|
20 July 03 |
Belfast and New York, Ireland and America, and the Strange Phenomenon
of “Irish Studies” as Seen in the Graphic Fiction of Garth Ennis |
|
|
JULIAN DARIUS |
|
A version of this essay
was presented at the 12th Graduate Irish Studies Conference at Claremont
Graduate University (Claremont, California) on 25 March 2000. It was made available online
simultaneously on PersianCaesar.com and on Sequart.com on 20 July 2003. More on Garth Ennis. |
Garth Ennis, an Irish writer working in the
graphic novel (or extended comic book) format, represents a literary
outsider. Although he shows
considerably greater disdain for many other groups, Ennis has openly shown
disdain for conventional literary values, regarding them as little more than
wankery. Readers simply enjoying
literature -- or writing -- is much more important for Ennis than their
abstracting systems of ideas, full of unnecessary terminology. He probably
would not approve of this paper. Set in this context, it would be
irresponsible of me to offer a conventional academic paper; doing so would
not do justice to his texts, to use unnecessary literary jargon. Nonetheless, I would like to suggest that
Ennis offers various depictions or attitudes towards Irish and American
cities, particularly Belfast and New York City. These depictions recur and evolve throughout Ennis’s work, to
use another term disdained by Ennis.
The three sets of graphic novels that are most relevant here are his Troubles
graphic novels, his Hellblazer cycle of graphic novels, and his Preacher
cycle of graphic novels. The Troubles Cycle |
|
Both Troubled Souls and For a Few Troubles More
occur in Belfast, but the first depicts the city as oppressive and the second
as comical. |
Troubled Souls, the first of the two Troubles
graphic novels, was Ennis’s first significant work. At the time, Ennis was an nineteen-year-old Belfast native (see
the Vertigo edition True Faith, pages 7-8). Far from seeing this job as a literary opportunity, Ennis mostly
saw it as a chance “to escape from university” and to earn money -- referred
to as “beer vouchers” (ibid 8). Troubled
Souls first appeared in serialized form in issues #15-20 and 22-27 of the
U.K. anthology Crisis, published in 1989 with art by John McCrea. For a Few Troubles More followed in
Crisis #40-43 and 45-46, published in 1990 and also illustrated by
McCrea. Both narratives occur in
Belfast, but the first depicts the city as oppressive and the second as
comical. In Troubled Souls, Belfast possesses
a gravity capable of randomly drawing its inhabitants into its politics,
forcing them to take a particular political side; to take the side of the
political city over concerns for family, friends, and love; and to perpetuate
this same gravitational capability.
This Belfast is one in which “the past screams at you,” in the words
of the book’s introduction writer, Malachey Coney. This Belfast is a segregated one where, “depending on ... which
religion you are ..., you’ll only walk down certain streets.” The introduction contrasts Troubled
Souls with literary attempts to deal with the troubles: “nowhere in its pages will you find one of
the usual stereotypical Irish characters, such as the Russian-trained
international assassin masquerading as an embittered Catholic Priest turned
renegade terrorist ... . What you
will find are ordinary people who find themselves swept up by extraordinary
circumstance, when familiar lives can be bent unrecognizably out of shape.” And this is exactly what we do find. Tom, the Protestant main character, while
drinking with his mates in a bar, is handed a wrapped gun by a stranger. After being hassled and injured by the
police, the stranger reclaims the gun.
Tom spends time with his brother and his aunt, then sees this stranger
in the street. The stranger, Damien,
implicitly threatens Tom’s loved ones and demands Tom help him. Tom begins to defend the I.R.A.’s stance
and to argue with his anti-I.R.A. father, but knows this to be a
rationalization, an attempt to justify what Damien will ask him to do. Tom meets the aunt of his new girlfriend,
Liz. Damien reappears and coerces Tom
to plant a bomb in a trash receptacle.
