12.2.04Pond Scum: 100 Years of Verisimilitude
By Steve Finbow
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Green, black, and orange replace the red, white, and blue in Jasper John's Flag (Moratorium). For me, this representation of the Stars and Stripes signifies America’s emerald-tinted view of Ireland. The green of the Irish flag represents the Catholics, the orange the Protestants, and the white signifies the peace between the two (no, really). In the wonderful illustration by Nicholas Allanach below, aside from the cuff of Ulster, Ireland is lost beneath a sea of dream and denial. The land of Ireland lies between our two countries and comes between us in our cultural views of it – a view that can be at once cloyingly beautiful and shudderingly terrible.
Art by Nicholas Allanach
The magnificent novels and short stories of William Trevor (try The Story of Lucy Gault or Reading Turgenev) show that beauty and terror are at the heart of Ireland’s reality – America finds it beautiful, while England has sometimes feared it. I would argue that America’s idea of Ireland, and America’s view of the rest of the world, is a form of magical realism. There is nostalgia for a world that has never been, a world recreated in fantasy.In a Manhattan children’s bookstore, I worked for a month suggesting titles such as Stripy Goes to the Piercing Parlor to well-spike-heeled Upper East Side mothers and nanny-chasing fathers. One afternoon, I had a conversation with the owner that went something like this.
Finbow: Yeah, I know Charing Cross Road. Foyles. Loads of second-hand bookshops.
Owner: I’d love to visit. Is it still foggy?
Finbow: Er, no. I can’t remember when it was last foggy in London.
Owner: Yeah, I’d love to see all those guys in the top hats and bowler hats, with umbrellas, and the Bobbies and the Beefeaters.
Finbow: Er, yeah. Right. And we can visit Sherlock Holmes and, maybe, if you’re a very good boy, Winnie the Pooh might invite us for tea.Martin Amis has written that America is “where spavined Alabaman must mingle with Virginian nabob, where tormented Lithuanian must extend his hand to the seven-foot Cape Codder.” In other words, is it because America is so disparate and so desperate for an identity that it coats the rest of the world with a slimy batter of romance and ignorance? Disneyfication or diversification?
"Everyone is a little Irish on St Patrick’s Day," reads a Hallmark advert. Green plaid becomes fashionable. There’s the ritual patting of the heads of red-haired children. House of Pain tracks (sham-rock?) pound through speakers. Guinness-quaffing is mandatory. Remember the Caffrey’s ad? Ireland swirling in the mist of memory, the homeland-longing of the vaguely Irish, the flame-haired beauty with brimming pint, the rain, the peat, the bucolic bogs, all recalled from a New York bar that references Ireland only in the green fungus growing and glowing somewhere in the toilets. This is a neo-romantic Oirishness. It is not the reality of a tigerish emerald economy or Ireland's high-tech silicon glens. I'm sorry, but Ireland isn't Maureen O'Hara and John Wayne. It isn't bacon and cabbage. It isn't Caffrey’s and Guinness. Likewise, England isn’t roast beef and horseradish, it isn’t Yeoman Warders, and it isn’t Hugh Grant and Kate Winslet.
As British literary critics appropriate the works of Swift, Yeats, Wilde, Joyce, Beckett, and Heaney – to name but a few Irish authors yoked to the English canon – so America appropriates images of the world, articles of culture, and Americanises them. The Caffrey’s advert, St. Patrick’s Day, and green beer are nothing compared to the monstrosity that is Disney’s Epcot, but there is a resemblance.
A quick look on the Epcot website and we can see a pub, a leafy village, Morris dancers, and the queen – made from what looks like boiled eggs – in the UK pavilion; lederhosened musicians, flugelhorns, and oompah bands in the German; mime artists in the French; the Italian theme music sounds suspiciously like the wedding scene music from The Godfather. In one of the “guest-imonials,” a sugar-high woman remarks, “I like to shop in the World Showcase. You get an idea of what the countries are probably really like.”
No, you don’t. No. No. No. In each of the European pavilions, there is an accordion player. Why? Grinning fools carrying squeezeboxes do not follow me around Soho [ed: The London one]. Oh, and my favourite thing about Epcot is that it has a USA pavilion? You’re in the USA. Why do you need a pavilion to provide a show-and-tell about what it’s like to be in the USA? Epcot and, if I dilate this theory, America, is a checklist of cultural misapprehensions. If you want to go to Italy, go to Rome’s Trastevere district; if you want to do England go to London’s Whitechapel; or if you fancy a German experience try Prenzlau Berg in Berlin; and then you can give Osceola Parkway West, Exit 67, Orlando, Florida, a miss.
So, what’s this you said about magical realism and American cultural awareness? Oh, yeah. See, in America these days the law of causality is not applicable. To re-quote the woman above, the world is “probably really.” Unparalleled events are generic. Fantasy is prevalent. Ireland is a land of mists and leprechauns, France of berets and strings of onions, and England is full of happy policemen! One definition of “magical realism” has this to say, “Note that magic realism often arises in societies with repressive, authoritarian, or totalitarian governments, and may represent an accommodation to a severely dangerous form of political reality.” (Wikipedia).
I was 14 when my family forced me to visit Walt Disney World. I didn’t want to go. I wanted to go to Key West. I had a migraine and spent the whole day looking for shade. I found a reiterant realm, glucose-popped, brightly lit, with rides of head-banging monotony. I threw up on Boardwalk. Adults dressed in animal costumes still haunt my dreams. From the White House/Cinderella Castle, a flag flies; the Stars are Mickey Mouse heads and the Stripes camouflage for:
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.--WB Yeats, Easter 1916.
Click here to read previous Pond Scum columns.
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Steve Finbow writes out of London, England. He has worked for the poet Allen Ginsberg, the writer Victor Bockris, and the artist Richard Long. His fiction, essays, and short plays appear, or will appear, in Eyeshot, 3am Magazine, Yankee Pot Roast, uber, Locus Novus, InkPot, Dicey Brown, The Guardian Online, and Pindeldyboz. He is currently working on a novel (Yeah, right). He can be contacted here.
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