The Decline of Summer Festivals: How the Nuclear Family, Globalisation of Food Production, and International Trade and Travel has changed our relationship with Nature

 

Bonfire Night, St. John's Eve by Jack Butler Yeats (Ireland)

 
Traditional summer festivals have always revolved around the solstice and bonfires on the feast of St. John (24 June) in many countries. Maypole dancing was also an important aspect of some rural and agricultural summer events, and other summer festivals like Ferragosto (15 August), involved celebrating the early fruits of the harvest and resting after months of hard work. The summer solstice was seen as the height of the powers of the sun which has been observed since the Neolithic era as many ancient monuments throughout Eurasia and the Americas aligned with sunrise or sunset at this time. In the ancient Roman world, the traditional date of the summer solstice was 24 June, and "Marcus Terentius Varro wrote in the 1st century BCE that Romans saw this as the middle of summer."

 

Saint John's Fire with festivities in front of a Christian calvary shrine in Brittany, 1893

Ferragosto (Feriae Augusti ('Festivals [Holidays] of the Emperor Augustus') were celebrated in Roman times on August 1st "with horse racing, parties and lavish floral decorations. Inspired by the pagan festival for Conso [Consus], the Roman god of land and fertility."  The pagan Italian deity, Consus, who was a partner of the goddess of abundance, Ops is believed to have come from condere (“to store away”), and so was probably the god of grain storage. The holiday of the Emperor Augustus was celebrated during the month of August with events based around the harvest and the end of agricultural work, and involved the rural community who were able to take a break from the back-breaking work of the previous weeks. In the 7th century, the Catholic Church in Italy adopted the holiday but changed the date of celebration from August 1st to August 15, to coincide with the celebration of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary so as "to impose a Christian ideology onto the pre-existing celebration".

Therefore, historically the midsummer festivities ranged from mid June to mid August as the strength of the sun went into decline and the fruits of the harvest were beginning to come in.

However, compared to the other seasonal festivals, such as Christmas, Easter, and Hallowen, which have a very strong presence in the media and in the shops, but not the summer festivals. Why is this? Except for commercial music and arts festivals, there are no major commercialised products associated with the historical summer agricultural and fertility rites. For example, Christmas's rebirth is associated with Santa Claus, Christmas trees, and the giving of presents. Easter's new life festival is celebrated with dyed eggs, chocolate eggs and chocolate bunnies. Halloween's reminders of death and the departed are celebrated with 'trick or treating', pumpkins, and bonfires.

In all these cases the combination of commercialisation and tradition has seen reciprocal relationships as one feeds off the other. The globalised media and cinema indulge in the myths of each season creating updated versions of their traditions that result in new economic and cultural products, for example, the growing of pumpkins in Ireland to replace the original turnip lanterns that the Irish brought to the USA, or new movies based on new twists on the myths of Christmas. These aspects keep nature-based pagan festivals alive in the mind of the public throughout most of the year.

Not so with summer. In general there seems to be no particular object or tradition to exploit or commercialise, or at least not yet. There are various possible reasons.

 

 

The Feast of Saint John by Jules Breton (1875).

In the last 100 years or so we have seen a societal change from the community to the nuclear family. The general increase in wealth since the 1960s has resulted in mass international travel for summer holidays and tourism. The overall result of these changes in family, lifestyle, and  the growth of non-agricultural occupations has seen people becoming more and more disconnected from the land and the agricultural traditions associated with farming and harvests. This was combined with the monopolisation and globalisation of agricultural production, and the international trade of agricultural goods.

Despite all of this, there are midsummer traditions that are persisting, although with a much lower profile than the other seasonal festivities.

What were the summer pagan traditions? Probably the strongest of the summer traditions is the bonfires of the feast of St. John. In the 13th century CE, a Christian monk of Lilleshall Abbey in England, wrote:

"In the worship of St John, men waken at even, and maken three manner of fires: one is clean bones and no wood, and is called a bonfire; another is of clean wood and no bones, and is called a wakefire, for men sitteth and wake by it; the third is made of bones and wood, and is called St John's Fire."

