A Peer-Reviewed E-Journal of Franco

Transcription

A Peer-Reviewed E-Journal of Franco-Irish Studies.
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1, Autumn 2008:
JOFIS
Number 1, Autumn 2008:
“Encounters / La rencontre”
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Editor:
Jean-Christophe Penet
(National Centre for Franco-Irish Studies, ITT Dublin, Ireland)
Editorial Board:
Professor Fabienne Garcier (Université Lille 3 Charles-de-Gaulle, France)
Professor Bernard Escarbelt (Université Lille 3 Charles-de-Gaulle, France)
Dr Mary Pierce (University College Cork, Ireland)
Dr Paula Murphy (Mater Dei Institute, Dublin City University, Ireland)
Dr Claire Dubois (Université Lille 3 Charles-de-Gaulle, France)
Dr Carolino Amador Moreno (Universidad de Extremadura, Spain)
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Contents
Introduction: Encounter(ing) / (A) La Rencontre (de)… JOFIS, p.3
Creative Encounters, ou la rencontre comme source de création:
- “History painting and patriotism: James Barry and Jacques Louis David,” Dr Claire Dubois, Université Charles-de-Gaulle Lille3, pp. 6-24
- “Louis le Brocquy’s Philosophical Navigatio,” Dr Paula Murphy, Mater Dei Institute of Education, DCU, pp.
25-37
Literary Encounters, ou quand la rencontre se fait littérature:
- “Brendan Behan’s France. Encounters in Saint-Germain-des-Prés,” Jean-Philippe Hentz, Université Strasbourg II, pp. 38-57
- “Between the Idea and the Reality. John Broderick and the French Connection,” Peter D.T. Guy, National
Centre for Franco-Irish Studies, ITT Dublin, pp. 58-75
- “Pondering Eternity in a Stifling Rural Setting: François Mauriac's Thérèse Desqueyroux and John McGahern's The Barracks,” Dr Eamon Maher, National Centre for Franco-Irish Studies, ITT Dublin, pp. 76-89
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Rencontre des catholiques nouveaux et/ou marginaux d’Irlande et
de France:
- “Etonnantes rencontres aux frontières du catholicisme irlandais contemporain,” Professeur Catherine Maignant, Université Charles-de-Gaulle Lille3, pp. 90-110
- “Ce téléphone rouge qui nous relie désormais à Dieu. Sécularisation et définition de la rencontre avec l’audelà revue et corrigée chez les catholiques en France et en Irlande ultramoderne,” Jean-Christophe Penet, National Centre for Franco-Irish Studies, pp. 111-129
A Shreking Encounter!
- “‘there’s a lot more to ogres than people think’: Shrek as Ethical Fairy tale,” Dr. Eugene O’Brien, Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, pp. 130-156
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Encounter(ing) / (A) La Rencontre (de)… JOFIS
Quelle thématique plus appropriée, pour ce premier numéro de la revue JOFIS (Journal of Franco-Irish
Studies), le tout premier du genre, que celle de la rencontre ? Quoi de plus légitime étant donné que JOFIS est
lui-même l’objet d’une heureuse rencontre, celle de chercheurs en humanités, jeunes ou confirmés, français ou
irlandais, lors d’un colloque par le NCFIS sur le même thème en octobre 2007 ? C’est à un échange des plus
stimulants entre chercheurs à la culture et à la formation différente mais dont les différences peuvent s’avérer
être une richesse pour la recherche lorsqu’elles deviennent échange, auquel nous souhaitons que JOFIS donne
le jour. Aussi espérons-nous que la rencontre d’auteurs et de faits de civilisation français et irlandais provoquée par la revue se fasse sous le signe d’un rapprochement, d’une mise en contact fruit du hasard ou, au
contraire, concertée et voulue, ou encore, de façon plus primordiale, qu’elle ait lieu à la manière d’un affrontement, d’un combat libérateur d’idées, et qu’elle ouvrira la voie à un éclectisme digne de ce nom, à même de
nous donner un nouveau regard sur les auteurs et les événements étudiés.
Thème porteur, la rencontre peut se décliner en une multitude d’angles. Pour des raisons de lisibilité évidentes,
nous en avons sélectionné trois au sein de ce numéro.
La rencontre entre France et Irlande se veut tout d’abord, dans ce numéro de JOFIS, artistique. Aussi
Claire Dubois se penche-t-elle sur l’influence du peintre français Jean-Louis David sur l’Irlandais James Barry
à une époque où, dans le sillage de la Révolution française, la peinture historique prend le pas sur le Rococo.
En ce XIXe siècle naissant, que cela soit en France ou en Irlande le travail du peintre se doit, comme le montre
Dubois, de participer au bien commun et à l’élévation de la société. Cependant, souligne Dubois, David et Barry, maîtres incontestés de la peinture historique, parviennent tout de même à « (…) turn history painting into a
contemporary and relevant genre, uniting universal principles with present-day events that they witnessed
first-hand ». David et James communiquent donc, à travers leurs tableaux, leur propre vision de la France et de
l’Irlande, transcendant les institutions et le simple rôle d’éducateur alors conféré à l’artiste. Plus proche de notre époque, Louis le Brocquy, artiste irlandais contemporain, souhaite également transcender la société de son
temps à travers son art. Dans le second volet consacré aux rencontres artistiques, Paula Murphy se penche
donc sur ses « portrait heads » et « travellers series ». Confrontant, d’une manière originale et novatrice, le
travail de l’artiste aux écrits de Derrida et Lacan, Murphy remarque que « (…) [le Brocquy’s] portraits and
paintings encourage exploration of the dualities of public perception and subjective reality; psychical and
physical worlds; objective time and time perceived by consciousness; and self and other: the other in the self,
in culture and the artist as other ».
L’artiste se fait autre au fil de ses rencontres, que celles-ci soient le fruit de « navigatios » philosophiques, artistiques ou encore psychologiques. C’est à une rencontre littéraire, lors d’un voyage physiquement
ancré dans un espace bien délimité, que nous convie Jean-Philippe Hentz au sein de notre section consacrée à
la littérature. Hentz analyse en effet l’influence de Paris, et plus précisément du quartier de Saint-Germain-desPrés, sur l’œuvre du rebelle irlandais Brendan Behan. Paris fut pour Behan le lieu de rencontres plus cruciales
les unes que les autres : celle d’avec les idéaux de la révolution et de la république, celle encore, plus personnelle, d’avec un autre auteur subversif, Jean Genet. Elles participèrent toutes à l’émancipation de Behan, qui se
mit peu à peu à acquérir une véritable stature d’auteur. Hentz en conclut donc que : « In the mirror held out to
him by Paris, it is finally himself that Behan encountered, or rather the writer that he had carried within himself on his arrival and who found in Paris the propitious conditions for his expression ». Les rencontres littéraires ne sont cependant pas toujours aussi directes que celle mise en avant par Hentz. Peter T. Guy se penche,
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par exemple, dans son article sur John Broderick, sur l’influence des écrivains catholiques français – et plus
particulièrement celle de François Mauriac et de son Baiser aux lépreux – sur le premier roman de Broderick,
The Pilgrimage. D’une manière plus générale, Guy souligne une influence balzacienne dans les romans de
l’écrivain irlandais. De Balzac à Broderick en passant par Mauriac, on y rencontre en effet un intérêt prononcé
pour les émotions humaines, la routine mondaine de la vie provinciale et, surtout, une même obsession envers
l’idée de salut. Partant de ce constat, Guy questionne le réalisme de Broderick à la lumière de la théorie du
critique Lukács. Dans un dernier chapitre consacré aux rencontres littéraires, Eamon Maher explore plus profondément encore l’influence de François Mauriac sur les écrivains irlandais contemporains puisqu’il
confronte le roman Thérèse Desqueyroux à celui de John McGahern, The Barracks. Il met ainsi en lumière les
similitudes entre le sort des deux héroïnes respectives, Thérèse Desqueyroux et Elizabeth Reegan, mais aussi
l’approche différente qu’elles adoptent face à leur foi au cours de leur vie pour le moins tragique. Dans son
article, Maher nous démontre avec succès « (…) the light that is often shed on individual writers and cultures
when they are considered in a more international and intercultural context ».
Le troisième volet de nos rencontres reste dans le domaine du spirituel, puisqu’il s’agit de la rencontre
des catholiques nouveaux et/ou marginaux qui ont émergé en France et en Irlande lors des dernières décennies.
S’intéressant au cas de l’Irlande, Catherine Maignant y montre comment, là-bas comme ailleurs, un
« kaléidoscope d’ouvertures » se dessine « aux frontières de la doxa catholique ». Ces catholiques marginaux,
qui réinterprètent les Ecritures hors de la Tradition, ont en commun, toujours selon Maignant, de « (…) refléter
l’actuel pluralisme de valeurs qui se relativisent mutuellement, et de légitimer une quête multiforme du sacré
par delà le bien et le mal tels que définis par l’orthodoxie catholique ». Jean-Christophe Penet montre, quant à
lui, que, s’ils ne tombent pas toujours dans la marginalité décrite par Maignant, les catholiques de France et
d’Irlande redéfinissent, d’une manière générale, leur rencontre avec l’au-delà d’une manière plus directe depuis Vatican II. Cette redéfinition de ce que c’est qu’être catholique chez les Français et les Irlandais, nous dit
Penet, est en effet plurielle, mais suit une seule et même logique : celle de l’hypersécularisation. Caractèristique de notre ère ultramoderne, celle-ci a entraîné la sécularisation du politique et du catholicisme lui-même.
Reprenant Jean-Paul Willaime et Danièle Hervieu-Léger il montre donc comment, en France et en Irlande,
« l’ultramodernité n’est pas synonyme de moins de religieux, mais de religieux autrement, d’une identité catholique subjective, immanente ».
La dernière rencontre de ce premier numéro de JOFIS est une rencontre qui a tout le sérieux du ludique.
Une rencontre du troisième genre, pourrions-nous dire. Eugene O’Bien nous emmène en effet à la rencontre de
ce monstre du cinéma made in USA qu’est Shrek. S’intéressant tout d’abord à la structure du genre dont Shrek
émerge, le conte de fée, et plus particulièrement à sa fonction normative et éthique, O’Brien montre comment
ce dernier instaure « a closed-off world where magic is the norm; where beauty and goodness are adequated;
where princes are brave, and princesses are beautiful; where witches are evil and where every evil magic spell
has its antidote; where animals talk and where wishes are granted and where, ultimately, there is a happy ending. » Ce faisant, le conte de fée sert à légitimer l’ordre social établi des XVIe et XVIIe siècles en le renforçant. Bien que la première scène de Shrek comporte tous les tropes du conte de fée, le film consiste, en réalité,
en un questionnement du genre qui aboutit à sa déconstruction par le rire. La déconstruction de ces contes dans
lesquels il est suggéré que, pour pouvoir faire parti des heureux élus qui « vécurent heureux et eurent beaucoup
d’enfants », il faut être prêt à se transformer moralement et/ou physiquement (c’est-à-dire à intégrer la norme
sociale) n’est pas sans conséquences éthiques, nous dit O’Brien. En effet, c’est avec humour que Shrek nous
rappelle que le rang social et les apparences ne sont pas un gage de moralité ni d’éthique. Ainsi : « Shrek, with
its valuing of the other, with its espousal of difference, with its sense that who you are is often very different
from what you are, shines an ethical light on these accepted areas of children’s culture and asks the decon-
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structive questions that make this film one to watch, enjoy and think about. »
Sur ces bonnes paroles, il ne me reste plus qu’à vous souhaiter à toutes et à tous une excellente lecture
qui, je l’espère, deviendra source de réflexion et d’inspiration. Mais avant cela, je tiens à remercier à nouveau
toute l’équipe du comité éditorial pour son formidable travail ainsi que Eamon Maher pour son soutien tout au
long de cet ambitieux projet.
Enjoy the following “Encounters” with JOFIS!
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Creative encounters, ou la rencontre comme source de création.
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History painting and patriotism: James Barry and Jacques Louis David
Dr Claire Dubois, Université Charles-de-Gaulle Lille3
In his book, A Letter to the Dilettanti Society (1798), James Barry (1741-1806), an Irish-born painter
living in London, claimed that the creation of an academy of arts would definitely improve British society,
especially on a moral level. He thought that the situation was much better in France thanks to the talent of artists such as Jacques Louis David (1748-1825). Barry hailed David’s reforming efforts which enabled the
French to gather around a new patriotic feeling. He hoped that the French example would be followed in the
British Isles so as to foster civility and virtue (Barry 1798, 26-7).
David is considered as the main European painter between the years 1785-1815. His career covers a
very troubled period including the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the fall of the monarchy and the
Empire. As a liberal, David welcomed the promises of social change fostered by the Revolution. He was even
elected deputy to the National Convention in 1792. He painted propagandist works celebrating the republican
martyrs. He later became Napoleon’s official portraitist and represented him as a national hero. As regards
Barry, his career reflects the complexity of the Irish situation and illustrates the hopes and disappointments of
a section of the Irish population vis-à-vis the Union of 1801. Exiled in London to earn his living, Barry integrated an Irish subtext into some of his compositions and criticised the British policy concerning the Irish
question. - he criticised British policy in Ireland in his book, A Letter to the Dilettanti Society.
These critiques are obviously not voiced explicitly because of Barry’s situation position in London.
Barry wished to live from patronage and could not, therefore, be too disrespectful. Furthermore, he believed in
a possible reconciliation between Ireland and England within a new United Kingdom that would be more tolerant on a religious level. His disappointment was all the greater when he understood that the Union would
not meet his expectations, especially as regards Catholic emancipation. Certain drawings like Passive Obedi-
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ence (1802-1805) attest this change of mindset. Both painters were trained in Rome under the guidance of
Joseph-Marie Vien. They later chose to concentrate on history painting, the noblest genre, superior to all others morally and intellectually. They first took their inspiration from ancient subjects before dealing more directly with the history of their homeland. According to them, history should allow the artist to show his fellow-citizens the way to social improvement. Both Barry and David claimed visual arts had moral power enabling artists to act for the public good. This moral regeneration should take into account historic and heroic
models, whether ancient or not. Painting is not only a matter of aesthetics but it is also an intellectual undertaking.
In this chapter, I intend to show the importance of history painting in the Enlightenment era and its
particular codes. More specifically, I will focus on the way Barry and David used these codes and modified
them to accommodate local history and universal moral concerns. I will also highlight their conception of the
artist’s role within society and the close links between painting, history and patriotism.
From the middle of the eighteenth century, the taste for rococo art was gradually replaced by a more
moralising style. As sensual and decorative as the rococo might have been, its aim was not to educate the mind
of the public. The philosophy of the Enlightenment prompted artists to produce a more profound and rich art
which would touch the viewers while educating them by giving them models of conduct. Or, as Diderot put it:
‘Bouleversez-moi, réduisez-moi en pièces, faites-moi frissonner, pleurer, trembler, mettez-moi en colère; puis
apaisez mes yeux, si vous le pouvez’ (Lee 2002, 15).
Anecdotes from the Greek and Roman mythologies were thus to be replaced by antique or biblical
heroic scenes. The subject of these scenes was taken from literary sources such as the Bible, ancient history
and epic poetry. The aim was to educate by showing man performing heroic deeds or in situations proving his
heroism and his greatness. History painting was considered as intellectually superior to other genres such as
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landscape or portrait painting which were only designed to please the eye but not enlighten the mind. The public taste did not follow immediately the advice of the intellectuals and the rococo kept selling well. In France,
King Louis XVI was the first monarch to encourage history painting because he thought that such painting
would legitimise and consolidate national identity. From 1775 onwards, he started granting more funding to
commissions of patriotic and didactic works, enabling history painting to blossom even in the public taste.
According to Sir Joshua Reynolds, painter and member of the Royal Academy, art should only be
devoted to representing the ideal, and leave aside the local and day-to-day activities. The neoclassical movement was based on the choice of universal themes which allowed artists to cross cultural and national borders.
In his book Discourses on Art (1769-1790), a collection of his lectures at the Royal Academy, Reynolds encouraged painters to rise above the local dimension so as to approach universal themes and aim at representing
forms that would be universally recognised. Many even thought that painting was writing for the illiterate and
that it was more easily understandable than words. James Barry compared painting and poetry, saying that
their methods and aims were similar. Both arts sought to create a certain image in the reader’s or viewer’s
mind, an image that should inspire as well as instruct:
All writers of character, who have employed their thoughts upon the productions of genius, are
universally agreed, that the essence and groundwork of poetry and painting is in every respect the same;
and Aristotle’s Poetics and Horace’s Epistle to the Pisos, will be found just as essentially applicable to
painting as to poetry. There is necessarily in both, the same glowing enthusiastic fancy to go in search
of materials, and the same cool judgment is necessary in combining them. They collect from the same
objects, and the same result or abstract picture must be formed in the mind of each, as they are equally
to be addressed to the same passions in the hearer or spectator. The scope and design of both is to raise
ideas in the mind, of such great virtues and great actions as are best calculated to move, to delight, and
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to instruct. In short, according to Simonides’s excellent proverb ‘painting is silent poetry, and poetry is
a speaking picture’ (Barry 1775, 107-8).
But Barry thought that visual art was superior to poetry thanks to its evocative power. ‘It is a mode of
communication as much superior to language, as the image of anything in a looking-glass is more satisfactory
and superior to any mere account of the same thing in words’ (Barry 1798, 63). For Barry, painting was the
noblest of all arts because of its capacity to call up associations of ideas more quickly than any other art. Reynolds even compared the aim of art to that of civic humanism. He claimed that both shared the same concern
for the public good. Art thus had noble aims and the artist should not create art for art but for higher purposes:
We pursue the same method in our search after the idea of beauty and perfection in each; of virtue, by
looking forward beyond ourselves to society, and to the whole; of arts, by extending our view in the same
manner to all ages and all times (Reynolds 1797, 134). The quest for the public good should prevail over that
of personal and domestic well-being. History painting should also avoid focusing on local forms or subjects,
and aim for an ideal and general model. These perfect situations were often taken from classical antiquity because enlightened philosophers claimed that history should not have a value in itself. The artist was expected
to struggle to overcome his or her desire to create art in order to succeed in educating the viewer. The artist’s
duty was more moral than historical. That is why the subjects of history painting had to be of classical origin
according to Reynolds, as they were supposed to inspire morals and virtue better than local history. Reynolds
even denies the interest of national history because he finds it too local and too trivial. Here is his criticism of
Dutch art:
The painters of the Dutch school have still more locality. With them, a history-piece is properly
a portrait of themselves; whether they describe the inside or outside of their houses, we have their own
people engaged in their own peculiar occupations; working, or drinking, playing or fighting. The cir-
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cumstances that enter into a picture of this kind, are so far from giving a general view of human life,
that they exhibit all the minute particularities of a nation differing in several respects from the rest of
mankind (Reynolds 1797, 69).
Dutch painters were too circumstantial. They did not look beyond themselves to society or aim at universal principles and forms. They rather emphasized their differences and originality. Reynolds considered
cultural and national specificities as trivial as day-to-day activities. These were not worthy subjects. Reynolds,
however, did not live up to his idealism and spent most of his time painting portraits. Still, there was no higher
vocation than history painting. Barry and David both subscribed to the humanist ideas of the Enlightenment
and to the taste for history painting because it emphasized the role of the artist who could not be considered as
a mere craftsman. According to Barry, the art of painting was devoted to the improvement of society and the
artist had a very important role to play in this process: ‘Our art has the glory of being a moral art, with extensive means, peculiarly universal, and applicable to all ages and nations, to the improvement and deepest interests of society’ (Barry 1798, 14). Painting was the most universal form of language and could thus be understood by anybody. It should then be used for noble purposes to improve society.
Luke Gibbons considers The Oath of the Horatii (1784-5) as the ideal formulation of patriotic virtue
(Gibbons 1991, 103-4). This work is often said to be the clearest statement of neoclassical painting because of
its stiffness and concern for patriotic duty. David took inspiration from the play Horace by the French playwright Pierre Corneille. It is widely celebrated for its enhancing of male virtues and civility. But the episode of
the oath did not exist in the play. David’s work conveys a sort of tension which makes it highly powerful. The
setting looks like a theatre stage. Horace’s three sons are pledging their allegiance to Rome even if this leads
them to fight the Curatii, hero of the city of Albano and their own brothers-in-law. The nation is more important than their own family. The painting is divided in two parts. On the left we can see the men and their patri-
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otic ardour and on the other, the women seem to be resigned to their fates. This conflicts with the rules of
unity. Moreover, the composition is not centred. David takes liberties with the traditional rules of the grand
style. This painting enabled him to be considered as the leader of a new school of painting in France. If the
work echoes the aforementioned concerns for virtue and civility, it is considered mainly as a fresh and striking
image by the public (Lee 2002, 93-5).
This work perfectly illustrates the rules of history painting, although the end of the Horatii’s story is
much more tragic than it seems when you look at the painting. All the Curatii are killed, the only Horace left
ends up killing his sister because she mourned her fiancé. The full story shows a form of patriotism where violence and death are the only possible ends, the price to pay for personal commitment. If Barry painted antique
works, he also started linking history painting and national identity very early in his life. He thus contravened
the rules of the genre, as he upheld that:
History painting and sculpture should be the main views of every people desirous of gaining
honours by the arts. These are tests by which the national character will be tried after ages, and
by which it has been, and is now, tried by the natives of other countries (Walker 1790, 22-3).
Barry thought that works of art not only proved the value of the nation but also emphasized its character and
its originality. In his book Inquiry into the Real and the Imaginary Obstructions to the Acquisitions of the Arts
in England, (1775) he claims that art can show the public what it should or should not do by offering them
images of beauty and deformity. These representations had to be adapted to each culture, as art could be moral,
sublime and civil only if it showed perfections that befitted the national character of each country. Barry
shared Reynolds’ ideals about the universality of art but, unlike him, placed it at the core of national construction. Reynolds’ ideal did not survive the American and the French revolutions which brought to the fore the
prominent importance of history as a living force. The use of the past by the various republican or reforming
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movements in France and in Ireland pushed history to the forefront. When one looks at works by Barry and
David, the coexistence of classical antiquity and contemporary events is striking.
From the 1750s, a new interest in national and local history emerged at the instigation of German historians such as Herder
*endnote 1.
Herder claimed that each culture was unique and original and depended pri-
marily on the characteristics peculiar to each people. He also believed that historians needed to move away
from the study of classical antiquity so as to avoid neglecting their own nations’ past. Each nation of Europe
should be studied for itself and not compared to any other. Herder criticized all universal values because he
held them to neglect the original spirit of each people. Irish historians retained from Herder the fact that each
people has its own original history that should be studied from within according to its own time and place.
They therefore tried to move local and national history back into the spotlight. But according to the advocates
of classical antiquity, national tradition was closer to superstition and fable than to history; it was not appropriate for the creation of an art with moral duties. Thomas Campbell claimed that the history of Ireland lacked
coherence and heroic or exemplary events. Irish history was too topsy-turvy for him; trivial events, he believed, were the only motives for war and not, as it should have been, moral action or motive:
There is no variety of events, no consecutive series of action, no motives to war, or inducements to
peace, but the adultery of some queen, the rape of some virgin, or the murder of some chief. In fine,
there is no exemplary morality, no colour of just history (Campbell 1777, 239).
Irish history does not seem worth representing on canvas when you read such a passage. More generally, local history could not be taken as a subject for history painting because it did not show heroic examples
that could inspire moral deeds. In the British Isles, Edmund Burke had a crucial influence thanks to his theory
on tradition. He claimed that tradition was based on the customs and wisdom inherited from the ancestors
(Dunne 1988, 72). Burke’s writings were considerably influential in the artistic field. He was Reynolds’ friend
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and Barry’s patron. He was so close to Reynolds that, at the time, certain commentators said that Burke had
actually written the Discourses on Art. What is clear though is that from 1776, Reynolds gradually broke away
from radical humanism to assert instead that the general or universal that we perceive is the remnant of traditions and customs (Reynolds 1797, 282). According to John Barrell, the American and French revolutions
forced art theorists to reconsider the interest of local and national history. Reynolds looked at the French
Revolution with fear and he certainly did not want his theory to justify such an event. Indeed, what suits the
French does not necessarily suit the British. The British national interest is not the same as that of the French
(Barrell 1986, 151).
In addition, some nationalist movements used the past to legitimize their action by asserting their continuity with the heritage left by glorious ancestors. If the Irish Patriots of the 1780s claimed their link with
classical Greece, the United Irishmen were the first defenders of cultural nationalism, emphasizing the traditional aspects of Irish society against the gradual Anglicisation and loss of identity that threatened it. In such a
framework, only national history could foster a feeling of belonging to a community. It was a living history
contrary to classical antiquity and it could put forward moral and national ideals.
In 1790, Joseph Cooper Walker published Outlines of a Plan for Promoting the Art of Painting in Ireland. In this book, he gave a list of possible painting subjects all taken from Irish history. He claimed that the
Irish nation was being formed and that the crossover between national characteristics and art would allow Ireland to assert itself as a strong nation on the European chessboard (Walker 1790, 5). At that time, some Irish
historians including himself tried to throw some light onto the history of their country in order to unite all
Irishmen around a common and original past which they could be proud of. He encouraged artists to read history books or to look for subjects of painting in the chronicles. Walker also believed that Ireland should follow
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the example set by the context of the European Enlightenment because the promotion of art, he thought, would
help to develop trade and enrich the nation in many ways.
Like James Barry, who he mentions in his book, Walker believed that history painting had a key role
to play because it unveils what is at the core of each nation. This is an example of a subject for history painting
recommended by Walker: ‘Saint Patrick encompassed with Druids, Bards and Chieftains, explaining the nature of the Trinity by means of the shamrock. A druidical temple overthrown, at some distance, the sun rising’ (Walker 1790, 32). The overthrown temple stands for the end of heathenism. But the scene proves that
evangelisation was achieved peacefully as Patrick explains the Christian creed to the druids thanks to the
shamrock. This is the representation of the fact that there was never a martyr in Ireland. The sun rises on this
scene of reconciliation announcing the advent of a new era for Irish history, one that blends the ancient Irish
virtues with those of the Christian religion brought from abroad. At the time of Celtic Christianity, the distinction between Catholicism and Protestantism didn’t exist. So the choice of this period to symbolise reconciliation is crucial.
Walker wanted to promote the national interests and thus went against the codes of history painting.
He tried to reconcile national awareness with the classical character and the search for virtue. Irish history was
also worth taking as a model of virtue. Towards the end of his life, James Barry painted The Baptism of the
King of Cashel by Saint Patrick whose subject had similarities with Walker’s hint at history painting. This
painting constitutes Barry’s contribution to the debate on the Union with England. Barry supported it and even
had expectations of it. But he also feared that the traditional vision of Irishmen as inferior to Englishmen could
endanger a project which should be based on achieving full equality for all citizens. The problem also existed
in the cultural field. Barry’s unfinished work supports the historians’ claim that Ireland’s pre-Christian (and
thus pre-Norman) culture is worthy of interest and even noble. Patrick and the king are clearly on an equal
footing. The king has a stoic attitude, bowing his head to be baptized *endnote 2. The ancient Irish were a civili-
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sation of cultivated warriors. The king is a young and strong warrior whereas the patriarch is old and wise.
Each of them seems to have something to learn from the other.
*endnote 3.
This baptismal scene symbolises the Anglo-Irish relationship as Barry understood it. Ireland
could take England as model but it also had to preserve its own dignity. Patrick represents the Latin contribution to Irish culture but the fact that the temple is on the left implies that it was not imported from England by
him. Temples and dolmens in the background show that the greatness of the pre-Christian past still matters.
Their presence also implies that Irish culture was as sophisticated as the classical culture before evangelisation. The juxtaposition of all these stages of civilisation shows the evolution of ancient Irish culture from the
dolmen to the temple. Barry re-created or, should we say, imagined a sort of continuity between the distant
past and the Ireland of his time. This also implied that Irishmen were as noble as their distant ancestors had
been. Some of them even showed their strength and endurance under the Penal Laws. This work shows the
union between pagan virtues inspired from the Irish past and Christian piety in a world on a heroic scale. It
also shows Barry’s expectations of the Union but also his concern about the treatment of the Catholic population within the framework of the Union*endnote 4.
In France, David’s situation was quite different. He had a better financial situation than Barry and his
reputation was well-established. First, David had not played an active role in the revolutionary process even
though he had supported it. In fact, he realised that the Revolution offered unique opportunities to history painters: ‘Il est de mon devoir de répondre aux nobles invitations de patriotisme et de gloire que suggère l'histoire
de la Révolution la plus heureuse et étonnante’ (Lee 2002, 133). David considered his art as a means of expressing his patriotism. Around 1790, he began a painting which was to commemorate a prestigious revolutionary event, The Oath of the Tennis Court. The painting is a politically-informed epic representation of the
event. The members of the Convention share their excitement at the decision they have just taken: they will
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give France a democratic constitution. David exhibited a preparatory drawing of the painting at the 1791 show,
together with a list of the characters. Many of these characters can easily be identified. In the foreground, three
clergymen, who have joined the Third Estate, are embracing each other fraternally, which symbolizes the advent of a new order in which divisions no longer exist
*endnote 5.
Around them, one can see deputies raising
their hats and arms to take the oath. The common people stand on the window ledges or on ladders to witness
the historical moment. David chose to represent the scene during a thunderstorm to enhance its dramatic tension. A violent wind blows through the curtains. This weather evokes the purification of the ground which is
regenerated after a thunderstorm (Lee 2002, 134-8). Unfortunately, David’s work was never completed. He
stopped working on it in 1792 because the reconciliatory vision of the Revolution and the national unity that
the painting was supposed to celebrate were now out of place. Some deputies had been compromised and the
Revolution had now become the matter of the common people that David had relegated to the position of simple spectators. Some time later, David decided to exhibit the preparatory drawings again as well as The Oath
of the Horatii. The two paintings are often compared because of their common epic representation.
Looking at these works by Barry and David, it seems clear that for them history painting is synonymous with personal commitment. Painting is not only a matter of aesthetics but it is mostly an intellectual undertaking. It shows the role that artists give themselves as history painters in society. They share a desire for
reconciliation within their respective societies.
The end of the eighteenth century witnessed the development of public opinion as an active force on
which the success of a work would now depend. David soon realised the importance of public opinion and
tried to integrate a narrative or present-day interest which would please the public and attract its attention (Lee
2002, 8). Barry was also aware of the importance of the public taste but his situation of Irish Catholic exiled in
London was not to his advantage for the recognition of his talent. Yet, Barry produced one of the first history
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painting cycles in Europe, The Progress of Human Knowledge and Culture, shown at the Royal Society of
Arts in London. The cycle covers the four walls of the Lecture room and is incredibly rich in terms of hints
and references. In 1866, the Redgrave Brothers, Richard and Samuel, described Barry’s immense work in the
following terms: “He thus completed an epic in art, unique of its kind, the first and, so far, the last, which his
country has produced” (Redgrave 1981, 81). This historical cycle shows the evolution of classical civilisation
to the viewer. The subject seems to be perfectly in accordance with the rules of history painting as depicted
earlier, but Barry also integrated comments on the relationship between England and Ireland, an Irish subtext
that has passed largely unnoticed until recently. He thereby hoped to inspire the public by giving them a moral
example to follow and by claiming his role as a guide within British society.
In this series, consisting of six pictures, I have endeavoured to illustrate one great maxim or moral
truth, that the obtaining of happiness, as well individual as public, depends on cultivating the human faculties.
We begin with man in a savage state, full of inconvenience, imperfection and misery; and we follow him
through several gradations of culture and happiness, which, after our probationary state here, are finally attended with beatitude or misery (Allan 2005, 52).
Barry claimed that patience, attention and some instruction were required to understand his art. He
supported initiatives to create museums or galleries to exhibit works. His work was profoundly didactic and
his aim was to transmit to the public his artistic vision of society and of a nation (Barry 1809, 277-80). He took
this idea a bit further by designing a work with multiple layers of meaning that could only be understood in the
light of his writings. His personal and artistic vision of the ideal nation was not perceptible at first glance. William Pressly showed that the historical cycle also has a profoundly Catholic meaning that Barry had to hide
from the Royal Society of Arts for fear that his work would be rejected (Pressly 2005, 47-55).
Towards the end of his life, Barry did not hide his disappointment at the 1801 Union. The promises
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made to the Catholic population had not been held. Barry’s disappointment at the Union appears obvious when
one looks at the drawing Passive Obedience (1802-1805). The man on the left is turning away from the big
black cloud at the centre of the composition which represents destruction and chaos. In the top right corner,
there are elements that represent the failure of civil society subsequent to the 1798 rebellion: gallows, cut-off
heads and the whip. There are also scenes looking like depositions which identify the victims as martyrs. The
details of the action are located on the sides. Characters symbolising the British oppression in Ireland can be
identified, especially former kings. Their status is visible because they carry sceptres. King James I carries one
which reads ‘passive obedience’ and ‘divine justice.’ This clearly mocks the claim that the right of kings is
inherited from the gods. Next to James, you can recognize Rubens, the official painter of the monarchy, and
Spenser, the famous author of A View of the Present State of Ireland, a book which describes the Irish as barbarians. Spenser is holding his book, The Faerie Queen. In the bottom left corner, there is a parody scene of
the Act of Union in which the oath is taken on a skull, symbolising the promise of death. This is also a reinterpretation of one of Barry’s works, The Act of Union. The male figure seems to be forced to seek the meaning
of all this outside the drawing. The subject of this painting is probably history itself that cannot be represented
in a fixed way like classical antiquity. Barry did not believe that the Union could ever benefit the Catholics. He
could see that Irish Catholics were still considered as second-class citizens and that the promised emancipation
had been crossed off the political agenda. He certainly hoped that this drawing would make people wonder
about the all these unkept promises.
The artist consequently held a very important role within the society, a role which endowed him with
a lot of responsibilities. David considered that works of art required a philosophical approach to life. Indeed,
he wrote that:
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Pour atteindre leur objectif, les chefs d'oeuvre doivent charmer autant que pénétrer l'âme et faire
grande impression sur l'esprit autant que la réalité. Aussi l'artiste doit avoir étudié tous les ressorts de l'humanité et doit parfaitement connaître la nature. En clair, il doit être philosophe (Lee
2002, 6).
A nation is not only formed by its people and by its history, it is also characterised by its creative force. The
link between artistic and historical experiences is a very important one to advance human knowledge according to French sociologist Mircea Eliade. It allows for the creation of ‘cultural values,’ whether they be expressed in art, in historiography or in philosophy (Eliade 1991, 113-5). During the Revolution, David portrayed virtue and patriotism and he glorified the revolutionary heroes while supporting the promise of social
change. After 1793, he was threatened because of his membership of the Convention and he decided to retire
from political life. He then decided to leave the portrayal of men behind to dedicate himself, instead to the sole
representation of ideas and principles. But he grew so impressed by the charismatic personality of Napoleon
Bonaparte that he soon became his official portraitist. He then started painting propagandist works such as
Napoleon Crossing the Alps at the Grand Saint-Bernard (1800). This painting portrays Napoleon as a hero, on
a reared up horse in stormy weather. This particular painting was criticised at the time because Napoleon
looked fixed and unnatural.
Both Barry and David were criticised because their art was considered too intellectual and thus somewhat unapproachable by the common public. Delacroix blamed David for his lack of technique and for the
stiffness of his paintings. In the British Isles, David was also known as one of the men who had sent Louis
XVI to the guillotine. His works were thus almost universally rejected. Barry’s works were often looked down
upon because they were too crowded with characters or topical references. Their meaning often went beyond
the limits set by the framework as they called forth a lot of thinking. Barry’s paintings cannot be understood at
first glance. Nor can they achieve a spatial and a temporal unity, as they gather characters from different peri-
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ods of time. Most critics could not separate Barry’s and David’s works from their political involvement, and
both painters were criticised on these grounds.
