The Salon Interview Gabriel Byrne
The joys of being Irish
The new Dublin
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- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Of course, none of this stuff seems ridiculous if you believe it, and if you don't, it's no dumber than reading your horoscope or throwing the I Ching. The more interesting problem, it seems to me, is figuring out what this new Celtic Revival is really about. It has something to do with the emergence of Irish-identified pop-culture figures, such as Bono, Sinéad O'Connor and Daniel Day-Lewis. It has something to do with Ireland's successful and dramatic transformation from an agrarian Catholic society to a secular service economy, and with the tourist theme-park version of Ireland that's now visible as a sort of overlay on the landscape. (When I visited Dublin last summer, pink neon signs featuring quotations from "Ulysses" had been hung throughout the central city, as if the distinction between the book and the geography it described had been erased by Andy Warhol.) But it has even more to do with white guilt. The real Celts -- to make a very long story short -- were by general consensus a warlike, agricultural, clan-based people who emerged in central Europe some 3,000 years ago and gradually drifted west into Britain and Ireland. (Most of the great stone monuments of the British Isles were not, in fact, built by the Celts, but by other, earlier people about whom very little is known.) Almost from the beginning, when the Romans, Normans and Anglo-Saxons, in successive waves, threatened to exterminate Celtic civilization, the complex realm of Celtic myth and spirituality assumed a unique importance in the European mind. The Celts became the Native Americans of Europe, if you like, objects of fascination to the German Romantics with their doom-obsessed epics and the English Victorians with their naked fairies in the backyard. Some of that ambient Celtic mystique survives into the present; it accounts for the allure of bogus theologies invented yesterday by some huckster and for the attachment your Granny Murphy feels for that porcelain leprechaun on her mantelpiece. The Celts -- as opposed to the living Irish or Scots or Welsh, who tend to be more familiar with Andy Sipowicz than with Cernunnos, the Antlered God -- are the original white soul men, permanently free from history, the tragic heroes of an endless archetypal time-loop. They never knew capitalism, never built an empire, always lived in harmony with nature. They were us, before everything went wrong. God knows a lot of things went wrong and there has been a lot of history it'd be wonderful to escape. But hasn't the spectacle of middle-class white Americans trying to evade their provenance grown tiresome, repeating like a broken record for generations, from ashram to Zen monastery to sweat lodge? It's tough to defend the classic shamrock-and-shillelagh style of Irish-American nostalgia, which will be much in evidence at thousands of bars across the country on St. Patrick's night. It's a cheap and vulgar indulgence that no longer has much to do with the real place called Ireland. Its boozy sentimentality can even be dangerous; half-digested Irish-American myth kept the IRA's "hard men" supplied with guns and money for generations. But it seems to me the guy on the bar stool who weeps when the jukebox plays "How Are Things in Glocca Morra?" is experiencing a less pretentious and more heartfelt version of the same longing the New Agers feel -- a fading folk memory of the agrarian rhythms of life our ancestors left behind.
There's no going back, of course, and no place to go back to. The
old-school fantasy Ireland of trickster leprechauns and comely village
maidens is an imaginary country, adjacent to and sometimes overlapping the
one conjured up by the pseudo-scholarly geeks of the New Age, with their
Hounds of the Goddess and their Alchemical Wands. (I kept waiting for the
"Star Trek" universe to intrude into "Celtic Oracles" somehow -- "Sulu Under
Rowan Tree," or simply "Jim Kirk Rampant.") I don't precisely want to join
the people who'll spend the evening of March 17 binge drinking and the
morning of March 18 projectile vomiting, but I can say at least two things
on their behalf: They scare the bejesus out of the gentle and mannerly
faery-lovers, and they're only trying to get away from who they really are
for one orgiastic evening.
Andrew O'Hehir is a frequent contributor to Salon. |
