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Post by hibernicus on Aug 1, 2017 19:58:01 GMT
OK, here's an example from the autobiography - don't have my copy to hand so I can't give the page reference: At one point, complaining about the limitations of contemporary Irish writers, he declares that every effective literary "brand" - he gives Graham Greene's novels as an instance - is set in the present day. This is sheer unsupported assertion, and it's wrong because:
(1) If he is talking simply in terms of commercial saleability, he should just go into any bookshop and he will find large numbers of historical novels on display. This isn't confined to the Anglophone world - Spanish writers have produced a steady stream of novels in recent years set around the era of the Spanish Civil War, for example.
(2) If he is talking in terms of literary quality, WAR AND PEACE is universally acknowledged to be one of the greatest novels ever written, and it's a historical novel, set in the generation before Tolstoy's own.
(3) Just to take a counter-example, Sir Walter Scott in the early C19 was probably the first international best-seller; novels based on his operas (LUCIA DI LAMMERMOOR) are still in the repertoire, the framework of the classic US Western with its ambivalence about "the blessings of civilisation" derives from Scott, many minority cultures drew on the model of the Scottean historical novel to express their own identities (e.g. the Flemish revivalist Hendrik Conscience wrote THE LION OF FLANDERS. Scott is a pretty faded star these days, but he was a star.
Fennell seems to completely miss the point that writing about the past can also be a way of reflecting on the present (how we got here,where present-day social phenomena came from). I strongly suspect that the reason he makes such an absurd statement is dislike of the way the recent Irish past is portrayed by many contemporary writers (examples might include John Banville's "Benjamin Black" novels, which one critic - who is not himself a believer - complained portray 1950s Ireland as a concentration camp with priests as guards). The way to establish the shortcomings of such accounts is to examine them in detail, but Fennell can't be bothered so he dismisses them with sweeping statements which sound impressive but just crumble to dust when examined.
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Post by hibernicus on Sept 18, 2017 19:56:36 GMT
Anne Chambers' new biography of TK Whitaker cites two letters from Whitaker to Desmond Fennell, currently in Whitaker's archive in UCD. Both are from 1982 and involve Whitaker complaining about statements in Fennell's SUNDAY PRESS column - I am not sure if the particular columns were reprinted in NICE PEOPLE AND REDNECKS. She doesn't say whether the letters were sent to the SUNDAY PRESS or to Fennell personally, nor whether Fennell replied. The first letter simply involves Whitaker complaining that Fennell's references to the 50s show how easy it is to forget the widespread sense of despair and defeat in the Republic in that decade. The secondseems much angrier - Fennell had written a column in response to the December 1982 bombing of a pub in Ballykelly, Co. Londonderry, killing 11 soldiers and six civilians en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droppin_Well_bombing Fennell had said that the bombing, and the Troubles generally, were due to British insistence on keeping 600,000 Irish people in Northern Ireland subjugated under its rule. Whitaker accuses him of implicitly justifying the bombing, and asks if the other 900,000 people in NI are not Irish what are they and what is to be done with them? [Readers of Fennell will know that he holds that they are British and that they should be given limited self-rule within an united Ireland, though I don't think he has ever worked out what that would mean in practice.] I don't necessarily endorse all Whitaker says, but this might be an important resource for discussing Fennell. One other point - Fennell's response to Ballykelly, as described by Whitaker, sounds quite like his response to 9/11.
