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‘Irish writer’ normally means a writer of fiction. Ireland loves fiction. An Irish writer who engages creatively with reality is a rarity, and most of the few who do so emigrate or die frustrated. Uniquely in Europe, Irish magazine shops do not offer a home-produced magazine of ideas. My essay “On Thinking in Ireland”, which you can reach by clicking here, deals with this unbalanced state of affairs.
Speaking more generally, it must
be obvious that it is better to go through life seeing rather than not seeing. Seeing, for example, that when an ideology - Christianity, Communism, consumerist liberalism - is powerful in a country, it is powerful - shapes how people think and live – because its worldview and its rules are endorsed by the rulers; it is preached everywhere; and many believe the preaching, more or less; in that order of importance. My essays, here and in my books, are attempts to see things clearly.
I invite you to read or print off the following essays:
Comments via the Contact facility are welcome. I need feedback to see more clearly still.
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My New Book
Written in Maynooth 2007-2008
Ireland After the End of Western Civilisation (2009)
[This book like my other books in print can be purchased by using the appropriate Link or Amazon.co. uk]
The West's present system of rules for individual, interpersonal and international behaviour has replaced that of European civilisation. A utopian experiment that originated in and emanated. from the USA, it is a western parallel to the similarly post-European Soviet experiment of recent memory.
Being, like its Soviet counterpart, a rootless ideological construct, it does not make sense to westerners as a framework for life, but pains and frustrates them. It has lasted until now merely owing to the constant increase of the power to buy things and do things which it has been providing to states and consumers. When that dual increase ceases, it will dissolve into social chaos, leaving the task of building the widely desired new civilisation to a future generation.
Those are the bare bones of Desmond Fennell's ground-breaking account of the recent history and present condition of the western world - an account which is given pressing relevance by the West's economic crisis. It is also the context in which - in a series of essays dated and set in the weeks leading up to the Lisbon Treaty referendum of 2008 - he discusses the referendum campaigns; the European Union; the soft totalitarianism of contemporary western government; the decline of Irish Catholicism; Terry Keane and Charles Haughey; Irish Times and Irish people; confusion in Dublin's art museums; and the Dundrum Shopping Centre. Belfast: Athol Books, www.atholbooks.org ISBN 978 08034 120 1, pp.102 |
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Written in Anguillara and Dublin 2004-06
About Behaving Normally in Abnormal Circumstances (2007)
Ireland in my early years constitutes the ‘abnormal circumstances’ of the title essay. Having reached adulthood with a ‘normal’ interest in the world at large, a compulsion to write about it, and an assumption that the Irish were normally human, I found myself at odds with the established writing practice of my compatriots, academics included. For them, it seemed, an unwritten law had decreed that they should write only about Ireland and its affairs, past and present. Fate had rendered the Irish a ‘special’ people, set apart from mankind.
After recounting how I lived through and tackled this abnormal situation, I proceed on my accustomed way. In essays, ranging from meditative to perhaps startling, I explore Irish history and the Irish present, early Italian painting, Winckelmann’s myth-making, Europe’s history and its present plight, the defeat of feminism, the special position of the Jews, and the birth of Amerope.
Finally, in a diary where I relate the backgroundto many of these essays, discuss the Irish lack of enterprise, and end up in Maynooth, I offer a view of the author as worker and private man.
Belfast: Athol Books, www.atholbooks.org ISBN 9-780-85034-116-7 |
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Other Books Since 1996Written
in Seattle 1995
Uncertain Dawn: Hiroshima and the Beginning of
Postwestern Civilisation (1996)
The
USA was never a dependency of Western Europe but it was a product
of its European civilisation and until World War II a junior partner
in the shaping of modern western civilisation. Since the atomic
massacre of Hiroshima, which made America a superpower, was endorsed
by the West as a virtuous act, all that has changed. The common
civilisation is postwestern and shaped by the United States in its
New American departure; it is Ameropean civilisation. Western Europe
has grown accustomed to depending on and imitating New America.
