BUNGALOW BLITZ

Bungalow Blitz: The House that Jack Built

in Bungalow Blitz: Another History of Irish Architecture, Banff (The Walter Phillips Gallery, 2006, forthcoming)

by Aoife Mac Namara

[cont’d]

Letting Go, Hanging On and Sitting Pretty

The nineteenth century Gaelic Revival — initially if ironically, also associated with the Anglo-Irish élite — created an emblematic landscape in which certain artefacts acquired mnemonic status because they fulfilled the need for a retroactive continuity of culture to an distant age … the imagery accompanying this narrative was of a predominately rural Ireland, its true cultural heartland defined by the landscape and way of life of the wild, western Atlantic fringes — those furthermost removed from Anglo-influences but also most congruent with the precepts of nineteenth century Romanticism. — Brian Graham⁹⁷

There is no possibility of restoring a pristine, pre-colonial identity: the lack of historical closure (enduring partition) …is bound up with a similar incompleteness in the culture itself, so that instead of being based on narrow ideas of racial purity and exclusivism, Irish identity is open-ended and heterogeneous. But the important point in all of this is that the retention of the residues of conquest does not necessarily mean subscribing to the values which originally governed them. — Luke Gibbons⁹⁸

It is apparent that identity is defined by many and variable criteria and that national identities are created in particular social, historical and political contexts. As such, the idea of Irishness evoked over the course of the bungalow debates cannot be interpreted as a fixed identity. Rather, the idea of Irishness used by many of these writers to stand in for something stable and agreed, is a situated, socially constructed narrative capable of being read in conflicting ways by different readers and of being transformed through time⁹⁹. Writing about the production of narratives of nation at different moments in history, Barnes and Duncan suggest that, “the power of the narrative rests on its ability to evoke the accustomed, a trope that works by appealing to ‘our desire to reduce the unfamiliar to the familiar¹⁰⁰.’�” I would argue that the creation of hegemonic landscape narratives, such as the idea of the west of Ireland, facilitates this process by denoting particular places as centres of collective cultural consciousness, and in so doing, allows for the designation of other sites — other places — as centres for all that is not contained in these repositories: in the case of Ireland, this spatial organization affords a special kind of freedom to areas outside of the west. Secure in the knowledge that all that is needed to support the idea of a culturally, linguistically, socially and geographically unique place called Ireland is preserved in the whitewashed cottages and low-rise simplicity of the west, the nation’s increasingly affluent suburbanites and urbanites can enjoy — guilt free — the pleasures of life in increasingly globalized environments, be they built, cultural, social or economic¹⁰¹. Without this security (tenuous as it is), it is arguable that Ireland’s passage from Europe’s underdeveloped yet culturally distinctive backwater to a centre of global post-industrial living would be far less seamless.

However, as Roland Robertson has suggested, “there is no good reason to define globalization largely in terms of homogenization¹⁰².” Nuala Johnson’s historiographic work on the relationships between modern Irish national identities and the idea of the west of Ireland (particularly the construction of the Gaeltacht regions), supports this view. Johnson argues that the drive toward independence, and the relationships articulated between language and cultural identity in Ireland are “exemplars of broader attempts across Europe to establish ‘imagined communities¹⁰³.’�” She provides a detailed analysis of the history of Irish language policy in relation to specific regions and landscapes. In it, she suggests that the treatment of these regions as “homogeneous places and the direction of economic and regional policy from the political centre precluded any genuine encounter with these linguistic communities as modern and sustainable entities¹⁰⁴.� For Johnson, as well as for Graham, Kiberd, Gibbons and others, the primacy of the west of Ireland as cultural heartland of the country is not a given. Rather, it began life as part of a larger colonial discourse before shifting gear and becoming an essential component of the late nineteenth-century construction of an Irish nationalism. This dependence on a pseudo Gaelic iconography of place and space, has, over time, proven to be an exclusive rather than inclusive discourse. I would argue that it is this impossible idea of a (however Gaelic) otherness, that is in no small way responsible for the very real disappointments experienced by the urban and suburban visitors to the west of Ireland discussed earlier. These visitors, when faced with a Jack Fitzsimons bungalow, find themselves confronted not by a culture radically different to their own, but one that seems to want to be just what they have tried to leave behind (albeit for the weekend).

