Strange Country: On Edmund Burke, Brian Dillon, and the Uncanniness of Grief
A substantially re-worked and extended essay originally written last year in response to my grandfather's passing.
Edmund Burke, the eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish statesman and philosopher, has often been accused of lapsing into hysteria towards the end of his life. One of his most eloquent contemporary opponents, Mary Wollstonecraft, wrote her Vindication of the Right of Man as a stern riposte to the hyperbole exhibited in Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1791), the latter’s invective against the French revolution and all it represented. There, in his fulminations against the malevolent ‘cabal’ of speculators, innovators, and firebrands who had taken an axe to the ancient tree of French civil society in the name of ‘Liberty’, Burke was construed as having acquiesced to a kind of rage or madness that was said to have been resting latently in his capricious character, awaiting provocation. In the sensible and polite age of Enlightenment, where dignified restraint and rational assiduity were the cardinal masculine virtues, Burke had fallen to the throngs of passion. He was acting like a hysterical woman swept up in a tide of irrational emotion, therefore obliging Wollstonecraft to fill the role he had abrogated by revealing the fatuousness of the threat he diagnosed – enclosed in a subtle critique of eighteenth-century gender relations. The Reflections, in any case, was the work of a madman out of touch with his senses; thereby explaining the hyperbole that pervades the text, Burke’s blatant distortions of historical fact and political reality, and the uncompromising fervency with which he met a revolution that had yet to disintegrate into the Jacobin Terror; and which seemed to many – not least Burke’s own parliamentary colleagues in the Whig party – to signify nothing more than the inauguration of a new age of French liberty and the consigning of an old, despotic regime to history.
To read Burke in this fashion would be to misconstrue his position. Although his writings grew less restrained from 1790 until his death in 1797, as the stable world of his youth appeared to be disintegrating around him as the French ‘disease’ spread with a tremulous vigour across Europe, Burke’s prose was never uncontrolled, manic, or fervid. To employ ‘madness’ as the basic imperative key to his thought, the gem, as it were, to an ‘accurate’ reading, would be to forego the more difficult task of measuring the consistency of his avowed moral and political principles. To these he adhered consistently throughout his life; a life that was neither contradictory, hypocritical, or the product of madness, as any close reading of his collected works and correspondence will demonstrate. The position he adopted in the Reflections was consistent with the positions he had taken on a series of issues throughout his career, ranging from the British constitutional crises of the 1760s, the conflict with the American colonies in the 1770s and ‘80s, his dogged pursuit of Warren Hastings and the East India Company for their egregious misconduct in the Indian subcontinent, and the various problems arising from the Anglo-Irish ascendency in Ireland.
Burke’s position, evident as early as his second book, A Philosophical Enquiry into Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), was that an external force ought not to intrude into an organic community and shatter the complex web of association and tradition that had coalesced gradually over the centuries to form a cultural community, tearing asunder the traditional bonds of authority, prejudice, and social sympathy which acted as an adhesive in keeping the polity unified and strong. The American colonies had been provoked into rebellion in 1775 by an overpowering and rapacious British government that was disregarding their enshrined civil liberties by, among other infringements, dictating their terms of international trade and association. The Irish Catholics and Protestant dissenters had been rendered a ‘turbulent people’, as Burke put it, not because they were naturally barbaric or malevolent owing, say, to their Catholicism or some component of the Irish national character – as many of Burke’s contemporaries and certain nineteenth- and twentieth-century British writers and politicians would have us believe – but because they had borne the repressive weight of English (British) colonialism. Over the course of several centuries, this had instituted the ‘most unparalleled oppression’. By Burke’s time, this was clearly manifest in the penal laws, which constrained Catholics and dissenters alike and made a mockery of civil society in precluding two-thirds of the island’s population from participating in political or economic life to the benefit of the Protestant ascendency, which maintained an ‘insulting and vexatious superiority’. Not for long would a people tolerate such a state of ‘humiliating vassalage’, as Burke knew well, but as many were surprised to discover on the outbreak of rebellion in Ireland in 1798. The peoples of India were justified in rebelling against British governance in the region because this ‘governance’ amounted to little more than commercial despotism. Instead of preserving the grounds of civil liberty and social cohesion by guarding property rights and respecting indigenous traditions and systems of belief, the East India Company subordinated the preservation of organic society to the development of commercial markets; thereby undermining the moral purpose of their enterprise in abrogating the duties they owed their subjects as a conquering power. In France in 1789, the same threat to civil society was proliferating; though now on a scale that, for Burke, was unparalleled, auguring a dark future for Europe if this cancer was permitted to spread beyond France’s borders.
