkemiddel,
nemlig den stemningsskabende
lyriske prosa, må medtænkes hvis den skal
læses med udbytte af en gymnasieklasse.
For at eleverne skal få udbytte af den lange
indledning, må de have forventninger til
personerne og til novellens tematik.
Titlen er et godt udgangspunkt for at skabe
forventninger. Advanced Learner's Dictionary
angiver 9 forskellige betydningsvarianter af
adjektivet dead, fx "no longer alive",
"inanimate", "insensitive", "extremely
tired" og "finished". Mange af betydningerne
kaster lys over novellens tema, og det vil
være relevant at bruge dem til en diskussion
af hvad man kan forvente sig af teksten på
baggrund af titlen.
Der er mange andre muligheder for at forberede
eleverne på læsningen af novellen.
Man kan tage udgangspunkt i et af tekstens
centrale symboler, fx. sne, og lade eleverne
nedskrive deres associationer til ordet. Eller
man kan begynde med begrebet livsaldre og
lade eleverne beskrive de forskellige stadier
på livets vej og hvad der karakteriserer dem;
hvornår er man fx. midaldrende, og hvad
indebærer det at være det? Det afgørende er
at der skabes billeder i hovedet på eleverne
som de kan møde teksten med.
UNDERVISNINGSSTOF
78
Det vil nok være de færreste gymnasieelever
der kan bevare interessen for teksten gennem
25 svære sider blot fordi læreren fortæller
at der kommer gang i handlingen på
de sidste fem. I stedet kan man vælge at gå
lige til sagen og starte med at lade eleverne
lytte til den sidste halve side af novellen
hvor sneen og livet og døden smelter sammen
og bliver til poesi. Hører de passagen
et par gange og har de samtidig teksten foran
sig, får de en forestilling om både stemning,
sprog og tematik i novellen, ligesom
passagen vil fokusere opmærksomheden på
Gabriel som novellens hovedperson. Man
kan evt, lade eleverne understrege enkelte
ord i stykket, fx. "snow" og "falling" og
bruge disse gloser som udgangspunkt for
en diskussion. Igen drejer det sig om at lade
ordene danne billeder og få eleverne til at
lægge sprog (engelsk) til billederne.
Baglæns læsning
Det spørgsmål der naturligt melder sig når
man har hørt og læst dette stykke men ikke
kender handlingen i øvrigt er, hvilken begivenhed
der har sat Gabriel i sådan en stemning.
Næste skridt er derfor at læse Grettas
beretning om Michael Furey, en historie
som de fleste teenagere vil kunne sætte sig
ind i og lade sig gribe af.
Ved at begynde læsningen af novellen bagfra,
vil man have flyttet fokus i læsningen
fra den ydre handling (som eleverne kender)
til personernes psykologi. Hvem er
Gabriel og Gretta egentlig? Eleverne får
herved forventninger til hovedpersonerne
som skærper deres opmærksomhed under
læsningen. Fokuseringen på Gabriel vil
også gøre det lettere for eleverne at orientere
sig i det store persongalleri som introduceres
i de første 25 sider.
Novellens ledemotiviske opbygning står
ligeledes skarpere ved en "baglæns" læs-

ning. Betydningen af de mange henvisninger
til sne, død, lys, ild, sang osv, træder
tydeligere frem. Hvad læreren under en
traditionel kronologisk læsning møjsomme -
ligt må udpege, kan eleverne i mange tilfælde
selv slå ned på, fordi de har mødt
motiverne i koncentreret form i slutningen.
Forventning, forståelse, fortolkning
Den læsestrategi jeg har foreslået i det foregående
kan sammenfattes som et forsøg på
at give eleverne en andengangslæsers oplevelse
af teksten første gang de læser den.
Strategien er særligt velegnet til en kompleks
og tæt tekst som "The Dead", men
den kan i øvrigt bruges i mange sammenhænge
hvor en traditionel fra-start-til-slut
læsning kommer til kort.
Fremgangsmåden låner ideer fra readerresponse
kritikken, hvilket dog ikke betyder
at den skal opfattes som en bekendelse til
den skole. I den form jeg har præsenteret
her drejer det sig om at lade undervisningen
tage udgangspunkt i mødet mellem
tekstens billeder og de billeder eleverne
danner sig før og under læsningen. Det er
vigtigt at fastholde at teksten står i centrum,
og at tekstens billeder eksisterer uafhængigt
af elevernes mentale billeder. Men
det er ligeså vigtigt at slå fast at den tekst-
UNDERVISNINGSSTOF
79
forståelse og fortolkning som læsningen
skal munde ud i opstår som resultat af mødet
mellem de to sæt billeder. Strategien
bygger altså på en generel holdning til
tekstlæsning, nemlig at forventning til teksten
bør gå forud for forståelse og fortolkning.