History painting forbade the representation of contemporary scenes or of living people unless they
were transferred to remote locations or distant times. David deliberately overlooked that code when he planned
to paint The Oath of the Tennis Court. This neglect made the painting lose a lot of its immediate interest when
the political situation changed, and so David gave up his project. Barry never represented contemporary scenes
in a plain way. Some of his drawings or paintings have a topical interest but it is integrated into a classical atmosphere or outlook. The Phoenix or Resurrection of Freedom (1776-1790) is a sort of indictment of England
in the context of the American Revolution. Liberty has fled to America and we can now see mourners on the
British shores regretting her departure and mourning the subsequent death of Britannia. Around her body are
gathered those who had worked for liberty according to Barry; Milton, the author of Paradise Lost, Andrew
Marvel, Algernon Sydney, John Locke and Barry himself. Freedom left, according to Barry’s painting, because British corruption had prevented her from blossoming:
O Liberty thou parent of whatever is truly amiable and illustrious, associated with virtue, thou
hatest the luxurious and intemperate and hast successively abandoned thy loved residence of
Greece, Italy, and thy more favoured England when they grew corrupt and worthless, thou hast
given them over to chains and despondency and taken thy flight to a new people of manners simple and untainted (Pressly 1983, 73-5).
Barry certainly knew that his attack was too direct because he did not sign this painting. He also gathered historical figures in his imaginary paradise in the painting Elysium and Tartarus or the State of Final Retribution,
the last painting of the historical cycle The Progress of Human Knowledge and Culture. This painting was
supposed to ‘bring together in Elysium those great and good men of all ages and nations, who were cultivators
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and benefactors of mankind’ (Allan 2005, 58). Among those historical figures, Barry had gathered people like
Galileo, Copernicus, or Henry IV. Barry was convinced that art and artists played an important role in society
by helping people to act so as to find happiness. David also defied the rules of history painting when he
painted The Oath of the Tennis Court, indicating a crisis in the system of pictorial representation and a crisis in
the institutions themselves. The fixed codes of history painting did not fit the reality of history anymore.
Both Barry and David were fully involved in their role of guide as artists within the society they lived
in. Beyond social recognition, they sought to communicate their artistic vision of the nation, regardless of artistic institutions. They wanted to inspire the public through their art. Barry was the only member of the Royal
Academy ever to be expelled. And he was so because his opinions were considered too democratic. David, as
a well-established artist, encouraged his pupils to cultivate the creative and intellectual side of their art despite
the opinion of the Academy according to which technique came first. Yet, we now admire both Barry and
David for their involvement in the history of their country, for their works that are both anti-establishment and
symbolic of the upheavals at work at the time. They tried to turn history painting into a contemporary and relevant genre, uniting universal principles with present-day events that they witnessed first-hand.
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Works Cited
Allan, David G.C., 2005. The Progress of Human Knowledge and Culture: A Description of the paintings by
James Barry in the Lecture Hall or “Great Room” of the RSA in London. London: The Basingstoke Press.
Barry, James, 1775. An Inquiry Into the Real and Imaginary Obstructions to the Acquisition of the Arts in England. London: n.d.
Barry, James, 1798. A Letter to the Dilettanti Society Respecting the Obtention of Certain Matters Essentially
Necessary to the Improvement of Public Taste, and for Accomplishing the Original Views of the Royal Academy of Great Britain. London: n.d.
Barry, James, 1809. The Works of James Barry. London: T. Cadell and W. Davis.
Barrell, John, 1986. The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt. New Haven and London: Yale
University Press.
Campbell, Thomas, 1777. A Philosophical Survey of the South of Ireland. London, 1777.
Dunne, Tom, 1988. “Haunted by history: Irish romantic writing 1800-1850”, in Porter, Roy, ed., Romanticism
in National Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dunne, Tom, 2005. ‘Painting and Patriotism’ in Dunne, Tom, ed., James Barry 1741-1806 ‘The Great Historical Painter’. Cork: Crawford Art Gallery and Gandon Editions.
Eliade, Mircea, 1991. La nostalgie des origines : méthodologie et histoire des religions. Paris: Gallimard.
Gibbons, Luke, 1991. “History, Art and Romantic Nationalism in Ireland” in Brady, Ciaran, ed., Ideology and
the Historian. Dublin: The Lilliput Press.
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Lee, Simon, 2002. David. Paris: Phaidon.
O’Halloran, Sylvester, 1778. A General History of Ireland from the Earliest Accounts to the Close of the
Twelfth Century. London: G. Robinson.
Pressly, William, 1983. James Barry, The Artist as Hero. London: The Tate Gallery.
Pressly, William, 2005. “Barry’s murals at the Royal Society of Arts”, in Dunne 2005, pp. 47-55.
Redgrave, Richard and Samuel, 1981. A Century of British Painters. Oxford: Phaidon Press.
Reynolds, Joshua, 1797. Discourses on Art. London: H. Morley.
Walker, Joseph Cooper, 1790. Outlines for a Plan for Promoting the Art of Painting in Ireland. Dublin:
George Bonham.
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Louis le Brocquy’s Philosophical Navigatio
Dr Paula Murphy, Mater Dei Institute of Education, DCU
Louis le Brocquy is probably the most celebrated Irish artist of the last century, and the commendations received on the celebration of his ninetieth birthday in 2006, including numerous exhibition retrospectives worldwide, and an RTE Arts Lives documentary dedicated to his life and work, confirm this estimation.
Since the 1970s, an important aspect of his work has been the portrait heads series, which is a collection of
paintings of famous artistic figures that includes Shakespeare, W.B. Yeats, Seamus Heaney, Samuel Beckett,
James Joyce and Bono, amongst others. Le Brocquy’s heads are not traditional portraits. On the contrary, they
conglomerate several images of the subject, often from different stages of life, into one painting. Moreover,
the representation is not realistic but an attempt to represent both the outer image of the subject and his inner
psychical world. Speaking of the portraits he states ‘I have encouraged differing and sometimes contradictory
images to emerge spontaneously’ (le Brocquy 2006, 22).
This chapter will examine le Brocquy’s portrait heads and his travellers series, arguing that they illustrate the Derridean undecidable: that which cannot conform to either polarity of a dichotomy. By exploring the
relationship between the artist and French philsophers Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan, I will show how
the portraits and paintings encourage exploration of the dualities of public perception and subjective reality;
psychical and physical worlds; objective time and time as perceived by consciousness; and self and other: the
other in the self, in culture and the artist as other. Further, I will suggest that le Brocquy’s heads epitomise Ireland’s postmodern condition because they have no fixed, stable anchoring point. As le Brocquy states, because
of photography and psychology, we can no longer portray the human being as static. Consequently ‘a portrait
can no longer be the stable pillared entity of Renaissance vision’ (Le Brocquy 1996, 15). What emerges instead is the collapse of objective and subjective realities, across time and space, onto each other, in a manner
that demands philosophical, as well as artistic, examination.
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Undecidability is a concept that Derrida elaborates in order to express the impossibility of defining one
aspect of a dualism without its necessary incorporation of the other aspect, often its opposite. The idea returns
in Derrida’s work in many different guises, such as pharmakon, hymen, and spectre. For example, Derrida’s
thoughts on ghosts and haunting play on the relationship between the spirit (Geist) and the spectre (Gespenst)
(Derrida 2006, 156). The spirit of the individual and his or her ghost seem mutually exclusive: spectres are
normally thought of as appearing after a person has died and their spirit has been extinguished. However, Derrida insists on the mutual dependency of the two terms. He states that, ‘The spectre is of the spirit, it participates in the latter and stems from it even as it follows it as a ghostly double’ (Derrida 2006, 156-7). Similarly,
the spirit cannot signify without a spectre, because, as Saussure argued, meaning is differential and not integral
to any one sign. The source of meaning is undecidable between the two terms, because both are necessary.
Indeed, the spirit, as spectre’s opposite, is itself haunted by its alternate meaning, because it can also mean
ghost or revenant. This idea is transposed by Derrida onto the concept of being itself. He argues that every
ontology (being) necessitates a hauntology: syntagmatic and paradigmatic signifiers through which the ontological entity is defined. He states, ‘To haunt does not mean to be present, and it is necessary to introduce
haunting into the very construction of a concept. Of every concept, beginning with the concepts of being and
time’ (Derrida 2006, 202).
Le Brocquy’s inspiration for the portrait heads series is traced back to what he calls a ‘blind year’ (Le
Brocquy 2006, 17), a year in which artistic inspiration was lacking. His wife, the painter Anne Madden, encouraged him to visit Paris, in the hope of stimulating ideas for new work. While there, he observed at the
Musée de l’Homme the Polynesian image of the human head, which represented for him, as his own heads do,
‘the mysterious box which contains the spirit: the outer reality of the invisible interior world of consciousness’ (Le Brocquy 2006, 17-18). In these portraits, le Brocquy attempts to bring together two opposed facets
of the self: the visible, tangible, physical head and the invisible, intangible, metaphysical mind. Like Derrida’s
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spirit and spectre, there is an undecidability between the two: without a physical casing, there could be no consciousness, no thoughts, no subjectivity; without consciousness, without a brain to send signals to the heart to
beat, the lungs to breathe, the mouth to eat, the physical self would die and the physical casing would dematerialise. Rather than seeing the two aspects of the self as radically different, to the extent that it is impossible to
represent the two in one image, le Brocquy’s portraits attempt to present the human head in both its aspects. In
the past, portrait painters represented that which was visible, presumably hoping to evoke aspects of their subject’s consciousness through the representation of their physicality. Le Brocquy paints that which is visible
and that which is ordinarily invisible. Through the translucent colours, the dashes of red which seem to connote muscle, tissue, and blood beneath the skin, the viewer gets a sense of looking at and into the head simultaneously. For le Brocquy, art has the capacity to inspire this alternative way of seeing, and to this end, he
quotes from William Blake’s poem ‘There is No Natural Religion’ that ‘Man’s perceptions are not bounded by
organs of perception’ (Blake 2000, 42). Blake and le Brocquy share a sense that seeing, touching or hearing
are only the physical elements of human perceptions. The paintings of both encourage the viewer to look not
only with their eyes, but with their imaginations. Blake stated that ‘The Nature of My Work is Visionary or
Imaginative’ (Abrams 2000, 37). So too is Le Brocquy’s. In fact, le Brocquy even presents art interpretation as
an irreducible tension beween its two necessary components: the ability to see (vision) and the ability to see
beyond (visionary). He states ‘I think of the art of painting as another way of seeing, another approach to reality – another porthole’ (le Brocquy 2006, 14).
Le Brocquy’s portraits do not only traverse the conventional boundaries between the physical and metaphysical dimensions of humanness, they also cross the boundaries of time as they are ordinarily conceived of in portrait painting. Instead of capturing his subject at a particular moment, le Brocquy’s method involves melding
images of his subjects from various points in life into the portrait, so that the ontology of the subject as it appears in the portrait is visually haunted by a variety of past images of that individual. In this way, le Brocquy’s
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portraits again attempt to represent consciousness. The consciousness of an individual at one moment in time,
his or her mode of thinking and sense of self, is shaped and moulded by past experiences, and conversely, past
experiences are retroactively re-narrated and re-worked in light of present circumstances. The past acts on the
present through après coup, or deferred action. As Lacan states, history as experienced by the individual is not
a chronological set of events but rather ‘the present synthesis of the past’ (Lacan 1987, 36). Le Brocquy describes how this sense of the contemporaneousness of various ‘pasts’ is brought about in his paintings of
Yeats:
The successive factual appearances of each one of us are necessarily dissimilar, since each one
of us has many layers, many aspects and none more than Yeats. In the one hundred studies towards an image of W.B. Yeats…I therefore tried as uncritically as I could to allow different aspects of Yeats’ head to emerge…in the hope of discovering a more immediate image – still and
free of circumstance – underlying the ever-changing aspect of this phenomenal Irishman (le
Brocquy 2006, 22-3)
This concept of time is linked with Yeats’ ‘circular lunar system of reincarnation’ (le Brocquy 2006, 20) and
the circular time of Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake that forever returns upon itself (Le Brocquy 2006, 18). But, in
relation to the portrait heads, it is also, and perhaps most importantly, a representation of the mechanics of
memory in consciousness itself; a representation of the fact that we do not remember the past in a linear way,
or even as a jumbled assortment of separate images, thoughts and feelings. Rather, past memories react with
and act on each other, and concurrently, these changeable memories are continually re-processed by the mind
in light of present conditions. Le Brocquy relates this to the concepts of emergence and disappearance, which
he sees as ‘twin concepts of time’. According to him, ‘one implies the other and… the state or matrix within
which they co-exist dissolves the normal sense of time’ (le Brocquy 2006, 19). Emergence and disappearance
are also related to art, because le Brocquy believes that he allows images to emerge from the canvas itself
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rather than transferring them from his mind, referring to images in painting as objets trouvés. Consequently, it
seems that painting, and perhaps art in general, may be a privileged mode for allowing conscious time to be
expressed.
Richard Kearney, in his article dealing with the crossover between the artistic endeavours of Joyce
and le Brocquy, points to inclusivity and inconclusivity as central connections between their work. Hauntings
of the past in the present, presented without hierarchy or centre-point is seen to be the common feature. He
states, ‘le Brocquy’s 120 studies towards an image of Joyce perfectly epitomize this multifacetted (sic) dissemination. These studies are incorrigibly inconclusive, no single image being capable or privileged isolation,
because Joyce’s own logos is an interminable navigatio or odyssey’ (Kearney 1987, 32). This sense of a journey without end is obviously true of the number of studies of individual subjects, but also in the sense that
each one is a conglomeration of the subject at different moments in life, showing his interior and exterior aspects. However, to take note of this feature of le Brocquy’s work only insofar as it corresponds with Joyce,
fails to do justice to the importance of this philosophical and artistic dissembling of spatiality and temporality.
On the subject of identity and its temporal dimension, le Brocquy’s artistic philosophy is also very much in
line with Derrida. For Derrida too, identity is never still for long enough to be captured or defined, although he
argues that it has proven necessary historically to think in this way, otherwise the endless change and variation
within individuals would make discussion about whole societies impossible. That there are any stable identities is a lie we must sometimes tell ourselves because to do otherwise would be impractical. The difficulty is
that this necessary lie becomes naturalized, so that over time, it masquerades as the truth without detection.
Because of the necessity of thinking in terms of stable identities, Derrida states that ‘I would interpret identity
as an artefact that I take very seriously, while trying to avoid its naturalisation or even ontologization. This
means that there is no identity, there is only identification or self-identification as a process’ (Derrida 2003,
25). Lacan makes a similar point about identity, which he describes through the metaphor of the grammatical
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phenomenon of the future anterior, in which the speaker refers to past, present and future simultaneously. For
example, the sentence ‘In decades to come le Brocquy will have been the pre-eminent 20th century Irish artist’
conforms to the future anterior. Lacan explains this process of identity formation, and its pan-temporal characteristic, as follows: ‘[w]hat is realized in my history is not the past definite of what was, since it is no more, or
even the present perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been for
what I am in the process of becoming’ (Lacan 1989, 94).
The difference between the stable identity projected onto an individual and the fluidity experienced by
the subject relates to another dualism that le Brocquy challenges: that of interiority and exteriority. For Derrida, the relation between an entity’s inside and its outside is one of supplementarity: each is the supplement of
the other. The fact that every entity requires a supplement to make it complete, means that the supplement
does not provide full ‘presence’ for the entity, but rather underscores the absence at its heart. The address that
Stephen writes for himself in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a good example of this logic: ‘Stephen
Dedalus, Class of Elements, Clongowes Wood College, Sallins, County Kildare, Ireland, Europe, The World,
The Universe’ (Joyce 1992, 15-16). He defines himself in ever-widening circles because each place needs
something else to give it full meaning or full presence as Derrida says. So it is with le Brocquy’s representations of the head’s inside as well as outside in his paintings. He imagines the human head as a ‘box which
holds the spirit prisoner, but which may also free it transparently in the face’ (le Brocquy 2006, 23). The cranium, the skull, holds the subject’s consciousness and supports its mask of skin: with these two elements to
control the rest of the body, there seems to be no need for another to sustain identity. Yet, le Brocquy’s statement implies the presence of another – for it to be known that an individual’s spirit is freed in his or her face,
another pair of eyes must be present.
Here, is it is clear that the portrait heads are ruled by the logic of supplementarity. That which is in-
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side the human head, experienced by the subject, is not enough to sustain consciousness: it must be supplemented by another person’s gaze, who recognises the individual, and through differentiation, allows the individual to recognise his or her own subjectivity. Le Brocquy claims that his portrait heads are an attempt to, if
not paint consciousness, then to acknowledge or ‘recognise’ this dimension of subjectivity: ‘Clearly, it is not
possible to paint the spirit. You cannot paint consciousness. You start with the knowledge we all have that the
most significant human reality lies beneath material appearance. So, in order to recognise this, to touch this as
a painter, I try to paint the head image from the inside out’ (le Brocquy 1992, 13). It is this consciousness that
requires the supplement of another to know itself. Lacan too, like Derrida, acknowledges the necessity for the
supplement of the other in order to acquire identity. For him, the need for another is thought of as a question; a
plea. He states, ‘What constitutes me as a subject is my question. In order to find him, I call him by a name
that he must assume or refuse in order to reply to me’ (Lacan 1989, 94).
The way in which the arbitrary division of the interior and exterior of the human head is deconstructed
in le Brocquy’s work is given an added dimension when the role of the painter as creator and/or discoverer of
the artistic image is considered. For le Brocquy, the face functions as ‘at once a mask which hides the spirit
and a revelation of this spirit’ (le Brocquy 2006, 24). Just as le Brocquy’s representation of the action of the
past on the composition of his portraits reflects the mechanics of memory in the conscious and unconscious, so
too does his concept of the face as that which, concealed and revealed, reflects the psychoanalytic view of how
the subject is structured. According to Lacan, the human mind has three distinct parts: the imaginary, symbolic
and real. The symbolic represents the socializing force at work on the individual through moral codes and cultural worldview. Language is both the channel through which these mores are transmitted and itself the ultimate structuring force on the individual. The imaginary is the realm of illusory identifications that is catalysed
in the mirror phase. Representing the whole, unfragmented self that exists before language has been acquired
by the child, is the real. The loss of the real causes a split in the subject, between the undivided self that is sub-
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merged out of conscious perception when the child accedes to language and the laws that go with it, and the
symbolic self constructed by and through language; the identity given to the subject by the collective symbolic
community. From this perspective, the social self may be the mask that le Brocquy refers to, and the real, the
revelation of that self, which may be glimpsed through his artistic depiction. This, perhaps, is what he refers to
as the ‘“whatness” of the image’, which is ‘the essence of the art of painting’ (le Brocquy 2006, 16).
However, le Brocquy also characterizes the subjects of his portraits as other: completely alien to the
self, as well as a reflection of self. As he states, ‘In this sense, you peer at this Other, searching for a larger
image of yourself’ (le Brocquy 2006, 24). That a painting can be a parallel and opposite of the self at once may
seem paradoxical, but in this case too, le Brocquy’s thinking is reflected in Derrida’s, for whom there is always an otherness within the self – in fact, this may be the self’s defining feature. According to Derrida,
A culture is different from itself; language is different from itself; the person is different from itself.
Once you take into account this inner and outer difference, then you pay attention to the other and you
understand that fighting for your own identity is not exclusive of another identity, is open to another
identity (Derrida 2001, 13).
Within the self, this otherness may well be the unconscious, what was referred to in Freud’s time as the
stranger in the house. Like Derrida, le Brocquy attempts to bring together both aspects of the mind, conscious
and unconscious, showing that the self is part of the other, and crucially, that the other is part of the self, evident in his assertion that ‘the painter continually tends to paint his self-portrait in all things’ (le Brocquy 2006,
26). Le Brocquy summarises his artistic philosophy of seeing beyond, being visionary; his attentiveness to
otherness, both external and internal, and the function of art in creating representations of both of these, when
he says: In the context of our everyday lives, painting must be regarded as an entirely different form of
awareness, for an essential quality of art is its alienation, its otherness. In art at most profound level, actuality –
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exterior reality – is seen to be relevant, parallel, but remote or curiously dislocated’ (le Brocquy 2005). For le
Brocquy, not only the painter or the subject, but art itself is a mode of otherness, in its relation to reality.
In his many paintings of the travelling community, le Brocquy espouses an awareness of a culture’s
difference from itself that Derrida recognizes, situating travellers as both part of Irish culture and also radically
different from it. Yvonne Scott writes that ‘the very earthiness of the lifestyle, the seeming closeness to nature and lack of inhibition, placed the Travellers at the furthest remove from the mundane trappings of settled
life’ (Scott 2006, 11). Le Brocquy himself refers to the travelling community as ‘outcasts in society’ (le Brocquy 2006a, 14). His travellers series can be regarded as representing the other of Irish society and he was careful to respect this otherness in his dealing with them, even to preserve it. In answer to speculations that he
lived with the travelling community for a time, he responds, ‘I learned almost immediately that I should not
become intimate with them – not try to become one of them, as it were’ (le Brocquy qtd. in Scott 2006, 12).
Here we see le Brocquy embracing social and cultural otherness, as he embraces the otherness of the self in his
portrait heads series. Scott suggests an analogy between the travellers’ ‘outsider’ status and le Brocquy’s position as a painter in Ireland. He came to the craft with no formal training, and in attempting to paint in a modernist style he was alienated to a degree by the conservative Irish art establishment. There can be no question
that socially and economically le Brocquy was far more privileged than the subjects of his traveller paintings,
but in terms of the artist, not the man, there is a correlation between the two. It begins with his view of the
traveller and the artist as ‘other’ of society and plunges, internally, to the otherness within the self, encapsulated in his portrait heads. Perhaps this is why he states that, “For me the Travelling People represented, dramatically perhaps, the human condition” (le Brocquy qtd. in Crookshank 1967, 8).
Le Brocquy goes a step further when he associates this otherness with divinity. In a typically deconstructive gesture, in his travellers series le Brocquy presented the traditionally-conceived primitivism of the
travellers as a form of divinity. Many traveller figures from the series are depicted with roughly triangular
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faces, an idea inspired by the faces of the Apostles on the Celtic High Cross in Moone, Co. Kildare (Scott
2006, 15-16). That an individual or group should be associated with the divine power of creation resonates
strongly with the work of the artist, through which a glimpse of transcendence may emerge from the hands of
a human rooted in the immanent. This theme is given substance in the painting Man Creating Bird, which has
been described as ‘the culmination of the Tinker series’ (Smith 1997, 28). Its carnivalesque quality may be
derived from the subject’s similarity to a puppeteer. A string is visible that trails from his right hand to the figure of the bird, which he holds in his left. In the lower left-hand corner, an object that could be a cracked eggshell seems to defy the title of the painting, which describes man as the bird’s creator. It is possible then, that
we can read this painting as indicative of desire for divinity; the fleeting glimpses of it within humanity, rather
than its possession.
It is unsurprising that travellers should be a metaphor for the creator, who is a metaphor for the artist.
For le Brocquy, it may be the concept of being an outsider that enables such a connection between these three
concepts. Scott claims that travellers can be regarded as ‘closest to the fundamentals of existence which have
spawned the originary myths of creation, procreation and death’ (Scott 2006, 11). I would argue that it is the
travellers’ liminality that connects them to religious myths: Jesus, after all, was an outsider in his own time: a
man of little means, from an ordinary family, whose very divinity alienated him in the most extreme way, from
human life itself. Adam and Eve, similarly, became outsiders on their banishment from Eden, displaced because of their desire for knowledge. Le Brocquy’s tapestry, Adam and Eve in the Garden, shows Eve picking a
piece of fruit from the tree, with Adam looking on, and suggests the couple’s impending isolation with the
ominous black swirls in the right-hand background. This desire for knowledge is equated with a desire for divinity in the biblical story. The serpent tells Eve about the tree of knowledge, saying, ‘in the day ye eat
thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be Gods’ (Genesis 3:5). The artist, and art itself, is necessarily other to society and reality, respectively. This otherness is seen by le Brocquy to be necessary for divin-
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ity, or, in secular terms, transcendence, such as that invoked by art.
It is possible that le Brocquy regards his traveller figures as providing an appropriate symbol for the
inevitable otherness of the human condition, because he believes that the implosion of ontological binaries like
those of past and present, interior and exterior selves, was, historically, part of the Celtic tradition which he
has inherited. Speaking of his work in relation to that of Joyce and Yeats, le Brocquy presents the collapse of
ontological binaries, mirrored in his own art, as distinctively Celtic: ‘Is this indeed the underlying ambivalence
which we in Ireland continue to stress; the continual presence of the historic past, the indivisibility of birth and
funeral, spanning the apparent chasm between past and present, between consciousness and fact?’ (le Brocquy
2006, 152). Although le Brocquy situates his artistic philosophy in Celtic tradition and history, he seems to
have anticipated a cultural movement, as his attitudes have more in common with postmodern Ireland than
they do with the Celtic past. His emphasis on difference as opposed to unity, and diversity as opposed to uniformity, resonates with the more liberal, more fragmented, but more heterogeneous culture which now characterizes the Irish nation.
Through exploring the philosophical implications of le Brocquy’s portrait heads series, his deconstructive approach to self and other, the other within the self, and the other in Irish culture, is evident. His undecidable dualities of interiority and exteriority, hauntology and ontology are echoed in Derrida’s deconstruction, and his views on consciousness, identity as a process, and the divergence between conscious time and
real time resonate with both Lacan and Derrida. In his portrait heads series and travellers series, he allows the
viewer to participate in his expedition into the self, his discoveries about the temporally and constitutionally
multifaceted nature of the internal world, and how that world relates to the world outside, in terms of art, society and culture. While Joyce’s Homeric journey was a literary one, le Brocquy’s ‘heroic voyage’ his
‘navigatio’ is both artistic and philosophical (le Brocquy 2006, 29).
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Works Cited
Abrams, M.H., ed., 2000. The Norton Anthology of English Literature (Seventh Edition), Vol. 2. New York:
W.W. Norton.
Blake, William, 2000. ‘There is no Natural Religion’ in The Norton Anthology of English Literature (Seventh
Edition), Vol. 2. Edited by M.H. Abrams. New York: W.W. Norton.
Crookshank, Anne, 1966. Louis le Brocquy: A Retrospective Selection of Oil Paintings 1939-1966 (exhibition
catalogue). Dublin: The Municipal Gallery of Modern Art; Belfast: Ulster Museum.
Derrida, Jacques, 1981. Dissemination. Translated, with introduction and notes by Barbara Johnson. London:
The Athlone Press.
Derrida, Jacques, 2003. Life after Theory. Edited by Michael Payne and John Schad. New York: Continuum.
Derrida, Jacques, 2006. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf with introduction by Bernd Magnus and Stephen Cullenberg. London:
Routledge.
Joyce, James, 1992. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Wane: Wordsworth Editions Ltd.
Kearney, Richard, 1987. ‘Joyce and le Brocquy: Art as Otherness’ in The Crane Bag Book of Irish Studies,
Vol. 2. Edited by Mark Patrick Hederman and Richard Kearney. Dublin: Folens, pp. 32-40.
Le Brocquy, Louis, 1992. 'An Interview with Louis le Brocquy by George Morgan', The Irish Landscape. Kinsale: Gandon Editions.
le Brocquy, Louis, 1996. 'An Interview with Louis le Brocquy by George Morgan', Louis le Brocquy, The
Head Image. Kinsale: Gandon Editions.
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Le Brocquy, Louis, 1983. ‘A Painter’s Notes on Ambivalence’ in The Crane Bag Book of Irish Studies, Vol. 1.
Edited by Mark Patrick Hederman and Richard Kearney. Dublin: Folens, pp. 151-2.
Le Brocquy, Louis, 2005. 'The Human Head: Notes on Painting & Awareness', 18th Distinguished International Department Lecture, Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (Dublin, 14 November) [http://www.annemadden.com/LeBPages/Quotes.html], accessed April 16th, 2008.
Le Brocquy, Louis, 2006. The Head Image: Notes on Painting and Awareness. Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art.
Scott, Yvonne, 2006. ‘Louis le Brocquy: Allegory and Legend’ in Louis le Brocquy: Allegory and Legend.
Limerick: The Hunt Museum, pp. 11-25.
Smith, Alistair, 1996. 'Louis le Brocquy: On the Spiritual in Art', Louis le Brocquy, Paintings 1939 – 1996
(exhibition catalogue). Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art
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Literary Encounters, ou quand la rencontre se fait littérature.
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Brendan Behan’s France. Encounters in Saint-Germain-des-Prés.
Jean-Philippe Hentz, Université Strasbourg II
In contrast to his featuring of Ireland and New York in Brendan Behan’s Island and Brendan Behan’s New
York respectively, Behan did not use France or Paris as subject for his books. However, France, Paris and the
district of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, a kind of village within the city, played important roles in Brendan Behan’s
development, particularly through, and on account of, the influences and personalities he encountered there.
Those experiences, enhanced by symbolical aspects of place which reflected and reinforced key characteristics
of his identity, convictions and literary endeavours, would enrich his subsequent writing.
There are very few well-informed sources about Behan’s stays in Paris and it is mainly in Confessions
of an Irish Rebel, the second volume of his autobiography, that some account of his Parisian adventures is to
be found. The very nature of autobiography suggests that, the author’s sincerity notwithstanding, the account
should be treated with a degree of caution and should not be accepted as totally factual. The need for such prudence is accentuated by the fact that Behan did not physically write this book. He dictated the material and
thus can be seen to have taken on a traditional storytelling stance, with all the liberties that such a role implies.
Brendan Behan’s France is first an ideal place, that of the Revolution and of the Republican ideals;
Paris is the town where the writer, free from any shackles of the past, can reveal himself to himself, and to
others. But the past is actually and unavoidably present, and Paris is haunted by the ghosts of Behan’s predecessors, with whom he has to compromise until he ultimately negotiates his own re-appropriation of that place.
It is through a prism of Parisian cosmopolitanism that the renewal and regeneration of his vision of Ireland are
accomplished.
Paris and the revolutionary writer
France and French Republican ideals
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The first encounter between Brendan Behan and France can be traced back to his childhood. Significantly, it
was a literary meeting. His father, Stephen Behan, read French books - in particular, Zola’s novels and Maupassant’s short stories - to his children. Stephen Behan was a house painter, but he was also an educated man
who had attended a Jesuit school and whose first ambition had been to enter the priesthood. He was eager to
hand down his knowledge and enthusiasms to his children. Thus, young Brendan, a bookworm, was introduced at an early age to the works of French writers, and also to the writings of Irishmen who had lived in
France. Pre-eminent in that latter group was Wolfe Tone who had recorded accounts of his visits to Paris between 1796 and 1798.
Tone was a founding member of the United Irishmen and an iconic figure for Republicans. In the Pantheon of the Behan family, and hence in the estimation of Brendan, Tone ranked highly. Brendan’s interest and
admiration can be deduced from his eagerness to contribute, at the age of fourteen, to an Irish Republican journal entitled the Wolfe Tone Weekly. Not alone had Paris been a place of refuge for Wolfe Tone, it was also the
cradle of his Republican convictions, and the launching pad from which he attempted to organise French aid
for Ireland’s independence struggle. Thus, through Tone, the French language, culture, history and capital city
were intimately linked with the Republican ideals that Brendan Behan shared with his family. Hence, Stephen
Behan’s desire to familiarize his children with French at an early age is actually rather more akin to a political
act than to the disinterested transmission of a certain erudition. This link between the French language and
Irish Republican ideals has its origins in the 18th century, when revolutionary France was seen as the country
which would deliver Ireland from the occupying British authority. France never actually accomplished that
task but the hope lived on and France was presented as “a brother country in religion, from which the liberating expedition can come some day,” *endnote 6. a myth that would, in time, give rise to a Republican and revolutionary ideal. The linkage between France and the Irish Republican struggle can be found in Brendan Behan’s
life, during the times of his imprisonment in Arbour Hill and the Curragh as result of involvement in IRA ac-
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tivities. His prison years, from 1942 to 1946, were periods during which he had opportunity to further his education, notably his knowledge of the Irish language, but also that of French. As he wrote to his cousin, Séamus
de Búrca, on 16th August 1943:
Ask Sean as well, to ask Fred if he has the Maupassant in the French because I’m learning it
now (not doing much good at it tho! Peadar O’Flaherty who teaches it, says I’m the laziest
bleeder God ever put life into! (Mikhail 1992, 24)
The “Maupassant” in question is apparently the one that his father used to read to him when he was a child,
but the passive child who listened without always understanding what was being read to him is now taking up
his father’s torch and is becoming an adult capable of acting on the text through his own reading – Behan had
become a student. These “studies” finally transform the prison into a kind of university, a place of learning
where knowledge is exchanged and where real lectures, such as those given by Peadar O’Flaherty, are organised. This representation of prison is quite reminiscent of that given by one of Behan’s mentors, Frank O’Connor, in An Only Child, the first volume of his autobiography: “In fact, [prison] was the nearest thing I could
have found to life on a college campus […].” (O’Connor 1970, 205)
Like O’Connor, who was imprisoned during the Civil War because of his Republican commitment,
Brendan Behan is a political prisoner who takes advantage of prison to have access to a knowledge which
might otherwise have been out of his reach. Moreover, the fact that he studies Irish and French at the same
time is far from being insignificant: both languages are inextricably associated with his Republican and nationalist political ideals; learning them implies as much a genuine interest as an ideological bias. As Behan would
amply prove in later years, this political predilection places him in the direct line of descent from the relationship that his father had with the French language.
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First encounter with Paris and birth of the writer
In 1948, Brendan Behan went for the first time to Paris, where he spent a few months. This stay happened
shortly after he had been released from prison where he had served four months for molesting a policeman.
Apart from a few short visits back to Ireland, Behan continued to live in Paris until 1950, and he subsequently
returned frequently to that city. His choice to settle in Paris may have arisen from several motives: his need to
go away from Ireland; the impossibility for him to go to Great Britain, where he was persona non grata; his
doubts concerning his vocation as a writer and consequently his desire to live in a town which had been the
refuge of numerous Irish writers such as Joyce, Wilde or Beckett. That latter reason is suggested by Colbert
Kearney in The Writings of Brendan Behan:
Paris had the reputation of being an artist’s city and many writers had served their apprenticeship
there. It might be what he needed: perhaps he could lose himself and his reputation in a new city and
release the artist in himself. (Kearney 1977, 32)
It may be claimed that his Parisian period allowed Behan to reveal himself to himself as a writer, and to move
from the orality of the raconteur and entertainer that he had been up till then, to more serious writing. This
would be the opinion of Ulick O’Connor in Brendan Behan:
Though he had begun for the first time to acquire a writer’s discipline in Paris, Brendan behaved from
time to time just as if he were back in Dublin. The difference was that in between bouts of drinking in
Paris he worked hard: before this in Dublin the only time he had found himself able to write consistently was when he was in prison. […] In Paris they were interested in what you had done, not what
you might do. It was a working writer’s city, with an indifference to reputation, especially to those
gained outside it, that bordered on the insular. Here Brendan formed habits of regular writing hours
and became aware of the need for re-writing. He worked at writing - as a craft and not as a means of
occupying himself when he wasn’t house-painting or drinking. When he finally settled back in Dublin
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in 1950 he was no longer just an entertaining talker who intended to be a writer: he was a writer who
liked to talk a lot. (O’Connor 1972, 140-141)
Indeed, it appears that it was in Paris that Behan began to work on the writing of Borstal Boy, of which Ulick
O’Connor says that “it took Paris to make him begin it.”(O’Connor 1972, 142) In addition, he started to write
for the theatre while at the same time working as a journalist. It was also in Paris that he wrote two short stories, A Woman of No Standing and The Confirmation Suit, which were published in 1950 and 1953 respectively. In the winter of 1952, Behan also published in Points, an English avant-garde journal in Paris, an article
about his being arrested in Liverpool at the age of sixteen. This article is in fact the earliest version of the
opening pages of Borstal Boy, the first volume of his autobiography that would be published in 1957.
