{"id":249,"date":"2016-03-18T08:53:50","date_gmt":"2016-03-18T08:53:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/irishhistoriansinbritain.org\/?p=249"},"modified":"2020-10-11T14:19:17","modified_gmt":"2020-10-11T14:19:17","slug":"revising-the-rising-revised","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/irishhistorians.egino.opalstacked.com\/?p=249","title":{"rendered":"Revising the Rising Revised"},"content":{"rendered":"
By\u00a0Arthur Aughey<\/span><\/strong><\/h5>\n

\"Dame-Murdoch\"<\/p>\n

I was struck by a comment of Ruth Dudley Edwards\u2019 (2015) on public interest in the anniversary of the 1916 rebellion. \u2018All Ireland seems to be hosting history fight clubs these days\u2019. Headline exaggeration apart, her point is well-made. Those who have observed the way in which 1916 is presently being commemorated in the Republic of Ireland would likely agree with Fintan O\u2019Toole\u2019s (2016) judgement that, officially at least, \u2018the commemorations of the Rising have been doing a pretty good job of restoring more complex realities, treating the rebels as neither saints nor terrorists but real political actors in a wider European conflict\u2026The context of the first world war, the central role of women and Dublin\u2019s horrendous poverty are all being written back into the story\u2019. One might propose an initial, if tentative, comparative history of 1916 commemorations.<\/p>\n

In 1966, the 50th<\/sup> anniversary, the events of 1916 were commemorated in a historical vacuum, as if not only the Proclamation of the Republic came fully formed from the heads of what Dudley Edwards calls \u2018the seven\u2019 but also all that went before and all that came after were defined by the political incarnation of that moment. In 1991, the 75th<\/sup> anniversary, as I claimed in an essay at the time (1991), what was living in the tradition of 1916 in the Republic \u2013 the functioning of stable statehood \u2013 was dead in Northern Ireland and that what was dead in that tradition in the Republic \u2013 the violent propaganda of the deed \u2013 was very much alive in Northern Ireland. The close ideological relationship between the two, if not publicly acknowledged, meant in practice that there was a muted official response to commemoration while the IRA\u2019s campaign continued, at that time seemingly without any end in prospect. In 2016, now that the Northern Troubles no longer figure prominently, that more complex and open mode (I am reluctant to say \u2018inclusive\u2019) to which both Dudley Edwards and O\u2019Toole refer has become possible. \u2018Yet\u2019, as O\u2019Toole concedes, \u2018 the struggle has always been to decide whether it is history or current affairs, something that has happened or a harbinger of something yet to happen, done and dusted or unfinished business\u2019. To say that it is both history and current affairs raises questions about the appropriate distinctions, especially this one: when we talk of the past is this the same thing as history? Or, to put that another way, what is history\u2019s relationship with the past? I want to discuss this as a tale of two books.<\/p>\n

The first is a novel. Recently our university library has been \u2018de-cataloguing\u2019. I don\u2019t know if that is the correct bibliographical term and in popular usage the term would probably be \u2018dumping\u2019 \u2013 not, to be fair to Ulster, in the literal sense of consigning to the rubbish heap but in the financial sense of releasing onto the market poorly performing stock. Very generously, staff were given the opportunity to cast an eye over these old books, perhaps to redeem them and to give them a new home. Browsing the trollies of battered fiction ranked alphabetically from A to Z, I arrived at \u2018M\u2019. On this trolley there was a fair number of Iris Murdoch novels – I have to admit to never having read an \u2018Iris Murdoch\u2019 all the way through so I can understand why students avoided taking those novels out on loan. I thought that I was familiar with all her titles but was surprised by one of the stock. I found one that I had not heard of before which, unexpectedly and serendipitously, dealt with the 1916 Irish rebellion. That book, The Red and the Green<\/em> (1965) (I suppose one can call it a historical novel), turned out to be the first \u2018Murdoch\u2019 I did manage to read to the end \u2013 not because I found it a compelling story (which I didn\u2019t) but because there were striking passages every now and again which encouraged me to keep reading.<\/p>\n