In their dissolution of the French monarchy, dis-establishment of the Catholic church and forceful transfer of church lands over to a novel ascendency of ‘speculators’, the re- drawing of France’s ancient administrative departments according to a mathematical system, and re-establishing from scratch the French constitution on a collection of abstract, a priori principles, the revolutionaries had divorced France from history, from centuries worth of accumulated national tradition and cultural association; depositing them in a new condition, a new world wherein the maps of old turn to mere paper: the world of modernity. It was Burke’s task to diagnose this condition, to chart this un-travelled territory, to proffer a warning to his audiences in Britain and the remaining monarchies in Europe. He facilitated the impression of the Reflections being rushed, writing under the guise of a travel writer reporting his impressions of a strange new world back to the imperial metropole; whereas, in fact, every metaphor, allusion, reference, and rhetorical flourish was methodically chosen and arranged so as to elicit the desired aesthetic response from the reader. Burke sought to evoke a sense of dis-ease in the face of this sublime new condition arising in France and threatening to subsume the world. With the revolution, ‘France had broken the sound-barrier,’ as the Irish critic Seamus Deane once put it, eviscerating an organic national community and creating a rupture in time itself. ‘France’ was now phantasmal entity, not of this world, utterly divorced form what had proceeded it, divested of its moral spirit, transmogrified into something terrifyingly new. Perhaps the most captivating of the many allusions employed in the Reflections is Burke’s central illusion, lifted from King Lear, and employed to emotive effect when he wrote or spoke of the terrible deprivations meted out to innocent people in America, India, Ireland and, now, France. It occurs when Burke comes to deal with the events of 5 October 1789, when a Parisian crowd stormed Versailles. They proceeded to breach the palace and enter the queen’s bedchamber un-impeded, surely intent on killing her. Burke saw the national spirit of France as residing in the body of the monarch, or Marie Antoinette, providing a forceful synecdoche were this body to be reduced to that of a mere animal and slain. Had she been captured by the marauding mob, the queen would have been stripped of her royal garments, her sanctity, tearing her loose from the constellation of ancient traditions from which she derived her regel eminence. What might have happened, and which would eventually happen in 1793, had already happened to France itself. She had been divested of her sanctity, robbed of her noble virtue, for the ‘age of chivalry is gone’, as Burke lamented. ‘That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.’
Burke’s pen was animated by acute pangs of grief. The world he was born into, one of predictable regularity and fixed social hierarchy in which deference was reciprocated according to established social custom founded on bonds of communal sympathy, had just been smashed on a concrete floor, stirring in him the ambition to vindicate a world that is now departed but which survives in Britain, through withstanding siege from multiple sides; most obviously from Ireland, which by the mid-1790s was threatening to explode into rebellion. As Burke had written in the Philosophical Enquiry, his most philosophical work: ‘It is the nature of grief to keep its object perpetually in its eye, to present it in its most pleasurable views, to repeat all the circumstances that attend it, even to the last minuteness.’ Nostalgia corresponds to a similar logic: for one to be nostalgic, one requires an isolated object, one that cannot be actual but must be passed, surviving only in the ephemeral fragments, relics, and transient impressions that constitute the nebulous density of one’s memory. Grief and nostalgia are a reciprocal pair; both propel us towards some object, a deceased parent or a vanquished civilisation, as we try to distance ourselves from a world rendered uncanny by their sudden dissolution, throwing us beneath a veil of tears, unable and unwilling to avert our eyes from the terrible absolute bequeathed to us by their passing. It leaves one bereft, tired, pinning for conviction; a force to carry one across the threshold of one life to the next, from grief to equipoise.