If Paris as a place apart gave Brendan Behan the opportunity to develop and establish his status and
his vocation as a writer, that progress probably owed much also to his encounters with members of post-war
Parisian literary circles, groups that he assiduously frequented. On his arrival in Paris, as he recounts in Confessions of an Irish Rebel, Behan went straight to the district of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the Mecca of the
French and international intelligentsia of the time. For Behan, Saint-Germain-des-Prés actually becomes the
synecdoche of Paris and of France as a whole, all concentrated in essence in this district whose boundaries he
never seems to cross. The focus on area is reminiscent of a typical motif of working-class writing: the importance of the district and its components in the working-class culture. Behan transposes the approach onto this
part of Paris which becomes, in a way, the French equivalent of Behan’s Dublin locality. Moreover, Behan
categorically refused to be considered as a tourist in Paris, as can be read in Confessions of an Irish Rebel
when a young Irishwoman calls him a tourist:
I choked with indignation, and Desmond, Donal and George gazed at her with disgust. The foul word
that had just left her lips stamped her, in all our eyes, as a cad, or a caddess. It’s not a word used in
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polite society along the boulevards, unless you are speaking of somebody else, of course. (Behan
1967, 213)
The very formal vocabulary used in this extract suggests an ironic treatment of the haughtiness of the “polite
society,” an appellation which describes the cosmopolitan denizens of Saint-Germain-des Prés rather than the
local population. At the same time, it intimates a sincere feeling of belonging to this place that was his home as
a writer. That he was also an inhabitant of a space that he had purposely appropriated, and so became a citizen
of Paris, will be discussed later. Behan’s right to belong is substantiated by the degree of his integration into
the local community: he was friends both with Samuel Beckett and Albert Camus, notorious frequenter of the
Café de Flore and Les Deux Magots; he mixed with the Existentialists and in other literary and artistic avantgarde circles of the time; Boris Vian, a writer and musician, as well as a prominent figure in the night life of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés, translated Behan’s successful play The Quare Fellow into French.
Jean Genet – an intertextual encounter
The district of Saint-Germain-des-Prés provides Behan with a pretext for evoking the writer Jean Genet, who
was closely linked to Sartre. Although Behan never met Genet personally, it is possible to talk about a kind of
intertextual encounter between the two writers. Genet was a former thief who had spent several years both in
prison and in a reformatory that could be compared to a Borstal School. His experience of the reformatory was
turned into an autobiographical novel entitled Miracle de la Rose, published in 1946. Behan’s acquaintance
with that text is evidenced in Confessions of an Irish Rebel:
I had extracts of his autobiography read to me, some of which rose the hair on my head. And, as my
mother once remarked, that which would shock Brendan Behan would turn thousands grayes. (Behan
1967, 173)
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If this sometimes very blunt and frank narrative may have shocked Behan, I would argue that – contrary to
Ulick O’Connor’s assertion – he had nonetheless a real admiration for Genet and that Borstal Boy was influenced by Miracle de la rose. Indeed, if books such as the autobiography of Wolfe Tone, Mitchel’s Jail Journal
or Tom Clarke’s Glimpses of an Irish Felon’s Prison Life have been considered as sources of inspiration for
the writing of Borstal Boy, the fact is that Borstal Boy actually quickly deviates from narrative codes of that
type although it may have initially echoed or followed them. Thus, like in any prison life narrative, the opening pages of Borstal Boy deal with Behan’s arrest, trial and imprisonment, alluding to everything that happened in his life before these events and portraying a character ready to fight and to sacrifice himself in defence of a cause. This posture, or pose, disappears with Behan’s entrance to Borstal and it is replaced by a very
positive representation of incarceration, in which political convictions seem to take a back seat while emphasis
is placed on good-companionship, friendship and the initiation of the young man. That approach corresponds
more closely to the codes of the Bildungsroman than to those of the prison life memoir.
If the theme of homosexuality, omnipresent in Genet’s book, does not appear in Behan’s autobiography or at least not as obviously so, there is nevertheless a certain resemblance between Miracle de la rose and
Borstal Boy. Both texts share the themes of the beauty of youth and, within the fenced-in worlds of these institutions, the themes of the closeness of the friendships and the microsocieties which are formed therein, all with
their own rules. Besides, in Confessions of an Irish Rebel, Behan draws a kind of parallel between Genet’s
situation and his own:
[Genet] was a burglar for many years and also a poet. He was arrested many times for breaking and
entering and each time refused to recognize the Court. […] Monsieur Genet told the Court that he
robbed as an existentialist, and had a conscientious objection to keeping his hands easy. In a less civilized country, he would have been engaged in the production of mailbags, four stitches to the inch.
But Sartre and a number of other writers demanded that they leave the boy alone. And he is now an
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honored French writer, a credit to his country and the proprietor of an estate in the country. (Behan
1967, 172-173)
Even though Behan and Genet were not arrested on similar charges, it should be noted that Behan, like Genet,
had refused on several occasions to recognise the court before which he appeared, and had also asked for his
trials to be held solely in the Irish language. An instance of these demands is recorded in Confessions of an
Irish Rebel. The occasion is that of Behan’s 1942 trial for involvement, with several of his IRA comrades, in a
shooting at Glasnevin cemetery:
As we were soldiers of the Irish Republican Army we refused to recognize the Court, and the Court
entered pleas of “not guilty”, after it had been established that we were of right mind. (Behan 1967,
72)
Behan’s expressed motivations are rather political while those of Genet tend towards the philosophical, but
both of them express the same intent to defeat a legal system that can be seen as incompetent or without jurisdiction because it considers as an offence or a crime what the defendants present as legitimate actions that are
in keeping with their convictions.
The consequences of courtroom defiance were not, however, the same for Behan as for Genet. The
support for Genet from Sartre and other intellectuals of the time promoted recognition of his talent and of his
status as a writer. As for Behan, he went to prison to stitch mailbags. Indeed, when he says that “[i]n a less
civilized country, he would have been engaged in the production of mailbags, four stitches to the inch”, he
actually refers to his own experience and thus may be seen as introducing a subtle, and possibly bitter, criticism of an under-civilised Ireland that is incapable of recognising the talent of its own writers. The purpose is
less to shower praise upon France than to use that country as a counterpoint to Ireland which, quoting Seán O
Casey, he reduces to “a great country to get a letter from.” (Behan 1967, 215)
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Paris and the ghosts of the past: encounters and confrontations
Paris or the ideal Ireland
Over decades and generations, France, and Paris in particular, provided refuge for exiled Irish writers and allowed publication of works which would not have been possible in the environment of censorship at home.
However, Paris like London or New York also became a kind of double of Dubln in the negative, a place
where writers like Brendan Behan went in search of an ideal Ireland in which they would actually have a
place. In Inventing Ireland, Declan Kiberd identifies 1892 as the year when Paris took London’s place as a
refuge for the Irish writers. It was in London in that year that Oscar Wilde was not allowed to stage his play
Salomé. Consequently, he had Salomé published in Paris with “the assertion that Paris was now the true home
of personal freedom.” (Kiberd 1996, 161) According to Kiberd, this event was a turning point: “Certainly, the
axis which had once run from Dublin to London now ran [run] from Dublin to Paris instead.” (Kiberd 1996,
161)
Thus Paris became the place where the Irish writer could, at the same time, go in search of himself
and build up his own ideal Ireland. This is clearly expressed in Confessions of an Irish Rebel when Behan
evokes Paris through the more or less famous Irishmen who lived there:
[…] I knew I would come back to France, which I had grown to love very dearly and felt was
part of my inheritance. After all, you might say that the Latin Quarter was bounded by the Rue
du Bac on the northwest by the river and the Irish college on the southeast at the Rue des Irlandais, up behind the Pantheon, where Wolfe Tone plotted to free a people and destroy an empire
on one hundred guineas and a hard neck, and where students waved their black shovel hats and
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cheered John Mitchel, the old Republican Ulsterman, son of a Unitarian minister, who wiped his
eyes from the warmth of a Papist welcome.
“Always Ireland with your people,” said Jeus. “You think everything in regard to yourselves.”
Even the French Revolution, and who is more entitled? It was an Irishman led the people in the
attack on the Bastille. He was a Wexfordman and a cobbler by the name of Kavanagh. (Behan
1967, 180-181)
The Latin Quarter is truly transfigured and re-appropriated by an Irish reading of its geography. It becomes the
ideal Ireland of Brendan Behan: a Republican, revolutionary Ireland, where religions are not sources of conflicts and where the heroes are still alive. Furthermore, the allusion to the Pantheon is quite revealing: this
place, where the key figures of the French history of the last two centuries are buried, also seems to encompass
in its aura the names of the Irishmen who marked the Republican struggle. This is in keeping with the ideological dimension of France, seen as a symbol of the Republican ideals and thus as a part of Behan’s
“inheritance”. Jeus’s comment, “Always Ireland with your people […] You think everything in regard to yourselves”, rather suggests a kind of Irish national egocentricity, but does actually not correspond to the spirit of
what Behan says. It seems clear that there is no intention to relate everything to oneself, but rather to go in
search of oneself, to find again the source of a national identity which also includes cosmopolitanism.
This idea of an identity which would be both national and cosmopolitan is very evident in Behan’s
works, as it already was in those of Joyce and O’Casey. Most notably, it is apparent in the chronicles that Behan wrote for the Irish Press from 1954 onwards and which are anecdotes about Dublin life and the urban culture. Those chronicles put Behan into the position of an “urban raconteur”, in the words of John Brannigan
who also notes in Brendan Behan: Cultural nationalism and the revisionist writer that:
[These anecdotes] functioned as a site of definition, recollection, debate and comparison, in which
[Behan] identified Dublin with the metropolitan street cultures of Paris, New York and London, with
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the post-war drive for urban regeneration which was sweeping changes across Europe, and with the
potent legacy of the cultural and political revival which had transformed Ireland in the early decades
of the twentieth century. (Brannigan 2002, 74-75)
We may find in this type of writing what was already in embryo in Behan’s relation to Paris, that is a hybridization of the national and international, traditional and urban cultures. Like the re-appropriated geography of
the Latin Quarter, this hybridization allows the writer to look at the world around him, and particularly at Ireland, in a critical way, while at the same time remaining strongly attached to his national culture.
However, if France is a place from which one might take a critical look at Ireland, the reverse is also true. This
appears for example in Behan’s use, or sometimes counter-use, of the Irish language, as John Brannigan remarks:
Behan used his poetic writings in Gaelic as a space in which to experiment with the relationship
between style and contemporary themes, between the apparent solidity of traditional forms and
the ‘shocking’ or disorientating effects of new experiences and materials. (Brannigan 2002, 65)
What John Brannigan describes is clearly apparent in the poem entitled “Oscar Wilde”, whose title and subtitle
are in French and whose text is in Irish. It is also evident [Gaelic, or] in the French title of the poem
“L’Existentialisme”, that is subtitled in English “An Echo of Saint-Germain-des-Prés,” and the main text of
which is in Irish. This poem mocks the Sartrian philosophy, which was quite fashionable at the time of Behan’s first stay in Paris and which Behan considered as laughable, as can be inferred from the last lines of the
poem :
[…] there’s not a bit
Of sense or pain, still less
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Truth, in what I say
Or in the opposite way. (O’Connor 1972, 125)
The use of three different languages to write this poem could be explained in the following way: Existentialism, because it is above all a typically French issue, does not translate into another language, which ironically
suggests that one has to be French to understand that way of thinking. But Existentialism also established the
international fame of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, a phenomenon which is suggested by “An Echo” in the English
subtitle. However, in English, the understanding of what is Existentialism has already become superficial; it is
now a mere echo, the reverberation of a thought, an empty shell. Through rendering the body of the poem’s
text in Irish, Behan highlights what he deems to be the absurdity of this philosophy, and he mocks a sterile
quest for meaning and an intellectual pose which is not based on anything tangible. This poem is actually quite
reminiscent of the Gaelic satires of the 17th century, a tradition which Behan takes up, not to apply it to a local
Irish element this time, but to a Parisian and cosmopolitan culture than can be deciphered and possibly criticised through this traditional writing approach that, in turn, reinforces the discrepancy already suggested by
irony.
Encounters with ghosts
If France and Ireland have a dig at each other in Behan’s works, it may be attributed to the hardships of the
exiled writer, and to the disillusionment that Behan underwent in France, as he had done at home. Apart from
purely financial worries (which led him to undertake activities that were only barely legal) Behan was also
confronted by the sometimes oppressive presence of the ghosts of his Irish predecessors. Foremost among the
ghosts were Oscar Wilde, and especially James Joyce. In Brannigan’s opinion the works of Joyce, and also in
Ireland itself, those of the writers of the Revival, were raised almost to the status of literary norm, thus exert-
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ing such an influence that succeeding writers finally considered themselves as parasites. For instance, Behan
recounts in Confessions of an Irish Rebel how he was asked, in the Parisian bars, to talk about Joyce and Ireland. This request was repeated so frequently that he eventually wrote a poem entitled “Gratitude to Joyce,”
*endnote 7.
because talking about Joyce and Ireland was a good way for him to be offered drinks by his audi-
ence :
Here in the Rue St André des Arts,
Plastered in an Arab Tavern,
I explain you to an eager Frenchman,
Ex-G.I.s and a drunken Russian.
Of all you wrote I explain each part,
Drinking Pernod in France because of your art.
(O’Connor 1972, 136)
It can be inferred from those six first lines of the poem that Behan, while anxious to escape from the oppressing influence of his illustrious predecessors and simultaneously hoping that Paris would be the place where he
could be free from that weight, is finally confronted with James Joyce’s omnipresence. This could explain the
attraction for him of cosmopolitanism and the search for other models, like Genet. Both pursuits would help to
resist this omnipresent shadow and avoid what John Brannigan calls the “culture of indebtedness” *endnote 8 :
In [‘Gratitude to Joyce’], Behan reveals his anxiety about his parasitical relationship to Joyce,
living (or in this case drinking) off the stories that he can tell to foreign audiences eager to hear
about the great Irish author. Behan is describing the sterile function which he performs, reduced
to glorifying [glorifying] the works of the dead in return for the anaesthetic rewards of drunkenness. (Brannigan 2002, 33)
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However, it is the international renown of writers such as Joyce and Yeats which contributed towards making
Ireland one of the vibrant centres of contemporary Western literature. The corollary of that status is that later
writers, such as Behan, stood to benefit from this renown, and to profit by the achievements of their predecessors. This intergenerational reciprocity is acknowledged by Behan in the last lines of the same poem:
If I were you
And you were me,
Coming from Les Halles
Roaring, with a load of cognac,
Belly full, on the tipple,
A verse or two in my honour you’d scribble.
(O’Connor 1972, 136)
The end of the poem attempts to redress the balance through the ostensibly casual way in which Behan puts
himself on an equal footing with Joyce. This postulated equality and reciprocity highlights the opportunistic
nature of Behan’s processes, since he finally cashes in on Joyce’s image more than he actually suffers from it.
It would appear that, if one accepts that the “parasitical relationship” evoked by Brannigan effectively exists, it
is provoked less by the agonizing influence of the past than by the law of supply and demand. Indeed, in a very
pragmatic way, Behan supplies Irishness when there is a demand for Irishness, provided that he is paid for it.
This idea of a commercial transaction, and of literature reduced to a token for barter or commerce, is
metaphorically expressed in the “pornography” Behan claimed to have written for French magazines and in his
alleged activity as a pimp in Paris over a few months. There is actually no trace of substantiating evidence for
the truthfulness of these assertions. Yet, one may nevertheless consider that Behan told the truth, but in his
own way, a feature that, according to Ulick O’Connor, is typical of his writing:
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It is inherent in Brendan’s style of recounting autobiographical episodes that he slips easily into
the story-teller’s device of exaggeration for the sake of the effect on the listener. (O’Connor
1972, 55)
Taking this peculiarity of Behan’s style into account, and bearing in mind his quality of “urban raconteur,” one
has grounds for assuming that “pornography” in this case refers to the parabolical writing of the confrontation
of the writer with the reality of a work which, like pornography, implies the production of purely commercial
written works, devoid of any artistic pretension, such as journalism for instance. Indeed, in Confessions of an
Irish Rebel, the act of writing pornography is directly linked to journalism:
George explained over breakfast that one of his extramural activities was writing pornography,
and if ever I was in the need, it would be no trouble to put the writing of one or two articles in
my way. (Behan 1967, 180)
or:
After I had agreed to write pornography in English for French magazines and poems in Irish and
stories in English for the American magazine, Points, we settled down to more serious business.
(Behan, 1967, 211)
These two extracts clearly link pornography to a certain kind of journalism. Notably in the first one, the word
“articles” rather refers to journalism than to pornographic writing, with which one might sooner associate the
word “stories.” Hence, although Behan may actually have written pornography for French magazines, this formulation could also refer to a form of literary prostitution. The comparison is particularly reminiscent of The
Catcher in the Rye, a book that Behan especially liked. At the beginning of that novel, Holden Caulfield talks
about his brother, D.B., a writer who lives in Hollywood where he writes scenarios for the cinema:
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[D.B.] used to be just a regular writer, when he was home. […] Now he’s out in Hollywood,
D.B., being a prostitute. (Salinger 1991, 1-2)
The motif of prostitution appears in Confessions of an Irish Rebel when Behan recounts the period during
which he supposedly worked as a pimp in Paris, mostly “providing” American punters. In fact, in a quite revealing way, it is also in this episode of the book that he recalls the evenings he spent talking about his native
soil:
“That the giving hand may never falter,” I would say, as the Americans peeled off a few dollar
notes for my trouble, and I would entertain the astonished company with songs about my native
land. Rich in liquor, my voice carried round the room. (Behan 1967, 216)
The transaction between the pimp and the punter, and that between the storyteller and his audience, are effected simultaneously, as if they were one and the same deal. While it cannot be asserted with certainty that
Behan actually was a pimp for Parisian prostitutes, it can surely be claimed that he undoubtedly felt like the
pimp of Joyce and Ireland, which he would sell to the highest bidder. But this “commerce” allowed him at the
same time to part with an unwanted inheritance, to take away its sacred aura and to replace it with a chosen
inheritance.
Brendan Behan’s France, the symbol of the Republican struggle and the refuge of Wolfe Tone, the
hero of his youth, thus also became the symbol of (and the location for) his emancipation as a writer. The liberating force of his Parisian experience actually allowed him to carry out a necessary metamorphosis from
raconteur to writer, and to free himself from sometimes stifling literary influences in order to go and find his
own style of writing. If Paris was the place where Behan was confronted with the difficult everyday reality of
a writer-to-be, it also provided him with a second home, the district of Saint-Germain-des-Prés which became,
in his own words, a part of his inheritance, a constituent element of his identity. In the mirror held out to him
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by Paris, it is finally himself that Behan encountered, or rather the writer that he had carried within himself at
his arrival and who found in Paris the propitious conditions for his expression.
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Works cited:
Behan, Brendan, 1990. Borstal Boy, London: Arrow Books.
Behan, Brendan, 1967. Confessions of an Irish Rebel, New York: Lancer.
Brannigan, John, 2002. Brendan Behan: Cultural nationalism and the revisionist writer, Dublin: Four Courts
Press.
Genet, Jean, 2002. Miracle de la Rose, Paris: Folio.
Jeffs, Rae, 1968. Brendan Behan: Man and Showman, Cleveland; New York: The World Publishing Company.
Kearney, Colbert, 1977. The Writings of Brendan Behan, Dublin: Gill and Macmillan.
Kiberd, Declan, 1996. Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation, London: Vintage.
Lambert, Pierre-Yves, 2004. “Images de la France dans la littérature gaélique moderne”, Entrelacs francoirlandais, ed. Paul Brennan, Caen: Presses Universitaires de Caen, pp. 197-209.
Mikhail, Edward Halim (ed.), 1992. The Letters of Brendan Behan, London: Macmillan Academic and Professional LTD.
O’Connor, Frank, 1970. An Only Child, London: Pan Books.
O’Connor, Ulick, 1972. Brendan Behan, London: Coronet.
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Salinger, J. D., 1991. The Catcher in the Rye, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1991.
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Between the Idea and the Reality. John Broderick and the French Connection.
Peter D.T. Guy, National Centre for Franco-Irish Studies, ITT Dublin
In an article for The Sunday Independent, Brighid McLaughlin wrote:
In Seán’s Bar in Athlone, I wondered who would remember Broderick. Dr. Harmon Murtagh was not
optimistic.
“If you walk down Church Street and ask the first ten people who John Broderick was, I’d be surprised if they’d know.”(McLaughlin 1998, 1-6)
John Broderick’s (1924-1989) legacy to Irish literature is not so much his dedication to the craft, or indeed his
craftsmanship, but his role in the shaping of the modern Irish novel. He despised the hypocrisy of the provincial bourgeoisie, and was one of the first to make a homosexual his central protagonist. In doing so he faced
the wrath of the clergy – we might think lightly of the eponymous brandishing of the crozier today, but in the
Ireland of the early sixties, it was, if nothing else, an audacious piece of brinksmanship. Of course, he could
afford to be somewhat blasé when facing down our cultural totems – unlike John McGahern or Francis
McManus he was not reliant on the State for financial support as his family owned one of largest bakeries in
the midlands. After his first four novels were published to critical acclaim, his work became more embittered,
more insular but he was never forced to ameliorate the standards of his work. Rather, he blithely continued on
writing bad novels, retreating further into the literary backwaters until, by the time of his death, he was all but
forgotten
*endnote 9.
For the purpose of this chapter I wish to discuss Broderick’s first novel, The Pilgrimage, and his
Franco-Irish influences that impacted on its composition. If Broderick has any immediate literary consanguinity, it would be in the European tradition and, foremost, the French Catholic writers. The term in itself is contentious. Broderick’s great literary hero was François Mauriac, scrutinizer of the coeurs inquiets and practitio-
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ner of a complex religious plerophory that defies any simple elucidation.
I have little doubt that Broderick used Mauriac’s early novel Le Baiser au Lépreux as the basis for The
Pilgrimage; Noémi d’Artiailh, married to the repulsive cripple Jean Péloueyre for prestige and monetary accruement, bears a striking similarity to Julia Glynn. Both Michael Glynn and Péloueyre share a penchant for
martyrdom; Péloueyre goes so far as to deliberately contract tuberculosis on account of his disfigurement.
Jean’s trip to Paris proves the epiphany that is only hinted at in The Pilgrimage, but in both instances the
reader must decide on the motives of the leading players.
A second literary influence would most likely lie in the Realist canon. If the French Catholic writers
spoke of the necessity of emerging from Balzac’s shadow, they, as other French writers would discover, were
never wholly successful in their aspirations. Balzac looms large over the writing of Mauriac; they share the
same preoccupation with human emotions, with provincial life and mundane routine, with physical and material captivation, with psychology and introspection — particularly in regards to the feminine subconscious –
and a preoccupation with the possibility of salvation, even with spirituality.
It is curious how often the name of Balzac crops up in connection with Broderick. The Daily Telegraph’s obituary for the writer on the 31 July 1989 states that: ‘He thought of himself as a kind of minor Balzac of the Irish midlands.’ Elsewhere, in a review in The Irish Independent (27 January 1973) of his fifth
novel, An Apology for Roses, Hugh Leonard commented upon the ‘black-souled, pietistic, money-grubbing
denizens of a landscape as materialistic as Balzac.’ Benedict Kiely, again in a review for An Apology for
Roses, spoke of Marie Fogarty’s rapacious behaviour in the following terms: ‘This is as brutal as Balzac, who
among novelists, is still the best man on money and what it can do, and what men and women will do for
it.’(Kiely 1973)
To broach both these fields - and in one essay - I will be leaning upon the work of the American critic,
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Leo Bersani, whose forte lies in the area of psychoanalytical realism. Bersani has made a habit of treating fictive characters as though they were patients and the critic the analyst. In his A Future for Astyanax: Character
and Desire in Literature, Bersani focuses upon the concept of desire as the central tenet in exploring character
and identity in realist narratives. (Bersani 1969) According to Freud, desire represents one of the major determining forces in language and symbolic interaction. (Freud 1952, 62-63) The repression of desire forms the
cornerstone for psychoanalysis – the great duality of want or fantasy in conflict with social or sexual constraint. For Bersani:
Desire is a threat to the form of realistic fiction. Desire can subvert social order; it can also disrupt
novelistic order. In formal terms, disruptive desire could be thought of as a disease of disconnectedness in a part of the structure which rejects being defined by its relation to other parts and asserts, as it
were, a scandalous affinity with elements alien to the structure. (Bersani 1969, 66)
I chose the medium of psychoanalytical criticism for much this reason. Bersani speaks of the realist novel’s
ambivalence in relation to ‘heroes of desire.’(Bersani 1969, 67) Confrontation in the realist novel habitually
erupts when the protagonist clashes with the strictures of social containment (Bersani 1969, 73). Bersani
speaks of the realist authors’ penchant for ‘castrating desire’ in much the same way that Freud referred to the
castration complex in his essays on the theory of sexuality – if society is phallocentric, then the subject defends himself against the contradictions which result from observation, a conflict that is abandoned only after a
severe internal struggle. (Freud 1952, 241-260) I will go into further detail on this matter later in this chapter;
for now, suffice it to say that I chose the psychoanalytical approach in relation to John Broderick, because of
the notable presence of rebellious or iconoclastic heroes in his fiction.
Broderick’s characters founder under the austere climate of social and religious probity. Homosexuality is seen as a disease that is to be exorcised; something malevolent that threatens to disrupt the social order.
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For Broderick, sexuality was about subjugation or it was seen as something unbridled that was recurrently
hammered by the Catholic Church until it was reduced to an act of indecorous perversion. In The Pilgrimage
there are scarcely any relationships that could be termed ‘loving’ (Murray 1992, 20) People marry for money,
property and social advancement. Sex is almost bestial, in that it is all flailing limbs and darkened rooms reeking of uninhibited concupiscence. Should it fall into dissolution, Broderick’s heroes are arbitrarily dismissed
from the narrative. Nevertheless, in their departure, they attain a grace denied to them by the society that castigates them for their dégagé attitude – it is a small thing perhaps, for in Broderick’s novels conformity and desire are forever at odd with one another. He offers no compromise to this particular pons asinorum; for Broderick, as life mirrors art, struggled vainly with a fervently Catholic outlook and a sexual proclivity that was forever open to boundless speculation.
In his article in Eiré-Ireland, Patrick Murray writes: ‘A critic with a taste for the psychoanalytical interpretation of authors and their work would certainly be tempted to read Broderick in Freudian
terms.’(Murray 1992, 31) The danger of this approach is falling into psychobabble, thereby reducing Broderick’s work to crude adumbrations, where his beloved mother is centred behind the text with the author too
frightened to bring his female characters ‘into’ the family home, condemning them forever into a sort of literary exile, a half-way home for fallen women. Broderick may have had, as Murray suggests, an oedipal complex but in comparison, his work is no more misogynistic than other writers of his generation. It does not excuse his penchant for female deprecation, nor should it be overly belaboured. The primary section in this chapter will utilise Bersani’s treatment on Flaubert in a comparative study of The Pilgrimage *endnote 10. His work on
the centrifugal pull in literature helps open up the possibility of non-referential criticism of the self, a criticism
that strips bare the belief that the antecedent source is more pertinent than the gesture, ‘the experiences which
already exist.’(Bersani 1970, 10) Another area which I wish to examine, particularly in relation to Mauriac, is
the final chapter in The Pilgrimage which has given rise to a great deal of speculative criticism; as such, I aim
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to explore the problems of closure in the aforementioned text in particular.
Utilising Flaubert’s Madame Bovary in a comparative study of John Broderick’s The Pilgrimage is as
good a place as any to begin in earnest. The novel centres around the marriage of the rapacious Julia
Glynn to local business man Michael Glynn, a closet homosexual who is bedridden, racked with a severe
form of arthritis. He is attended upon by both his nephew, Doctor Jim and his manservant, Stephen. Julia has
been having an affair with Jim, who, while treating her with contempt, satisfies her voracious demands. While
she may have designs upon furthering the relationship, she begins to receive anonymous letters detailing her
sexual infidelities. Her suspicion falls upon the ‘sinister’ Stephen, who both attracts and repels her. From
Stephen, she learns that his relationship with Michael was, in part, sexual. He later relates to Julia the story of
another relationship he had with a Stephen Page-O’Reilly, ‘a notorious queer’, which leads to blackmail on his
part and the threat of disclosure. They are miserable figures indeed. In one notable passage from The Pilgrimage, Julia Glynn relates the influence of Page-O’Reilly on the impressionable Stephen:
This was how the first pattern had been imposed: the pattern which Stephen would repeat all his
life. With what deadly intuition had that corrupt young man known down to the most inconsequential gesture the part he must play if he was to bind Stephen to him. (Broderick 2004, 175)
And later, in the same paragraph:
But she thought she knew why Stephen had fallen in love with her. He would always be attracted to the perverse, the abnormal, the corrupt, because only with them could he construct the
impossibly romantic vision of life which he cherished. (Broderick 2004, 176)
Note the proliferation of negative adjectives. Much may be read from these lines, for if desire/eros destroys,
the containment of our desire helps induce equilibrium back into society. Sex is the corrupting force in Broder-
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ick’s fiction; it has to be purged from the system. Hence, when the local priest suggests a pilgrimage to
Lourdes, it is as much a metaphor for the immolation of desire as it is for any possible remedy for the stricken
Michael. The final chapter is a succinct one-liner: ‘In this way they set off on their pilgrimage, from which a
week later Michael returned completely cured.’ The realist author places a great deal of importance in these
‘disruptive forces’; they represent the breaking down of the social construct, throwing caution to the wind, for
they rage against the options open to them, and rather then compromise, dismiss them arbitrarily.
However, in order to regain the order that is of paramount importance to the realist novel, these fictive
rebels have to be exposed to a ritual of expulsion. If not, as pointed out by Bersani, the novel drifts from a realistic portrait to one that becomes increasingly allegorical. Once the hero has been dismissed, the community is
once more able to settle down, to begin once more the process of social structuring. A character such as Zola’s
Anna Coupeau, the prurient courtesan whose behaviour appears outrageous to a community in which affairs
and tryst were common but never flaunted (Zola 1972), offers a good example. As a child descended from the
Rougon-Macquart line, she was raised in an atmosphere of dissolution and promiscuity, and she can no more
avoid her future than she can escape her past. In order for the novel to progress, she is to be expelled and thus
the thin veneer of morality is reapplied.
Bersani has done sterling research into Flaubert and the influence of Flaubert on Broderick is irrefutable. In his later novels, Broderick’s exasperating habit of halting the dialogue to offer some form of hierarchal
commentary on events increased to the point where he actually began to intervene directly in his own novels.
But if Broderick ever had a literary brother, it would probably have been Willie Ryan, the protagonist from his
fourth novel, The Waking of Willie Ryan. Willie has been incarcerated in an asylum for over twenty years, a
pawn in a conspiracy between his sister-in-law and local Parish priest, who are aware of his homosexual affair
with a local landowner, Roger Whittaker. After he is released, he returns home causing consternation for all
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involved. Willie, in speaking to Halloran, his ‘minder’, describes his former lover, Roger, as ‘more or less like
a father to me.’ He continues, ‘I never had anybody like that, I suppose that was what I was looking for.’ Willie builds up Roger as a God, ‘the way you do with somebody you love.’ (Broderick 1969, 111)
Freud refers to this double orientation of the Oedipus complex in his paper on the psychical consequences of the anatomical distinction between the sexes. This orientation refers to a sort of affection for the
father that makes the mother superfluous; indeed the son may wish to arrogate the place of the mother. (Freud
1952, 241-260) The love rival here is not the hypothetical mother but the church, which threatens and, in part,
follows through on the threat to castrate the child. The ideal marriage of his sister-in-law, Mary, and Roger, his
surrogate father, is denied to Willie Ryan. Both spurn his affective advances; Roger misinterprets his idealistic
love and uses him for his own sexual gratification while Mary is horrified when Willie attempts to kiss her.
The church intervenes, and Willie is expelled from the community so that the linearity of the plot may continue unruffled, if only until his latter-day return.
It is to Willie’s reading habits that I wish to turn to next. During a later exchange between Willie and
Father Mannix, the priest takes an interest in a few books of Willie’s piled up on the mantelpiece:
‘Susan got them for me,’ said Willie, standing up and taking down Madame Bovary, which was
on the top of the pile. ‘I’ve read them before, years ago. Roger lent them to me. But I’m enjoying reading them again… She’s got this in a second-hand bookshop in town. It’s a curious coincidence, but it’s Roger’s, the same book I first read. Mrs. Whittaker must have sold some of his
books after he died. Look, here’s his name. (Broderick 1969, 123)
A curious coincidence indeed. Roger Dillon is the absent centre in the novel and around him the plot weaves
its torturous course. The resolution of desire takes place retrospectively, as it does in The Pilgrimage, in which
Julia Glynn idly recreates an earlier love affair with Howard Kurtz, an American divorcee. Using the Flauber-
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tian cliché, often as breathless as to be maddeningly cloying, Julia remarks, ‘She was never to love again in the
course of her life.’ (Broderick 2004, 21) Both she and Willie Ryan share a penchant for sadistic theatrics, as
Willie muses: ‘I thought I hated him, and because I didn’t know then that no matter how we fought or tortured
each other I would always go back.’(Broderick 1969, 112) If Julia finds Stephen’s sadistic lovemaking
‘distasteful’, it is preferable in the sense that it helps to recreate some semblance her relationship with Kurtz,
the American who initiated her to lovemaking. Both seem indifferent to sexual pleasure, but not in a conventional manner. Rather, it is the symbiotic turning away from physical to intense sensations that indicates to me
a certain predominance for visual desire.
It is for this reason we return to Madame Bovary. I mentioned in the opening paragraphs of this article, a debt, I feel, Broderick owed to Mauriac’s Le Baiser au Lépreux. The female protagonist is a representation of Phèdre, a modern-day Emma Bovary. She is invoked in other novels of Mauriac, such as the named
protagonist of Thérèse Desqueyroux, once more as a young wife who tries to liberate herself from a boorish,
unsatisfactory husband and later, along the path of redemption, she appears again in “Thérèse chez le docteur,”
a short story from his collection, Plongées, and La Fin de la nuit. Emma Bovary may well have been Julia
Glynn in an earlier, literary existence, but Julia lacks the imagination of Emma, a saving grace perchance.
Emma kills herself because, after attempting to reach into the panicky depths of her vocabulary, she fails to
conjure up the intense sensations that forever trip along the tip of her palate. Whilst Emma searches for the
true meaning of desire, Julia merely seeks to survive, for Julia ‘was not a woman who could live without a
lover.’(Broderick 2004, 135) Emma, equally, hungers for a lover who can help her escape the drab reality of
Yonville, a lover who can recreate the extreme sensations of the ball at la Vaubyessard. Jean-Pierre Richard, in
his work on Flaubert titled Littérature et sensation, considers the infusion of these sensations as a masking
device that breaks down the difference between people, reality and daydreams (Richard 1970, 147). The result
is that Emma Bovary is more a loose coalescence of body parts and surfaces.
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Many commentators seized upon Broderick’s fondness for recording bodily movements in almost
minute detail. As Patrick Murray acknowledges, his characters are constantly ‘pursing their lips, stroking their
noses, crossing and uncrossing their legs, folding and unfolding their arms’ and so forth (Murray 1992, 25).