Previously, from its emergence out of the marriage of Christian
Roman survivals with Germanic and Celtic peoples, Western Europe
had produced and shaped its historical ages. Now it lives in an
age that has been determined not by itself but, with its consent,
by American superpower.
Desmond Fennell, having set this scene, explores New American civilisation
as the chief artefact of American superpower and the master-mirror
of our postmodern, postwestern age. Alternating a personal travel
journal with lucid public reflection, he invites us to consider
the paradoxical fulfilment of the Enlightenment’s anti-European
dream; the transformation of a Protestant, Liberal republic into
a great pagan, collectivist empire; the dethroning of reason by
mass emotion and its electronic management; the rise of the religion
of naturism; the proliferation of new rules and new sins to replace
the rejected ones; the stimulation of compassion for a great variety
of approved victims; the fomented assault on able-bodied, heterosexual,
white-skinned men and the civilisation they created. Setting New
America’s radical breakaway in the context of similar attempts
in Europe, beginning with the French Revolution, Fennell sees lessons
to learn from the failed Soviet attempt. In our nervous refusal
to think through our new civilisation, and supply it with a coherent
humanism that embraces massacre with all the rest, he finds the
principal internal threat to its successful endurance.
Dublin, Sanas Press, ISBN 0 9522582 1
8 (out of print)
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Written
in Dublin 1996
Dreams of Oranges: An Eyewitness Account of the
Fall of Communist East
Germany (1996)
There
is a time to stop when visiting a museum, and it is before blurring
and fatigue set in. Leaving the Pergamon, I recross the footbridge
and set off along the canal bank towards Marx-Engels-Platz. It is
a balmy twilight, going on for six o’clock. Soon the white
and brown palace of the Republic comes into view, and the vans and
lorries of the television companies parked beside it on the Platz,
some of them with satellite dishes mounted. Tomorrow night the Palace,
built to symbolise the Republic, will be the headquarters of the
election count that ends it. My head full of Nebuchadnezzar and
the rising and falling of states and empires, I think: this is the
last evening of the Marxist-Leninist GDR, the last time the sun
goes down on it. I wonder what Erich Honecker is thinking. Crowds
are still strolling along the Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse. As I cross
Marx-Engels-Platz, the fawn television tower stands against the
blue Hotel Stadt Berlin, and the neon lights are coming on singly.
By the time I reach the other side, behind the Palace, the cars
on Werderstrasse have their lights on. Police are standing around
in groups, presumably to protect the election headquarters.
A poignant moment from Desmond Fennell’s account of the obsequies
of socialism. Was it a natural death, murder, or suicide? The author’s
verdict on the demise of the two-hundred-year-old socialist project
is suicide while under the blinding influence of religious fervour.
Dublin, Sanas Press, ISBN 0 9522582 2
6 (distributed by Veritas, www.veritas.com)
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Written
in Anguillara 1997-8
The Postwestern Condition: Between Chaos and Civilisation
(1999)
A
civilisation is essentially a hierarchical set of rules of behaviour
which is subscribed to by rulers and ruled throughout an extensive
territory for a long time. It lasts because it makes sense. In recent
decades the West, led by the rulers of the USA, has rejected many
characteristic rules of western civilisation and replaced them with
new rules. This has amounted in effect to the end of western civilisation
and movement towards a new one: a venture not unlike that which
began in Russia in 1917. Not merely ‘postmodern’, the
present age is postwestern. The break began when the West, led by
the American president, pronounced the Hiroshima massacre virtuous
and armed itself with atomic bombs. That overthrew and replaced
a central rule of western civilisation: ‘massacre is immoral
and
forbidden’.
The new collection of rules and related values is chaotic, does
not make sense. So life, as presented to people, lacks sense. People
find sense, mainly, in the constant increase of spendable money,
public and private, and of the things that money can buy. This dependence
for sense on something that can easily end makes the Ameropean system
fragile; as fragile as the Soviet system in its last decade. To
prevent a collapse into chaos when the money stops increasing -
to preserve the essence of what we have - we must transform the
system into a civilisation: organise its values and rules as a coherent
hierarchy, and win authority and acceptance for this new manifestation
of sense.
