Free Across the Pond by Terry Eagleton Page B

Ireland. The Irish drink Guinness, of course, but Guinness is not really Irish any longer. The brewery is owned by an international corporation. A number of things that seem to be Irish, such as Irish stew or the founding of Dublin, are not Irish at all. The Irish might, however, engage in such activities as singing “Danny Boy” or saying “Begorrah” (a word which nobody in Ireland has ever been known to utter) simply to please the tourists, rather as lunatics in eighteenth-century London would froth at the mouth and slash at their wrists when visitors came to view them, only to resume their usual demure demeanour once they had gone.
    It should be said, incidentally, that one key difference between the Irish and the British is that on the whole the Irish like Americans, whereas generally speaking the English do not. Ireland’s affection for the United States is hardly surprising, given the loyal support the country has shown its people over the centuries. In the years after the Great Famine, whole villages in the west of Ireland would have sunk without trace had it not been for the New York Police Department. It was the money its Irish officers sent back home which kept them afloat. The distance from Dublin to Boston is in many ways shorter than that from Dublin to London. Flying to the aid of a downtrodden, semi-destitute country stands as one of the United States’s great historic achievements, along with Emily Dickinson and magnificent bacon. (These, however, are to be weighed against its lamentable ignorance of the teapot, which is largely a consequence of never having owned India.) There are aspects of Northern Irish culture (golf, snooker, huge meals, guns, obesity, theme parks, violence, paramilitaries, puritan values, Evangelical fervour) which closely resemble parts of the States. Most U.S. presidents with Irish backgrounds have been from Ulster, the northerly part of the nation.
    Innocence and Experience
    It is because they are so outgoing that Americans can seem so innocent. However much experience they accumulate, there can still be a freshness and directness about them which seems deeply non-European. Whatever great stacks of human life they already have under their belts, they always seem eager for more, and we associate eagerness with the innocent rather than with the jaded and overbred. It is not, of course, that all Americans really are innocent, any more than all Europeans are devious and decadent. It is rather that straightness and openness are childlike qualities, and childhood and innocence, despite the best efforts of Sigmund Freud, are still thought to be closely allied. Being crafty and deceptive are complex social practices that children have yet to pick up. The day when a child learns to dissemble marks a milestone in its progress towards adulthood, though it would seem strange to celebrate it with a visit to the circus.
    Striving to recapture a lost innocence is a staple theme of American culture. Perhaps all civilisations are nostalgic for Eden, but America has more reason for this hankering than most. It has never lost its sense that there is something synthetic and unreal about civilisation. Regaining the happy garden was a constant preoccupation of the early Puritans. There is, however, a paradox about trying to recapture lost innocence, not least in literature. To write about childlike innocence is inevitably to betray it, since there is no writing in paradise. Language is the sign of a fallen adult world. It signifies that you have been cast out of the happy garden, and does so in the very act of trying to scramble back into it. You cannot get behind language in language. The child’s innocence is not meaningful to the child itself, so that trying to retrieve it is less like trying to unearth a buried state of being than like trying to remember what happened last night when you were leglessly drunk. The reason this is so hard is that the brain was probably not laying down memory traces