I Was Listening… but Did Not Succeed in Hearing You.
The very idea of soundless music seems impossible, a contradiction. Certainly, we can imagine music, recall or compose it in the mind’s ear, and the skilled sight-reader can ‘hear’ the score before her eyes. A silent musical performance is less conceivable: it is this absurdity that John Cage exploited with 4’33”.
In this paper, I wish to examine two episodes in mid-20th century Irish novels where instances of this kind of experience are posited. One of these novels is relatively well known, though perhaps, by its singularity and gnomic playfulness, it is a book that still manages to avoid being thought canonical: Flann O’Brien (Brian O’Nolan)’s The Third Policeman (1967).[1] The second is much more obscure: Ralph Cusack, better known, if known at all, as a painter, published one novel, Cadenza (1958) a surreal, absurdist work, grounded in autobiography, but avoiding any claim to fidelity or truth.
They were near- exact contemporaries. O’Nolan was born in 1911, Cusack slightly more than a year later, and the younger man pre-deceased his elder by a year in 1965. They would almost certainly have known of each other and it is probable that they would have met in the very small world of Dublin bohemia in the forties and fifties. They meet on paper in Anthony Cronin’s Dead as Doornails: Cronin knew both well, and paints a more sympathetic picture of Cusack here than in his novel, Life of Riley, where he appears as Sir George Dermot, a bullying, condescending, and oafish drunk, with a passion for music expressed through the medium of compulsory, and very loud, gramophone recitals for his house-guests.[2]
Despite this coincidence of time, place and, for a time, habitat, they were almost as different in background and outlooks as it was possible to be in early- to mid- 20th century Ireland. O’Nolan, a native Irish speaker, though not from a Gaeltacht (an Irish speaking district), Catholic, generally held to be small ‘c’ conservative in matters political was born in Strabane, in what would become part of Northern Ireland, into a large family, but moved to Dublin in his early teens and seems never to have left it subsequently. He took a BA and an MA at University College Dublin and then entered the Civil Service, where he was to stay until taking early retirement in 1953. Cusack was born in north County Dublin. His father had been a British Army officer and later a successful stockbroker. Cusack attended Charterhouse and then Cambridge and lived in France for much of his life. While it would seem – if Cadenza is to be believed – that he had Republican sympathies as a young man, his upbringing was solidly Protestant and Unionist, and his milieu was one that would have remained oriented towards London and further afield, even as the Free State became ever more inward-looking, and, with wartime neutrality, at odds with the former colonial power. It is likely, I think, that O’Nolan, whose inability to suffer gladly was not confined to the definitively foolish, would have detested the likes of Cusack.
1
The long voyage of The Third Policeman -or to give it its original title Hell goes Round and Round -to publication is well-known: written soon after O’Brien’s first novel, At Swim-Two-Birds, (1939), it was rejected by that book’s publisher, Longman’s, and lay in a drawer for a quarter century, until its author cannibalized it for The Dalkey Archive (1965), before it was eventually published the year after his death. The book is narrated in the first person by an unnamed, young-ish man, who we realise, towards the end, has been dead all along. Most of the action takes place in what must be a version of hell, one that, as Aidan Higgins noted, bears a striking resemblance to the landscape around Athlone.[3] There are plenty of bicycles, two (or three) policemen and no women.
Our narrator finds himself in ambiguous custody at a police station manned by two policemen, with veiled and persistent references to a mysterious third of their ilk, Sergeant Fox. Sergeant MacCruiskeen is the dominant voice, a man of many opinions, all of them wrong, and a compulsive hobbyist – as is his compatriot.
MacCruiskeen had been at the dresser a second time and was back at the table with a little black object like a leprechaun’s piano with diminutive keys of white and black and brass pipes and circular revolving cogs like parts of a steam engine or the business end of a thrashing mill. His white hands were moving all over it and feeling it as if he were trying to discover some tiny lump on it and his face was looking up in the air in a spiritual attitude and he was paying no attention to my personal existence at all. There was an overpowering tremendous silence as if the roof of the room had come halfway down to the floor
[….]
‘That is my personal musical instrument’ said MacCruiskeen ‘and I was playing my own tunes on it in order to extract private satisfaction from the sweetness of them’.
The sergeant’s ‘private satisfaction’ leaves our narrator confused, and somewhat defensive:
‘I was listening’ I answered ‘but did not succeed in hearing you’
‘[….] only myself has the secret of the thing and the intimate way of it, the confidential knack of circumventing it’ replied the sergeant.
