Childhood is a crucial stage of Irish life. It is the time in which essentials of Irish experience are nurtured, which will be developed later in abroader scope. Childhood is depicted as a universally important theme in all Irish writing, regardless of its artistic orientation towards traditional or countertraditional. In traditional writing, childhood is depicted in the interactions between people and society. Protagonists are glimpsed actively living in realistic surroundings, among lively people. On the other hand, in counter-traditional writing, which is an artistically created universe, reality is replaced by fictiveness. Over an author’s body of work there may be fixity and recurrence in protagonists and themes, to elucidate life’s structure in a whole artistic perspective. Regardlessof orientation, Irish writing invariably has influential roots in childhood, because childhood is where Irishness gains its essential foothold. This paper spotlights and elucidates childhood, investigating how it works as an influential element in forming protagonists in linkage with later life

Ito, Noriko

English

Cadernos Espinosanos (E-Journal)

89Childhoods in Irish WritingNoriko ItoAbstract: Childhood is a crucial stage of Irish life. It is the time in whichessentials of Irish experience are nurtured, which will be developed later in abroader scope. Childhood is depicted as a universally important theme in allIrish writing, regardless of its artistic orientation towards traditional or counter-traditional. In traditional writing, childhood is depicted in the interactionsbetween people and society. Protagonists are glimpsed actively living in realisticsurroundings, among lively people. On the other hand, in counter-traditionalwriting, which is an artistically created universe, reality is replaced by fictiveness.Over an author’s body of work there may be fixity and recurrence in protagonistsand themes, to elucidate life’s structure in a whole artistic perspective. Regardlessof orientation, Irish writing invariably has influential roots in childhood, becausechildhood is where Irishness gains its essential foothold. This paper spotlightsand elucidates childhood, investigating how it works as an influential elementin forming protagonists in linkage with later life.I.Irish writing is characterized by what is called Irishness, components of whichinclude nationalism, Catholicism, and the love of place. Actually nowadays Irishnesshas difficulty in being maintained. However, it is still a substantial issue when we readIrish literature. In all fields everything changes over time, and must be reconsidered ina new light. Such is the case with Irishness also. Let’s take childhood as an example.Childhood is a popular topic in Irish writing, which has taken it as a time in whichspecifically Irish experience takes place, which may later be supplemented or supplantedby wider experience. In traditional writing, childhood is represented through activeinteractions between people and society, while in counter-traditional writing it isinterpreted through a stylized aestheticism. Consequently, there is a marked differencein expression between these two ways.The past is remembered, and as it is replayed, it is transformed. Also memory isnot continuous or coherent but rather discontinuous and erratic. When childhood isrecalled, that stage of life is made independent and arbitrarily spotlighted. Many phases,90some of which are difficult to get through or progress from. However, childhood ischaracterized by a certain number of unifying specificities, Irishness, which integratestraditional Irish writing as a corollary. For instance, Colm Tóibín’s protagonists areborn from the Irish climate, as are John McGahern’s and Colum McCann’s. These writersare, in a sense, traditionalists. Irishness, even though it is not so powerful nowadays asin the past, is still influential in their protagonists’ lives.Characteristically, traditional writers depict childhood in the interactions betweenpeople and society while counter-traditional writers like John Banville and Ann Enrightdo not. It is natural that in the enclosed universe of counter-traditionalists’ fiction, thereis little or no interaction between protagonists and society. Traditionally, Irish childhoodplays a significant role, moulding the lives of protagonists. It often happens that theyhave an unhappy childhood. “Had I had a happy childhood? No” (Éilís Ní Dhuibhne93). The circumstances they are in are oppressive and restrictive. The protagonists thinkthat their past, including childhood, is problematic, influenced by social and familialconditions. Restrictiveness is mentioned in the experience of Eamon Redmond:Eamon went out to play, careful not to sit on the cold cement in case he got acold, and not to get into fights. He was allowed to bring other boys into thehouse, but they had to play quietly. Often, when they left to go home and havetheir tea, he relieved. He had the house to himself again and could sit oppositehis father and work at his lessons.(Tóibín 1992. 