Shaw's Everyday Emergency: Commodification and John Bull's Other Island

Shaw's Everyday Emergency:

Commodification in and of John Bull's Other Island

Over the past decade, Irish culture and cultural products have increased in value in the global market, from the successes of Riverdance and Celtic music to the ubiquitous pub and the latest revival of Irish theater. Accompanying this revaluation of all things Irish was the growth of the traditionally sluggish Irish economy into the Celtic Tiger of the 1990s. It would seem a good time, consequently, for a reassessment of Bernard Shaw's John Bull's Other Island and its place in this new context. Largely recognized as Shaw's "Irish" play, it is concerned with the questions of land possession, Anglo-Irish politics, and the deployment of stereotypes. This matter of stereotypes remains Shaw's greatest concern; he uses it to discuss economics and politics and thereby reveal to his audiences the interrelatedness of these subjects. By "exploding" the stereotypes of the stage Irishman and stage Englishman (and I gender these intentionally), Shaw's play critiques English colonial policies abroad (what in the modern era could be classified as late capitalism) and the consequent commodification of the "Other."

Theories of the commodification of culture can be traced through Marx's discussion of fetish commodities in Capital, to Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's articulation of "the Culture Industry" in their Dialectic of Enlightenment, to more recent work undertaken by critics such as Arjun Appadurai, David Hesmondhalgh, and Shane Gunster. ¹ Positing a specifically colonial context for the idea of culture as a commodity, Deborah Root analyzes exotic images and their place in the global economy. ² Although Root is concerned with power relations, with who and what are being represented by whom and to whom, it is Graham Huggan who pushes the discussion into a postcolonial context by differentiating between postcoloniality and postcolonialism. "Postcoloniality," he says,

is a value-regulating mechanism within the global late-capitalist system of commodity exchange. Value is constructed through global market operations involving the exchange of cultural commodities and, particularly, culturally "othered" goods. Postcoloniality's regime of value is implicitly assimilative and market driven: it regulates the value-equivalence of putatively marginal products in the global marketplace. Postcolonialism, by contrast, implies a politics of value that stands in obvious opposition to global processes of commodification. ³

Shaw himself gets sublimated into the process of postcoloniality despite his challenge to the more facile and readily commodifiable images of Irishness presented by many other dramatists. But what Root describes as the "commodification of the proper name," the branding of artists, cultures, and places, suggests that the play was increasingly commodifiable as soon as Irishness became attached to it and, even more subtly, as soon as it was known that Shaw was its author. ⁴ That this process occurs despite the play's themes and the ways in which they are treated creates a dilemma for a Fabian socialist such as Shaw.

Historical Context

Written in 1904, John Bull's Other Island is Shaw's only full-length play to be set largely in Ireland, despite the fact that he was Irish by birth. ⁵ In the preface, Shaw notes that he wrote it "at the request of Mr. William Butler Yeats, as a patriotic contribution to the repertory of the Irish Literary Theatre. Like most people who have asked me to write plays, Mr. Yeats got rather more than he bargained for" (v). The Abbey would reluctantly decline to stage the play. Yeats, in a letter to Shaw, states that casting would be too difficult, as would the logistics of a large cast performing on the Abbey's relatively small stage. ⁶ Although these were legitimate concerns, which Shaw accepted in good humor, he assumes that the social vision of his play was alien to that of the Abbey's directors: "It was uncongenial to the whole spirit of the neo-Gaelic movement, which is bent...