James Stephens's Diminutive National Narratives: Imagining an Irish Nation Based on the "Orient"

JAMES STEPHENS'S DIMINUTIVE NATIONAL NARRATIVES: IMAGINING AN IRISH NATION BASED ON THE "ORIENT" Joseph Lennon Critics usually regard James Stephens as one ofthe most whimsical and entertaining of the modernist Irish writers. Consequently, his writings are rarely read for their social and national impUcations. While whimsy certainly comprises much of his poetry and prose writings,1 a good portion of Stephens's work, particularly his later short stories, portrays social reaUties of early twentieth-century Ireland. In these stories Stephens's characters struggle against poverty, unemployment and class subjugation amidst tropes of Indian and Irish mythology. Throughout his career, Stephens wove myth into reahstic stories seeking to construct narratives ofthe emerging Irish nation. These narratives borrow heavily not only from versions of Irish myth, but also from OrientaUst versions of"Eastern" philosophy and mythology. Stephens used these mythological and philosophical tropes to represent Ireland's present in hopes of writing Ireland's national narrative. In this respect, his works provide a complex and specificaUy Irish answer to Homi K. Bhabha's rhetorical question: "How does one write the nation's modernity as the event of the everyday and the advent of the epochal?" ("DissemiNation" 293). I Stephens's stories of his "nation's modernity" were written on the threshold of the contemporary and the epochal, relying both upon nativism and OrientaUsm. Homi Bhabha's use of the term national narrative signifies a narrative in the broadest cultural sense, that is a narrative which permeates a culture, embodying its identity and hegemony . Every nation has a national narrative as weU as many stories of nationhood or what I will call diminutive national narratives. These diminutive narratives both signify and represent a nation, but cannot fully pervade a culture or embody its identity. As Ireland broke from England, Stephens and other Irish writers self-consciously attempted to "write the [new] nation" in their narratives. What they wrote had a significant effect on Ireland, primarily because many oftheir diminutive narratives were later incorporated into the Irish Republic's programs of official nationaUsm; for example, Yeats's poetry and Lady Gregory's plays about the west of Ireland became part of the RepubUc's image of rural Ireland. But to consciously create the identity of a nation or its national narrative is, of course, an impossibiUty. Both the identity and the narrative of a nation evolve through the events and accidents of history, emerging through the shared experiences of its members, not through conscious constructions of a few individuals. A national narVol ·. 20 (1996): 62 THE COMPAnATIST rative resonates for individuals in a nation, interpellates or hails them as citizens, and becomes the center of their collective identity. Understanding the need for a unified national culture in Ireland, Stephens and other Irish writers tried to unify the nation by writing narratives which linked Ireland's past to its present. Theorists of nationhood as far back as Ernest Renan in 1882 have noted the need for a coherent past in nation building: A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things, which in truth are but one, constitute this soul or spiritual principle. One lies in the past, one in the present. One is the possession in common ofa rich legacy ofmemories ; the other is present-day consent, the desire to live together, the will to perpetuate the value ofthe heritage that one has received in an undividedform [emphasis added]. ("What is a Nation" 19) Stephens projected mythical pasts—interestingly, both Irish and Indian —onto Irish culture as a way of reimagining Ireland. The new Ireland that he revealed to the Irish pubUc presented an undivided heritage of pre-colonial Ireland. In a seemingly strange move, Stephens often substituted OrientaUst visions of Hindu spirituaUty for Irish mythology. But this actually was a common move for the Theosophists and Irish spirituahsts. The reUgions of India, China, Japan, Turkey and other countries of the "Orient" represented models of pre-colonial, pre-modern, and pre-Christian Ireland for these spiritual theorists. Because they did not view the "Orient" coevally, they believed they could find a spiritual panacea for the ailments ofmodern Western European culture. Stephens, in particular , assumed that the classical Indian caste system could be...