Haunted English: The Celtic Fringe, the British Empire, and De-Anglicization (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Haunted English: The Celtic Fringe, the British Empire, and De-Anglicization Matthew Hart Haunted English: The Celtic Fringe, the British Empire, and De-Anglicization. Laura O'Connor. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Pp. xviii + 240. $49.95 (cloth). In the introduction to Haunted English, Laura O'Connor turns to the "de-Anglicization" of Ireland promoted after 1892 by Douglas Hyde, founder of the Gaelic League and first President of the Republic. Demonstrating a sensitivity to language characteristic of her analyses, O'Connor explains how Hyde's awkward neologism reflected his need to find an "alienating" label for the "toxic effects" of Anglicization, its "instrumentalist connotations" helping to suggest that British hegemony is "something harmful that [...] can be, and ought to be, reversed" (xvi). Haunted English explores the poetics of that reversal. Reading poems by W. B. Yeats, Hugh MacDiarmid, and Marianne Moore, O'Connor shows how the language of the provincialized "Celtic Fringe" survived its violent exile behind the "English Pale," living on as an "evocative object" within global Anglophone literature and playing a central part in modernist debates about "gender, secularism, [and] the changing status of literary genres" (17). For a general modernist audience, Haunted English has two significant features. First, O'Connor shows how the narrative of de-Anglicization exceeds the history of the Gaelic Revival. A long first chapter, "Beyond the Pale," addresses the history of "linguicism" ("the discrimination against others on the basis of language or speaking style" [xiii]) in Ireland, whereby the proscriptions and prejudices of life on the fringe of empire created a melancholic double consciousness: an "ambition to adopt Englishness that is interminably withheld; and a repressed identification with the Gaelic culture that is reviled as worthless and yet revered" (43). Narrating the formation and deformation of this colonial melancholy, O'Connor reads key texts of Celtic Orientalism by Matthew Arnold and Ernest Renan, then explores how intellectuals like Hyde and Yeats undid the reified opposition between Teuton and Celt that was the discursive symptom and bulwark of Irish cultural oppression. She also provides impressive analyses of the cultural-political meanings of Gaelic genres like the aisling (Jacobite dream-vision poem) as represented by Aogán Ó'Rathaille's "Gile na Gile." Rooted in Ireland, Haunted English extends into the contact zone where the Celtic Fringe paradoxically overlaps and is divided from the English Pale, focusing less on Gaelic itself than on its formal and discursive significance for Anglo-Celtic poetry. Chapter two, "'Eater and Eaten': The Haunted English of W. B. Yeats," therefore deals with how English is for Yeats both quarry and prey (63). As a poet who declared that "everything I love has come to me through English," but who couldn't disavow the "shade of grief cast over Ireland by the history of linguicism" (60–1), Yeats turns the relation between Irish and English into the matter and meter of poetry. For instance, he praised Lady Gregory's mixing of "Tudor vocabulary" with "a syntax partly moulded by men who still thought in Gaelic" (76). He also offered a four stress rescanning of Milton's blank verse, where the pentameter is shaken up by "the Irish preference for a swift current" (84). O'Connor's argument, then, is that by refusing the dualism that makes Gaelic a permanent victim and English a perpetual killer, Yeats avoided the "'eat or be eaten' logic of linguicide" (5). [End Page 830] In "The Tower" or "The Curse of Cromwell," hunted Irish becomes haunted English, with Yeats developing an Anglophone idiom somewhere "between English and Gaelic, written and oral, and elitist and popular literary traditions" (109). Though Yeats made only desultory attempts to learn the "subjugated national language," Gaelic persists in his verse as a "ghostly presence" that confirms his Irishness even as its reconciliation with English imaginatively reconstitutes the waning cultural authority of the Anglo-Irish elite (110). From Anglo-Irish dialectics, chapter three shifts to "Hugh MacDiarmid's Poetics of Caricature." This geographical move represents the second way in which Haunted English is notable for modernist studies. MacDiarmid neither spoke nor read Gaelic, but by showing how the discourse of the Gael operates as an undertone in...