A "Lingo if Its Ahn": Linguistic Control in The Shadow of a Gunman
If, as Homi Bhabha writes in the introduction to The Location of Culture, the "study of world literature might be the study of the way in which cultures recognize themselves through their projections of ‘otherness'" (12), then the literature which arises out of colonialism warrants especially close examination. The need to construct Otherness is intensified in colonial relationships, both for the colonizer and the colonized. One must do so in the process of ruling, the other in resisting that rule. For both, the Other provides a site for the "formation of cultural identities understood not as essentializations...but as contrapuntal ensembles, for it is the case that no identity can ever exist by itself and without an array of opposites, negatives, oppositions: Greeks always require barbarians, and Europeans Africans, Orientals, etc." (Said, Culture 52). Imperialist states use this contrapuntal structure of identity to justify subjugation, while colonized peoples use it to spur and sustain resistance movements which require the creation of a national character portrayed, within an opposition to the culture of the oppressor, as in need of revival and reclamation. The operation of these projections of identity becomes particularly interesting in the case of colonial Ireland due to its unique racial and geographic relationship to England. The work of playwright Sean O'Casey, particularly in his Dublin trilogy, offers an opportunity to interrogate the operation and ramifications of cultural constructions of Otherness in an Irish colonial context.
Ireland, one of Britain's "white colonies," historically presented "a continuous colonial problem" (73) and continues to do so in many ways, despite decolonization. Edward Said notes that "the problem of Irish liberation...has continued longer than other comparable struggles" (236) and highlights the role of otherness in that struggle: "Since Spenser's 1596 tract on Ireland, a whole tradition of British and European thought has considered the Irish to be a separate and inferior race, usually unregenerately barbarian, often delinquent and primitive" (236). Several centuries after Spenser, Matthew Arnold's picture "of the Irish as ‘undisciplinable, anarchic, and turbulent by nature'" (Castle 49) demonstrates the durability of this representation. Gregory Castle, Vincent Cheng, and Tracy Mishkin, among others, have written detailed accounts of the equation of the Irish with apes, blacks, violence, and irrationality. David Lloyd delineates what partly underlies this tradition:
Of course, from the perspective of dominant history, the subaltern must be represented as violence. ‘Must' in two senses: that which cannot be assimilated to the state can be understood only as outside the law, disruptive and discontinuous, unavailable for narration; secondly, the history of the state requires a substrate which is counter to its laws of civility and which it represents as outrageous and violent, in order that the history of domination and criminalization appear as a legitimate process of civilization and the triumph of law. (127)
Subaltern cultures often attempt to counter the Othering performed upon them by the imperialist state through a reversal which posits an authentic native culture, which must be recovered. By the early twentieth century in Ireland, this reversal was intimately involved in the Celtic Revival and strains of primitivist self-representation, both of which "underscore the extent to which Irish-Ireland nationalists had internalized anthropological and colonialist assumptions about the Irish ‘race'" (Castle 5). The valorization of the Irish race, and the Irish peasant in particular, was an important component of nationalist representations, however, as Victor Cheng remarks, "the discourse of race as it pertained to Ireland also inevitably shaded into the discourse of Empire" (18). Instead of "attacking racial construction, many Irish people posited their own Irish essence" (Mishkin 67). Such reversal merely reinforces the binary system of Otherness employed in imperialist representations because to "base a nationalist response upon the terms of these essentializing binary distinctions is to play by the same rules of that binarity and thus to take on the same hierarchical assumptions" (Cheng 49). Thus, it becomes a trap rather than a means to freedom.
On either side of the binary divide, questions of representation and Othering intersect with questions of language, writing, and speech. They are "discursive processes that participate in the dynamics of ‘othering' (Cheng 20). In Michel Foucault's conception of discourses, they "are not once and for all subservient to power or raised up against it...discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also...a starting point for an opposing strategy. Discourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile, and makes it possible to thwart it" (100-1). The role of language is central in the contested realms of representation, power, and power relations in patriarchal, colonial, and class structures. Saemus Deane acknowledges that role when he asserts that "Irish speech is a political territory" (65). In Edward Said's seminal Orientalism, and later in Culture and Imperialism, he examines the role that European discourse has played (and continues to play) in creating and maintaining non-European peoples as subaltern groups.[1] The use of language as a means to exercise power over people is found in the way that Orientalism "expresses and represents [non-Europeans]...culturally and even ideologically as a mode of discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles" (Said, Orientalism 2). The point of connection between the abstract realm of language and political reality becomes a locus for both the control and the creation of the latter by the former. In Said's conception, underneath "the different units of Orientalist discourse...is a set of representative figures or tropes" (71), which function to create projections of otherness and self. In considering colonial Ireland, Cheng follows Said in claiming that the "hegemonic power of a dominant ideology is such that it imbues the entire culture with, in this case, an Orientalized discourse of otherness - so that, inevitably, the very terms by which an individual in the culture thinks are inescapably tainted by such constructions" (175). Hence, language, via its part in representation, can function as a means of wielding power and assigning and enforcing social roles. Therefore, those who control access to the dominant discourse control access to the various levels of the social hierarchy: "the creation of uneven relations of linguistic competence and production...duplicate discursively the inequalities of socio-political power" (Castle 147). It remains an inescapable fact that those implicated in imperialist discourse are forced to act within the framework of these hierarchical relationships. These relationships, in turn, function as sites for the contestation of power and identity.