These bodily movements, whilst remaining an irksome assuaging of lust, accentuate the diffusion of character
into a confusing mélange, where a sort of fragmented comportment replaces centrality. On one level, we are
merely being offered an insight into the hidden innuendo promulgated by the legion of scandalmongers who
populate a Broderick novel. On a deeper level, we recognise a character like Julia Glynn as a hedonistic creature, who associates ‘love with luxury, with pleasure given and accepted lightly, almost casually,’ (Broderick
2004, 21) as do innumerable others from the Broderick canon, such as Sybil Quill from Don Juaneen or Kitty
Carroll and Mary Ryan from The Waking of Willie Ryan. Psychologically, they may appear apt for deeper
analysis, yet beneath the surface there is very little to them. In between moments of monotony, they provide a
catalyst for the plot’s evolution, not by what they represent, but what they fear. They risk exposure to the voracious maw of the watchful jungle, and under its gaze, they appear to founder. Ultimately, these characters are
sensualists, ‘products of years of rich foods, over-heated houses, soft beds, fine linen and financial security’.
(Broderick 1969, 81) If there is no depth to the psychological stratum, then their comportment, their manner
and material assets prove most telling. Julia Glynn was educated in a very old tradition, ‘that of the sensitive
courtesan to whom the luxury of idle days is the very breath of life.’(Broderick 2004, 21) She differentiates
herself from Kitty Carroll and Mary Ryan only in that ‘men were as necessary to her as jewels and furs are to
other women.’(Broderick 2004, 135) Like Emma Bovary, Julia Glynn is no more than the sum of her parts;
‘underneath her thick woollen dress so correct, so respectable, she was naked.’(Broderick 2004, 13) Comparatively, as Bersani says of Emma Bovary: ‘the unresponsiveness of Emma’s environment to her dreams of
glamour produces the symptoms which, while they superficially suggest a complex psychology, emphasize the
highly original thinness of her character.’(Bersani 1969, 155) Emma awaits the catastrophe of disclosure that
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will reveal her love for Leon, but she does nothing to encourage the development. She is held back by
‘idleness and fear’, and the disclosure never materializes (Flaubert 2003, 214). Julia, equally, awaits disclosure, but with bated breath. Whilst Emma turns her anxiety as surrogate to her romantic fantasies, Julia appears oblivious to anything but the preservation instinct, as does her lover, Jim, who concerns himself more
with the five thousand pounds coming to him from Michael’s will than with Julia’s overtures.
Freud’s theories on infantile sexuality may shed some light on this anxiety.(Freud 1952, 123-246)
Before puberty, the development of inhibitions tends to be more pronounced in females, in that the component
instincts tended to take the passive form in female sexuality while repression tends to become more manifest
with girls. With the onset of puberty, boys experience the ascension of libido whilst girls face a fresh wave of
repression, centred on the vagina supplanting the clitoris as the leading erotogenic zone. Because of having to
change their sexual zone in the crisis years of puberty, females are more prone to neurosis, particularly hysteria. Another element, the emphasis on the breast as a place of succour, is also highlighted. The child depends
upon those who satisfy his needs; he comes to love them. When the child is denied access to the breast, he may
well feel that he has lost someone he has loved. Thus, states Freud, ‘a child, by turning his libido into anxiety
when he cannot satisfy it, behaves like an adult. On the other hand an adult who has become neurotic owing to
his libido being unsatisfied behaves in his anxiety like a child: he begins to be frightened when he is
alone.’(Freud 1958, 239) Neither Julia nor Emma can bear to be alone; the ache of drab reality is too much
to bear. Both, then, sate their anxiety with men who will never, can never, love them.
Romantic despair is edged in dignity. Julia may be regarded as a whore; indeed, she sells her body as
readily for money as she does for satiation. Even Emma stoops to prostitution at the very last. Everything in
her life is done with an air of theatrics; even her sickness is imaginary. But her redeeming quality, between the
mediocre and the imaginary, is the verbal luxury of sensual objects. Her death, at her own hands, is the perfect
dénouement for Emma Bovary, and she thus demonstrates her independence from the author who possibly
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sought to inflict a more coded form of sexual punishment upon her. Flaubert, in his attempt to fill in those
‘great vacant spaces’ of boredom, as Rousset would term it, further attenuates the imagination of Emma
Bovary, an imagination in which only the strongest sensations linger. (Rousset 1962, 172) The possibilities of
life are thus pronounced, never more so than in refrain she hears carried through her window, as she lies on her
deathbed: “souvent la chaleur d’un beau jour / Fait rêver fillette à l’amour…” (Flaubert 2003, 304).
Julia’s saving grace is that she emerged in the ascendancy, from the earlier possibilities of her sexual
maltreatment into a woman who appears to have supplicated the role of Kurtz, the only love of her life. Kurtz
tells her, ‘If ever I saw a body made for love you’ve got it. From now on you’re going to learn what to do with
it’, and these are the same lines she reiterates to Stephen. (Broderick 2004, 20) Julia Glynn is empowered, and
Emma Bovary doomed, because Julia is a realist, Emma an incurable romantic. As Julia states rather pointedly, ‘Everything happens in real life…As you well know. It’s only in novels that it doesn’t.’(Broderick 2004,
77) The sublimating nature of love is utilised to great effect in Madame Bovary, but aside from one throwaway
comment in The Pilgrimage, it is not a preoccupation of Broderick’s. Between the sensual and the abstract,
there lies only the thin veneer of idealistic affectation. Julia Glynn is a romantic heroine, a modern Madame
Bovary, only because she is not in any way romantic. She cannot afford to be; at least, not in John Broderick’s
world.
Any discussion on linearity in the novel requires some reference to Georg Lukács, Marxist critic and
author of the remarkable The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, which savages the modernist movement,
lambasting the apostates as a motley assortment of self-obsessed misanthropists. I wish to discuss some of
Lukács theories before referencing D.A. Miller’s Narrative and its Discontents in relation to the closing chapter of The Pilgrimage in particular. But first, what of Lukács? His views on realism are of inestimable value,
though somewhat tempered by his Marxist ideology. Arbitrarily dismissing the naturalists’ surface reading, he
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saw the classical realist novel as reflecting ‘a truer, more complete, more vivid and more dynamic reflection of
reality.’(Lukács 1964, 174) It is a view that would clash, for example, with John McGahern’s manifesto, ‘The
Image;’ that is, the ‘still and private world’ which draws comparison with the Proustian moi profond, the profound and deep seated ‘I’, juxtaposed against the ritualistic milieu (McGahern 1991). Explicitly, it is the solitary artist in society who transforms the subjective world of the imagination into the objective world of social
identity and form. For Lukács, the realist novel was not so much about ‘the episodic life of the mind’ but the
‘full process of life.’ He rejects both the objective and subjective views of reality, the latter Joycean or, in parlance, McGahern-esque. (Lukács 1979, 54) Rather, he promulgates the necessity of presenting an ‘intensive
totality’ which corresponds to the ‘extensive totality’ of the world at large. ( Lukács 1979, 55) His thoughts
emanate from Hegelian philosophy; that is, society as part of an unfolding drama, where linear development is
never straightforward, but fragmented and contradictory. Lukács uses the example of the workers’ struggle
against their capitalist overseers; the contradiction between the proletariat establishing control and thereby
negating the capitalist mode that utilises their labour to the benefit of the factory owners. But since the capitalist system formed the basis for the inception of the factory system, the workers are more or less negating themselves. Lukács’s solution is dialectical, a dynamic and developmental resolution that reflects his Marxist thinking. Put somewhat adumbratively, my thesis will be met by antithesis, until such time as both sides are powerful enough to form synthesis, which becomes the thesis, which will be met by antithesis and so on. Against
this view, we have the individualism of modernist writers like Woolf, Eliot, Joyce and the French Naturalists,
who were conceived of as distinctly elitist. Lukács’s work on linearity is of pivotal importance in our understanding of modern literary trends. Broderick, in contrast, would have followed the example of Mauriac, who
was concerned more about the individual than any particular social group. As Mauriac states:
Il est certain qu’au delà de la vie sociale, de la vie familiale d’un homme, au-delà des gestes que
lui imposent son milieu, son métier, ses idées, ses croyances, existe une plus secrète vie : et c’est
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souvent au fond de cette boue cachée à tous les yeux que gît la clef qui nous le livre enfin tout
entier. (Mauriac 1928, 273)
Unlike McGahern, Broderick never espoused any significant literary manifesto. In the words of F.C. Molloy,
from the 1960s in Ireland, there were signs ‘that themes related to the community were no longer of primary
importance; instead, there was an increasing concern for the lot of the individual.’ (Molloy 1978, 193-194)
Broderick followed that trend negating even the words of Mauriac when later he fell back upon caricature.
There is nothing unambiguous about Broderick. I agree that he does not fit into the Lukácian definition of the classical realist. Rather, when he slipped from Mauriac’s gaze, he made a habit of borrowing whatever style suited his needs, whether out of design or lack. Often he fell back on the language of chatter, what
Barthes called ‘an unweaned language: imperative, automatic, unaffectionate, a minor disaster of
static.’(Barthes 1975, 5) Miller, in his writing upon narrative closure, spoke of ‘hesitation…matched by decision, nonobjectal desire by object choice, the cultivation of suspense by the culmen of moral judgement, irony
by knowledge, chatter by an elsewhere of serious revelations…’ (Miller 1981, 44) That is, he speaks of the
binary oppositions in the traditional novel that is epitomized in the opposing of narratability, which is the evidence of the narrative text and closure, which is the sign that the text is over. The difficulty of closure is thus
the difficulty of erasing the narratable. We are aware of a happy ending in which the quest is completed or the
lovers are (re)united, as much as the composition of a sad ending, which is often symbolised by a funeral or
departure. If the McGahern novel habitually ends with a funeral (as it did with The Barracks, The Pornographer, Amongst Women and That They May Face the Rising Sun), the Broderick novel most often ends in stasis.
The novel that leads itself towards death often appears to be bracing itself for the flight from death. Thus, all
such postulations on closure remain, simply, an attempt to persuade the reader to suspend the disbelief that
closure is, ultimately, possible.
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In that context, the final chapter in The Pilgrimage is worthy of closer scrutiny. It was probably the
reason the book was banned in the first place, under the auspice that someone such as Michael should not be
so arbitrarily ‘cured’ at the shrine of Lourdes. Of this, Julien Green replies in his Preface to the 2004 edition,
rather stoically: ‘Since when has healing been exclusively available to the just?’ (Broderick 2004, 2) Of
course, before we begin, we have to ask the pertinent question: cured of what? His arthritis or his homosexuality? Michael’s paralysis is likely a metaphor for his impotence; his ‘limbs were too twisted for massage’, with
the word ‘twisted’ of particular interest in that it connotes a certain unbalance. (Broderick 2004, 26) Julia suffers from a similar condition in accordance with her sex, in that ‘a woman suffers continuously from the impotence which is exceptional in a man’ as indicated by the critic Janet Dusinberre (Dusinberre, 1996). With her
husband’s paralysis, she is forced to assume the dominant, phallocentric role in the relationship.
If Michael is cured, what then? Does he reassume his previous role at the head of the family? The
childless marriage may indicate further impotence against nature’s decree; when the material worth of the family is devoid of an heir, it will remain threatened with extinction. The conclusion, in the words of Sean McMahon, ‘proposes another novel, which is, I think, unwritable. Impressed as one is by the blow-in-face technique
of such an ending, one still feels cheated. It smells of prestidignation and is unworthy and unnecessary.’ (McMahon 1971, 127) Unworthy only in the sense that the closing chapter does little to erase the narratability, we draw our own conclusions thereafter. The question of Noémi d’Artiailh’s possible renunciation in
Mauriac’s Le Baiser au lépreux is equally équivoque; according to your conviction, you either choose to believe in the divine or not. As the Abbot in Brian Moore’s novella Catholics states: ‘No one can order belief…
it is a gift from God.’ (Moore 1983, 90) If Broderick’s desires were unfulfilled or sublimated, it is not surprising that the Church also came to symbolise something more than a sideshow. However, it is important to remember that the Church, as Broderick saw it, was divided into two separate spheres: there was the Church as
extension of the community and the Church as the extension of one’s private faith. The former was damned by
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association, while the latter was instinctual and deeply personal. This stance was a by-product, no doubt, of
Broderick’s staunchly ‘Catholic’ influences, in particular, Mauriac. Mauriac had no qualms in naming his
ideological derivations. In Mes Grands Hommes, he names, amongst others, Pascal, Rousseau, Maurice and
Eugénie de Guérin, Balzac, Flaubert, Loti, Gide, Radiguet and Graham Green (Mauriac 1951). Mauriac differentiated between the common-law believers whose substantiations were afflicted with ‘intellectual poverty,
base credulity, hatred, the fear of strange alluring passions, and, under the guise of edification, prejudice
against the noble works in favour of false and foolish rhapsodies’ and the more daring proponents of a internalised Christian faith (Mauriac 1952). However, a writer like Mauriac could afford to be daring; he could
afford, even, to be sanctimonious. At the time of Mauriac’s ‘conversion’, Catholicism in England and France
was no longer the force it once had been. Mauriac rallied against the dying of the sacramental light, and thus
brought into being an intrinsic tenet of his philosophy: to be a true Christian is to suffer; we all have a cross to
bear and we bear it, for the most part, alone.
In The Pilgrimage, Julia Glynn states, rather melodramatically, ‘This is the way the world ended: in
solitude.’(Broderick 2004, 49) The world, of course, is merely a temporal structure. It is a testing ground of
one’s faith and it is likely that Mauriac would heartily ascribe to this assessment. It is here that we return to
this question of desire. Mauriac may have found fault with Freudian psychoanalysis, but there was no doubt
that he was deeply affected by it. The unnamed whiskey priest in Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory
is such an example: in one instant, he celebrates a forbidden Mass; in the second, he is arrested for public
drunkenness. We are all tempted by external agencies, but within us all there remains the possibility of salvation and redemption. Both the priest and Sarah Miles in The End of the Affair suffer internal turmoil before
choosing to die as saintly figures. If stability is to return to the community and linearity to the plot, it is done in
much the same way as a magician draws a rabbit from the hat. What is the trick? The fact that there is none,
that the miracle might be real, is so absurd to a sceptical audience that the final chapter really needs no further
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explication. It is as damning an indictment of the faithlessness of modern society as any in the Broderick oeuvre. He says everything he wishes to say, by saying nothing at all!
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Works cited
Barthes, Roland, 1975. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Ricard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang.
Bersani, Leo, 1969. A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature Boston: Little, Brown & Company.
----, 1970. Balzac to Beckett – Center and Circumference in French Fiction. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Broderick, John, 2004. The Pilgrimage, Preface by Julien Green, Dublin: Lilliput Press.
----, 1969. The Waking Of Willie Ryan, London: Panther.
Dusinberre, Janet, 1996. Shakespeare and the Nature of Women, Basingstoke: Routledge.
Flaubert, 2003. Madame Bovary. Transl. by Geoffrey Wall. London: Penguin.
Freud, 1952. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works (24 vols.) London: Hogarth Press
and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, vol. IX.
Kiely, Benedict, 1973. ‘A Black hymn to Mannon’, Review of An Apology for Roses, Hibernia,
2nd February.
Lukács, Georg, 1964. Studies in European Realism, New York: Grosset & Dunlap.
----, 1979. The Menaing of Contemporary Realism, London: Merlin.
Mauriac, François, 1950. A Kiss for the Leper. Transl. by Gerald Hopkins. London: Eyre &
Spottiswoode.
----, 1928. Le Roman. Paris: L’Artisan du Livre.
----, 1951. Mes Grands Hommes. Translated as Men I Hold Great by Elsie Pell. New York: Philosophical Li-
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brary.
----, 1952. The Stumbling Block. New York: Philosophical Library.
McGahern, John, 1991. ‘The Image’, in The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, vol. 17, July.
McLaughlin, Brighid, 1998. ‘The Lonely Torment of John Broderick’, in Sunday Life / The Sunday Independent, March 29th, 1998 – pp.1/6.
McMahon, Seán, 1971. “Town and Country”, in Eire-Ireland, vol. VI, Spring.
Miller, D.A., 1981. Narrative and its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Modern Novel, Princeton NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Molloy, F.C., 1978. “Themes and Techniques in the Contemporary Novel in Ireland.” PhD thesis, UCD.
Moore, Brian, 1983. Catholics. London: Triad/Panther.
Murray, Patrick, 1992, ‘Athlone’s John Broderick’, in Eire-Ireland, Winter, pp.20-38.
Richard, Jean-Pierre, 1970. Stendhal et Flaubert littérature et sensation. Paris: Le Seuil.
Rousset, Jean, 1962. Forme et signification/Essais sur les structures littéraires de Corneille á Claudel. Paris:
Le Seuil, 1962.
Zola, Émile, 1972. Nana, London: Penguin.
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Pondering Eternity in a Stifling Rural Setting: François Mauriac's Thérèse Desqueyroux
and John McGahern's The Barracks.
Dr Eamon Maher, National Centre for Franco-Irish Studies, ITT Dublin
People might justifiably be sceptical at the validity of comparing two authors who are separated by language,
social class and culture. François Mauriac (1885-1970), elected to the Académie Française in 1937, Nobel
Laureate in 1952, was born into a well-to-do Catholic bourgeois land-owning family from the Landes district
near Bordeaux. His future as a writer was assured from the moment he submitted his first collection of poetry,
Les Mains Jointes, to Maurice Barrès in 1909, who predicted: ‘Votre carrière sera glorieuse/You will have a
glorious career.’ It was, of course, an accurate prediction. Mauriac went on to publish a vast array of highly
acclaimed novels, essays, poetry collections, as well as being very active as a journalist. He is closely associated with the genre commonly referred to as ‘le roman catholique’ or Catholic Novel, of which he was the
most famous practitioner, along with Georges Bernanos and Graham Greene. This is a very different background to that of John McGahern (1934-2006), who was the first-born child to a Garda sergeant father and a
primary school teacher mother and whose youth was spent in the western counties of Leitrim and Roscommon.
The death of his mother when he was only ten years of age would leave an indelible mark on the young boy.
The woman’s fervent wish was that John would one day become a priest, but with the passing years he became
alienated from organised religion and opted for literature as his life’s vocation instead. We read in Memoir:
‘Instead of being a priest, I would be the God of a small vivid world.’ (McGahern 2005, 205)
The publication of his first novel, The Barracks, in 1963, brought a very favourable critical reaction
but the second novel, The Dark, was banned on its publication in 1965 for allegedly containing material with
the potential to corrupt public morality. The role of the Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid, who
intervened directly to ensure that McGahern be dismissed from his job as a primary school teacher after the
banning, was an indication of the power of the Catholic hierarchy at the time in Ireland. Samuel Beckett, on
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hearing about the young writer’s plight, was willing to organise a protest, but McGahern refused, saying that it
would give the affair too much importance. Instead he chose to emigrate for a time to England before coming
back to settle permanently in Leitrim with his second wife, Madeline Green, in 1970. He remained there until
his death in 2006.
I supply these short biographies in order to briefly situate the two authors and to give readers an idea of
how different their experiences and social circumstances were. Whereas Mauriac was very conscious of Catholicism as a guiding force in his life and suffered when accused of overemphasising the sinful nature of Man
in his fiction, McGahern, who lost his faith in early adulthood, chose to depict characters who were undoubtedly Catholic but who didn’t reflect deeply on what being Catholic actually meant. Their main concern was
with eking out a living from their small farms, going to Mass and the Sacraments, surviving as best they could
with the limited resources at their disposal. Mauriac’s Catholicism was a central element in his life, and his
characters often betray some of the author’s doubts and apprehensions about issues surrounding faith. The
main difference of approach between the two writers lies in the intellectual engagement with religion that is
strong in Mauriac and almost completely absent in McGahern. The latter stated once in an interview with Julia
Carlson:
The amazing thing is that it’s [Ireland] a Catholic country and that nearly all the writers are not
Catholics. They’re lapsed Catholics. I think that the Church in Ireland was peculiarly antiintellectual, say, compared to the French Church. People like Mauriac or Bloy could have no
place here. It was a simple world of the GAA and the drama society with a very distorted view
of life.
Nobody actually took any time to understand what to be Irish was. There was this slogan and
fanaticism and a lot of emotion, but there wasn’t any clear idea except what you were against:
you were against sexuality; you were against the English (Carlson 1990, 63).
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This type of negative reinforcement had a lot to do with Ireland’s position as a fledgling state that was only
coming to terms with its independence from British colonial rule. Catholicism was a means of distinguishing
ourselves from the coloniser, a kind of cultural identity badge if you will. The Catholic Church’s dominant
role in the newly formed state was cemented by a close relationship with the political leaders and its heavy
involvement in health and education. Fintan O’Toole has argued that Catholicism in Ireland had long been a
nationality as much as a religion. He notes:
The words ‘Irish Catholic’ did not denote merely a person of a specific faith born in a specific
country. They also had come to stand for a country, a culture, a politics. Catholicism in Ireland
has been a matter of public identity more than of private faith. For most of its history, the Republic of Ireland was essentially a Catholic State, one in which the limits of law and of behaviour were set by Church orthodoxy and the beliefs of the Catholic bishops (O’Toole 1997, 15).
Contrast this to a country like France where, since the Revolution, there has been a strong Republican tradition, one that sought to curb the power of the Church and to keep it at arm’s length from anything to do with
politics. The separation of Church and State was formally ratified in 1905 and France’s active secular wing
ensures that there are no breaches of this law. In order to feel authentically French, therefore, did not, and does
not, imply in any way being Catholic, to the same extent as in Ireland. In fact, at the time when Mauriac wrote
his most famous novels, the years between the two World Wars, many of his compatriots had become dubious
of the existence of an all-loving God in the face of the carnage and suffering that they had witnessed first hand
in the trenches or heard about from family members and friends. This disillusionment is best captured by the
World War I veteran Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who, in his masterpiece, Journey to the End of the Night, wrote:
The biggest defeat in every department of life is to forget, especially the things
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that have done you in, and to die without realising how far people can go in the way of nastiness.
When the grave lies open before us, let’s not try to be witty, but on the other hand, let’s not forget, but make it our business to record the worst of human viciousness we’ve seen without
changing one word (Céline 1997, 28).
There is a desire expressed by Céline in this passage to restore one of the major casualties of the Great
War, Truth. His novel is a debunking of the mythical heroism and glory that were long associated with wars
and his emphasis is on the mindlessness and absurdity, the futile sacrifice of life, the horror and pain that are
the hallmarks of such conflicts. It should come as no surprise that existentialism came to the fore in France
during the ‘entre-deux-guerres’ period, at a time when the population was demoralised by the huge loss of
human life and the apparent absurdity of the human condition. Ireland’s experience of the Great War was
never as immediate or decimating as that of France.
Having highlighted these important historical differences, I am now going to discuss one novel by
Mauriac and McGahern in order to illustrate their depiction of how two of their female characters face up to
the prospect of eternity – their reactions will be determined to a large extent by the social milieu in which the
two women live. We’ll start with Mauriac’s most famous depiction, Thérèse Desqueyroux. From the outset,
the bordelais novelist knew that by describing the failed attempt of his heroine to poison her husband, and by
displaying sympathy with such a criminal soul, he was treading on dangerous ground. He tries to allay some of
the anticipated anger in his Foreword:
Many will feel surprised that I should give imagined life to a creature more odious than any
character in my other books. Why, they will ask, have I never anything to say to those who ooze
with virtue and who ‘wear their hearts on their sleeves’? People who ‘wear their hearts on their
sleeves’ have no story for me to tell, but I know the secrets of the hearts that are deep buried in,
and mingled with, the filth of the flesh (Mauriac 2005).
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Clearly, virtuous people don’t supply the novelist with the same amount of scope as those whose hearts
are ‘mingled with the filth of the flesh.’ The task of exploring what motivated Thérèse to systematically poison
her husband is rich in psychological possibilities. The novel opens in the aftermath of her trial for attempted
murder, a crime for which she has been acquitted, largely as a result of her husband Bernard’s testimony. Bernard was anxious above all else to ensure that the family name would not be besmirched by having a convicted
criminal in its fold. Hence his decision to cover up the truth about what really happened to him. Now, as she
travels home to meet her intended ‘victim’ for the first time since the trial, Thérèse goes over in her mind the
reasons for her action. She is lucid about the attraction she had felt for Bernard, in large part a result of his
possessing acres and acres of pines – she has property in her blood – and is frank about her determination to
marry him. On her wedding day, however, she knew that she had made a terrible mistake: ‘Thérèse realized
she was lost. She had entered the cage like a sleepwalker and, as the heavy door groaned shut, the miserable
child in her reawakened.’ (Mauriac 2005, 47) The problems began when she was faced with the prospect of
sexual concourse. ‘As when, before a country scene pouring with rain, we imagine to ourselves what it looks
like in the sunshine – thus it was that Thérèse looked upon sensuality.’ (Mauriac 2005, 48) She got no pleasure
from their love-making and felt soiled afterwards. Her husband’s obvious enjoyment contrasted starkly to her
own bemused indifference: ‘Nothing separated us more than his delirium; I’ve often seen Bernard sink himself
entirely in his pleasure – and me, I played dead, as if the slightest movement on my part could make this madman, this epileptic, strangle me.’ (Mauriac 2005, 49)
Thérèse’s loss of her virginity coincides with her changed reaction to her husband and his family. The
fact that her pregnancy, announced shortly after returning from honeymoon, is greeted with such joy by Bernard, only increases her sense of frustration and isolation. The future birth of their child is ultimately about
continuing the family line and has nothing to do with love: ‘And he gazed with respect on this woman who
carried within her body the future sole master of innumerable pines.’ (Mauriac 2005, 57) His family were even
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worse, in Thérèse’s eyes. They ‘venerated me as a sort of sacred vessel, the receptacle of their progeniture;
there’s not a doubt that […] they would have sacrificed me for that embryo. I was losing all sense of my individual existence.’ (Mauriac 2005, 80) When she does give birth to a baby girl, Marie, her maternal instincts
are muted to say the least: ‘She didn’t want Marie to resemble her. She wanted to have nothing in common
with this flesh detached from hers. People started saying she lacked maternal feeling.’ (Mauriac 2005, 82) Her
antipathy towards Bernard is heightened by what she views as his hypocrisy: ‘She can remember loathing her
husband more than usual on Corpus Christi day, when she watched the procession through the half-closed
shutters. Bernard was the only one walking behind the canopy.’ (Mauriac 2005, 83) His motivation is a desire
to be seen as an upright Catholic: in Thérèse’s words: ‘he was performing his duty’.
Having traced the reasons why Thérèse began to despise her husband, Mauriac then subtly unveils her
unconscious decision to poison him. There are no rational reasons for her doing what she did: ‘she was engulfed in the abyss of her crime; it had breathed her in.’ (Mauriac 2005, 84) Mauriac’s refusal to condemn his
heroine, his obvious sympathy for her plight, caused many of his Catholic readers to feel uncomfortable. The
novel becomes really interesting when the heroine and her husband meet again in the residence of her Aunt
Clara, Argelouse. Clara is very fond of her niece and spies through the keyhole as Bernard lays down the law
as to how they will proceed in the wake of what could have been a shameful scandal. Thérèse is afforded no
opportunity to explain her actions and, reflecting on her fate, she observes the pine trees in the distance that are
‘like an enemy army’. ‘These wardens, whose piteous complaint she could hear in the wind, would watch her
languish through the long winters […]. They would be the witnesses of her long suffocation.’ (Mauriac 2005,
94) She knows now that she will live out the remainder of her life in the seclusion of Argelouse. After the interview with her husband, upstairs in her room, Thérèse contemplates taking her own life and pleads with God
to intervene. She utters the following prayer:
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If He exists, the Being (and she saw again the impressive Corpus Christi procession, the solitary
man crushed under the cope of gold, and the thing he carried in his two hands, and his moving
lips, and that air of sorrow) – then let Him stop my criminal hand before it’s too late. (Mauriac
2005, 99)
She pours the lethal dose of chloroform into the water but before she can take it, she hears a commotion and a
servant rushes into her room to announce that Aunt Clara has died. Is this a miracle or mere coincidence?
There is no way of knowing. Thérèse stares into the abyss that is eternity and then draws back from the edge.
Could this be an example of a substitution of souls? Aunt Clara dies so that Thérèse can be saved? These are
the sort of questions that recur frequently in Mauriac’s novels. Sometimes, it is the sinners like Thérèse or
Louis, the hero of Le Noeud de vipères (Nest of Vipers), who appear to possess more genuinely Christian
qualities than the self-righteous Catholics who surround them and whose poor example turns them away from
religion. Mauriac stated unambiguously why he was attracted to characters like these in his essay Le Romancier et ses personnages (The Novelist and his Characters):
[..] as distasteful as they appear to many, they are free of the one thing I detest above all else in
the world and which I have difficulty enduring in any human being: complacency, a feeling of
self-righteousness. They are not happy with themselves, they know their own misery (Mauriac
1984, 117-118, my translation).
‘Knowing your own misery’, accepting your faults, these are essential ingredients of any mystical quest.
In spite of the lack of sustenance for her spiritual longings within the confines of conventional religion,
Thérèse manages nevertheless to attain some sort of accommodation with God towards the end of the novel.
After an absence of some months, her husband announces that he is to return to Argelouse where he and his
wife are to be visited by his sister Anne, formerly a close friend of Thérèse, and her fiancé. The latter, aware of
the rumours surrounding the trial, wants to assess for himself what skeletons might be in the family closet. He
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is satisfied by the show of unity he witnesses and resolves that the marriage should go ahead. Bernard, horrified at the deterioration in his wife’s appearance, proceeds to attack the domestic staff for their neglect of his
wife and stays at Argelouse to nurse her. As a reward for her performance in front of Anne’s betrothed, Bernard releases Thérèse from her sequestration and agrees that she can go to live in Paris. He accompanies her to
the capital, where for a brief moment, on the pavement of a Parisian restaurant, there is a slight hope of reconciliation between the couple. Bernard asks Thérèse what her motivation was for poisoning him and this
prompts some optimism in her soul: ‘[…] now she seemed to perceive a light, a kind of dawning, and she
imagined a return to that secret, sad country: she imagined a whole life of meditation, of perfecting herself in
the Argelouse silence, an interior journey in search of God… ’ (Mauriac 2005, 119) The possibility of some
sort of outlet for her spiritual quest is dashed when her explanation that she ‘gave in to a hideous sense of
duty’ is met by absolute incredulity by Bernard who is convinced that she hoped to get all the property in the
event of his death. The moment passes and she is left alone to contemplate a life of independence and perhaps
adventure in Paris.
Mauriac, the fervent Catholic, thus produces quite an ambivalent novel from a theological point of
view. We are not given any real indication as to what the future holds for Thérèse. The search of God that she
considered possible if she secured her husband’s forgiveness seems to fade into the background once he rebuffs her explanation. We can see her attachment to religious rituals is genuine, but that those who, like Bernard, use religion for their own selfish purposes fill her with disgust. She therefore seems to be left in a spiritual no-man’s-land, with no obvious resolution to her problems.
The fate of McGahern’s heroine, Elizabeth Reegan, while displaying some similarities, is quite different
to that of Thérèse. While also trapped by her marriage to a widower with three children, Elizabeth doesn’t
dwell in a morbid manner on her sad lot. She is not an educated woman like Thérèse, has no servants to do the
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daily chores, and is responsible for running a busy house single-handedly. To add to her woes, she discovers
that she is suffering from cancer, which, as a former nurse, she senses to be terminal. The novel traces the
course of the illness from the original diagnosis through a mastectomy until the heroine ultimately succumbs
to its ravages and dies. So while we are talking about a very different itinerary from that of Thérèse, it is in
their reaction to the prospect of eternity that there is room for a fruitful comparison. Before Elizabeth met and
married Reegan, a sergeant in the police force and a veteran of the War of Independence, she had spent years
nursing in London where she had a liaison with a doctor, Halliday, who suffered from depression and was
prone to anti-religious outbursts. On one occasion, he addressed the following question to her: “What’s all this
living and dying about anyway, Elizabeth? That’s what I’d like to be told.” (McGahern 1963, 85)
In many ways McGahern’s work is an attempt to unravel some of the mysteries associated with ‘all
this living and dying.’ When she first discovers that she is terminally ill, Elizabeth is reminded of Halliday’s
comment. Whereas he dies in a car accident, that is suspected to be a case of suicide, Elizabeth adopts a more
stoical attitude to the crosses and injustices that existence throws her way. While sceptical of certain aspects of
the Church’s dominant role in the local community, she remains attached to a number of its rituals. Unlike
Thérèse, Elizabeth chooses to see beyond the faults and failings of those who use religion for their own ends
and thus manages to embrace the ultimate message contained in the Gospel. But she is more than capable on
occasion of adopting an independent stance, as can be seen when she refuses the parish priest’s invitation to
become part of the Legion of Mary, which she sees as ‘a kind of legalised gossiping school to the women and
a convenient pool of labour that the priests could draw on for catering committees’. (McGahern 1963, 163)
She also has a commitment to prayer, particularly the rosary: ‘It has grown into her life, she’d come to love its
words, its rhythm, its repetitions, its confident chanting, its eternal mysteries.’ (McGahern 1963, 220) She acknowledges that her response to it is purely instinctive: ‘What it meant didn’t matter, whether it meant anything at all or not, it gave the last need of her heart release, the need to praise and celebrate, in which every-
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thing rejoiced.’ (McGahern 1963, 220) The mechanical droning of the responses to the prayer gives the same
type of pleasure and reassurance as a day when the family work together in harmony at saving the hay, or at
any other such communal activity. Elizabeth also enjoys visiting the church for some quiet moments of meditation. She doesn’t go with a view to asking for her problems to disappear – that is not her approach at all:
‘There were no answers… she’d no business to be in the church at all except she loved it and it was
quiet.’ (McGahern 1963, 165)
Elizabeth’s husband is a disgruntled, unfulfilled man who hates having to take orders from a superior
officer for whom he has no regard. He didn’t fight in the War of Independence to end up being told what to do
by a younger officer. There is genuine love between Reagan and Elizabeth, even if they don’t communicate at
any deep level, and this love is a source of consolation to her as she faces death. Her greatest regret about dying is the thought of being separated from her husband and the beauty of a landscape which, when in the
bloom of rude good health, had escaped her attention. Now that she knows she is soon to be parted from it, she
really ‘sees’ it for the first time:
It was so beautiful when she let the blinds up first thing that, ‘Jesus Christ’, softly was all she
was able to articulate as she looked out and up the river to the woods across the lake, black with
the leaves fallen except the red dust of beech trees, the withered leaves standing pale and sharp
as bamboo rods at the edges of the water. (McGahern 1963, 170)
When I questioned him about the significance of this scene, McGahern stated: ‘When you’re in danger of losing a thing it becomes precious and when it’s all around us, it’s in tedious abundance and we take it for
granted as if we’re going to live forever, which we’re not.’(Maher 2001, 75) Nature is not in any way complicit in Elizabeth’s fate, as Thérèse viewed it to be in hers. Rather, it’s a soothing presence, as well as a source
of nostalgia. While looking out on the countryside from the window of a train as she travels to hospital, the
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banal sights assume a heightened importance for Elizabeth: ‘Trees, fields, houses, telegraph-poles jerking on
wires, thorn hedges, cattle, sheep, men, women, horses and sows with their litters started to move across the
calm grass.’ (McGahern 1963, 112) There is a real incantatory quality to the writing here, a desire to name and
to commemorate the banal local scenes. Elizabeth is playing the role of the writer in wording the world, naming things, places and people.
