A Revolution of the Mind: The Search for Identity in Roddy Doyle's A Star Called Henry →
Presented at the American Conference for Irish Studies--Midwest, 21-23 October 2010.
A Revolution of the Mind: The Search for Identity in Roddy Doyle's A Star Called Henry
The search for a distinct identity[1] is a challenge of any post-colonial[2] society when contending with a loss of identity, both communal and individual, and is certainly an issue Ireland has had to struggle with. Often a fervent nationalism will arise in reaction to the identity-crushing control of colonialism. However, as Gayatri Spivak notes, "the very nationalist forces that could alleviate the conditions imposed by colonization are often those forces that will oppress…during colonization and after independence."[3] Spivak is referring to the material conditions of a colonized country, yet this statement also can be applied to the mental conditions of a colonized people—specifically to the losses of cultural and personal identities, as well as to the equally self-stifling aspects of nationalism. In his novel, A Star Called Henry, [4] author Roddy Doyle explores how each political entity does not allow for the development of identity, by Henry's (his protagonist) search for an authentic self. Doyle does this first by developing Henry's lack of identity resulting from centuries of colonialism in Ireland, and then developing Henry's inability to form an identity under the controlling aspects of nationalism.
Colonialism (sometimes called imperialism) refers to one country claiming sovereignty over another, typically asserting its own culture over the indigenous one.[5] According to E.T. Salmon,"the British Empire, it was thought, would bring a new era of peace in which unity and good government would spread over the world as in the best years of the Pax Romana."[6] In order to bring about this "peace" in Ireland,[7] strict policies of Anglicization were taken (enforced by government legislation and police), such as the teaching of only English in schools in an effort to eliminate the native language. [8] These assimilation policies, however, "tended to either ignore the question of ethnic diversity or to treat the matter of ethnic identity superficially as merely one of a number of minor impediments to effective state-integration…[the goal being] a common identity uniting all inhabitants of the state, regardless of ethnic heritage…"[9].
According to Kirsti Bohata, attempts at assimilation served only to create a sense of "duality, or hybridity"[10] in the colonized, because a whole self, fully integrated into the colonizer's society, was impossible due to the inherent polarity between oppressed and oppressor. This duality created confusion and stress because the colonized were essentially living in two worlds: their culture, that was being marginalized, and the colonizer's culture, in which they were already marginalized.
Additionally, Bohata notes, that there was also a sense of inferiority "instilled (in part) by the internalization of the negative English/British perceptions and constructions as well as a [touted] version of history which shows…defeat as an inevitable phase in the progressive march of civilization."[11] This, in addition to the sense of duality, served to strip the colonized Irish of their identity without replacing it with another, leaving only a lack of self-identity and self-worth.[12]
This lack of an Irish identity due to colonialism is personified in Doyle's protagonist, Henry Smart. Henry is born into a poverty-stricken family living in a Dublin slum in 1901. The material conditions of Dublin at this time, the "poverty, unemployment, inadequate housing, violence and domestic abuse…and incarceration" are a result of colonialism not providing what it purports to (unity, good government, and prosperity) because of inherent class structures that make it very difficult for indigenous people to prosper.[13] According to Henry,
We fended and coped…we survived but never prospered. We were never going to prosper. We were allowed the freedom of the streets…but we'd never, ever be allowed up the bright steps and into the comfort and warmth behind the doors and windows. I knew that. I knew it every time I jumped out of the way of a passing coach or car, every time I filled my weeping mouth with rotten food, every time I saw shoes on a child my age.[14]
Because of the poverty, Henry, and his younger brother Victor, take to the streets of Dublin in an effort to survive. Henry notes that, "We made a living. We robbed and helped, invented and begged…there were thousands of street arabs just like us."[15] Eventually, Henry stops returning home, and by the age of nine, does not know where his mother and father are. When Victor dies from "a cough… [just one of the] thousands coughing…being choked to death by poverty,"[16] Henry looses his identity of belonging to a family.
