Comment: On Art and Nationalism

Nations want to be boosted by the arts. They show this by their eagerness to sponsor and to censor. They will both sponsor and censor if you let them. On the other hand, do the arts want anything from a nation that is worth having? And what are the costs of the inspiration the arts do inevitably derive from that source: mythologies, legends, a history of hatreds and loyalties. These things are the artist's stock in trade—to put it coolly, subject matter. Does he owe something to national identity in return? Questions like these were raised by the papers delivered at our conference, and they came back with added force from the screenings and the discussions.

The speakers shared a preoccupation with what has come to be called an imagined community, though this happened in some cases to coincide with an actual community in Ireland. I don't think the word community was worked too hard; and yet the idea of imagined communities, which legitimates so much of the current study of nation and narration, has somehow got into our casual habits of thought. We haven't, in my opinion, paused long enough to ask what we are taking on board. This failure of reflection isn't anyone's fault, but it must be said one gets disappointingly little help from Benedict Anderson's book Imagined Communities, which coined the phrase, and no help at all from the manner of that book's reception by scholars, any pair of whom may appreciate it for opposite reasons.

Anderson allows as possible criteria for an imagined community a shared body of customs, habits, and rituals, a known history of events and heroes (which may shade into legend), language, religion, and boundaries (whether natural or artificially marked). Yet none of these criteria is supposed to be necessary in itself to constitute an imagined community, nor are several of them sufficient in combination. A given plurality of persons may share a single language, a religion, a body of habits and practices and a stock of received memories, yet fail to make the grade as a community, while another lot share a folklore based on a forgery, a religion cooked up in the last generation by a notorious worldling and charlatan, and a dispersed population of belongers who speak a great many dialects, yet by their passion and cohesion they may succeed in embodying an imagined community as real as any.

"Faith in a fact can help create the fact," said William James; and one effect of Anderson's suggestion that all communities are mental constructs has been to ratify or, anyway, upgrade the claim of tribes or confederacies pressing for national recognition, no matter how slender their foundation in history and circumstance, while depressing the prestige of the older faiths, which have passed from the heat of militancy to the dubious triumph of nationhood. There are those who find it natural to accept such a theoretical double stance: good-natured and receptive nominalism exerted on behalf of nations-in-the-making, extreme rigor and skepticism deployed against the established and recognized states. But is it plausible to infer from this stance a radical politics, as is now widely supposed? Might not a truer radicalism lie in rejecting the claim of any community to bestow meaning on the lives of men and women? A more general consequence of Anderson's line of thought has been to revive some of the faded glamour of the idea of nationhood by stressing the imaginative dimension in the construction of all nations. Thinking on this pattern has thereby served to confirm a tendency, very pronounced among Western intellectuals, to sympathize vaguely with the aspirations of insurgent groups, while disdaining the elementary provisions for self-defense by people whom statehood has raised to legitimacy.

There can be no doubt that Irish Studies have benefited from a disposition to sympathize with imagined communities. Ireland's heroic twentieth-century memory hasn't...