Aware of her impending death, she is acutely aware of the seasons passing. The religious ceremonies
mark the different times of the year. The last Christmas meal that she shares with the family assumes a sacramental quality: ‘Never did the table-cloth appear so bright as this day… and the meal began and ended in the
highest form of all celebration, prayer.’ (McGahern 1963, 183) Christmas is followed by Lent, with its stark
reminder of the transience of human life: ‘Ash Wednesday, a cold white morning, all the villagers at mass and
the rails, to be signed with the Cross on their lives to be broken, all sinners and needing the grace of God to be
saved, the cross thumbed by the priests on their foreheads with the ashes of their mortality.’ (McGahern 1963,
194) Elizabeth sees special significance in the Stations of the Cross: ‘She saw her own life declared in them
and made known, the unendurable pettiness and degradation of her own feelings raised to dignity and meaning
in Christ’s passion.’ (McGahern 1963, 194)
At Easter, she ruminates on how the Resurrection and the Ascension ‘seemed shadowy and unreal compared to the way of Calvary, it might be because she could not know them with her own life, on the cross of
her life she had to achieve her goal, and what came after was shut away from her eyes.’ (McGahern 1963, 195)
One gets the distinct impression that Elizabeth is sustained in her illness and impending death by her religious
faith. As I already stated, she does not seek a miraculous cure or facile comfort from religion. No, she remains
lucid (a quality she shares with Thérèse) and strong, aware that to truly know God, one must first of all cross
the threshold of death:
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It seemed as a person grew older that the unknowable reality, God, was the one thing you could
believe or disbelieve in with safety, it met you with imponderable silence and could never be
reduced to the nothingness of certain knowledge. (McGahern 1963, 177)
There is a sophisticated philosophy at work here, a high level of both stoicism and self-knowledge.
McGahern is adroit at describing the rituals associated with death. As soon as Elizabeth breathes her last
breath, the women at her bedside take over: ‘the priest and the doctor were sent for, the news broken to
Reegan on the bog, the room tidied of its sick litter, a brown habit and whiskey and stout and tobacco and
foodstuffs got from the shops at the chapel, the body washed and laid out – the eyes closed with pennies and
her brown beads twined through the fingers that were joined on the breast in prayer.’ (McGahern 1963, 221-2)
After death, everything follows the same pattern that has been observed for centuries, as people arrive to wake
the corpse and pay their respects. Sandwiches and drinks are supplied, discussions entered into about the person who has died, the life she led, her illness and death. Two of the guards who work with Reegan, Mullins
and Casey, slip away to the nearby Protestant cemetery during Elizabeth’s funeral. Behind them they can hear
the dull thud of clay hitting the coffin and they can’t help showing their relief:
‘It’s Elizabeth that’s being covered and not me and I’m able to stand in the sun and watch’, not
able to take the upper hand in their minds til they got the bulk of the stone church between themselves and the grave. (McGahern 1963, 223)
Elizabeth Reegan displays the fortitude and resilience of a woman who accepts her impending death
with equanimity. This does not imply in any way that she passively endures her plight but rather that she realises that eventually all life ends in the same way: ‘Whether she had cancer or not wasn’t her whole life a waiting, the end would arrive sooner or later, twenty extra years meant nothing to the dead.’ (McGahern 1963, 72)
The biggest difference between this approach and that of Thérèse Desqueyroux is that it is adopted by a
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woman who has reached some type of accommodation with the business of ‘all this living and dying’, and
leans on her spiritual convictions to help her through her journey towards eternity. In some ways, her itinerary
is similar to that of McGahern himself who, although an agnostic, retained a respect for the role Catholicism
played in his life. He wrote in Memoir: ‘I have affection still and gratitude for my upbringing in the church: it
was the sacred weather of my early life, and I could no more turn against it than I could turn on any deep part
of myself.’ (McGahern 2005, 222) This could explain his motivation for organising a very traditional funeral
Mass, concluding with a decade of the rosary at the graveside. Mauriac never formally broke with the Church
but frequently questioned and agonised over some of its dictates. He excels in depicting his inner torment, both
in his novels and essays, to an extent that led Donat O’Donnell to sense that he took delight in it:
The power of transmuting such torment and delight into a communicable form is very rare, and
those who possess it will find readers and admirers as long as humanity continues to enjoy tormenting itself. (O’Donnell 1953, 37)
This brief attempt at analysing how two novelists deal with their heroines’ attempt to come to grips with
the mystery that is eternity will hopefully have cast light on some significant differences, but also similarities
that come from the fact that both writers shared a common Catholic upbringing that impacted in all sorts of
subtle ways on how they approached these issues. Hopefully, it will also demonstrate the light that is often
shed on individual writers and cultures when they are considered in a more international and intercultural context.
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Works cited
Carlson, Julia, 1990. Banned in Ireland: Censorship and the Irish Writer. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, 1997. Journey to the End of the Night. Translated by Ralph Manheim. London: John
Calder.
McGahern, John, 1963. The Barracks. London: Faber and Faber.
McGahern, John, 2005. Memoirs. London: Faber and Faber.
Maher, Eamon, 2001. “Interview Between Eamon Maher and John McGahern” in Studies, vol. 90, n°357.
Mauriac, François, 1984. Le romancier et ses personnages. In Edmond Jaloux, François Mauriac romancier.
Paris: Buchet/Chastel.
Mauriac, François, 2005. Thérèse Desqueyroux. Translated by Raymond N. Mackenzie. Lanham/Maryland:
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
O’Donnell, Donat, 1953. Maria Cross: Imaginative Patterns in a Group of Modern Catholic Writers. London:
Chatto & Windus.
O’Toole, Fintan, 1997. The Ex-Isle of Erin. Dublin: New Island Books.
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Rencontre des catholiques nouveaux et/ou marginaux d’Irlande et
de France
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Etonnantes rencontres aux frontières du catholicisme irlandais contemporain
Professeur Catherine Maignant, Université Charles-de-Gaulle Lille3
En 1999, pour la première fois depuis quatre siècles, paraissait, à l’initiative du pape, une édition actualisée du
manuel catholique du rituel d’exorcisme. Selon Jean Paul II en effet, « le diable ‘prince du monde’, poursui
[vait] son action insidieuse », et tout un chacun risquait d’être « tenté par le démon » lorsqu’il s’y attendait le
moins (Dempsey 2005). A la mi-février 2005, l’inquiétude papale grandissante face au succès de Satan trouvait son expression et sa réponse dans la mise en place d’une formation d’exorciste au prestigieux Athénaeum
Pontificum Regina Apostolorum. Etaient au programme l’histoire du satanisme, les rites d’exorcisme, la prière
de libération et une formation visant à aider les âmes en contact avec l’occulte et la magie. En Irlande, la nouvelle fut accueillie avec faveur par tous ceux qui s’inquiétaient des nombreuses manifestations paranormales
qui, disaient-ils, étaient le signe d’une activité redoublée des puissances infernales *endnote 11. Elle fut également
reçue avec enthousiasme et soulagement par ceux qui s’inquiétaient de la progression d’idées religieuses nouvelles : relayée par Catholicireland.net, la création de la nouvelle formation proposée à Rome devint l’occasion de dénoncer l’insidieuse progression des religiosités syncrétiques, elles aussi présentées comme l’œuvre
du diable. C’est toutefois à la dernière cible des adeptes de l’exorcisme que le présent travail s’intéressera particulièrement, les religieux catholiques apparemment séduits par des théories peu conformes à la Vérité dictée
par Rome. En 2005, Catholicireland.net, sans citer aucun nom, se réjouissait en effet à l’avance de la possibilité qui serait ainsi offerte à l’Eglise de marginaliser les originaux par une reprise en main de la formation théologique des jeunes :
To offer future priests a balanced and profound theological, moral and spiritual formation will
serve to avoid, or at least reduce considerably, the risk of having presbyters who are seduced by
risky theological speculation, or liturgical and pastoral experimentations with undeniably syncretistic connotations. Therefore it is good to recall that the Church is in ever greater need of holy
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priests, not of priests who preach ambiguous theological theses and strange liturgical and pastoral practices, because only holy priests are able to renew the Church *endnote 12.
Aux frontières de la doxa catholique actuelle se dessine en effet un kaléidoscope d’ouvertures, qui esquisse des
voies encore confuses vers l’avenir. Ces tâtonnements, fruits de rencontres étonnantes, ont en commun de refléter l’actuel pluralisme de valeurs qui se relativisent mutuellement, et de légitimer une quête multiforme du
sacré par delà le bien et le mal tels que définis par l’orthodoxie catholique.
S’il est aisé de caricaturer cette démarche de quête brouillonne en n’y voyant qu’éclatement, individualisme exacerbé, perte des valeurs primordiales, il est beaucoup plus pertinent d’y lire des signes propres de
notre temps, qui nous permettent d’envisager de manière positive une réalité en voie, non de déconstruction,
mais de reconstruction. Liant la mort de la métaphysique traditionnelle et la renaissance du sacré, Gianni Vattimo voit ainsi en l’ère postmoderne un âge des possibles où les Ecritures et l’incarnation divine pourraient
enfin retrouver leur sens premier et guider l’humanité vers une compréhension nouvelle du message d’universalité du christianisme, fondée sur l’acceptation de l’évolution et la nécessité de l’hybridation (Vattimo 2002,
46). Au cœur du débat, les conflits d’interprétation sur la Bible et sur l’importance religieuse d’espaces hors
des Ecritures orientent la question vers le sens de la vérité et la place de la dimension humaine dans le rapport
au divin.
Ces phénomènes sont d’actualité en Irlande comme ailleurs. Là aussi, le Texte sacré n’a plus d’impact
chez certains que dans ses nouvelles interprétations, liées à un contexte particulier, pluraliste et syncrétique, où
le hors-texte, parfois à la frange du christianisme, occupe une place de plus en plus centrale. Les contingences
du monde contemporain et l’imaginaire individuel ont, dans ces milieux, largement supplanté la Vérité unique
proclamée par Rome et sa métaphysique fondée sur la raison. Tant les réinterprétations du Livre Saint que les
critiques du message de l’Eglise cherchent ainsi à transfigurer le religieux pour lui insuffler une vie nouvelle,
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redéfinissant le divin dans un sens assimilationniste, intime et universalisant.
La première rencontre, étonnamment inattendue, qui fonde la plupart des orientations nouvelles est
celle du Dieu de la Bible. Nombreux sont ceux qui, analysant la vérité prescrite par l’Eglise de Rome en tant
qu’objet historique, réfutent en effet sa valeur et cherchent à retrouver Dieu dans les Ecritures, c'est-à-dire audelà de la métaphysique d’origine scolastique. Cette tendance, « fidéiste » et « bibliciste », fut en son temps
dénoncée par Jean-Paul II dans son encyclique « Foi et raison » comme une dérive extrêmement dangereuse
car elle nie le précepte rappelé par le Concile Vatican II selon lequel « la parole de Dieu est présente à la fois
dans les Ecritures et la Tradition » (Jean-Paul II 1998, 84-5). A cela, Peter de Rosa, prêtre défroqué irlandais,
mais également ancien professeur de métaphysique et d’éthique au séminaire de Westminster et doyen de la
faculté de théologie de Corpus Christi à Londres, répond que l’espoir de l’Eglise repose précisément sur ceux
qui refusent de se soumettre à la Tradition. Selon lui, l’Eglise entre dans le troisième millénaire avec un sens
moral du 19e siècle et une structure médiévale fondée sur l’absolutisme papal et le célibat des prêtres. Une réforme lui apparaît donc indispensable (de Rosa 1988, préface).
Le rejet de la tradition de l’Eglise devient ici la condition même de la redécouverte du Dieu de la Bible. Ce sentiment est partagé par l’ensemble des progressistes catholiques, en Irlande et dans le reste du
monde. Pour Gianni Vattimo, le nouveau Dieu dans lequel l’humanité est appelée à croire n’est ainsi 'bien entendu' pas celui « de la métaphysique et de la scolastique médiévale, qui n’est d’ailleurs pas le Dieu de la Bible, c'est-à-dire du Livre que la métaphysique rationaliste et absolutiste moderne avait peu à peu dissous et
nié » (Vattimo 2002, 15-6). « Le Dieu retrouvé dans la postmodernité postmétaphysique », poursuit-il, « n’est
que le Dieu du Livre » (Vattimo 2002, 18). Or ce Dieu peut légitimement prétendre à l’universalité car il est,
par essence, ouvert à la multiplicité des discours et au pluralisme contemporains.
Selon Vattimo, la revendication d’universalité du christianisme ne doit en effet pas être entendue
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comme « la prétention de dire l’unique vérité avérée qui s’opposerait aux erreurs des dieux faux et trompeurs,
mais (…) se présente comme une capacité ‘assimilatrice’ » qui constituerait « le sens même de la doctrine de
l’incarnation » (Vattimo 2002, 46-7). Il s’avère donc indispensable de dissocier religion et spiritualité, ne serait-ce que parce que l’expérience religieuse est avant tout individuelle et s’accomplit au niveau le plus intime
de chaque être. Donal Dorr voit dans la spiritualité effective l’expression de la réponse privée à un appel divin,
qu’il vienne d’au-delà de nous ou des profondeurs de notre conscience » (Dorr 2004, 58). Toutes les dernières
publications de Mark Hederman, philosophe et moine à Glenstal Abbey, vont dans le même sens. L’appel,
pour lui, vient de l’intérieur et il s’agit d’être à son écoute. Il faut, affirme-t-il, tenter de décrypter les signes
qui nous sont livrés par notre inconscient, être attentifs à nos rêves et compter sur les forces mystérieuses qui
nous habitent pour rencontrer Dieu et réaliser pleinement l’engagement spirituel auquel notre humanité nous
destine.
Puisqu’il en est ainsi, rencontrer l’humain en nous, se réjouir de notre humanité, même dans ce qu’elle
a de plus animal, devient une condition essentielle, selon laquelle refondre le message catholique. C’est contre
« la violence totalitaire » de l’universalisme mal compris par les autorités ecclésiastiques centrales que ressurgit (…) ce que Michel Maffesoli nomme « la sagesse démoniaque » contemporaine, cette sagesse « qui met en
relation tous les éléments constitutifs de la nature jusque et y compris aux plus sauvages », pour « brouiller les
codes rationnels » patiemment élaborés notamment par le christianisme (Maffesoli 2002, 38-9). L’erreur du
christianisme a été d’asseoir l’essentiel de son message sur une fausse dualité bien/mal, qui est à l’origine de
ce que Mark Hederman nomme la « culture schizoïde » prescrite par l’Eglise. Le mal absolu n’existe pas davantage que le bien total. La tradition jungienne, reprise par Maffesoli insiste sur le fait que Satan souligne à
jamais « l’imperfection de la création », puisqu’il existe une zone d’ombre, une divinité des abîmes qui lie en
Dieu la bonté infinie et la cruauté insigne (Maffesoli 2002, 76). L’Eglise Catholique place aujourd’hui au banc
des accusés ceux qui cherchent à se réconcilier avec le mal inné en tous dans une perspective positive. Heder-
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man lui reproche ainsi d’avoir nié la part de ténèbre qui est notre fardeau commun et imposé aux hommes un
modèle angélique en opposition avec leur humaine nature, créée et voulue par Dieu
*endnote 13.
Il convient au-
jourd’hui, selon lui, de réhabiliter ce qu’il appelle « the proper dark of the Roman Catholic tribe » (Hederman
1999, 34). Voici résumée, d’après le sociologue Michel Maffesoli, une revendication centrale de notre temps :
« la personne plurielle s’affirme, la personne composée (…), antagonique, contradictoire » ; et « la réaffirmation de la personne plurielle, dans un monde polyculturel, aboutit à réintégrer le mal comme un élément parmi
d’autres » (Maffesoli 2002, 16-7).
Or, dans l’esprit de la morale catholique binaire, la dialectique du bien et du mal se reflète dans l’opposition entre l’esprit, ou l’âme, et le corps. Hederman voit en cela une étonnante incompréhension du dessein
divin :
Our invitation to become children of God, which is what the incarnation was about, (…) became
an invitation to renounce being human and to set about becoming divine, to stop being animals
and to start being angels. (…) If ‘spiritual’ is interpreted in this way, it means renouncing or repudiating everything that is not spiritual, which means our nature, our flesh and, above all, our
sexuality (Hederman 1999, 28).
Si l’on suit toujours l’analyse de Maffesoli, « La peur de l’animalité est le fondement de la perspective universaliste. Elle est le fonds de commerce, intangible, de tous les moralistes » (Maffesoli 2002, 44), pour qui la
sexualité mène aux portes de l’enfer. Toutefois, par-delà le bien et le mal, se situe l’intégrité de la création
divine que le démiurge n’a pu vouloir que sexuée. Tel est le message, de tous les progressistes qui ne cherchent rien de plus que de renouer avec leur humanité.
D’après Donal Dorr, il n’y a rien là que de très légitime. Et il s’interroge : “Why is it that shame is so
inextricably linked to what should be such a positive and enjoyable experience as sexual activity?” (Dorr
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2004, 100). L’Eglise n’a rien compris, ajoute-t-il, qui, pendant des siècles, a présenté la sexualité comme strictement biologique et reproductive au lieu d’y lire une manifestation de l’amour de Dieu. Il est urgent d’inventer une spiritualité de la sexualité qui soit plus conforme à l’enseignement de l’Evangile :
(…) I have devoted several pages to the exploration of shame and various damaging reactions to
it. It is because this throws a lot of light on the distorted and dysfunctional theology and spirituality of sexuality which was dominant in the church in recent centuries – at least up to Vatican
II, and to some extent even up to the present. If we are to develop a healthy spirituality of sexuality, we must face the challenge of correcting the inadequate and at times distorted theology and
spirituality which we have inherited. We cannot any longer assume that what is presented to us
as the ‘traditional catholic teaching’ on sex and sexuality is an accurate and adequate reflection
of what Jesus stands for (Dorr 2004, 116).
Les Catholiques perdent de vue l’humanité de Jésus, renchérit Peter de Rosa (1998, 238). En effet, démontre-til dans sa magistrale et très critique étude de l’histoire de la papauté, la phobie du sexe au sein du dogme catholique peut historiquement être attribuée à St Augustin, jeune homme aux mœurs dissolues, qui devint pur
esprit après sa conversion. Il prit alors en horreur les amours illicites, voire sordides, de sa jeunesse, interdit sa
maison aux femmes et n’accepta plus de leur parler qu’en présence de témoins. Et de Rosa conclut : “His
conviction that sexual appetite is of its nature evil became the great tradition of the Church” (Dorr 2004, 319).
La tradition de l’Eglise dans ce domaine comme dans tant d’autres est donc strictement humaine et non divine.
Et Donal Dorr de rappeler l’extrême sensualité du texte du Cantique des Cantiques, qui peut être lu comme
une glorification de l’amour sexuel, l’un des plus beaux présents de Dieu. Jésus, par ailleurs, ajoute-t-il, ne
rejetait pas les femmes, bien au contraire : il les traitait en égales, ce qui, à l’époque, passait pour scandaleux.
L’héritage de Saint Augustin trahit donc la parole du Christ et l’Eglise s’est rendue coupable d’un abus de
pouvoir totalement illégitime au vu de l’enseignement divin (Dorr 2004, 124-6).
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L’Eglise s’inquiète naturellement de tels débordements, provenant de ses propres rangs. En tête des
profanateurs vient la Catholic Theological Society of America, qui, se lamente Living Tradition, l’organe du
forum théologique romain, a totalement trahi sa vocation :
The CTSA report proclaimed to Catholic educators a long series of morally irresponsible, shocking, and pastorally devastating conclusions such as the following : a) that Sacred Scripture does
not necessarily forbid any form of genital behaviour whatsoever ; b) that adultery can be morally
acceptable; c) that contraception can be wholesome and moral; d) that premarital intercourse can
be a morally good experience ; e) that evaluations of premarital intercourse that are ‘sin-centred’
should be avoided ; f) that obscene words are now part of the common vocabulary and may be
used in polite conversation ; g) that pornographic material is not immoral ; h) that masturbation
is not sinful ; i) that homosexual intercourse is not wrong in itself (…). *endnote 14.
Ces conclusions sont un excellent résumé de ce que disent les progressistes catholiques en Irlande également.
Partout dans le monde, d’ailleurs, des instructeurs catholiques se font ainsi les agents de ce que Rome nommerait le démon : “Teachers in Catholic schools (…) are not only in effect propagating the spirit of the world,
the flesh and the devil, but doing so with the apparent blessing of the Church” *endnote 15. Le catéchisme de l’Eglise Catholique est pourtant clair sur la question; le document de référence publié par la Conseil Pontifical
pour la Famille, “The Truth and Meaning of Human Sexuality: Guidelines for Education within the family”,
l’est aussi. Le sixième commandement, « Tu ne commettras pas l’adultère », avec son corollaire, selon lequel
tout homme qui a regardé une femme avec concupiscence a déjà commis l’adultère en son cœur servent de
base aux directives catholiques en matière de comportement sexuel.
Bien loin de ces considérations dictées par l’histoire de l’Eglise, Mark Hederman, explorant son humanité, y découvre en outre une dimension masculine autant qu’une dimension féminine, à l’image de Dieu,
lui aussi réinterprété par certains comme un être sexué à la fois mâle et femelle. Le père Thomas Casey, rappe-
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lant la célèbre déclaration de la chanteuse Madonna à propos du lien entre religion et érotisme, commentait dès
1994, de la manière suivante *endnote 16 :
Although I do not subscribe to her sizzling cocktail of sex and religion, I believe there is more
than a grain of truth in what Madonna says. We need to reintegrate sexuality into our Christianity. We have forgotten or concealed the fact that God is more sexual than any of us. (Casey
1998, 101)
Et il poursuivait de la manière suivante, en proposant une réinterprétation du mystère de la Trinité, fondée sur
sa perception de Dieu comme homme et femme tout à la fois:
For a long time, we, Irish, have followed the example of St Patrick in grasping at the shamrock
to help us picture the Trinity. That is okay for children. But for over eighteens, sexual love
would be a much more real (and graphic reality). (Casey 1998, 102)
Le père Casey nous révèle d’ailleurs que, de la même manière qu’un enfant naît de l’union charnelle entre un
homme et une femme, le Saint Esprit naît du rapport d’amour entre le Père et le Fils : « The unexpected result
of this mutual surrender of love is a third person, the Spirit » (Casey 1998, 103). Dieu sexué est pur amour et
père d’un homme sexué à son image.
Lorsque l’homme croise en lui-même sa propre humanité, encouragé en cela par sa rencontre initiale
avec le vrai Dieu des Ecritures, doublement sexué, il découvre également, selon certains, une part de Dieu en
lui-même. Selon John O’Donohue, « le corps est le temple de l’Esprit Saint”; et il poursuit : “If we believe that
the body is in the soul and the soul is divine ground, then the presence of the divine is completely here, close
with us” (O’Donohue 1997, 73). John O’Donohue fonde sa certitude sur une grande pensée mystique du christianisme médiéval, celle de Maître Eckhart, un penseur cité régulièrement par la plupart des progressistes catholiques. Dans la perspective qui est la nôtre ici, il est pertinent de noter que Maître Eckhart a été condamné
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en 1329 pour vingt-huit de ses thèses, jugées « malsonnantes, téméraires et suspectes d’hérésie » (Eckhart
1942, III). Les autorités ecclésiastiques de son temps lui reprochaient de proposer de la théorie de l’union mystique une interprétation exacerbée qui déifiait l’âme humaine, envisagée dans une union si intime avec Dieu
qu’elle ne se distinguait plus de son créateur. De même le mystique était-il soupçonné de panthéisme, ce qui
n’est pas sans écho à l’époque contemporaine, puisque les réformistes se réclamant de Maître Eckhart, écologistes de cœur, mettent en avant l’immanence de Dieu. Le divin doit, selon eux, être vénéré dans sa création, la
nature et la planète, qu’il est de notre devoir de protéger. Notons aussi que Maître Eckhart n’a été réhabilité
que très tard, au XIXe siècle, et par la pensée protestante très essentiellement.
Etonnante rencontre, donc, l’homme est susceptible, pour certains, de trouver Dieu en lui-même, mais il
peut être difficile à identifier, d’où le recours à toute une série de pratiques au frontières du catholicisme en
termes de supports rituels ou de croyances. Pour y parvenir, en effet, il peut être nécessaire, selon les expérimentateurs, de se placer au croisement de toutes les spiritualités et philosophies susceptibles de nous aider.
Dans la tentative première qui consiste à briser les codes d’accès à notre inconscient, Mark Hederman propose
ainsi des techniques originales, dont l’utilisation de symboles qui l’aident à avancer dans l’obscurité intérieure
où il cherche Dieu. Dans un ouvrage de 2003 accueilli avec une certaine méfiance par l’opinion catholique
irlandaise, Hederman suggère à cette fin, par exemple, l’utilisation des cartes de tarot pour nous aider à « lire
le monde comme symbole » (Herderman 2003). Il y voit un équivalent européen et chrétien des idéogrammes
chinois, une porte ouverte sur « un monde alternatif, une autre forme de pensée » car les arcanes sont les
« reliques d’une sensibilité religieuse » (Hederman 2003, 27) pré-moderne. Dénonçant le détournement par les
occultistes et autres astrologues de cartes à la symbolique purement chrétienne à l’origine, il voit en elles « an
idiot’s guide’ to the unconscious. » (Hederman 2003, 29) On le voit bien ici : pour lui, l’accès au vrai Dieu des
Ecritures, peut se faire hors de la Bible et hors des livres en général. C’est même l’un des leitmotive de son
ouvrage. Commentant l’arcane VIIII du tarot de Marseille, qui représente l’ermite, il écrit ainsi :
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The card shows a monk, like Lao-tzu, whose name means ‘old man’, embodying a wisdom, not
to be found in books, a wisdom both elemental and ageless, represented by the fire in his lamp.
(…) This tiny particular lamp represents personal wisdom, not universal law. The design, features, and colours of the card betoken a pragmatic approach to truth rather than an abstract or
philosophical one. Such wisdom is not found in libraries; it is distilled in broken hearts. The hermit’s tranquil demeanour results from individual insight. It is the surefootedness of the mystic
rather than the assimilated security of religious dogma (Hederman 2003, 150).
Pour Hederman, le Dieu du Livre se trouve manifestement hors de toute interprétation livresque et tout
particulièrement dans l’imaginaire humain figuré par la création artistique. Car les cartes sont aussi des œuvres
d’art et, en cela, une métaphore de la création. De l’arcane XXI et dernier, le Monde, il dit ainsi qu’il représente le triomphe de la résurrection et célèbre le monde comme absolu de la créativité divine :
The world is to be understood neither as an organism nor as a mechanism, it is a work of art; it is
movement and it is rhythm. And if we are pure of heart we can syncopate our basic rhythm to
the divine rhythm and be taken up in the dance of eternity. Creativity and joy are at the root of
creation, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. (Hederman
2003, 208)
L’art est mis en avant comme moyen privilégié d’accès à Dieu car il est le fruit de l’imaginaire et de la créativité humains. “Art reveals to us the uniqueness of what it can mean to be human”, écrit Hederman (Hederman
2003, 26), ce qui nous guide spontanément vers le divin, ultime créateur. La réinterpretation du divin passe
aujourd’hui nécessairement par une spiritualisation de l’expérience religieuse. Or cette spiritualisation
« accentue l’aspect esthétique » entendu dans le sens d’accès à l’imaginaire. Pour Vattimo, « L’état de civilisation à laquelle nous sommes parvenus nous offre la chance de réaliser le règne de l’esprit conçu comme allègement et ‘poétisation’ du réel » (Vattimo 2002, 83).
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Il est significatif alors d’entendre en Irlande des voix s’élever pour qu’il soit fait appel aux artistes pour
réinventer la religion. C’est à ce prix que la pensée catholique, pensent certains, pourra se revigorer de l’intérieur. Anthony Draper, prêtre et professeur de théologie à Dublin, présente ainsi l’écrivain comme « l’orateur
de la condition humaine » et confère à son œuvre un caractère sacré :
The artist can see deeper than the political slogan, the psychological jargon, the ecclesiastical
rhetoric (…). This prophetic dimension of the artistic vocation, digging beneath the surface, can
hardly be ignored by the theologian who shares in the same prophetic spirit, being called to
search under the exterior to discern the hidden presence of God (Draper 1998, 123).
Le temps de la censure est donc apparemment définitivement révolu et l’on en appelle aux artistes pour réinventer la religion catholique :
We must breathe life into the dead weight of our liturgies, by inhaling their forgotten fragrances,
their hidden beginnings (…) we must re-imagine baptism (..). We must re-imagine penance (…).
We must re-imagine Eucharist (…). We must re-imagine marriage (…). We must re-imagine
suffering and death (…).
So let our artists freshen the telling of our tale. So let them fresco our oratories as they will stain
our transparencies as they need to. Let them raise the roofs of our cathedrals and decant God’s
light. (Matthews 1998, 39-46)
La spécificité de notre époque réside en réalité dans la multiplicité des approches possibles, qui légitime, aux
frontières de la doxa, une absolue liberté dans le rapport au divin, et le rejet de tout discours de type normatif.
Si, dans le contexte catholique, il est maintenant permis d’envisager de dissocier la spiritualité de la
religion, si « un christianisme non religieux » (Mathews 1998, 39-46) prend ainsi corps dans le cadre postmoderne, il paraît indispensable, du même coup, de revenir sur la signification même du concept de métaphysi-
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que. La perception judéo-chrétienne de Dieu créateur de toutes choses et origine ultime de l’être avait abouti à
une identification totale de la métaphysique et de la science de l’être en tant qu’être avec la science de Dieu,
pour se trouver totalement réduite à la théologie et à son interprétation d’une source ultime de la vérité. Revenir sur ce précepte fondamental invite à s’interroger sur la possibilité même d’une métaphysique contemporaine. Elle ne devient en fait envisageable que si nous nous référons à la définition originelle, fondée sur la
présentation d’Aristote, qui distingue physique, science de la nature et métaphysique, science de l’au-delà de
la nature *endnote 17, et qui postule simplement l’existence d’un monde invisible au-delà du monde. Cette proposition minimale rend alors légitime une redéfinition de la relation à Dieu par le biais d’une métaphysique réinventée, plurielle, à l’image de notre « Babel postmoderne » (Vattimo 2002, 29). L’expérience spirituelle authentique n’est alors accessible qu’au-delà des apparences, au-delà de rituels vidés de toute signification. A
une métaphysique de système se substituent ainsi des métaphysiques de l’expérience, qui ne sont pas sans évoquer les thèses de Bergson dans son Introduction à la métaphysique, pour qui l’intuition humaine se situait au
cœur de la relation avec le divin. Dieu étant par définition absent et l’expérience spirituelle se déroulant exclusivement dans l’esprit de l’individu qui la vit, on peut, suivant cette approche, suggérer que l’homme acquiert,
hors du système établi, le pouvoir de réinventer le sacré et de revoir ses rituels dans une perspective qui valorise son imagination.
Certaines expérimentations aux marges du catholicisme vont tout à fait dans ce sens. Elles montrent
que l’on peut alors se donner la liberté de franchir des frontières interdites pour créer un nouveau lien avec le
divin. Nous prendrons deux exemples, l’un indigène et influent dans ses formes mesurées, le christianisme
celtique, et l’autre exogène et marginal, le christianisme et les sagesses orientales. Dans les deux domaines, il
existe des différences considérables de degré entre modérés et extrémistes, mais les uns comme les autres manifestent la tentation de franchir la frontière vers une terre aussi largement inconnue que porteuse de promesses
pour l’imagination humaine. Nous verrons d’ailleurs que les attirances revendiquées ne sont pas mutuellement
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exclusives et que les frontières se rejoignent.
L'un des analystes les plus rigoureux de la question du christianisme celtique, John O'Riordain, souligne, dans son ouvrage intitulé Irish Catholic Spirituality, Celtic and Roman, l'extraordinaire élément de permanence qu'il voit dans le sentiment religieux irlandais depuis l'évangélisation. Après une analyse en quatorze
points de cette remarquable continuité, il conclut: “(...) our popular religious tradition is at once faithful to the
point of apparent fatalism and fresh, free-flowing, and unpredictable as a mountain stream” (O’Riordain
1998, 12). Elle est donc force de vie, contrairement à l'institution que les Irlandais rejettent aujourd'hui au profit d'un message trop longtemps occulté.
L'Eglise a ainsi desservi la religion catholique, affirme le père Daniel O'Leary, en dénonçant les pratiques populaires superstitieuses d'inspiration vaguement païenne. Celles-ci avaient en effet le mérite de rythmer
« le mystérieux voyage de l'âme » et de le ritualiser, ce dont l'Eglise catholique s'est montrée incapable
(O’Leary 1999, 223). Michael Drumm, professeur de théologie au Mater Dei Institute de Dublin le confirme,
dans un plaidoyer en faveur d'un retour intelligent aux origines :
We might bring forth many riches from our past to help us incarnate the faith in a post-modern
context. We could look again at the emphasis on communal rituals rather than just the individual's search for meaning; at the interaction of Christian and pagan motifs; at the celebration of
the earth; at the encounter with the numinous and otherness in many of our traditions. This is
already happening in what is termed “Celtic spirituality”. (Drumm 1996).
Cette citation très riche mérite que l'on s'y intéresse. Elle résume en effet en quelques mots l'essentiel des éléments principaux de définition d'une spiritualité irlandaise qui serait force de renouveau pour la foi catholique.
Tout en établissant une distinction entre les spiritualités dites celtique et irlandaise, l'auteur y revendique l'appartenance de l'Irlande à la grande tradition des Celtes, qu'il définit en termes d'aptitude à la fusion
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éclairée des traditions religieuses. Des ouvrages sur la spiritualité celtique comme modèle pour les temps futurs sont parus en assez grand nombre ces dernières années. Il est intéressant de noter que l'accent y est systématiquement mis sur faculté novatrice des Celtes, successivement prêts à assimiler la religion néolithique et à
embrasser le christianisme tout en préservant les aspects essentiels de leur sensibilité religieuse. C'est sur la
base de cette permanence, mais aussi du dynamisme et de l'adaptabilité de la culture celtique, préservée par
l'histoire, que doit, selon les adeptes du Christianisme celtique, se fonder toute tentative de régénération religieuse. A cette frontière, le risque existe de basculer de l'autre côté. C'est ce qui est arrivé au père Dara Molloy, prêtre catholique, qui a quitté l'Eglise pour mener à Inis Mór, avec sa femme ses quatre enfants, une existence qu'il présente comme celle d'un moine celtique, mais qui inclut une dimension ouvertement druidique.
Aucune des élaborations intellectuelles précédemment évoquées ne propose un système cohérent fondé sur un seul type de pensée religieuse. Toutes puisent leur inspiration de plusieurs sources, présentées
comme compatibles. Ce n’est ainsi pas un hasard si les adeptes irlandais du christianisme celtique sont en général soucieux de manifester leur respect envers les conceptions bouddhistes. John Main et William Johnston,
deux religieux catholiques précurseurs de l’exploration des rapprochements possibles entre christianisme et
bouddhisme, ont tous deux été initialement attirés par le christianisme primitif : le christianisme des origines
est en effet celui qui se prête le mieux aux analogies avec les sagesses orientales –ainsi John O’Donohue voitil, pour sa part, un parallèle convaincant entre sa compréhension de l’anam ċara celtique et du kalyana mitra
hindou (O’Donohue 1997, 48) *endnote 18. C’est aussi la forme de christianisme qui, comme le bouddhisme, est
compatible avec la sensibilité écologique. Notons entre parenthèses que les adeptes de l’éco-théologie, autre
dérivation contemporaine du christianisme, se réclament eux aussi des thèses bouddhistes. Selon le rapport du
Conseil Pontifical pour le Dialogue Interreligieux sur le New Age, le rapprochement entre écologie, christianisme celtique et religions d’orient est typique des dérives dangereuses de la spiritualité contemporaine. Tout
en reconnaissant la légitimité d’une quête spirituelle, ses auteurs notent qu’une telle approche s’inscrit dans
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une démarche qui va à l’encontre de la révélation chrétienne et condamnent le relativisme qui la sous-tend
(CPDI 2003, 5).