***
Brian Dillon, one of the finest Irish critics writing today, offers something of a guide for navigating the capricious tides of enveloping grief. Originally published in 2005, Dillon’s first book and memoir, In the Dark Room, represents his own tentative surveyal of the desolate landscape thrown open before him on the death of his parents. In a way, all the diffuse strands of his growing oeuvre can be said to coalesce under the themes of grief and depression. The book that encapsulates this, Ruin Lust (2014), examines the allure of ruins to European writers and artists from the eighteenth century to the present. Prior to the Renaissance, little attention was paid to the detritus of passed civilisations. It was only on the historization of the western mind, and the gradual realisation that no existing state of affairs is permanent or unchanging but perpetually tending towards disintegration, that ruins came to exude a powerful aesthetic resonance, evident in the flourishing of European romanticism. The rupture of modernity was prerequisite for such a persuasion to arise, in cutting one loose from the contexture of history and communal sympathy, making discordant all that had been harmonious, revealing the future to be indeterminable. ‘This sense of having lived on too late, of having survived the demolition of past dreams of the future, is what gives the ruin its specific frisson, and it still animates art and writing,’ as Dillon writes. When stranded in the dark room, isolated, unsure of where to turn for each direction proffers the same darkness, one can only bid recourse to the remnants at their disposal for a sense of orientation.
This is one way of reading In the Dark Room; though it rests adjacent to a more literal reading. Dillon’s mother died in 1985, when Dillon was sixteen; his father died from a heart attack five years later, during his second-year college exams, leaving Dillon and his two brothers orphaned and the inheritors of the world his parents left behind. Once familiar, this world had been made strange, uncanny, all within having been stripped of its former sanctity. This included the family house in Dublin, the myriad of objects it contained, and a collection of photographs. The idea for the book arose from Dillon’s fixation with these photographs while he was living in England several years after selling the house in 1993, struggling to complete a Ph.D. and to withstand the protracted consequences of his never taking the time to properly grieve his parents’ deaths. The photos captured his parents at different stages in their lives: as charismatic young individuals standing out against a moribund, mid-century Ireland that would eventually succeed in wearing them down; as a dashing new couple, bounding across O’Connell Bridge in Dublin; and as new parents – but little else beyond this. As his mother’s condition began to deteriorate, so too did the family’s enthusiasm for adopting a superficial gaze and hollow poise for the camera.
Dillon sought to conduct an archaeology of these photographs; to examine these final remnants of two people he once knew, however imperfectly. He was working in the dark room, where photographic negatives are turned into images, trying to excavate what secrets these images might reveal and what consolation they might offer. What started as a narrow project soon grew to encompass all the detritus of his former life. In Essayism, his 2017 study of the essay a form and its practitioners, Dillon defines memory as that ‘refined and slow-drying medium which covers everything’, from ash trays to hallways. Taken together, all the dispensable items that clutter a house relate a world of association, for they constitute the fulcrum of memory, the singular mementos that form its substance. He describes memory in In the Dark Room as ‘a sort of sphere, in which are piled up ... all manner of essential and useless objects.’ Dillon arranges these objects – his mother’s favourite pen, his father’s pipe and notebooks, the living room corner cabinet – in five successive chapters: ‘House’; ‘Things’; ‘Bodies’; and ‘Places’. Through this archaeology of memory, Dillon is guided by a rich grouping of novelists and writers in whose work he finds affinity and vindication, none more so than Marcel Proust and Walter Benjamin. We see the influence of the former in Dillon’s sheer assiduity to the details of memory and association, in reifying these down to their concrete particulars; and the latter in Dillon’s tendency to collect, to organise, and to arrange, all in order to bestow a veil of coherence onto something inescapably incoherent, if not chaotic.