A paranoid, Kafkaesque environment unfolds. Realizing Liz will be near the exploding bomb, he arrives on
the scene and, as he leads her off, the bomb explodes. He witnesses a soldier die, his body torn
and straining, in the street. Tom
himself is hospitalized for shrapnel, where he finds himself celebrated as an
innocent Protestant victim. Damien, told
to kill Tom, confronts Tom but lets Tom flee. Tom vacations and then returns to Belfast. Damien, who has identified with Tom, takes
him to an I.R.A. safehouse where they talk about their lives. This brilliant sequence has Damien
relating his brother’s death during an ambush of an army patrol. His brother had been innocent, and his
killers unknown, but the army had labeled all of the dead as guilty, leading
Damien to join the I.R.A. He explains
that he needed to hide the gun and saw that Tom would be scared enough to
comply. He reveals that he has seen
the I.R.A. meeting with the pro-English U.V.K., saying: “If you’ve got some of your own people
turned renegade, then gettin’ the opposition to do them works fine ... but
it’s more than that. They’ve got the
city stitched up between them, Tom. I
mean, look: if you’ve got two
groups with rackets to get cash ‘for the cause,’ think what they’d manage together.” |
|
The Catholic / Protestant dichotomy has thus been replaced with
the rich / poor dichotomy. |
This shifting of the conflict from
ideology to money recalls Tom’s meeting with Liz’s rich and snobby aunt, who
lives outside of Belfast. She
said: “Of course, when people on the
mainland find you’re from over here they think it’s awful. Full of sympathy, wondering how you
survive, if you’ve ever been shot.”
She continues: “Look out the
window. I mean, there’s not a bit of
trouble here, or most other areas.
So I just say, ‘my dear, it’s no trouble at all. There is violence, but that happens
in places on just wouldn’t go!”
The Catholic / Protestant dichotomy has thus been replaced with the
rich / poor dichotomy. Damien’s
experience with the I.R.A. seems to confirm this, placing the leaders of both
Catholics and Protestants in a post-modern relationship of supplementation,
opposed less against each other than against those without power. Tom and Damien both implicate themselves
in this power structure. Damien
says: “Plenty of morons like me for
cannon fodder.” Tom adds: “An’ enough cowards like me to let it go
on. An’ even better, plenty of well
off people to be selfish bastards an’ not give a damn.” Americans, moreover, are implicated as
well. Damien talks about Noraid, “the
Americans that finance the I.R.A.”:
“We had a visit from them once.
They sent a wee party to see what we spent their money on ... We
showed them two blokes with armalites.
The yanks thought this was great.
They cheered and then pissed off home, so as to send even more
money. I don’t even think the guns
were real.” Typical of Ennis’s style, he undermines
the Romanticism of these two enemies becoming friends. Tom narrates that “What we’ve done is so
similar ... what’s been done to us is so similar ... .” But he continues: “if we can be
friends, I think to myself ... if we can do it, surely everyone else
can? But I’m drunk, so I don’t see
how bloody childish that is.” When
driving in the city after their talk in the safehouse, Tom suddenly flees
Damien, unable to trust. Damien chases him down, producing a gun to show that
he has no intention of using it -- leading to his being shot and killed in
front of Tom by M.P.s. When we next
see Tom, he is packing. Because he is
considered an innocent Protestant, his kidnapping has been taken as a case of
mistaken identity. Tom says goodbye
to his friend and then to Liz, who says that if he leaves “they’ve won.” Tom replies: “They won a long time ago.”
The “they,” of course, is both sides -- the dichotomy between them
already exposed. He leaves, looking
back from the ferry with morbid sadness on Dublin. |
|
For a Few Troubles More is
less a sequel than the second part of a diptych, arguing for the fun side of
Dublin wherein the troubles are human and the military conflict is just part
of the accepted landscape. |
The second Troubles graphic novel, For
a Few Troubles More, follows Tom’s friends. Dougie and Valerie are marrying because she is pregnant. Full of antics of bawdy jokes not entirely
absent from Troubled Souls, For a Few Troubles More focuses on
the “laughing and chatting and boozing” of Dublin, the “ordinary” life Tom
desired to rejoin but could not. For
a Few Troubles More includes Dougie’s friend Ivor making a drunken,
crude, and sexually explicit speech as best man, bathroom humor, and the
ghost of a fat moonshine-maker and his pet snake, who was flattened beneath
an army vehicle and floats around in his flattened form, complete with tire
tracks. For a Few Troubles More
is less a sequel than the second part of a diptych, arguing for the fun side
of Dublin wherein the troubles are human and the military conflict is just
part of the accepted landscape. For a Few Troubles More must fail, however, to provide an equal
counter-balance; juxtaposed against Troubled Souls, one can simply state
that Dougie, Valerie, and Ivor have not been pulled into the city’s
gravity. The use of ghosts and
exaggerated depictions strike the reader as farcical or unrealistic, thus
undermining the work’s stance. The
two would be synthesized in later works -- works that would do more justice
to the perspective For a Few Troubles More represents. Years later, having become a successful
American comic book writer, Ennis was now free to produce a sort of
“director’s cut” of his older work.