It is perhaps the first play in O'Casey's Dublin trilogy, The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), which is most directly concerned with the various facets of the interactions between language, identity, and power in a colonized state. The play produces a more complex and nuanced reading than Shakir Mustafa suggests. Mustafa views it as a "curiously one-sided view of the colonial encounter that flattens historical events by assigning responsibility for their development to one partner" (100) and "comes close to a blanket rejection of contesting colonial rule" (100). Yet, the "strains and tensions, and the problematics of identity, imposed on writers by...marginalization" (Vance 5) inform questions of speech, writing, politics, and Irishness. To different degrees, the various inhabitants of O'Casey's tenement experience a loss of control over their lives and identities, a loss which is bound up in their nationality, class, and gender. Their lack of access to the dominant, privileged discourse directly fosters the powerlessness and stagnation in which they exist, and precipitates Minnie's death at the conclusion of the play. Forced to employ a language, and so a view of reality, not their own, the tenement-dwellers ultimately must accept the binary of otherness which is imposed upon them and relinquish their ability to alter their condition.
Within the working-class community of the play,
almost "all the characters in The Shadow of a Gunman are defined by
their attitude to language" (Kearney, Sean 64), and their relationship
to its use. Engendered and demarcated by means of language, the social
hierarchy is apparent throughout the play. Not only does it separate the
characters from one another, but it also situates them in relation to one
another and their environment. In O'Casey's Autobiographies,
the ease or difficulty encountered by a community in verbally representing itself has an effect on the ease or difficulty it has in being politically represented....Dialect, or any form of vernacular language that is derided as inappropriate, uneducated, has either no linguistic status or a very frail one. Those who speak are correspondingly marginalized or excluded politically. (150)
As Deane's statement implies, the language of representation need not be written, although writing confers a more privileged position on its agent than the spoken word.
Seumas Shields attempts to use spoken language to exercise such power both during and after the climactic raid on the tenement house by the Black and Tans. The raid itself is brought about as a result of a similar effort by Tommy Owens to exert power through language. When Tommy walks into Davoren's room unannounced, interrupting a private, non-verbal communication, he immediately launches into what amounts to a verbal construction of identity in his conversation with Donal and Minnie. He "uses language here not to communicate sincerely-held beliefs, but to stage an act in which a heroic Tommy Owens plays the lead" (Schrank 70). He reconfigures his social role, undergoing a "metamorphosis from slum dweller to sentimental star" (70) in an effort to exercise control over the perceptions of those around him. He begins with a negation that is actually an affirmation: "you needn't be afraid o' me, Mr. Davoren" (O'Casey 94). In denying that he should or could be a source of fear for Davoren, Tommy simultaneously asserts the opposite. He claims a power for himself that can be threatening even to the person who might be seen by others as the quasi-leader of the tenement through his association with writing and authorship. He also implies for himself a kind of half-veiled existence beyond that of the everyday, the kind of secret deeds or double life often attributed to the traditional popular or sentimental hero. He continues in this vein of shadowy implication:
Davoren. Why should I be afraid of you, Mr. Owens, or of anybody else?
Tommy. Why should you indeed? We're all friends here-Mr. Shields knows me well-all you've got to say is, ‘Do you know Tommy Owens?' an' he'll tell you the sort of a man Tommy Owens is. There's no flies on Tommy--got me? (O'Casey 94)
The vague insinuations Tommy makes through his rhetorical questions ("Why should you indeed?") are intertwined with and reinforced by implications of a type of clandestine network of which Tommy is a member ("We're all friends here-Mr. Shields knows me well"). He controls privileged access with his own name functioning as a sort of signifying password ("all you've got to say is, ‘Do you know Tommy Owens?'").