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 12, 2017 21:47:05 GMT
The latest issue of VILLAGE magazine - the one with Ted Heath on the cover - has a Fennell article arguing that Ireland has lost its historic identity and become no more than a British region. I think he makes some legitimate points - such as the virtual demise of our religious culture, the widespread loss of much concrete knowledge of pre-Famine history, etc, but I find his mindset extremely problematic. Here are a few reasons why: (1) He seems to imply that the Connemara Gaeltacht as he knew it in the 1970s and 80s was "really" Irish in a way that, say, the inhabitants of Dublin 4 were not. (2) He glosses over the difference between what the Revival wanted to make of Ireland and what Ireland actually was at the time of the Revival. This means that once he accepts that the Revival project has not achieved what it set out to achieve, he cannot comprehend that there might be other resources which could be drawn upon to influence Irish culture - he can see no difference between total victory and total defeat. (Another source of this mindset is his failure to admit that the Revival was not homogeneous - he talks of Horace Plunkett, Arthur Griffith, Douglas Hyde and WB Yeats as if their idea of what Ireland should become was identical, although Plunkett was an unionist, Griffith had doubts about the Gaelic Revival, and Yeats put poetry before politics in a way that Fennell denounces when practised by Seamus Heaney.) During the Revival debates there were complains that the Gaelic Leaguers' equation of Irishness with the language was leading some people to say that if they couldn't speak Irish they must necessarily be English. This seems to me precisely where Fennell's insistence that if you aren't Irish as he defines it you're not Irish at all has ended up. (3) One prefiguring of this is the famous argument in 1912 or 1913 between Griffith and Francis Sheehy Skeffington. Sheehy Skeffington says that Ireland consists of the people who live and work there at a particular time and it is senseless to speak of Ireland as existing apart from them. Griffith says that Ireland has a historic identity, a national soul going back to Eamhain Macha, which transcends the individuals alive there at any particular time. Fennell's position is Griffith's and to be honest I am with Sheehy-Skeffington. (4) Even if Ireland as an entity were to cease to exist, and I don't think it has - I just disagree with Fennell about what sort of entity it is - the people who inhabit this piece of earth would still be subjects of sympathy and service as souls for whom Christ died and as our fellow human beings. Underneath Fennell's lucubrations about the end of Western civilisation, and his claims to represent "humanism" is the implication that large numbers of people - the Americans in particular - have ceased to be human. There's a fundamental nihilism and misanthropy in his mindset which repels me.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Oct 13, 2017 8:52:42 GMT
(3) One prefiguring of this is the famous argument in 1912 or 1913 between Griffith and Francis Sheehy Skeffington. Sheehy Skeffington says that Ireland consists of the people who live and work there at a particular time and it is senseless to speak of Ireland as existing apart from them. Griffith says that Ireland has a historic identity, a national soul going back to Eamhain Macha, which transcends the individuals alive there at any particular time. Fennell's position is Griffith's and to be honest I am with Sheehy-Skeffington. I'm with Griffith. Simply defining Ireland as the people who live and work here at a particular time is so banal, so pedestrian...it makes a nation no different to the inhabitants of a hotel or a train carriage at any particular moment. If you think nationality is THIS, I feel it really belies the meaning most of the human race have attached to their nationality (or other tribal allegiance) through history. And I also agree with Fennell about the Connemara Gaeltacht being more Irish than the dwellers of Dublin 4. The point is that the Connema Gaeltacht is more distinctively and traditionally Irish. This doesn't mean I agree with all Fennell's arguments, of course.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Oct 13, 2017 8:58:19 GMT
One of my problems with reductionism is its obviousness. Saying that a nation is simply co-extensive with the people who happen to be within its borders at the same time...isn't this the same as the reductionism that defends any sex act as "what consenting adults choose to do with their bodies?". Or that gender is whatever you want it to be? Or that two fathers are as good as two mothers, because "Studies have shown"? Or that social rituals, traditions, and customs are tomfoolery? Etc. etc. etc. etc.? Isn't this kind of tepid rationalism a blueprint for a very dull society? Doesn't it ignore the complexity of the human organism?
I don't understand people like Sheehy Skeffington or Jeremy Bentham, who seem to plump for the most obvious interpretation of everything, and who assume that humanity at large just doesn't "get" it. Why doesn't it occur to them that perhaps they are the ones who don't "get" it?