Litteratur
Joyce skrev "The Dead" i 1907, men novellen
blev første gang trykt i samlingen
Dubliners der udkom i 1914. Sidehenvisninger
i artiklen er til:
Ann Charters (red.), The Story and its Writer.
An Introduction to Short Fiction, Boston
(Bedford Books) 1995.
Både novellen (med indledning og noter)
og en række fortolkninger står at læse i:
Daniel R.Schwarz (red.), Case Studies in
Contemporary Criticism: James Joyce `The Dead",
New York (St.Martin's Press) 1994.
Heri findes også en kort sammenfatning af
idégrundlaget for reader-response kritikken
(Schwarz, op.cit. s.125 ff.).
Den irske skuespiller Gerard McSorley giver
en glimrende oplæsning af novellen i
samlingen `The Dead" and Other Stories,
Penguin Audiobooks 1995.•

CHAT- RUMMET
Ireland and the Troubles in Northern Irelanc
- tema
med historisk synsvinkel
Af Birte Lunau Nielsen, Albertslund Amtsgymnasium
Selv om et tema ikke behøver at omfatte
mere end 3-6 tekster, har jeg i år i en 2.g
sproglig valgt at brede emnet ud og lade det
strække sig over en stor del af årets undervisning
for at komme til bunds i en væsentlig
problematik, nemlig Nordirlandsproblematikken.
Hovedformålet var at give eleverne
en bred forståelse af dette stofområde.
Samtidig ønskede jeg at opfylde bekendt
tekster fra før 1900 og tek-gørelseskravet:
ster fra det seneste tiår, forskellige genrer:
roman,noveller,poesi,non-fiction og inddrage
forskellige AV-midler.
Vi startede med lidt baggrundsmateriale
hentet fra Tony McAleavy: Conflict in Ireland
(Collins Educational History 13-16 Project,
1987) for at få den historiske baggrund og
fokuserede så på The Great Famine 1845-49,
hvor jeg havde taget nogle sider fra Gerald
Keegan: Famine Diary (skrevet af en skolelærer,
der i 1848 emigrerede til USA, men
døde af pest, da skibet nåede frem til
Newfoundland — udgivet i 1895 og gen
af Wolfhound, 1991) en barsk an-
-optrykt
klage mod England, som lod irerne dø,
mens landbrugsprodukterne blev sendt til
England. Derefter læste vi et digt om
samme tema: The Famine Year af Lady Wilde
(Oscar's mor) (Penguin Book of Irish
Poetry) med tilhørende stile:
1) "Explain why you can find lines from
83
this poem on a houseend in the Cathohi
area in Belfast in September 1995 and
give a description of the mural" eller
2) billedstil til Searching Potatoes during
the Famine (Ireland, Skoleradiohæfte
1977 s. 9). "Imagine you are one of the
persons in the picture and write down
your thoughts...".
Vi hørte så The Dubliners synge nogle traditionelle
ballader og sang selv med på: Matt
Hyland (glimrende som lytteøvelse med der
langsomme melodi), Carrickfergus, Farewell t
Car/ing/ord, I'm a freeborn Man, The Black
Velvet Band + The Rising of the Moon. Her
søgte vi at indkredse, hvad der er karakteristisk
for balladerne , hvorfor denne versform
stadig er populær og hvordan digtere
som f.eks. Lady Wilde + Yeats står i gæld t^
denne genre. Dette dannede overgang til at
læse Yeats: Down by the Sally Garden + Wild
Swans at Coole (Two Centuries of English
Poetry). Fra en stor Nobelpristager i littera
tur gik vi så til en anden: Seamus Heaney,
hvor vi læste Digging, Punishment, The
Grauballe Man, The To//und Man (og hørte ej
gammel skoleradioudsendelse DR 1977 on
ham). Med disse punktnedslag fik eleverne
et indblik i, hvor rig den poetiske tradition
er i Irland, og hvor levende en del den er a
irsk litteratur samt hvor meget den historiske
bevidsthed betyder.

Efter afrundingen af poesien, som
havde ført os op til nutiden, så vi videoen
Ireland - The Fight for Peace - A History of the
Troubles (købt i Dublin til 5 irske pund)
med gode interviews med bl.a. John Hume
og gik så i gang med at læse Brian Moore:
Lies of Silence (1990, Longman —roman/
længere værk/ tekst fra sidste tiår). Med sin
blanding af thriller og lovestory appellerer
den til mange elever, og Longmanudgaven
har god introduction, glossary and study
programme, ligesom den er dejlig kort (214
ns). Personligt havde jeg gerne erstattet den
med en nyere roman af højere litterær karat
som f.eks. Seamus Deane: Reading in the
Dark Oohn Cape, 1996 — den bog der burde
have fået the Booker Prize 1996) eller David
Park: Stone Kingdoms, men de muligheder
forelå ikke på bogdepotet. Undervejs mens
vi læste romanen, så vi filmene In the Name
of the Father og Cal.