He got up and went to the dresser and took out his patent music box which made sounds too esoterically rarefied to be audible to anyone but himself. He then sat back again in his chair, put his hand through the handstraps and began to entertain himself with the music. What he was playing could be roughly inferred from his face. It had a happy coarse satisfaction on it, a sign that he was occupied with loud obstreperous barn-songs and lusty shanties of the sea and burly roaring marching songs. The silence in the room was so unusually quiet that the beginning of it seemed rather loud when the utter stillness of the end had been encountered. [4]
Cadenza, as noted, was Cusack’s only venture into literature and it is an uneven, sometimes excessive book. It is narrated as the reminiscences of Desmond, a hero whose life bears a quite close resemblance to what we know of Cusack’s. These un-chronological memoirs are told from carriage 304D on a train serving Dundalk from Amiens St. (now Connolly) station in Dublin. Desmond decides he has had enough of the world and wishes to remain in this liminal situation for as long as he needs to, bribing and cajoling poor Mick, ‘the Begrudger’, who appears as the ineffective figure of authority. In this state of being permanently ‘on the way’, he recalls episodes from a north Dublin childhood and adolescence, from time spent with his musical uncle Melchior in the Hebrides, and from his wanderings in the south of France.
He finds himself, one morning, in a rustic café. As he downs the first of many glasses of pastis, he gradually begins to make out the other patrons of the dimly lit room:
Seated at the table as far as possible distant from the other two there was a third, no, including Madame, a fourth personage; of indeterminate shape and uncertain size, clad in dark garments in the darkened room, he reminded me of unpleasant things which could not recollect but feared I knew only too well. He was leaning very blackly over the scarcely white table, his arms splayed awkwardly and unevenly across it…..silently strumming some alfresco sonata, upon which he was furiously concentrating, with the tips of strong, sensitive fingers, on the marble. Evidently he was drunk. […….]
Drinking, I watched, and the silent sonata continued. He played with both hands: obviously he heard it, and as I watched I could almost hear it too.
Then I did hear it, he paused lifted his hands, then began again. I could hear it, I mean I could see and hear it: he had begun the slow movement of the fourteenth, Opus twenty-seven – the Moonlight. The more I watched, the clearer it became [….] it was a fine performance and I shared it all with him.[5]
Desmond, and the mysterious table-top pianist, who turns out to be the village priest, share a musical experience, and yet it is entirely soundless. Obviously, this depends on a very high level of musical knowledge and instrumental skill on both their parts; it would not be an experience available to the ‘mere’ listener.
As their adventure continues, ever more surreally and drunkenly, Desmond and the curé talk of how music pierces the veil of religion
the last Beethoven quartets [….] addressed mercifully to no friend of acquaintance of my bishop or his Pope […] only an unbeliever could so deeply believe, only one deaf so resplendently hear! [6]
And later the village priest raises a toast: ‘here’s to God’s enemies – to their God’s enemies -may he damn them!’
2
In order to try and grasp the relation between the two episodes detailed above from the Third Policeman and Cadenza, and to attempt to pose a more general point about the conceit of silent musical experience, we turn to Adorno, and more particularly to Aesthetic Theory. [7]
Aesthetic Theory was unfinished when Adorno died in 1969 and the version compiled by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann contains many repetitions that would, perhaps, have been erased from the final version. Nevertheless, even allowing for this, the figure of ‘the philistine’ returns again and again in the work, surely deliberately: the ghost that haunts the meeting of the artwork and the proper aesthetic comportment with its vulgar insistence on ‘getting something’ from art, whether that something be pleasure, meaning, or, with music, ‘a feast for the ears’. The philistine is the bourgeois who wishes ‘art voluptuous and life ascetic’ when ‘the reverse would be better’.[8]
The philistine is not the person who knows nothing about art, but rather the one who knows enough to have taste, but not enough to see or hear the excess embedded in the art, its incommensurability or ‘enigmaticalness’, a quality that Adorno believes to be the necessary condition of the artwork, a condition of which music is the limit case, being at once ‘completely enigmatic and totally evident’.[9]
The contrasting figure to the philistine, at least with regard to music, is a puzzling one:
He alone would understand music who hears it with all the alienness of the unmusical and with all of Siegfried’s familiarity with the language of the birds.[10]
Understanding, however, is not to be understood as exhaustive, as akin to ‘solving’ a crossword. Rather, this special mode of elucidation proceeds by ‘concretizing [the work’s] enigmaticalness’,[11] in other words, by grasping that in the work that organises and preserves the enigma. If one element of this special kind of understanding may be the naivete of the ‘unmusical’ the other element is possibly the opposite:
Those who can adequately imagine music without hearing it possess that connection which is required for its understanding. [12]
The crab-like progress towards a set of criteria that might unlock a method for establishing the connection between this ‘enigmaticalness’ and ‘truth content’ of an artwork reproduces, mimetically, the mental journey through the artwork towards, but never arriving at, understanding.