In one of those strange coincidences of reading and life, when I had completed the novel I discovered that this year\u2019s March edition of the Dublin Review of Books<\/em> included an interesting article on The Red and the Green<\/em> by Pauline Hall as part of the DRB<\/em>\u2019s literary reflection on the Rebellion\u2019s centenary. The article served only to show that my ignorance of the book had nothing to do with its<\/em> history but merely with a gap in my own <\/em>reading history. It is The Red and the Green<\/em> (not, as one might have expected, The Orange and the Green<\/em>) because Murdoch \u2018links the apparently local romantic movement for Irish independence with international socialist struggles\u2019. Indeed, the book ends with an Epilogue set in 1938 in which Dublin 1916 is discussed with reference to the Spanish Civil War. Hall notes the significance of the novel\u2019s date of publication. In 1965 there was a \u2018lull\u2019 in Irish history which she identifies as \u2018just short of fifty years after the Easter Rising, on which the action of the novel converges, and four years before the outbreak of the Troubles in Northern Ireland\u2019. For those old enough to remember that year, this comment has some force (and for some the years of the middle sixties remain either a time of lost innocence or a time of missed opportunity). This is far from being yet another example the truth that old men (and women) forget. Historians have made similar observations without, of course, claiming that there was<\/em> any golden age. For example, J.C. Beckett proposed in his celebrated The Making of Modern Ireland<\/em>, first published in 1966, that the great achievement of the Government of Ireland Act had been to secure stability in Ireland which it had not experienced for 300 years. And we know what came shortly afterwards, events influenced by ideological currents flowing from the anniversaries of both the Battle of the Somme and the Easter Rebellion. Hugh Kearney has also written that in that \u2018lull\u2019 people did expect old antagonisms to be moving towards resolution. The violence of the next thirty years ‘was a future quite unforeseen in the 1960s’. And Marc Mulholland, working on the premiership of Terence O’Neill, wrote of his sense of shock when surfacing from his immersion in the documents of the period at the Public Records Office in South Belfast he considered \u2018the disaster that overtook Northern Ireland in the years following’. Not only did these years take a shape that seemed inconceivable in the period that preceded it but also the violence appeared incommensurate with what was ‘the Northern Ireland Question’ of its day. That historical<\/em> note of contingency, unpredictability and disordering of expectations is useful when thinking about the past<\/em> of 1916.<\/p>\n

Hall remarks that one of the novel\u2019s characters makes the surprising announcement that Ireland \u2018doesn\u2019t have any history to speak of\u2019. Murdoch, she thinks, would have been \u2018well aware of the irony of this observation\u2019. She may well have been; though there are two contrasts made in the novel which deserve closer attention and which may make that announcement less contextually surprising. For the character who announces thus also asks with some exasperation (40): \u2018Why do people in Ireland always talk about history<\/em>?\u2019 It is a question prompted by a national contrast: \u2018English people don\u2019t talk about English history all the time\u2019. To which her interlocutor responds: \u2018They don\u2019t have to ask the question, What went wrong?\u2019 and the reason for the difference is simple: \u2018For them nothing went wrong\u2019. That contrast is one of the familiar tropes of popular Irish thinking, a variation on that old familiar saw of Anglo-Irish misunderstanding: that the Irish always remember their history while the English always forget theirs. In 1916, then, the English forgot about \u2018the dead generations\u2019 from which Ireland \u2018receives her old tradition of nationhood\u2019. But the Irish remembered and the rebels were proved right that Ireland\u2019s \u2018children\u2019 would heed the call to rally \u2018to her flag\u2019. For the first time, history would go \u2018wrong\u2019 for the English and go \u2018right\u2019 for the Irish. Ireland\u2019s destiny, immanent in all its history, was fulfilled as a consequence. Whatever the truth of that popular proposition about the Irish and their history (and I think there\u2019s none) it remains a powerful current in nationalist self-understanding. As the key rebel character in the novel puts it succinctly: \u2018His parents had had little Irish patriotism and this lack was for him a part of their utter commonplaceness. His own recognition of himself as far from commonplace came with his early sense of his Irish destiny, his sense of belonging not to himself but to some design of history\u2019. That design required \u2018a pure Ireland of the mind, to be relentlessly served by a naked sense of justice and a naked self-assertion\u2019. In this historical drama there were only two characters, \u2018Ireland and himself\u2019. There is a chilling and disturbing quality to that patriotism, a terrible beauty indeed. However, it is the second of the novel\u2019s contrast which is more interesting.<\/p>\n

Towards the end of the Epilogue, the Irish mother attempts to keep the peace during yet another argument between her romantic son who is considering, on the basis of the family\u2019s legendary association with 1916, volunteering to fight in the Spanish Civil War and her pragmatic, sceptical English husband who dismisses the former as nonsense and the latter as one group of barbarians fighting against another. She has experience of pouring oil on troubled waters and in this case recalls the wisdom of her father who was opposed to any kind of extremism. The contrast is made thus: \u2018He said the Irish talked nothing but history, but had no historical sense at all\u2019. Is that not yet another ironic observation, a novelist\u2019s delight in the paradoxical and which is ultimately meaningless? I think not and would argue that it goes to the heart of those questions which continue to occupy academics (and not just academics) today \u2013 questions of \u2018memory\u2019, of \u2018commemoration\u2019 and, in Northern Ireland particularly, of \u2018dealing with the past\u2019.<\/p>\n