Il est notoire que, depuis les années 60, le monde occidental se réapproprie très librement les techniques psycho-corporelles et certains principes philosophiques bouddhistes et hindouistes. Le mouvement était,
au départ, peu perceptible en Irlande, mais il l’a désormais rejointe, au point d’exercer une forme d’influence
dans le contexte contemporain des mutations du croire. Mark Hederman pour sa part, explorant la part obscure
de l’intériorité humaine dans Kissing the Dark, se réfère, entre autres, au modèle que pourrait constituer une
technique de méditation Zen particulière pour parvenir à apprivoiser son inconscient :
Gentling the bull is a Zen training process which allows you to get in touch with [the unconscious]. This involves searching for, finding, catching and riding back home, the bull that is part
of everyone’s being. (…) We have to undertake some similar exercise or exercises in Europe to
start befriending the Minotaur (Hederman 1999, 157).
D’autres enfin, à l’instar du Bénédictin anglais John Main, fondateur, dès 1974, d’une école de méditation à la
croisée des chemins entre traditions chrétiennes primitives et orientales, envisagent la contemplation comme
partie prenante d’une conscience spirituelle globale. Insistant sur la centralité de la méditation chez les Pères
du désert du IVe siècle et des parallèles à établir avec les enseignements des maîtres d’Asie, John Main a diffusé ses préceptes de par le monde. Ses centres de méditation chrétienne, unis en 1991 sous la dénomination
de World Community for Christian Meditation comptent aujourd’hui des groupes dans le monde entier. Il en
existe dans toutes les régions d’Irlande, au Nord comme au Sud, qui sont animés indifféremment par des laïcs
et des religieux. L’ordre bénédictin dans son ensemble est, par ailleurs, à la pointe des échanges spirituels entre Ouest et Est, et il participe à des rencontres avec des moines bouddhistes (surtout zen) depuis 1979.
La personne qui semble aujourd’hui aller le plus loin dans le domaine du rapprochement entre catholi-
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cisme irlandais et bouddhisme est sans nul doute le philosophe et théologien irlandais Joseph O’Leary, actuellement professeur associé à l’université Sophia de Tokyo. Il postule en effet la possibilité d’un rapprochement
viable entre christianisme et bouddhisme sans renier le christianisme et en construisant l’avenir. Sa position est
radicale : il s’agit de réinventer les religions traditionnelles pour les adapter au contexte global contemporain.
Certes confidentielle à l’échelle de l’Irlande, cette perspective est symbolique du dynamisme du dialogue interreligieux entre christianisme et bouddhisme au niveau international.
Joseph O’Leary se fixe en réalité la tâche « d’élaborer un discours proprement théologique sur le pluralisme religieux » (O’Leary 1994, 27) au nom des « rapports de complémentarité » (O’Leary 1994, 33) qu’il
voit entre les grandes traditions religieuses. Il le justifie par différents exemples dont celui qui suit : « Comparé
au bouddhisme, il peut sembler que le christianisme soit une religion émotive et confuse ; l’Evangile a besoin
des analyses bouddhistes pour expliquer la logique sa doctrine d’amour et pour dissoudre la fausse ontologie
sur laquelle repose l’égoïsme » (O’Leary 1994, 34). Le christianisme en retour, est susceptible d’apporter au
bouddhisme la notion de primauté du Christ « comme figure intégrale du salut de Dieu, tout en admettant que
le processus du salut puisse se poursuivre de manière indépendante dans les autres traditions » (O’Leary 1994,
253). Le Christ est toutefois ici compris dans son interprétation gnostique, « non plus comme le Christ-Roi de
la chrétienté, mais comme concentration de la sagesse et de l’illumination » (O’Leary 1994, 294).
Le Conseil Pontifical pour le Dialogue Interreligieux, citant Jean-Paul II, rappelle que les positions
gnostiques ont été rejetées par l’Eglise et que l’on ne peut détourner la parole divine en se réclamant d’une
prétendue connaissance profonde de Dieu (CPDI 2003, 6). Or c’est bien la notion même de Dieu qu’il est
question de revoir à la lueur de théories humaines selon une approche moniste. O’Leary en convient bien volontiers, puisque sa thèse centrale s’attache à réconcilier le Dieu personnel des Chrétiens et le non-théisme
bouddhiste. Il suggère, pour ce faire, d’utiliser « une idée maîtresse, sous-jacente aux réflexions bouddhistes
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sur la fragilité du langage, celle de la vacuité (śûnyatā) [pour] repenser Dieu et son Christ » (O’Leary 1994,
17). Il s’agit là pour O’Leary d’un apport constructif à la théologie chrétienne et le moyen de limiter la prolifération d’une « religiosité sauvage » dans laquelle il ne se reconnaît pas (O’Leary 1994, 315). Dans sa lettre aux
évêques de 1989, le cardinal Ratzinger dénonçait dans ce type d’élaboration intellectuelle une perception de
Dieu qui n’avait plus rien à voir avec la seule vraie tradition chrétienne, puisque devenu « un abîme indéterminé de divinité' »
*endnote 19.
Il est bien impossible, selon les autorités centrales de l’Eglise, de réconcilier dua-
lisme et monisme.
Aux marges de la doxa catholique, une dynamique de réinvention est à l’œuvre hors des cadres de la
tradition de l’Eglise défendue par Rome comme l’une des composantes essentielles du dogme. Les catholiques
progressistes à l’origine du processus participent, ce faisant, à un double phénomène de démythification et de
remythification. Tous reviennent sur la lente élaboration historique de croyances que leurs pères croyaient fondées en nature. Le Christ n’a jamais rien écrit, souligne ainsi Mark Hederman. La religion du Livre, dit-il,
n’est pas autre chose au départ que l’articulation humaine de la pensée divine dans les systèmes de pensée de
l’époque, eux-mêmes le fruit d’histoires antérieures. Au cadre philosophique grec qui, le premier, accueillit les
prémisses de la parole chrétienne, vinrent ensuite s’ajouter des éléments multiples, entachés d’erreurs d’interprétation et d’inventions pures qui eurent pour effet, conclut Hederman, d’altérer grossièrement le message
hors-Texte de Jesus. Dénoncer de la sorte la fabrication historique revient à démythifier le dogme. Remythification il y a bien également dans les cercles progressistes puisqu’il est, après tout, question de réinventer le
christianisme sur une base à la fois individuelle et syncrétique.
Pour Gianni Vattimo, le problème actuel de l’Eglise de Rome est qu’ « elle ne parvient pas à se libérer
de la littéralité historique du choix des premiers apôtres » (Vattimo 2002, 74). Pour répondre aux propositions
religieuses de toutes natures, la seule option qui lui reste offerte est alors le repli dans un discours réaction-
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naire, dénonçant tout ensemble les aberrations des nouveaux mouvements religieux et les interprétations catholiques libérales des Ecritures, encourageant la piété populaire de type traditionnel et le culte du pape. Pour
Vattimo, comprendre en contexte les métaphysiques nouvelles permet de revenir au vrai Dieu. Alors toutes les
dérives par rapport au modèle dogmatique prennent sens. Une lecture spiritualisée du message des Ecritures
permet de comprendre qu’ « histoire sacrée et histoire profane ne se distinguent plus » et alors « l’effet du pluralisme culturel, ainsi que politique, social, etc., qui caractérise le monde postmoderne est une sorte de
‘spiritualisation’ du sens même de la réalité » (Vattimo 2002, 76-77). C’est dans ce nœud des possibles que
l’on peut désormais accéder à la vie éternelle réinterprétée par Vattimo pour signifier « la jouissance parfaite
des significations et des formes spirituelles que l’histoire de l’humanité a produites et qui constituent le
‘royaume’ de l’immortalité » (Vattimo 2002, 86).
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Works cited
Casey, Thomas, 1998. “Old Yarn and New Stories”, Conway Eamonn & Kilcoyne Colin, éds, The Splintered
Heart. Dublin: Veritas.
Conway, Eamonn & Kilcoyne, Colm, éds, 1998. The Splintered Heart. Dublin: Veritas.
Conseil Pontifical pour le Dialogue Interreligieux, 2003. Jesus Christ The Bearer of the Water of Life – A
Christian Reflection on the New Age, in www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/interelg/documents/
rc_pc_interelg_doc_20030203_new-age-en.html
de Rosa, Peter, 1998. Vicars of Christ. Dublin: Poolbeg.
Dempsey, Anne, 2005. « Exorcising the Devil. Is it really all in the Mind? », The Irish Independent, 23 February.
Dorr, Donald, 2004. Time for a Change. Dublin: Columba Press.
Draper, Anthony, 1998. “The Frontier of the Word” in Conway Eamonn & Kilcoyne Colin, éds, 1998 The
Splintered Heart. Dublin: Veritas.
Drumm, Michael, 1996. “Irish Catholics - a People Formed by Ritual” in Eoin Cassidy, éd, Faith and Culture
in the Irish Context. Dublin: Veritas.
Hederman, Mark, 1999. Kissing the Dark. Dublin, Veritas.
Hederman, Mark, 2003. Tarot: Talisman or Taboo – Reading the World as Symbol. Dublin: Currach Press.
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Jean-Paul II, 1998. Faith and Reason. Dublin: Veritas.
Maffesoli, Michel, 2002. La part du diable. Paris: Flammarion.
Mathews, Aidan, 1998. “The Annals of Hannah”, in Conway Eamonn & Kilcoyne Colm, éds, 1998 The Splintered Heart. Dublin: Veritas.
O’Donohue, John,1997. Anam Cara. Londres: Bantam Books.
O'Leary, Daniel, 1999. Lost Soul? The Catholic Church Today. Dublin: Columba Press, 1999.
O’Leary, Joseph, 1994. La vérité chrétienne à l’âge du pluralisme religieux. Paris: Les Editions du Cerf.
O'Riordain, John, 1998. Irish Spirituality, Celtic and Roman. Dublin: Columba Press, 1998.
Vattimo, Gianni, 2002. Après la chrétienté. Paris: Calmann-Lévy.
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Ce téléphone rouge qui nous relie désormais à Dieu. Sécularisation et définition de la rencontre avec l’au-delà revue et corrigée chez les catholiques en France et en Irlande ultramoderne.
Jean-Christophe Penet, National Centre for Franco-Irish Studies
En guise d’introduction, l’auteur du présent article tient à s’expliquer sur le choix de ce titre assez incongru,
voire carrément étrange. Pourquoi telle référence à un « téléphone rouge » qui relierait désormais les catholiques de France et d’Irlande à Dieu ? Il s’agit ici de reprendre ce symbole par excellence de la guerre froide,
cette guerre idéologique entre les deux grandes entités politiques antéposées qu’étaient alors l’URSS et les
Etats Unis d’Amérique, une guerre toute « moderne », dans ses enjeux du moins, et ce afin de le transposer
dans un contexte « ultramoderne », dans lequel il ne permet plus à deux nations de se joindre, mais à chaque
individu (car l’ère ultramoderne est celle de l’individu tout-puissant) de joindre l’au-delà en cas de crise.
En effet, dans le sillage de Marcel Gauchet nous considérons que la longue phase de paix rendue possible par l’équilibre nucléaire de la Guerre Froide dans l’après-1945 créa les conditions d’un « nouveau bond en
avant de la société de l’histoire » à partir des années 1970. Selon lui, il se serait produit à cette époque « un
processus de libéralisation d’une ampleur sans précédent, auquel la désagrégation de l’empire soviétique a
donné sa portée finale en même temps que sa dimension mondiale depuis les années 1970 » et cette libéralisation « a (…) le visage d’une individualisation démultipliée par rapport aux limites qui la bornaient antérieurement, d’une dissolution des encadrements familiaux, moraux, communautaires qui comprimaient la liberté des
personnes » (Gauchet 2005, 28). Il s’agirait, ni plus ni moins, de l’effondrement des institutions et des grandes
croyances qui avaient caractérisé l’époque moderne jusqu’alors.
D’après Patrick Michel dans Politique et religion. La grande mutation, l’effondrement du communisme ne serait, en effet, qu’une étape supplémentaire d’un processus de désenchantement bien plus vaste, et
qui touche aussi bien le politique que le religieux puisque, selon lui, tout deux « (…) concourent à structurer
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des univers de sens, différents les uns des autres, mais en constant rapport de recouvrement et d’emboîtement,
de complémentarité et d’opposition, voire de juxtaposition » (Michel, 1994, 99). Aussi discute-t-il le fait que
d’aucuns vivent les conséquences de l’effondrement du communisme comme une crise de la centralité puisque, selon lui, cet effondrement n’est que l’illustration de la crise du croire ensemble dans ce qu’il appelle
« l’ère du relatif » (Michel 1994, 20). Le célèbre désenchantement du monde dont nous parle Marcel Gauchet
dans son ouvrage du même nom, phénomène religieux à l’origine et rendu possible par la nature même du catholicisme (religion de la transcendance, de l’incarnation et de l’interprétation qui, par des biais détournés,
permit l’avènement de l’Humanisme et de la modernité)
*endnote 20,
s’étend donc aujourd’hui à tous les domai-
nes, dont le domaine politique. Cette hypersécularisation serait, d’après Jean-Paul Willaime, l’une des caractéristiques de ce qu’il appelle « l’ultramodernité », une notion qui ne traduit pas tout à fait la même idée que
celle de postmodernité *endnote 21.
A l’instar de Anthony Giddens, il est possible de considérer, en effet, que « loin d’aborder une ère
post-moderne, nous entrons plus que jamais dans une phase de radicalisation et d’universalisation des conséquences de la modernité » (Giddens 1994, 12). Ce que traduit la notion d’ultramodernité. Celle-ci se veut synonyme de société moderne, où, selon le sociologue « les individus sont effectivement émancipés des pouvoirs
religieux et de tous les systèmes symboliques englobants qui prétendent dire le sens. La société elle-même
n’est plus intégrée par un système unifié de sens et l’on assiste à un processus de désinstitutionnalisation de
sens accentué par la mondialisation de l’économie et de la communication » (Willaime 2004, 202). C’est à
travers le prisme de cette ultramodernité dont nous parle Willaime, qui prolonge la modernité et prend racine
dans le processus de libération des années 1960 et 1970, que nous nous proposons d’étudier la redéfinition de
la rencontre avec l’au-delà chez les catholiques français et irlandais contemporains. Pour ce faire, il nous faut
tout d’abord nous intéresser de plus près à cette première reconnaissance officielle de la modernité par l’institution catholique, et donc à sa première expérience avec la vague de libération dont parle Marcel Gauchet que
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fut Vatican II, et à la manière dont le concile a profondément transformé les institutions et l’identité catholique.
Dans son effort de s’adapter au monde moderne pluraliste et libéral, l’Eglise annonça, lors de Vatican
II, sa volonté de renoncer à l’idée que l’Eglise catholique est la seule détentrice de la vérité afin de favoriser,
sous la notion d’œcuménisme, le dialogue avec les autres églises
*endnote 22.
C’est en ce sens que, selon le spé-
cialiste de sociologie politique Alain Dieckhoff, le concile de Vatican II consista en un « véritable renversement anthropologique et ecclésiologique » puisqu’il marqua l’acception par l’Eglise de valeurs qu’elle n’avait
cesse de rejeter jusqu’alors, et donc l’abandon (qu’il soit forcé ou volontaire) de son intransigeantisme (Michel
1997, 332). Ceci ne fut pas sans effets sur les fidèles de France et d’Irlande, qui se trouvèrent parfois déstabilisés face aux changements doctrinaux et structurels d’une Eglise se définissant de plus en plus de manière démocratique, comme l’ensemble des fidèles, et de moins en moins de manière hiérarchique, comme l’institution
ecclésiale. En effet, dans un monde ultramoderne où le pluralisme règne en maître, la tradition religieuse, qui
pouvait jadis être imposée autoritairement, doit, comme le souligne Peter Berger, désormais être marchandisée
afin d’être vendue à une clientèle qui n’est plus obligée d’acheter (Trigano 2001, 188). Avec Vatican II, la foi,
l’identité même des catholiques se trouve donc changée puisqu’elle cesse d’appartenir au domaine de l’indiscutable et de l’intouchable (où l’intransigeantisme de l’institution la cantonnait), pour devenir peu à peu un
choix, une proposition faite par une Eglise qu’ Yves Lambert qualifie de « prestataire de service » (Lambert
1992, 11).
En intégrant, avec Vatican II, les valeurs du pluralisme à son dogme et donc, par conséquent, à son
institution (s’adaptant ainsi au monde moderne), l’Eglise a de la sorte perdu de son autorité qui émanait de son
unicité, de sa prétention à être seule détentrice de la vérité. De la sorte, depuis le Concile l’institution semble
en effet avoir survécu, selon le philosophe Paul Thibaud, « (…) dans un état d’anarchie négative, de dispersion
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clandestine, hargneuse, conflictuelle, non consentie, beaucoup prenant - chacun dans son coin – leurs petites
libertés. Une institution qui est dans cet état n’assure plus sa tâche d’organiser la communication dans l’espace
(confrontation des diverses expériences) et dans le temps (confrontation avec la tradition) » (Thibaud 2005,
103). Une simple comparaison entre la réaction plutôt timide et légaliste au concile de Vatican II en Irlande, et
la réaction largement enthousiaste en France à un Concile attendu et auquel les élites catholiques françaises ont
largement participé, suffit pour exemplifier la confrontation des diverses expériences au niveau des Eglises
particulières à laquelle il est ici fait allusion. Ainsi, l’unicité de l’Eglise à travers l’espace et le temps, ce fondement du dogme catholique, se retrouve-t-il mis à mal par ce pluralisme qui a pénétré l’institution catholique,
et la conduit à se redéfinir, ou plutôt, à être redéfinie par ses fidèles. L’éclatement de l’unicité de l’Eglise ne
s’arrêta pas, d’ailleurs, au niveau de l’Eglises universelle, puisque des divisions et des tensions se firent sentir
dès le lendemain du concile entre partisans et opposants du concile au sein de chaque Eglise particulière. En
effet, en donnant aux laïcs plus d’autonomie et un pouvoir accru, Vatican II leur a donné non seulement les
moyens de critiquer mais aussi l’envie de repenser l’institution. De la même façon, encouragés par les redéfinitions liturgiques du Concile, qui mettaient l’accent sur l’eucharistie (et donc sur cette rencontre, cette prise
de contact avec Jésus chez les catholiques), les laïcs se mirent à vouloir limiter le rôle de l’institution médiatrice avec l’au-delà afin de pouvoir accéder à une rencontre plus immédiate avec Dieu.
En réalité, il nous semble que cette volonté d’une rencontre immédiate entraînant la déliquescence de
l’institution catholique ne serait pas seulement due à Vatican II, mais qu’elle s’inscrirait avant tout dans la logique, bien plus vaste, de cette ultramodernité qui lui est contemporaine et dont il serait un symptôme. En effet, dans l’ère ultramoderne, le règne de l’individu est absolu, puisque, son principe d’autonomie étant complètement achevé, son choix est roi, et que toute institution se retrouve de facto remise en question, qu’elle soit
politique ou encore religieuse. C’est ainsi que, reprenant la théorie sur le croire développée par Daniel Hervieu-Léger dans La religion pour mémoire (1993), Patrick Michel considère que l’effondrement du commu-
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nisme et celui de l’institution catholique sont deux événements à ramener à une seule et même cause : la crise
du croire ou, plus précisément, « la crise du croire ensemble », et donc de l’institution en tant qu’organe de
« transmission, de médiation et de contrôle » (Michel 1994, 112).
Ainsi, depuis la fin des années 1960, que ce soit en France ou en Irlande, on enregistre chez les catholiques le déclin constant et considérable de la pratique de la confession – ce formidable outil de contrôle des
fidèles pour l’institution. Ou, comme le constate Marguerite Corish pour l’Irlande, « La confession est la pratique qui, chez les catholiques irlandais, a le plus souffert au cours de la période 1974-1989 (…). La pratique de
la confession mensuelle est passée de 47% en 1974 à 18% en 1989. En 1995, elle a encore baissé et n’atteint
plus que 14% » (Corish 1998, 140). Bien que, pour des raisons historiques évidentes, la pratique de la confession en Irlande semble avoir baissé plus lentement qu’en France dans les années 1960 et 1970 (pour s’accélérer considérablement dans les vingt dernières années), son déclin régulier à partir de cette période semble être
l’une des premières indications que l’Irlande, tout comme la France, ait également commencé à devenir ultramoderne dans les années 1960. Ainsi, le croire s’y est, par conséquent, individualisé, et n’est aujourd’hui
« fondamentalement validé que par et dans une pratique et non plus par la référence à une institution qui en
définirait le cadre et le contenu avant d’en contrôler le déploiement » (Michel 1994, 125). Ceci nous permet
d’expliquer que la pratique de la prière, pratique immédiate de la rencontre avec l’au-delà s’il en est, soit désormais plus fréquente que la présence à la messe chez les catholiques français et irlandais. En effet, d’après le
dossier de janvier 2007 du Monde des Religions, consacré aux « Catholiques français », « la pratique habituelle de la prière (au moins une fois par semaine : 25%) est plus de trois fois supérieure à la participation habituelle à la messe (toutes les semaines ou plus : 8%) ». A l’autre extrême, seulement 30% des catholiques ne
prient jamais, alors qu’un nombre beaucoup plus élevé d’entre eux, 52%, ne va jamais à la messe. On trouve
des chiffres similaires concernant la prière en Irlande, quoiqu’un peu plus élevés puisqu’ils atteignent les 60%
pour toutes les tranches d’âge, mis à part les 18-26 qui n’atteignent que 54% (Cassidy 2002, 29). C’est ainsi
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que, dans Measuring Ireland : Discerning Values and Beliefs, Eoin Cassidy en conclue que : « (…) when it
comes to giving expression to their beliefs [the Irish] increasingly prefer a private to a communal setting » (Cassidy 2002, 29). Que ce soit en France, ou encore en Irlande, les catholiques de l’ultramodernité
semblent donc s’éloigner de ce que nous nous proposons d’appeler l’institution « standardiste », c’est-à-dire
une institution ecclésiale qui assure la médiation avec l’au-delà, et qui donne la norme.
Cet éloignement se fait au profit d’une rencontre plus immédiate, qui se veut plus forte et plus authentique, car plus personnelle, avec l’au-delà. C’est cette individualisation de la foi, où chacun cherche des résultats concrets ainsi que des émotions, que souligne la sociologue Céline Béraud, spécialiste de l’évolution des
pratiques catholiques dans la modernité, dans Le Monde des Religions de janvier 2007 puisque, selon elle,
lorsque les catholiques s’adressent à l’Eglise : « C’est moins une médiatisation avec l’au-delà qui est attendue,
qu’une expression émotionnelle ici et maintenant ». Ce qui n’est pas sans poser de problème, puisque, comme
elle le fait remarquer, le rite catholique, qui n’est pas centré sur l’individu, ne se prête pas à cette nouvelle attente. Pour remédier à ce problème, certains catholiques n’hésitent donc pas à s’inspirer des religions du
monde entier afin de redéfinir le rite catholiques en des termes plus personnels – et pas très orthodoxes –
comme, par exemples, ces centaines de « chrétiens bouddhistes » qui vont chaque année pratiquer le bouddhisme sous la houlette du maître Thich Nhat Hanh, fondateur du Village des Pruniers dans le sud-ouest de la
France... *endnote 23.
Ainsi, si être catholique, c’est dire et faire ce que demande la hiérarchie, se plier aux règles d’une
sous-société, les catholiques sont moins nombreux que jamais en France et en Irlande ultramoderne, l’éthique
catholique étant dans ce cas en contradiction avec celle de l’ère ultramoderne (contrairement à celle de l’époque moderne dans laquelle, malgré l’avènement de l’individu, l’obéissance et la fidélité à un groupe, à une
institution était toujours de mise). C’est là une manière de comprendre la baisse chronique de participation à la
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messe dominicale, pourtant obligatoire chez les catholiques, que l’on observe depuis en France et en Irlande
depuis les années 1970, et dont témoignent les données du tableau ci-dessous :
Participation régulière à
l’eucharistie (1 fois par semaine ou plus) en France :
1970s
1980s
1990s
*1970
18%
*1975
14%
*1980
11%
**1990
9.9%
2000
2005
**2004
7.7%
°2005
13%
°°2007
9%
Participation régulière à
l’eucharistie (1 fois par semaine ou plus) en Irlande:
µ1974
91%
µ1981
86%
µ1984
87%
µ1992
85%
µ1999
65%
µ2003
50%
°2005
50%
*Source: Jacques Maître, “Les deux côtés du miroir. Note sur l’évolution religieuse actuelle de la population française par rapport au catholicisme”, in L’année sociologique, n°38, 1988, pp. 33-45, p. 34.
**Source: Jean-Louis Ormières, L’Europe désenchantée. La fin de l’Europe chrétienne ? France, Belgique, Italie,
Espagne, Portugal (Paris: Fayard, 2005), p. 88.
µSources: EUREL (Religion en Europe/Religion in Europe): 1974 and 1984 reproduced from Breslin and Weafer,
Religious Beliefs, Practice and Attitudes: A Comparison of Two Irish Surveys 1974-1984 (Maynooth: Council for
Research and Development, 1985); 1999 reproduced from Fahey et al., A Study f Values and Attitudes in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland (Dublin: Institute of Public Administration, 2005); 2003 taken from an
RTE/Prime Time Survey.
°Source: 2005 ESS (European Social Survey) in O’Mahony Eoin, “Mind the Gap: Measuring Religiosity in Ireland” Studies, Spring 2008, vol. 97, pp. 87-97, p. 93
°° Source: CSA/Le Monde des Religions poll, “La France est-elle encore catholique?,” February 2007
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Ces données illustrent clairement le flagrant déclin de la participation au catholicisme à la fois des Français et
des Irlandais. Certes, les catholiques Irlandais sont toujours cinq fois plus nombreux que leurs homologues
français à participer régulièrement à la messe. Il n’en demeure pas moins que l’église catholique de France et
l’église catholique d’Irlande ont vue toutes deux leurs chiffres de participation des fidèles à la messe dominicale plus ou moins divisés par deux au cours des trente dernières années, avec une chute spectaculaire et bien
plus perceptible en Irlande qui prend des allures de « normalisation » accélérée. Pourtant, il nous faut ici nous
demander si la désertion des églises signifie que les catholiques sont devenus indifférents ou, plutôt, qu’ils ont
changé la forme de leur pratique, en accord avec leur époque.
Comme vous l’avez déjà compris, c’est la deuxième hypothèse que je défends ici (la seule qui me
semble acceptable). En effet, il nous semble que, dans notre ère ultramoderne, mesurer la fidélité religieuse en
dénombrant l’assistance à la cérémonie eucharistique, à la confession, au baptême, au mariage et aux obsèques
ne permette pas de tirer des conclusions sur l’appartenance religieuse, puisque ce serait là appliquer un cadre
de lecture moderne à quelque chose qui ne l’est plus. Bien plus, il nous faut désormais prendre en compte la
redéfinition de l’identité catholique à l’épreuve de la sécularisation, et ce afin de reformuler en des termes ultramodernes la signification de l’appartenance religieuse.
Si, en accord avec la théorie de Marcel Gauchet, on considère que le christianisme fut la religion qui
permit, par des biais détournés, l’avènement de l’Humanisme et donc, à terme, celui de la modernité *endnote 24,
puisque, comme il le souligne dans Le désenchantement du monde, « la religion de l’incarnation est fondamentalement une religion de l’interprétation. C’est-à-dire une religion impliquant aussi bien la détermination et
l’imposition d’un dogme que la liberté des consciences » (Gauchet 1984, 105), il nous est alors possible de
considérer que le christianisme fut également le berceau du sécularisme, puisque ce mouvement, qui consiste
en la revendication de la possibilité du bonheur sur terre, ici et maintenant, fut contemporain de l’Humanisme
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et se développa tout au long de l’ère moderne. D’ailleurs, ben que ce mouvement, promulgué officiellement
pour la première fois en Angleterre par George Jacob Holyoake en 1846, fut longtemps considéré (à tort)
comme anti-catholique, il devient assez rapidement une source d’inspiration pour les théologiens chrétiens qui
se mirent à défendre ce que l’on peut nommer un « christianisme séculaire ». A partir de la fin du XIXe siècle,
certains théologiens se mirent en effet à suggérer que le christianisme ne devait pas s’occuper uniquement de
l’au-delà, mais que les chrétiens devaient également trouver en ce monde les moyens de vivre leurs valeurs
chrétiennes. Selon eux, c’est dans les tâches quotidiennes, dans la vie de tous les jours que le message du
Christ prenait véritablement tout son sens. Le catholicisme, en ce sens, commençait une modernisation et une
sécularisation que sa genèse rendait possible.
C’est toujours selon la même logique d’une modernité poussée à bout et, finalement, reconnue par
l’Eglise catholique, que, plus récemment, l’idée de bonheur fut à nouveau réévaluée et la place du corps reconsidérée chez les catholiques, avec notamment Vatican II qui réhabilita les réalités terrestres *endnote 25. C’est
ainsi que, comme le remarque Yves Lambert : « Désormais, dans le christianisme, du moins dans le catholicisme français, il n’y a guère d’opposition du bonheur ici-bas et du bonheur dans l’au-delà, et même le christianisme se fait promesse de bonheur ici-bas. » (Lambert 1992, 89). Ainsi, en France, le MEJ (Mouvement
Eucharistique de Jeunes), nous indique Françoise Champion, intègre à ses pratiques l’individualisme contemporain, puisqu’il reconnaît que les voies d’accès au bonheur ne sont pas seulement les voies religieuses ou
celle de la militance : « L’épanouissement personnel ne peut faire l’économie de tout ce qui, dans notre société, apparaît comme besoins humains : des loisirs, des vacances, le sport…et aussi, avant tout, la reconnaissance
professionnelle et la prise en compte des aspirations effectives et sexuelles. (…) » (Lambert 1992, 213). Cette
acception de la possibilité du bonheur ici-bas, du sécularisme, consiste donc en une redéfinition profonde de
l’identité catholique s’il en est.
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C’est ce dont témoignent les nouveaux mouvements religieux qui émergèrent, en France d’abord, puis
en Irlande, dans le sillage de Vatican II, et dont la spiritualité se propose, d’après Salvatore Abbruzzese, « (…)
comme une option globale qui propose, au lieu d’une insertion dans des « lieux » désertés ou devenus inexistants, une vie nouvelle immergée dans le siècle » (Abbruzzese 2005, 104). Ces nouveaux mouvements semblent être complètement en phase avec l’ultramodernité puisque, comme elle, l’un de leurs aspects fondamentaux réside dans la centralité de l’autonomie du sujet. Dans ces mouvements, en effet, qui reposent sur des
traits charismatiques, la libre appréciation du témoignage devient le seul critère rationnel dans le parcours
d’adhésion au mouvement. De même, le fait que tous ces mouvements s’inscrivent dans le même contexte
catholique les empêche de se présenter comme voie unique et augmente de la sorte les marges d’autonomie
d’un sujet qui reste libre de choisir entre des formes différentes de renouvellement spirituel. D’où le deuxième
aspect ultramoderne de ces nouveaux mouvements : ils offrent un parcours spirituel qui se veut également un
parcours social ou, comme le souligne S. Abbruzzese : « Charpentés sur le modèle communautaire, ces mouvements donnent vie à une pluralité de réseaux relationnels, qui posent le sujet dans un univers d’échanges, de
sociabilité et d’entraide sans équivalents » (Abbruzzese 205, 105). Ainsi, l’appartenance, chez les catholiques
ultramodernes, ne requiert plus le marquage social, contrairement à l’époque moderne où, comme l’a montre
Tom Inglis pour l’Irlande en reprenant Bourdieu, être catholique était source de capital social. Au contraire, le
marquage social des catholiques ultramodernes semble être soumis au seul principe de discrétion sociale qui
est, en outre, « l’un des traits distinctifs de la société urbaine contemporaine » (Abbruzzese 2005, 105). Les
nouveaux mouvements religieux témoignent donc d’un changement de style chez les catholiques, et donc
d’une redéfinition de l’identité catholique.
Mais comment, au juste, se définit traditionnellement l’identité catholique ? Selon le président de la
Conférence Nationale des Prêtres d’Irlande John Littleton, « Catholic identity can best be defined using three
terms: universality (or catholicity), tradition and sacramentality. These three principles describe the overlap-
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ping and interdependent, yet distinctive, strands of Catholicism » (Fuller, Littleton et Maher 2006, 27). De ces
trois aspects, il semble qu’au moins un (ou la totalité) soit de nos jours remis en question par des catholiques
ayant appris à faire usage de leur liberté de conscience depuis Vatican II. Selon que l’on revendique la tradition des premiers siècles ou celle du Concile de Trente, selon que l’on continue de revendiquer l’universalité
de l’Eglise ou qu’on la rejette, considérant le catholicisme comme une religion parmi d’autres, aussi vraie mais
pas plus vraie que les autres, on se trouve dans la catégorie des catholiques intransigeants ou des catholiques
transigeants… Avec l’intégration des valeurs, d’abord modernes, puis, désormais, ultramodernes à l’identité
catholique, nous sommes donc passés d’une définition unique, objective et socialement déterminée de l’identité catholique à une définition multiple, subjective et intérieure. De la sorte, la religion devient plus souple, plus
personnelle et moins contraignant. C’est clairement le cas en Irlande où, comme le note Cassidy, « There is
increasing evidence that Church teaching in key areas of sexual ethics is progressively less influential in determining lifestyle choices among its members or adherents » (Cassidy 2002, 24). De même, une autre preuve
que les catholiques français et irlandais sont passés d’une conception transcendante à une conception immanente de leur identité religieuse se trouve dans le fait que de plus en plus de catholiques participent à l’eucharistie durant la messe. En Irlande, le nombre de catholiques participant à l’eucharistie est passé de 28% en
1974 à 43% en 1989, ce qui, selon Tom Inglis, « (…) verifies a decline in the doom-and-gloom, fearful, fireand-brimstone type of beliefs associated with the devil and hell, and the rise of a feel-good ethos within the
Church » (Inglis 1998, 209). Jean-Louis Ormières constate le même processus à l’œuvre en France, montrant
en quoi la signification catholique de la communion et, surtout, les conditions que le croyant doit réunir pour y
participer, s’estompent. Selon lui, cela montre combien « en faisant de la communion un sacrement plus ouvert
et plus sensible qu’il ne l’était jadis, le catholicisme contemporain est pénétré du processus d’individualisation ». *endnote 26.
En s’individualisant, le catholicisme devient essentiellement pluriel, ce que montre clairement Jean-
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Marie Donegani dans La liberté de choisir. Pluralisme religieux et pluralisme politique dans le catholicisme
français contemporain. Selon lui, c’est « la pluralité des modes d’identification et d’expression religieuses qui
semblent marquer le catholicisme contemporain et engage à modifier les instruments que la sociologie religieuse avait, en d’autres temps, forgés pour recenser le peuple catholique » (Donegani 1993, 24). Il répertorie
donc la pluralité des catholiques français selon différents modèles et sous-groupes qui correspondent aux différents degrés d’un axe de polarisation qui va de « l’intransigeantisme » (refus de la modernité) au
« transigeantisme » et du « marginalisme » (religion comme rôle social) à « l’intégralisme »
*endnote 27.