Dillon reveals himself as a quintessential romantic. He is concerned with the ruins of his former life because he is propelled towards them through grief and nostalgia for the vanquished world of which they provide only the faintest glimpse. His family home is in ruins by the time Dillon comes to sell the house in 1993, three years after his father’s death. Not physically, though it soon may be, but figuratively in the sense of being stripped of its sanctity: the essence that made this assemblage of mortar, steel, and concrete a home rather than a mere house. The intricate web of association once sustained by the house has been extirpated, its contents removed as the sale approaches, causing it to appear strange to Dillon as he bids it farewell, as though it were foreign territory, as though he had never felt at home here. On visiting his mother’s dead body before her funeral to say goodbye, Dillon recalls being cast into a state of aphasia, unable to speak, stunned into silence by the uncanniness of the moment and its strange rituals. He finds it difficult to recognise the woman in the coffin as his mother; she no longer accords with the images he holds of her in his memory, reducing him to apathy:
When I ask myself if I really saw the dead body of my mother in the mortuary of a Dublin hospital in July 1985, the question is not a historical one. I know I was there; but what exactly did I see? My most vivid memory is the violent certainty that I was seeing all the wrong things, that I was incapable of bearing the weight of the memories that forced down on me like the mortuary’s low celling.
On Learning of his father’s death in 1934, Samuel Beckett wrote to his close friend and confident Thomas MacGreevy, proclaiming that ‘I cannot write for him; I can only follow the roads and climb the ditches after him’. Beckett could not approach the task of writing about his father because his sudden departure had torn a hole in his mental fabric, leaving him inarticulate, unable to assess a loss of such proportion from a position of acute awareness and detachment. It was impossible; all he could do was go searching for the points of association which provide evanescent glimpses of his father and the life they lived together, but never the full picture. The full picture will never be re-composed; it has been shattered to pieces. The pieces remain, nevertheless, to be collected, organised, and treasured.
***
It was fitting, perhaps, that I would be notified of my grandfather’s death as I sat on my bed flicking through the opening pages of Dillon’s memoir. I’d bought it in Dublin the previous day, having discovered Dillon earlier in the summer and set myself to finding and reading all that he has published. It was while I was in the National Library, searching for a reference to accompany an essay I was writing on the Irish philosopher George Berkeley, that I received a message from my father informing me that Grandad’s condition in hospital had deteriorated and that I should come home. I wouldn’t make it in time, as I knew, so I prevaricated. Rather than seek company, I opted to spend the afternoon at the National Gallery in a fruitless effort to silence the din resounding in my ears by burying myself in the idyllic landscapes of Thomas Roberts, William Ashford, and George Barrett; the cascading ecstasy of Jack B. Yeats set against the familiar realism of Walter Osbourne; the sublime chiaroscuro of Caravaggio’s The Taking of Christ and the heart-rending pathos of William Burton’s The Meeting on the Turret Stairs; the beautiful portraiture of Titian, Hogarth, and William Leech, especially the latter’s portrait of his wife, Saurine, The Sunshade. Iris Murdoch writes in one of her novels of a character who, on beholding a portrait painted by Thomas Gainsborough’s of his two young daughters hanging in the British National Gallery, she breaks down in tears. Gainsborough has caught their likenesses with such meticulous care and attention, in a way that only a devoted father could accomplish, affording absolute emphasis to the very slightest of individual mannerisms, that he offers a hint of what true love ought to resemble. It is a rare feat, making its effect all the more palpable; through the radiating impulses of aesthetic sympathy, the tender feelings it evokes within us on our perceiving it, such an experience pushes us towards a certain disposition wherein the scales momentarily fall from our eyes, leaving us rapt in the face of that which portends so much but offers so precious little. Leech, in his painting, achieves something similar in presenting a living portrait of the woman he knew so intimately and loved with such gentle passion. One can discern a hint of her character in the confident poise, the fixedness of her stare, the lightness with which she supports the sunshade that casts her under a sumptuous yellow hue, almost as though you could speak to her. With each visit she becomes more of a friend, a stable presence in the company of whom I can feel assured, if not content. I have spent my adolescence under the watchful gaze of these paintings, bringing friends on post-lecture excursions and girlfriends on first dates, always assured of their permanency. Even if they are repositioned around the gallery they will still be there, awaiting me, ready to proffer a font of memory by which I may appease my thirst. I could turn to them for consolation, a momentary deliverance from whatever impinged me, as I have done since I was sixteen. Now, they were enveloped in a din that steadily grew louder, making my hands quiver, my stomach heave, and my vision blur as I strained to rectify myself; to latch on to something steady in a world that felt, in that moment, to be disintegrating around me.
