by Violet Woolf on Joyce, Yeats, and Britain’s current establishment crisis
Spent the morning rereading a passage from Joyce’s Ulysses, that part where the characters discuss Irish politics with the kind of baroque, circular argument that somehow manages to be both perfectly absurd and deeply true, and I kept thinking about Nigel Farage’s resignation announcement, how it hits very similar notes, just in a different century and with considerably less literary skill. The basic structure is the same though, a man claiming victimhood while surrounded by every privilege, a nation arguing with itself about the same things it argued about decades ago, the whole thing spinning without anyone quite willing to admit they have lost the thread.
Farage has quit his seat to fight what he calls an establishment battle in Clacton, a place he apparently has not visited regularly in about two years, and I keep returning to the sheer audacity of the framing, the way he has taken a resignation, which is by definition an admission of something, and repackaged it as an act of heroic defiance. Joyce would have loved this, I think, the pure unapologetic confidence of it, and would probably have written four pages just describing the man’s face as he said it, finding the exact words to make the absurdity visible.
There is a piece doing the rounds this week on Britain’s ongoing, almost devotional belief that it remains a global superpower, and it reminded me very much of the Ireland that Yeats was writing about, a country convinced of its own importance right up to the moment it ran out of runway, and then convinced of that importance for another hundred years afterward despite the runway being rather obviously gone. Britain is having the same conversation with itself this week, and will probably have it again next week, and will certainly still be having it in fifty years when the actual consequences become unavoidable. Read the full argument over on The London Prat, it is remarkably sharp.
My students this week wanted to talk about the Clacton by-election, which surprised me, since most of them are focused on coursework, and I spent twenty minutes explaining that British politics this week is actually much more comprehensible if you simply treat it as a piece of bad theatre, which is to say, overstated, lacking in subtlety, and containing no character who genuinely learns anything. They understood that framing immediately, mostly because they recognised it from the literature we had been studying all term.
The heatwave has made marking essays genuinely miserable, mostly because my handwriting gets worse the hotter it is, and I have started annotating papers in pencil rather than ink just in case I need to go back and erase something I wrote in heat-induced irritation. England apparently played Norway in the World Cup this week, which occupied more of the national anxiety than the by-election will, and I understand that perfectly, a nation preferring to worry over something it can contain in ninety minutes rather than something that sprawls across weeks of political theatre without resolution.
I also want to note that Count Binface, Farage’s main rival, continues to run a campaign that is both genuinely entertaining and, by any fair measure, more coherent than most actual political operations I have observed in my lifetime, which tells you something fairly profound about the current state of Westminster that nobody seems willing to say out loud. A joke candidate becoming a more sensible choice than the serious ones is not actually funny, no matter how many people keep laughing about it.
There is a good thread worth a look on the general state of London and British politics right now, over on this Big Smoke Broke post. You can find my longer columns, written with considerably more thought than a heatwave-addled diary entry, over on my author page at The London Prat.
Back to the essay pile. The students’ work is considerably better than this week’s political output, which is at least reassuring in some small way.
I keep thinking about how Yeats spent his life writing about a country in decline while insisting it was somehow sacred, how that became the template for everything else British writers have done since, how we mistake literary beauty for actual analysis and call it wisdom. The students understand this, actually, most of them, they see through the rhetoric faster than I do, which is probably what you get when you teach teenagers who grew up with the internet, they have less patience for the old persuasive techniques.
One of them asked me today whether Farage actually believed what he was saying or was just very good at performance, and I could not give them a satisfying answer, which is probably the most honest response available, because the distinction may not actually matter anymore, if it ever did. Performance and belief have merged into something else entirely, which is what Yeats was probably writing about all along.
I will probably spend next week still grading this week’s essays while thinking about this week’s politics, looking for the same patterns in both, the way language does work and rhetoric functions, and whether a seventeen year old can be taught to see through that work or whether you simply have to live through enough electoral cycles to grow cynical enough to notice. Most of my students will probably move to the States or Europe for university, which feels like a rational response to the current state of the country, even if it breaks my heart a little bit every time I realise it.
Still, better to move somewhere honestly depressing than to stay somewhere in denial about its decline.