In order to survive, Henry has to continually reinvent himself, working as a "beggar's assistant, rat catcher, cattle drover, and tugger"[17] just to eat. While this does create in him a highly developed ability to adapt to any situation, it never allows Henry the opportunity to develop himself. He has to continually be someone or something else.
In addition to not developing a self-identity as a child, Henry does not develop a cultural identity as well. He states, “I didn't even know I was Irish,"[18] and to him, "Ireland was something in songs that drunken old men wept about as they held on to the railings at three in the morning and we homed in to rob them; that was all."[19] As far as nationalism and Home Rule are concerned, to Henry," it meant nothing to those of us who had no homes."[20] But this level of poverty, brought about by centuries of colonialism, reduces Henry to an existence of such that he can only attempt to keep alive. He states, "I was surviving. But it wasn't enough. I was itching for something more."[21] Striving to find more, Henry eventually latches on to the nationalist movement.
Nationalism refers the people of a country's "strong desire to define their cultural identity."[22] Throughout the centuries, Ireland experienced surges of nationalist uprisings against the colonial government, but when "the country became constitutionally part of the United Kingdom by an Act of Union"[23] in 1800, making "Ireland…subject to the parliament at Westminster,"[24] Ireland responded with an even greater national spirit to win its independence. Had governmental attitudes been different, perhaps this union would have been accomplished. Nonetheless, "the unwillingness of Britain to grant Catholic emancipation, its contentious role during the Great Famine, its reluctance to allow a form of Home Rule, and its eventual heavy-handedness during the Rising[25], and especially throughout the War of Independence"[26] all served to make "rebels of the thousands of quiet people who'd never thought beyond their garden gates."[27] "The union was now identified with hopes disappointed, grievances unremedied, liberties denied, with poverty…and above all with the catastrophe of the great famine."[28]
Political groups rose up in response to the growing nationalism. The Fenians (also called the Irish Republican Brotherhood; later the IRA) was founded in 1858 as a nationalist and democratic party whose primary objective was Home Rule. In 1905, Sinn Féin formed as a reaction to IRB politics. Although there "existed an affinity based on separatist tendencies…the big difference between the two was that while Sinn Féin stood by a policy of passive resistance…the IRB planned to establish an Irish republic by physical force." [29] In spite of their differences, however, these two groups (with a number of smaller factions) were "concerned not so much with electoral or parliamentary success, but …rather to some social, cultural or political ideal," and were responsible for "the change in the mental climate of Ireland between 1891 and 1921."[30] In A Star Called Henry, Doyle echoes this notion of nationalism being a mental construct when an IRB member states that the Irish people are afraid of change. "They're frightened of their betters, and that means virtually everybody they encounter…It's the result of hundreds of years of colonialism. And that's our task…to convince them that they have no betters. This is a revolution of the mind."[31]
Henry joins the Nationalist movement, not for Ireland, as he states, "I didn't give a shite about Ireland,"[32] but for improvement in his condition, and for a search for personal identity. Yet this fervent nationalism does not allow Henry to develop an authentic self either.
Just as Henry had to continually reinvent himself in order to survive while living under the conditions created by colonialism, he now has to continually reinvent himself to survive living under nationalism. He first becomes Brian O'Linn, volunteer in the Citizen Army.[33] Then he transforms into Fergus Nash, dockworker by day,[34] and Henry Smart, Fenian by night.[35] Although this persona has the same name as Henry, Henry shifts into third person at times, illustrating that this is just a reinvention, not a development of identity.[36] Henry moves on to captain, and later, he "was one of the Squad, one of the secret elite. An assassin. There were…twelve, and we became the Twelve Apostles, and the name stuck…".[37]
This reinvention is a useful survival tool, but mentally unhealthy because Henry continues to lack an identity of his own. His lover, Annie, asks him, "Are you in there at all?" "I am Annie," he answers. "Bursting to get out."[38] In their final moment together, she tells him, "You were never here." "I was," Henry says. "No. Not really," Annie says, and taps his head, then taps his chest to make her point.[39] Henry is a hollow man.