Dernæst arbejdede klassen i grupper
med tre forskellige noveller fra den meget
fine novellesamling Writing from Ireland (Valerie
Qiunlivan,Cambridge U.P. 1995 — efter
min mening den bedste af de mange glimrende
og prisbillige Writing from ... bøger-
Atheneum har den til ca. 70 kr.) med minitemaet
"Irish Women": Margaret Barring-
CHAT- RUMMET
84
ton: Village Without Men (1982), Sam
McAughtry: The Passing of Billy Condit (1970)
+ Mary Beckett: Belfast Woman (1980). Hver
gruppe skulle analysere deres novelle og
fremlægge deres resultat skriftligt og
mundtligt for resten af klassen, der så kunne
stille yderligere spørgsmål inden opsamlingen
af temaet. Village Without Men har
længe hørt til mine favoritter med sin fine
beskrivelse af kvindernes hårde liv i Vestland
og barske selvtægt, mens The Passing
of Billy Condit og Belfast Woman er interessante
parallelhistorier om blandede ægteskaber
og selvstændige kvinder, der ikke vil
lade sig terrorisere af andre (mænd). Endelig
rundede vi af med en artikel fra
Newsweek: Emerald Tiger ( 23rd Dec, 1996)
om 'Ireland's booming economy' for at vise
hvordan Irlands økonomiske situation er
blevet radikalt ændret siden tilslutningen til
EU. (samtidig blev det til træning af ekstemporaltekst
+ referat af non-fiction tekst).
Forløbet strakte sig over mange måneder,
og nogle vil måske mene, at det er for
lang tid at bruge på irsk litteratur, men da vi
jo har fagkonsulenternes ord for at irsk
ækvivalerer britisk og ikke skal regnes som
tredje engelsktalende land, mener jeg, at det
er acceptabelt, da jeg er af den opfattelse, at

meget af den bedste litteratur på engelsk
skrives i Irland. Elevevalueringen af forløbet
var meget positiv. Desværre fik jeg ikke
klassen op til eksamen, så jeg kan ikke sige,
hvordan teksterne fungerer ved eksamensbordet.
P.S. Udover de bøger jeg har omtalt ovenfor,
vil jeg gerne anbefale følgende nye irske
bøger, som jeg har haft glæde af at læse
selv:
1) William Trevor: The Collected Stories
(Penguin 1992 —1261 s for 11£ - et
fund for pengene med bl.a Coffee with
Oliver).
2) Marie Heaney (gift med Seamus): Over
Nine Waves — A Book of Irish Legends
(Faber & Faber 1994 — forside
er i øvrigt et udsnit -illustrationen af
Gundestrupkarret fra Nationalmuseet).
3) Dermot Bolger: Fathers Music (1997)
(endnu bedre end hans `The Journey
Home').
CHAT- RUMMET
EFTERLYSNING!
4) Fidelis Morgan: My Dark Rosaleen
(Heineman, 1994. -Mandarin paperback
1995 — historisk roman med nedslag i
1588 —1921 og 1990).
5) Phillip Casey: The Fabulists (Lilliput,
1994 —' a story of love, unemployment and
storytelling set in Dublin of today).
6) Niall Williams: Four Letters of Love (Picador,
1997 ).
7) Clare Boylan: Home Rule (1992).
8) Deirdre Purcell: Love Like Hate Adore
(Macmillan 1997).
9) Frank McCourt: Angela 'c Ashes (Harper
Collins, 1996 — Flamingo paperback
1997 — 'the traditional Irish miserable
childhood' ikke af samme litterære standard
som Reading in the Dark, men
alligevel umiddelbart gribende, en bestseller,
der snart skal filmdramatiseres).
10) David Park: Oranges from Spain
(Phoenix, 1990 — mange fine noveller)
Jeg efterlyser en TV udsendelse om den amerikanske forfatterinde Edith
Wharton, TV2 d. 6/9-98 (højst muligt). Jeg har en elev der agter at skrive
3. årsopgave om hende, men Amtscentralen har ikke gemt udsendelsen.
Kan en venlig kollega hjælpe?
Med venlig hilsen
Kirsten Zacho,
Skive Gymnasium & HF
Kastanievænget 8
7800 Skive
Tlf. 97 52 38 77
85