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Post by Young Ireland on Oct 13, 2017 16:15:18 GMT
One of my problems with reductionism is its obviousness. Saying that a nation is simply co-extensive with the people who happen to be within its borders at the same time...isn't this the same as the reductionism that defends any sex act as "what consenting adults choose to do with their bodies?". Or that gender is whatever you want it to be? Or that two fathers are as good as two mothers, because "Studies have shown"? Or that social rituals, traditions, and customs are tomfoolery? Etc. etc. etc. etc.? Isn't this kind of tepid rationalism a blueprint for a very dull society? Doesn't it ignore the complexity of the human organism? I don't understand people like Sheehy Skeffington or Jeremy Bentham, who seem to plump for the most obvious interpretation of everything, and who assume that humanity at large just doesn't "get" it. Why doesn't it occur to them that perhaps they are the ones who don't "get" it? To be fair, it could be argued that ethnic nationalism and sexuality are more alike in this respect, in that they both appeal to people's instincts. While patriotism, like sexuality, is good, due to original sin, the majority of its expressions are warped to some extent. Just because something is good in itself doesn't mean that all applications thereof are thus good.
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Post by assisi on Oct 14, 2017 9:22:34 GMT
(3) One prefiguring of this is the famous argument in 1912 or 1913 between Griffith and Francis Sheehy Skeffington. Sheehy Skeffington says that Ireland consists of the people who live and work there at a particular time and it is senseless to speak of Ireland as existing apart from them. Griffith says that Ireland has a historic identity, a national soul going back to Eamhain Macha, which transcends the individuals alive there at any particular time. Fennell's position is Griffith's and to be honest I am with Sheehy-Skeffington. I'm with Griffith. Simply defining Ireland as the people who live and work here at a particular time is so banal, so pedestrian...it makes a nation no different to the inhabitants of a hotel or a train carriage at any particular moment. If you think nationality is THIS, I feel it really belies the meaning most of the human race have attached to their nationality (or other tribal allegiance) through history. And I also agree with Fennell about the Connemara Gaeltacht being more Irish than the dwellers of Dublin 4. The point is that the Connema Gaeltacht is more distinctively and traditionally Irish. This doesn't mean I agree with all Fennell's arguments, of course. Another analogy for the nation is ourselves, the individual human being. We don't wake up every day as a blank slate ready for that days images and experiences alone to define us. Our character, personality and soul consist of all the experiences, traditions and memories accumulated over the years, added to any innate personal nature we were born with. The influence of our parents can be mammoth, some good some not so good, it rarely leaves. They too have been influenced by their parents in turn, so we are already linked back to near but retreating history. We are influenced by our old friends, our primary and secondary school experiences, university, old neighbours, events from the past, nostalgia for the past, little epiphany moments and magic moments through life, by traditions, by holidays, nature and scenery, literature and many more. I would like to think that a nation is a bit like that, although defined (and re-defined often, and admittedly open to spurious interpretations) by a collective group of people, the nation's inhabitants, rather than an individual.
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 15, 2017 18:55:02 GMT
Perhaps I should have clarified my objection a bit more. I didn't mean to say that everybody is equally Irish because they just happen to be on the island - as if, say an Australian tourist becomes Irish by stepping onto the tarmac at Dublin airport and remains so until their flight leaves Irish airspace. What I meant was (a) the proportion of the Irish population which Fennell defines as "truly Irish" is too small to serve as an adequate definition for the whole population; it amounts to treating most of the population as irrelevant when you are defining Irishness, but nonetheless maintaining that they are bound by the definition of Irishness that you come up with. (Let us suppose for example that someone suggested that in order to be truly Irish you have to be a member of the Church of Ireland. This is not in fact self-evidently ridiculous if this person believes that the Church of Ireland is in fact what it has claimed to be, and there are in fact more members of the C of I in the Republic than there are native speakers of Irish, but it will strike most people as outlandish because there are just too few. Conversely, the idea that Ireland is really the city state of Dublin with some extensions added on is questionable, but it's not ridiculous in the same way because there are so many Dubliners and the city is dominant in so many other ways.) (b) If you accept that people are Irish they must be taken into account when you are determining what Irishness is - it's morally and politically questionable to say "you're Irish when it comes to deciding your obligations but not when we are determining what rights you have". (c) Even in the case of the proportion of the population who are thought to be "truly Irish" there is the danger that the person doing the defining is projecting his imagined version of Irishness onto them and ignoring their actual concerns. There is a passage in Fennell's autobiography when he is discussing his Gaeltacht community activities, and he says that in lobbying etc he took a secondary role because he wanted the locals to produce their own leadership, but he is not sure in retrospect that this was the right thing because while they did secure various demands they did not even request the sort of elected local self-government that he believes they should have. He doesn't ask why they did not do this, or whether they might be right in having other priorities, or how they might be persuaded - he simply assumes that if they don't come up with his patent nostrum under their own steam, there must be something wrong with them.