In Ireland, St John's Eve bonfires are still lit on hilltops in various parts of the country. According to Marion McGarry:

"Since the distant past, bonfires lit by humans at midsummer greeted the sun at the height of its powers in the sky. The accompanying ritual celebrations were primal, restorative, linked with fertility and growth. Midsummer and the time around St John's Day have been traditionally celebrated throughout Europe."

 

 

Midsummer festival bonfire (Mäntsälä, Finland)

The bonfires were associated with purification and luck. Every aspect of the fire was important and taken into account: the flames, the smoke, the hot embers, and even the ash:

"Jumping through the bonfire was a common custom. A farmer might do this to ensure a bigger yield for his crops or livestock, while engaged couples would jump together as a sort of pre-wedding purification ritual. Single people jumped through in the hope it would bring them a future spouse. Finally, the fire was raked over and any cattle not yet at the summer pasture were driven through the smouldering smoke and ashes to ensure good luck. The remaining ash was scattered over crops or could be mixed into building materials to encourage good luck in a building. The ash was considered curative too, and some mixed it with water and drank as medicine. Embers were brought into the house as protective talismans."

 

It was reported that John Millington Synge (playwright) and his friend, Jack B. Yeats (artist and illustrator) attended a St. John's Eve celebration on a visit to County Mayo, Ireland, in 1905. At first, "they had been saddened by the depressed state of the area, but then Synge is quoted as saying: "...the impression one gets of the whole life is not a gloomy one. Last night was St. John's Eve, and bonfires - a relic of Druidical rites - were lighted all over the country, the largest of all being in the town square of Belmullet, where a crowd of small boys shrieked and cheered and threw up firebrands for hours together." Yeats remembered a little girl in the crowd, in an ecstasy of pleasure and dread, clutching Synge by the hand and standing close in his shadow until the fiery games were over."

Bonfires were lit to honor the sun and to protect against evil spirits which were believed to roam freely when the sun was turning southward again. They were "both a celebration of and devotion to the natural world."

Maypoles were erected either in May or at midsummer as part of European festivals and usually involved dancing around the maypole by members of the community. It is not known exactly what the symbolism of dancing around the maypole is but most theories revolve around pagan ideas, e.g., Germanic reverence for sacred trees or as an ornament to bring good luck to the community. In England:

"the dance is performed by pairs of boys and girls (or men and women) who stand alternately around the base of the pole, each holding the end of a ribbon. They weave in and around each other, boys going one way and girls going the other and the ribbons are woven together around the pole until they meet at the base."

 

 

Dance around the Maypole by Pieter Brueghel the Younger, 16th century

When the church authorities could not co-opt pagan festivals like Ferragosto they banned them. For example, Kupala Night is one of the major folk holidays of the Eastern Slavs that coincides with the Christian feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist and involved activities "such as gathering herbs and flowers and decorating people, animals, and houses with them; entering water, bathing, or dousing with water and sending garlands on water; lighting fires, dancing, singing, and jumping over fire; and hunting witches and scaring them away".

In medieval Russia, these rituals and games were considered demonic and the hegumen [head] Pamphil of the Yelizarov Convent (1505) wrote to the Pskov governor and authorities describing them thus in the Epistle of Pamphilus of Yelizarov Monastery:

 

"For when the feast day of the Nativity of Forerunner itself arrives, then on this holy night nearly the entire city runs riot and in the villages they are possessed by drums and flutes and by the strings of the guitars and by every type of unsuitable satanic music, with the clapping of hands and dances, and with the women and the maidens and with the movements of the heads and with the terrible cry from their mouths: all of those songs are devilish and obscene, and curving their backs and leaping and jumping up and down with their legs; and right there do men and youths suffer great temptation, right there do they leer lasciviously in the face of the insolence of the women and the maidens, and there even occurs depravation for married women and perversion for the maidens."

 

 

Couple jumping over a bonfire in Pyrohiv, Ukraine on Kupala Night.

 

In another commentary from Stoglav  (chapter 92, a collection of decisions of the Stoglav Synod of 1551) it was written:

"And furthermore many of the children of Orthodox Christians, out of simple ignorance, engage in Hellenic devilish practices, a variety of games and clapping of hands in the cities and in the villages against the festivities of the Nativity of the Great John Prodome; and on the night of that same feast day and for the whole day until night-time, men and women and children in the houses and spread throughout the streets make a ruckus in the water with all types of games and much revelry and with satanic singing and dancing and gusli [ancient Russian instrument plucked in the style of a zither] and in many other unseemly manners and ways, and even in a state of drunkenness."

