The eternal rocks beneath
Patricia Craig
HEATHCLIFF AND THE GREAT HUNGER: STUDIES IN IRISH CULTURE by Terry Eagleton Verso, £18.95, pp. 355 Terry Eagleton's cast of mind is erudite and ingenious, and his ingenuity is nowhere more in evidence than in the opening essay of this collection. `Heathcliff and the Great Hunger' superimposes an allegory of Irish- ness, in the person of Heathcliff himself, over the narrative of Wuthering Heights: this intractable Brontë character, Eagleton says, 'starts out as an image of the famished Irish immigrant, becomes a landless labourer set to work in the Heights, and ends up as a symbol of the constitutional nationalism of the Irish Parliamentary Party'. Before the audacity of this pro- nouncement can take our breath away so that's what Emily Brontë had in mind, and we never knew - he goes on to make out quite a good case for this eccentric reading (The hunger in Wuthering Heights is called Heathcliff . . . ').
Where the facts don't fit the hypothesis, he simply acknowledges the discrepancy and carries on regardless; pointing it out himself before someone else can do so. For example, he mentions Branwell Bronte's visit to Liverpool in 1845, and surmises that he might have encountered an Irish urchin there and passed on the information to his sister. But Eagleton is making a point about the famine exodus out of Ireland and as he says himself, the dates don't quite fit. The earliest famine refugees would have arrived in Liverpool in the autumn of that year, about the time when Emily Brontë was beginning her novel. Never mind - the infant Heathcliff is dirty and ragged, and speaks 'a kind of gibber- ish' which might well be identified as the Irish language. And his relations with the Lintons - if you want to pursue the allego- ry as far as it will go - could be said to show certain similarities to those of Ire- land and England. (Oddly enough, Terry Eagleton makes nothing at all of the Brontes' - or Bruntys' - actual Co. Down origins.) This is an expanded version of an essay which first appeared in the Irish Review in 1992; the additions mostly concern ques- tions of land, politics, the catastrophic famine itself and its benumbing effect on the imagination (to which the dearth of actual famine literature testifies). All these matters are taken up in subsequent chap- ters of Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: ascendancy and hegemony, the difference between the two and the failure of the latter; the Anglo-Irish novel and all its implications; the entanglement of culture and politics and the reasons for their inseparability. It's a practice of Terry Eagleton's to advance his arguments by means of contradiction, paradox, or dead- locked assertion: opposites yoked together for maximum poignancy or ironic effect. Hence we get, 'the difference which props up his [i.e. the colonialist's] power is also what threatens to undo it'; `the distance which enables true cognition is also what obstructs it' (pace Maria Edgeworth); 'Few pursuits were more native to the country than getting out of it.' It's one way to approach the complexities in Irish history (turning schisms into aphorisms), and also to enliven the academic study of literature, which can benefit from the odd touch of bravado. (Not, however, if it entails equat- ing the Anglo-Irish gentry with Count Dracula: this 4s going too far, even if it's read as a follow-up to the Heathcliff/ Ireland fusion.) Terry Eagleton has engaged in an ener- getic reading programme - as his foot- notes indicate - and much of what he has to say is of absorbing interest. (The odd inaccuracy aside - he doesn't seem to realise, for instance, that the 'Gaelic ballad' is as rare as a Garus turf-cutter on a social visit to the Big House. Gaelic literature comes in many forms, but not often in that particular one.) One essay pays due — indeed, overdue — homage to the 17th-century philosopher Francis Hutcheson; while another (the one entitled The Archaic Avant-Garde', in a further instance of illuminating oxymoron) considers — among other things — the activities of feminist-republicans in the early part of the 20th century.
It's not Terry Eagleton's fault if the facts about these which seem most intriguing are also those most suggestive of out-and-out dottiness: Maud Gonne getting Yeats to put his ear to the Donegal ground in search of fairy music, Charlotte Despard opening a teetotal pub called the Despard Arms. He mentions Margaret Cousins, a suf- fragette of high courage and intelligence but not her exorbitant aversion to sexual intercourse, which led her to comment, in the autobiography she wrote jointly with her husband, that she could never see a child in the street without being reminded of the 'shocking circumstance' which had brought it into existence. This tells us something about Irish puritanism, which could bear examination along with culture and conflict.
Never mind: there is plenty here to pro- voke both argument and assent. Eagleton is far from being a revisionist but he does at one point run through a selection of Irish revolutionaries, pointing out an illiberal aspect of each (`Charles Kickham [the Fenian novelist] . . . denounced the Land League as communistic . . . Arthur Griffith was a monarchical anti-Semite . . . '). Still, these are then excused as blind spots in an otherwise more-or-less enlightened agita- tors' agenda in the run-up to 1916: by no means 'a record to be scorned'.
Such anomalies of outlook, views you don't expect the holder to hold, can actual- ly help to identify the ramifying strands in Irish nationalism, which has nearly as many forms of expression as there is ornamenta- tion in the Book of Kells. Eagleton gets to grips with a good many of them, and with Irish literature and its limitations up until about 1920. With his eye ever alert for an unexpected item, he lets us know that Synge's elemental Aran Islands tad a fish- ing industry directly linked by large trawlers to the London market' (but he doesn't indicate how much the playwright's narcotic quaintness owes to literal — not just vividly approximate but absolutely lit- eral — translation from the Irish).
Heathcliff and the Great Hunger is resourceful and densely written; so densely, indeed, that the author has found it neces- sary at intervals to bring in something quirky, a joke or oddity among the histori- cal data, to lighten the tone. Not that the latter is always attuned to merriment. Eagleton at one point reports the view of certain English officials, during the famine, to the effect that it served the Irish right for relying on such an uncouth form of nourishment. A more refined diet might produce more civilised behaviour.
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