Irish English literature interaction

The notion of Irish literature is often the subject of much critical contention. For some people Irish literature is reserved for works in the Irish language. The fact that the Irish language was almost eradicated during the nineteenth ascorbic acid is still, however few people actu e rattlingy now speak or create verb every(prenominal)y it in contemporary Ireland, an inescapable fact of Irish accounting and Irish literary hi myth. Its eradication was, in part, a matter of governmental compulsion and also, in part, a matter of the tragic history of the long scale of emigration which followed on the Irish Famine of 1845-8.This is why, among Irish writers who write in the position language, language itself becomes the focus of their reflection. Literature in slope in Ireland has been a literature in which ideas of Ireland of people, community and nation entertain been both created and reflected. To understand how it is true it is necessary to contemplate the conceptions of a distinctively Irish identity which make water been articulated, defended, and challenged. An different point to consider is how the intelligence of alienation, felt almost by all Irish writers, influences their choice of themes for literary works.For the material of my study I provoke chosen the works of 2 great Irish writers, prose writer Joyce and poet Heaney and American writer who nevertheless is regarded as English writer, Thomas Stern Eliot. The reason I choose to allow in Eliot in this essay is that he is much uniform Joyce and the comparison mingled with those cardinal geniuses with help to trace the directions of intersection and similarity of two cultural customss. Another reason for choosing to study Eliot, together with Joyce and Heaney is that all leash writers were exiles, the fact that influenced their literary style and themes.They knew and influenced each other.. Eliot founded new literary movement, and Joyces practiced innovations still occupy his fol lowers like Heaney. The work of all triple great moderns exhibits the peculiarity features of modern art in being problematical to the point of obscurity, complex, allusive, experimental in form, and encyclopedic in scope. The work of all terce writers, especially Heaneys, is imbued with the modern attitude to the pastthat the past was radically different from the present just eternally haunts it and so is inescapably past-present.Of the three writers, Joyce was clearly driven into exile in order to write. Joyce wrote with scrupulous materiality with its fidelity to detail and habit of naming names, and satiric vein. Outwardly vagabond Joyce was not inwardly so. His life and art were transfixed, rooted in the capital of Ireland he had known as a young soldiery, which was the subject of all his work. Joyce constantly carried feeling of alienation in relation to his homeland. Joyce rejected his home, family, night club, nation, and religion. alienation is explicitly detaile d in capital of Irelanders, the collection of short stories focused on the exploration of Irish theme.One of those stories Araby focuses on a vagrant son energized by a desire for escape from the confinement of Irish culture. The desire for much(prenominal) escape appears already in the first story of collection, continues in the stake and finally materializes in the third. The epiphanies at the end of first three stories metaphorize the look to of freedom. To gain clear understanding of this metaphor of the travel in invite of liberation we have to illustrate what was the outrank of Irish culture in the broader aspect of British literature and how it is reflected in Joyces literary work.This story is a metaphor for Joyces life too, for his search for spotlight where he would have been able to work. Joyces issue is to present the lives lived by his people and their characteristic and characteristically Irish ways of trying to make sense of them. The work taboo of Dub business organizationrs illustrates more(prenominal) than the human physique it illustrates the Dublin condition, which may be outlined as an excessive degree of susceptibility to decay and loss. It is a condition not of excess but of deprivation. The first three stories The Sisters, Encounter and Araby atomic number 18 connected by the common hero, a boy, who is looking for something that is not on that point.Araby opens with an critique of the empty back rooms of an aband aned house on a cunning street An uninhabited house of two stories stood at the blind end, detached from its neighbors in a square ground (Joyce, 29), concludes with the lights going out in an emptied hall The upper part of the hall was now tout ensemble dark. Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a instrument driven and derided by self-assertion (Joyce, 36), and in between tracks the narrator as his money and the dreams built on it come, by degrees, to energy.The story gives much aid to detail. In the characterization at the marketplace, the narrator gainers vivid metonymic of the boys world. The boy aspires to commence his journey to Araby, a journey which is metaphorized as chivalric quest. His finis is eastward, the East is even more important metaphorically to the boy The syllables of the vocalise Araby were called to me through the silence in which my soul luxuriated and cast an Eastern trance over me (Joyce, 32).Because he had thought the East would be the proper place in which his desire might be realized, he is disillusioned, as readers, of Araby by his encounter with the actuality of the empty bazaar with its magical name. On arrival to the Araby the boy discovers absolutely discouraging scene which makes him describe himself, in this confrontation with the real world, in one of Joyces most famous sentences Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity and my eye burned with anguish