However, the importance of festive holidays lies in their value for reconnecting with family, friends and community. Michele L. Brennan examines the psychological aspects of traditional celebrations:

"Holiday traditions are essentially ritualistic behaviors that nurture us and our relationships. They are primal parts of us, which have survived since the dawn of man. Traditional celebrations of holidays has been around as long as recorded history. Holiday traditions are an important part to building a strong bond between family, and our community. They give us a sense of belonging and a way to express what is important to us. They connect us to our history and help us celebrate generations of family. Children crave the comfort and security that comes with traditions and predictability. This takes away the anxiety of the unknown and unpredictable."

 

 

Maypole dance during Victoria Day in Quebec, Canada, 24 May 1934

The seasonal festivals were based on the very real fear and anxiety of human survival, focussing on the means of sustenance: agricultural production. The vagaries of weather patterns meant that there was never any guarantee that fruits and crops would survive until successful harvesting.

While much of this anxiety was quelled by changes in the agricultural production methods of the twentieth century. However, now, in the twenty-first century, there is an ever growing recognition that modern agricultural systems are untenable, and that a new emphasis on alternative and sustainable food growing practices is essential:

"Increasingly, food growers around the world are recognizing that modern agricultural systems are unsustainable. Practices such as monocultures and excessive tilling degrade the soil and encourage pests and diseases. The artificial fertilizers and pesticides that farmers use to address these problems pollute the soil and water and harm the many organisms upon which successful agriculture depends, from pollinating bees and butterflies to the farm workers who plant, tend and harvest our crops. As the soil deteriorates, it is able to hold less water, causing farmers to strain already depleted water reservoirs."

However, this in contrast with technocratic elites who have a very different perspective on the future of food, as Colin Todhunter writes:

"It involves a shift towards a ‘one world agriculture’ under the control of agritech and the data giants, which is to be based on genetically engineered seeds, laboratory created products that resemble food, ‘precision’ and ‘data-driven’ agriculture and farming without farmers, with the entire agrifood chain, from field (or lab) to retail, being governed by monopolistic e-commerce platforms determined by artificial intelligence systems and algorithms."

While science and education has contributed to the changes in beliefs associated with ancient traditions revolving around purification and fertility, the psychological aspects of traditional holidays remain important. Furthermore, the growing awareness of the importance of good organic food is gradually competing with the monopolistic trends of globalist agritech.

The observance of traditional festivals, with their emphasis on nature and the annual cycle of seasonal changes focus attention on the here-and-now, on living according to our means and resources, and is a far cry from the teleological ideologies of patriarchal religion. The Christian church diverted people's attention away from a practical, scientific cosmology towards their own heroes and saints who provided individualistic examples of concern for one's own destiny after death and 'judgement' in the far future, as being more important than our present relationship with nature.    

Over the centuries this process formed a gradual alienation of people away from nature itself, helped along now by the constant monopolisation of land, and the growth of agritech giants.

 

 

Dancing around the midsummer pole, Årsnäs in Sweden, 1969.

 

Instead of respecting the land, farmers use intensive farming to maximize yields, using more and more fertilizer and pesticides, depleting the nutrients of the soil and causing desertification to spread. When I was growing up, local annual horticultural festivals and competitions emphasised diversity, production over consumption, and quality food produced locally. Traditional festivals, with their focus on sun cycles and the seasons, complemented and structured our relationship with nature, as well as work and rest, life and death.

It is necessary to re-focus our attention back on this life, on how we plan to organise our basic sustenance into the future, and in a sustainable way, before others turn nature into a desert, a dust bowl of gigantic proportions, in their constant, remorseless drive to convert the earth into profit.

 

 

 

Becoming the Backdrop: The Oppression of Native Americans in Hollywood cinema, and 'Killers of the Flower Moon'

 

 

 

Killers of the Flower Moon is a recent epic movie set in the 1920s examining a series of murders of members of the Osage Nation, who became wealthy when oil was found on their tribal land. The film is set in Oklahoma (Choctaw language phrase: okla, 'people', and humma, 'red') and depicts the story of a local political boss who was contriving to steal the Osage wealth. The film is long, with a running time of 206 minutes, and shows an ensemble cast of well-known actors such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Lily Gladstone, Jesse Plemons, Tantoo Cardinal, John Lithgow, and Brendan Fraser.

