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Dreams of Empire, Empire of Dreams: Lord Dunsany Plays the Game

2009; Philosophy Documentation Center; Volume: 13; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/nhr.0.0113

1534-5815

Patrick Maume,

Joseph Conrad and Literature

Dreams of Empire, Empire of Dreams:Lord Dunsany Plays the Game Patrick Maume Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett (1878–1957), eighteenth Baron Dunsany in the peerage of Ireland—usually known as Lord Dunsany—continues to be admired by devotees of fantasy fiction, but he receives little attention in Irish Studies. His Orientalist fantasies articulate a defiantly aristocratic aesthetic, based on game playing—including war and hunting—as well as on the privileging of the storytelling process over "truth" or meaning, and on a love of ornamentation for its own sake. As such, his aesthetic has, perhaps unexpectedly, something in common with postmodernism. And yet, for an author most renowned as a fantasist, the real world of the Ireland in which he lived and worked is consistently present in his oeuvre. Dunsany's portrayal of Ireland, shot through with diehard Unionism, combines sardonic observations on the silences and hypocrisies of the new state with a wistful attraction to its peasant illusions; Dunsany's version of imperialism in Ireland saw the system not as a pathway to modernity, but rather, as a means of preserving feudal values that were disappearing from Britain itself. As in his depictions of India and Africa, he clings to the dream of empire even as he discards the claims to social progress and religious superiority that originally underwrote the dream. In doing so, he highlights the tensions between "reactionary" and "progressivist" visions of imperialism. Dunsany was born in London on July 24, 1878, the elder son of John Plunkett, a Conservative MP. (Most Irish peers did not sit in the House of Lords; they could represent British—not Irish—seats in the Commons.)He spent his childhood at his mother's home, Dunstall Priory in Shoreham, in Southeast Kent. Dunsany's education intensified his sense of his Kent childhood as a lost paradise. His father, who died in 1899, wished him to become a soldier: Dunsany was sent to Cheam Preparatory School and to Eton, where his dreamy nature made him unpopular, before entering the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. In 1899 he became a lieutenant in the Coldstream Guards, and was stationed in Gibraltar, his first glimpse of the East. After World War I, Dunsany recalled the [End Page 14] Boer War—which was widely criticized by British radicals at the time and is generally regarded as a point when Britain began to doubt its own colonial ventures—as a fight between honorable combatants, in contrast to the dehumanized trenches of the Western Front.1 He left the army in 1901, thus avoiding the messy and often barbaric counterinsurgency campaign that followed the occupation of the Boer Republic, and settled at the family seat in County Meath, though he took little interest in business or farming.His property, including Durham coal mines, was managed by his uncle, Horace Plunkett, the former Unionist MP and advocate of agricultural cooperation.2 Dunsany resented his uncle's bossiness, but Plunkett introduced him to the Dublin artistic and intellectual circles where Plunkett recruited publicists and collaborators for the co-operative movement. The most prominent of these was George Russell (Æ), a mystic, poet, painter, and associate of W. B. Yeats. Plunkett employed Russell as an organizer of his Irish Agricultural Organisational Society and as editor of the movement's journal, the Irish Homestead, later the Irish Statesman. Like many writers of the time, Dunsany was fascinated by Tibet; the Himalayan ascetics in his stories owe much to Æ's theosophy.3 Dunsany had a memorable physical presence. He stood six-foot-four and dressed untidily. He was fond of practical jokes and parlor games. He hunted and shot, and was a keen observer of animals; his love of the Irish countryside developed through fox hunting with the Meath gentry and shooting on the bog. In 1904 Dunsany married Beatrice Villiers, daughter of the earl of Jersey; they had one son. Her sister married Lord Longford; the Dunsanys were close to their nephews Edward and Frank Pakenham (later sixth and seventh earls of Longford, respectively the co-founder of the Gate Theatre and eulogist of Eamon de Valéra), for whom Dunsany invented fantastic and elaborate imaginary orders of chivalry.4 Dunsany entered...