The second book is an intellectual\u2019s notebook. At the same time as I was reading The Red and the Green <\/em>I was also working my way through Michael Oakeshott\u2019s (2014) recently published Notebooks, 1922-86<\/em> (and perhaps there is more than a casual link here because Oakeshott and Murdoch were at one time lovers). Here was another serendipitous moment. One of the great themes of Oakeshott\u2019s thought is the problem of historical understanding, what distinguishes it and what compromises it as a \u2018mode of experience\u2019. The Notebooks<\/em> provide a remarkable insight into how fragments of ideas and immediate reflections are later worked up into influential philosophical texts and there is evidence of Oakeshott\u2019s consistent wrestling with the idea of history. (It is worth a fleeting speculation to consider whether he and Murdoch shared their thoughts about history, for the distinction between talking about \u2018history\u2019 and the \u2018historical sense\u2019 is one which is central to Oakeshott\u2019s own view).<\/p>\n

Thus, in an extended note added in 1958, Oakeshott reflected on the \u2018legendary & the historical\u2019 and headed his remarks with the title: \u2018Their different structure.\u2019 In the former, he wrote, all that is \u2018casual, secondary, unresolved, truncated, obscure oruncertain is absent\u2019. Agency reveals only a few simple motives according to a unity of feeling. There is pattern and types and, ultimately, everything is \u2018exact & nothing is confused\u2019. By contrast, the latter is \u2018confusion, contradiction, individuality, lack of arrangement, uncertainty, events which lead nowhere & complicated motives & circumstances; obscurity, variety \u2013 & yet a kind of intelligibilty\u2019. He concluded this note with his characteristically subtle ambivalence. \u2018To write history is so difficult that most historians are forced to make concessions to the technique of legend\u2019. It is a conclusion repeated in his essay \u2018The Activity of Being an Historian\u2019 (1962) where we find it rephrased thus: \u2018And if in so new and so delicate an enterprise [the historian] finds himself tempted into making concessions to the idiom of legend, that perhaps is less damaging than other divergencies.\u2019 That is why he is convinced that the \u2018past is past only for history; elsewhere it is present\u2019. In other words, though the historical event is gone and is now only accessible (if at all) by disciplined historical research, it continues to have another life \u2018in fable, in gesture, in turns of speech, in habit, and above all in myth\u2019 (2014).<\/p>\n

It is this other life of fable, gesture, turns of speech, habit, and myth to which Murdoch is referring when she wrote of the Irish always talking history and which, in Oakeshott\u2019s more austere moods, is not history at all. Indeed, he likened this engagement with the past to a field in which people exercise their moral and political opinions, like whippets in a meadow on Sunday afternoon. 1916 has (and continues) to reveal energetic whippet exercising, an occasion for indulging in self-pity, self-righteousness and maudlin sentimentality. And to this list we can also add self-justification, as if it were all about us<\/em>. By contrast, the historical sense<\/em> – not <\/em>talking \u2018nothing but history\u2019 – refers the \u2018circumstantial to circumstances \u2013 a whole in which everything is contingent \u2013 even the whole\u2019. Historical sense, then, is concerned with occasions and not causes. For Oakeshott (and I think this is the point Murdoch is also making) much of what passes for \u2018talking nothing but history\u2019 is either celebration of \u2018cause\u2019 or demonstration against it. He was firmly convinced of one thing: \u2018there is absolutely no point in demonstrating against the past\u2019, at least the \u2018historical sense\u2019 as Oakeshott understands it. If one does, it means not engaging with history but with politics. Herbert Butterfield\u2019s famous formulation of the study of the past with one eye upon the present as \u2018 the source of all sins and sophistries in history\u2019 becomes here two eyes on the present with no historical sense whatsoever.<\/p>\n