Mimesis is central to Aesthetic Theory: aesthetic experience is, essentially for Adorno ‘the configuration of rationality and mimesis’.[13] Mimesis is both semblance and process. With the partial exception of visual art, the artwork relies for its effect and for the understanding of that effect on an ordered sequence of events, whether these events be words, sounds, images, or gestures. This ordering is experienced as given and it is that ordering that cleaves individual experience to the artworks, which are ‘schemata of experience that assimilate to themselves the subject that is experiencing’.[14] This processual ordering of experience is both archaic and futural: pointing to a kind of knowledge with one foot in ritual and superstition and another that ‘[anticipates] a condition beyond the diremption of the individual and the collective’ [15]
The exemplarity of music as the artform that displays the dialectic that structures both expression and reception most clearly is also apparent in Adorno’s insistence on the particular mode of address of music: ‘[it] says We directly, regardless of its intentions’ .[16] The ‘We’ is ‘a social whole on the horizon of a certain indeterminateness’[17] This is not to suggest that music is an undialectical universal language: it speaks through the ‘ruling productive forces and relations of the epoch’ but can at least suggest the finitude and historicity of those forces and relations. [18]
To return to our priest and policemen. It is easy enough see in MacCruiskeen’s performance of ‘coarse’ musical enjoyment a parodic mimesis of musical experience without the ‘We’. Using his own private instrument, of which he has ‘the knack’- the masturbatory resonances are hard to miss – the Sergeant leaves out the essential component of the musical: its publicness, and the announcement of a ‘We’ that unites the subject with the singular object that, in providing a schema of a kind of experience that we live through but not in, removes us from private experience.
The world of the two (or three) policemen is one in which rules are written back into the world with absurd and terrifying results. MacCruiskeen’s ‘mollycule’ theory, where men become bicycles through the exchange of atomic matter via constant intercourse between arse and saddle, and the complicated and terrifying system of levers and dials by which their demi-monde is ordered, speaks of a disordered rationality, a world gone made through the excess of reason and want of sense. Our narrator escapes the gallows by being nameless and thus, despite all the somatic evidence, not existing.
As O’Nolan’s original title suggests, hell is a place where nothing even happens, or rather nothing ever happens for the first time: repetition, stasis and the fetish-like absorption in the wrong details – the reduction of all questions to being, in the end, ‘about a bicycle’ – produce a world from which escape is impossible.
Cusack and his curé are brought together by an act of magically precise mimesis. Desmond’s experience of watching the priest’s mime becomes the experience of listening through ‘exact imagination’, the understanding being led by a trained engagement with music that gives access to it without hearing it.[19] Unlike the sergeant’s absorption in his own private instrument, the curé performs his engagement with Beethoven in a way that invites the kind of engaged attention that, for Adorno, is the opposite of the mechanised and de-humanised consumption that characterises the products of the culture industry and its sedated subjects. Between them, Desmond and the priest perform the Moonlight Sonata, and its status as a ‘schema of experience’ that is entirely singular, but ‘assimilates to itself the subject (s) that [are] experiencing it’ is made present.
3
While it would be reductive to describe Aesthetic Theory as a 20th century update of Kant’s Critique of Judgement, Kant certainly haunts Adorno’s unfinished work, and much of the structure of his theory may be understood as Kant re-worked or a disenchanted age, with the artwork itself operating as a placeholder for the deformed subject, no longer capable of constituting herself as a disinterested judging subject.[20] The work of art alone retains the independence that modernity strips from an administered humanity.
The Critique of Judgement is a work that, in appearing to fail to do what it sets out to do, succeeded in doing many other things. As Adorno argues, Kant was able to write an aesthetics without knowing very much about art. One of the arts he knew least about, and cared less for, was music. Nevertheless, the third Critique was hugely influential as a theoretical foundation for the ideological fixing of music as ‘absolute’ and as the universal and universalising object of bourgeois taste. Hannah Arendt argues that while the Critique of Judgement fails as an aesthetics, it succeeds as a covert politics.[21] The individual subject, judging according to the four moments of disinterest, universality, purposefulness without purpose, and necessity, is inducted into a form of judgement that exposes her to the underlying layer of the sensus communis that unites us in a affective affinity of feeling: we feel, not just the correctness of our sensibilities but their putative universality, a feeling that is, in turn, indexical of their validity. Crucially, this all happens at a non- or a- conceptual level: we feel this with a conviction that carries with it a felt necessity.