It did well, grossing $157 million worldwide as well as receiving critical acclaim, with praise for Scorsese's direction, the screenplay, production values, editing, cinematography, musical score, and cast performances, especially DiCaprio, Gladstone, and De Niro. It was also nominated for ten Academy Awards, including Best Picture; seven Golden Globe Awards, including Best Motion Picture – Drama, and with Gladstone winning Best Actress; nine British Academy Film Awards; and three SAG Awards, with Gladstone winning Best Actress."

The story revolves around Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) who comes to live with his brother and uncle William King Hale on Hale's reservation ranch after World War I. Hale is a reserve deputy sheriff and cattle rancher who poses as a friend of the Osage while at the same time secretly organising the killing of the Osage through multiple different means such as shooting, poisoning, and even blowing up a house. Ernest Burkhart marries Mollie Kyle, an Osage whose family owns oil headrights.

 

Lily Gladstone's portrayal of Mollie Burkhart garnered critical acclaim, earning her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress

 

Mollie decides to go to Washington and asks President Calvin Coolidge for help in solving the murders. Bureau of Investigation (the eventual FBI) Agent Thomas Bruce White Sr. and his assistants are sent to Oklahoma to find out who is behind the murders. White finds out the truth and persuades Ernest to confess his involvement and testify against his uncle Hale. Hale and Ernest are sentenced to life imprisonment but both were paroled after years of incarceration, despite Osage protests to the parole board.

Killers of the Flower Moon has themes which differ from traditional Westerns in that the 'cowboys' are focused on oil production and resent the community that owns the rights to oilfields. It is also different in that law and order is controlled not by the local sheriff [who is corrupt in this case] but by the federal state who sends in its agents to find out what is going on. This twentieth century concept of the developing power of the state taking over from the nineteenth century local power of the sheriff is only the start. The newly developed FBI launches into containing local criminality with all the power and forces of the federal state. The FBI went on to be involved in the capture and deaths of numerous infamous mobsters of the day, including John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson and Machine Gun Kelly.

The Osage case is also depicted in the 1959 American crime drama film, The FBI Story, showing how the FBI developed from a detective agency to an enforcement agency with the statutory authority to carry guns and make arrests:

The FBI was compelled to investigate after one of the [Osage] murders was committed on federal government land. The FBI forensics laboratory ties the doctored wills and life insurance policies of the murder victims to a local banker, Dwight McCutcheon, with the typewriter that he used.

 

Native Americans and Hollywood cinema

In Killers of the Flower Moon Martin Scorsese had originally intended that Leonardo DiCaprio would play the FBI agent who solves the crimes. However screenwriter Eric Roth began to fear the story underplayed the experience of the Osage people and repeated tired tropes. "We didn't want to go much further with this Great White Hope saving Native Americans," says Roth. This fear of stereotyping led to Scorsese meeting with members of the Osage community in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, including Chief Geoffrey Standing Bear, the principal chief of the Osage Nation.

Hollywood has had a long history of depicting Native Americans in cinema. The Cree filmmaker Neil Diamond covers a century of the portrayal of North American Natives in his documentary Reel Injun:

Reel Injun explores the various stereotypes about Natives in film, from the noble savage to the drunken Indian. It profiles such figures as Iron Eyes Cody, an Italian American who reinvented himself as a Native American on screen. The film also explores Hollywood's practice of using Italian Americans and American Jews to portray Indians in the movies and reveals how some Native American actors made jokes in their native tongue on screen when the director thought they were simply speaking gibberish.

 

Reel Injun film poster

Scorsese was obviously aware that to be taken seriously today he would have to involve the Osage Nation in the making of this film. This story involved an extraordinary situation for Native Americans anywhere in North America, as the Osage directly benefited from the natural resources of their territory.