14-15)Protagonists are also characterized by their being outsider. Eamon found himselfestranged from his cousins, Helen (Colm Tóibín’s The Blackwater Lightship3) was notlike an ordinary girl, Brian Tierney (Brian Moore’s An Answer from Limbo) was a blacksheep of his family, and so on. Signs of later predicament are already apparent in theirchildhood. Also with Brian Moore himself, childhood determined his later life. Moorelived in different places through his life. As a writer, he depicted the places he livedlater in contrast with the place of his childhood, Northern Ireland. The Northern Irelandsituation serves as a background in depicting Sheila Redden (Brian Moore’s The Doctor’sWife) at a turning point of her life. Sheila runs away from home. Away from the souredmemory of childhood, Brian Tierney goes to America.The protagonists search for their identity, which is closely tied to Irish history.They may have ambiguous feelings about history and their birth. A Second Life byDermot Bolger and Songdogs by Colum McCann are works in which writers make birththe central theme. Their dubious birth is the dubious history of Ireland, in which colonizersand colonized coexist and their cultures mix. In McCann’s short story, “Fishing in theSloe Black River,” the complexities and their effects on the Irish are crystalizedsymbolically. Recreating a new idea from the old material of Irishness, the story becomesa parable. Childhood, which is generated happily or unhappily from indigenous climateas the protagonists grow, is followed by their turbulent adolescence. The present is91begotten from and is inseparably twined with past. Both stages of life must go alongwith and be affected by, time. However, some protagonists defy against this truth andtry to preserve the past in eternal present. The mixture of the two tenses and freezingtime are a usual method of novels. This exemplified in the protagonist The Sea, is TheSea  by Iris Murdoch of The Sea. The protagonist, Charles Arrowby, tries to carry on hisideal of his love of Hartley. Due to the unnaturalness of his ideal, the story turns out afrustration.In ordinary human affairs humble common sense comes to one’s aid. For mostpeople common sense is moral sense. But you seem to have deliberately excludedthis modest source of light. Ask yourself, what really happened between whomall those years ago? You’ve made it into a story, and stories are false.’ (At this point Titus, who could bear it no longer, surreptitiously seized a pieceof ham and some bread.)‘And you are using this thing from the far past as a guide to important andirrevocable moves which you propose to make in the future.’ You are making adangerous induction, and induction is shaky at the best of times, consider Russell’schicken – (355)Things in childhood are involved in things happening now. Time sequence is oftenignored in novels. The tendency is prominent in Irish literary writing.Some of the protagonists want to estrange themselves from the native country.They make exiles of themselves. Emigration is a method by which they can get throughlife. A significant turning point, emigration sometimes seems to solve the problems.However, it is difficult to say that it is a really happy solution. Many do not emigrate butstay in Ireland. Colm Tóibín’s protagonists are products of the time and the place. In hisIrish-based novels, Tóibín’s protagonists reveal how the Irish lived in Ireland from thenineteenth century to the late twentieth century. They show themselves to be born fromthe time. McGahern represents the time with superb precision and relevancy. He iscalled a regionalist. McGahern, Tóibín, and McCann write of returning natives afterestrangement from their country. Katherine Proctor of Tóibín’s The South, after a longexile in Spain, returns to Ireland. She did not have a happy childhood. She was anAnglo-Irish descendant. One memory which is reverberated is the day when she sufferedpersecution when her family was burned out of their house:An image came to her constantly of a child running for help, running for her life,being run through with bullets, while the thunderous sound of a fire roared inthe background’ (85).After a long time experiencing upheavals in Spain, she returned to Ireland. Shefinds herself in a country unknown to her and tries to readjust herself to it. Time changes92everything, and protagonists must remould themselves. They reconcile with the pastand their childhood is integrated into the whole scale of their life.IIBanville’s writing is free of all specificities of Irishness and can be read as anart born anywhere on the earth. His transcendental writing embodies what Bhabha (1994)mentions about the contemporary tendency of literature:What is theoretically innovative, and politically crucial, is the need to thinkbeyond narratives of originary and initial subjectivities and to focus on thosemoments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences.These ‘in-between’ spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies ofselfhood – singular or communal – that initiate new signs of identity, andinnovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the ideaof society itself.The themes and motifs Banville extracts from Irish experiences are radically innovatedthrough experimental usage of words. From the start, Banville is detached from Irishness.Even house or family, which is essential to Irish literature, is