"Homesick for Abroad": The Transition from National to Cultural Identity in Contemporary Irish Drama

"Homesick for Abroad": The Transition from National to Cultural Identity in Contemporary Irish Drama JOCHEN ACHILLES In Irish plays of the last thirty years, the supranational orientation, only occasionally noticeable in plays of earlier periods. is becoming more conspicuous. The question of cultural stasis versus progress is refonnulated in terms of the related specificity and rootedness of Irish culture versus its cosmopolitan leanings and its willingness to change its identity without losing it. Whereas their predecessors either shaped or disfigured the Holy Grail of Irish nationhood, living Irish playwrights are more interested in using the stage to test such multicultural notions of identity as the one suggested by the sociologist Stuart Hall who defines it "as contradictory, as composed of more than one discourse , as composed always across the silences of the other, as written in and through ambivalence and desire."1 In colonial times a uniform national identity was habitually and for obvious reasons associated with progress in the Irish context. In the postcolonial period, such self-sufficiency is increasingly viewed as hampering progress, as indicative of the perpetuation of an outdated impasse. Cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism, formerly considered as detracting from the national cause, are more and more viewed as the only direction in which cultural progress may be sought. The culturalist paradigm - that is, a new perspective of progress which calls for a mediation between the familiar and the unfamiliar and a reconciliation of the particular and the general- is beginning to replace the nationalist paradigm. Up to the sixties, plays with a political perspective were predominantly concerned with the promises. realities, and disappointments of national independence . These plays function largely as a cultural self-reflection of a preexisting notion of Irish nationhood which is defined in both mythical and political tenns and which is often represented allegorically by a woman (as in Modern Drama, 38 (t995) 435 JOCHEN ACtm.LES Yeats's Cathleen ni HOI;/ihan) or as a house (as in O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock and Cock-a-doodle Dandy as well as Behan's The Hostage).' The achievement of national independence by the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 is a watershed with regard to the attitude taken to the nationalist paradigm . Henceforth, it is no longer ardently embraced but criticized, satirized, and dismantled. It comes more and more under fire in plays, ranging from O'Casey's so-called Dublin-Trilogy (1923-26) to Johnston's The Old Lady Says: No! (1929), Behan's The Hostage (1958), and Murphy's The Blue Macushla (1980). The political or nationalist paradigm of Irish selfhood - the "metaphysics ... of the entry into full self-realisation of a unitary subject known as the people," as Terry Eagleton describes it in one of the Field Day pamphlets3 - dissolves in the more or Jess acidic irony of these works. A more liberal culturalist paradigm takes its place in recent drama, which functions as a discourse in.which a specifically Irish identity is positioned within a larger intercultural framework. The aim of the culturalist paradigm is not uniformity but the coexistence of particularities. In other words, a specifically Irish identity is no longer viewed as a primordial and unitary given but as a distinct element among others which is tied to a multifaceted culture by communicative processes. Contrary to a unitary national identity, a cultural identity which is capable of tolerating ambivalence is not primarily established through political action but through changes in the collective unconscious and in public opinion.4 Contemporary Irish playwrights are among the agents of such changes. The impact of a considerable number of these playwrights and their work on the Irish public has been substantially strengthened by Field Day, a theatre company and publishing house established in Derry in 1980 by Brian Friel, the actor Stephen Rea, and the poet Seamus Heaney. Field Day has emerged as the most important platform for both the intellectual discussion and the dramatic presentation of the religious. socia-political. and psychological ramifications of cultural change. In a series of Field Day pamphlets, specifically Irishissues such as religious strife and the language question are repositioned within the wider international context of the changing roles of nationalism and imperialism in an...