The trauma of a divided soul
By Darshan Singh Maini

EVEN a casual survey of religious, sectarian, communal and ethnic conflicts that have darkened the pages of human history would show some disturbing similarities in the midst of all manner of confusions and contradictions. The true heart of darkness — evil in its primeval, atavistic form — beats under every kind of skin, white, black, brown or yellow. And, therefore, fanaticism and terrorism have always had an umbilical link. Thus, nearly all the Freudian ghosts can be seen lurking in the communal or racial unconscious of man, and the march of rationality, science and radical thought has not erased the darkness within, though, to be sure, the level of social consciousness, in general, has certainly risen.

But even a casual consideration of such long and despairing clashes which take on the colour of insurrections, proxy war etc all over the globe shows that, there are some sections of people whose regressive modes of thought and conduct would not change even if some viable solutions to their tangled problems were to be found after a long and agonising search for peace, as, for instance, in the Protestant Ulster today. The bombing in Omegh, the worst in years, has showed, the power of evil to poison the processes of peace. For, it quote the American literary critic, Ihab Hassan, terrorism is not a merely political problem; "it is also the sick dream of men in search of their aboriginal self".

I have picked up the Irish issue not only because it dominates the British media, but also because its Celtic-Gaelic character offers some revealing insights into the processes of the Irish mind. Of course, this kind of inner landscaping can be easily extended to other conflicts of this kind, though to be sure, each such conflict has two structured features: is unique local raison d’etre and its universal invariables.

Now the Catholic-Protestant ideological (or theological) clash was once a most grievous and lethal part of the European continent, and the Imperialist powers went on to establish outposts of their faith in conquered countries of the Third World. However, with the end of imperialism as such, this Christian problem has almost ceased to agitate the new generations whether in Europe or in the United States or elsewhere, in general. The two communities live in a fairly easy and comfortable relationship — except, of course in the divided Ireland.

It was, then, the Great Divide of the 20s that left the Protestant Ulster a part of Great Britain, and the larger Catholic South an independent republic. And that political split tore apart all earlier ties, and with each passing decade, the lush green island was rocked more and more into a state of despair, helplessness and irrationality, making nonsense of every possible solution. The complexity of the problem got compounded when strategies and weapons of modern terrorism queered the pitch to the point of rage and recklessness.

My aim here is not apportion blame for the monstrous excesses on both sides of the dividing line, but to offer the reader an overview of the Irish/Celtic consciousness with a view to making things slightly more intelligible. No solutions are being considered or scouted for. And for this purpose, I have chosen to see the Irish imbroglio through a literary lens, if you like. For nor all your Whitehall documents, treaties and treatises can reach down to that grid of Irish energies which we find compulsively subsumed in the poetry and plays of the great Irish writers. For, poetry, drama, fiction, in the end, provide far deeper and penetrating insights into the fevers that burn in the Irish blood, and make any solution terribly difficult, if not hopeless.

Though the "mad" Ireland has been throwing up a number of outstanding writers from Dean Swift to the witty George Barnard Shaw, I have elected to bring only two writers into the argument: The greatest Irish poet, W.B. Yeats, and Eugene O’Neill, the greatest American playwright of Irish extraction. Between the two of them, there’s I trust room enough for closing with the Gaelic ghosts of antiquity.

Yeats, of course, wrote a number of political poems on the subject of Irish independence, and could see, like an eagle, the tide of insensate hatred and violence sweeping not only his native island, but the European continent also. Such poems as The Second Coming predicted the terrorism of our times. He envisioned the fall of politicians from grace, drawn into "dragon-ridden" days and into the dark pit of insanity, "weasels fighting in a hole", as also the rise of the bestial elements in public life, the rise of the Anti-Christ in the form of a terrifying beast of prey. Such scenes and symbols, of course, go beyond the scope of the imagination embroiled in real-politik. That’s why this drive into the extreme helps understand the reasons which continue to block the Irish mind (and in our case, the Indo-Pak mind) returning the politicians and the pundits to dusty answers.

Before I turn to O’Neill’s plays and the pitiless probe into the Irish "madness", I take the liberty to quote a few lines of the opening stanza from one of my own published poems, W.B. Yeats since they have a direct bearing on the issue in question, if we keep the tenor of the argument in view:

Ah, that emerald island of fogs

And fens remains an eternal home

To all such who would carry

War to the outposts of being,

And burn all towers and Troys

To attain a nirvana of fire and flame.

If, then, racial traits and temperaments were to be taken as significant pointers in political or religious conflicts, the Celtic aspect of the Irish people remains for centuries as clue to the blazes in their blood. It appears as though the land rocked by famines, poverty, invasions and sea-storms had, over a period of millennia, become conditioned to a life of death and destruction, of booze and bloodshed. And then the eternal fogs had entered the Irish mind, befuddling and fouling up the issues of peace, sunshine and freedom. Thus stretched to the promontory of politics, there’s always a danger of a desperate plunge into "the destructive element," to recall Joseph Conrad’s famous phrase. Existential insecurity and the howling wolves of hunger in their past drove the Irish into such states of mind where reality dissolves into a miasma, and into a bottle of raw stinging whisky, into the bosom of a whore. Of course, the modern Ireland is today a fairly affluent country like other European nations, but its old fevers and "fixations" have not been quite tamed, and the two divided halves continue to cling to such residues in their consciousness.

Eugene O’Neill, in his own tragic way, represents the Irish search for the Absolute, but finds the void too obtrusive to let his imagination turn to smaller pieties and private peace. No wonder, his plays of the final phase, unlike Shakespeare’s, show no accommodations, reconciliations or reunions. On the contrary, in such highly autobiographical plays as Long Day’s Journey into Night and A Moon for the Misbegotten, his earlier pessimism acquires a magnificent new edge and eloquence, and as he unbuttons the "mad" story of his own Irish family, we feel the full tragic dignity of "old sorrow". And as he tears the bandages, one knows how the Irish can eat into each other’s vitals, blaspheme, dare the devil himself, fall into a ribald, sentimental romanticism, and like that existential isolato, captain Ihab of Melville’s Moby Dick "strike at the sun" it if insulted them!

No wonder, then, violence, fakeness, phoniness and theatricality become collateral conditions of the Irish character, and fatalism the philosophy of life. Indeed, the crack-up of the O’Neill family (the Tyrones, of the plays) is indirectly a crack-up of the Irish family as a unit of cohesion and stability — a crack-up eventually, of the Irish community as a whole.

In resorting to the poems of Yeats and to O’Neill’s last plays written over decades ago, I am not trying to link the entire political imbroglio of the Irish people today to only their tormented and tortured past. Few nations, as I have said earlier are not thus divided in their souls even though the style may be different. However, why the Irish problem remains intractable, refractory and almost hopeless despite recent efforts has, I trust, not a little to do with the Irish character and mindset.

It ipso facto, proves that religions, by impulse and inclination, are so conceived or constituted as to perpetuate splits, schisms and divides, whatever tall sermons be delivered from the pulpit or the podium about the universality and equality of all religions!