Anyone who hasn't read them the
novels of James Joyce can be viewed as an extended meditation on the private
lives of Dubliners - Bloom in particular in Ulysses is a fascinating depiction
of 'Everyman' and all the assorted junk that passes un-sifted through his mind.
Like a walking billboard being bomb-barded with extraneous advertising jangles.
Interesting too that 1914 marks the break of Jung with Freud and reminds us of the astonishing popularity psycho-analysis enjoyed throughout Europe - everywhere it seems except Ireland, as the subject matter and technique; 'confession' via 'free association' was already monopolised by the Catholic Church who had, according to Joyce at any rate, a vice-like grip on the nation's intimate thought and lives. - A deathly claw almost, which kept the city "in mental paralysis". Just imagine your wife giving more credence to the whispered admonitions of a parish confessor than your own pillow-talk proverbials?
Intolerable - hence the well-trodden consolations of Monto.
Yes, confession had me tortured. I'd spend the whole week rummaging my mind for assorted 'sins' and pursue each thought mostly down blind alleys hoping to find the nugget of venality that would satisfy my inquisitor. In time, this process can build character, but it can also destroy self-confidence & shut a person out from the joys of life. While others enjoy simple pleasures you find yourself brooding endlessly. Very hard to take the psyche out of habits formed early. Ideologies I find may be reflexive - like a loosely-fitting woollen. When challenged, a deep well of stored impressions is often revealed. These you can talk to, and if your lucky, learn from. Others are hard-edged and implacable; black & whites predominate and the shared human dimension is deliberately diminished. They present us all with a challenge.
At independence, the 20th C. reading habits of the Irish were circumscribed by the Censorship Board set up by the 1929 Act and inspired by such luminary nuggets as this missive issued by the Council of Irish Bishops in 1927:
"The evil one is ever setting his snares for unwary feet. At the moment, his traps for the innocent are chiefly the dance hall, the bad book, the indecent paper, the motion picture, the immodest fashion in female dress - all of which tend to destroy the virtuous characteristics of our race."
Liam O' Flaherty wrote;
"The censorship of literature was imposed, lest men like me could teach the Irish masses that contact with dung is demoralizing, that ignorance is ignoble and that poverty, instead of being a passport to Heaven, makes this pretty earth a monotonous Hell."
Assuming anyone ever got to read him.
After the 1929 Censorship of Publications Act the clamp came down and virtually every Irish novelist of repute including Joyce, Lawrence and Maugham, had their work banned. You couldn't use the words 'birth' and 'control' in the same sentence, & even foreign papers covering divorce proceeding were seized at the ports. The five member Censorship Board encouraged customs officials and members of the public to report 'obscene' material; "little literary pimps in every village and hamlet" as Gogarty called them. In 1930, the nadir had been plumbed when the Municipal Gallery had their nudes removed.
G.B. Shaw exclaimed;
".. having broken England's grip of her, she slops back into the Atlantic as a little grass patch in which a few million moral cowards are not allowed to call their souls their own by a handful of morbid Catholics, mad with heresyphobia, unnaturally combining with a handful of Calvinists mad with sexphobia ..."
Later, in 1932 the Academy of Belles Lettres was set up by AE, Yeats, Gogarty, O Faoiláin, Padraig Colum, Frank O' Connor, Peadar O' Donnell, Francis Stuart, Shaw et al. to protest. They would do so largely in vain for the next 50 years.
Nowadays, I take an anthropological view of the Abrahamic God seeing it more a sophisticated by-product of primitive animism given flesh perhaps in the palace intrigues of Akenathon who seems to have converted the ancient Egyptians to monotheism. The transplantation & cultural diffusion of this phenomenon into the Graeco-Roman classical world and its legitimation by Constantine is indeed an event of transformative world-historical importance but its ramifications hopefully should become ever more diluted as secular and enlightened multi-cultural educational techniques are increasingly adopted. While the "the Christ Jesus" played a happy and formative role in my own childhood teaching me much about basic ethics today thankfully I no longer need or require absolution from a putative Sky-God or his self-appointed representatives, my own conscience being a perfectly satisfactory arbiter.
Though I'm a "southern Irish Catholic" then, and heir to all its hang-ups, I don't believe in the Christian God and regard the big bang an inexplicable cosmic fluke rather than the pre-meditated act of a benign deity. Judaeo-Christianity with its monotheistic God may have been an improvement on polytheism and primitive animism but I'm guessing all faith-based belief systems will have vanished within a few hundred years, if not sooner.
The thing is, and what keeps me in the church (though I'm by no means a regular mass-goer, as you can imagine), is the absence of any satisfactory replacement - it just provides all those rites of passage from the cradle to the grave, acts as a powerful social glue and as an organisational locus for the community.
What else can provide an even remotely comparable force of cohesion? I'm wondering if similar sentiments pertained among those of different faiths a hundred years ago; i.e. paying lip-service to the church, being a hypocrite (perhaps) and simply towing the line as its "the done thing"?
The church is being eaten alive in modern Ireland and the aforementioned censorship and moral surveillance long consigned to history. Apart from the many scandals, I'm sure Darwinism has silently taken hold of the populace. Such is the state of general erosion an undertaker friend of mine in Galway is even investing in incinerators in an expected market shift. Primary schools are increasingly secular and the media seldom bothers to hunt out the clergy's opinion on anything unless it concerns them particularly, and if it does, it usually focuses on some abuse or other. That said, there's a social cement there being chipped away.