Two things threaten the success of such an effort. The present
chaos of values, rules and interpersonal relations suits the rulers,
preachers and capitalists who jointly control the system; it feeds
their collective power. In the US unhappiness has been increasing
about the endorsement of Hiroshima - the moral decision on which
our postwestern world, from its nuclear armament to its rules and
values, ultimately rests.
London, Minerva Press, ISBN 0 75411 145
8
(distributed by Veritas, www. veritas.com)
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Written
in Anguillara 1999-2001
The Turning Point: My Sweden Year And After (2001)
Between
the 1960s and the 1990s, through his journalism, books and pamphlets,
Desmond Fennell acquired a wide and varied readership. Immersed
as he was in the affairs of Ireland - the art scene in Dublin, the
implementation of the Second Vatican Council, the restatement of
Irish identity, the completion of the Irish Revolution, decentralisation
of government, solving the Northern problem - it became apparent
to readers that they were dealing with an unusual kind of Irish
intellectual, not readily assignable to any of the usual Irish categories.
In The Turning Point, Desmond Fennell reveals the story of his
intellectual development from his teenage years in Dublin to the
1990s in that same city. The book’s focus, however, is on
his thirty-first year, 1960, which he spent largely in Sweden. Sweden
was to have been the culmination of eight years spent by Fennell
in Europe and Asia enlarging his knowledge of the world and mankind.
Sweden was then the avant-garde country of the western world, the
place where the future was being pioneered, and he went there believing
that he would relish that future. But the reverse occurred, with
a result that shaped his life in the following decades. Disappointed
and shocked by what he found there, his worldview fell apart. Returning
to Ireland, he was faced with the task of reconstructing a view
of the age that corresponded with its reality.
In his final chapter, ‘The Rest of My Life So Far’,
Fennell recounts his battle against the tide in a Republic of Ireland
that, far from completing the Revolution, was becoming a province
again.
The Turning Point is an extraordinary piece of vivid narrative
and searching introspection by one of Ireland’s most creative
thinkers, who now lives in Italy.
Dublin, Sanas Press, !SBN 0 9522582 3 4 (hbk),
0 9522582 5 0 (pbk), distributed by Veritas, www. veritas. com |
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Written
in Anguillara 2000-02
The Revision of European History (2003)
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In this conversational book Desmond
Fennell provides three
things in one:
- a critique of the standard History of Europe as found in textbooks
and works of reference, on the grounds that it is distorted by
‘imprecise designation’ and ‘victors’
history’ and does not make sense for Europeans in the twenty-first
century;
- a manual which enables readers of the ‘standard history’,
wherever encountered, to note the main distortions and make appropriate
mental corrections;
- an outlined ‘new history of Europe’ which would
be ‘true and clear’ and make sense for Europeans living
in the twenty-first century (see page 79)
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Athol Books, Belfast www.atholbooks.
org ISBN 0 85034 104 3 |
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Written in Dublin and Anguillara 1994-2003
Cutting to the Point: Essays and Objections 1994-2003 (2003)
For almost forty years, Desmond Fennell has written lucidly and cogently on a variety of issues concerning Ireland and the wider western world, often clashing with the Irish liberal-revisionist ascendancy. This book comes ten years after his last collection of essays, Heresy: The Battle of Ideas in Ireland.
In this new collection, Fennell’s subject matter ranges from Graham Knuttel’s paintings, Irish Studies in the United States and ‘the European dialect of Lingua Humana’ to a Rilke poem, the relationships of religion and nationalism, Irish literary studies in Italy, and the personal story of ‘a new friend suddenly lost’. Other essays are entitled ‘A Provincial Passion: Cleansing Irish Literature of Irishness’, ‘The Recent Birth and Chequered Career of “Rural Ireland”’, ‘Three Views of Reality: The Poetry of Higgins, Kavanagh and Heaney’ and ‘News for Dublin 4: God Is Alive and Thriving’. In an Epilogue, ‘The Author as a Dublin Liberal Problem’, Fennell deals analytically and definitively with his treatment by the liberal-revisionist Correctorate.
Dublin: The Liffey Press, ISBN 1-904148-35-2
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