It is noteworthy, then, that he has chosen to revive not the drama Troubled
Souls but the humorous For a Few Troubles More. In fact, he turned that shorter, weaker
part of the Troubles diptych into a series. In 1997, Ennis revised and expanded For
a Few Troubles More as Dicks, a four-issue mini-series published
by Caliber Press in the U.S. That
series was itself expanded with additional material as Bigger Dicks, a
four-issue mini-series published in 2002 by the U.S.’s Avatar Press, which
collected this material in trade paperback form as Dicks. This was followed by Dicks 2 in
late 2002 and early 2003, alto by Avatar.
All were illustrated by Troubles illustrator John McCrea, who
had collaborated with Ennis on mainstream work like Hitman. |
|
For an academic or literate reader, Troubled Souls was the
superior work of the two Troubles, interrogating deep issues in a
manner that would have rated rave reviews if it were a film -- whereas For
a Few Troubles More feels silly and disposable. Yet it is exactly this that Ennis seems to prefer. |
The Dicks series is noteworthy here
mostly for its indication of which side of the Toubles dichotomy Ennis
himself prefers. For an academic or
literate reader, Troubled Souls was the superior work of the two Troubles,
interrogating deep issues in a manner that would have rated rave reviews if
it were a film -- whereas For a Few Troubles More feels silly and
disposable. Yet it is exactly this
that Ennis seems to prefer: he has
continuously avoided pretension in his statements about his own work, even
looking down on any serious or philosophical statements contained within --
while championing the violent and funny bits. Indeed, while Ennis remains an important voice in American
comics, his own statements dangerously border on equivocation between
seriousness and pretension. Hellblazer Debatably, Ennis’s next major work was on
the Hellblazer series for DC Comics, beginning in 1991. He got the job at 20 years old (see Hellblazer
#83’s letter column). This series,
well-respected by the sophisticated American comic book writers, features an
English magician named John Constantine, but his stories often have more to
do with the horrors of life than of the supernatural. Ennis began writing the series with issue
#41. He quickly added an Irish girlfriend
for John. John visits and reminisces with an Irish
friend named Brendan in issue #42.
They fondly recall Kit, Brendan’s former girlfriend from Belfast. By the end of the issue, Brendan has
died. John met Kit in London issue
#46. For the next two issues, the two
contemplate a relationship. In issue
#49, the two start their relationship by having sex on Christmas Day in
1991. Issue #50 is framed around
their time in bed together. John
moves into her flat on the condition that he not bring his nasty magic with
him. The English in Ennis’s issues – and
particularly the authorities -- seem rather anti-Irish. Issue #52 features the prince, identified
only as the brother to the big-eared one, saying as he snorts cocaine that
“terrorist pigs killed my uncle, you know.
Don’t see why we can’t build a big wall ‘round Belfast and throw food
in to the bastards.” This particular
royal is next show in a bondage outfit, complete with nipple rings, in issue
#54. In #62, we learn that one of John’s
relatives served with Cromwell in Ireland and participated in the notorious
Dogheda Massacre. |
|
The party in issue #63 shows John engaging in much the same
antics as For a Few Troubles More. |
Issue #63 features John having his
fortieth birthday party while Kit is back in Belfast due to a family
illness. The party shows John
engaging in much the same antics as For a Few Troubles More, including
Swamp Thing growing marijuana so that they can all smoke it, including
Zatanna (a former member of the Justice League). John urinates on the shoes of the long-standing mystical DC
character called the Phantom Stranger. Ennis’s anti-literary -- or
anti-pretension -- attitudes may be seen here as well. Issue #64 has Kit, who makes her living as
an artist, needing to “finish that cover for the new Amis book.” John asks “is this Another exploration of
the complexities of his own arsehole?”