This idea is supported by a host of literary critics, cultural historians, writers, artists and other scholars who claim that the idea of the “west”� was strongly reinforced by the intellectual élite of early twentieth-century Ireland. For these, often Anglo-Irish, members of the emerging ruling class, the “west�” became an idealized landscape, populated by an romanticized people who invoked the representative, exclusive essence of the nation they sought to create simply through their “otherness�? from Britain. In the Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon’s study of class conflict and cultural hegemony in post-colonial nations, he asserts that “the national middle class which takes over power at the end of the colonial regime is an under-developed middle class … it is in no way commensurate with the bourgeoisie of the mother country which it hopes to replace¹⁰⁵.�” Perhaps then, the Irish middle class fetishization of the architecture of underdevelopment (the whitewashed cottage) can be understood more as a disavowal of their own sense of cultural inadequacy than as an expression of genuine interest in these houses and the lives that went with them. For as Fanon also wrote, “the national government, if it wants to be national, ought to govern by the people and for the people, for the outcasts and by the outcasts. No leader, however valuable he may be, can substitute himself for the popular will; and the national government, before concerning itself about international prestige, ought first to give back their dignity to all citizens, fill their minds and feast their eyes with human things, and create a prospect that is human because conscious and sovereign men dwell therein¹⁰⁶.�”

If the symbolic universe of traditional Irish-Ireland created by this emergent bourgeoisie became, as Brian Graham argues it did, a construction of Irishness that was defined by Gaelicism and Catholicism, and if he is right in suggesting that this “supreme imaginative achievement�? remained unchallenged until the 1960s, then it is little wonder that these bungalows were difficult to accept¹⁰⁷. By the time Jack Fitzsimons published the first edition of Bungalow Bliss in 1971, few of us in the west of Ireland looked to these constructions of Irishness as models against which to form the built and cultural contexts of our lives. However, while the idea of Irish-Ireland may not have structured how the west saw itself (or indeed how the towns, cities and suburbs represented themselves to themselves and others), its heart remained in the unmodernized (and perhaps unmodernizable) west. Thus, the west paralleled other dimensions of nationalism to create an Irishness that empowered and legitimized the new state and the regional and class specific élite in whose names it was established. An Irish-Ireland that the Irish speaking people in Joanne Lacey’s oral histories could not recognize, and one which appears not to have been drawn upon in the design and organization of the houses pictured in the photographs of either Antick or Kearney¹⁰⁸.

This paper opened with a quote from Seamus Heaney’s essay on the “poetics of architecture�” in contemporary Ireland, and, having wrought its way between sometimes fragile and often diverging lines of argument, it finds itself back at the same place: wondering what sort of cultural nationalism is articulated through the criticism of Bungalow Bliss. And, not only what it achieves, but who its achievement reassures. If those of us active in the culture and heritage industries can now stand comfortably before the architecture of Norman and Anglo-Irish occupation (feeling neither politically or aesthetically oppressed by its continued occupation of our territory), why is the presence of the bungalows, the dwelling of choice for so many of our indigenous people, so intolerable¹⁰⁹?

The work undertaken in this project — in the photographs, exhibitions, conferences, installations and paintings — suggests that the paradox lies somewhere in the cultural politics of architecture in a country only now reaching maturity. In _Ireland After History_, David Lloyd argues that the idea of cultural nationalism in Ireland is — or has been — premised on the need to retrieve for a people an authentic tradition that will differentiate it “culturally if not racially from those that surround or occupy it¹¹⁰.�”

Perhaps Lloyd has pinpointed the problems for an architectural nationalism in Ireland: any such project is premised on the existence of a collective or shared tradition, no matter how deeply buried. If cultural nationalism — even the hybrid and Anglo-centric nationalism of bungalow critics — seeks to bring back cultural forms that have survived colonization “in the deep history of a people and to use these to oppose the hybrid and grafted forms that have emerged in the forced mixing of cultures that colonization entails”,� then the fight against the hybrid bungalow and the advocacy of the whitewashed cottage can be seen as one such act¹¹¹.

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Notes [cont’d]

⁹⁷ Graham, 195.

⁹⁸ Gibbons, 179.

⁹⁹ Declan Kiberd’s Inventing Ireland (1996) continues to be one of the most important studies of the relationship between Irish literature, discourse and identity from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries.

¹⁰⁰ Barnes and Duncan, 11–12.

¹⁰¹ In the essay, “Glocalization: Time-Space and Global Culture”,� Roland Robertson argues that the term “glocalization�” more adequately describes the relationship between the local and the global as one of interaction and interpretation rather than of binary opposites: “It makes no good sense to define the global as if the global excludes the local”.� See Roland Robertson, “Glocalization: Time-Space and Global Culture”,� in Global Modernities, eds. Featherstone, Lash and Robertson (London: Sage, 1995), 2–37.

¹⁰² Robertson, 34.

¹⁰³ Anderson quoted in Johnson, “Making Space: Gaeltacht Policy and the Politics of Identity�” in Graham (1997), 174

¹⁰⁴ Johnson, 176.

¹⁰⁵ Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1965), 68.

¹⁰⁶ Ibid.

¹⁰⁷ Graham, 172

¹⁰⁸ Joanne Lacey, interview from Liverpool Transcripts (private collection), 2001.

¹⁰⁹ Heaney, Seamus, 68–72.

¹¹⁰ Lloyd, p. 91

¹¹¹ Ibid.

© Aoife Mac Namara 2005