The Sacrificial Emplotment of National Identity. Pádraic Pearse and the 1916 Easter Uprising

AbstractA sense of national identification remains amorphous and inert unless it is cognitively structured and motivationally oriented. Perhaps the most consequential way of structuring and orienting nationalism is through emplotment (organizing in the form of a story). Emplotment commonly follows one of a few cross-culturally recurring genres. In nationalist contexts, the heroic genre-treating military conflict, loss or potential loss, and reasserted sovereignty-is the default form. However, this default may be overridden in particular circumstances. When social devastation precludes heroic achievement, a sacrificial emplotment-treating collective sin, punishment, sacrifice, and redemption-is often particularly salient. Earlier work has examined cases of sacrificial emplotment in its most extreme varieties (treating Hitler and Gandhi). The following essay considers a more ordinary case, the sacrificial nationalism of the prominent Irish anti-colonial revolutionary, Padraic Pearse, as represented in his plays.KeywordsEmplotment, genre, heroic narrative, nationalism, Padraic Pearse, sacrificial narrativeIntroductionIt has been clear since at least Benedict Anderson's (1991) Imagined Communities that we do not have some sort of simple and direct access to national identity. Cognitively, national identification needs to be structured; emotionally, it needs to be motivated. In Understanding Nationalism (Hogan 2009), I have argued that one of the most important ways in which nationalist identification is organized and oriented is through emplotment. Emplotment, most influentially discussed by Hayden White (1973), is the narrative shaping of a history or a condition. It involves selecting and construing events in ways consistent with a particular story structure, typically following the pattern of a prominent genre.The first section of the following essay briefly outlines the emplotment of nationalism, stressing in particular the sacrificial genre. The second section takes up some broad considerations regarding the role of sacrificial emplotment in anti-colonial Irish nationalism generally and in the 1916 Easter Uprising in particular. The third section turns to Padraic Pearse, both a playwright and a leader of the 1916 Uprising. Subsequent sections consider three of Pearse's plays, addressing their relation to sacrificial nationalism.The analysis developed across these sections has three main purposes. First, it aims to illustrate a common form of nationalist sacrificial emplotment, perhaps the most common form, but one that was not represented in Understanding Nationalism. Second, it seeks to demonstrate the continuity between imaginative narrative organization and actual political action. To do this, it focuses on the relatively unusual situation of a major revolutionary figure who was also a writer of fictional narrative. Finally, it sets out to do all this by way of an examination of Pearse, thereby, I hope, furthering our understanding of this historically important figure as well.Emplotting nationalismNationalism is not simply a set of beliefs or ideas.2 It is equally, perhaps more importantly, a set of story structures that guide both understanding and emotional response. There are many such structures-organized and oriented by human emotion systems-that may be used to emplot national identification. The most prominent is the heroic structure. Specifically, heroic tragi-comedy is a cross-culturally recurring prototype with two components-usurpation and threat/defense-bearing on individual and in-group pride and the related desires for individual and in-group dominance. The usurpation sequence concerns the internal subversion and restoration of a society's legitimate governance. The threat/defense sequence concerns the conquest of the home society by an external enemy and the eventual restoration of autonomy. This is, so to speak, the default form of emplotment for nationalism, the form that, for example, serves to justify war. …