Memory Ireland: Volume 2: Diaspora and Memory Practices

6. The Kitsch of the Dispossessed

75 6 The Kitsch of the Dispossessed SPU RGEON T HOM PSON Since the mid–nineteenth century at least, Ireland has appeared in American culture somewhat as it does on “The Surrealist Map of the World”— larger than life and severely distorted. Most imported Irish cultural elements have, historically, been systematically mediated through mass cultural forms; that is, they have entered into American consciousness as artifacts of commodity culture. That this has been occurring for at least 150 years is clear from recent research into the tourism industry in Ireland, which has been promoting itself actively since the end of the Great Famine. Less researched, however, is what lies behind or motivates such mass cultural expressions of Irishness. Irish kitsch arrives in force on the American scene only after the Great Famine made kitsch necessary as a mediating modality of culture, one that tries to soften the blow of memory. By first framing our understanding of kitsch in terms of the politics of memory and nostalgia, then examining instances of kitsch in Irish America alongside an analysis of Patrick McCabe’s and Neil Jordan’s versions of The Butcher Boy, I demonstrate that the forms that cultural loss takes for an emigrant community are charged with power and meaning and should not be easily dismissed, as kitsch so often is. Furthermore, by examining the way that kitsch serves simultaneously as that which connects and that which clearly marks removal from the homeland, I will argue that kitsch ultimately remains deeply ambiguous as a signifier. This indeterminacy marks the limits of kitsch to heal or bridge the gap for an emigrant community while also making it invulnerable to full instrumentalization by projects of ethnicity commodification. 76 Memory and the Irish Diaspora FOLK ART AND THE P OLITIC S OF NOSTALGIA Kitsch is a vast category of material culture, but ethnically specific kitsch usually is produced to do the cultural work of commodifying and hypostasizing identity in the service of state nationalism or Eurocentrism (inscribing binaries like “modern and traditional,” for example). One such case is, as Walter Benjamin noted, the African masks that arrived with primitivism at the beginning of the twentieth century. The African mask, and folk art more generally, for Benjamin, signified a problem important to the critic of taste or aesthetic judgment. Unlike many of his contemporaries (Loos, Adorno, or Horkheimer), Benjamin refused to dismiss kitsch as merely impoverished cultural production imposed by the ruling classes upon the ruled. For Benjamin, kitsch served other ends. As he explains in a fragment posthumously entitled “Some Remarks on Folk Art,” written in 1929, “Folk art and kitsch ought to be regarded as a single great movement that passes certain themes from hand to hand, like batons, behind the back of what is known as great art.” Kitsch evokes what is beneath the surface of modernity; it teaches us, he argues, that, “When we are in earnest, we discover our conviction that we have experienced infinitely more than we know about” (1999, 278). That is, by making present the “primitive,” backward, or premodern—even in mass-produced forms—kitsch elicits experiences concealed from the present. It is, hence, so often the case that ethnic kitsch takes “vulgar, sentimental, gaudy” forms, and is so often perceived by dominant cultures “as signs of underdevelopment and inadequate assimilation,” as David Lloyd points out (1999, 92). Embarrassing in its bad taste, like the arrival of a country cousin, kitsch is modernity’s returned repressed, made manifest in a language of uncomfortable objects. Using the African mask as an enabling nexus for his theory, Benjamin concludes with a characteristic aphorism: “Art teaches us to look into objects. Folk art and kitsch allow us to look outward from within objects” (1999, 279). Kitsch and folk art pass themes—not mechanically but “hand to hand”—“behind the back” of great art, allowing access to memories that arrive as “echoes.” And, crucially, Benjamin compares what “great art” requires—a spectatorial relation in which one can only “look into” objects—to what kitsch instructs: like the “primitive” African mask, it invites us to use it to “look The Kitsch of the Dispossessed 77 outward” from the perspective of objects. Understood as such, it becomes impossible to fetishize kitsch. This comparison has a crucial relevance for understanding the way that kitsch relates to the logic of the commodity form. Benjamin notices, in other words, that (especially ethnic) kitsch does...