Additionally, Henry is not only marginalized under colonialism because he is both Irish and poor, but the Fenians also have a class structure that will only allow Henry to rise so far in rank. In his essay "The Pitfalls of National Consciousness," Frank Fanon notes that "anti-colonial nationalism, an ideology aimed at the (re)attainment of nationhood through means of the capture and subsequent 'occupation' of the colonial state, typically represents only the interests of the elite indigenous classes."[40] Likewise, Neil Lazarus suggests that "the national liberation movements never were what they were—that is, that they were always more concerned with the consolidation of elite power than with the empowering of the powerless, with the extension of privilege rather than with its overthrow, and so on."[41] In particular, Henry notes: I was bang in the middle of what was going to become big, big history, I was shaping the fate of my country, I was one of Collin's anointed but…I was excluded from everything. I was never one of the boys. I wasn't a Christian Brothers boy, I'd been unlucky enough to miss Frongoch,[42] I'd no farm in the family, no college, no priest, no past…And none of the other men of the slums and hovels ever made it on to the list. We were nameless and expendable, every bit as dead as the squaddies in France. We carried guns and messages. We were decoys and patsies. We followed orders and murdered. [43]
Henry eventually realizes that he is just a commodity to the IRB, not a human being. “I was a slave. I'd killed more men than I could account for…because better men than me had ordered me to."[44] He notes that, "just when we're rid of the English we'll have new masters."[45]
Further resembling the colonizers, the nationalists expect strict conformity to the party line and do not allow for personal identity. When Henry recognizes that he has no identity—that he is a slave—and begins thinking for himself, Henry no longer wishes to kill in the name of nationalism. "I'd decided: my war was over."[46] Likewise, he befriends a Jewish man against orders.[47] As soon as he makes these decisions, his usefulness to the party is over because he will no longer take orders without question. Henry's director, when letting Henry know that he now has a contract out on his life by the IRA, states that the reason is simply, "If you're not with us you're against us. That's the thinking."[48]
Although the quest for independence is laudable, when nationalism does not make allowance for personal identity, it can be as tyrannical as colonialism. Doyle convincingly illustrates how colonialism creates a lack of personal identity, and how nationalism can be as stifling by placing his protagonist, Henry, in a time when the two political affinities were clearly juxtaposed. It can be controversial to offer artistic criticism on issues that are charged with political sympathy, because the pain of the past makes such objectivity difficult, yet an artist's role is to unflinchingly hold a mirror up to society. By inquiring into the darker aspects of nationalism, Doyle is able to give the reader a more authentic look at this period of the Irish struggle for independence. He does not offer any easy answers, however, for Henry's search of self, for nationalism gone awry, or for the reader, but finding a distinct identity after centuries of colonialism is not an easy thing to do.
Works Cited
Ashcroft, Bill, Griffiths, Gareth and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. London: Routledge, 1994.
Ashcroft, Bill. Postcolonial Transformation. London: Routledge, 2001.
Bohata, Kirsti. Postcolonialism Revisited. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2004.
Child, Peter. Post-Colonial Theory and English Literature: A Reader. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999.
Connor, Stephen. Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997.
Doyle, Roddy. A Star Called Henry. New York: Penguin Group, 1999.
Hooper, Glenn, and Colin Graham, eds. Irish and Postcolonial Writing: History, Theory,
Practice. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002.
Lazarus, Neil. Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Moody, T.W and F. X. Martin, eds. The Course of Irish History. Cork: The Mercier Press, 1967.
Salmon, E. T. The Nemesis of Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974.
Spivak, Gayatri. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New York: Routledge, 1988.
Sullivan, Megan. Women in Northern Ireland: Cultural Studies and Material Conditions.
Gainsville: University of Florida Press: 1999.