"I was anxious," Scorsese says. "I knew that if I could not gain their trust, then there's no sense in making the film. As a European American, a Sicilian American, I may have natural limitations, and I hoped that they would forgive that. But they had to know it was coming from the right place and not a surface revisionism, which is simplistic. I wanted something really, really complex that deals with humanity." [...] "One of the people in the room said, 'You have to be very careful. You're putting words in the mouths of people that ... These are real people to us. They're part of our families.' "

The depiction of the Native Americans from the early cinematic beginnings emphasised violence, vacillating from violence to be admired to violence to be feared, depending on the ideological needs of each decade in the twentieth century. When America was under internal or external threat then the violence of the 'Injun' was to be feared. When America needed a strong identity, a powerful role model of the fearless warrior, then the Native American was to be admired. In either case the violence provides catharsis for the colonising power. Even though it is the Native Americans that are being depicted, their needs are secondary.

Many white actors played Native American roles and had no concern for Native American opinions about their roles. "White people playing native roles? I love it, 'cos it's funny!" says Cheyenne/Arapaho filmmaker, Chris Eyre, in Reel Injun. Native Americans were played by Burt Lancaster, Charles Bronson, Burt Reynolds, Elvis Presley, Boris Karloff, Anthony Quinn, Chuck Connors, Daniel Day-Lewis, Sylvester Stallone, Pierce Brosnan, Johnny Depp and others.

In Smoke Signals, a 1998 coming-of-age comedy-drama film directed by Chris Eyre, there is an awareness of the Romanticist portrayal of the Native American as a hero for white audiences. Similarly, white heroes were seen as belonging to the colonial cultural mindset. In Smoke Signals, Thomas Builds-the-Fire argues: "Nobody can help us. No Superman. No Batman. No Wonder Woman. Not even Charles Bronson, man." (Reel Injun)

 

 

Smoke Signals film poster

Killers of the Flower Moon tells a Native American story and is even populated with Osage actors - yet it is still a white man's story, paid for and dominated by, white actors. While it is difficult for any group to tell their story, especially in an expensive medium like cinema, it is even more difficult to imagine the dominant group/oppressor telling your story. Can we expect the British to make radical films about Irish uprisings against British rule? Can we expect the Israelis to make films about the Palestinian struggle against settler land grabs?

 

This is not to say it is impossible, or to object to others telling the stories. Two of the best movies made about recent Irish history were made by British directors: The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006) by Ken Loach and Hunger (2008) by Steve McQueen, covering the Irish War of Independence and the 1980s Hunger Strikes respectively. However, ultimately the victims are the best to tell their own stories, for nuance and perspective on the oppressor. This is arguably because the oppressor ultimately always makes the story about themselves, trying to deal with their past shame  - assuming, of course, that their narrative is sympathetic to the victims and not the oppressors.

 

The missing analysis of structural oppression

 

However, the feeling of being a helpless bystander persists. As Jesse Wente, a Ojibway film critic, remarks about Dances with Wolves (1990), one of the most successful films about the American West:

The natives were fleshed out as characters, allowed to be seen as more complete people. They weren't just warriors; they weren't just peaceful. There was a very sensitive and sympathetic approach. It doesn't erase the fact that at it's core the film is not a native movie. It is still a movie made from the outside of us and it's about us and is meant to be sympathetic towards us. But, it isn't us. It's a story about a white guy. And, Indians are the T and A, but it gets promoted as being about native people or Indians, but it's not, really. We're just backdrop. (Reel Injun)

 

What is missing is an analysis of structural oppression that exists in economic, legal and social forms in society and the ways in which people experience oppressive conditions in their daily lives. That oppression is defined as structures of domination and oppression that gives other groups the power to determine one's actions. Thus,

 

Individuals experience oppressive conditions because they are part of a group that is defined on the basis of shared characteristics such as race, class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, nationality, age, ability, etc. These major social groups have specific attributes, stereotypes and norms associated with them.

 

In 'Five Faces of Oppression', Iris Young discusses five types of oppression: exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence. Under the heading of Exploitation, Young discusses the question of the ownership of the means of production and the necessity for labour power. If you are the owner you gain from the profit generated from the production. In the case of the Osage they gained royalties from oil licensing not from oil extraction which required ownership of the equipment to do so. Therefore they received a small portion of the profits accrued. 

 

In terms of Marginalization, Native Americans on reservations are marginalized by high unemployment rates and limited opportunities to develop marketable skills. 

