A Chastened Communion: Modern Irish Poetry and Catholicism

2. Kavanagh’s Parochialism: A Catholic Poetics of Place

49 2 Kavanagh’s Parochialism A Catholic Poetics of Place While Austin Clarke’s conflict with Catholicism centered upon control over the inner terrain of his psyche, for Patrick Kavanagh , the countryman, the contested ground was external. Kavanagh’s effort to negotiate the tensions inherent in Catholicism’s attitude toward the landscape ultimately led him to fashion a spiritual cartography that drew upon Catholic principles and practices but transcended the institutional church’s efforts to regulate the sacredness of place. The tutelary spirit of Kavanagh’s poetic imagination was primarily a genius loci that, depending upon his location and perspective, manifested itself either as a beneficent or malign presence. Such attention to the charisma of place has been a central feature of Irish poetry as far back as the dinnseanchas or place-lore poems composed by the Irish fili. But what distinguishes Kavanagh from his precursors in this tradition is his acute awareness of the challenges awaiting the modern writer whose efforts to conjure up the spirit of the landscape must compete with the Catholic Church’s appropriation of that power. Indeed, Kavanagh’s quest to formulate a poetics of place that registers the complex dynamics of its spirituality invests his poetry with a significance that more than compensates for its occasional formal deficiencies. It also gives rise to his most important contribution to Irish literary and cultural criticism—the concept of parochialism. For Kavanagh, parochialism designates a dialectical sense of place based upon the reciprocal interplay of the local and universal, a spatial variant of the familiar hermeneutical circle whereby the understanding of part and whole mutually 50 | A Chastened Communion anticipate and reinforce each other. This principle was famously exemplified in Kavanagh’s mid-career poem “Epic,” where a seemingly trivial land dispute between small farmers in his home parish of Inniskeen garners a wider significance when it is paralleled with Homer’s Iliad; in turn, Homer’s ancient epic becomes more readily accessible to a modern audience as we realize that Homer “made the Iliad from such / A local row.”1 That this notion of parochialism constitutes an important step in the fashioning of a truly postcolonial consciousness has been frequently acknowledged . But what has been neglected is an understanding of the extent to which Kavanagh’s parochialism reflects a particularly Irish Catholic sensibility with regards to place, one that is rooted both in deeply embedded theological principles as well as in the cultural struggle between localized folk variants of the faith and the ecclesiastical center. Kavanagh first fashioned this concept in 1952 as a weapon in his battle against the hegemonic nationalism that he believed was corrupting Irish culture. Seeking to distinguish his artistic cultivation of his rural County Monaghan homeland from the romantic primitivism of the finde -siècle Celtic Revival and the mid-century neo-Revival, Kavanagh followed Coleridge’s principle of concept formation via desynonymization —the synonyms differentiated in this case being the words “parochial ” and “provincial.”2 “The provincial,” Kavanagh averred, “has no mind of his own; he does not trust what his eyes see until he has heard what the metropolis—towards which his eyes are turned—has to say on any subject . . . The parochial mentality on the other hand is never in any doubt about the social and artistic validity of his parish.”3 With this distinction , Kavanagh sought to evade one of the most dangerous legacies of colonialism, the insidious dynamic by which the colonized province and the imperial metropolis define themselves against each other. In doing so, he became, in the words of Declan Kiberd, “a genuinely postcolonial thinker, one who had emptied his mind of the categories devised by colonialist and anti-colonialist alike.”4 Contrarily, provincial writers such as the Celtic revivalist J. M. Synge and the neo-Revivalist poet F. R. Higgins, according to Kavanagh, remain entrapped within these categories. Eager to do their part in fashioning a national consciousness but lacking an insider’s knowledge of the actual lives of the Irish peasantry, these writers Kavanagh’s Parochialism | 51 short-circuit the complex dialectic of local and universal, substituting the metropolis for the universal and the metropolitan simulacra of the local for its actuality. In the crucible of provincial imaginations such as theirs, the local is always steeped in the elixir of the national or imperial. On the other hand, parochial writers, such as James Joyce and George Moore, possess the courage...