CULTURESHOCK: A deeper examination of cultural history can explain much about the supposed absence of an Irish artistic response to the first World War, writes Fintan O'Toole
HERE'S A WORD: Hulluch. What does it mean? Most people would be able to guess that it is a place name - actually a village in northern France.
Apart from those with a special interest in the first World War, though, few will recognise its significance. Yet it is the site of what is probably the most horrific single incident in Irish history since Cromwell's massacres at Drogheda and Wexford. It was there, in April 1916, that the men and boys (some of the dead were 17 years old) of the 16th Irish Division, and the Dublin Fusiliers in particular, were engulfed by a cloud of chlorine gas.
The effects were like being drowned and burned at the same time. Even amidst the carnage of the first World War, it was an especially awful way to die.
One of the reasons we don't know about Hulluch is that the attack happened on the Thursday of Easter week - in the middle of the 1916 Rising. Even though the casualties at Hulluch were far worse than those on all sides during the Rising (538 men died and 1,590 were injured), they were, within Irish culture, far less imaginable. They were not part of the grand narrative of national resurrection that had been established in the late 19th century and that continued through most of the 20th.
In the context of this week's events marking the end of the first World War, this kind of absence is more or less officially acknowledged. It is, to borrow a phrase, a "known unknown". Yet the cultural reasons for it are perhaps less obvious than they seem.
It simply isn't true that Irish artists ignored the war until recent decades. Nor is it even true that the suppression of artistic memory of the war was simply a function of Irish nationalism. It came from something more interesting than that - a pincer movement in which both Irish and British cultures colluded.
The first thing to acknowledge is that no conflict (even the Easter Rising) has ever had so much direct participation by Irish artists. The novelists George Birmingham, Patrick McGill, James Hanley, Liam O'Flaherty, the poets Francis Ledwidge, Tom Kettle, and Thomas McGreevy, the playwright George Fitzmaurice and the war artists John Lavery and William Orpen are among those who actually served at the front.
Throw in the fact that arguably the greatest play to deal with the war is Sean O'Casey's The Silver Tassie, and the idea that Irish artistic engagement is a recent phenomenon becomes obviously absurd.
In reality, what happened is a much more active process of suppression - on both sides of the Irish Sea. This story is generally reduced to the great symbolic moment of WB Yeats's decision to reject The Silver Tassie for the Abbey, a moment that does indeed emphatically underline the conscious removal of the war from the official cultural narrative. But that picture is radically incomplete without considering two other acts of effective censorship, both of which happened in Britain.
While England embraced its war poets like Wilfred Owen and Sigfried Sassoon after 1918, much of the Irish war art was a vastly more uncomfortable presence. There is a much darker strain of deeply twisted violence than you could find in Owen or Sassoon. Orpen belied his status as an official war artist by showing wrecks of men wandering shell-shocked through blasted buildings.
His painting Dead Germans in a Trench does exactly what it says, with no trace of triumph, sentiment or existential posturing. Irish writers were especially open about the sheer brutality of the conflict. Hanley's The German Prisoner (published in 1930) has two British army soldiers (one of them, Peter O'Garra, is Irish) torturing a German prisoner in shockingly obscene ways, urinating on him and sodomising him with a bayonet. O'Flaherty's The Return of the Brute has a soldier protagonist who sublimates his homoerotic desires for another soldier into the brutal murder of a corporal. Hence the two acts of suppression that we need to place alongside the fate of The Silver Tassie.
Orpen's haunting painting To the Unknown British Soldier Killed in France, first exhibited in 1923, showed a coffin flanked by a pair of ghostly shell-shocked soldiers, naked except for tattered blankets, with two ironic cherubs floating above them, all in the opulent setting of Versailles palace.
Loved by the public, who voted it "painting of the year", it was attacked by the press and effectively censored by the authorities - Orpen had to paint out the ghosts before the work was allowed to hang in the Imperial War Museum. As the museum's board explained of the original painting, "it does not show what we wished shown".
Hanley's electrifying novella The German Prisoner didn't show what the official culture wanted to be shown either. Though rightly praised by William Faulkner among others, it was suppressed for obscenity by the British censors. It was printed and circulated privately, but it had no public impact.
Hanley himself has been almost completely occluded from Irish culture. Having emigrated to Canada he is now known, if he is known at all, as a Canadian writer. The point, then, is that the Irish artistic response to the first World War was marginalised, not just because it didn't fit in with the narrative of Irish nationalism, but because at its best it was strange, stark and violent, saturated in religious despair, disturbed sexuality and bleak mockery.
Even when it was sublimated into fantasy, as in Fitzmaurice's dazzlingly weird short plays, it is about psychic fragmentation, the loss of official meaning and the inadequacy of existing images and language to the experience of the front.
By simply lamenting the supposed absence of that response, the response of Irish artists to the war is missing, not because it didn't happen, but because it was too honest, too courageous and too powerful to be stomached.