totally differentiated from ausual Irish one. The house he depicts is inhabited by ghosts. House is usually full ofghosts in the sense that memories of the past are there. However, Banville’s ghosts arerather aesthetic, waiting to be made into art. They are analyzed and are adjusted to thewriter’s plan as any other material of his is. Counter-traditional writing, in which objectsare entirely controlled by the writer, is unfamiliar to Irish writing. McGahern or Tóibínwould not have allowed intellectual musings to occupy such a vast space. Nor would anyother traditional writer. Banville’s narrator plays Janus roles. He is the self, as both subjectand object, who writes and is written about. The book is written by him, who is seenwriting. When he says that he is not here and may be somewhere else, he expresses thecomplex situation of the artist. Ironically the narrator has not established the self, who is“a bag of slack flesh in a world drained of essence”. (Banville 1991. 99). The undefinedself cannot be anything especially Irish. Childhood, which is the time he faces, vacillatingbetween uncertain past and future, is the time which is bereft of any Irish specificities. Thedescription of the self or time shows that Banville’s writing is not Irish specificity butgeneralized ideas.One protagonist of Banville’s books says that childhood is entirely fictional, a timeof “somehow indestructible treasures nestling at the heart of the world.” (Banville 1997.31). To the protagonist, who so often finds himself returning to childhood, the past seemsalways present, where memory and imagination merge and “confused soft noises mingle inthe air…it will remind you of somewhere else, a meadow, with poppies, beside a dustyroad.” (Banville 2000. 137). The meadow is any meadow and poppies are any poppies in the93world. These things are seen by the self. Childhood is recollected through senses: “I amalways strangely moved by the smell of exhaust fumes on the morning air. ..A swagger stick:Why is it, I wonder, that the sea smells of tar? …Life is full of mysteries” (Banville 2000.13). As childhood is described sensuously, so the body of the protagonist is also perceivedneutrally: “this strange, soft, breathing body in which my spinning consciousness was darklytrapped”  (Banville 1998. 34). Childhood in Banville’s novels is a nucleus which does notchange in ever expanding stylistic structure of ever increasing verbal experiment. It is on itsown without being interacted with from outside. On the other hand, childhood in traditionalwriting is bred and is growing through the interactions with the surroundings. In both waysof depicting childhood, it childhood is the watershed where harmony is broken and isinseparably combined with the sense of loss. It is gone forever and we hear Helen’s lament:“My childhood is gone forever” (Tóibín 1999. 73). She knew her father died before hergrandmother came to tell it to her. In her bed, she felt that her childhood was over.The childhood depicted by traditionalists is wider scoped in the interactions betweenhumans and society than that depicted by counter- traditionalists. A ten-year-old child’sexperiences cannot help piloting his later life. Eamon Redmond, Tóibín’s (1992) protagonist,stayed with his relatives during the civil war. In the countryside where he lived, he experiencedsex for the first time. After the deed, he was attacked by a sense of guilt, and when he cameback to Enniscorthy, he soon went to the church to confess. Readjusting and conforminghimself to social conventions, he reconstructed his life, to his relief. Childhood intraditionalists’ writing is temporal and spatial, closely related with the time when and theplace where it is written. McGahern’s protagonists were all born in the early twentieth centurywhen Irish tradition was still solid enough, although modernization was already incipient.The protagonist of The Dark (1965) was rigorously punished for answering back to hisfather. His course of life seemed to be fixed when he got a scholarship and studied at auniversity. However, he did not continue with the clerical profession, but instead, he made apilgrimage in which he might find a new direction. At the end of the book, which is open-ended, his new direction is just a suggestion. His childhood, inseparable from Irish climate,is unhappy, but is accepted by him, as is seen in the reconciliatory ending of the book. InMcGahern’s last book, That They May Face the Rising Sun, (2001) he has finally arrived atan apparently more settled stage, as we find direct references to childhood absent. Instead heconcentrates on the opposite extremity of life, depicting an idyllic rural existence in whichpaganism is not far beneath the surface. In fact, this may shadow his memories of his ownearliest existence, but such is not referred to explicitly.IIIThe love of place is another constituent of Irishness. In traditional writing, peopleare depicted as being grounded in areas or places. Childhood memory is inseparablefrom places, real and imaginary. Places in books are real and at the same time unreal,94because they are recreated from reality. However, there is a difference between places,as depicted by traditionalists and