Ella
O Dwyer is a former Republican prisoner, who was sentenced
in 1986 for her participation in a bombing campaign
in England. She was later released under the terms
of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. Her book is based
on the MA and PhD she completed while imprisoned.
Its general topic is power, control, and the intimate
relation they establish with the structure of language
and the framework through which meaning operates.
Unsurprisingly, she draws heavily on the ideas of
French thinker Michel Foucault, who in his study on
the birth of the prison in the nineteenth century
explored the relations between power and knowledge.
I can attest to the authority of Foucaults
work, having spent years imprisoned in the Victorian
time wraps of Brixton and Durham prisons. He got it
right; a circle of surveillance called empire projects
an imposed silence and anonymity upon the subject
psyche. (p. 23)
For
O Dwyer, silence and anonymity are the hallmarks of
Irish national discourse. This is the result of the
thwarting of discourse by English colonial interference.
Imperialism is not just a social and economic phenomenon,
it also affects the way people think and express themselves
culturally. The characteristic dynamic of domination
and colonisation inherent to power is also present
in the traditional interpretative structures which
design and epitomise official culture. (p. 47)
Empire-speak as O Dwyer calls it, from
Edmund Spencer to Margaret Thatcher infiltrated and
shaped indigenous narrative at all levels, obstructing
the emergence of a national discourse. This cognitive
control results in a culture of silence.
Empire-speak infiltrates and shapes indigenous
narrative at all levels, as already demonstrated by
the very colonising influences attendant on the entire
cognitive institution. (p. 93) O Dwyer's book
examines how this process is at work in a number of
novels and plays, not all by Irish authors but in
every case affected by colonial and neo-colonial domination.
In a series of close textual studies, she shows how
colonial interference colonises the writing space
of Edmund Spencer, Samuel Beckett, Joseph Conrad,
Chinua Achebe, and Michael Farrells novel Thy
Tears Might Cease; creating what Frederic Jameson
calls a "political unconscious" immanent
in the narratives of the various works analysed. She
also refers to many historical, political and cultural
figures and events from the 1798 United Irishmen to
the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. Her symptomatic reading
traces and investigates in their writings the manifestations
of power and control, interpreting the gulfs, spaces
and splits in those texts as a symptom of a repressive
system of meaning. For example, in the novels of Chinua
Achebe, she notes that the deliberate absence
of power from the frontline dramatic agenda actually
engenders and cultivates the absent quality of a presence
or power which permeates the novel in a less tangible
form. (p. 120)
The
book avoids a one-dimensional reduction of those works
to the economy of power, and insists on the contradictory
logic at work in those texts. A latent utopian and
emancipatory content is also present, although under
a repressed form. In order to go beyond empire-speak
and cognitive control, O Dwyer seeks to spell
out this otherness locked into the silences
and spaces of narrative. It is the gift of otherness
to provide a path out of those interlocking relations
of power and violence. (p. 124) One of the most
powerful example she uses to illustrate this potential
is her discussion -unfortunately too brief- of traditional
Irish musical language. To borrow a metaphor from
Wittgenstein, what the subaltern cannot say,
traditional Irish music is able to show.
Rescuing
the speechless and unspeakable moments of history,
music notes and mediates between various dimensions
of standard meaning. Frustrated for want of expression,
the passions and drives of that elaborate cognitive
system seek refuge in the musical context, borrowing
a voice from the milieu of sound. (p. 36)
Music
thus allows the recognition, retrieval and delivery
of identity. While oppression factors crucially
at tonal and thematic levels, the co-ordination and
composed aspect of traditional play indicates the
stalwart tenacity of a surviving people. (p.
38) O Dwyer is absolutely right to argue here that
resistance to empire and cognitive control is present
in the tensions immanent to the musical material;
her argument has a close affinity to T.W. Adornos
analysis of Schoenbergs atonal compositions,
when he pointed that the status of music as a commodity
is resisted internally by the music itself by deliberately
maintaining unresolved tensions.
O
Dwyers book is excellent on the conflict-ridden
nature of language, particularly on how the syntax
of ideological narrative is disrupted by the return
of the repressed. Ella O Dwyer skilfully analyse
this literal war of words, where statement and silence
are strategically deployed as weapons of conflict,
where the linguistics of power address the logistics
of combat. Ours has been a discourse at war
where syllable and silence are unleashed according
to their military merit. (p. 26) She meticulously
shows how each writer negotiates with language, relating
meaning to the antagonism involved in engagements
with power. Her treatment of the different authors
is first class. However, O Dwyer's book is not without
its flaws. Her writing tends not only to be difficult,
but is too often simply obscure. It might be the purpose
of a wretched sentence like A deadly power shielded
by the cloaked consciousness of subjectivity unnerves
the cognitive mainstream which compounds its oppressive
governance with a drive to dissolve that threat
(p. 66) to subvert the bogus transparency of empire-speak;
but it is probably more a symptom of that same empire
speak than a real solution to it. When not obscure,
parts of the book are simply quite bizarre. The last
chapter is particularly so, consisting of a surreal
encounter between Wolfe Tone, Robert Emmet, Eamon
de Valera, Bobby Sands, Mairead Farrell, Samuel Beckett
and his character Molloy. Her choice of materials
can also be sometimes questionable. Rex Taylors
biography of Michael Collins or Danny Morrisons
novel The Wrong Man might be interesting;
but they are far less significant than let's say C.Desmond
Greaves' biography of Liam Mellows or Mairtin O Cadhain's
reinvention of the Irish language. But those flaws
should not detract us from the fundamental quality
and originality of this book.
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