Creating the Self, Recreating the Nation: The Politics of Irish Literary Autobiography from Moore to Behan

Abstract

In a recent essay in the Irish University Review, Eamonn Hughes observed that ‘[a]utobiographies of the Revival period can be productively read as a series of meditations on and arguments about Ireland and Irishness’ (2003: 28). Hughes’s position is a refinement of Declan Kiberd’s contention that ‘autobiography in Ireland becomes, in effect, the autobiography of Ireland’ (1995: 119). Clearly, Kiberd and Hughes agree that Irish autobiographical writing merges personal and national identities but not, in Hughes’s view, without a struggle. His phrase ‘arguments about’ indicates that, in his reading of revivalist autobiography, ‘Ireland’ and ‘Irishness’ are contested terms. Drawing on the autobiographical work of George Moore, Sean O’Casey, Brendan Behan and, to a lesser extent, W. B. Yeats, I would like to take Hughes’s observation a step further by arguing that, in telling their stories, these writers assert their Irishness by opposing both colonial and nationalist versions of Irish identity. The Ireland they critique is too repressive, too Catholic, too indifferent to its poor. In its place they seek a pluralistic and tolerant society, hospitable to artistic achievement and to social idealism. In essence, then, these writers define their ‘Irishness’ as a political act to enable a cultural, religious and social transformation of Ireland. Premised on a view of Irish autobiography as both cultural narrative and personal document, the first section of this chapter describes the discourses of colonialism and nationalism against which these autobiographies are written.