Indivi-
dualisme et pluralisme favorisent donc une perception bien plus personnelle de l’identité catholique, ce dont
témoigne le dossier du Monde des Religions de janvier 2007, puisque y sont défini comme catholiques tous
ceux qui se considèrent comme tels. Selon le sociologue Jean-François Barbier-Bouvet, « Pour être apparemment subjective, cette définition permet d’éclairer d’un jour intéressant – et paradoxal – des pratiques et des
croyances bien réelles, mais désormais extrêmement multiformes » (Barbier-Bouvet 2007, 23). Et elles pourraient difficilement être plus multiformes, puisque, en France, 18% seulement des catholiques croient en un
Dieu personnel (ce qui est pourtant un des fondements du christianisme) et 79% croient en une force ou un
énergie. L’on remarque le même processus à l’œuvre chez les catholiques irlandais, bien qu’il faille souligner
le caractère tardif de ce processus, le catholicisme « moderne » (c’est-à-dire institué) ayant résisté plus longtemps en Irlande qu’en France
*endnote 28.
La façon dont les Irlandais envisagent la nature de Dieu a tout de
même changé de manière significative, puisque de 1981 à 1990, la proportion de personnes interrogées qui
croient en un Dieu personnel a baissé de 77 à 67%, alors que la proportion de ceux qui croient en un Dieu proche « d’une sorte d’esprit ou de force de vie » a augmenté de 15 à 24% (Corish 1998, 141).
Tout ceci nous montre bien, donc, en quoi l’ultramodernité n’est pas synonyme de moins de religieux,
mais de religieux autrement, d’une identité catholique subjective, immanente. La rencontre avec l’au-delà se
trouve ainsi redéfinie de manière spatiale chez des catholiques français et irlandais en proie à ce que Willaime
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appelle une « mondialisation symbolique », qui serait à l’origine d’une indétermination des frontières et des
appartenances
*endnote 29.
Parallèlement à cette dissémination des croyances, la dissociation entre croyances et
pratiques chez les catholiques rend difficilement repérables les groupes catholiques en tant que groupes, puisqu’ils sont désormais largement désinstitutionnalisés. C’est en ce sens que, à l’instar de Michel de Certeau, il
est possible de considérer que le christianisme n’est plus un corps, mais un corpus. La mutation actuelle du
catholicisme ne consisterait alors pas en un simple déplacement des « lieux d’Eglise », ou simple recul de
l’emprise institutionnelle, mais bien plus dans le fait qu’elle soit devenue « un lieu hors de tout lieu ». Le discours chrétien, en effet, ne se soutient plus de l’appartenance ou de la référence à un groupe et le groupe luimême se dissémine, émietté dans la pluralité des énoncés singuliers. L’Eglise a donc cessé d’être un lieu de
production, pour devenir « un produit, un objet imaginaire du discours » (Certeau 1987, 273). Cette
« métaphorisation » du religieux, comme l’appelle Danièle Hervieu-Léger
*endnote 30,
explique qu’en France
comme en Irlande, on assiste à un redéploiement du religieux, sa régulation n’étant plus verticale mais horizontale, la communauté, lieu de définition traditionnel, institutionnel de l’identité catholique, se transformant
peu à peu en réseaux.
*endnote 31.
Cette régulation horizontale du religieux en terme de réseaux, qui permet une
régulation en termes de normes choisies et rôles négociés, n’est pas propre au religieux, et est l’une des caractéristiques de l’ultramodernité, puisque la sociabilité en réseaux permet de tisser des liens entre individus partageant la même expérience sans pour autant se placer dans la dépendance d’une institution, elle permet de
socialiser le sens sans l’institutionnaliser.
Cette nouvelle manière, ultramoderne, d’être catholique a donc des répercussions évidentes au niveau
spatial, géographique, comme en témoigne l’histoire de la paroisse. Les nouvelles pratiques catholiques, plus
souples, plus ponctuelles, contribuent, il est vrai, à l’affaiblissement du lien à la paroisse. En effet, dès les années 1970 se fait sentir, en France, le besoin de faire disparaître la « vieille paroisse communale », cet
« anachronisme », et de la repenser
*endnote 32.
Selon le journaliste Puyo dans Voyage à l’intérieur de l’Eglise,
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beaucoup de curés de l’époque sont convaincus que « si beaucoup de paroisses sont aujourd’hui en difficulté,
c’est qu’elles étaient davantage des regroupements plus ou moins hétéroclites de « pratiquants » que de vraies
« communions » de frères rassemblés autour du même Seigneur » et « s’emploient donc à transformer leurs
paroisses en ce sens » (Puyo et Van Eersel 1977, 382). Ce projet de repenser la paroisse eu l’occasion de devenir réalité grâce à la pénurie de prêtres, qui s’accélère depuis les années 1980, et qui a contraint de modifier le
nombre de paroisses. En 1983, une nouvelle définition établie par le droit canon met fin à la paroisse tridentine, qui se définissait comme une fraction d’espace, un ensemble de population, un lieu de culte et d’accès
aux sacrements, et la présence d’un curé. Désormais, « La paroisse est une communauté précise de fidèles qui
est constituée d’une manière stable dans l’Eglise particulière, et dont la charge pastorale est confiée au curé
comme à son pasteur propre, sous l’autorité de l’évêque diocésain » (Canon 515). L’aspect territorial. n’est
donc plus primordial, et cède la place à l’aspect communautaire (Bertrand et Muller 2002, 43). En effet, même
si cette définition précise qu’en règle générale la paroisse sera territoriale, c’est-à-dire qu’elle comprendre tous
les fidèles du territoire donné, c’est avant tout l’occupation par une communauté qui construit le territoire et
non l’inverse.
L’abandon de la paroisse tridentine répond de la sorte aux besoins d’une population hautement mobile, surtout dans les grandes agglomérations de la France urbaine, où l’on trouve « des réseaux d’individus et
de familles qui s’impliquent, dans la durée ou de façon épisodique et ponctuelle, par la mise en œuvre de leur
foi dans les sociétés localisées » (Bertrand et Muller 2002, 201). On retrouve ce phénomène plutôt urbain dans
la capitale de l’Irlande, à Dublin, là où de nombreux catholiques n’hésitent pas à prendre leur voiture afin de
d’assister à la messe dans une paroisse avec laquelle ils se sentent plus d’affinités, plutôt que de se rendre dans
leur propre paroisse. Là encore, les catholiques français et irlandais échappent à l’institution, se détournent
d’une identité catholique transcendante, donnée d’en-haut, pour en créer une plus flexible, choisie et plus immédiate. C’est en ce sens que, d’après Danièle Hervieu-Léger, les catholiques sont passés de la figure classi-
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que du paroissien à celle du pèlerin, ce qui l’a amené à considérer que : « la sécularisation, ce n’est pas d’abord la perte de la religion dans le monde moderne. C’est l’ensemble des processus de réaménagement des
croyances qui se produisent dans une société dont le moteur est l’inassouvissement des attentes qu’elle suscite » (Hervieu-Léger 1999, 42).
Dès lors, chez les catholiques français et irlandais, il y a bien également redéfinition temporelle de la
rencontre avec l’au-delà, qui accompagne et complète la redéfinition spatiale, puisque ce qui fait désormais
l’âme du comportement religieux, c’est « la quête et non la réception », « le mouvement de l’appropriation au
lieu de la dévotion institutionnelle » (Gauchet 1998, 106). L’image du catholique que l’on préfère en ces temps
ultramodernes est donc celle du pèlerin, qui « se situe un peu à l’écart, un peu en dehors du temps dans sa
quête d’expérience directe avec le sacré et de transformation intérieure » (Bertrand et Muller 2002, 257). Pourtant, cette « liminalité » (terme emprunté aux théologiens) nous apparaît bien idéalisée, et c’est l’impatience
qui nous semble avant tout marquer la quête de sens des catholiques français et irlandais contemporains. En
effet, nous sommes entrés dans ce que nous pouvons appeler une période d’hypersécularisation, synonyme de
l’omniprésence d’un ici et maintenant permanent (ce qu’illustre bien l’internet, qui abolit toute frontière spatio-temporelle). L’individu ultramoderne revendique donc plus que jamais son droit au bonheur ici-bas, et
c’est ainsi que, chez les catholiques irlandais, la notion de « offer it up » semble avoir complètement disparu
des mentalités. La quête de sens des catholiques français et irlandais est dès lors marquée par une volonté de
satisfaction immédiate : il s’agit là, véritablement, de la nouvelle utilisation du téléphone rouge à laquelle nous
faisions allusion, un téléphone rouge qui nous relie désormais à Dieu, espèce de « hot line » à laquelle on a
recours en cas d’urgence.
C’est ce qu’illustre à merveille la pratique de la prière puisque, en France, 43% des catholiques ne
prient qu’« exceptionnellement » (17%) ou « de temps en temps » (26%), ce qui nous laisse penser qu’ils ont
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recours à la prière comme soutien, comme moyen de demander de l’aide à Dieu dans des moments difficiles,
et non comme pratique régulière visant à nourrir une communication spirituelle continue avec l’au-delà *endnote
33.
Qui plus est, cette redéfinition temporelle de la rencontre avec l’au-delà en des termes ultramodernes se
retrouve également dans le rapport même des catholique à la mort : la moitié des catholiques français, en effet,
se déclarent favorables au principe d’euthanasie active. Selon Gilles Lipovetsky dans Le crépuscule du devoir,
il s’agirait là d’un symptôme de l’ère du « néo-individualisme », selon lequel aucune fin idéale ne dépasse le
droit des personnes à disposer de leur propre vie et de leur mort (ce qui paraît pour le moins en contradiction
avec le dogme catholique…). La notion ultramoderne du règne absolu de l’individu ici-bas a donc également
fait son chemin chez des catholiques qui ne veulent plus attendre que l’au-delà décide de manière absolue du
commencement et de la fin de la vie humaine : ils veulent pouvoir rejoindre leur créateur plus rapidement et
dans moins de souffrances si bon leur semble. De la même manière, le choix de la crémation, de plus en plus
fréquent chez les catholiques depuis son autorisation par Vatican II en 1963, témoigne de la même impatience.
De 1% des décès en 1980, la crémation est passée à 25% d’entre eux en 2005 (Faure 2006, 185). Dans « Le
choix de la crémation », Pierre Faure montre en quoi celle-ci est signe d’individualisme, puisqu’elle consiste
en l’autonomie du choix de chacun jusqu’au bout et au-delà, l’individu décidant de son statut post mortem. Il y
souligne comment, dans le cas de l’incinération, le feu est apprécié pour sa pureté, sa rapidité, sa capacité à
libérer le corps (selon une imagerie empruntée à d’autres croyances et non au catholicisme) et conclue – et ce
sera là également notre conclusion : « nos contemporains ne veulent plus et ne peuvent plus attendre : il faut
aller vite, y compris après la mort » (Faure 2006, 195).
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Works cited
Abbruzese, S., 2005. “Les nouveaux mouvements religieux” in Encyclopaedia Universalis, Corpus 5. Paris:
Encyclopaedia Universalis.
Barbier-Bouvet, Jean-François, 2007. “Les catholiques à la loupe”, in Le Monde des Religions, janv-fév., n°21.
Bertrand, Jean-René and Muller, Colette, 2002. Où sont passés les catholiques ? Une géographie des catholiques en France. Paris : Desclée de Brouwer.
Cassidy, Eoin G., 2002. Measuring Ireland: Discerning Values and Beliefs. Dublin: Veritas.
Certeau, Michel, 1987. La Faiblesse de croire. Paris: Le Seuil.
Charlier, Jean-Emile and Moens, Frédéric, 2002. “Métamorphoses d’un sacrement. La communion, de la pratique socialisée à la pratique sensible.” in Archives de sciences sociales des religions (119), juil-sept., pp. 29-43.
Cholvy, G. and Hilaire, Y.-M., 1988. Histoire religieuse de la France contemporaine 1930/1988. Paris: Le
Cerf.
----, 2005. Le fait religieux aujourd’hui en France. Les trente dernières années (1974-2004). Paris: Le Cerf.
Corish, Marguerite, 1998. “Pratiques et croyances religieuses, valeurs morales” in Brennan, Paul, La sécularisation en Irlande. Caen: Presses Universitaires de Caen.
Donegani, Jean-Marie, 1993. La Liberté de choisir. Pluralisme religieux et pluralisme politique dans le catholicisme contemporain. Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques.
Faure, Pierre, 2006. “Le choix de la crémation” in Etudes, février, n°21.
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Fuller, Louise, Littleton, John and Maher, Eamon (eds.), 2006. Irish and Catholic? Towards an Understanding
of Identity. Dublin: The Columba Press.
Gauchet, Marcel, 1985. Le Désenchantement du monde. Paris: Gallimard.
----, 1998. La Religion dans la démocratie. Paris: Gallimard.
----, 2005. La Condition politique. Paris: Gallimard.
Giddens, Anthony, 1994. Les Conséquences de la modernité. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1994.
Hervieu-Léger, Danièle, Le Pèlerin et le converti. Paris: Flammarion.
----, 2003. Catholicisme, la fin d’un monde ? Paris: Bayard.
Inglis, Tom, 1998. Moral Monopoly. Dublin: UCD Press.
Lambert, Yves, 1992. Crépuscule des religions chez les jeunes. Paris: L’Harmattan.
Michel, Patrick, 1994. Politique et religion. La grande mutation. Paris: Albin Michel.
---- (dir.), 1997. Religion et démocratie. Paris: Albin Michel.
Ormières, Jean-Louis, 2005. L’Europe désenchantée. La fin de l’Europe chrétienne? Paris: Fayard.
Puyo, Jean and Van Eersel, Patrice, 1977. Voyage à l’intérieur de l’Eglise. Paris: Stock.
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Thibaud, Paul, 2005. « Le catholicisme contemporain » in Encyclopaedia Universalis, Corpus 5. Paris: Encyclopaedia Universalis.
Trigano, Shmuel, 2001. Qu’est-ce que la religion ? La transcendance des sociologues. Paris: Flammarion,
2001.
Willaime, Jean-Paul, Europe et religions. Les enjeux du XXe siècle. Paris: Fayard, 2004.
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A Shreking Encounter!
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‘there’s a lot more to ogres than people think’: Shrek as Ethical Fairy tale.
Eugene O’Brien, Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick.
Once upon a time there was a lovely princess. But she had an enchantment upon her of a fearful
sort which could only be broken by love’s first kiss. She was locked away in a castle guarded by
a terrible fire-breathing dragon. Many brave knights had attempted to free her from this dreadful
prison, but none prevailed. She waited in the dragon’s keep in the highest room of the tallest
tower for her true love and true love’s first kiss. (Shrek Screenplay, 2001)
The trope that begins this quotation is one of the most familiar in the language. ‘Once upon a time’ is an indelible signifier that we are about to hear a fairy tale, a genre beloved of small children, tired parents, and harassed teachers because, once this story has begun (and it is often prefaced in group mode by the tag ‘are you
sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin’), then there will be silence and attention. There are strong conventions at
work in the lifeworld, the Lebenswelt, of this genre and many of the stable tropes are identified in the above
quotation. The fairy tale is generally about royalty and the heroes and heroines are invariably princes and princesses. Kings and queens figure prominently as well, but the main actants in these stories are the younger and
more aspirational members of royal families. Princesses are always beautiful, very often endangered and usually seen as the objects of desire of all with whom they come in contact.
Their beauty provokes desire in princes and envy in others, usually women, and they are frequently
the victims of enchantments. Thus Rapunzel is locked in a tower, Sleeping Beauty is cast into a deep sleep and
Snow White is poisoned by an apple. All of these beautiful young women are then sorely in need of rescuing
and it is here that the princes of the stories find their role. Just as the princess waits, so the prince journeys, and
the journey is a seminal trope of the fairy tale – the progress, through difficulties, to a preordained destination
being central to the genre. Battling their way through enchanted forests, climbing up impossibly tall towers
and fighting off magic spells, these intrepid young men rescue the young women and they ‘all live happily
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ever after.’ Structurally, the stories are very often framed by the two emblematic phrases – ‘once upon a time’
and ‘they all lived happily ever after’ – and these framing phrases have an ethical as well as formal function.
Writing about Kant in The Truth in Painting, Jacques Derrida made some telling points about the relationship
between the frame (parergon) and the work itself (ergon). Derrida notes that:
The parergon stands out both from the ergon (the work) and from the milieu; it stands out first
of all like a figure on a ground. But it does not stand out in the same way as the work. With respect to the work which can serve as a ground for it, it merges into the wall and then, gradually,
into the general text …. The frame is in no case a background in the way that the milieu or the
work can be, but neither is its thickness as margin a figure. (Derrida 1987, 61)
Derrida’s point is that the structuration of a work of art is predicated on a framing device which is both part of
the work of art, and at the same time, part of the ground from which that works originates. In this context, he is
examining the inter-relation of the frame, which gives structure and specificity to a work of art, and the work
itself. To extrapolate a little, the frame of any work of literary art involves the philosophical and epistemological context out of which that work derives, and towards which that work is addressed. In the fairy tale, the
work is demarcated by a very strong linguistic frame which sets the tale apart from the normal symbolic order.
Once those parergonal phrases are uttered, we know that we are in a closed-off world where magic is the
norm; where beauty and goodness are adequated; where princes are brave, and princesses are beautiful; where
witches are evil and where every evil magic spell has its antidote; where animals talk and where wishes are
granted and where, ultimately, there is a happy ending.
The fairy tale is a closed-off, and almost hermetically-sealed world, and throughout its generic history
there have been strong ideological reasons for this very monological structure, and before looking at Shrek as a
deconstruction of the fairy tale genre, and going on to examine the ethical consequences of this deconstruction,
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I would first like to examine the history of the fairy tale as a way of understanding the very strong parergonal
nature of the genre. Once upon a time (!) fairy tales were not written for children. In spite of their name, the
popular fairy tales usually have very little to do with fairies. The name was taken from the French ‘contes de
fée’, and the French literary fairy tales of the 17th century do feature far more fairies than the tales which are
best-known today. The Grimm brothers collected the folk tales of the German people to make up their volume,
but fairy tales are more than just folk tales. The German term for them is ‘Märchen’, a word for which there is
no satisfactory English equivalent – it is the diminutive of Mär, a story or a tale, and has come to mean a story
of wonder and enchantment.
Throughout sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe, the fairy tale was produced for the consumption of the aristocratic elite, constructing a commentary on normative behaviour and the exercise of power as
governed by a seemingly unbreakable and reciprocal symbolic order, as in the Middle Ages. In this sense, the
symbolic order that is enunciated in these stories is one in which certain normative values are set out very
clearly and very didactically. To be royal is very much the desideratum of these stories. Generally kings,
queens and princesses are good, noble and benign rulers of their kingdoms. Occasionally there is a wicked
queen, as in Cinderella, but she is very much an aberration in the royal household. Her evil is almost at odds
with her lineage, and in the end of the story, it is the good member of the royal family who triumphs. There is
very little social mobility in these tales and when it does occur, it is a process whereby only those non-royals
of unusual ability are allowed to become royal. A form of meritocratic upward mobility is set up where woodcutter’s sons or clever tailors or gifted younger sons are set tasks, accomplish them, and are then given the
hand of the princess in marriage, and thus transform the endogamous world of the fairy tale through a carefully
selected form of exogamous selection. It is enough for the princess just to ‘be’ (and of course to be beautiful),
whereas her suitors have to do, they must demonstrate their merits through their deeds. In the very narrow
parergonal frame of the fairy tale, the correlation between appearance and reality is quite static. To be beauti-
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ful is to be good; to be a princess is to be beautiful; to be a prince is to be brave and handsome; to journey is to
journey to a set destination, and magic is everywhere. The strong verbal parergon makes sure that this world is
hermetically sealed and that its didactic influence is very focused. It constitutes a strong ideological reinforcement of the existing social order.
It was thus that the play of power between fairy tale characters reflected a civilizing process devolving
on notions of class and sex. During this period, fairy tales functioned to entertain the aristocracy, serving as
‘secular instructive narratives’ (Zipes 1996, 2). Institutionalized as a genre, fairy tales throughout the seventeenth century proliferated into such cultural spheres as the ballet, opera and court festival. Yet, as Baudrillard
traces in Symbolic Exchange and Death, the period stemming from the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution marked a significant shift away from the symbolic, instead becoming dominated by the counterfeit, manifest in the ‘false’ image. With the accretion of bourgeois order and the birth of fashion, the sign eclipsed its
symbolic obligation, liberated into a field of connotation as the signifieds of production, status, wealth and
eminency. The Renaissance also marked the ‘destructuration of the feudal order,’ in the ‘emergence of overt
competition at the level of signs of distinction’ (Baudrillard 1993, 50). The counterfeit appears within the liberation of the sign, emancipated from symbolic duty, yet reproducing the image of the symbolic through falsification.
The fairy tale in late eighteenth-century Europe similarly became ‘freed... to expand its form and content’ (Zipes 1997, 65). With a shift in the means of production and a growing demographic of literate citizens,
the fairy tale, once produced exclusively on behalf of the adult aristocracy, became available to all citizens,
including children. Fairy tales continued to carry civilizing narratives, extending the vision of the aristocracy
into broader society:
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Mme. Le Prince de Beaumont’s Magasin des enfants (1756) used approximately ten fairy tales,
including ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ to instruct young girls in how to domesticate themselves and
become respectable young women, attractive for the marriage department. (Zipes 1997, 65)
The early nineteenth century marked the autonomy of the fairy tale. In a developing free market system, the
fairy tale increasingly came to be viewed and packaged as a household commodity. In this movement, access
to the fairy tale, with its enunciations on gender behaviour, the nature of the child, power and success became
a connotation of status and integration into ‘high’ culture.
Disney’s animated features throughout the 1930s enacted the fairy tale genre as a format inscribed
within a cinematic code:
There is ... a structural rigidity about the Disney animated features that has grown increasingly
obvious as the years have passed. The editing principals applied to Snow White were those of
conventionally well-made commercial film of the time. There was nothing particularly daring
about the way it was put together, its merit was based on other skills. In general, a scene would
open with an establishing or master shot, then proceed to an intermediate shot, then to close-ups
of the various participants, with conventional cut-aways to various details of scenery or decor as
needed. (Schickel 1969, 172)
What is interesting here is that the filmic technique is very similar to the narrative technique – there is a core
or master shot and from this is derived all of the other textual details. The structural rigidity spoken of here is
mimetic of a formal and epistemological structural rigidity that has been already noticed in the genre. The
‘master shot’ is indicative of the monological type of genre which is closed off and has one message to communicate
Structurally, in both narrative and filmic guises, the fairy tale is totally predetermined. Vladimir Propp
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in chapter three of his seminal Morphology of the Folk Tale, has set out 31 different topoi from which all such
tales are constructed. I cite them here:
A member of a family leaves home (the hero is introduced);
An interdiction is addressed to the hero (‘don’t go there’, ‘go to this place’);
The interdiction is violated (villain enters the tale);
The villain makes an attempt at reconnaissance (either villain tries to find the children/jewels
etc; or intended victim questions the villain);
The villain gains information about the victim;
The villain attempts to deceive the victim to take possession of victim or victim’s belongings
(trickery; villain disguised, tries to win confidence of victim);
Victim taken in by deception, unwittingly helping the enemy;
Villain causes harm/injury to family member (by abduction, theft of magical agent, spoiling
crops, plunders in other forms, causes a disappearance, expels someone, casts spell on
someone, substitutes child etc, commits murder, imprisons/detains someone, threatens
forced marriage, provides nightly torments); Alternatively, a member of family lacks
something or desires something (magical potion etc);
Misfortune or lack is made known (hero is dispatched, hears call for help etc/ alternative is that
victimised hero is sent away, freed from imprisonment);
Seeker agrees to, or decides upon counter-action;
Hero leaves home;
Hero is tested, interrogated, attacked etc, preparing the way for his/her receiving magical agent
or helper (donor);
Hero reacts to actions of future donor (withstands/fails the test, frees captive, reconciles disputants, performs service, uses adversary’s powers against him);
Hero acquires use of a magical agent (directly transferred, located, purchased, prepared, spontaneously appears, eaten/drunk, help offered by other characters);
Hero is transferred, delivered or led to whereabouts of an object of the search;
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Hero and villain join in direct combat;
Hero is branded (wounded/marked, receives ring or scarf);
Villain is defeated (killed in combat, defeated in contest, killed while asleep, banished);
Initial misfortune or lack is resolved (object of search distributed, spell broken, slain person
revived, captive freed);
Hero returns;
Hero is pursued (pursuer tries to kill, eat, undermine the hero);
Hero is rescued from pursuit (obstacles delay pursuer, hero hides or is hidden, hero transforms
unrecognisably, hero saved from attempt on his/her life);
Hero unrecognised, arrives home or in another country;
False hero presents unfounded claims;
Difficult task proposed to the hero (trial by ordeal, riddles, test of strength/endurance, other
tasks);
Task is resolved;
Hero is recognised (by mark, brand, or thing given to him/her);
False hero or villain is exposed;
Hero is given a new appearance (is made whole, handsome, new garments etc);
Villain is punished;
Hero marries and ascends the throne (is rewarded/promoted). (Propp 1968, quoted in Holbek
1986, 385)
What this shows is the very rigid structural formulation of the folk and fairy tale and by extension, the rigid
values that these secular instructive narratives impose. In a fascinating development, Brown University in the
United States has set up an internet centre for the study of Fairy Tales and Electronic Culture, and on this they
have enabled an electronic text generator which will allow for the creation of different tales by selecting a set
of these elements (http://www.brown.edu/). This very structuralist generating mechanism testifies to the core
or master tropes from which the fairy tales have derived, and I would suggest that this closed form is mimetic
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of the closed ethical structure of the fairy tale – there are norms and these norms are hegemonic and overdetermined.
Thus, to return to our original quotation, the norms of the secular instructive tale would all seem to be
in place: the princess is lovely, she is under an enchantment, there is the necessary dragon, and a necessary
journey, love is seen as something with a real-world value; she is in dire need of rescuing, and true love will
conquer all – but only in the putative shape of a gallant knight or prince. However, the final lines of this quotation allow for the eruption of a deconstructive force in these tales because after the final sentence: ‘She waited
in the dragon’s keep in the highest room of the tallest tower for her true love and true love’s first kiss’, there
follows a stage direction ‘(laughs)’ and then the eponymous hero snorts ‘Like that’s ever gonna happen. What
a load of - (toilet flush)’. With this bout of carnivalesque laughter, we see the deconstruction of the monological fairy tale motifs by this most deconstructive of films. Mikhail Bakhtin has made some interesting points
about the power of laughter in terms of opening up systems to different voices. He notes that through laughter,
‘the world is seen anew, no less (and perhaps more) profoundly than when seen from the serious standpoint’,
and he goes on to add that certain ‘essential aspects of the world are accessible only to laughter’ (Bakhtin
1968, 66). For Bakhtin, one of the functions of art is to critique societal and ideological norms:
The serious aspects of class culture are official and authoritarian; they are combined with violence, prohibitions, limitations, and always contain an element of fear and of intimidation.
Laughter, on the other hand, overcomes fear, for it knows no inhibitions, no limitations. (Bakhtin
1968, 90)
One of the most important aspects of this change is the opening up of the hitherto closed parergonal form of
the fairy tale to other discourses and other voices. The image of Shrek using the pages of the book as toilet
paper in an outhouse carry a strong intertextual association with James Joyce’s Ulysses, as both characters are
in an outhouse and both are reading something, Shrek is reading a fairy tale while Leopold Bloom is reading a
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newspaper:
He kicked open the crazy door of the jakes. Better be careful not to get these trousers dirty for
the funeral. He went in, bowing his head under the low lintel. Leaving the door ajar, amid the
stench of mouldy limewash and stale cobwebs he undid his braces. Before sitting down he
peered through a chink up at the next door windows. The king was in his countinghouse. Nobody. Asquat on the cuckstool he folded out his paper, turning its pages over on his bared knees.
Something new and easy. No great hurry …. He tore away half the prize story sharply and wiped
himself with it. Then he girded up his trousers, braced and buttoned himself. He pulled back the
jerky shaky door of the jakes and came forth from the gloom into the air. (Joyce 1989, 15-16)
The parallel here is clear – there is an intertextual opening up of the closed parergonal world of the fairy tale to
other texts, other voices and other worlds. Just as Ulysses has taken the Odyssey and opened it up to the modern world, and to multiple meanings, so Shrek does the same thing with the fairy tale. One of the interesting
things about Ulysses is that it is the first novel where bodily functions feature to a large degree (Robinson Crusoe managed to get through twenty eight years of anally-reported detail of his life and times without ever mentioning bodily functions, and one can read all of Austen without finding any discussion of toilets) and as such
it broke new ground. The same is true of Shrek, as the eponymous hero also breaks wind (another connection
with Joyce) and his motto about eructation is ‘better out than in I always say’ (Shrek Screenplay, 2001). The
laughter here is unusual in fairy tales – never a genre known for its humour – but it also serves the deconstructive purpose of Shrek. The same is true of the journey motif in both texts. In Ulysses, the original delayed journey to home of the hero of the Odyssey is deconstructed and by the time Bloom gets home, the very notion of
that sense of ‘home’ has been deconstructed. In the true Freudian sense, the Heimlich has become Unheimlich
and this sense of the uncanny pervades Shrek’s journey to save the princess – it, too, will be a redefinition of
the trope of journey and of the certitude of the destination.
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The mention of bodily functions here – the breaking of wind – is symbolic of a breaking of windows
in the closed frame of the fairy tale. It is a synecdoche of the trope of anamorphosis, a looking awry at a cultural text. Writing in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis, Lacan focuses on Hans Holbein’s
1533 painting of The Ambassadors (Lacan 1977, 85-90). In this painting the gaze of the reader is focused on
two men, Jean de Dinteville, and Georges de Selve, who appear to be gazing back at the viewer. Between them
is a table on which are placed various objects, ‘symbolic of the sciences and arts as they were grouped at the
time in the trivium and quadrivium’ (Lacan 1977, 88), and at the bottom of the painting, at a forty degree angle
to the horizontal is an anamorphic skull, which also appears to stare back at the viewer. For Lacan, this anamorphosis is not noticed at first:
What, then, before this display of the domain of appearance in all its most fascinating forms, is
this object, which from some angles appears to be flying through the air, at others to be tilted?
Begin by walking out of the room in which no doubt it has long held your attention. It is then
that, turning round as you leave – as the author of the Anamorphosis describes it – you apprehend in this form ...What? A skull. (Lacan 1977, 88)
The existence of the skull is dependent on perspective; it is only when the gaze turns away from the full frontal
perspective that the anamorphic scopic field allows the skeleton which undercuts the optimistic vision of the
picture to emerge. The perspectival interaction of the emblems of renaissance power and intellectual mastery
with the classic emblem of mortality, the skull, provides a broader range of meaning to the picture. The dialectic between mastery over nature through increased scientific and geographical knowledge, and the constant
presence of death, is part of the meaning of that picture; indeed, it is the relationship between the two perspectives that creates the complexity of Holbein’s work. To look at this picture awry is to constantly oscillate between the different perspectives, and this, I would contend, is the ‘meaning’ of the picture. And this looking
awry is the perspective that Shrek takes on the world of the fairy tale.
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By applying an anamorphic perspective, Shrek is able to deconstruct the rigid adequations of the fairy
tale – the motivated and overdetermined connections between the aristocracy and ethical goodness. Thus the
following pastiche of the talking mirror in Sleeping Beauty:
FARQUAAD: Evening. Mirror, mirror on the wall. Is this not the most perfect kingdom of them
all?
MIRROR: Well, technically you’re not a king.
FARQUAAD: Uh, Thelonius. (Thelonius holds up a hand mirror and smashes it with his fist.)
You were saying?
MIRROR: What I mean is you’re not a king yet. But you can become one. All you have to do is
marry a princess. (Shrek Screenplay, 2001)
The very casual ‘evening’, that is used to address the mirror, is an index of the looking awry in this film – the
talking mirror is seen as just a usual item in the world and is addressed as such. While the motivation here is
very obvious social climbing, the suggestion is that all fairy tales, with their ambitious younger sons or woodcutters who aspire to the love of a princess, do so with one eye on the social consequences of such a relationship. The very two-dimensional nature of attraction in this world – princesses are always pretty – is clear in the
talking mirrors’ enumeration of the three bachelorette from whom Farquaad will choose his future princess:
MIRROR: (chuckles nervously) So, just sit back and relax, my lord, because it’s time for you to
meet today’s eligible bachelorettes. And here they are! Bachelorette number one is a mentally
abused shut-in from a kingdom far, far away. She likes sushi and hot tubbing anytime. Her hobbies include cooking and cleaning for her two evil sisters. Please welcome Cinderella. (shows
picture of Cinderella) Bachelorette number two is a cape-wearing girl from the land of fancy.
Although she lives with seven other men, she’s not easy. Just kiss her dead, frozen lips and find
out what a live wire she is. Come on. Give it up for Snow White! (shows picture of Snow White)
And last, but certainly not least, bachelorette number three is a fiery redhead from a dragon-
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guarded castle surrounded by hot boiling lava! But don’t let that cool you off. She’s a loaded
pistol who likes pina colads and getting caught in the rain. Yours for the rescuing, Princess
Fiona! (Shows picture of Princess Fiona) So will it be bachelorette number one, bachelorette
number two or bachelorette number three? (Shrek Screenplay, 2001)
The humour here is sharp and intertextual. The wry aside that though Snow White ‘lives with seven other men,
she’s not easy’ is anamorphic in that it applies some real-world values and ideologies to the world of the fairy
tale. The same is true of the sushi-loving and hot-tubbing Cinderella.
In the traditional view of the ‘instructional tale’, the parergonal world is a teaching aid to the moral
and ethical mores of the outside world; it suggests that someday your prince will come; that those of a higher
station are automatically ethically good and that there are happy endings, but only for the chosen few. However there are other ideological values enunciated by fairy tales which have more serious and negative consequences – that girls should be slim and pretty if they want a happy ending; that ugly sisters are also ethically
ugly; that stepmothers are invariably evil; that monsters are always evil; that people and creatures which are
different are often evil and to be feared; that there is no chance of trolls or dragons changing their habits; that
ethical, social and moral roles are rigid and fixed and that crucially there is no room for difference in this
highly structured and hierarchical world. Farquaad’s ethnic cleansing of his kingdom of Dulac of all of the
fairy tale creatures is an example of this and the image of the refugees populating Shrek’s swamp is a poignant
and intertextual reminder of Rwanda and Darfur and the Middle East, where refugees have been similarly
driven out off from territories because they are paralleling the ‘fairy tale trash’, who, in Farquaad’s words, are
‘poisoning my perfect world’ (Shrek Screenplay, 2001). His desire for Fiona is based on her beauty and on the
fact that she is a princess. He is unaware that she suffers a curse and appears by day in her beautiful form and
by night in the form of an ogerish woman. She explains the genesis of this in a conversation with Donkey:
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FIONA: It only happens when sun goes down. ‘By night one way, by day another. This shall be
the norm... until you find true love’s first kiss... and then take love’s true form.’
DONKEY: Ah, that’s beautiful. I didn’t know you wrote poetry.
FIONA: It’s a spell. (sigh) When I was a little girl, a witch cast a spell on me. Every night I become this. This horrible, ugly beast! I was placed in a tower to await the day my true love would
rescue me. That’s why I have to marry Lord Farquaad tomorrow before the sun sets and he sees
me like this. (begins to cry)
DONKEY: All right, all right. Calm down. Look, it’s not that bad. You’re not that ugly. Well, I
ain’t gonna lie. You are ugly. But you only look like this at night. Shrek’s ugly 24-7.
