Fintan O’Toole is one of the most respected columnists and literary journalists working in the English language. He writes for the Irish Times and is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books. His latest book, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain, is an excoriating cultural analysis of the political ideas behind Brexit.
You argue that English nationalism is the ghost in the Brexit machine. Why do you think that is?
From the turn of the century onwards, you have this extraordinary rise of the idea of England as a political community [ie, a popular desire for England-only legislation voted on by English-only politicians]. All the public opinion surveys show this. It’s very odd and I can’t think of any other parallels where it happens without a political party, without newspapers, without a national theatre. There’s no WB Yeats of English nationalism. So it’s not very well articulated. It’s a set of feelings rather than a political programme and Brexit offers itself as the way to address it. It says here’s the way to express yourself with an English identity. But it doesn’t answer it.
In your book, you criticise the way parallels have been made between Brexit and the 100 years war. What is the main problem?
A single word: vassalage. What on earth is this word doing in political discourse in the 21st century? I was struck by its re-emergence. It comes originally from Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson, this mad idea that somehow the 100 years war shows the English capacity to throw off feudal vassalage. It’s a ludicrous misunderstanding of history. The war was more like Charles Taylor in Sierre Leone – a hideous crime against humanity. To go back to that as the only thing you have to express what English freedom might mean in the 21st century shows how demented it is.
You also write about the long English tradition of clinging romantically to heroic defeat. What do you ascribe this to?
George Orwell wrote about this in the early 1940s. He said that it was extraordinary that if you think about the poems that English schoolkids will know, they’re all about defeats or retreats or disasters. It’s Scott of the Antarctic, it’s the Charge of the Light Brigade, it’s Gordon of Khartoum. That tradition of heroic failure was great when you were ruling the world as it was a way of saying we’re not really a nasty imperial power. But in a post-imperial age you get a farcical version. Because originally the thing that characterised heroic failure in the English imagination was not self-pity, but Brexit is full of hysterical self-pity.
You describe a false caricature of Germany, put about by Brexiters, of an expansionist nation. You also say that the EU, and especially Germany, had a need to severely punish debtor countries. Is Germany the glue that holds the EU together or a controlling villain?
There’s no doubt that Germany is the major power in Europe, and that’s one of the things going on with Brexit. It’s this idea that this country we defeated twice in the 20th century is now seen as the dominant power. That leads to fantasies that Britain really lost the war and we’re being taken over insidiously by the Germans. The real problem with the Germans isn’t that they’re trying to take over Europe. It’s that they’ve promulgated a very heavy austerity that is deeply ingrained in the German mentality. The irony is, it’s exactly the policy that the Tory Brexiters themselves were pursuing.
Some critics believe the EU is like the Hotel California. You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave. Why did Ireland reject the treaty of Lisbon in 2008 and then accept it in 2009?
It’s a real pity that David Cameron didn’t study the Irish referendums before calling one. Because what happens in referendums is that it’s a Yes, No and people vote on a whole set of generalised feelings about their own country, about their own particular situations. They’re sorts of tests of public mood rather than about the substance. What happened with Ireland is we said, did we really think through the consequences? Let’s talk about this, then see how the people feel. And in the second referendum more people turned out. The weird thing in the Brexit mentality is that June 2016 was this sacred moment of history that can never ever be revisited. If you can’t have second thoughts, you don’t have democracy.
What’s going to happen now?
I’m increasingly convinced that there will be a second referendum. The Sherlock Holmes principle is always a good one: you eliminate the impossible and whatever remains, however improbable, must be the solution. The second referendum has always been highly improbable but everything else is looking impossible. There’s just no deal that the Europeans can do that can get through the House of Commons. And no deal is so catastrophic that you have to hope that no sane parliament would allow it. So the one thing left is a second referendum.
What books are on your bedside table?
I’m catching up with Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick, which I probably should have read years ago. And also a wonderful book by a woman called Emilie Pine, called Notes to Self, a series of personal essays beautifully written. The other thing is by Derek Mahon, who’s 77 and had given up writing poems, and he’s down in West Cork and he’s just published a book called Against the Clock, which is about dying but also about climate change. And it’s absolutely wonderful.
What’s the last really great book you read?
Actually the last really great book I read was Jonathan Sumption’s extraordinary history of The Hundred Years War. It’s utterly riveting. So far, four hefty volumes and you just wish it wouldn’t ever end.
Which classic novel did you read recently for the first time?
Believe it or not, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Everybody’s talking about it as being very prescient in all sorts of ways. You’ve got the two dystopias, 1984 and then Brave New World. People say we’re more like BNW in this soporific culture, where we’ve given up all striving and are being managed, but I still think there’s some 1984 going on as well.
Which classic novel are you most ashamed not to have read?
Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. I’ve tried about five times. The problem is with me. It’s obviously a great book, but I just get bogged down.
Which book would you give to a young person?
Best thing that happened to me when I was young was that my father told me that everyone had read the complete works of Shakespeare by the time they were 14. It was life-transforming for me. I wrote a book some years ago called Shakespeare Is Hard, But So Is Life, which was aimed at young people. You can be enormously enriched by artistic experiences that you’re not fully capable of intellectually processing.
Which book or author do you always return to?
At the moment I return to Samuel Beckett, particular his later work. He’s such a giant in theatre and fiction, and those late Beckett pieces are like nothing else in the world. It’s like an imagination at the end of its tether. People find Beckett bleak, but at the moment he’s incredibly consoling for his lack of self-pity. You carry on, you keep the imagination alive and you keep trying to make something beautiful out of things, however bleak they may be. I find that almost religious. I gave up on religion a very long time ago, but there’s something in those Beckett texts that actually has that force of meaning and consolation to us.
