AGAINST JOHN HEWITT As expressed in the work of its most talented advocate, John Hewitt, a poet of Protestant background with socialist sympathies, literary regionalism asserted that a love of the Ulster landscape could be cultivated as an affective sentiment that would bind the peoples of the region irrespective of constitutional or national politics. ‘Ulster’, Hewitt wrote in 1947, ‘considered as a region and not as a symbol of any particular creed, can, I believe, command... the loyalty of every one of its inhabitants’. To serve this purpose, however, landscape had to be leached of overt national significance; hence the emphasis on ‘region’ as a supposedly more intimate and neutral micro-domain below the divisive jurisdictions and fissures of state and nation. Hewitt’s literary regionalism was nonetheless a loaded political construct. His imagined ‘Ulster’ begins essentially with the Elizabethan plantations and largely elides the pre-colonial Gaelic province. Its geographic emphasis is on the more heavily Protestant region east of the river Bann at the expense of the more Catholic areas to the west. The linguistic and literary inheritance of the region is defined as Ulster Scots rather than Ulster Gaelic, and traditions of Protestant republicanism and nationalism are downplayed. While the political boundaries and outlines of Hewitt’s imagined ‘Ulster’ remain deliberately nebulous – for him Ulster as a region need not be coterminous with Northern Ireland – the project nonetheless aimed to secure cultural and emotional and ultimately political legitimacy for a more civic version of the Northern state. The problem with cultural regionalism, however, was that it was a cultural project that sought to attain its political end (the elaboration of a civic unionist identity) by insisting on its apolitical character rather than by harnessing itself to a transformative political project. The literary regionalism sponsored by Hewitt, and taken up to various degrees by other left or liberal Protestant writers such as W. R. Rodgers and Sam Hanna Bell, dissented from both the official ‘high’ Unionist culture endorsed by the Northern state and from populist Orangeism. Nevertheless, it remained keenly suspicious of Irish nationalism and the sources of Catholic alienation were never systemically or vigorously confronted. At the same time, before the outbreak of the Troubles, the political establishment in Northern Ireland always remained suspicious of literary regionalism, terrified, as Edna Longley remarks, that Ulster ‘local’ culture, whether Irish or Scots, might always simply be a Trojan horse that would turn out to be a cover for Irish national culture.
Posted on: Tue, 04 Mar 2014 10:13:25 +0000
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