Kit replies: “It’s just a hack
job. I’ll string a coupla bits’ve
lace over a few leaves and paint the background to look like stone. Ballack-head in the office’ll stick a wee
border round it an’ call it post modern, an’ away you go.” |
|
Issue #67 ends with Kit on a boat to Ireland, a reverse of the
end of Troubled Souls in direction, gender, and role in the plot --
but both have left their lovers. |
Kit, however, is targeted by thugs eager
to hurt John; her killing is ordered by a man standing in front of the
British flag (#64). Attacked in her
flat, she ably defends herself, slicing one man’s face and putting a butcher knife
into another’s crotch (#65). After
John wraps up his machinations, Kit leaves for Belfast, saying, “I’m fed up
with this town ... And the people carry on like -- I dunno. It’s like they’re beaten. They’ve nothing left in them.” Here we may see the stereotype of the
lively, tougher Irish thinking the English to be repressed sissies. When Kit says she wants “a quiet life,”
John indignantly responds in a manner that might recall Liz’s elitist, rich
aunt in Troubled Souls: “So
you’re moving to Belfast?” Kit
replies: “Oh, don’t be so bloody
stupid! You’ve never even been
there. You don’t know what you’re
talkin’ about.” Issue #67 ends with
Kit on a boat to Ireland, a reverse of the end of Troubled Souls in
direction, gender, and role in the plot -- but both have left their lovers. It is only after this that Kit and Belfast
are truly characterized. Issue #70
focuses entirely on Kit in Belfast, never depicting John although she is
haunted by his absence. Only now do
we find out her name is Kathryn “Kathy” Ryan -- as if she has an Irish face
and an English one. She talks with
her friends and family, and conversation topics smoothly drift from the
troubles to lovers and sports. She
and her sister, Claire, remember their father abusing them, and Kit realizes
her resulting unwillingness to “take shit off anyone” has led to her
leaving John. Family here becomes a
focus, motivating Ennis’s Belfast characters as it had not in the Troubles
graphic novels. |
|
1 In a passage that illustrates Ennis’s feelings
about American politics, in line with his earlier views on Irish politics,
this allegorical J.F.K. also speaks about his legacy: The widespread rumor, speculation and slander
that has occurred since the incident in Dallas you refer to, has at its core
the assumption that this administration was in some ways the last hope
for fairness and decency in America.
It is this assumption -- more accurately, accusation -- that
has kept me in a personal, spiritual and spatial limbo for over thirty
years ... and I would therefore like to take this opportunity to deny
this accusation as strongly as possible. John responds with a
question of a slightly different tone:
“So you were actually a bit of a git?” To this, J.F.K. responds: To be seen in a historical context as the
conscience of the Unitied States is not the honor one might think. It is, in fact, a burden, and one
that I was -- at the time -- loath to shoulder. My chief concerns were, to set the record straight, immediate
political survival, and regular extramarital sex with as many women as
possible. After John points out
that it “doesn’t take a genius to work that out, chum” and the two have
another brief exchange, John offers an instant, perhaps cynical but
insightful analysis on the problem in the American consciousness: “People like to believe that
bollocks. Helps to think someone
tried to stop all the shittiness there is today. Nobody likes the truth.” More on Garth Ennis’s Hellblazer
work. |
John visits New York City from
#72-75. His initial reaction is one
of awe: “It’s too big to be
real. The sun bounces off these great
glass ladders built to Heaven, and you’re nothing one minute and the next
you’re a giant in a world built specially for you.” These issues, however, featuring John wandering through an
allegorical America with a bureaucratese-speaking J.F.K. eternally wandering
with the back of his head blown off.
