2002
Jean Baudrillard says we ask ourselves about our identity only when we have nothing better to do. It is, no doubt, a Western luxury, and an indulgence of the intellect. But it is precisely with Western luxuries that I would like to concern myself; I would like to dwell on the collective life of the European imagination, and ask whether and how, born in England at mid-century, writing as the new century begins, I can claim a part of that collective life.
We cannot take credit for our European identity. It stands outside the process of historical definition. It was created before history began, by the movements of shifting land masses, crumpling and folding into each other. The rise and fall of mountains precedes the rise and fall of cities. Europe had a rich inheritance of metals and minerals, so that the continent became supreme in the arts of working metal; and had unique topographical advantages, being blessed with natural harbors, with navigable rivers running deep into the interior of the continent.
So, what Europe mined could be transported; in time, the products of agriculture were also transported. Our early identity, then, is intimately linked to the natural world. As soon as we define man as apart from that natural world, the question of our identity, collective and individual, begins to arise. We begin to tell ourselves stories about who we are. We draw an imaginary line around ourselves and say, this is my space, my territory, this is where I belong. The attributes of that space decide the way we see ourselves. But our ancestors’ space was also imaginary, and we are the children of the physical and mental journeys they undertook.
In our minds each one of us draws a line between homeland and exile. Our identity depends on how we locate ourselves, in time and space, along this line. When we stay at home—unless we are living through an ethnic war, or an intellectual crisis of self-definition—we are content just to be. When we travel abroad, our hosts ask us to account for ourselves, define ourselves. When I speak or read abroad, I am sometimes described as a British writer, sometimes as an English writer. To me, the first description is meaningless. “Britain” can be used as a geographical term, but it has no definable cultural meaning.
As for calling me an English writer—it is simply what I am not. I was born in England in 1952 into a postwar society that was both anxious and complacent. Anxious, because the struggle since 1939 had been so hard; complacent, because—as my elders would have put it—England had won again. We had not been invaded.
The gaunt old virgin Britannia had once again spat in the eye of the European rapist. The island status, the separateness of Britain, or England, was essential to her understanding of herself. For generations, our historians had proceeded as if “Britain” and “England” meant the same. Scottish children learned Scottish history, and English history. But English schoolchildren did not learn Scottish history. They learned English history alone—and they called it British history. Historically, the English have not bothered to define themselves. They just are. It is other people who, in their view, have the problem of definition.
English nationalism is not recognized to exist. The clashes between England and Ireland were not, in the past, seen as a battle between English nationalism and Irish nationalism. They were seen as a result of the Irish nation’s stubborn refusal to recognize that it was, for all practical purposes, English. It would be amusing, if the results had not been so bloody.
I grew up in a village in the north of England, a descendant of Irish immigrants who had come over to work in the textile mills. My mother was a textile worker, as was her mother before her. As a small child, I grew up in what was essentially an Irish family, surrounded by Irish people who were old. By the time I was ten almost all of them were dead. My consciousness of being Irish seemed to die with them.
Where have they gone, those old people? There is a place in my head, where I sit down with them. But in what sense could I call myself English? I was born on the northern tip of the Peak District, a country of mountains and moorland, of few people and many sheep. It was not the town, so was it the country? I had seen the English countryside in picture books. There were trees, cottages of golden stone, cottage gardens bright with flowers. This bleak and treeless terrain where I lived was—obviously—some other place.
Very often, at our church, we sang a hymn called “Faith of Our Fathers,” which celebrated the Roman Catholic martyrs of the Reformation, and included the ambitious prediction that “Mary’s prayers / Shall bring our country back to thee.”
Even when I was quite young, I used to think how comical it would be if the police marched in and arrested us; for, whereas Protestants pray for the reigning monarch and the status quo, we appeared to sing along in hopes of the mass destruction of the House of Windsor.
After this event—and the mass re-conversion—after we were once more in communion with our European brethren, the hymn promised us this: “England shall then indeed be free.” (Was it “indeed,” or “at last”? By its nature, this seminal text of my youth is absent from dictionaries of quotations. I try to think who I could call, to sing it to me down the phone, but I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t be unreliable or embarrassed: like the mathematician of Browning’s poem, “I feel chilly and grown old.”) As I grew up, I came to see that Englishness was white, male, southern, Protestant and middle class. I was a woman, a Catholic, a northerner, of Irish descent. I spoke and speak now with a northern accent. And if I tell an Englishman my date of birth and my religion and ancestry, I am telling him, without needing more words, that my family are working people, probably with little education.
