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Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Books / Theater / Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz After Shakespeare, the Great English-Language Playwrights Are Cosmopolitan Irishmen

Posted by Brendan Kiley on Tue, Feb 28, 2012 at 9:24 AM

My review of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion—which is far fiercer and bitchier than people tend to remember—will come out in this week's paper. A detail that didn't fit into the review comes from a Harold Bloom essay on The Importance of Being Earnest:

After Shakespeare, most of the best stage comedies in English were written by Anglo-Irishmen. William Congreve's The Way of the World, Oliver Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The School for Scandal, were joined in later times by Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, John Millington Synge's The Playboy of the Western World, and Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot.

He doesn't propose a theory about why, but I'll make a reckless, Tuesday-morning stab. I'm guessing Irish writers tend to eclipse English ones for the same reason Southern writers tend to eclipse Yankees and Latin American writers tend to eclipse Spaniards. (Yes, I'm taking one little list in one little essay and extrapolating a ridiculous, sweeping, unified-field theory about geography and imagination. Good morning!)

Two possibilities for this phenomenon:

1. An anxiety-of-influence issue. Each of the dominant cultures (England, the North, Spain) has its humongous old icon (Shakespeare, Melville, Cervantes) that writers in the subservient cultures wrestle with—not just with the intensity of younger writers, but with the double fury of being a) younger writers with b) chips on their shoulders for coming out of a culture that is considered more brutish, less refined, less worthy. They struggle harder and wind up going further: Joyce, Faulkner, and Borges; Martin McDonagh, Flannery O'Connor, and Roberto Bolaño.

2. Assuming that English is to Irish what Yankee is to Southern and Spanish is to Latino, call the formers the metropole (dominant, wealthier, smug), and the latters the periphery (derided, poorer, shame mixed with a little—maybe even secret—chip-on-the-shoulder pride).

A rough equation derived from those givens: the benefits of a cosmopolitan metropole education + a rich oral tradition from the periphery with superstitions and cosmology alien to the metropole + the inward-lookingness produced by shame mixed with chip-on-the-shoulder pride = a promising foundation for good work.

In other thrilling and extremely important news, here's an old video of a jujitsu guy fighting a capoeira guy.

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Shakespeare is a fag. More to the point, Shakespeare is a clown dependent upon dick-jokes.

Posted by Central Scrutinizer on February 28, 2012 at 9:39 AM

Assuming that English is to Irish what Yankee is to Southern and Spanish is to Latino, call the formers the metropole (dominant, wealthier, smug), and the latters the periphery (derided, poorer, shame mixed with a little—maybe even secret—chip-on-the-shoulder pride).

Did you seriously compare the victims of colonialism to the American South? Seriously?

Posted by Zuulabelle

on February 28, 2012 at 9:45 AM

@ 2. Yes! Quick! To the Indignationmobile!

Posted by Brendan Kiley on February 28, 2012 at 9:54 AM

The Irish are a storytelling race and always have been. Though "Waiting for Godot" is a French play, not an Irish one: Beckett wrote it originally in French, and translated it himself. He, like Joyce, was an Irishman in exile.

Posted by Fnarf

on February 28, 2012 at 10:39 AM

The Latin America v Spain thing can be explained by the fact that there are like three quarters of a billion Latin Americans and only a couple dozen million Spaniards. So, probability alone will land more talent in Latin America.

Clusters of achievement are better explained with sociological factors, primarily the incentive systems in place. An approach like that will then also explain why most Great Composers from a Certain Era were Germans and why the best basketball players are mostly Black.

You wouldn't try to explain why the most accomplished practitioners of kendo are Japanese with something about the warrior ethos. You'd just chalk it up to the fact that they do a lot of kendo in Japan and not much elsewhere.

Posted by Alden on February 28, 2012 at 10:46 AM

@ 4. Au contraire, Fnarf. Godot is a cosmopolitan Irish play by a cosmopolitan Irishman (who, in some ways, was trying to erase his origins). The cosmopolitan part is important—the peripheral writers need to have exposure to the metropole(s) (whether it's Beckett in his Parisian cafes or McDonagh watching British daytime TV) for the equation to work.

Posted by Brendan Kiley on February 28, 2012 at 10:53 AM

If your periphery category is reasonably flexible, I think you can pick up Stoppard by virtue of not speaking English as a first language and having a generally buffeted-about early childhood. But what about Frayn, Orton, and Ayckbourn?

Posted by tdonut on February 28, 2012 at 10:59 AM

Brendan I think several doctoral dissertations lurk herein. Leave 'em there. And @2, yes, the South is marginal to the dominant North, just as Ireland was marginal to England.

Posted by Chicago Fan on February 28, 2012 at 11:00 AM

Shaw's plays are much more acid than most people realize, but the real meat, in my opinion, is his lengthy introductory/prefatory essays. I remember the first one I read was for his Cleopatra (which I read after seeing the Claudette Colbert movie), and I eventually read all of them. Thanks for reminding me -- now I want to go back and read them again.

Posted by Calpete on February 28, 2012 at 11:08 AM

@ 8. Yes sir. Work is for graduate students. I'm just a lazy thesis-proposer.

Posted by Brendan Kiley on February 28, 2012 at 11:16 AM

@9 -- you betcha. I particularly like the preface for The Doctor's Dilemma. Youch!

Posted by tdonut on February 28, 2012 at 11:16 AM

@6, written in French. Beckett wrote in French, not English, not Irish. There's nothing Irish about it. He was not cosmopolitan; he was an exile. There is a difference. He lived in France for more than sixty years, where he produced virtually all of his famous works. He only returned to Ireland briefly one time, I believe, in 1945, and then stayed in France for another 50+ years. He is buried in Paris, not Dublin. He, like Joyce, hated Ireland. His impact then and now is not Irish; nor his antecedents. He has more in common with other French writers of the time period than with anything Irish, aside from Joyce, who likewise was a deliberate exile. Unlike Joyce, however, his writing subjects are rarely specifically Irish in any meaningful way.

Posted by Fnarf

on February 28, 2012 at 12:07 PM

Disagree! People exiled from their homelands still have a homeland, however much they may resent it and try to scrape it from themselves. He was an Irishman who lived in Paris and resented his motherland. But he was still an Irishman, however much he would've insisted otherwise. You're from where you're from, whether you like it or not. You can deny your past; you cannot alter it.

But the dynamics of artists who try to burn away their origins can make for great work.

Posted by Brendan Kiley on February 28, 2012 at 12:42 PM

I just want to add that when I studied Irish lit in college Beckett was included. Waiting for Goddot can be read as a critique of De Valera's post-colonial quest to make the republic more 'Irish'. Beckett also uses a lot of odd grammatical quirks found in Irish.

Posted by CbytheSea on February 28, 2012 at 4:49 PM