(For
example, when asked to shake, J.F.K. replies: “Unfortunately I am unable to do so at this time. And it pains me greatly, as the President
of the United States of America, that this should be the case. However, the removal of my hand from my
head will result in a loss of faculties which could eventually become a
destabilizing force at some point in my personal future” (#74). When John asks if he can ask a question,
J.F.K. responds: “This administration
prides itself on a policy of openness and accessibility.”)1 This
allegorical America also includes Lady Liberty gang raped each day, dollar
bills uttering the various sins of the U.S.A., dead Native Americans, Uncle
Sam depicted as whoremaster, and Britannia a whore in an alley addicted to
heroin. At the end, John recants his
praise of New York City, commenting:
“It’s nothing new, this place ... if it whispers lies you want so
badly to believe -- don’t.” In issue #76, John’s return flight is
diverted to Dublin and he spends the entire issue talking with Brendan’s
ghost. Brendan makes statements about
the troubles similar to those made in Troubled Souls. He focuses on the deaths caused by both
sides because of their rhetoric, further attacking “them friggin’ Yanks
keepin’ it goin’.” He says: “Come over an’ see what yer bleedin’ struggle’s
doin’ to us ... ‘an’ while yeh’re at it, take a wee look ... an’ yeh’ll see
why yer family left ... in the first place!” In issue #82, one issue before Ennis’s
last, Kit returns and talks with John, but only to say goodbye and have sex
once more. Following his last issue,
Ennis wrote a special entitled Heartland that features Kit in
Belfast. (The same title was given to
the Kit solo issue, #70.) John is
entirely absent and the story focuses on Kit confronting her past, further
emphasizing the role of family in Belfast as the real fixture of life. Heartland makes its case about
Belfast better than any earlier work with John or Kit, depicting Belfast as a
city of ethnic family connections and suggests that they -- rather than the
troubles -- provide the origin for both violence and happiness. Ennis links the awareness of ambiguity
missing from the political debate with the awareness of ambiguity in the
personal attempt to reconcile one’s family with the its violence. Belfast’s false horizontal political
dichotomy, a function of apparent heartfelt opposition, finds contrast with
New York City’s true vertical economic hierarchy, which goes apathetically
unopposed. Preacher In early 1995, following Hellblazer,
Ennis began a new and very successful series called Preacher; it would
continue, accompanied by a mini-series and a number of specials (all titled Preacher
Special, followed by a specific subtitle), until #66, published in 2000;
all of this material would be written by Ennis and illustrated predominantly
by Steve Dillon, who had collaborated with Ennis on Hellblazer. Preacher’s main character is a Texas
preacher named Jesse Custer who has a supernatural creature living inside him
-- a being called Genesis, who is the child of an angel and a demoness. This grants the character the ability to
speak and have anyone obey. His
girlfriend is Tulip, a gun-toting one-time hitgirl. Cassidy, an Irish vampire, acts as the couple’s friend and,
after Jesse’s apparent death, as Tulip’s lover. Preacher, more than any other Ennis work, features crazy
characters. (Most of the specials, in
fact, focused on these characters rather than the main cast.) Arseface is a boy who shot himself in
imitation of Curt Cobain and wound up with a horribly deformed face and a
severe speech impediment; logically enough, he becomes a rock star. The Saint of Killers is a gunman from the
Wild West who, having frozen Hell with his hate and later killed the Devil
for insulting him, replaces the angel of death. Jesse Custer’s father’s hick family includes a man who has sex
with animals and who kills their neighbor -- a boy with one eye due to
pollution -- after the boy inadvertently spies on a bestiality session; the
boy is discovered when the man urinates after sex on the boy’s hiding place
-- and in the boy’s solitary eye.
Starr, leader of a secret society, is slowly maimed over the course of
the series, including having his penis torn off by a dog; he says, in
response, “my dick’s in the bitch’s mouth -- and I don’t mean in a good
way.” Other characters include a
tough cop in New York City who discovers his taste for sadomasochistic
homosexuality, sexual investigators, a man who makes love to an artificial
woman sculpted from meat products, and his assistant, a sadomasochistic woman
obsessed with Adolf Hitler and Nazism, whose best line is “Fuck me hard and
call me Eva.” Custer’s self-imposed
mission is to find God, who has forsaken all Creation, and take Him to task. |
|
Like previous works, Preacher thus also depicts Ireland --
though not Belfast specifically -- as a place of families wearing the mask of
politics, further claiming that naïve views of Irish cities as glorified
metaphors hide simpler, more personal motivations. |
Issues #25-26, relating Cassidy’s past in
Ireland and New York City, are of particular note here. He and his brother participated in the
Easter Rising of 1616. As Liberty
Hall is being shelled from a gunboat on the river, Cassidy’s brother hears
the man in charge, Patrick Pearse, say that he knows their side will
fail. “They have to die ... that is
what we all came here to do,” he says, explaining -- correctly -- that this
will preserve “Easter Week Nineteen-Sixteen ... in the minds of the Irish
people.” Cassidy’s brother forces
Cassidy to desert, explaining he was only fighting to keep an eye on
Cassidy. On the way out, Cassidy’s
brother kicks Michael Collins in the genitals. Cassidy’s brother says:
“Years from now they can look back at this mess from a safe distance
an’ start puttin’ words like revolution an’ tyranny an’ glory in the history
books.” The reality, however, was
“all that hair an’ blood an’ brains all over the walls ... the fellas lyin’
dead in the street ... the whol’ve bloody Dublin’s on fire.” Cassidy’s brother explains that their
mother’s a Protestant and their father’s a Catholic; when Cassidy asks “why
would a Catholic man marry a Proddie,” his brother replies: “Oooh, I don’t know now. D’yeh think they might’ve been in love or
somethin’ like that?” Like previous
works, Preacher thus also depicts Ireland -- though not Belfast
specifically -- as a place of families wearing the mask of politics, further
claiming that naïve views of Irish cities as glorified metaphors hide
simpler, more personal motivations. |
|
More on Preacher. |
After becoming a vampire, Cassidy leaves
for New York City. Like John
Constantine, Cassidy is enraptured with New York City, which he has not had the
advantage of even seeing on television.
