Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

by Fintan O'Toole

‘The fact is that, in spite of the way we behave, we cannot any longer feel that the infliction of pain is merely funny’ GEORGE ORWELL, 1944

I grew up with those contradictions. The official Irish culture of my childhood and youth was one that defined Ireland as whatever England was not. England was Protestant; so Catholicism had to be the essence of Irish identity.

And, though Catholicism was an important point of distinction, it is also true that many Irish people preferred to live in England because they could escape from Irish sexual prejudice and repression.

is a short journey into what Raymond Williams called a ‘structure of feeling’: the strange sense of imaginary oppression that underlies Brexit.

Crudely, passionate nationalism has taken two antagonistic forms. There is an imperial nationalism and an anti-imperial nationalism; one sets out to dominate the world, the other to throw off such dominance. The incoherence of the new English nationalism that lies behind Brexit is that it wants to be both simultaneously.

So, besides grandiosity and gloom, there was always intellectual indolence. It is important to keep this in mind because it is a strain in English public discourse about Europe that would never go away.

Membership of the Common Market was therefore sold – and grudgingly accepted – primarily as a sovereign remedy for Britain’s economic ills.

‘If,’ Harris wrote in the introduction to the twentieth-anniversary edition in 2012, ‘there was one factor that suddenly gave my fantasy of a united Germany a harder edge, it was the news that exactly such an entity was unexpectedly returning to the heart of Europe.’

With Brexit, England would experience the consequences of not being careful what you wish for.

Franklin was, as Stephanie Barczewski puts it in her richly illuminating history Heroic Failure and the British, ‘a failure on a monumental scale, but he nonetheless became one of the greatest Victorian heroes’.

By 1854, the Admiralty alone had spent £600,000 (tens of millions in today’s values) looking for Franklin. ‘Some of the rescue expeditions had themselves had to be rescued.’5 Heroic failure acted like a magnet, drawing ever more failure towards itself.

The English could afford to celebrate glorious failure because they were actually highly successful – the myths of suffering and endurance covered up the truth that it was mostly other people who had to endure the suffering.