From the time of his entrance, Tommy employs speech in order to present a self constructed by performance. It must be noted that whether by design or fortuitous accident, his entrance effectively places him at the center of the attention of both his onstage and theatre audiences, interrupting the intimate moment between Davoren and Minnie. In addition, it presents the intrusion of the public into the private while illuminating Davoren's performance of himself with Minnie by creating a parallel through the proximity of the two performances. He begins to clarify some of his insinuations by asking another rhetorical question: "It's ‘Up the Republic' all the time--eh, Mr. Davoren?" (94). Thus, Tommy situates his constructed self in a specific cultural and historical understanding of the popular hero, the kind of nationalistic figure who would have been celebrated in Revivalist literature and song not only familiar to Tommy and the others, but especially attractive to people of their class.[2] He elaborates this vision of himself in the role of the Irish popular hero when he tells Davoren, employing the standard rhetoric of such heroic tales, "Two firm hands clasped together will all the power outbrave of the heartless English tyrant, the Saxon coward an' knave. That's Tommy Owens' hand, Mr. Davoren, the hand of a man, a man - Mr. Shields knows me well" (94). Tommy's stereotypical rhetoric echoes the type of rhetoric employed in speeches like those heard on the streets of Ireland and in O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars. Nationalists in all of these settings attempt to produce and exercise power through speech and writing.
Such attempts reinforce the performative aspect of Tommy's speech acts and their role in attempting to create reality. Tommy's repetition of "Mr. Shields knows me well," (94), later to metamorphose into "Mr. Shields knows that - ask Mr. Shields, Mr. Davoren" (95), underscores the public nature of his performance of self. His repeated invocation of the knowledge or opinion of Seamus Shields identifies his performance of self as inextricable from his reputation. Reputation here encompasses the production of both power and masculinity. His sense of the one is bound up tightly with his sense of the other: "That's Tommy Owens' hand...the hand of a man, a man" (94). Tommy's speech act associates his adherence to the cultural template of a true man with his hand, the instrument of physical power. His hand functions semiotically, signifying the nationalist hero. It represents the revolutionary hand that would pull the trigger or throw the bomb, the hand of the gunman. The performance of these dual aspects of Tommy's personality is necessarily a public phenomenon, for language both creates and disseminates his creation to an audience. In turn, the audience is necessary in order to give Tommy's self performance a sense of reality within "the social dramatic structure" (Castle 145).
For the off-stage audience, Tommy's performed self comments on the performative nature of power relations, including masculinity. Further, it reveals the sources of its production within his cultural context. The sentimental nationalist song that Tommy sings acts as one of these sources by fostering the heroic illusions he attempts to adopt:
...
This passage of O'Casey's text interrogates the manner in which such popular songs as this operate in the creation and maintenance of both masculine and nationalist ideologies. The very existence of the songs promises glory and immortality to the male hero who dies for Ireland as a martyr. These songs transmit and preserve his honor and memory through their circulation and repetition. Such linguistic creations form part of "the aesthetic politics of nationalism which finds its most intense symbolism in martyrdom" (Lloyd 27). In this case, the song links the "hayros" with speech acts. Their deeds are deeds of speech, of crying out on Ireland's behalf. Midway through the line, Tommy becomes one of these heroes and enters their company: "God save Ireland ses we all" (O'Casey 95). The pronoun "we" constructs Tommy as a hero himself, an identification that is carried through the next line of the song to his death on the battlefield.
The creation of the heroes with whom Tommy associates himself relies on an Orientalist and traditionally nationalist definition of the Irish people. The Irish are "noble-hearted" (94). This is not the heroism of individuals but the "spirit of their race" (95). Meanwhile, the English as a people are reduced to a single "vengeful tyrant" (95) in the ultimate distillation of Tommy's notions of the Englishman as either tyrant, coward, or knave. Later in the scene, Tommy makes yet another distinction between the Irish and English (as well as between his constructed self and those less heroic): "who'd think o' dinner an' Ireland fightin' to be free - not Tommy Owens, anyhow. It's only the Englishman who's always thinkin' of his belly" (95). In order to define the Irish as individuals and heroes, the English must represent the Other, all that the Irish are not, and so the heterogeneity of England is finally amalgamated into a solitary imperialist emblem. However, "the polemical assertion of identity damagingly forecloses on other possible identities and tends to deform both the individual and the body politic" (Vance 166). In a colonial context, that foreclosure effectively traps the subject in a binary representative structure. Language sustains and naturalizes the binaries of colonization in the service of hegemony. The resulting pervasiveness of the terms of imperialist discourse forces the characters in Shadow to define themselves within that discourse, whether by resistance or complicity. Later in the play, the English too will participate in the same process of self-definition, with the Irish in the role of Other. The popular nature of Tommy's song, reinforced by the working class accent which becomes pronounced during its second half, ensures its widest possible dissemination and so serves what amounts to an overtly political function: "Even today Irish audiences would recognize Tommy's song as one of the most famous hymns of Irish Nationalism" (Kearney, Glamour 58). It transforms dead Irishmen into heroes (a subject addressed perhaps most strongly in the Plough and the Stars) and refashions reality in terms which are beneficial to the nationalist ideology which it promotes. The song therefore provides a site of resistance to colonialist representation while simultaneously accepting the assumptions underlying its differentiations.
