LITERATURE: Irish Literature a ‘Model for Third World Authors’

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Sarah O'Hara

DUBLIN, Feb 27 1996 (IPS) - “Ireland is a first-world country but with a third-world memory,” says Declan Kiberd, a literary critic and one of Ireland’s foremost intellectuals.

In his book ‘Inventing Ireland’, Kiberd links the fact that Ireland was a colony of Britain for centuries with the tremendous achievements of writers such as James Joyce, William Butler Yeats and Oscar Wilde. And, he argues, because of this colonial past, Irish literature had a large influence on literature in Latin America, India and Africa.

Ireland was Britain’s oldest colony. The Republic of Ireland gained its independence in the early 1920s, leaving the north- eastern part of the island, now known as Northern Ireland, under British rule.

Kiberd, who lectures in Anglo-Irish literature at University College Dublin, says: “We were one of the first English-speaking peoples to decolonise — our minds as well as our territories. Irish writers like Yeats and Wilde had a huge exemplary value for Indians and Africans.”

He traces the magic realism in Latin American literature back to Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’, which mingles the mythical with the realist form of narrative.

Another writer, Wilde, fostered the notion of androgyny in plays such as ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’, creating characters who were ‘manly women’ and ‘womanly men’. Wilde rejected the simple either/or categories of the rationalism which flourished in the era of 19th-century imperialism, the idea of man or woman, black or white, argues Kiberd.

The playwright’s work had an enormous influence on the writings of Ashis Nandy in India, and on the politics of Mahatma Gandhi, Kiberd says. “Gandhi, like Wilde, rejected the imperialist categories of thought; and he evolved an alternative code and subversively fed that back to the imperialist centre.”

“In other words, he refused to fight British militarism with Indian militarism: he devised an alternative set of criteria to which British militarism was found wanting.”

Yeats, one of Europe’s greatest poets, provided a reading of Shakespeare, which rescued his works from the dead hand of 19th- century English critics, for example, in the treatment of characters in the play, ‘Richard II’.

“The imperialists of the 19th century had schooled themselves to admire the usurper Bolingbrooke for his efficiency and to deride someone like Richard for his complexity. Yeats restored a set of meanings to the play which it originally had lost in the years of imperial criticism.” (MORE)

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