All these markers—descent, religion, region, accent—are quickly perceived and decoded by those who possess Englishness, and to this day they are used to exclude. You are forced off center. You are a provincial. You are a spectator. If you want to belong to Englishness, you must sell off aspects of your identity.
Possibilities of self-redefinition were presented to me. I could become educated, go and live in the south if I liked, abandon my faith and change my accent. I did some of these things. The American novels I began to read had taught me that literature did not proceed entirely from the torture chambers of the imagination; having spent my teenage years with Dostoyevsky, I was more than happy to meet Updike and Lurie. But most of the US literature I encountered was, as it happened, East Coast and Waspish; and the Jewish novelists, in their moral sophistication and urban poise, seemed more central to the culture than the Wasps themselves.
So, if American novels entertained me, they hardly expanded my means of self-construction. Though I was grateful for a state-sponsored schooling that had lasted much longer than that of anyone else in my family, I had not really been educated, rather, brought up to pass exams.
My knowledge of Latin evaporated the minute I walked out of the exam room at fifteen, and I had never learned Greek. My lack of knowledge of classical literature still embarrasses me. At no conscious level could I link myself to the ancient idea of Europe, to the defining myths, to the common culture that is shaped by our inheritance from Greece and Rome. And yet they must have been pervasive, I think: in the water or in the air; or let’s say that the crumbs from that inheritance had fallen to me from the table of pan-European Romanticism. For when I began to write, at twenty-two, I defined myself from the first as a European writer.
The first book I wrote was A Place of Greater Safety, a novel about the French Revolution, set in Paris. It was not the first book of mine to be published; it occupied me for many years, and was not published until 1992. I had never been to Paris when I began to write. This did not matter. In my dreams of Europe, I had found the keys to the gate of an unknown city. For the constant and passionate imagination, no documents or passes are needed. It did not seem to me that I was writing of dead people or events that were distant and frozen. I was working at a transformative moment in the history of Europe.
I was then the least alienated of beings. I was at one with the work I did. By writing a novel one performs a revolutionary act. A novel is an act of hope. It allows us to imagine that things may be other than they are. The English are literal-minded about borders. For obvious reasons, they do not make a territorial identification with the continent of Europe. A stretch of water cuts them off. If you are in England, you can easily dismay your fellow citizens of Europe by a chance remark: by speaking of “crossing to Europe.” You are speaking geographically, of course. You do not mean to imply that you are not “in” Europe. Nevertheless, the unfortunate turn of phrase has some significance. It is difficult, from the point of view of a small offshore island, to develop a sense of the integrity of Europe.
I remember a few years ago visiting Passau, in Germany, and standing at the riverside at the point where one could take a boat either to Amsterdam or to Vienna. I felt, suddenly, a childlike moment of wonder: ah, Europe connects. I could have worked it out from the atlas. But it is a small thing to look at a map, and a greater thing to feel for yourself how a map relates to life.
Not every English-born person has been able to experience such a moment. My grandfather’s generation left those British islands only to fight in wars, wars that redrew the map of continental states but left the returning islanders lonely and injured and confirmed in their separateness. But now, from England, it is possible to travel with your car through a tunnel or step on a train and be, in every sense, in Europe.
I do not think there can ever have been an item of government transport policy that reaches so far into the imagination as the Channel Tunnel. Our sense of ourself is altered, and for once, not by some great discontinuity, not by a fracture but by a process of linking up, of connection. There is no heroic sea voyage, no airport formalities, no moment of take-off, no traumatic parting from one’s own solid earth: only the business of changing platforms at a London station.
It is a small miracle, a psychic transformation made possible by engineers. In the course of writing my last novel, The Giant, O’Brien, I was led back to Ireland. My book was based on the true story of an Irish giant, a man called Charles Byrne, who was a little under eight feet tall: who journeyed to London, at the end of the eighteenth century, to exhibit himself as a monster, and who died there, and who was dissected by the Scottish surgeon John Hunter.
His bones are hanging up even today in a London museum: an awful symbol to remind us of how the body of Ireland is cut apart. In the course of my writing, I felt a great sadness about the loss, for me, of the Irish language. I was aware my mouth was empty, but I was aware also that my brain was crammed with newly minted myth.