I visited Grandad’s home the evening after his passing, finding a group of uncles, aunts, and cousins, all on my father’s side; many of whom I haven’t seen in years, often over a decade. Why, I was never able to fathom; they were never much of a ‘family’, and by a variety of shifting currents over the past few years have grown further apart. I was already in strange country, dealing with people I had little association with other than the happenstance of my surname, and whom I would often pass on the street without recognising. The situation was peculiar, even disorientating; for not since I was six, seventeen years ago, had I known a loss of comparative scale. I had no sense of what to expect, let alone how to cope when the reality set in. The tone that evening was jovial, almost like a party, as everyone gathered in the kitchen over tea and sandwiches, seemingly oblivious to poignancy of our situation. There was a pane of glass dividing me from them, as I leant up against the kitchen counter, a cup of chilled water turning lukewarm in my hand, observing instead of participating. I was somewhere else, enclosed in a sphere but unable to designate its parameters; bereft of energy to feign an inviting countenance, unwilling to let my mask slip in front of these veritable strangers. This sense of pervading uneasiness was foregrounded on hearing my aunt say, as she attached a black ribbon to the front door: ‘Oh, the place just won’t be the same without him.’ It wouldn’t be, and wasn’t that evening, as I left the party to meander in between the rooms, remembering all the pleasant occasions we shared here. They were long ago, now, but the remnants of better times live on in those fragments that remain. The curtains were drawn, but the mirrors were neither covered or the clocks stopped. I used to sit in that chair in the corner, adjacent the bookshelf, draped now in the same white cotton covering as then, eating buttered toast and watching the cigarette smoke emanate from my grandmother’s lips. The crucifixes remained on the walls, staring down at me, joined by a baroque, even pastiche portrait of Padre Pio that always fascinated me. I pass into the main hall, meeting the framed portrait of myself as a baby hanging on the opposite wall at my eye level, to the right of the coat rack. I recall learning here, against the doorframe of the living room, saturated by the hall-ceiling light, toying with my grandfather’s pocket-watch as he, just up the hall from me, was putting on his boots for our walk out to the Curragh plains. Recognising my transfixion, he tossed a packet of Rolos at me. I received such a fright, being utterly engrossed in the artistry of this time piece, that I let it drop. Had the silver chain not been wound round my hand it would have struck the hardwood floor. Now, his pocket watch rests on the mantelpiece in the dining room, joined by a selection of other, seemingly random items that display no obvious coherence apart from their being collected here, as objects that each afford some hint, however tantalizing, of a vanquished world we long to re- inhabit but know we never will. And so we bid recourse to these items, for against the barren landscape that stretches out before us they provide not a map but a lantern. A collection of photographs lay strewn across the dining room table, as I re-joined my aunts and uncles, ostensibly so that we might find a funeral portrait of Grandad but implicitly for something else. Where better to begin than with the photographs?