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Post by hibernicus on Nov 30, 2017 22:35:13 GMT
This article by the American political scientist Patrick Deneen making the case that liberalism devours itself (and that both classical liberalism and the sort of state absolutism which Americans call liberalism are different aspects of the same phenomenon because they share the same basic assumptions) is the sort of analysis which Fennell ought to be making to support his worldview. I am not sure if I completely agree with Deneen (he does not in the article - though he may in the book from which it is taken - really address why so many people have historically preferred liberalism to an organic society) but he is making a connected argument and knows what he disagrees with. Fennell just makes a series of arbitrary assertions which he treats as self-evident. iasc-culture.org/THR/THR_article_2017_Fall_Deneen.php
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 17, 2018 21:23:03 GMT
OK, here's an example from the autobiography - don't have my copy to hand so I can't give the page reference: At one point, complaining about the limitations of contemporary Irish writers, he declares that every effective literary "brand" - he gives Graham Greene's novels as an instance - is set in the present day. This is sheer unsupported assertion, and it's wrong because: (1) If he is talking simply in terms of commercial saleability, he should just go into any bookshop and he will find large numbers of historical novels on display. This isn't confined to the Anglophone world - Spanish writers have produced a steady stream of novels in recent years set around the era of the Spanish Civil War, for example. (2) If he is talking in terms of literary quality, WAR AND PEACE is universally acknowledged to be one of the greatest novels ever written, and it's a historical novel, set in the generation before Tolstoy's own. (3) Just to take a counter-example, Sir Walter Scott in the early C19 was probably the first international best-seller; novels based on his operas (LUCIA DI LAMMERMOOR) are still in the repertoire, the framework of the classic US Western with its ambivalence about "the blessings of civilisation" derives from Scott, many minority cultures drew on the model of the Scottean historical novel to express their own identities (e.g. the Flemish revivalist Hendrik Conscience wrote THE LION OF FLANDERS. Scott is a pretty faded star these days, but he was a star. Fennell seems to completely miss the point that writing about the past can also be a way of reflecting on the present (how we got here,where present-day social phenomena came from). I strongly suspect that the reason he makes such an absurd statement is dislike of the way the recent Irish past is portrayed by many contemporary writers (examples might include John Banville's "Benjamin Black" novels, which one critic - who is not himself a believer - complained portray 1950s Ireland as a concentration camp with priests as guards). The way to establish the shortcomings of such accounts is to examine them in detail, but Fennell can't be bothered so he dismisses them with sweeping statements which sound impressive but just crumble to dust when examined. Another point which strikes me in connection with this - it occurred to me just as I went out the door this morning -is that Des Fennell presents himself as heir to the early twentieth-century Gaelic and Literary Revivals; to Douglas Hyde (who collected eighteenth-century folksongs), WB Yeats (who wrote poems about ancient Gaelic heroes and eighteenth-century aristocrats), Daniel Corkery (whose most famous book is about the eighteenth century) and so on. How does he reconcile this with his claim that effective literature is NEVER set in the past? Is Yeats not a literary "brand", and an extremely powerful one? What planet is Des Fennell living on? On a related point, I remember him claiming that Irish preoccupation with de Valera is abnormal and that - for example - the British don't seem to have the same preoccupation with Churchill. But the Europhiles and Eurosceptics in Britain have been arguing for years over which side Churchill would have been on, and a new Churchill film (FINEST HOUR is only the latest) seems to be released every year.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Jan 17, 2018 22:00:14 GMT
It's funny you should refer to the film as Finest Hour, Hibernicus. It's actually Darkest Hour. And I only mention it (I usually don't correct trifling mistakes like that) because I've been wondering myself why they didn't call it Finest Hour. "This was their finest hour" is the famous phrase. To call it Darkest Hour seems perverse.