Because judgements of the beautiful and the sublime are non-conceptual, they are led by examples rather than by rules. Reflection on the example, or rather on the reflexivity of judgement for the subject confronted with such an example, and the conviction that accompanied this of the universal and necessary moments of this judgement, constituted a political subject – or, at the very least, a subject primed for Kant’s republican state. It is important however, that the matter of the judgement, the example, should itself be empty of positive political or moral content: what was exemplary was the exercise of taste and the flexing of the mental muscles, not the object. The subject, cultivated in this manner, would become adept in the type of consideration that would lead, in the end, to the instantiation of the republican ideal.
This twin heritage of the Critique of Judgement – the elevation of music as the highest expression of disinterested cultural achievement, and the creation of an ideal political subject combined in the coming into being of a German state through the 19th century.
There is, as I have noted elsewhere, a disjunctive ambiguity in the relationship Kant claims between taste and this sensus communis. In section 20, taste ‘proves’ the existence of a sensus communis, whereas later, in section 40, taste is a ‘kind’ of sensus communis. Perhaps the most daring move is contained in the question Kant refuses to answer in the following passage:
That we do actually presuppose this indeterminate standard of a common sense is proved by the fact that we presume to make judgments of taste. But is there in fact such a common sense, as a constitutive principle of the possibility of experience, or is there a still higher principle of reason that makes it only a regulative principle for us, [in orderl to bring forth in us, for higher purposes. a common sense in the first place? In other words, is taste an original and natural ability, or is taste only the idea of an ability yet to be acquired and I therefore I artificial, so that a judgment of taste with its requirement for universal assent is in fact only a demand of reason to produce such agreement in the way we sense? [22]
The posited connection between the aesthetic, the political and the ethical – the demand of reason – must remain at this level of indeterminacy for Kant if freedom is to be maintained. What is also crucial here is the embedded notion of progress, the idea of ‘an ability yet to be acquired’. The exercise of taste will, in this formulation lead to an overall amelioration in the coherence, transparency and sympathy within social wholes – states – and reduce the possibility of conflict.
David Lloyd notes the relevance of a later passage in the Critique of Judgement with regard to this: in the Methodology of the Judgement of Taste, which concludes the first half of the work:
And such must have been the age, and such the nation, that first discovered the art of reciprocal communication of ideas between the more cultured and ruder sections of the community, and how to bridge the difference between the amplitude and refinement of the former and the natural simplicity and originality of the latter-in this way hitting upon that mean between higher culture and the modest worth of nature, that forms for taste also, as a sense common to all mankind, that true standard which no rules can supply. Hardly will a later age dispense with those models. [23]
‘Reciprocal communion between the more cultured and ruder sections of the community’ was the task that Irish nationalism faced in the years before independence, an ambition it shared with the architects of the literary revival. As Lloyd notes elsewhere, the nationalist project too quickly collapsed the modes of subjectivity that Kant was careful to keep apart:
The Irish nationalist merely insists on a different notion of what is to be formed in the encounter with genius: not so much the intermediate subject of taste as, directly, the political subject, the citizen subject, itself. [24]
Adorno notes that ‘the Kantian “without interest” must be shadowed by the wildest interest’.[25]
Adorno’s point is that the aesthetic and the comportment ‘proper’ to it, for Kant, involves a sublimation of the cultic, and of any attachment that would instrumentalise and otherwise implicate the artwork in the work as an agent of anything apart from critique. For Adorno, the artwork exists to hold open a ‘gap’ within an oppressive totality: he borrows this function from Kant but shifts it from the act of aesthetic judgement to the work itself. For Kant, it is judgement, exercised in an exemplary fashion, that opens up the space for an affective subjectivity that is also communicable – and which is underwritten by that communicability. The virtue of this for political citizenship is obvious: the subject able to judge affectively but disinterestedly is enrolled in a project that transcends her particularity and private concerns while assuring her that any public ratiocination about the ‘greater good’ will resonate with her own understanding of such a thing.
The danger is that if, instead of the exemplarity of aesthetic judgement being preserved as the step between the private and the public, and being held apart from the political, however artificially, the presentation of aesthetic examples is taken as prescriptive, as an actual instruction as to how we ought to live, as citizens and a subjects, the whole Kantian machinery collapses.