 

Under the heading of Powerlessness, different types of jobs confer levels of status on their employees. When we combine status with class, "most people of color have to prove their social respectability –– it is not assumed or automatically granted."

 

Under Cultural Imperialism "cultural dominance refers to the way that one group's experiences, cultural expressions and history are defined as superior to all other groups' experiences and histories." In this narrative of the 'helpless' Osage community the dominant view of justice is to find out who is doing the killing, which in turn, justifies the 'universalist' idea that one is living in a community that 'cares'. 

 

The last heading, Violence, covers two types of structural violence: state-sanctioned racial segregation backed up by violence, and the range of violent tactics used against the Osage that is based on knowledge power controlled by elites, for example, new medicines and explosives.

 

In this way we can see how institutions and those with power work together with individual attitudes rooted in white privilege, patriarchy, and capitalism to keep the working class poor, while at the same time, allow the wealthy to maintain and increase their capital accumulation.

 

The people's own social and cultural movements towards freedom

 

These issues will never be resolved within a system and ideology that only discusses distributive issues and never discusses such basic fundamentals as the ownership and control of the means of production. This is where the transition in thinking from capitalist ideology to socialist ideology becomes essential.

 

In the meantime, films like Killers of the Flower Moon are a step in the right direction in that the involvement of groups on the margins in major cinematic productions encourages confidence and desire to see more. The possibility of a cinema that not only looks at marginalised histories but also writes into the narrative a demonstration of the structural aspects of oppression is always potentially on the horizon, especially as the means of production in cinema become cheaper to obtain and use, and more accessible to ordinary people.

 

As Killers of the Flower Moon depicts a Native American story and uses Native American actors, it could and should inspire Native Americans to make their own independent films that include a structural analysis. I don't think we can ever expect Hollywood to make such films, as the American neocon and militarised state is so embedded in the Hollywood system. In the end, a new cinema will have to arise from the people's own social and cultural movements towards freedom, filling a vacuum created by the contrast between Hollywood fantasy and stark social realities.

 

Although in the Native American, Irish, and Palestinian stories, failures were more common than successes, the depiction of struggle is always profound no matter what era the story is set in. The difficulties, the hardships, the bravery, the resistance is always inspiring.

 

Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin is an Irish artist, lecturer and writer. 

Authoritarian Ireland and the Secular Apocalypse

 Book Review of Prophet Song by Paul Lynch

 

Prophet Song: The Secular Apocalypse

In his book, How The Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe, Thomas Cahill shows how the Irish monks maintained European culture during the dark ages when Rome was sacked by Visigoths and its empire collapsed. In the subsequent chaos and illiteracy, symbolism took over from analysis. Cahill writes:

"The intellectual disciplines of distinction, definition, and dialectic that had once been the glory of men like Augustine were unobtainable by readers of the Dark Ages, whose apprehension of the world was simple and immediate, framed by myth and magic. A man no longer subordinated one thought to another with mathematical precision; instead, he apprehended similarities and balances, types and paradigms, parallels and symbols. It was a world not of thoughts, but images. Even the "Romans" at Whitby presented their point of view in the new way. They did not argue, for genuine intellectual disputation was beyond them. They held up pictures for the mind - one set of bones versus another." (p204)

One thousand years later as the symbolism of the Dark ages and medievalism waned, a new movement arose to replace it: Romanticism. In the Romanticist outlook, passion and intuition determined our understanding of the world combined with themes of isolation and loneliness, and a delight in horror and threat. Beauty became about strong emotional responses and not about form. The Romanticists rejected Enlightenment Era artists who, like the Irish monks, were interested in ideas and thoughts, and who used them to depict and critique social relations.

The Romanticist delight in isolation, loneliness, horror, and threat has become the dominating force in most of modern culture. The rise of Social Realism (art that depicts and critiques social relations) thus far, has been local and brief, yet glorious.

Dockers (1934) by Maurice MacGonigal

Unfortunately, Romanticism is a movement that is not only dominant in the production of culture but is also favoured by the institutions of commendation. One such institution is the Booker Prize for literature, and a good example is the 2023 winner, Prophet Song, a dystopian novel by the Irish author Paul Lynch:

"The novel depicts the struggles of the Stack family, including Eilish Stack, a mother of four who is trying to save her family as the Republic of Ireland slips into totalitarianism. The narrative is told unconventionally, with no paragraph breaks."