He says: “I remember lookin’ up at them [the buildings], near
laughin’, like, an’ thinkin’ -- no way! No way can they build them that big! There were people shoutin’, an’ cars drivin’ about, an’ music
comin’ out’ve places.” Unlike John,
however, Cassidy learns his lesson quickly as he is soon robbed by a fellow
Irish immigrant. He says: “This magic place, yer heart soarin’ as
high as the skyscrapers, an’ it turns out it’s just as shite here as it was
back home?” He meets a group of other
Irish immigrants who gather in a particular bar. One fought for the English while others are rabidly
anti-English, but more important is their friendship. The anti-English never return to Ireland,
their rhetoric irrelevant compared to their life of friends and drinking in
New York City. This depiction of the
Irish immigrant experience in New York offers the city as a place that
naturally unmasks the simple, human motivations sometimes hidden in Irish
cities. |
|
|
Garth Ennis and Irish Studies |
|
Ennis’s work offers an extreme antiseptic to the canon of Irish
writers, including Yeats, Joyce, and Heaney. |
Ironically, however, Garth Ennis has not
left Ireland. He shows an affection
for America, particularly for westerns and for New York City, but he neither
particularly romanticizes America nor seems to need the unmasking New York
City provides. If Ennis’s works show
any legitimate reason to flee Ireland, it is the poverty and the
politics. But Ennis has removed himself
from the politics, suggesting that Belfast natives are not the political
beasts of their conventional depictions.
The church and Irish politics distracted Stephen Daedalus, but not
Garth Ennis. As his career has
continued, the oppressive atmosphere of Dubliners is increasingly
critiqued. Ennis’s work thus offers
an extreme antiseptic to the canon of Irish writers, including Yeats, Joyce,
and Heaney. It is fun, it is family,
and it is friends that concerns Ennis rather than masks of political or literary
value. Ennis’s work is earthy art
interested in entertaining. Opposing
himself to the rhetoric of the university that writing allowed him to escape,
seemingly uninterested in the fundamentally English established tenants of
literature, embracing the life behind what the world wants to see of Ireland,
Ennis stands as a uniquely and honestly Irish writer. |
|
Asked by an Irishman what she studied, one of my academic friends
replied that she was “in Irish Studies.”
“And what would that be?” the Irishman coolly replied. |
More than offering a critique of the
academy and its literary pretentiousness in general, Ennis’s work provides an
antiseptic to Irish Studies. Allow me
here an anecdote I heard from a friend who specializes in Irish Studies. When she was last in Ireland, she and some
academic friends talked to some Irishmen in a pub. Asked by an Irishman what she studied, one of my academic
friends replied that she was “in Irish Studies.” “And what would that be?” the Irishman coolly replied. I’ve been to numerous conferences with
papers considered to be “Irish Studies,” and during those papers I never
cease to be amazed through my boredom.
One that I remember (at least loosely) described Dublin as a panopticon. For twenty minutes. As with most papers that deal with
Foucault, there was little evidence the author had ever read Foucault, but
that’s a more typical academic problem:
those who work with theorists typically only know the dime store
version of their theory and often find their pet theorists as difficult and
unrewarding as others find their own writing; they end up claiming that the
agents in The Matrix are walking panopticons simply because they’re
strong in fights (I actually heard such a paper). Such stupidity is a very academic form of stupidity, a very
highbrow form of stupidity -- one endemic of academic journals and writing in
general. But Irish Studies has an
additional problem: try telling an Irishman
that Belfast can only be understood as a panopticon. Mind you, this was a sociological paper;
it wasn’t claiming that the Belfast of a particular film or novel was a
panopticon -- no, Belfast itself, due to the politics of the city, was
a panopticon. What the hell does that
have to do with the life of the Irish?
