The Goal is Soul

Everyone by now, as the semester endgame asserts itself, feels like they're singing their own personal "Weary Blues," right? Anyway, I just wanted to create this thread in order to invite more comments on The Commitments. It seems like I appreciate and enjoy the film more and more every time I see it. There's clearly a generational theme in the film: Roddy Doyle was about 30 when he wrote the novel, and although he's in his mid to late 50s now we can still think of him as someone associated with the "new" Ireland (away from the constricting ideologies and narratives of the past) and as one of the most important Irish writers of his generation. We see this generational slant, of course, in the movement towards music and away from the commitments to state and church (Elvis above the Pope, right). We might say it rejects traditional Irishness (and thus the pieties of state affiliation), as well, in the music the characters adopt (and this strikes me as different from "The Dead," when the appearance of "The Lass of Aughrim," a traditional ballad with connections to the west of Ireland, seems to be valorized at the end, at least relative to the earlier conversation about opera and the classical tradition): the audition scene at Jimmy's apartment was telling in this regard, as what we saw there was a bunch of aspiring Irish musicians who were all over the musical map in terms of the traditions and identities they were peddling. In this sense, the novel/film seem to be making an argument against single, univocal, essential identities, which of course were the cause of so much trouble and pain in twentieth century Ireland.

Hybrid identities find an apt metaphor in soul, too, which we know to be a kind of fusion of gospel, blues, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll. My sense is that the Gilroy essay has some useful passages for this kind of blending, especially when he talks about the discourse of authenticity and the need for an "anti-anti-essentialism" that might allow us to move beyond old and narrow ways of thinking about identity into "wider, as yet uncharted, worlds" (110). Soul is an interesting metaphor, too, in terms of Irish identity. There seems to be no soul in Joyce's Dublin at times, and Gabriel Conroy learns that the fire has gone out of his soul. Contemporary Irish literature often defies our tendency to think of the Irish as being all about soulful rebellion by time and again (at least through the 1980s and early 1990s) depicting a void at the heart of Irish society. That's why these musicians and young people in the film are so symbolically important, representing as they do a new direction into the future. I'm reminded, too, of U2's Bono, who has often ended live performances of their song, "Beautiful Day" with the impassioned refrain, "the goal is soul!" There's also a short essay by Bono, which appeared in Richard Kearney's book Across the Frontiers, in which Bono invokes some of the race/class/identity issues we discussed last week ("I'm black 'an I'm proud!"). Discussing U2's influences (in the 1980s, in particular), Bono notes that "We started looking into American music, Gospel, Blues, the likes of Robert Johnson ... John Lee Hooker. Old songs of fear and faith. As I said when we first started the band, we felt like outsiders in Rock Music but these themes were very much inside U2, they were also very Irish.... The Irish, like the blacks, feel like outsiders. There's a feeling of being homeless, migrant, but I suppose that's what art is -- a search for identity. The images of our songs are confused, classical, biblical, American, Irish, English, but not in a negative sense. The fight, the struggle for a synthesis is what's interesting about them. The idea of an incomplete, questioning, even abandoned identity is very attractive to me."

So, we appreciate the uplifting and efficacious effect of music-making in The Commitments, and we take comfort in the fact that even though the band self-destructs at the end, each member seems to emerge as a stronger person. It's a novel, a film about finding fulfillment, raising one's self-esteem (making a commitment to oneself), changing and taking control of one's life, finding and having a voice. "Better to pass boldly into the next world ..."