On Friday morning, trying to get away from Brexit, I got on an exercise machine to mortify the flesh. Fleeing the radio, I turned my iPod on to shuffle.
Up popped a random song that I must have heard before but didn't remember: Nic Jones singing a ballad about the disillusioning aftermath of a 19th century gold rush:
“Farewell to the gold that never I found
Goodbye to the nuggets that somewhere abound
For it’s only when dreaming that I see you gleaming
Down in the dark, deep underground.”
So much for escaping Brexit. Only when dreaming could they see it gleaming. Brexit has always existed in the deep dark underground of the English reactionary imagination. And this is what gives it such a strange, hallucinatory quality.
It is hard sometimes to remind yourself that it is really happening, that we won’t awake soon and turn to our partners and say, with Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “I have had a dream – past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream.” But if you write about Brexit, this is what you become: an ass who goes about expounding someone else’s dream.
At 5.30 on the morning of Friday, December 7th 2017, I was sleeping soundly in Laurel Villa, a lovely guest house in Magharafelt, Co Derry. In my dream, my mobile phone was buzzing angrily on a bedside table and some mad person with an English accent was saying things about Theresa May and Michel Barnier and Brussels and the withdrawal agreement.
Right here and now, who can deny that English Dreamtime is a nightmare from which we are all struggling to awake?
I distinctly remember thinking that it was not a good thing that this stuff was invading my dreams, that, if my sleeping brain was conjuring these invasive images, I really needed to get a life.
And then it struck me that I was in fact awake, that I had actually answered the phone and that someone in London really was asking me to go on the radio and comment on the deal that was emerging after all-night talks. I had experienced one of those eerie moments of befuddlement, probably no more than a second or two, where you hang between two states, one that is imaginary but seems real and one that is all too real but seems like it ought to be imaginary.
I’ve never quite been able to shake off the feeling that this is oddly apt: Brexit does have that weird logic of dreams, where things seem to flow from one another in some rational sequence but also leap from impossibilities to absurdities.
In July, when Boris Johnson, with his usual propensity for walking away from the trouble he has created, resigned from Theresa May's cabinet, he lamented in his letter to her that; "The dream is dying, suffocated by needless self-doubt."
The metaphor is awkwardly mixed – how do you suffocate a dream? – but this dream language was striking nonetheless. It was echoed in a mournful editorial in the Daily Telegraph (where Johnson soon found a luxury lifeboat from which to whine about everybody else’s failure to do what he had so ignominiously failed to accomplish himself), lamenting May’s Chequers plan for Brexit: “This was the weekend that the Brexit dream died . . . the dream has been dashed”.
English Dreamtime
I started to think about this dreaming: what is it that gleams in the deep dark underground of England's dreams? A line by that great Anglo-Irish thinker Johnny Rotten came to mind: "There is no future in England's dreaming." But what past is there then? It has to be a kind of counter-factual past, a landscape of dark myths. For how else can we explain the force that underlies Brexit: imaginary oppression?
At some level, in order to get to Brexit, a society has to dream itself into a condition that it never experienced. Indeed, it has to dream itself into exactly the opposite condition to the one it actually did experience.
A great colonial power has to imagine itself as having been colonised by the EU. A country still obsessed by the war it won – the second World War – has to imagine itself as having been defeated (this time sneakily and stealthily) by the Germans. These are very, very strange things for a country to do to itself and they require some explanation.
So after Boris Johnson’s claim that “the dream is dying” I decided to write a short book exploring what I call English Dreamtime, that mental landscape of heroic failure in which loss and grief are somehow more solid than success and contentment.
It became, I’m afraid, a little treatise on self-pity as a pleasurable indulgence, even as it leads to self-harm. In another kind of history this would seem neither here nor there, too far out to have any immediate connection to unfolding political and economic realities.
In another, more rational time, dark fantasies of imaginary oppression would be confined to the pages of dystopian counter-factual thrillers. But right here and now, who can deny that English Dreamtime is a nightmare from which we are all struggling to awake?
Fintan O'Toole's Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain is published today by Head of Zeus