The guarded
affirmation of a national voice speaking through Philip Roth’s
writing eludes me.
I baulk at his
end-line:
the rich
native tongue of which I am possessed
Writers
in Ireland, including mono-linguists, live in proximity to a language
– Irish, Gaelic, Erse, Celtic – often controversially described
as a ‘language of the dispossessed’, which complicates the voice
of the writer so that the strength of assertion that Philip Roth can
muster is elusive.
Certainly
a great slew of magnificent Hiberno-English writings, from voices
across social, geographical and religious locales, have been heard
from Ireland.
Would
Louis MacNeice, Thomas McCarthy, Maeve Binchy and Eavan Boland, all
writing in English in the 20th
century, each hold to an assertion of being an Irish writer in the
manner in which Philip Roth asserts he is, above all other divisors
of ethnicity, social class, religion and parish, an American writer?
Perhaps
a nation requires American gigantism; perhaps it needs to occupy a
high position in the pyramid of national measures, from a base of
‘occupied’ to an apex of ‘free’, in order for its writers to
hold such a view of themselves.
Held
up to closer inspection, perhaps it is possible to ring-fence the
multiplicity of voices writing in America into one great corral that
is that federation of states which were welded together by a model of
economic development so intense it took the furnace of an horrific
internal war to re-define a brutal form of enslavement and to open
the way for increasing waves of European immigrants to industrialise
the plains and cities of the mid- and far west.
That
certain writers’ voices, and Philip Roth’s is one of them, can
soar above their own particularity and glide upon the rising thermals
of a national voice, is no doubt possible. Jose Saramago is a
Portuguese writer? Yes? Nadine Gordimer is a South African writer?
Yes? James Joyce is an Irish writer? Or is he?
He
wrote marvellously in the ‘rich native tongue’ of which he was
possessed, as dynamically and creatively as Philip Roth, ironically
for both of them and for us, their readers, in a close cousin of each
others English which superseded and fully absorbed the indigenous
languages it encountered.
Would
Philip Roth say he was an American writer if he wrote in Yiddish? Or
Hebrew? Or in Lenape, a language of the swamps and coastal plains
along the Delaware River basin, around which the industrialised urban
sprawl of New Jersey grew?
If
James Joyce wrote in Irish any question as to his being an Irish
writer would be superfluous. But would he be read? And so lauded?
A
conjecture then, on languages and contingency in Ireland and America:
Demographic
changes consistent with Philip Roth’s description of the American
Dream as ‘radical impermanence’ indicate that, in the future,
writers in America may possess American-Spanish as their ‘rich
native tongue'. Historically, a 16th
century war between Spain and England ended in Ireland in 1588 with
an armada of Spanish warships floundering on the western coasts of
the island, where sailors and soldiers scrambled ashore to survival
with or slaughter by the locals.
The
conjecture suggests
that had
the
armada succeeded, James Joyce would have written his great works in
Spanish, as an Irish writer.
We
write in the languages we grow up in. Philip Roth says as much. I
write in English because I grew up in it. I write in Irish because I
possess it (and it possesses me) as a post-historical contingency. I
grew up in English because the Spanish armada sank and English became
the language that supplanted Irish and many other languages across
the world. As did Spanish.
Readers
are fortunate to have the works of Philip Roth in American-English.
We would be equally fortunate to have his work were he writing in
American-Spanish, but that’s for a future time, perhaps, for a
post-Roth time, indeed for a time that may never come to pass.
And
we are fortunate to have James Joyce, Jennifer Johnston, Roddy Doyle,
Polly Devlin, Patrick MacGill, John Hewitt, Emma Donoghue – readers
can make their own lists – who are Irish writers, however fragile
and contested such a declaration and a designation may be.
Or
are we to speak as poet Michael Hartnett did, bi-lingual and restive
– what writer isn’t? - who asserted that English was ‘the
perfect language to sell pigs in’ when he proclaimed his Farewell
to English?
Wrestling with
the contingencies of our time and place determines us as writers and
designates the assertions we make about our voices, our sense of
where our expressive acts sit and the national and other carapaces
under which they shelter.
Ronda,
7.6.2017
www.facebook.com/DaveDugganWriter