Talib, Ismail S. The Language of Postcolonial Literatures. London: Routledge, 2002.
[1] By identity, I mean the characteristics that are unique to a person, such as personality (a sense of individualism, rather than a sense of collectivism), or the aspects that make a culture different from another, such as rituals, and values.
[2] Bill Ashcroft, Postcolonial Transformation (London: Routledge, 2001) 8-9. "Employed by historians and political scientists after the Second World War in terms such as the post-colonial state, ‘post-colonial’ had a clearly chronological meaning, designating the post-independence period. However, from the late 1970s literary critics have used the term to discuss the various cultural effects of colonization. The term has subsequently been widely used to signify the political, linguistic and cultural experience of societies from the former British Empire."
[3] Gayatri Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1988) 245.
[4] Ruddy Doyle, A Star Called Henry (New York: Penguin Group, 1999).
[5] Some theorists have stated that this actually benefits the host country in that the parasitic country usually creates economic development, etc. Andre Gunder Frank, however, declares that the opposite is true: the colonizer absorbs the wealth of the host nation, crippling it economically. Likewise, Franz Fanon points to the psychological effects of colonialism.
[6] E. T. Salmon, the Nemesis of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974) 26. Specifically, this work refers to the history, and similarity of Roman and British colonization. For a concise overview of Irish history, see T.W. Moody and F. X. Martin, eds., The Course of Irish History (Cork: The Mercier Press, 1967).
[7] The Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland began in 1169, and although it was never a completely successful conquest, marks the beginning of England's colonial interest in Ireland. See chapter 8 in Moody and Martin.
[8] See page 4-5 of Peter Child's introduction in Post-Colonial Theory and English Literature: A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), for several quotations given by prominent English nationals affirming these goals. Likewise, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, in The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1994) 8, note that typically oppressors have the view that their culture is "the supposedly superior racial or cultural model."
[9] Stephen Connor, Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997) 267-9
[10] Kirsti Bohata, Postcolonialism Revisited (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2004) 22-5.
[11] Bohata 24-5.
[12] I do not mean to imply that I believe that there should have been a successful assimilation, but to only illustrate that what is being taken away is not being replaced (although that is the stated goal behind Anglicization), thereby leaving an even greater psychological hole.
[13] Megan Sullivan, Women in Northern Ireland: Cultural Studies and Material Conditions (Gainsville: University of Florida Press: 1999) 2.
[14] Doyle 75.
[15] Doyle 73.
[16] Doyle 94.
[17] Doyle 73-7.
[18] Doyle 59.
[19] Doyle 79.
[20] Doyle 80.
[21] Doyle 81.
[22] Ismail S.Talib, The Language of Postcolonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 2002) 27.
[23] See Hooper's introduction in Glenn Hooper and Colin Graham, eds., Irish and Postcolonial Writing: History, Theory, Practice (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002) 13.
[24] Moody and Martin 248.
[25] There are other Risings, such as the Young Ireland rising in 1848, and the Fenian rising in 1867. See Moody and Martin, chapters 17-18.
[26] Hooper 14.
[27] Doyle 208.
[28] Moody and Martin 276.
[29] Moody and Martin 300.
[30] Moody and Martin 303.
[31] Doyle 244. Emphasis added is mine.
[32] Doyle 104.
[33] Doyle 154.
[34] Doyle 169.
[35] Doyle 193, 206.
[36] Doyle 217, 234.
[37] Doyle 268.
[38] Doyle 173.
[39] Doyle 229.
[40] Qtd. in Neil Lazarus, Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) 78.
[41] Lazarus 78.
[42] Frongach is a prisoner camp located in Wales that some of the prisoners from the 1916 Easter Rebellion were taken to.
[43] Doyle 233.
[44] Doyle 355.
[45] Doyle 363.
[46] Doyle 322.
[47] Doyle 270, 316. The novel lightly touches on some issues of anti-Semitism, but for the purposes of this paper, they will not be covered.
[48] Doyle 365.