special issue: literature, criticism, theory || the artist and society: krino 1986-1996

The Artist and Society: Krino 1986-1996Author(s): Ciarán BensonSource: Irish University Review, Vol. 27, No. 1, Special Issue: Literature, Criticism, Theory(Spring - Summer, 1997), pp. 69-73Published by: Edinburgh University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25484703 .

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Ciaran Benson

The Artist and Society: Krino 1986-1996

The anthology begins with these words from Ezra Pound:

Krino, to pick out for oneself, to choose.

That's what the word means.

From the many things to choose between in this rich anthology I want

to select a few to illustrate its importance as a resource of writing and

change over the last ten years. I do this because I believe that what the

editors of Krino have themselves chosen to include has a coherence in its

diversity and topicality in its questions. For the first time in quite a long while there are some heated debates going on in the public arena which focus sharply on the arts. These include Francis Stuart's election as a

Saoi of Aosdana and the debate on Michael Collins and film, between

Neil Jordan, Eoghan Harris and Kevin Myers.2 Krino, then, takes its name

from Ezra Pound, whose connections with fascism are all too well-known.

But it also includes poems from Paul Celan and an interview with

Miroslav Holub. What justifies this inclusiveness in the light of the sorts

of heartfelt objections to honouring the writer Francis Stuart? It is timely for us to ask some old questions once again:

What in Ireland do we expect the role of art and artists to be in the

evolving political consciousness of the nation?

What should a body like the Arts Council be protecting when it sees itself as protecting the integrity of art and artists? In a week when the Universities Bill is before the Dail what is it

that is being protected when "academic freedom" is highlighted

by the universities as a cherished value?

At a time in the United Kingdom when the State's role in actively

teaching "morality" through its national curricula is high on the

political agenda how are we to think about rights and duties,

especially in relation to the arts, and the nature of the freedom we

in liberal democracies have come to associate with them?

1. Speech to launch Krino 1986-1996: An Anthology of Modern Irish Writing, ed. Gerald

Dawe and Jonathan Williams (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 19%), at the Douglas

Hyde Gallery, 29 October 1996.

2. Following Neil Jordan's reply to Eoghan Harris in the Irish Times on 23 October, Harris responded on 26 October and a lively debate ensued. [Ed]

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These are not easy questions to answer and may not even be well put. But either by a tacit consensus or by active construction they must be addressed. At a time when "culture wars" have raged across the political

landscape of the United States, when across the world (as Amnesty International tirelessly reminds us) the exercise of precious freedoms to

think and talk lead to torture, imprisonment and death, Ireland has been

curiously serene.

In the three years that I and my colleagues have served on the Arts

Council, the only serious symptoms of the existence of these questions have been the publication by Brandon Press of Gerry Adams's stories a

few years ago (and its clash with the then Section 31 of the Broadcasting Act) and, last week, Aosdana's honouring of Francis Stuart as Saoi. In

each case issues of contamination of art by association with ideologies of violence arose as needing discussion.

Before continuing let me be very clear. I fully support Aosdana's

honouring of Francis Stuart as a great Irish writer. What I want to address are the other issues that this has given rise to. Does the artist have a role

that, by virtue of his or her calling, transcends in some Nietzschean way the standards of conventional morality? Can the artist and his/her art

be treated as hermetically sealed from the artist-as-citizen and his/her affiliation to one or other political ideology?

In a liberal democracy I think that we do in fact make this distinction, sometimes in line with an artist making it, and sometimes on behalf of

artists who fail to make it or refuse to make it. If this is what we are

tacitly doing what justification do we have for doing so?

There is a poem of Paul Celan's in this anthology, translated by Brian

Lynch and Peter Jankowsky, whose first lines go like this:

Out of fists, whitened

By Truth hammered free from the word-face, a new brain blooms for you.

Beautiful, veilable by nothing, It casts them, the

thought-shadows. Therein, unshiftable,

they fold, today, now,

twelve mountains, twelve foreheads.

This marvellous image of hands formed in fists ? an image of struggle and risk ?

carving "Truth" as though from a hard ore of words in a

dark mine of ignorance and yielding, like some flower in the light of

day, a new brain must have something to do with how in the modern

world we answer these questions. This "word-made brain" then becomes a source of light, for how else

can it cast its unique types of shadow, thought-shadows, which defy

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darkness, "veilable by nothing". It is because the modern world has come

to understand the transpersonal nature of language and symbolisation, and its extraordinary powers to create meaning and value and humanity, that the primary exponents of its use have come to have the privileged

regard we grant them. Artists of all kinds are those exponents. Collec

tively we have come to reify what they do as "Art" granting it an

institutional autonomy like that of "Religion" or "Law".

I think that it is only because we have come to recognise how we each

in our personal psychology and achieved humanity are, as it were,

particular utterances of the great conversation which is human being that

in our form of society we place such special importance on what it is

that artists do.

I think that this must be what Georges Seferis meant when he wrote, as Henry Gifford reminds us in his Krino article, that "Art is for all men, never for the masses." Of their nature the arts are deeply personal. The

politician, as Seferis said, addresses the nation ("My fellow countrymen"), the artist simply his/her individual reader or listener.