The problem with this outcome is neatly summed up by Myles in a column from the years of the emergency:
People who call to my lodgings for advice often ask me whether being Irish is in itself an art-form… it would save so much trouble if we could all answer in the affirmative. [26]
4
I noted above that the Critique of Judgement, if not quite succeeding as a theory of art and beauty, had two effects relevant to our discussion: firstly, the construction of an ideal, republican political subject, and secondly, providing a justificatory apparatus for the elevation of music as the exemplary bourgeois art form.
However, as an Irish Catholic middle-class developed in the course of the 19th century, and as the ambition towards national self-determination began to find cultural expression, there was one distinction between the Irish experience and that of many of the other countries that aspired to and achieved to nationhood t the same time. As Harry White puts it:
The most significant event in modern Irish cultural history is the literary movement which stemmed directly from the Celtic revival of the 1890s [and] between the death of Parnell in 1891 and the Easter Rising of 1916 [produced] a body of literature written in English [that] changed utterly the complexion of cultural life in Ireland and …threw into sharp relief the relationship between Irish political aspiration and political expression [27]
What is notable, for White, is a failure to thrive: under these auspicious conditions
the concept of art music failed to develop in any significant way at the turn of the century [28]
The contribution of music to the nationalisms of the 19th and early 20th centuries is almost taken as a necessary condition by Dahlhaus:
Nationalistic music invariably emerges as an expression of a politically motivated need, which tends to appear when national independence is being sought, denied or jeopardised, rather than attained or consolidated.[29]
As Ireland in this period paradigmatically represented the state of independence being ‘sought, denied or jeopardised’, the failure of a national art music to emerge that captured and sustained this is, on the surface, puzzling.
If the musical life of Ireland before WW1 was etiolated, the Free State was truly a land without music.
White notes that ‘the tone of deploration which characterises so much periodical literature on music in the period 1920-50 is unrelieved’.[30] The new state had little time for art music which was seen as an ascendancy fetish: nor did the attempt to establish a Gaelic Ireland, focussed as it was on reviving the Irish language -with little success – manage to bring music in its slipstream. As Fleischmann noted, and as quoted by White at the head of his chapter on Sean Ó Riada:
Irish folk music, unlike that of nations whose music followed a normal course of development, has never been properly assimilated into a broader tradition of art music, due to the chasm – political social and religious – which existed for centuries between the spontaneous song in the vernacular which was the natural expression of the Irish people and the purely English tradition of music making in the towns.[31]
The notion that there was a ‘normal course’ of development, which Ireland failed to follow, is question begging: and understanding the historical dog that fails to bark a lot is a lot more difficult than explaining the one you can hear. Whatever the causes, art music in the Free State was poorly resourced, the hobby of a class that could afford it, or of a class that aspired to the distinction that it afforded, without the social capital to nurture, or even to understand it.
More fundamentally, the view that a ‘normal course of development’ would see folk music assimilated into ‘the broader tradition’ assumes that art music is a kind of universal solvent, able to effortlessly absorb all other music and that all other music is so assimilable and waiting for the heady embrace of the classical. This somewhat arrogant assumption – that all music must, to be worthwhile, find its home in the ‘higher’ form – is based on the manner in which folk music from parts of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and Scandinavia, areas for the most part culturally – and often geographically – closer to the cultural centres of orchestral and operatic music, were instrumentalised within those traditions towards the end of the 19th and into the 20th centuries in the cause of cultural nationalisms.
As Ó Seaghdha observes:
It is not surprising that some Irish historians of classical music will feel resentment or discomfort at the fact that, whereas in many countries with which they feel an affinity debate centres on interpretations of musical culture and recognised works of art, in Ireland it is the poverty or absence of musical culture and of works of art that must be interpreted […]
leading Irish academics tend to see the absence of a highly developed culture of classical music (with a full panoply of educational and infrastructural support) as something approaching a cultural crime’ [32]
It seems as if nationalism is to blame.
Whatever the justice of the charge, the absence of any kind of robust musical culture in the Free State was noted by Myles. He writes of:
A nation of befuddled paddies, whose sole musical tradition is bound up with blind harpers, tramps with home-made fiddles, Handel in fish-handel street, John McCormack praising our airport, and no street in the whole capital named after John Field. [33]
He finishes with the story of a young man, unversed in music, sent by The Freeman’s Journal to review a recital. The management, nervous of the result, provided him with a readymade review, but the young man, stricken by journalistic conscience (sic) felt the need to add something of his own:
Mr Paderewski gave a musicianly rendition of the above items, and was observed to play with equal facility on the black notes as on the white [34]
Likewise, though in an entirely different key, if we are to take Cronin’s portrait of Sir George Dermot as at least a semi-accurate caricature of Cusack, he was a man who felt strongly the absence of ‘peace, love and music’ from the life of the nation.