If you are a member of the Irish diaspora—and perhaps most of all, if you are an American or Australian of Irish origin—you are a victim of the Celtic Revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This movement was an attempt of a type familiar to us in Europe, an attempt to reach back to a mythical time and place, where the world was perfect and whole, where the Celts were a pure race, and the Irish language was a pure language. It was a sham, but it was seductive.
It fed into the current of Irish nationalism—the chief language of which, of course, is English. It was, however, a lasting, commercially rewarding sham, and it has taken on a new energy in recent years, with the rediscovery of a “Celtic” brand of music that seems to embrace many of Europe’s outlying, forgotten, misty regions, and give them a common identity, and at the same time set them defiantly apart from the mainstream. My own shelves, I should admit, are stacked high with recordings of this music from Ireland and Scotland, from Brittany and Galicia; in pursuit of the togetherness offered by otherness, I too have made the cash registers ring.
The new-minted “Celtic” culture offers the thing that is extremely attractive to the exile: a spurious sense of belonging. To be Irish has, recently, become suspiciously fashionable; though you are excluded from fashion, I think, if you are a Northern Irish Protestant. But if we ask, “Who are the Irish?”—and consult our history and not simply our emotional need for self-definition—they are not only Celts but Vikings, Normans, Anglo-Saxons, and Spanish and Scots.
When Mary Robinson became president of Ireland, she put a candle in her window, perpetually burning, to light the exiles home. I found myself thinking it must be a very high-tech candle, for you could see it blazing on the sunniest day. It needed to be bright, for there was a long way to guide us home.
About four years ago I visited Tromsø in Norway, one of the most northerly towns in the world. There, under the midnight sun, I felt instantly at home. Within its severe geometry, its black trees reflected in icy water, I felt more myself than I had felt anywhere before. It was a feeling I had not sought, that I had never expected, and that I have never lost.
On my next visit to Dublin, I bought from the National Museum a copy of a Viking armlet that had been excavated on a Dublin archaeological site. To my own satisfaction, I had come home in Ireland and in Europe. I had added another episode to my story of who I am; though it is powerful to me, I know it is a confabulation. And now I hardly ever go out without this symbol on my wrist, because at the beginning of the twenty-first century I am a primitive person, and not so secure as to leave my current place of residence without a marker to lead me “home.”
In my lifetime Ireland has changed its idea of itself, perhaps even more than England has. Ireland finds itself, as a country within the European Union, in a state of unprecedented prosperity, and also fully recognizing and celebrating the European dimension of its history. The year 1998 saw the bicentenary of the rising of the United Irishmen, an attempt by both Protestant and Catholic Irishmen to throw off British rule, with military aid from France.
The rising was a heartbreaking catastrophe. It led to mass slaughter of a helpless population, and is a source of continuing bitterness and misunderstanding. But to commemorate this dreadful event, modern Ireland has built a beautiful exhibition center in Enniscorthy, and planted trees of liberty in the grounds.
There, to my personal joy, the story of Ireland’s struggle for freedom was set in a European context. The tragedy does not diminish, but collective memory is honored, truth is served and myth gains in force. Ireland’s sense of connection to Europe is something the English are slow to acquire. Among novelists writing now, Michele Roberts brings a polished Anglo-French sensibility to her work. Tim Parks, a long-time resident of Florence, wrote first with an expatriate’s eye, but now infuses his unsettling narratives with a transnational jitteriness.
Barry Unsworth, whose early themes were slavery and colonialism, has lived for many years in Italy. One of the most remarkable novels published in England recently has been his Losing Nelson (1999). It tells the story of a modern-day man, a writer, who is obsessed with the glorious deeds of Nelson, reckoned the greatest of England’s sea commanders, and who is writing a glorifying biography of him. Yet he cannot get past one shameful episode in Nelson’s early career: his betrayal of the revolutionaries of Naples, to whom he had offered safe conduct, but whom he betrayed back to the hangman.
Unsworth believes this episode is of great consequence in the history of southern Italy. But the critics largely ignored the central point of his book. Unsworth dared to displace the Anglocentric view, and sacrifice an English hero to our common European humanity. It is still such a frightening enterprise, for some, that they are almost literally unable to read what he has put on the page.