counter-traditionalists. In traditional writing, placeand time are ruled by reality while with counter-traditionalists, place and time are justsingle dimensions, not an interactive area. With them, everything is renovated in spaceimagery. Body is a space, which is analyzed as an instrument and is spatially expanded.Like cubist painting, the body is deconstructed and seen from various angles. A fantasticusage of space carries us away into another dimension, like the wardrobe of C.S.Lewis’Narnia. With Banville, the landing at the top of the stairs is frequently the entrance tochildhood, to another fictional world, and there fabulous play of words and ideas isglimpsed. Windows, rooms, garden as well as landing, constitute space that frames anddefines a painting in words.In Moore’s case, childhood, as Sampson (1999) suggests, was a frustrating timeto him. At home he was reigned over by his father and could not conform to social andfamilial conventions, which gave him the sense of guilt, and his desire to leave hiscountry was nurtured. At school and at home he found himself as outsider. One day hewas badly bullied at school, because he said he would become a writer.You may remember how a much larger audience assembled as I was dragged tothe school drinking fountain, ducked under it and held until water ran down myspine, dripped into my trousers trickled down my skinny legs to fill my socksand shoes. You may remember that, after my duckling, I was forced to read myessay once more. Your motives were just, I suppose. You wanted to knock thepretensions from under me, to teach me the lesson I have been too long in learning.But I learned nothing. Soaking wet, my clothes torn, I read my essay, but withpride now, screaming out that I would do everything I had promised in it. Andall of you, watching my pale face and trembling shoulders, hearing the truefanatic in my thin defiant scream, all of you turned away, uneasy of me. Becauseconviction – even a wrong conviction – makes the rest of us uneasy. For the firsttime in my life I had won. My own unsurety died and for the remainder of myyears at school I grew in the wind of your disapproval. Your doubts that daymade me a victim – the victim I still remain – of my own uncertain boast.For I did not become great. I had no vocation for greatness. (32)The incident proved traumatic through his life, and in his book he refers to it again andagain. Childhood followed by adolescence left him in further frustration, which isrepresented in Moore’s An Answer from Limbo. Emigrating to America, the protagonistswears to become a writer. Through hard American life, his bitter childhood memory isincessantly remembered, and eventually leads him to cruelly treat his mother, who cameto live with him. The consistency with which he tried to adjust himself to his dreamsince his childhood is not fulfilled.95IV Conclusion Childhood is an especially important topic for contemporary Irish writers.traditional as well as counter-traditional writers make use of the topic. In a transitionaltime like now, it is important for writers to know where they are situated. Whether theyemigrate or stay at home, they must return to childhood to know what made the self.Childhood is the starting point, in which the self is formed. Whether it is formed in theinteractions with the outside world, or is formed within the fiction, depends upon thecharacter and situation of the writer, who makes the decision. This investigation hasattempted to summarize an aspect of Irish writing during the past decades, indicatingwhere writers are situated. A new contemporary- age sensibility is represented by counter-traditionalists, while Irish sensibility is solidly maintained with refreshing new anglesby traditionalists. In both cases, Irish childhood has equipped, and will equip, them withample influential and productive resources.Works CitedÉilís Ní Dhuibhne, The Bray House. Dublin: Attic Press, 1990.Colm Tóibín, The Heather Blazing. London: Picador, 1992.____. The Blackwater Lightship. London: Picador, 1999.Brian Moore, An Answer from Limbo. London: Picador, 1962.____.  The Doctor’s Wife. Fort Landerlae: Flamingo, 1976.Dermot Bolger,  A Second Life. New York: Viking, 1994.Colum McCann, Songdogs. London: Picador, 1996.____.  Fishing the Sloe-Black River. London: Phoenix, 1995.Iris Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea. London: Vintage Classics, 1999.Colm Tóibín, The South. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1990.Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 1994. Available at http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/bhabha/location1.html.John Banville, Kepler. London: Minerva, 1991.____.  The Untouchable. London: Picador, 1997.____.  Eclipse, Picador, 2000.____.  Birchwood, Picador, 1998. 34. John McGahern, The Dark, Faber and Faber, 1965.____.  That They May Face the Rising Sun. London: Faber and Faber, 2001.C. S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. London: GeoffreyBles, 1950.Denis Sampson, Brian Moore : the Chameleon Novelist. London: Doubleday, 1999.

Childhoods in Irish Writing

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Childhoods in Irish Writing

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