and anger (Joyce, 35).What the boy had expect ed as the completion of his traveling toward Araby, namely the validation of his mastery, ends by confirming, at to the lowest degree(prenominal) in his own eyes, his powerlessness. The wanted to find what the priest, the dead father, has lost religion in the ability to liberate himself and thereby to make at least the journey, into the unknown. Furthermore, he must find a means of bringing that numbers found in the books into touch with the prose, or reality of ordinary Dublin life. Eliot, like Joyce, was an exile.He left United States and found in England an organic society which satisfied his hunger for tradition and order society, politics, and religion were more fast related and institutionalized in England than in the United States. Unlike Joyce Eliots poetry is universal but there is little specifically topical anaesthetic attributions, Eliots work is not as local as Joyces is. When we look at his poems for physical evidence of his adopted country, we find little. such( prenominal) images as there are of city, village, church, or stately home are universalized, do symbolic.Eliot in his poetry tends to touch upon unconventional philosophical issues like what will fleet if we lose the capacitor to see the community between persons and lose the capacity to believe in any real community between persons. Such a hypothetical situation is exemplified in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock where the eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase (Eliot, line 56) have made the community between persons unable to be seen. The climax is in the middle of the poem, where we see most clearly what the theme of this poem is it is the peculiar affliction of our age metaphysical blindness.The middle is the most intricate one in the poem, but if we concentrate on what is essential, following Prufrock as he postulates up the stairs, as he wrestles with the dead lumber in his head, and as he draws near to the person he has come to visit, there is a moment of suspended t hought, a moment when Prufrock is his experience, a moment exemplary of in Eliots works, where the door out of the corridor suddenly opens, and we are invaded by a sense of reality. The opening here is not much more than a crack the flash of light to light as the lamplight is reflected from the embrown hair on the womans arms.But it is sufficient not only to throw Prufrock off his bent Is it perfume from a dress/ That makes me so digress? (Eliot, line 65) but almost to bring him to act. His Shall I say . . . ? shows him on the boundary of entering a real present. But then he falls back, and rejoins the arthropods, because he has nothing to act with, just as he had nothing to confront the streets with here, for example, he did not see the light answering light. This scene illustrates what is meant by the theme of metaphysical blindness. The poetic collection Prufrock & Other Observations had made Eliot famous in the English-speaking literary world.The interplay between Irish and English literature is continued by Joyces follower Seamus Heaney. This divided tradition states the essential condition of the modern Irish mind. The Irish literary tradition proffered a sense of identity which became the preoccupation of Irish writers of the early twentieth-century like Joyce that identity still confounds contemporary poets like Seamus Heaney. Modern poetry in general is haunted by the divided mind, a reflection of man cut off from his past, confused about meaning, and attempting to reconcile himself to his solitude.In the Irish literary tradition that reconciliation is defined in cultural and national terms. The struggle for reconciliation becomes embroiled in the question of identity. Heaney wrote in the early seventies, his poems have as their focus the relation of England to Ireland which tends to be that of domineering male to at sea female. His was a witness of cruelty in Belfast when Catholic savant arranged civil rights marches. Heaney moved from Belfast at the peak of this conflict, but his poem Punishment presents his experiences I can see her drowned / body in the bog, / the weighting stone, / the floating rods and boughs.(Heaney, 1975) In this poem Heaney explores a theme of visit for betrayal but admits his own feebleness when facing violence inculcated for ages I almost love you / but would have cast, I know, / the stones of silence. I am the artful voyeur / your brains exposed and darkened combs (Heaney, 1975) This poem as other in collection sum, are Heaneys bog poems, in which he disturbs very dark emotions and appeals to the political and social situation in his native northern Ireland.Heaneys through the interpretation of the past gives his comments on the present in conceal yet strong manner. In conclusion, Heaney, Eliot, and Joyce all exemplify the case of the creative person who due to various reason is forced to abandon his homeland. Eliot freed himself from America in order to transplant himself elsewhere. Joy ce was trying to find a perfect place for his creative activity. Despite his love-hate relationship with Ireland Joyce remained faithful to Ireland in spirit. Heaney deserted North Ireland because of unstable political situation but often resorted to it in his works.Thus we see, beyond certain similarities in their work, striking contrasts in the lives of these three writers. Joyce preceded and prepared the way for Heaney, as an Irishman writing happily in English. These should enable us bump to understand them and the general problem of the alienation of the modern artist. Works Cited appoint Eliot T. S. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock in Prufrock and Other Observations. New York Bartleby. Com, 2000 Heaney, Seamus. Punishment in North. London Faber and Faber, 1975 Joyce, James. Dubliners. London Penguin Group, 1996