What's going to replace it?
Mary Kennedy-ism??
Interesting too that 1914 marks the break of Jung with Freud and reminds us of the astonishing popularity psycho-analysis enjoyed throughout Europe - everywhere it seems except Ireland, as the subject matter and technique; 'confession' via 'free association' was already monopolised by the Catholic Church who had, according to Joyce at any rate, a vice-like grip on the nation's intimate thought and lives. - A deathly claw almost, which kept the city "in mental paralysis". Just imagine your wife giving more credence to the whispered admonitions of a parish confessor than your own pillow-talk proverbials?
Intolerable - hence the well-trodden consolations of Monto.
Yes, confession had me tortured. I'd spend the whole week rummaging my mind for assorted 'sins' and pursue each thought mostly down blind alleys hoping to find the nugget of venality that would satisfy my inquisitor. In time, this process can build character, but it can also destroy self-confidence & shut a person out from the joys of life. While others enjoy simple pleasures you find yourself brooding endlessly. Very hard to take the psyche out of habits formed early. Ideologies I find may be reflexive - like a loosely-fitting woollen. When challenged, a deep well of stored impressions is often revealed. These you can talk to, and if your lucky, learn from. Others are hard-edged and implacable; black & whites predominate and the shared human dimension is deliberately diminished. They present us all with a challenge.
At independence, the 20th C. reading habits of the Irish were circumscribed by the Censorship Board set up by the 1929 Act and inspired by such luminary nuggets as this missive issued by the Council of Irish Bishops in 1927:
"The evil one is ever setting his snares for unwary feet. At the moment, his traps for the innocent are chiefly the dance hall, the bad book, the indecent paper, the motion picture, the immodest fashion in female dress - all of which tend to destroy the virtuous characteristics of our race."
Liam O' Flaherty wrote;
"The censorship of literature was imposed, lest men like me could teach the Irish masses that contact with dung is demoralizing, that ignorance is ignoble and that poverty, instead of being a passport to Heaven, makes this pretty earth a monotonous Hell."
Assuming anyone ever got to read him.
After the 1929 Censorship of Publications Act the clamp came down and virtually every Irish novelist of repute including Joyce, Lawrence and Maugham, had their work banned. You couldn't use the words 'birth' and 'control' in the same sentence, & even foreign papers covering divorce proceeding were seized at the ports. The five member Censorship Board encouraged customs officials and members of the public to report 'obscene' material; "little literary pimps in every village and hamlet" as Gogarty called them. In 1930, the nadir had been plumbed when the Municipal Gallery had their nudes removed.
G.B. Shaw exclaimed;
".. having broken England's grip of her, she slops back into the Atlantic as a little grass patch in which a few million moral cowards are not allowed to call their souls their own by a handful of morbid Catholics, mad with heresyphobia, unnaturally combining with a handful of Calvinists mad with sexphobia ..."
Later, in 1932 the Academy of Belles Lettres was set up by AE, Yeats, Gogarty, O Faoiláin, Padraig Colum, Frank O' Connor, Peadar O' Donnell, Francis Stuart, Shaw et al. to protest. They would do so largely in vain for the next 50 years.
Nowadays, I take an anthropological view of the Abrahamic God seeing it more a sophisticated by-product of primitive animism given flesh perhaps in the palace intrigues of Akenathon who seems to have converted the ancient Egyptians to monotheism. The transplantation & cultural diffusion of this phenomenon into the Graeco-Roman classical world and its legitimation by Constantine is indeed an event of transformative world-historical importance but its ramifications hopefully should become ever more diluted as secular and enlightened multi-cultural educational techniques are increasingly adopted. While the "the Christ Jesus" played a happy and formative role in my own childhood teaching me much about basic ethics today thankfully I no longer need or require absolution from a putative Sky-God or his self-appointed representatives, my own conscience being a perfectly satisfactory arbiter.
Though I'm a "southern Irish Catholic" then, and heir to all its hang-ups, I don't believe in the Christian God and regard the big bang an inexplicable cosmic fluke rather than the pre-meditated act of a benign deity. Judaeo-Christianity with its monotheistic God may have been an improvement on polytheism and primitive animism but I'm guessing all faith-based belief systems will have vanished within a few hundred years, if not sooner.
The thing is, and what keeps me in the church (though I'm by no means a regular mass-goer, as you can imagine), is the absence of any satisfactory replacement - it just provides all those rites of passage from the cradle to the grave, acts as a powerful social glue and as an organisational locus for the community.
What else can provide an even remotely comparable force of cohesion? I'm wondering if similar sentiments pertained among those of different faiths a hundred years ago; i.e. paying lip-service to the church, being a hypocrite (perhaps) and simply towing the line as its "the done thing"?
The church is being eaten alive in modern Ireland and the aforementioned censorship and moral surveillance long consigned to history. Apart from the many scandals, I'm sure Darwinism has silently taken hold of the populace. Such is the state of general erosion an undertaker friend of mine in Galway is even investing in incinerators in an expected market shift. Primary schools are increasingly secular and the media seldom bothers to hunt out the clergy's opinion on anything unless it concerns them particularly, and if it does, it usually focuses on some abuse or other. That said, there's a social cement there being chipped away.
What's going to replace it?
Mary Kennedy-ism??
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