The appeal of the popular or sentimental hero and the trope's effectiveness as a rhetorical and political device derive from the trope's promise of social mobility. For a tenement dweller like Tommy, an Irishman living under an English colonial government in "a community in which literacy is only beginning to establish itself" (Kearney, Glamour 58), this promise constitutes the only such possibility available. Because Tommy is denied any actual mobility, he must take recourse to what may be seen as a fantasy, but, in fact, is an attempt at manipulating his reality. Tommy tries to exercise control over his identity and his environment through the oral performance of an "illusory Tommy" (Schrank 70) drawn from the romantic or sentimental tradition. Like others in Shadow, Tommy must resort to this kind of linguistic manipulation because "no other action seems possible" (71). It is an attempt to create a separate discourse in which, among other things, action and mobility are possible for him. Such speech represents a repudiation of the external control of self, a refusal of identity imposed by social and political circumstances. As part of his performance, Tommy reformulates Donal Davoren's identity as well. He "intentionally refuses to understand Donal's straightforward statement that he ‘has no connection with the politics of the day'" (70) in order to confer on him the identity of a gunman. The deliberate misinterpretation of Donal's words constructs the gunman upon whose friendship the alteration of Tommy's own identity depends.
Of course, any effective change depends on the degree of success of his "verbal smokescreens" (71). Minnie highlights their transparency and failure with her summation of his avowed nationalism: "Wouldn't that Tommy Owens give you the sick - only waitin to hear the call! Ah, then it'll take all the brass bands in the country to blow the call before Tommy Owens ud hear it" (O'Casey 103). Most of Tommy's onstage audience is aware that his constructed self is exactly that and nothing more. His tearful assertion that he would "die for Ireland" (95) rings as hollow as the reason why he has not yet joined the dead heroes of whom he sings: "I never got a chance - they never gave me a chance" (95). Donal and Minnie treat his claims as one would the fantasies of a child, agreeing in order to avoid conflict and, likely, to expedite Tommy's exit. When Tommy asks, "Why isn't every man in Ireland out with the IRA? Up with the barricades, up with the barricades; it's now or never, now an' for ever, as Sarsfield said at the battle o' Vinegar Hill. Up with the barricades - that's Tommy Owens" (95), one sees again the influence of the romantic heroic tradition in Tommy's use of language. Again, the quotation of the dead hero points to "dangers of fixity and fetishism of identities within the calcification of colonial cultures" (Bhabha 9), which end in an idealized and essentializing "celebratory romance of the past" (9). The irony of the situation underscores the falsity of such a foundation for national and personal identity. With his onstage audience as a gauge, the offstage audience may assume that Tommy's question may just as easily refer to himself. He has never been at a barricade nor is he a member of the IRA, as Minnie and Donal know and he admits (with the caveat that he has not been given the chance). Both they and the theatre audience know his rhetoric to be empty.
However, unfortunately for the residents of his tenement, not all his hearers have such privileged knowledge of the "private and idiosyncratic language" (Schrank 71) that he employs in his construction of self. Grigson recounts Tommy Owens "in the Blue Lion this evening...blowin' out av him...tellin' everybody that he knew where there was bombs; that he had a friend who was a General in the IRA" (O'Casey 119). From his statement, one may assume that Tommy, or rather Tommy's discourse, is the catalyst for the tragic conclusion of the play. While Tommy's construction of identity may not convince Minnie, it appears to be sufficient for the informers to the English authorities, who conduct a raid of the tenement later that night.
