However,
this unification brought with it the dependency of Ireland,
and along with that the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, for the
British government. It is therefore not merely coincidental
that elements in the works that are dubbed Spanish and within
the Spanish tradition are adapted to reflect on Anglo-Irish
and Irish issues at large.
In
approaching this minor discourse, some distinctive paradigms
and preconceptions are evident. Firstly, any student or
researcher should delineate the main controversies that the
terms 'Anglo-Irish' and 'Irish' entail, especially in the
field of literary criticism and literature, which is of great
importance to our approach.
The term Anglo-Irish presents specific connotations with
regard to key issues, such as race, place, religion and
polity. These have also conditioned the character of Irish
literature over time. In this light, the appropriateness of
the term Anglo-Irish for a greater part of the bulk of writing
proposed here is adequate. Secondly, any paradigmatic
classification of the period proposed for study should take
into account issues such as colonialism, patriotism and
nationalism, which informed the Irish case at the time. In the
intersection of these three paradigms we would also advance
three main aspects - place, religion and characterisation -
which are seminal in the representation of Spain and Spanish
references within the Irish literary discourse.
In what
could be termed the 'politics of place' in those writings for
which the Spanish locale is significant for the development of
the work, some aspects are worth considering. The settings of
the plays and poems of this introductory approach seek a place
outside physical Ireland and have recourse to cities of
importance in Spain. Indeed, there are references to cities
such as Madrid, Salamanca, as places of learning and faith
with closer links to the Irish religious diaspora at the turn
of the fifteenth century, Barcelona, Granada, Burgos,
Saragossa and Seville. We have also found interesting
references to the image of Oriental Spain - which coincides
with a general current of Irish orientalism prevalent during
that period [5] - and the accompanying estrangement of land
and religion. Of interest also are the allusions to the issue
of imperial locality through the approach to Spanish colonial
territories and a final consideration of the differentiation
between land, territory and soil as national entities. The
authors chose these particular settings with an underlying
purpose: the exposition of their approach to Ireland and even
Britain within the contemporary social and political context
in Europe. It should be remembered that most writers never
visited Spain. What they knew about Spain was largely from
accounts by former travellers and periodical publications.
Much first-hand information was gleaned from soldiers or men
of importance in the Dublin Pale or at the British Court. This
latter issue has not been researched sufficiently and a
thorough analysis of these varied sources is still pending.
Another
paradigmatic section could be termed the 'politics of
religion'. As we have stated above, religion was part and
parcel of the Anglo-Irish and Irish discourses at the time and
the representation of religion through Spanish references
merits investigation. Many of these works make closer
reference to the duality of Spanish religious history
epitomised in conflicts between two creeds, mainly the Moorish
and Christian religions. This representation, in turn,
contextualises many of the features that also characterised
the Irish religious conflict between Protestantism and
Catholicism during the period. For a better understanding of
the development of the issue of religion as it is depicted in
these works, three distinct time periods should be specified:
the period before the Act of Union in 1800, that between the
Union and Catholic Emancipation in 1829, in which we have
located most Anglo-Irish and Irish writings on the politics of
religion, and the period from Catholic Emancipation to 1850.
Thirdly,
the central focus of the analysis is that of the 'politics of
characterisation'. Indeed, the Spanish representations
constructed by Anglo-Irish and Irish writers reflect the
contemporary preoccupation with issues such as the character
of the nation, at a time when national identities were being
re-addressed. Furthermore, the variety of Spanish characters
provided these authors with a continuous history and tradition
that helped in the 'invention' of their own narrative in
Ireland. Any approach to the use of characterisation of the
period under study should consider aspects like the study of
colonial Ireland through the approach to the Spanish
conquistador Pizarro, the substantiation of the unionist
discourse through recurring references to the Anglo-Irish Duke
of Wellington in the Peninsular War, an overview of the
romantic nationalist novel, characters in translation by James
Clarence Mangan, and historical and legendary Spanish
characters, such as the Cid, King Pelagio and Don Roderick,
among many others. The representation of the Spanish hero is
evident, as a hero who withstands different conflicts with
Moors, French and even amongst Spaniards themselves in an
idealised glorification of the concept of race and national
character.
In The
Ballad Poetry of Ireland (1845) Charles Gavan Duffy refers
to Spain and the historical character of the Cid as a beacon
for the recovery of ancient ballads and heroes of the Gaelic
past. He states that 'in Arragon and Castile the chronicles of
the Cid, and the ballads of their long and heroic struggles
against the Moor, still feed that noble pride of race which
lifts the Spanish people above the meaner vices, and makes
them in spirit and conduct a nation of gentlemen.'(Duffy 1845:
37) Attention should also be paid to the study of stock
characterisation, which somehow finds inspiration in the
Spanish picaresque tradition, particularly in plays, short
comedies and sketches, followed by an introduction to the
presence of female characters and their connections with Spain
in Irish literature between 1789 and 1850.
In sum,
the object of any approach to this period and its works should
be the examination of history, literature, textuality and
ideology as the main tenets in the constitution of the
Anglo-Irish and Irish socio-historical subjectivities at the
turn of the eighteenth century with the reference to Spain,
the 'anecdote' in Irish literary discourse between 1789 and
1850. To take historical events and record them is an exercise
in ideological inscription. All these events are ultimately
transformed into history and canonised when they are inscribed
in the narrative. Catherine Gallagher provides a definition in
which our purpose of a collective approach through contextual
and textual practices is best described:
…it [new
historicism] entails reading literary and nonliterary texts as
constituents of historical discourses that are both inside and
outside of texts and that its practitioners generally posit no
fixed hierarchy of cause and effect as they trace the
connections among texts, discourses, power, and the
constitution of subjectivity (Gallagher 1989: 37).
In the Ireland, or rather
Anglo-Ireland, between 1789 and 1850, state power, be it from
London or the Pale in Dublin, extensively merged with cultural
forms in an attempt to impose a sense of tradition and
identity, so as to furnish the Anglo-Irish discourse and
assert the Anglo-Irish position of influence at the time. We
have found that many of our writers' works with Spanish
representations were produced with clear propagandistic
purposes, mixing or 'fashioning' to use Greenblatt's
terminology, literary aesthetics with effective 'material
practices'.
Most of the Irish writings
proposed in this brief approach had as their aim the re-creation
and re-enactment of the historical, social and,
principally, political contests of the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish predicament. It is
therefore not a coincidence that the depiction and analysis of
historical and cultural stages such as the Volunteer movement
of 1798, the development of events on the European continent,
especially in Spain, and the later Union between Ireland and
Great Britain in 1800, with the attendant self-extinction of
the Anglo-Irish parliament, were relegated to 'silence' in the
formation of the Irish literary canon, because they were
regarded as instances of the Ascendancy and as such 'too
English' in their postulates. This brief approach seeks to
support and assist in the analysis of late eighteenth and
early nineteenth century Irish literature, so as to supply a
'small grain' for the discontinuous subject of the Irish
literary tradition.
Any approach to the minor representation of Spain in Irish
literature between 1789 and 1850 should be concerned with the
study of the nature of the re-inscription of literature
in history, in this case Irish history, and the consequent
formation of the Irish canon of literature. In Ireland the
production of a so called 'national' literature in English
sprang from a series of direct historical events which were
highly charged with ideology and power, and as Said proclaimed
'these realities [power and ideology] are what should be taken
into account by criticism and the critical consciousness';
mainly because these are the realities 'that make texts
possible'
(Said 1983: 5). |