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Post by Young Ireland on Jan 17, 2018 22:03:39 GMT
It's funny you should refer to the film as Finest Hour, Hibernicus. It's actually Darkest Hour. And I only mention it (I usually don't correct trifling mistakes like that) because I've been wondering myself why they didn't call it Finest Hour. "This was their finest hour" is the famous phrase. To call it Darkest Hour seems perverse. To be fair Maolsheachlann, Churchill also used the phrase "Darkest Hour": en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Darkest_Hour
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Post by maolsheachlann on Jan 17, 2018 22:07:43 GMT
Fair enough...I didn't realize this.
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 26, 2018 21:38:30 GMT
In the latest VILLAGE Des Fennell reviews a festschrift for the veteran anti-EU campaigner Anthony Coughlan which consists of essays by various Irish critics of the EU. (The more Eurosceptic among you may like to keep an eye out for it.) Given the nature of the book and the likely readership of the VILLAGE,I don't see it as objectionable that the review mostly consists of uncritical summaries of the different essays, or that the view that Irish EU membership is a new form of colonial subservience is simply asserted and assumed to be true rather than argued. What does worry me is Fennell's complaint in the last sentences of the review that the problem with these essayists is that they fail to see that to resist the EU effectively requires an alliance with populists, whom he describes as grubby, disagreeable and generally unrespectable people. That sounds to me awfully like saying that the EU is so bad that fascists or communists are preferable. (The term "populists" is generally applied to rightists, but anyone who has watched the bandwagon-hunting activities of, say, the Socialist Workers' Party, its front organisations and associated imps will know that the description fits them equally well.) Back in the late 1930s and early 1940s there were Irish Republicans who thought the Brits were so bad that Hitler and/or Stalin were preferable. That didn't end well. For a brief summary I refer you to the career of Nikabrik the Black Dwarf in CS Lewis's PRINCE CASPIAN, whom I have always regarded as a symbolic portrait of Sean Russell. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Se%C3%A1n_Russell
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Post by maolsheachlann on Jul 27, 2018 6:14:21 GMT
In the latest VILLAGE Des Fennell reviews a festschrift for the veteran anti-EU campaigner Anthony Coughlan which consists of essays by various Irish critics of the EU. (The more Eurosceptic among you may like to keep an eye out for it.) Given the nature of the book and the likely readership of the VILLAGE,I don't see it as objectionable that the review mostly consists of uncritical summaries of the different essays, or that the view that Irish EU membership is a new form of colonial subservience is simply asserted and assumed to be true rather than argued. What does worry me is Fennell's complaint in the last sentences of the review that the problem with these essayists is that they fail to see that to resist the EU effectively requires an alliance with populists, whom he describes as grubby, disagreeable and generally unrespectable people. That sounds to me awfully like saying that the EU is so bad that fascists or communists are preferable. (The term "populists" is generally applied to rightists, but anyone who has watched the bandwagon-hunting activities of, say, the Socialist Workers' Party, its front organisations and associated imps will know that the description fits them equally well.) Back in the late 1930s and early 1940s there were Irish Republicans who thought the Brits were so bad that Hitler and/or Stalin were preferable. That didn't end well. For a brief summary I refer you to the career of Nikabrik the Black Dwarf in CS Lewis's PRINCE CASPIAN, whom I have always regarded as a symbolic portrait of Sean Russell. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Se%C3%A1n_Russell As someone who is anti-EU, I think it's ridiculous to see the Union as "colonial subservience", unless one means that the need to appeal to a metropolitan elite is so deeply ingrained in us now that we have a "colonial mentality". Ireland voluntarily joined the E.U. and there is very little sign of any public appetite to leave. Personally I wish it would leave, as I fear an ever-increasing loss of Ireland's distinctiveness and sovereignty. But I don't understand the economics of the thing, so I mostly keep quiet about this. I thought John Waters' speech at the Irexit conference reflected this view of the E.U. being a new occupier and was rather silly. Personally I think it is best, in political discourse, to confine the term "populist" to the nationalist right (stopping short of the extreme right)-- simply for clarity. If we use the dictionary definition, almost any political movement can be called populist. (I consider myself a populist.)
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