On one level, this causal chain may be read as the dangers of both personal bravado and Revivalist nationalism. Tommy's desire to be a hero, a "sentimental star" (Schrank 70), is revealed as essentially destructive by the damage that it eventually does to those around him. His desire also implicates the construct of masculinity in that destructiveness, since Tommy's sense of his self derives in part from his sense of his masculinity and how well he conforms to the cultural category of "man." His insecurity leads to the creation of his heroically masculine self, characterized by the personal bravado that he displays both when he interrupts the kiss between Minnie and Donal and offstage in the Blue Lion. His boasts in the bar are both a repetition and a heightening of the public nature of his similar boasts inside the tenement. Due to the more public setting, the consequences generated are themselves more public in character as well. It is also significant that Grigson reports these actions to the theatre audience and that they do not take place onstage; Tommy is again reduced to discourse and his character and actions are created through language.
On another level, the ultimately disastrous repercussions of Tommy's performance of his constructed self in the public and politically discursive space of the pub can be read as a commentary on Irish drama itself. With their realistic depictions of the lives of working-class Irish men and women, O'Casey's plays mark a movement away from the romantic or sentimental nationalist art which is represented in Shadow of a Gunman by Tommy's song. O'Casey's work represents a transition from the kind of hopeful revolutionary spirit and advocacy of martyrdom found in William Butler Yeats' Katherine Ni Houlihan. This text also dramatizes the rejection of and disillusionment with these same ideas and ideals, which are present not only in O'Casey's work, but in Yeats' later work as well.
The rejection in O'Casey's play of art or drama which perpetrates the romantic tradition of nationalism finds its expression in the disruption and death which that art causes. This is not the death glorified in the popular songs or quotations of Irish heroes, not the death Tommy Owens imagines for his constructed self. It is not the painless death of the "noble-hearted three" which Michael walks off to meet in Yeats' play, "undaunted to...doom" (O'Casey 95). O'Casey initiates a new tradition of realism in his plays that opposes the idea of the romanticized sacrifice. His realism derives not merely from his attribution of Hiberno-English to his working-class characters, but also from his portrayal of the grim results of a blind dedication to nationalism and an aggressive masculine ideal. His deaths are not glorious, but losses to be mourned. They are not the result of heroism, but of misguidance and manipulation by power structures forcing their ideologies on those who have no way to adequately resist them, no discursive, political, or economic spaces of their own. All of these issues come to a head in the climactic scene of the English raid on the tenements, the end result of the linguistic battle for territory, which runs throughout the play.
During the raid, Shields, like Tommy Owens, endeavors to assume a particular identity through language, and his attempt reveals the true extent to which the working-class Irish are controlled by language. A Black and Tan Auxiliary enters the room of Shields and Davoren as the raid spreads throughout the tenement and asks Shields for his name. Since a name in this situation functions as a linguistic tag, he thinks better of his initial impulse to answer with "Seumas" and instead offers "Jimmie Shields, sir" (O'Casey 123) as a substitute in his reply, an anglicized, and therefore safer, variant. Shields' choice parallels the English program to "anglicize the names," which was launched in the previous century as part of an effort to "permanently subjugate the population" (Said, Culture 226). To an English soldier, an Irish name carries a certain significance within the framework of the dominant discourse, of which he is an agent. With his substitution of his name, which is his signifier, Shields tries to alter his identity and so his social and political role, a role which places him in a very specific power-relationship to the Auxiliary. By hiding the Irishness inscribed in his given name, he seeks to avoid being associated with the politically overdetermined notion of Irishness. Shields demonstrates awareness that in "cultural discourse and exchange within a culture...what is commonly circulated by it is not ‘truth' but representations" (Said, Orientalism 21) and that "representations of culture have a powerful ability to install themselves as truths" (Castle 139). He knows that it is not important that he claims, "I never had a gun in me hand in me life" (O'Casey 123), but that to a speaker of English, the word Irishman contains, among its myriad associations, a man with a gun. The Irish are political activists, terrorists, and enemies of the Empire, and the "Anglo-Saxon stereotype of the Irishman, then, is that of Paddy the Ape, violent, drunken, poor, superstitious" (Watson 17). Within the dominant discourse, to which the Irish are subjected, the colonized country "is less a place...than a set of references" (Said, Orientalism 177), all of which contribute to the subjugation and paralyzation of those whom they Other.
