-
The Decadent of Moyvane
- The University of Akron Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
244 The Decadent of Moyvane the word “decadence,” in a literary context, tends to conjure up a vague whiff of Swinburne and scandal, or perhaps images of The Yellow Book, with its Beardsley covers and its selections of Arthur Symonds and Richard Le Gallienne. The Francophile associates the word with slogans such as épater le bourgeois and l’art pour l’art. The true connoisseur thinks of Théophile Gautier’s rebellion against neoclassicism and the doctrine of art in the service of society. If the connoisseur is particularly pedantic, he may wander over to his bookshelf, pull down Gautier’s MademoiselledeMaupin, and, blowing the dust from its pages, refer to the once-infamous introduction, lingering over the following passage: There is nothing truly beautiful but that which can never be of any use whatsoever; everything useful is ugly, for it is the expression of some need, and man’s needs are ignoble and disgusting like his own poor and infirm nature. The most useful place in the house is the watercloset . (xvii–xviii) “From that,” says the pedantic connoisseur, “comes all of Mallarmé.” He’s not wrong, really. If anything is essential to the literary movement of the late nineteenth century we’ve come to call the decadence, it is the rejection of the idea of art having any end other than art itself. The decadent’s ideal art was autonomous, free of any ties to politics, peoples, causes, or commerce. 245 Poetry in a Difficult World Despite Oscar Wilde’s “Symphony in Yellow” and “Impression du Matin,” we tend not to associate decadence of this sort with Irish poetry. Even Yeats, whose early work owed so much to the French symbolistes, doesn’t really rate as a decadent: his interest in l’art pour l’art was always counterbalanced by the claims of national liberation. For every “Sailing to Byzantium” moment in Yeats’ work there is a “Byzantium” as retraction ; for every aesthete’s poem like “The Cloak, the Boat and the Shoes” there’s a nationalist’s “Easter, 1916.” Yeats is far from atypical among Irish poets in having reservations about aesthetic autonomy. Indeed, Irish poetry of the past century has overwhelmingly been written in a tradition other than the decadence’s l’art pour l’art. From Yeats through Montague and on through Heaney and Eavan Boland, mainstream Irish poets have tended to write with a sense of the people’s claim on their art. The bulk of Irish poetic achievement over the course of the twentieth century took place within a framework of heteronomous rather than autonomous aesthetics: at some level poetry served the need of a community, be it national or sectarian, for self-expression. Declan Kiberd claims that the fundamental question posed by this heteronomous aesthetic tradition in Ireland has been “how to express life which has never yet found full expression in written literature” (118) and he argues that such a question is made most urgent in a nation striving for independence. Though we have come to think of decadence in literature as a matter of aesthetic autonomy, of art cut off from anything other than artistic concerns, Ireland’s decidedly heteronomous poetic tradition makes one wonder if another kind of decadence is possible. If a heteronomous poetic tradition is born out of colonial circumstances, what happens to that tradition when those circumstances no longer apply? Could the stylistic and emotional gestures of such a tradition fall into decay, inviting a self-indulgence empty of any real vitality? Gabriel Fitzmaurice’s BogholeBoys, gives us every indication that the answer to the question, in the Irish context, is a resounding yes. Fitzmaurice introduces his book with a short essay sounding the traditional notes of the Irish poet of community. His poems, he informs us, make “the authentic sound of [the] backwater.” As he describes his native village of Moyvane to us, he leans back, puts one arm around our [3.236.111.234] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 14:40 GMT) 246 The Poet Resigns shoulders and, gesturing widely at the “teachers and tricksters...priests and publicans” of the town, looks us squarely in the eyes and tells us, “I seek to give voice to these people.” The locals are, he opines, an endangered group, “the forgotten people of the new Ireland” (1–2). Fitzmaurice ’s gesture is among the oldest in Irish literature: the defiant preservation of an all-but-extinct culture through the voice of the heroic bard. The Irish poet...