Is that language the Irish might use?
Is that at all relevant to the Irish experience? The ancient Greeks spoiled us; the entire
voting population went to see plays and whatnot. This is Ireland, not Greece, and -- despite what academics have
claimed -- the two are not the same.
And most of the Irish have no time for academics, let alone
panopticons. |
|
“Irish Studies” -- the very name is an oxymoron. There is nothing Irish about Irish
Studies. |
It’s like creating “Gypsy Studies” and
writing about the revolutionary paraxis of a specific dance that is actually
rare and culturally eclipsed by panhandling.
Or like creating Marxist films and writings that are boring,
repetitive, lacking in camera movement, lacking in acting, and filled with
jargon while claiming that they’re going to encourage the revolution when
viewed by the proletariat, who actually can’t stomach anything longer than
two minutes (the time between commercial breaks) without seeing tits or
having sex alluded to in the most obvious manner. This is the widespread academic disease caused by lack of
awareness of the fact that academics have less in common with average people
than blacks with whites or women with men.
We are a society unto ourselves and we often look out, as all
societies do, on other societies and interpret them through the prism of our
own. And certainly the proletariat
has no concern for our discussions of the proletariat, nor do women as a body
have concern for the male gaze.
Neither group even has those terms -- “proletariat” and “male gaze”
are academic terms (as is the usage of “women” in academic discourse) and are
culturally biased, though we as academics do not realize as much because we
generally do not regard ourselves as a separate culture. Such terminological and methodological
problems are hypocritical and bad enough, but they rise to another level when
(mostly in the interest of the creators promoting their own careers)
departments or specializations are created with names like “Proliteriat
Studies” or “Irish Studies” -- the very name is an oxymoron. There is nothing Irish about Irish
Studies. It’s like if the
Anti-abortion University created Abortion Studies: the medium and the message are at odds. Let me be clear: I have no hatred of the Irish, nor need I point this out except
in the present politically correct culture (in which the fact that I have
Irish friends would be needed here, as if to absolve me). No, I simply know the dirty little secret
of Irish Studies: that the Irish
literary writers studied by the academy are atypical. Irish nationals who happen to be studying
in American graduate school have universally told me that their friends back
in Ireland think them -- and higher education in general -- to be self-indulgent. While I do not mean to say that all Irish
are anti-intellectual -- no group deserves such categorization -- I do mean
to say that the anti-academic, anti-literary values of Garth Ennis are a hell
of a lot closer to “Irishness” than “Irish Studies.” |
|
Garth Ennis thus provides real Irish literature. Ennis’s literature is bawdy,
anti-literary, and in a popular but marginalized form: comic books. Deliberately disposable, it provides a much-needed
counter-argument to established academic norms, including those of Irish
Studies. |
Garth Ennis thus provides real
Irish literature -- not simply English literature written by an Irishman with
just enough touches of Irishness to let the English and those Americans so
eager to send money “for the cause” think that they’re getting a colonial experience. The same syndrome is true for all tourism,
all sociological surveys: the
population plays to the expectations they feel the tourists or surveyors
have. Perhaps, if we are to
formalize Irish Studies, we should be studying writers like Garth Ennis. Ennis’s literature is bawdy,
anti-literary, and in a popular but marginalized form: comic books. Ennis’s work, deliberately disposable, provides a much-needed
counter-argument to established academic norms, including those of Irish
Studies. How appropriate that this should come from
a marginalized but revolutionary medium, traditionally the terrain of popular
rather than high culture. |
|
Read about the author on our About page. Julian Darius can be reached at julian@sequart.com. Discuss this article online on Sequart.com’s messageboards. |
Read more about Garth Ennis on Sequart.com. |
|
WEBMASTERS: |
To link to this article, link to http://www.sequart.com/garthennisCITIES.htm. |
|
PUBLISHERS: |
Please cite quotations by website and author (e.g. “—Julian
Darius, Sequart.com”). |