All the same, the country where I was born has changed enormously from that scared and insular postwar nation. The young are pro-European without having to think about it. The European Community is one of the givens of their world. The British parliament at Westminster has formally devolved a share of power to Scottish and Welsh assemblies. The English sense of identity is beginning to fracture. This is a healthy development. No one now would speak of an English writer, if he meant a Scottish writer.
Generations of emigration from the former empire have made Britain a pluralist, multi-ethnic, multi-faith society, and now, like the rest of western Europe, host to waves of refugees from disaster-stricken territories to the east. These migrant communities will have to reimagine themselves. We are all, as I have tried to show, members of imagined communities.
In the century ahead, shall we transcend nationalism, or accommodate it? There is a sense in which a postmodern world must be a post-nationalist world. But the idea of a nation will be with us for a long time yet, for historically, nationalist ideals have provided ideologies of resistance and emancipation, and in the present sorry state of Europe, I do not think we can reasonably ask thwarted and injured peoples to do without their nationalist ideals, or to ask them to bask in the light of a sunny cosmopolitanism—for them, the day has not yet dawned.
The greatest hope of minorities, I think, is that they can find a refuge in an imagined Europe of the regions: not in a superstate, a Europe created on the model of past nation states, but within a Europe of diversity in which plural identities can flourish: in which a man is free to define himself as a member of such a group or nation, but also to define himself as a European.
Meanwhile, I think it is the role of writers and artists to make sure that the idea of a nation is not regressive, not repressive, not injurious to the freedom of others. Can this be done? It is artists and writers who deal in symbol and myth, in the manipulation of our psychic realities. Myth is what can be collectively remembered, collectively imagined. I do not think you can separate what is remembered from what is imagined. Myth is a psychic resource that can energize us for better or worse. It is our way back into history, a substitute for lost languages and a mirror we hold to long-vanished faces: see, we say, they were just like us. Myth is a kind of sacred history.
It seems to incarnate a truth that goes beyond fact. It appeals to our origins among the gods, before we were merely human. It can offer symbolic consolations for the catastrophes that befall a people: in our heads, the wrongs of history are undone. Nations use their myths to affirm and reaffirm themselves. In times of war, occupation and diaspora, they provide at least an illusion of continuity. In times of prosperity they provide an assurance of a god-given right to thrive and to expand.
They can be a malign ideological mechanism: they can be used to exclude and excuse, or they can lead a whole people to adopt a lexicon of martyrdom and hopeless sacrifice. But myth can also be empowering and redemptive. The stories we tell ourselves, or which we appoint writers to tell us, can show us a better self, a self in potential.
Behind every nation or state there is the state-that-might-have-been. Myth expresses a need for rootedness and identity, but it also allows us to continue to exist when we are uprooted; it allows us to uproot ourselves and still live, to take a sea voyage from our own identity. Myth is in constant movement and change. It recreates itself through constant multiple reinterpretation, through countless acts of telling and reading and writing.
As writers, we have certain options, which we carry into the new century. We can, for example, like Samuel Beckett, repudiate the images of collectivity, seeing them as sentimental compensation for our individual isolation and misery. Beckett, notoriously, preferred to live in France at war rather than in Ireland at peace. But the émigré sensibility can become nothing more than affectation, an empty piece of provocation; you can choose to be an exile only because others stay at home.
More fruitful, perhaps, is the example of James Joyce, who shows that we can free ourselves from tribal constraints without abandoning ourselves to the despair of solitude. Joyce chose to blend Hellenic symbols with Irish symbols, to draw strength for his work both from a local culture and the culture of continental Europe.
Among twentieth-century novelists he is one of the greatest, most enriching examples of how a European identity may be imagined. At the beginning of the century, we want to carry our past with us, without being bowed under its weight. We want history to be our guardian angel, an airy companion who walks beside us into the new millenium. The creative imagination is a place of safety for the dead, where they can show their faces and be recognized. We have to conjure the people of the past, summon them back to life, so they can lead us to our future.
The god that artists must invoke is Janus, the double-faced god, the guardian of gates and doors. It is the duty and privilege of the novelist to look both outward and inward, to the past and the future, to the particular and the universal, to the parish and the world. My greatest wish for the writers of this century is that they will find a capacity to be both at home and on a journey; that they will find that Europe is our Heimat, and our home away from home.
This is an edited extract from Hilary Mantel’s essay “No Passports or Documents Are Needed: The Writer at Home in Europe,” in On Modern British Fiction, edited by Zachary Leader (Oxford University Press, 2002).