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From the Archives: “The Censorship of Indifference”

2022; Philosophy Documentation Center; Volume: 26; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/nhr.2022.0037

1534-5815

John F. Deane,

Irish and British Studies

From the Archives“The Censorship of Indifference” John F. Deane (bio) Letter to the New Island Number 1 i have labored in the cabbage-garden of Irish poetry for many years, watching it move from dark rooms in the backs of pubs where the till’s shrill whistles interrupted the flow of verse and where the poet was thankful for a pint as reward, to the development of Poetry Ireland, through the sure hands of Rory Brennan, Theo Dorgan, and Joseph Woods, into a national and highly respected institution. I have seen the end of the Dolmen Press and the flowering of new small houses of poetry publishers. It has been a slow and sometimes disheartening development, but poetry in Ireland has taken a high place in the consciousness of the nation. Or has it? It is boasted of in international circles; presidents quote bits and pieces of it in their speeches; institutions around the world honor the Irish poet. And yet, today, this appears to be a tinsel bell, an empty gourd, a glitzy show full of empty platitudes and sounding brass. I have never found poetry so ignored in actuality as I do today. I feel sad and strange to find myself offering a defense of poetry once more. Ireland seems to have lost that sense of its value that it boasts itself of holding onto for centuries. But before I can pray for the buoyant sense of poetry’s worth to return to our country, let me state some of the reasons why it must hold that worth. Literature imposes an order on our experience, even those forms of literature that treat of disorder in a seemingly disordered way, like Beckett’s work, like the later Joyce. The reproach offered to all forms of culture has been, and remains, that it does impose such an order, determining a map of meanings and symbols that creates a screen to hide the horror and disorder that is reality. [End Page 137] “Give us reality TV,” is the cry; “take away the unreal world of the imagination!” If poetry speaks, by being poetry, of the dignity of humankind, that we are created in God’s image and likeness; if poetry speaks of beauty and truth and goodness while wars and horrors abound at the same time, then it is poetry that appears to be offering a loud and cantankerous lie. Homer in his epics outlined an order imposed on warring humans and warring gods. The Iliad, the Odyssey, while being huge tales of battles and conflict, suggest a reigning plan and ordering underneath the murdering and betrayals. The Bible offered a similar ordering of things. Between them they form the basis of European culture. When this ordering fell apart, irreparably as it appears, when the machine age found its legs and started to move, then God died, and European culture lost its hold. This truth surfaces over and over again because, over and over again, times of universal suffering do recur. In our time, a terrible form of nihilism once again screams its presence, creating a framework within which our culture stands. War continues to show up all the inadequacies in our living and places the greatest possible stress on our forms of culture and our power with language. Nine-eleven, the war in Iraq, and the Israeli-Palestinian conquest leave us all with a sense of staining, and of helplessness. If noble intentions were enough, we would have a magnificent literature to counter war, but it has been learned that coldness and distance are required to form a literature, while the outpourings of fact and witness often remain in the realm of reportage. This, of course, is wholly valid in itself for such works may well serve as testament, and are salutary, whereas a literature born of retrospection may serve as monument to our experiences of elemental horror. All our literatures, our philosophies, our religions are built with the bricks and mortar of language and therefore the purity and truth of words remain crucial to our well-being. If the general sense of a loss of confidence in literature— demonstrated by the indifference of the greater part of humanity...