5
Should we then conclude that a rising Irish middle-class ‘did not succeed in hearing’ the call to affective and disinterested citizenship sounded by a culture of serious concert music? Would attending to such music have led them to a safe, European home, and, to mix the metaphor somewhat, diverted their ears from the siren call of sectarian and narrow nationalism?
In order to test the justice of this, a wider look at the cultural scene in Ireland in the years up to and including the Emergency is needed.
The invention of Ireland was an artistic enterprise that preceded the institutional form the country took when a conditional independence was achieved. As such, the actual existing country was never able to live up to the imaginative project. More than that, the condition of real, existing early to mid- twentieth century Irish people was relativized to a set of impossible and contradictory criteria, and there was a sense that, as a member of the first proud cohort of modern Irish citizens, one was expected to ‘perform’ Irishness in a way that did honour to the ‘dead generations’: to live ‘Irishness’ as an ‘art-form’ as in Myles’ mordant quip.
As David Lloyd notes, the coming to consciousness of a panoply of overlapping but also contradictory versions of the Irish nation during the years of the literary revival, the concurrent revival of interest in re-instating the Irish language as a vernacular for the entire country which replaced the more modest antiquarian interest of previous generations of enthusiasts, and the gradual, and then sudden, substitution of constitutional and gradualist nationalism with a more militant separatism, could all coexist as ‘a horizon of transcendence’ one that promptly disappeared once there was an actual country to run. [35]A country, that, as Lloyd also notes, in a pattern that was to be replicated across the former British Empire, ‘put in place institutions entirely analogous to those of the colonial state which dominated [it]’.[36]
The Irish state, when it finally arrived, was struck dumb: it could no longer speak the language of aspiration, the past re-cast as a bright future. It was caught on a selection of contradictions: the first being the performative contradiction common to all nationalisms – the desire to take ones place as an equal in the community of nations, because one’s nation was a nation ‘like any others’ founded in the equal and opposite conviction that one’s nation was not a nation like any other, but was fundamentally and substantially different from the colonising power and could not simply be subsumed into the ‘mother country’. Upon independence it found that it was exactly like other nations in most respects and required the same competencies to run it.
One way in which this difference was performed was as an anti-modernity that was a close cousin of artistic modernism and sometime found expression in that idiom. England, with its mass culture, its industry, its vulgarity, and its materialism, was as everything Ireland was not. Ireland was not innocent of modernity by any means: as Eagleton notes, Belfast, by the end of the century was the 5th most productive industrial city in the world.[37] Nor was industry confined to the north east: the transformations in Irish land holding and the changeover from tillage to pasturage made Irish agriculture part of an industrial chain that led from the small-holdings of the west, to the grazing lands of Meath and onto the slaughterhouses of London.[38]
The Third Policeman was offered to Longman’s in 1940 and we may assume it was at least partly written before the outbreak of war. Cadenza, written in the 1950s, is ‘set’ – a very loose setting – in wartime, which would have the last occasion during which Cusack would have lived full-time in Ireland.
While it would be reductive to suggest that The Third Policeman can be understood entirely as a satire on post-independence Ireland, it is, undeniably, an Irish hell that the narrator finds himself consigned to, and the administrative absurdities and legalistic non sequiturs of the police, and their occult faux-erudition about the nature of the universe, intertwined as it is with the fantasies of DeSelby, the mad philosophe that our autodidact narrator is devoted to, a devotion that, at least indirectly, is the cause of his death, can certainly be read as satirically directed at the various fantasies that sustained what O’Nolan would have felt to be the false consciousness of the Irish Free State.
In Cadenza, as a kind of prequel to the novel proper, which is in itself told as series of flashbacks from the safety of a stationary railway carriage, our narrator goes to the dentist, who fills his bleeding mouth with fragments of crockery so that he can’t speak for fear of them tumbling out. This, I might suggest, functions as a hallucinatory image of aestheticized Irish citizen of the first years after independence: a mouth so full of fragments as to make expression impossible.