Ireland, of course, cannot be merely a representation. Although Said maintains in Culture and Imperialism that a preoccupation with geography nevertheless occupies the center of the imperial relationship between England and Ireland, their proximity means that the physical reality of Ireland and the Irish must intrude more often and more disruptively into English representations. These disruptions account for English efforts mentioned by Said to alter Ireland through settlement projects and legal and linguistic Anglicization. Their efforts reveal a desire to reduce the destabilizing potential of the disjunction between representation and reality. However, hegemony can also reinscribe resistance within itself. Said argues that the situation in colonial Ireland gave rise to a discourse of resistance. He locates nationalism and nativism at the center of that discourse and calls for a movement beyond the rigid categories which they impose. For Said, nativism reproduces the absolute difference which characterizes the colonial relationship. In so doing, it reinforces the system of representation employed by the colonizer.
O'Casey's play dramatizes some of the difficulties which Said enumerates. During the raid, the power and control of the Auxiliary presents itself even in the attempt of Shields to avoid the application of that power. The expectations of his oppressor determine his answer to the question of his name, and so, even in choosing an alternate identity, Shields is still forced to define himself by the terms of the colonialist discourse. He defines himself by denying his Irishness. Thus, he defines himself negatively - by what he is not, much as the English define what they are not by transferring those undesirable qualities onto the "Irish." In his response to Shields' change of names, the Auxiliary both recognizes the power of language and shows circumscription of Shields' own power: "Ow, you're a selt (he means a Celt), one of the seltic race that speaks a lingo of its ahn, and that's going to overthrow the British Empire--I don't think!" (O'Casey 123). The soldier acknowledges the political power of language when he equates an Irish discourse ("a lingo of its ahn") with potential revolution. However, he simultaneously denies the existence of an Irish discourse by forcing Shields into the category of "selt" despite his definition of himself as "Jimmie," which excludes him from that category. The Auxiliary demonstrates that, ultimately, "linguistic events...[are] controlled by the linguist" (Said, Orientalism 143), a position which he occupies through his privileged access to the language and his ability, denied to Shields and the other Irish, to make his own meaning within it.
At the same time that Shields is asked for his name, the Black and Tans are occupied with making their own meaning in the room of Adophus Grigson. Grigson's encounter with the Black and Tans offers a second and more extreme example of linguistic control. Grigson, who sympathizes with English rule, tries to communicate his political position by adopting English linguistic contexts and symbols. He provides an example of those derisively tagged West Britons, Irish who "attempted to live as though they were English and in England, and...were often strongly criticized by Irish cultural nationalists" (Mishkin 80). Upon the approach of the English soldiers, he leaves a Bible on the table in his room, open to a verse which commands "Honour the King" in order to "show them what sort of man he was" (O'Casey 124). In addition, Grigson has displayed "a picture over the mantelpiece of King William crossing the Boyne" (125) to further reinforce his chosen political affiliation. However, as colonized person, he may only imitate and not control the language of the colonizers. Much as in Homi Bhabha's concept of mimicry, both texts, written and visual, are used by Grigson but controlled by the Black and Tans. It remains their language, in a very literal sense, despite his potentially subversive engagement with it, and they are therefore free to do with it what they wish and to make it mean as they wish. They refuse, as Tommy Owens does with Donal's denial of political interest, to accept the interpretation offered by the encoder. They respond to the biblical quotation by "flingin' the Bible on the floor" (125) and "make out...that it [the painting] was Robert Emmet, an' the picture of a sacret society" (125). The English soldiers assert Grigson's otherness by reinterpreting his materials as "seditious propaganda" (Armstrong 56) and then imposing on him, as they did on Shields, an "Irish" identity that conforms to the representation of Irishness which possesses currency in the ruling culture. They alter his identity through changing his name, in a parallel to the episode with Shields, "callin' him Mr. Moody an' Mr. Sankey" (125), and, in an ultimate demonstration of "assimilation as the cultural arm of hegemonic imperialism" (Lloyd 112), select his words for him, forcing him to pray for the Republic and sing a hymn of their choosing. After these events, the Tommy Owens-like constructions of masculinity which occur in the subsequent retelling of the incident by both Grigson and Shields cannot be seen as functioning in any way other than to underscore their already painfully apparent powerlessness and paralysis.
Donal Davoren too undergoes a similar experience at the hands of the Black and Tans during the raid. Like Shields and Grigson, he has the identity of the Other imposed on him. They answer his evasion of "Irish" status ("I-I-I was born in Ireland" [O'Casey 123]) with the assertion that this statement signifies that he is "Irish han' proud of it" (123). The Auxiliary constructs a self and a role for Davoren, "and the very act of construction is a sign of imperial power..., as well as a confirmation of the dominating culture" (Said, Orientalism 146). The relationship of the representation to the object is unimportant; it does not matter that Davoren is (avowedly) apolitical and not a nationalist. Within the discourse of the colonizers, his characteristics are predetermined. This episode again foregrounds the long history of the stereotyping of the Irish and the disjunction between representation and reality. Davoren wishes to locate himself within this disjunction, between the binary categories of representation. However, the Black and Tans override his potentially subversive positioning of himself. They force his equivocation of identity to resolve itself into an absolute by exercising the power to categorize him within the imperialist system. Linguistic categorization then makes possible political action upon the subject. Once he is defined as "Irish," Davoren may be located and dealt with within a recognized hierarchical structure.