But the artist has responsibilities, subtle ones requiring judgement and discipline. In his interview for Krino with Dennis OT>riscoll, Miroslav

Holub says that

Since 1963, when?having published three books of poetry in almost one year

? I discovered I was talking too much, I tried to get rid of

myself in a way... All those thirty years, I have been looking for other ways of writing....

In the dark years after the war in Czechoslavakia Holub's mentor said

to him, "look, Miroslav, this is not the time for writing poetry, for being

published. This is a detestable time, a detestable regime, we must simply

stay silent." Holub's reply reminds us of another famous one about the

consequences of silence by Bonhoeffer. Holub said: "My God, how can I

stay silent when I didn't speak? Nobody will figure out I am silent

because nobody heard me so far".

We expect our artists to speak, we want them to speak and we ? and

I particularly mean The Arts Council ? undertake to protect them for

speaking. We may not like how individual artists exercise that political

gift but not to fight for them to have it is to allow our own tongues to be

frozen into silence. Only by understanding the supremely social and

dialogical nature of individual consciousness can we understand how

we have come to protect the artistic and the intellectual voice, be it

maverick, mendacious, marvellous or mad.

Holub is again a wise observer here in his Krino interview:

In conditions of a more or less sane society, you can afford to be

mad as a poet. In conditions of a mad society, you can't afford it

because you would be just in the Establishment. You can be absurd

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in a non-absurd state of affairs. It is of no avail to go for absurdity in an absurd social order.

The artistic freedom which the Arts Council is designed to protect is

necessarily oppositional, though not necessarily strident. The car

tography of consciousness in a democracy is comprised of a potentially infinite number of points-of-view although in practice these aggregate into finite groupings. What we are there to protect is the creative dynamic

which is the precondition of growth and renewal.

But the artistic freedom cannot be understood alone. It is always defined in relationship to an audience, a public. Readers, spectators, listeners are the whetstone of that freedom. Without a critical well

informed public with its own protected freedoms the freedom of the

expressive artist will wither for want of a challenging reception; without

such a public the winnowing of good art from bad will not take place. That is again part of the role of a modern Arts Council. Only in this

wider context do our policies on education, community arts and regional

development make sense.

In her poem, Aubade, reprinted in the anthology Nuala Ni Dhomhnall

opens with this beautiful line:

Is cuma leis an mhaidin cad air a ngealann si:

?

which, as translated here by Michael Longley, reads

It's all the same to morning what it dawns on ?

In her last verse, again as translated by Michael Longley, she writes:

But it isn't all the same to us that night-time runs out; that we must make do with today's

happenings, and stoop and somehow glue together The silly little shards of our lives, so that Our children can drink water from broken bowls, Not from cupped hands. It isn't the same at all.

There is a great challenge to all of us ? artists, audiences, represen

tatives of the public interest ? to know why it is that we welcome all

that goes into the making of the sort of object that we are here to celebrate

tonight ? a book. If I can misappropriate the arresting title of a piece by

Tom Maclntyre in the anthology ? The Word for Yes ? we welcome a

fine book like this because it is a word for yes. Krino is a word for "Yes" to inclusiveness. In its eighteen issues so far,

Krino has embraced the word in poetry, prose, criticism, drama. It has

said yes to both English and Irish: Aodan MacPoilin has contributed

distinctively here. It has said yes to writing by fine writers whether

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woman or man: Eve Patten worked well here. It has said no to Irish

parochialism and yes to Irish sensibilities as part of great European traditions. It has said no to a politically limited notion of the word's

responsibilities and yes to the sort of understanding that allows a State

to fund its art at arms length as an act of self-conscious protection of

those arts.

This is a beautifully produced book and a credit to all who made it.

The typography against the clean whiteness of the pages is beautiful

and a credit to Gill and Macmillan. Wendy Williams has done a lovely cover. It all has quite a Japanese feel. In Krinoing Krino the editors, Gerald

Dawe and Jonathan Williams, cannot have had an easy job. On my own

count there are eighty authors included, representing many points on

that cartography of consciousness that I mentioned.

Seamus Heaney has spoken of the necessity of poetry surprising us

in terms of little gates being opened by words within themselves. This

selection of the many gates opened by Krino over the last ten years is a

tribute to Gerald Dawe in particular. Krino and the Arts Council have

had a very happy marriage from the beginning. It is no easy achievement

for a literary magazine not just to last this long but to grow and mature

over its first decade. Robert Nye recently wrote that "Reading anthologies is a bit like getting drunk on a series of miniatures". My advice to you is

sit down comfortably with these eighty miniatures. You have a treat in

store.

The very last words of the anthology are those of Desmond O'Grady,

appropriately from his poem Ezra Pound at Venice, making the anthology a sort of Ezra sandwich. They are:

"In praise for being and happening", small stone

two words

EZRA POUND

On your behalf, and to launch this splendid anthology, I borrow and

alter them slightly:

"In praise for being and happening" big book one word

KRINO.

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special issue: literature, criticism, theory || the artist and society: krino 1986-1996

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