A pervading sense of disappointment and annoyance seems to have determined the cultural atmosphere of the Free State. The aesthetes, such as Cusack, were disappointed in the philistinism of the middle-classes – not, in itself exceptional, but given an edge due to a cleavage between many of these aesthetes and the object of their disappointment in terms of religious and social background. The language revivalists were disappointed in the inhabitants of the Gaeltacht for refusing to conform to their view of an idealised peasantry, sustained by linguistic and cultural, rather than material, riches. Many of these understandably emigrated, seasonally or permanently, endangering the purity of their tongue, but at least managing to keep themselves alive. The cultural separatists – and the church – were disappointed in the urban working- and lower middle-classes for their attachment to mass foreign culture – the cinema and ‘jazz’ – and foreign games. The working-classes were disappointed at the scarcity of decent paying work, and, like their rural kin, often took the sensible route of emigration. The middle-classes probably had the least cause for disappointment: while their cultural horizons narrowed, the inequalities that had defined life before independence persisted, and probably widened, and large sections of a potentially troublesome proletariat were safely exported, thus protecting them from the threat of ‘Bolshevism’.
The sense is of a country that could not ‘succeed in hearing’ itself over the sound of its own voices.
After the disappointment of not finding a publisher for the Third Policeman, O’Nolan became, for most of the time during the war years, and after, Myles na gCopaleen.
Carol Taaffe has expertly outlined the often- contradictory position Myles/ O’Nolan of the early forties found himself in, observing, and often orchestrating, the war between “the Plain People of Ireland and the Corduroys”. The ‘Plain People’ of Myles’ satire, were both an ironic play on the various versions of the people, enlisted by all the various political and social interests in the Free State, only connected in name to the actual people who had to put up with those who petitioned their vote, but who were otherwise unfamiliar with, and certainly unsympathetic to, the actual lives of those people. Myles’ chorus of plain people tend to sound much more like actual Irish people than the fantastic simulacrum cradled in the heart of DeValera.
If Myles’ version of the Plain People of Ireland was laced with sympathy amid the mockery, he showed no mercy to ‘the corduroys’ his (and others) word for the local coterie of artists, endlessly bemoaning the provincialism of their surroundings, while strangely reluctant to leave. The apogee of this tendency, for Myles and others, was the White Stag group, of which Cusack was a peripheral member. Terence DeVere-White called them ‘the corduroy Panzer Division’ and the arrival from London, in 1940, of the two core members of that cadre in Dublin, Kenneth Hall and Basil Rácóski seems to have ignited something in hitherto quiet visual art circles. Dublin was hardly Casablanca on the Liffey, but its neutrality attracted many waifs and strays from the Anglo-Irish ascendancy back to their sometime home to sit out the war, along with various more straightforwardly bohemian figures. This milieu, which brought a slightly more cosmopolitan air to Dublin artistic circles, seems to have raised hackles all around them and, with a flair for publicity that was certainly equal to their level of artistic innovation, and in a city cut off from the rest of Europe, their single major group show, The Exhibition of Subjective Art, in 1944, ‘attracted widespread coverage in newspapers and periodicals’.[39]
Myles had the luxury of inhabiting a space where all sorts of contradictory opinions could be held at once, the better to take aim at all factions. Certainly, as Taaffe illustrates, he had no patience at all with the corduroys and with the pretensions of modern art (as he understood it, or at least as he presented it to his readers)
Nowadays your artist is a neurotic imbecile. He has the cheek to discern in his own dementia the pattern of a universal chaos […]Beware of ‘culture’ reader, of ‘art’ and ‘artists’ be careful and apprehensive [….] [They promote] an attitude that should not be encouraged however much it may float our poor country out into the mainstream of European culture. [40]
As Taaffe notes, this last sentence is a swipe at Herbert Read’s lecture that had been used to promote the White Stag exhibition. Myles remarked: ‘what my lordship finds rather pathetic in these parties is the exigency of having to send away to London to get an “opinion” as to whether they are “good” or “European”.[41]
6
If O’Nolan, in his various personae, uses the inability to hear as the guiding metaphor for what we might take to be a critique of the philistinism, or perhaps worse, the unviability of the Free State, the silent performance of the curé in Cadenza and the subsequent conversation between the priest and the novel’s protagonist point to something else, a perhaps more devastating, but also potentially redemptive critique.
In order to try and decipher what that message might be, we return to Adorno and that cryptic comment that ‘he alone would understand music who hears it with all the alienness of the unmusical and with all of Siegfried’s familiarity with the language of the birds’. [42]Adorno’s point is that understanding music is impossible in a fashion that would render its ‘meaning’ transparent, not that a subject could be imagined that would meet these contradictory criteria. But the formula is not empty or rhetorical: what is being pointed to is that there is something to understand about music and meaning: ultimately that such meaning is inexhaustible, unstable, but not, therefore, subjective or entirely private.