In addition to yet another example of determinacy effected through language, the character of Donal Davoren introduces a further dimension to the problem of language in Shadow: that of writing. The instances cited thus far have been verbal, and "Davoren is the only one in the play whose grammar is not characterized by Irish dialectical forms and whose accent is normally free from the elisions that mark and and -ing in the others" (Kearney, Glamour 65). His greater freedom from dialect translates to a lesser degree of marginalization. However, Davoren, who identifies himself as poet, is involved in an even higher form of language as well. Within his cultural context, the "working-class poor attributed an extraordinary value and prestige to ‘high' literacy, associating its manifestations...with the power of those who ruled over the working-class as naturally as gods or magicians controlled the fate of humans" (Kearney, Sean 64). The fact that Davoren possesses traits of this admired involvement with literacy and the written word positions him more advantageously in the social hierarchy than the others in the tenement. He is involved with literature, and in colonized nations "literary culture is conceived as offering not merely a path towards the resolution, but the resolution itself of the problems of subjective and political identity" (Lloyd 13). It seems to be his literary qualities as much as his verbally constructed identity as a gunman that first attract Minnie to him. He is seen by the other residents of the tenement as having the privileged access to discourse which they lack, which positions him as a link to the world of English discourse and power. He is the "one who could not only read but who could create the texts that others would read" (Kearney, Sean 64), that is, to wield influence on political and cultural reality. When Mr. Gallogher brings Davoren his letter to the IRA, he "attempts to appropriate the speech of his social superiors and also the most potent symbol of their power, the written document" (Kearney, Glamour 60). He becomes the medium for the "subject people who have the invader's language forced down their throats. They have not yet learnt to express themselves as fluently in the new tongue as they once could in their own" (Simmons 42). This fact is doubly present in the text that Mr. Gallogher has created. Not only is he forced to use the "invader's language"(42), but a legal form of that language, a highly specialized manner of expression only a relatively small number possess the tools to use correctly. This twice removes Mr. Gallogher from the source of power. The people who live in the tenement posit Davoren as accessing that power, as being one of those select few who can make the language of the invader obey their commands and bow to their intentions.
However, Davoren's power as agent of written language is greatly overestimated. Eventually, his language is not his own; its control belongs to the English. Therefore, he has no more fundamental power over it than Grigson. While O'Casey "offered something new on the Abbey stage" (Grene 111), Davoren seems content to quote continuously and to quote English poets like Shelley and Milton. Milton of course, held both anti-Catholic and anti-Irish views, and wrote of the Irish "that they were ‘indocile and averse from all civility and amendment'" (Cheng 25). Even Davoren's reaction to Minnie's death "is all too easily assimilated into his practiced linguistic rituals" (McDonald 98). It consists of a "repetition of Shelleyan fragments" (98), through which he creates an elevated poetic self for the public. His only means of authorized expression as a writer is through a hostile discourse. Davoren's socioeconomic position adds to this handicap by removing the material conditions under which it would be possible for him to write effectively. The loss of privacy occasioned in the tenement, "where curtains substitute for doors, where what doors there are don't shut, and where, as a result, the lives of individuals and families are constantly interrupted by the intrusion of others" (Corcoran 103) particularly inhibits him. Many critics posit "nationhood as primarily a fictive process - a process, in other words, of writing" (Castle 44). However, in order for Davoren to participate in this process, he needs to work towards a space outside the traditions of his conquerors, to establish an Irish tradition and an Irish discourse, neither of which he does. The English "ruled Ireland linguistically as well as politically, and [...] linguistic independence was as necessary as political independence" (Tracy 166). Therefore, his identification as a poet and man of letters occurs in a community "where the only equivalent power is that of the gunman" (Kearney, Sean 64), and the illusion and hollowness of the one position is mirrored by that of the other. Despite his "class pretensions" (Grene 124) and an undeserved aura of power, Davoren remains as immobilized as the rest of those in the tenement.