As we always love to reference James Joyce here in Ireland, we could argue that this paragraphless state of Prophet Song is influenced by the Molly Bloom soliloquy at the end of Ulysses, which was radical for its time in having no punctuation. (Indeed, Eilish Stack's daughter is called Molly).

Furthermore the style of Prophet Song, in general, is similar to Molly Bloom's stream of consciousness in that we get, merged together, Eilish's thoughts, worries and utterances.

Throughout the novel we also get, in a staccato rhythm, brief descriptions of the coercive actions of the state as it faces the growing opposition of a resistance movement that strengthens and spreads countrywide.

Communicating With Prisoners (1924) by Jack Butler Yeats (1871–1957)

From the off, the dark terror commences with knocking at her door which reveals two men 'almost faceless in the dark'(p1). The increasingly fascisitic Irish state is shown through the imprisonment of her trades' union husband (p29), an Emergency Powers Act (p53), government controls on judiciary (p58), national service (p73), unmarked cars pulling up silently (p76), foreign media internet blackout (p175), and the government closing the schools (p183).

The rebels, on the other hand, are really not that much different. And this is the crux of the issue. There has always been a large gap between the Romantic heroes and working class heroes. In Romanticism the 'resistance' or 'rebels' are often 'rejected by society' with various combinations of introspection, wanderlust, melancholy, misanthropy, alienation, and isolation.

And even though "the worm is turning" (p147), and the armed insurrection growing (p130) the violence is abstracted into terrorism (p160), and Eilish "is overcome by loathing, seeing not men but shadows parading the day born from darkness, seeing how they have made an end of death by meeting it with death" (p202). The two opposing forces meld into one in the confusion as Eilish encounters "one checkpoint after another" with "different faces speaking the same commands" (p283). Her escape from the mystical terror across the border into the unknown dark countryside to the sea could have come directly from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's (1749–1832) The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). Goethe wrote: “From the forbidding mountain range across the barren plain untrodden by the foot of man, to the end of the unknown seas, the spirit of the Eternal Creator can be felt rejoicing over every grain of dust”, emphasising the fearful, the mysterious and the unsure.

We live in stark, dark times, surrounded by media that is saturated with the Romanticist gloop of horror, terror, fantasy, science fiction, romantic egoism, etc., that threatens to slow society down and trap us into infinite and endless imagination to the detriment of any progressive forms of social consciousness and societal change.

Yet in the language of the Prophet Song there are many connotations of Ireland's centuries long struggle against British Imperialism and colonialism: Ireland's War of Independence, the war against the might of the British Empire in the description of the military men on horses (p190), state forces moving in on college green (the scene of rebellions going back to the 19th century) (p94), cycling before the curfew, crossing the border (p112), the harp emblem (p123), a stage set up at the old parliament (now the Bank of Ireland HQ) against emergency powers and calling "for all political prisoners to be released" (p87). However, Prophet Song is not about a popular rising continuing on from Ireland's tradition of radical opposition to authoritarian state forces.

The Apocalypse tradition: Karl Bryullov, The Last Day of Pompeii, 1833, The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia

It is in the Romanticist tradition of a powerful figure (the Prophet) who cries for the lack of love and compassion in the world and, in the apocalyptic tradition, calls for people to change their ways to avoid the wrath of God and the end of the world. The secular version, the postmodernist 'End of History' thesis leaves no hope for those who do not benefit from neoliberalism. The Romanticist escape to Utopia, the remote, the exotic, and the unknown, is in stark contrast with the real lives of past leaders and activists of collectivist and communitarian movements who suffered, struggled, and died for real social change.

Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin is an Irish artist, lecturer and writer. His artwork consists of paintings based on contemporary geopolitical themes as well as Irish history and cityscapes of Dublin. His blog of critical writing based on cinema, art and politics along with research on a database of Realist and Social Realist art from around the world can be viewed country by country here. Caoimhghin has just published his new book – Against Romanticism: From Enlightenment to Enfrightenment and the Culture of Slavery, which looks at philosophy, politics and the history of 10 different art forms arguing that Romanticism is dominating modern culture to the detriment of Enlightenment ideals. It is available on Amazon (amazon.co.uk) and the info page is here. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).