History, of course, would be meaningless if it had nothing interesting to say to the present and as our present changes so too does our past. It is difficult to keep still the whippets of moralising, difficult to avoid finding lessons, impossible not to \u2018revise\u2019 and, if there is deadliness in \u2018doing\u2019 there is even more deadliness in observing the dead burying their dead, an activity which can only recommend silence. As Oakeshott admitted early in his career there is indeed something decadent, something even depraved, in such a rigorous historical sense, one that would \u2018renounce for the time being everything which can be called good and evil, everything which can be valued or rejected as valueless. And no matter how far we go with it, we shall not easily forget the sweet delight which lies in the empty kisses of abstraction.\u2019 For the historian, those sweet but empty kisses are what everyone else would call life. Perhaps one can put it this way: being able to understand that difference, and knowing that there is a line to cross between the two, distinguishes the historian\u2019s interest in making sense of the past from the propagandist\u2019s interest in making a political point or the active citizen\u2019s concern for the commonweal (Is it possible, as Edna Longley once asked, to make the past serve as a homeopathic dose against violence? Or does celebrating events just keep the pot simmering until needed?)<\/p>\n

I suppose public commemoration can only give people what the people themselves are ready to accept. If we compare where we are now with where we were 50 or even 25 years ago, what the public will expect or accept of commemorations has modified significantly. Perhaps one can argue that in 1966 the commemoration of 1916 involved talking \u2018nothing but history\u2019, a celebration of the republican legend of the Rebellion expressed in \u2018a unity of feeling\u2019. In 2016 the commemoration qualifies that legend with greater historical sense (it hasn\u2019t replaced it), now involving greater contextual complexity, one which acknowledges \u2018complicated motives and circumstances\u2019. Perhaps that tentative, comparative history has some truth in it even though it may not hold true when the 125th<\/sup> anniversary comes around.<\/p>\n

Arthur Aughey is Professor of Politics, Ulster University
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

References<\/strong><\/p>\n

Arthur Aughey, \u2018What is Living and What is Dead in the Ideal of 1916?\u2019, in M\u00e1ir\u00edn N\u00ed Dhonnchadha and Theo Dorgan (eds.), Revising the Rising (Derry, 1991).<\/p>\n

Ruth Dudley-Edwards, \u2018Some awkward questions on the Easter Proclamation\u2019, Irish Independent<\/em> 18\/10\/2015 http:\/\/www.independent.ie\/opinion\/columnists\/ruth-dudley-edwards\/some-awkward-questions-on-the-easter-proclamation-34118484.html<\/a><\/p>\n

Pauline Hall, \u2018A Terrible Thing\u2019 March 2016 http:\/\/www.drb.ie\/essays\/a-terrible-thing<\/a><\/p>\n

Hugh Kearney ‘Visions and Revisions: Views of Irish history’, Irish Review<\/em>, 27, 2001 113-120.<\/p>\n

Marc Mulholland Northern Ireland at the Crossroads. Ulster unionism in the O’Neill years 1960-9<\/em>, Basingstoke 2000<\/p>\n

Iris Murdoch, The Red and the Green<\/em> (London 1965)<\/p>\n

Michael Oakeshott, Notebooks, 1922-86<\/em> (Exeter 2014)<\/p>\n

Michael Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes<\/em> (Cambridge 1990)<\/p>\n

Michael Oakeshott, \u2018The Activity of Being an Historian\u2019 in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays<\/em> (New York, 1962), pp. 137\u201367,<\/p>\n

Fintan O’Toole, \u2018The terrible beauty of the Easter Rising remains alive today\u20191\/2\/2016 http:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/commentisfree\/2016\/feb\/01\/easter-rising-century-ireland-1916<\/a><\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.ippr.org\/juncture\/commemorating-the-rising-history-democracy-and-violence-in-ireland<\/p>\n

Image source:\u00a0http:\/\/img.wikinut.com\/img\/1m2e_bnnwsgqjwvn\/jpeg\/180×300\/Dame-Murdoch.jpeg<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Arthur Aughey I was struck by a comment of Ruth Dudley Edwards\u2019 (2015) on public interest in the anniversary of the 1916 rebellion. \u2018All Ireland seems to be hosting history fight clubs these days\u2019. Headline exaggeration apart, her point is well-made. Those who have observed the way in which 1916 Continue Reading<\/i><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":256,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"templates\/template-full-width.php","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/irishhistorians.egino.opalstacked.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/irishhistorians.egino.opalstacked.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/irishhistorians.egino.opalstacked.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irishhistorians.egino.opalstacked.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irishhistorians.egino.opalstacked.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=249"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/irishhistorians.egino.opalstacked.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":443,"href":"https:\/\/irishhistorians.egino.opalstacked.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249\/revisions\/443"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irishhistorians.egino.opalstacked.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/256"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/irishhistorians.egino.opalstacked.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=249"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irishhistorians.egino.opalstacked.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=249"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irishhistorians.egino.opalstacked.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=249"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}