The character of Minnie Powell, according to G.J. Watson, "is the culminating touch in O'Casey's portrayal of a whole society given over to illusion" (258). Davoren's appearance of power, as stated earlier, attracts her to him. Like Davoren and the others, Minnie is rendered "unable to express herself in her own words" (Schrank 67). She too suffers from the need for a language of her own, and, as a woman, is also trapped in the social hierarchy, even more so than Davoren or Tommy Owens. Minnie is doubly deprived as a result of her gender, having to find expression by means of a language that is not only that of the colonizer and the middle and upper-classes, but also that of the male. Not only does the persistent English identification of the Irish as a feminine people "suggest an unconscious collusion between patriarchy and empire" (Cheng 24), but an "unmistakable patriarchal cast can be discerned everywhere in classical nationalism" (Said, Culture 224), which further excludes her from agency. As a result of this same nationalism, Minnie's "view of the world has been formed by romantic fiction" (Kearney, Sean 64). For example, in Davoren she finds another romantic fiction. His false identity of gunman seems to offer her a new identity as well as the "sweetheart" (O'Casey 92) of a gunman, which she assumes when she hides the bombs during the raid. Davoren's willingness to accept his verbally created role in the absence of the possibility of any action is matched by Minnie's inability to express herself in any other way but in relation to that role. She, like Tommy Owens, deliberately misunderstands Davoren's denials of political involvement in order to construct her identity in relation to his: "You're only jokin' now; you'd die for your country" (92). Like the other residents, she conforms to a predetermined role in her constructions, as emphasized by her final words. Her shouts of "Up the Republic" as English men drag her away demonstrate her lack of self-expression and access to language. Her cries exactly repeat Tommy's "It's ‘Up the Republic' all the time - eh, Mr. Davoren" (94) and so situate her final linguistic gesture in the emptiness of Tommy's received speech acts. Further, her fatal self-sacrifice realizes an ironic physical enactment of the heroic sentiments and events contained in Tommy's earlier song and in his boasts of dying for Ireland. Minnie is as much a victim of this romantic tradition as Tommy Owens. The Ireland she dies for is a discursive construction of patriarchal nationalism. She reacts to a discourse of values which valorizes martyrdom and death. And die she does, possibly from the bullets of Irish nationalists. Immediately prior to her death, Minnie does achieve some degree of agency. Only she acts, hiding the bombs, when the raid commences. However, her actions occur within the context of patriarchal national and colonial discourses and are performed to protect a man who falsely represents the former. She fails to, or cannot, act outside of this framework and so becomes reinscribed within it. O'Casey's women often represent virtue, but Minnie expresses hers within a fruitless and limiting set of discourses. She can do no more in her last moments than repeat a (male) slogan, much as Davoren does no more than quote other poets. O'Casey's own opinion was that "slogan cries were things happy enough in a song, but they made misery in a busy street" (Armstrong 59), and her use of the slogan as expression is as much a sign of her culturally and politically alienated identity as is the bloody paper found on her corpse. It seems to label her, summing up her being in a typewritten "Minnie" in the same way that the slogan provided a neat but useless summary divorced from but also creating reality. And, as with all of the other various assertions of identity in the text, this one is not authored by her but by another. Davoren is the source and author of Minnie, the one who lies dead in the street. One of his only acts of creation is simultaneously an act of destruction.
It seems appropriate to close by noting another, larger act of creation. Victor Cheng points out that Ireland itself is a linguistic creation: "The terms ‘Irish' and ‘Ireland' as national signifiers are purely retrospective constructs imposed upon an earlier...history by ‘imagining' for the island a historically-continuous community with a homogenous national character, whereas such a sovereign community has never existed in history" (216). The Shadow of a Gunman engages with cultural spaces involved in such constructions of national identity. In doing so, it raises the "problem of representation...as a crucial element in the intersecting matrices of politics, aesthetics and historiography" (Lloyd 128). Within the play, language is central to the creation and dissemination of representations. Therefore, access to a dominant discourse automatically confers power, and the lack of the same renders one a subject to be reconstituted at will by those in control of the language. Each and every resident of the tenement in The Shadow of a Gunman is a victim, to various degrees, of language in this sense. Their collective experiences all point towards the need for a language, and hence identity and power, of their own. The text offers a useful instance of the problematic interaction between the binary model created by colonialist projections of otherness and the cultural nationalism that seeks to contest them, an interaction in which O'Casey's characters ultimately remain ensnared.
Notes
Varadharajan 113-136 offers a useful critique of the positions of postcolonial subject and critic in Said’s work. |
|
See, for example, Kearney, Glamour, 57-59, on the lower class transmission of Nationalist ideology through story, ballad, and song. |
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