Extract
. The Brexiteers incanted a mixture of the first and second world wars to generate a mythical Britain in which to be British was to be heroic, ethical, and enlightened. The reactivation of this ancient spirit, they suggested, could unify an increasingly incoherent land torn apart by the same European enemy that it had once defeated.
Just like the aged narrators of the poems contemplating their own fate, the Brexiteers positioned Britain as an ancient, declining force poised on the brink of a glorious eternity. In spite of Britain’s post-imperial belatedness, that sense of already being too late, they contended that this ancient spirit could make the jaded land young again. Placing themselves against the shattering experience that was the loss of Britain’s global sway, they promised a world in which a simpler, more glorious past was to be restored.
Against the already ambivalent content of a quest vision of this sort, even darker resonances emerge. It was precisely this sort of fantastical history, in which to renew was to return to a purer past, that provided the tenacious narrative underpinnings of fascism. Tennyson’s aged sovereign Ulysses is a nationalist strongman before such a term existed, who “mete[s] and dole[s] / Unequal laws unto a savage race”, while Yeats and Eliot’s flirtations with autocracy are infamous. The quest narrative of national renewal is dangerous precisely to the extent that it promises to redeem: Make America Great Againand all that.
Brexit is and always has been a political theology. By keying into this elemental narrative, leavers could lend weight and meaning to their campaign through an intuitive, if often unconscious, historical plot. For those progressives who wish to fight Brexit, the urgent issue becomes whether they too can find a similarly deep story to tell about the UK’s relationship with the world about it.
A comment
An interesting and relevant article.
The go-to poem for Brexit must surely be Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” which seems uncannily prescient. From Wikipedia:
The tale begins with the ship departing on its journey. Despite initial good fortune, the ship is driven south by a storm and eventually reaches Antarctic waters. An albatross appears and leads them out of the ice jam where they are stuck, but even as the albatross is praised by the ship’s crew, the mariner shoots the bird:
With my cross-bow,
I shot the albatross.They soon find that they made a grave mistake in supporting this crime, as it arouses the wrath of spirits who then pursue the ship “from the land of mist and snow”; the south wind that had initially led them from the land of ice now sends the ship into uncharted waters
Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.The very deep did rot – Oh Christ!
That ever this should be.
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs,
Upon the slimy sea.The sailors change their minds again and blame the mariner for the torment of their thirst. In anger, the crew forces the mariner to wear the dead albatross about his neck, perhaps to illustrate the burden he must suffer from killing it, or perhaps as a sign of regret:
Ah! Well a-day! What evil looks
Had I from old and young!
Instead of the cross, the albatross
About my neck was hung.One by one, all of the crew members die, but the mariner lives on, seeing for seven days and nights the curse in the eyes of the crew’s corpses, whose last expressions remain upon their faces.
The air is cut away before,
And closes from behind.Finally the mariner comes in sight of his homeland, but is initially uncertain as to whether or not he is hallucinating.
The rotten remains of the ship sink in a whirlpool, leaving only the mariner behind.
Theresa May might wear chunky pearls around her neck, but they surely represent an albatross. In years to come, May will be stumbling around the Houses of Parliament, weighed down by her beads and rambling about the dead spirits adrift in a soulless ocean.
How my heart sings 