This instability does not absolve music of its imbrication in social and political lifeworlds: if anything, it is this very indeterminacy that animates its passage through such discursive environments. The felt knowledge of the importance and significance of music and the musical, in combination with the difficulty of stating where exactly that significance resides, and what it means for us for it to mean what -or as – it does, allows music to function as a radically destabilising agent against encrusted affectivities.
Music thus, as the curé shouts, allows the unbeliever insight into belief, the deaf access to a hearing beyond the acoustic.
This, I think, is key to why the initial musical encounter must be soundless: there is an insight here into the beyondness of music and the congruence of determinate, precise imaginative mimesis and indeterminate and unstable meaning that only the description of such an impossible, but conceivable, performance could convey.
To conclude: Sergeant MacCruiskeen’s soundless music box functions, I would contend, as an illustrative parable for the un-musicality of the Free State. However, lamenting the absence of a particular model of musical culture, and excoriating the populace for their negligence in not fostering such a thing, misses the point. The political and social value of music lies not in stabilising a functioning bourgeois culture but in the horizon of radical difference it can hold open. Music says it is thus, but it could also be otherwise.
[1] As recommended by the International Flann O’Brien Society, O’Nolan will be referred to in matters biographical or otherwise factual by his given name and according to the relevant pseudonym when dealing with individual works.
[2] Anthony Cronin, Dead as Doornails, (Dublin: Poolbeg Press 1980)
- Life of Riley, (London: Secker and Warburg, 1964)
[3] “It is, in fact, the landscape of Hell, which, as the Irish novelist Aidan Higgins has pointed out, is unmistakably that of the Irish midlands around Athlone: flat, fertile, and unremarkable, downright sinister in its ordinariness”
Roger Boylan, “We Laughed, We Cried: Flann O’Brien’s Triumph” in The Boston Review 2008 https://bostonreview.net/archives/BR33.4/boylan.phpR
4 Flann O’Brien, The Third Policeman, (London: Harper Collins 1966), pp.116-17
[5] Ralph Cusack, Cadenza, (Normal,Il: Dalkey Archive), 1984, p.97
[6] Ibid 106
[7] Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, Hullot-Kentor trans. (London and New York: Continuum), 1997 (Hereafter AT)
[8] AT13
[9] AT 122
[10] AT122
[11] AT 122
[12] AT122
[13] AT 127
[14] AT 287
[15] AT 131
[16] AT 167
[17] AT 168
[18] AT 168
[19] Shierry Weber Nichelsen, Exact Imagination, Late Work, (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1997)
[20] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, Pluhar trans. (Indianapolis: Hackett 1987) (Pagination will be given according to the Akademie Edition, as is conventional with Kant’s works)
[21] Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, Beiner ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982)
[22] Critique of Judgement 5:240
[23] Critique of Judgement 5: 356
[24] David Lloyd, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,1993), p.88
[25] AT11
[26] Quoted in Carol Taaffe, “Plain People and Corduroys: the Citizen and the Artist” in Baines, Jennika, ed. Is it About a Bicycle? Flann O’Brien in the 21st Century, (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2011), p.124-5.
[27] Harry White, The Keeper’s Recital, Music and Cultural History in Ireland 1770-1970 (Cork: Cork University Press/ Field Day 1998), p. 94
[28] White 1998: 97
[29] White 1998: 8
[30] White 1988 p.129
[31] White 1998:125
[32] Barra Ó Seaghdha, “Silent Symphony” (review of Music in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, Michael Murphy & Jan Smaczny (eds)) in Dublin Review of Books, Issue 5 Spring 2008
[33] Flann O’Brien, The Best of Myles: Selections from An Cruiskeen Lawn, (London: Flamingo 1993), p.241
[34] Ibid.
[35] Lloyd, 1993: 73
[36] Ibid 113
[37] Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger, (London and New York: Verso, 1997), p.274
[38] See, for example, Conor McCabe, Sins of the Father, (2nd ed.) (Dublin: The History Press, 2014)
[39] Róisín Kennedy, “Experimentalism or Mere Chaos? The White Stag Group and the Reception of Subjective Art in Ireland” in Irish Modernism: Origins, Contexts, Publics, Taaffe and Keown eds. (Bern CH: Peter Lang 2010), p.180
[40] Taaffe 2011 p124
[41] Kennedy 2011, p.191
[42] AT 122
Beyond the Spell of Labour.... 