FIONA: But Donkey, I’m a princess, and this is not how a princess is meant to look. (Shrek
Screenplay, 2001)
The final phrase: ‘this is not how a princess is meant to look’, encapsulates the formulaic ethical nature of this
genre – ogres are supposed to be brutish; princesses are supposed to look beautiful and if this homology between the norm and the individual is not correct, then some form of transformation must be taken into account
– not to make her happier but to make her fit for purpose in terms of this formulaic genre. The lesson that this
instructional tale gives in ideological terms is chilling. It suggests that to achieve a ‘happily ever after’ in life,
one must be prepared to change to fit the norm. Any form of difference is not tolerated and is seen as a ‘curse’
and the individual must be dealt with and Farquaad’s ethnic cleansing of fairy tale creatures is an example of
this trend. Here Shrek is liberating, through an anamorphic perspective, suggesting different meanings and
different future possibilities that will haunt the fairy tale genre:
According to Derrida, the future cannot be comprehended without coming to terms with the
Other, whether this Other signifies ghosts or death, or both. Hauntology is therefore present in
ontology, even if these ghosts that inform being are silent. It represents a spectral paradigmatic
chain, without which meaning or being cannot be expressed. (Murphy 2008, 21)
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Shrek himself is a synecdoche of this tendency. He is an ogre, and as such is hated by all people. Indeed the
film begins with an angry mob surrounding his house in the swamp and threatening to burn him out, not because he has done anything but because he is an ogre, and the whole film deconstructs the original rigid ideas
that ogres are evil and fierce. In the beginning of the film, Shrek confronts the angry mob and acts in a way
which both conforms to the stereotype and deconstructs it at the same time:
MAN 1: Think it’s in there?
MAN 2: All right. Let’s get it!
MAN 1: Whoa. Hold on. Do you know what that thing can do to you?
MAN 3: Yeah, it’ll grind your bones for its bread.
Shrek sneaks up behind them and laughs.
SHREK: Yes, well, actually, that would be a giant. Now, ogres, oh they’re much worse. They’ll
make a suit from your freshly peeled skin.
MEN: No!
SHREK: They’ll shave your liver. Squeeze the jelly from your eyes! Actually, it’s quite good on
toast. (Shrek Screenplay, 2001)
For the first time we see a sense of humour in Shrek and we see that an ogre is capable of self-mockery. We
also see through the film that his anger and desire to be left alone stems from the negative experiences he has
when dealing with people. Even his friend Donkey has been persuaded by the stereotype:
DONKEY: don’t get it. Why don’t you just pull some of that ogre stuff on him? Throttle him,
lay siege to his fortress, grind his bones to make your bread, the whole ogre trip.
SHREK: Oh, I know what. Maybe I could have decapitated an entire village and put their heads
on a pike, gotten a knife, cut open their spleen and drink their fluids. Does that sound good to
you?
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DONKEY: Uh, no, not really, no.
SHREK: For your information, there’s a lot more to ogres than people think. (Shrek Screenplay,
2001)
And this is at the core of the deconstructive imperative of Shrek. There are hauntological depths to be explored
in the identity of this ogre – there is a lot more to ogres than people think. The realm of culture has always had
a strong ideological valence with respect to the interpellation of subjects in the realm of ideology. Deconstruction, according to Derrida, is operative in the dismantling of ideological givens and to the seeming commonsense stereotypes that exist in culture and society:
What you need deconstruction for is to undo a number of presuppositions, prejudices and so on
and so forth. But where you don’t need to undo such things, you don’t need deconstruction. …
So it depends on the type of relationship that you have between interpretation and knowledge,
and of course the more you rely on interpretative languages, on institutional practices and so
forth, the more you need deconstruction. (Derrida 2001, 110)
He has also stated that the only attitude he is completely against is one which ‘cuts off the possibility of an
essentially indeterminable questioning … an effective and thus transforming questioning’ (Derrida 1995, 239),
and all of Shrek participates in this questioning. By looking awry at the traditional figures of the ogre and the
duke, and by endowing them with individual traits which transcend their structural types, Shrek sets out a different ethical paradigm and offers a different perspective in the standard tropes . So an ogre can be kind and a
princess can be able and capable and a duke can be evil, and when this is extrapolated into the real world, it
means that appearance and reality are not wedded together in a cratylistic fusion but instead can be treated on
an individual basis.
The treatment of the dragon, suitably large and fire-breathing, is an example of the deconstructive and
transforming imperative of Shrek, as far from being the stock image of an otherworldly terrifying beast, she
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falls in love with Donkey:
DONKEY: No. Oh, no, No! (the dragon roars) Oh, what large teeth you have. (the dragon
growls) I mean white, sparkling teeth. I know you probably hear this all the time from your food,
but you must bleach, ‘cause that is one dazzling smile you got there. Do I detect a hint of minty
freshness? And you know what else? You’re – You’re a girl dragon! Oh, sure! I mean, of course
you’re a girl dragon. You’re just reeking of feminine beauty. (The dragon begins fluttering her
eyes at him). What’s the matter with you? You got something in your eye? Ohh. Oh. Oh. Man,
I’d really love to stay, but you know, I’m, uh...(The dragon blows a smoke ring in the shape of a
heart right at him, and he coughs) .I’m an asthmatic, and I don’t know if it’d work out if you’re
gonna blow smoke rings. Shrek! (The dragon picks him up with her teeth and carries him off).
(Shrek Screenplay, 2001)
Generally in fairy tales, love is preserved for the main characters and those with whom we are supposed to
identify – there would seem to be little likelihood of the Ugly Sisters falling in love (in fact their desire for the
prince is seen as laughable) and the seven dwarves seem to have completely displaced their sexual urges onto
the world of work – especially in the Disney film version where the reality principle and the pleasure principle
seem to have become one for them. But here, the relationship between Donkey and Dragon is seen as important and is also seen as transforming. In the sequel, they become a couple and their offspring are called
‘dronkeys’ – a transforming fusion of dragon and donkey – and proof that in this deconstructive fairy tale, difference is not a barrier to happiness.
The humour in the piece above, where the gradual truth dawns on Donkey, and later where he is terrified by the sheer size of Dragon, he suggests that they take their time:
I don’t want to rush into a physical relationship. I’m not emotionally ready for a commitment of,
uh, this Magnitude really is the word I’m looking for – Magnitude – Hey, that is unwanted
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physical contact. Hey, what are you doing? Okay, okay. Let’s just back up a little and take this
one step at a time. We really should get to know each other first as friends or pen pals. (Shrek
Screenplay, 2001)
Their love story parallels that of Shrek and Fiona, and the humour of their attempts to solve their differences is
emancipatory as opposed to being caused by ridicule – we are laughing with them as opposed to at them. As
Bakhtin has perceptively observed, language, especially in its literary incarnation, is a powerful tool in the
deconstruction of such centralizing drives, as the ‘uninterrupted processes of decentralization and disunification go forward’ alongside the language of ‘verbal-ideological centralization and unification’ (Bakhtin 1981,
272). The laughter of Shrek is intertextual in the extreme. As well as the allusions to Ulysses, there are also
numerous allusions to other fairy tales, but these allusions are both an opening out of this story to others and
also an anamorphic perspective on the story and by extension on the genre.
In Bakhtinian terms, this deconstruction of classic fairy tale tropes is heteroglossic in that different
voices and different languages are allowed to confront each other and achieve some kind of dynamic interaction, or dialogization (Bakhtin 1981, 263). For Bakhtin, according to Emerson and Holquist, a language or
culture undergoes ‘dialogization’ when it becomes relativized, de-privileged, aware of competing definitions
for the same things (Bakhtin 1981, 427), and this opening out of discourse is ethical in that it allows for other
discursive modes to access the generic privileges and rewards – in this case the idea of ‘happily ever after’, a
reward not usually open to dragons or donkeys or ogres.
At the end of the film when a halting and stammering Shrek, still smarting at being seen as part of the
fixed parergonal identity of the ogre, is persuaded by Donkey that he has a chance at true love with Fiona:
FARQUAAD: Oh, this is precious. The ogre has fallen in love with the princess! Oh, good Lord.
(laughs)
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The prompter card guy holds up a card that says ‘Laugh’. The whole congregation laughs.
FARQUAAD: An ogre and a princess!
FIONA: Shrek, is this true?
FARQUAAD: Who cares? It’s preposterous! Fiona, my love, we’re but a kiss away from our
‘happily ever after.’ Now kiss me! (puckers his lips and leans toward her, but she pulls back.)
FIONA: (looking at the setting sun) ‘By night one way, by day another.’ (to Shrek) I wanted to
show you before.
She backs up and as the sun sets she changes into her ogre self.
She gives Shrek a sheepish smile.
SHREK: Well, uh, that explains a lot. (Fiona smiles) (Shrek Screenplay, 2001)
The prompter, also doubling as the masked torturer Thelonius, holding up the cards is an example of the formulaic nature of the genre. In a manner that gestures towards the Proppian Fairy tale generator, he is generating and orchestrating the responses of the audience to both the wedding and to the events that are ongoing as
the wedding is disrupted. The sense that an ogre and a princess cannot fall in love is clear in the dismissive
‘this is precious’ from Farquaad, For him, as representative of this world, there are no happy endings for ogres.
One could see this fairy tale parergonal discourse as exemplifying what Derrida calls logocentrism
In the main, Derrida’s work centres on a sustained attack on what he considers to be the authoritarianism of Western thought and, in particular, its commitment to essentialism. A vivid example of essentialism in
Western thought is the practice or phenomenon known as ‘logocentricity’: the belief that words are representations of meanings already present in the speaker’s mind. For Derrida, the relationship between speech and
transparency of meaning is the heritage of logocentrism and phonocentrism, which he explains as ‘the absolute
proximity of voice and being, of voice and the meaning of being, of voice and the identity of meaning’ (Derrida 1976, 12). Overall, Derrida rejects the conception of meaning as a fixed entity awaiting representation by either a spoken or written word. Instead he calls for: ‘the joyous affirmation of the play of the world
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and the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without
origin which is offered to an active interpretation.’ (Derrida 1978, 292)
When involved in his own ‘active interpretations’, Derrida engages with practices of deconstruction.
In deconstructing a piece of text, Derrida’s objective is to reveal the ambivalences, the contradictions and the
double blinds that lie within the text, and he does this by disturbing the binary structuring around which the
text is organised. As Derrida highlights, binaries are not peaceful partnerships but function as a consequence
of domination:
we are not dealing with the peaceful co-existence of a vis-à-vis, but rather with a violent hierarchy. One of the terms governs the other (axiologically, logically, etc.), or has the upper hand,
occupies the commanding position. To deconstruct the opposition, first of all, is to overturn the
hierarchy at a given moment. (Derrida 1981, 41)
It is important to note, however, that the aim is not simply to reverse polarities – this would be just
another instance of structure, where ‘the hierarchy of dual oppositions always establishes itself’ (Derrida 1981,
42). So, St. John’s Gospel opens with ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God’, and here, origin and meaning is attributed to the language of God and McQuillan suggests that this ‘is suggestive of the
ways in which Western thought is governed by an idea of stable or essential meaning, which is ultimately
fixed by a ‘transcendental signifier’ […] such as God […] Thus logocentrism, and this way of ‘reading’, is a
theological activity because it presupposes and desires a single, fixed and authoritative centre’ (McQuillan
2000, 14). Logocentrism in Derrida’s view is the centre of language and philosophy; it denotes Ideal and Divine truths that transcend human reasoning and is associated with the word of the father or God. It is the notion
of this ‘transcendental signifier’, which in the history of Western thinking is always equated with unquestionable truth and centres of meaning, that Derrida sets out to destroy. One could see the categories outlined by
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Propp as logocentric in that they define how a fairy tale should be set out. Thus in Shrek, the role of ogre as
villain is deconstructed as Shrek becomes the hero.
At the end of the film, as Fiona is about to be married off to Farquaad, and as his soldiers capture the
struggling Shrek, there is a heroic moment.
FARQUAAD: I’ll make you regret the day we met. I’ll see you drawn and quartered! You’ll beg
for death to save you!
FIONA: No, Shrek!
FARQUAAD: (hold a dagger to Fiona’s throat) And as for you, my wife...
SHREK: Fiona!
FARQUAAD: I’ll have you locked back in that tower for the rest of your days! I’m king!
Shrek manages to get a hand free and he whistles.
FARQUAAD: I will have order! I will have perfection! I will have - - (Donkey and the dragon
show up and the dragon leans down and eats Farquaad) Aaaah! Aah!
DONKEY: All right. Nobody move. I got a dragon here, and I’m not afraid to use it. (The
dragon roars.) I’m a donkey on the edge!
The dragon belches and Farquaad’s crown flies out of her mouth falls to the ground.
DONKEY: Celebrity marriages. They never last, do they?
The congregation cheers. (Shrek Screenplay, 2001)
Here the logocentric norms of the discourse are deconstructed as the princess is saved at the end of the story
but she is saved from the ‘duke/king’ – the traditional heroic figure of these tales by an ogre, a dragon and a
donkey – two traditionally evil ones and a helper figure. Through a burst of Bakhtinian carnivalesque laughter,
the binary is overturned and a donkey and a dragon and an ogre rescue the princess from an evil duke. Here
there is a relativization of language as it is the actual merits of the characters – Shrek’s kindness and decency,
Donkey’s loyalty and boundless optimism and Dragon’s love for Donkey in what can only called a biologi-
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cally-radical deconstruction of the parergons of sexual suitability – all shatter the certainty of the thirty one
structural components of the fairy tale, and would probably make the Proppian Fairy Tale generator overload
and crash. The certainties of the destination of the fairy tale are deconstructed in this film and expectations are
both defeated and transformed.
What makes this film work so well is the intersection of text and context. It is this intertextual dimension of the film that makes it deconstructive and also an agent of ethical change. What is set out by the parergonal context can often, as we have seen, be followed by the text; but this is not necessarily the case because
the text can also deconstruct the context and the predicted outcome of the textual journey may not be where
the tale takes us. As Murphy notes:
All interpretation is situated in the space of intersection between the diachronic imaginary and
symbolic dimensions of the text itself and the synchronic imaginary and symbolic context of the
temporally specific interpretation. Truth is constructed in this dialectic, and in this sense, every
text must submit to destinerrance. (Murphy 2008, xiv)
And this destinerrance is in many ways the destination of this anamorphic and carnivalesque deconstructive
fairy tale. The predefined journey of the fairy tale is now found to be in error – it no longer has a set destination but instead is going on a new journey, which is defined, not by types or by parergonal tropes but instead
by individual characters and their own different interactions which leads them, not towards a defined Proppian
destination at step 31, but instead to a destinerrant destination that is not predestined but is defined y the process of the intersubjective interaction and development of the characters. J Hillis Miller hasset out the importance of this term in Derrida’s thought:
What is destinerrance? Discussing it fully would be a virtually endless task. It is a concept, or
better, motif, or, better still, spatio-temporal figure, that connects intimately with the other sali-
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ent spatio-temporal figures in Derrida’s work. I call destinerrance spatio-temporal because, like
most of Derrida’s key terms, it is a spatial figure for time. It names a fatal possibility of erring by
not reaching a predefined temporal goal in terms of wandering away from a predefined spatial
goal. Destinerrance is like a loose thread in a tangled skein that turns out to lead to the whole
ball of yarn. It could therefore generate a potentially endless commentary. Destinerrance is connected to différance, that is, to a temporality of differing and deferring, without present or presence, without ascertainable origin or goal; to trace, iterability … to the future or the ‘to
come’ (l’àvenir); to the democracy to come in that avenir to come; to decision, obligation, responsibility, and, in another of Derrida’s neologisms, irresponsabilisation, to interruption, dissemination, the wholly other; to exappropriation, adestination, justice, law, right, the gift, the
secret, hospitality, testimony, sendings or dispatches (envois); to the messianic without messianism. (Hillis Miller 2006, 893-894)
The notion of ‘erring’ here in Miller’s explanation is used ironically as for Derrida, destinations are always
problematic as is the concept of the ‘to come’. But what is most important about the ethical position of Shrek
is that the journey towards a happy ending is open to all the characters. In the Swamp Karaoke that follows the
film on DVD, all the characters sing and join in what is an almost Shakespearian comic dance at the end with
no one left out (not even Farquaad who is seen as alive inside Dragon’s stomach). Destinerrance is very much
aimed at an open ethics of participation and as such, it is important in any reading of this film.
Shrek, I would maintain, participates in this destinerrance and does so through an anamorphic deconstruction of the generic norms of the fairy tale. The love stories here disinter the norms and by so doing offer
hope to those who are not life’s princes or princesses. The pre-programmed predestined idea that life has winners and losers and that these categories cannot change is deconstructed here at the end of the film:
SHREK: I – I love you.
FIONA: Really?
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SHREK: Really, really.
FIONA: (smiles) I love you too.
Shrek and Fiona kiss. Thelonius takes one of the cards and writes ‘Awwww’ on the back and
then shows it to the congregation. (Shrek Screenplay, 2001)
So ironically, Farquaad has been proven correct because their love is ‘precious’ and it is also a destinerrance
from the usual fairy tale ending. Ethically this shows that appearances and hierarchical positions are not necessarily the determinants of the ethically and morally good. And the destinerrant ‘wandering away’ from the defined goal also allows a wandering away from the parergonal straightjacket as the pre-written signs now have
to be improvised by Thelonius (whose own role as Farquaad’s torturer is deconstructed in the post-filmic karaoke as he sings ‘feelings’, the very moving rock song, thereby deconstructing his typecast persona).
Thus when Fiona is transformed into her ‘true form’ by ‘love’s first kiss’, she does not become the
beautiful Cameron Diaz-like figure of the daytime princess but instead is the ogrish night-time persona the
persona of whom she has earlier said ‘and this is not how a princess is meant to look’ (Shrek Screenplay,
2001). But when she sees that this is love’s true form she is more puzzled than anything else and when she
says ‘(standing up, she's still an ogre) Well, yes. But I don't understand. I'm supposed to be beautiful’. The
reply from Shrek demonstrates the unusual destination that this destinerrant tale has reached: ‘but you ARE
beautiful’:
FIONA: Really?
SHREK: Really, really, (Shrek Screenplay, 2001)
and it is here that the film achieves its ethical purpose.. Beauty, honesty, strength of character, loyalty – none
of these traits are confined to royalty or to those gifted with conventional beauty, and despite their charm, this
is the ideological subtext of many fairy tales and these are a source, I would argue, of many of the prejudices
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that our children can learn from them. Shrek, with its valuing of the other, with its espousal of difference, with
its sense that who you are is often very different from what you are, shines an ethical light on these accepted
areas of children’s culture and asks the deconstructive questions that make this film one to watch, enjoy and
think about. Shrek, as well as being funny and anarchic is profoundly ethical because if opens up a relationship
with the other that respects difference, that is in no way predestined and which allows for the singularity of the
individual be he or she ogre, donkey, dragon or princess – really, really.
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Works Cited:
Bakhtin, Mikhail (1981) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Translated by Caryl
Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Bakhtin, Mikhail (1986) Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, translated Vern W. McGee. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Baudrillard, Jean (1993 Symbolic Exchange and death. London: Sage Publications.
Derrida, Jacques (1976) Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. London: Johns Hopkins Press.
---- (1978) Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. London: Routledge.
Derrida, Jacques (1981) Positions. Translated by Alan Bass. London: Athlone.
Derrida, Jacques (1987) The Truth in Painting. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago:
Chicago University Press.
Derrida, Jacques (1995) Points…Interviews, 1974-1994. Edited by Elizabeth Weber. Translated by Peggy Kamuf and others. California: Stanford University Press.
Derrida, Jacques (2001) ‘Open Discussion’, in Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction Engaged. The Sydney Seminars, edited by Paul Patton and Terry Smith, pp. 105–20. Sydney: Power Publications.
Joyce, James (1989) Ulysses. Edited by Hans Walter Gabler, Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior First published 1922. London: Bodley Head.
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Lacan, Jacques (1977) The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Translated by Alan Sheridan.
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Miller, J Hillis (2006) ‘Derrida’s Destinerrance’, Modern Language Notes, 121.4 (2006) 893-910.
Holbek, Bengt (1986) Interpretation of Fairy Tales. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia.
McQuillan, Martin (2000) Deconstruction: A Reader. London: Routledge.
Murphy, Paula (2008) The Shattered Mirror: Irish Literature and Film, 1990-2005. Cambridge: Cambridge
Scholars Press.
Propp, Vladimir (1968) Morphology of the Folktale. Translated by Laurence Scott, with an introduction by
Svatava Pirkova-Jakobson. Texas; University of Texas Press.
Proppian Fairy Tale Generator.
http://www.brown.edu/Courses/FR0133/Fairy tale_Generator/gen.html
Schickel, Richard (1969) The Disney Vision. New York, Discus
Steig, William (2001) Shrek (Screenplay) Ted Elliott & Terry Rossio and Joe Stillman and Roger S. H. Schulman). DreamWorks
Zipes, Jack (1996) ‘Towards a Theory of the Fairy-Tale Film: The Case of Pinocchio’, The Lion and the Unicorn 20.1 (1996) 1-24.
Zipes, Jack (1997) Happily ever after: Fairy tales, children, and the culture industry. New York: Routledge
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Endnotes
1
Herder particularly worked on the Middle Ages , which historians used to compare to classical antiquity. For him, defending that period of history meant encouraging Germany to resist the French influence, especially in the cultural field. Patriotism is a form of cult of the national past according to
Herder. This new approach to history had a very important impact at the time, especially in small countries such as Ireland. See Johann Gottfried Herder, Une autre philosophie de l’histoire, 1774, translated
by Max Rouché (Paris: Montaigne, 1964).
2
The original representation showed that Patrick was piercing the king’s foot with his crosier but Barry
has erased it, making the attitude of the attendant a bit exaggerated.
3
If the Doric temple represented Patrick’s contribution to Irish culture, it would be on the right side. This
means that for Barry, Irish culture was as sophisticated as Greek culture (that’s why it is a Doric temple) before Patrick’s arrival. The comparison is not with the Roman Empire because at that time, England was often compared to Rome by British writers. Some claimed that Britain was the heir to the Roman Empire. Moreover, Irish historians such as Sylvester O’Halloran criticized Rome because of its
policy of deliberate acculturation of the conquered people, which they compared to the English policy.
O’Halloran also said that the fact that the Romans had not achieved the conquest of Ireland had pushed
them to describe the country as peopled with barbarians (O’Halloran 1778, pp. xxxi, 191).
4
James Barry had a very complex vision of patriotism. He advocated Catholic emancipation but he never
clearly supported Irish independence or the overthrow of monarchy, certainly because of his situation in
London. For more detail on that question, see Tom Dunne, ‘Painting and Patriotism’, in James Barry
1741-1806 ‘The Great Historical Painter’, edited by Tom Dunne (Cork: Crawford Art Gallery and
Gandon Editions, 2005), pp. 119-137.
5
On the left, Dom Gerle (who did not attend the oath), a Carthusian monk, stands for the secular clergy,
the abbot Grégoire, for the regular clergy and Rabaut Saint-Etienne, for the Protestant church.
6
“[un] pays frère en religion, d’où peut venir un jour l’expédition libératrice”. My translation. (Lambert
2004, 200)
7
It should be noted that the poem was originally written in Irish Gaelic and that the English version
given here was translate by Ulick O’Connor.
8
This is when an author feels indebted towards the writers of the past to such an extent that they become
unable to write, or at least to move away from the canons handed down by the said writers. (Brannigan
2002, 33)
9
For those who wish to find out more about the author, Patrick Murray’s essay from Eire-Ireland is authoritative – he was a cousin of Broderick’s but did not allow that to colour his treatment. (Murray
1992)
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10
I refer in particular to Bersani’s Balzac to Beckett – Center and Circumference in French Fiction (1970)
as well as chapter three in Astyanax.
11
Pat Collins et Billy Lendrum en particulier.
12
“Pontifical college launches course on satanism and exorcism”
http://www.catholicireland.net/newsroom/article.php?artid=744).
13
“The glory of God is humanity fully alive.” (Hederman 1999, 28)
14
Living Tradition. “On Human Sexuality: a Response of the Holy See to Parents”
(http://www.rtforum.org/lt/lt62.html), p.5.
15
Ibid.
16
“I do believe that religion and eroticism are absolutely related. And I think my original feelings of sexuality and eroticism originated in going to church,” Madonna, 1994 (Quoted by Casey 1998, 101).
17
Encore convient-il de signaler le contresens sur le grec μετά qui ne signifie pas au-delà mais après et se
réfère à l’ordre dans lequel les deux parties sont présentées dans l’édition de Andronicos de Rhodes.
18
L’auteur voit dans les deux conceptions une théorie comparable de l’amitié constructive.
19
http://www.ratzinger.it/document/orationisforma_engl.htm.
20
C’est bien par des biais détournés que le christianisme, religion de la transcendance et de l’incarnation
fut, selon Gauchet, à l’origine de la modernité. En effet, d’après le sociologue, dans le catholicisme,
avec Jésus la place du parfait médiateur a été prise entre Dieu et les hommes, et « nul après la venue du
dieu-homme ne pourra plus prétendre occuper en vérité le lieu-charnière en un corps nature et surnature », ce qui implique une profonde transformation des pouvoirs terrestres (Gauchet 1984, 193).
Commence alors une lutte d’influence entre le sacré qui dessert le ciel et la sacralité terrestre. Comme le
montre Gauchet, il s’agit là d’une « Révolution invisible en laquelle se joue ni plus ni moins le commencement de la politique moderne. C’est le tournant capital des XIII-XIVe siècles, qui va constituer
les monarchies nationales de l’extrême Occident – l’anglaise et la française surtout – en laboratoires
d’une très lente et décisive transformation d’où surgira au bout du compte cette nouveauté prodigieuse :
le pouvoir représentatif. Avatar lointain, mais direct, si singulier que cela doive paraître, de cette prime
métamorphose dans la sacralisation du roi, rendue possible par la dualité chrétienne, et concrètement
enclenchée par l’obligation faite aux princes de répondre aux prétentions impériales de l’Eglise. » (Gauchet 1984, 200).
21
En effet, le terme postmodernité, selon la sociologue Danièle Hervieu-Léger, postule que le temps de la
modernité, c’est-à-dire de « la mise en place des grandes séparations qui assurent aux différentes activités humaines leur autonomie propre, par rapport notamment à des normes religieuses s’imposant à l’ensemble de la société », est dépassée. Or, il n’en est rien. La sociologue considère, en effet, que « En la
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plaçant dans la souveraineté du peuple, la modernité a arraché à Dieu la source légitime de l’autorité
politique. En conférant à l’individu un pouvoir de plus en plus étendu de légitimation autonome des
autorités qu’il reconnaît comme telles, les sociétés de l’ultramodernité parachèvent l’arrachement du
principe d’autorité à cette transcendance, fût-elle celle de « l’ordre de la nature ». Cette mutation des
régimes de l’autorité « tenue d’en haut », dans la famille, dans les écoles ou dans l’entreprise, ne s’arrête évidemment pas aux frontières de l’Eglise » (Hervieu Léger 2003, 88).
22
Et c’est en ce sens que, 45 ans après le Concile, Mgr. Lalane déclare dans l’émission télévisuelle « C
dans l’air » diffusée sur la chaîne publique France 5, que : « Même si pour moi, dans ma foi, c’est le
Christ qui est la vérité – et je ne dis pas le Catholicisme, mais le Christ, qui est la vérité – je crois que
dans les différentes traditions religieuses il y a des richesses qu’il faut entendre » (« C dans l’air »,
France 5, diffusé le 20/02/2007)
23
A ce sujet, voir le dossier qui leur est consacré dans Le Monde des Religions de juillet-août 2006 (n°18).
24
Ainsi, selon Marcel Gauchet « Si a pu se développer un ordre des hommes à ce point en rupture avec les
précédents, et en rupture pour cause de renversement sur tous les sens de l’ancienne hétéronomie, c’est
dans les potentialités dynamiques exceptionnelles de l’esprit du christianisme qu’il convient d’en situer
la première racine. Elles fournissent un foyer de cohérence permettant de saisir la solidarité essentielle,
sur la durée, de phénomènes aussi peu évidemment liés que l’essor de la technique et la marche de la
démocratie. Ainsi le christianisme aura-t-il été la religion de la sortie de la religion. » (Gauchet 1984,
ii).
25
« L’idée du bonheur a été réévaluée et la place du corps reconsidérée. Les croyants, plus lents à l’admettre et redoutant une dérive hédoniste, y ont cependant contribué, depuis les jeux du patronage et du
scoutisme jusqu’à la façon nouvelle d’aborder le plaisir dans la sexualité. La sainteté attire toujours,
mais certains préfèrent ne pas vivre en dehors du monde : des moines s’installent dans la ville. La vie
mystique n’est pas réservée à une élite en prière dans les cloîtres : de Thérèse de Lisieux à Marthe Robin, cette conviction a gagné les chrétiens ; les monastères, Taizé, Paray-le-Monial, sont des foyers dont
le rayonnement spirituel porte loin. » (Cholvy et Hilaire 1988, 492).
26
Le facteur le plus évident est « l’estompement de la signification catholique de la communion et,
surtout, des conditions que le croyant doit réunir pour y participer » (Jean-Emile Charlier et Frédéric
Moens, « Métamorphoses d’un sacrement. La communion, de la pratique socialisée à la participation
sensible », Archives de sciences sociales des religions (119), juil-sept. 2002, pp. 29-43). Il y a quarante
ans en effet, les préceptes de l’institution étaient connus de tous ou presque. La notion « d’état de péché », aujourd’hui quelque peu désuète, interdisait alors l’accès au sacrement à une part significative
des fidèles. La méconnaissance de la culture catholique qui touche l’ensemble du dogme autorise une
interprétation plus libérale de la description. Les entretiens réalisés auprès des communiants montrent
que le sacrement n’exprime plus vraiment l’orthodoxie de celui qui le reçoit. ». (Ormière 2005, 255).
27
De même, selon Willaime : « La pluralisation externe du paysage religieux s’accompagne d’une plurali-
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sation interne à chaque tradition. S’il y a toujours eu, dans les divers univers religieux, différentes sensibilités, en particulier des orthodoxes et des libéraux, il n’y a pas toujours eu une diversification interne
aussi poussée que celle que l’on connaît aujourd’hui. Le sentiment religieux est en effet aujourd’hui
beaucoup moins régulé par les institutions ecclésiastiques, lesquelles ont non seulement perdu leur pouvoir sur la société (laïcisation), mais aussi sur leurs propres fidèles : l’individualisme religieux s’est
développé à l’intérieur même de chaque tradition religieuse, les acteurs revendiquant leur autonomie de
sujet dans la façon de vivre le religieux. Il y a ainsi de nombreuses façons d’être catholique aujourd’hui
(traditionaliste, charismatique, conciliaire, intégriste, Action Catholique, œcuménique, catholique social… sans compter les multiples variations individuelles) et les autorités ecclésiastiques sont obligées
de « faire avec ». » (Willaime 2004, 60).
28
Ce phénomène s’explique, selon nous, par la nature même de la modernité, qui fut l’époque de la toute
puissance des institutions et des systèmes de croyance. En Irlande, l’Etat moderne s’est formé avec l’alliance de l’Eglise catholique, qui y est donc devenue une institution toute moderne, allant jusqu’à « inventer de la tradition » (Hobsbawm). De même qu’à la même époque, en France, il fallait être républicain pour avoir du prestige social, il fallait être catholique en Irlande. Ce n’est donc pas le catholicisme
en soi qui régnait en Irlande à l’époque moderne, mais bien un catholicisme irlandais institué, qui remplissait une fonction sociale en définissant l’ « habitus » irlandais (Bourdieu). C’est en ce sens que l’on
comprend que les irlandais aient eu une vision légaliste de la religion, et que beaucoup aient été des
catholiques de façade. Ainsi, c’est le catholicisme légaliste, institué et de façade qui résista jusque dans
les années 1980 en Irlande (bien que de nombreuses failles se faisaient déjà sentir dès les années 1960),
de même que le culte de la République (le républicanisme définissant l’« habitus » français) continua
jusque dans les années 1980 en France. Si l’ultramodernité, en accord avec la définition qu’en donne
Willaime, c’est toujours la modernité, mais la modernité désenchantée, autorelativisée, problématisée
(avec désacralisation des ses institutions constitutrices) alors, et contre toutes attentes, l’Irlande serait
entrée dans l’ère moderne et ultramoderne en même temps que la France : lorsque, dans les années
1990, la France se mit à « séculariser ses écoles » (dans le sens ultramoderne de Willaime, c’est-à-dire à
questionner la légitimité de ses écoles, bastions de la Républiques, en tant qu’institutions), l’Irlande se
mit à séculariser les siennes (bastions du catholicisme en Irlande). De la même manière, il est possible
de considérer que le scandale des prêtres pédophiles qui déchaîna la presse irlandaise tout au long des
années 1990 fait écho au scandale des instituteurs pédophiles en France à la même époque. Si l’institution en question est différente dans chacun des deux pays, il s’agit là de la même crise de confiance
dans les institutions, d’une même crise du croire qui caractérise l’ultramodernité.
29
« La mondialisation n’est pas seulement économique, elle est aussi symbolique. Il n’y a plus de frontières spirituelles qui tiennent et l’identification d’un territoire à une religion n’est aujourd’hui plus possible même si certains ont la nostalgie d’une identité nationale étroitement liée à une religion. (…) Cette
mondialisation symbolique est accentuée par la mondialisation de la communication – télévisions câblées, Internet… - qui permet de recevoir chez soi informations et messages de toutes les spiritualités de
la planète. » (ER, 59).
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30
« La notion de métaphorisation du religieux rend compte du fait que, comme l’indiquent les théories de
la sécularisation, les principaux champs d’activités et de savoirs humains ont été soustraits à l’emprise
de la religion et se sont autonomisés. Mais, contrairement à la plupart de ces théories, elle pose en
même temps que le religieux n’est plus à proprement parler l’un de ces champs au même titre que la
politique, l’économie ou l’art, mais au contraire ce qui vient subrepticement colorer des pratiques et des
savoirs que leur autonomisation a rendu disponibles pour un réinvestissement religieux personnel. » (Michel 1997, 304).
31
“A la régulation verticale du religieux par les institutions a succédé la régulation horizontale du religieux par les réseaux, non plus une régulation en termes de normes imposées et de rôles prescrits, mais
une régulation en termes de normes choisies et de rôles négociés. Nous sommes bien entrés, comme
l’analyse Manuel Castells, dans une société de réseaux : « Les réseaux constituent la nouvelle morphologie sociale de nos sociétés, et la diffusion de la logique de la mise en réseau détermine largement
les processus de production, d’expérience, de pouvoir et de culture. Certes, l’organisation sociale en
réseaux a existé à d’autres époques et en d’autres lieux ; ce qui est nouveau aujourd’hui, c’est que le
nouveau paradigme des technologies de l’information fournit les bases matérielles de son expansion à la
structure sociale toute entière. De surcroît, le pouvoir des flux prend le pas sur les flux de pouvoir. La
présence ou l’absence dans le réseau de la dynamique de chaque réseau par rapport aux autres sont les
sources essentielles de la domination et du changement dans la société en réseau, dans la mesure où la
morphologie sociale l’emporte sur l’action sociale. » (Manuel Castells, La société de réseaux. 1. L’ère
de l’information (trad. de The Rise of the Network Society, 1996), Paris, Fayard, 1998, p.
525). »” (Willaime 2004, 211-212).
32
« Conçue plutôt pour la chrétienté rurale du Moyen Age, elle ne pouvait, en pleine civilisation industrielle et urbaine, qu’abriter un feu de tourbe, maigrichon et peu efficace. Il fallait d’urgence remplacer
l’anachronisme. » (Puyo et Van Eersel 1977, 11).
33
Le Monde des Religions, janvier-février 2007, n°21, p.34.
161
162
Number
1, Autumn 2008:
162

A Peer-Reviewed E-Journal of Franco

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