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.IRISH
STUDIES
ROUND THE WORLD
— 2009 —
David Pierce (ed.)
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Reflections on Irish Writing in 2009
David Pierce
2009 has been
a year for reflection, filtered in part through the publication of
letters and correspondence. A year ago I was writing about the
economic downturn, but this has now been augmented by the loss of
something as profound. Ireland is facing another period of radical
adjustment, the outcome of which will remain uncertain possibly for
years to come. What gives a certain edge to recent events is that
bishops can resign and reforms be announced, but all that is on the
basis of something painful, which is continuing. For cultural
historians and those dealing in time-lines longer than the present,
the revelation of abuse has come not so much as a shock as a
recognition that the ‘Troubles’ has a wider application than simply
being about politics or the North. Equally, the enormity of the
abuse has highlighted once again the role of the Church in post-Independence
Ireland. One conclusion we might legitimately draw is that the
concentration of power and the lack of transparency have contributed
in no small measure to the current malaise. Of course, many of the
young have long since stopped looking to the Church for guidance, so
there is some other kind of vacuum or hollowing out now beginning to
clamour for attention. It will be for later historians to determine
whether what is happening forms part of a larger crisis associated
with loss and the struggle for a new identity.
If the
scandal of recent sexual abuses highlights the deformity in
relations between the private and the public, then the
correspondence of Samuel Beckett underlines the importance of the
private as a defence against the public world. Indeed, there is no
better place to return us to ourselves than by attending to the
Irish writer who, above all others, hated cant and pomposity and who
constantly stops us in our tracks. “How can one write here,” Beckett
confides to Tom McGreevy on returning to teach at Trinity College,
Dublin, “when every day vulgarises one’s hostility and turns anger
into irritation and petulance?” (49; 5 October 1930). To my mind, it
was appropriate that The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1929-1940
were published to mixed reviews this past year, for Beckett never
fails to defeat expectation. If anyone was hoping to behold a writer
in the making or in full flow, they would have been not a little
disappointed. By way of contrast, D.H. Lawrence in his letters
frequently reaches the same pitch of heightened prose that we
encounter in his novels, but this is not the case with Beckett in
the 1930s. That said, there is enough of interest for the student of
Irish Studies to ponder and value.
On display
throughout these letters are Beckett’s difficulties in writing, of
putting pen to paper, in his home country. In turn, those
difficulties become the whetstone not only for Beckett understanding
his plight but also for developing his imagination. In that 1930
letter just quoted, it isn’t that he is hostile to the world but
that the world vulgarises his hostility. This is the Beckett country
we are familiar with, where plight and imagination become
inseparable. We are inside the folds of his personality. This is
Beckett one step removed not from reality but from the world, both
of which - both reality and the world — are then
redefined. In 1932, as if anticipating one of the leitmotifs of his
later work, the despairing Beckett tells McGreevy, “Nothing seems to
come off” (121). Wherever he turns, he meets with little success and
receives what he thinks is more than his fair share of rejections
from publishers and editors of literary journals, but he cannot
allow the matter to rest there, turning rejection slips into humour
at the expense of those who didn’t see a Nobel prize-winner for
Literature in the making. Chatto and Windus is recast as “Shaton and
Windup”, a phrase that wouldn’t be out of place in Lucky’s speech in
Waiting for Godot, and it is one of those quips to lift the
heart of all aspiring authors undergoing similar treatment. The
publishers thought his novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women,
was wonderful, he tells McGreevy, but “they couldn’t they simply
could not” (125). For non-native speakers of English, the humorous
distinction here between ‘couldn’t’ and ‘could not’ is worth
pondering, for in certain contexts, as here, the distinction is not
about formality or informality but about a hardening in attitude and
how this gets to be represented in writing.
It is not
without interest that Beckett insisted that only those letters
pertinent to his published work should be made available. It would
be difficult to know what constitutes the line between relevant and
irrelevant — or pertinent and its opposite —
when it comes to any author but especially to Beckett. So I’m not
sure Beckett got this one right. In Beckett, the private acts as a
bulwark against the world and provides not only a defence against,
but an entry-point into, the public world. In that sense he
redefines the line between the public and the private.
His
correspondence, for example, is full of problems with digestion and
the limitations therefore of the body, and it is fitting that we
should read about what is happening to him physically, for this
constitutes the material and crucible of his imaginative vision.
“Dies diarrhoeae” (124), a day of diarrhoea, he writes amusingly at
one point echoing the ‘Dies Irae’ of the Requiem Mass of the Dead.
Elsewhere, as yet another reminder that he was ill-at-ease with
himself, we read of panic attacks he suffered at night.
As expected,
the letters shed further light on his relationship with Joyce,
though not on his relationship with Joyce’s daughter Lucia. An early
reference to his writing “stinking” of Joyce reminds us of his need
to swerve away from the father figure, and, appropriately, it is
expressed in terms of odours (81). In a phone call from his hotel in
Paris in 1937, he stumbles across a domestic scene of the great man
shaving and being protected by his wife: “I rang up Shem now and was
engaged by Norah [for Nora] while he finished his shave” (562).
‘Shem’, the son in Finnegans Wake, and the figure most
closely associated with Joyce himself, is the name Beckett used as a
shorthand for ‘Mr Joyce’ when speaking with those like McGreevy
inside the circle. After an evening at the Joyces in early January
1938, he observes, “He was sublime last night, deprecating with the
utmost conviction his lack of talent” (581). The following week,
Beckett is stabbed in a street in Paris and hospitalised. The
“lovable” Joyce was very solicitous for his fellow countryman,
arranging for his medical care (though there’s no letter about this
here), sending him bunches of Parma violets and going to visit him.
That same month, it is clear that Beckett is well on the way to
recuperating when, in a sentence which ends with the painter Jack B.
Yeats, whom he much admired, he writes about his chronic inability
to understand a phrase like “the Irish people” or “to imagine that
it ever gave a fart in its corduroys for any form of art whatsoever”
(599).
Some readers
might be tempted to conclude that Beckett’s antipathy toward Ireland
in these letters was the final word on the subject. In Beckett
and Contemporary Irish Writing (2009), Stephen Watt concurs with
Deirdre Bair: “Beckett had no pride in his Irishness; national
identity meant nothing to him” (199). According to Watt, by December
1931, “Beckett could no longer tolerate Dublin and escaped to
Germany and then Paris” (198-9). The letters tell a more complex
story, where frustration is accompanied by yet more frustration. The
idea of a series is important here, for no single attitude emerges.
His confidant in these letters was a fellow Irishman, the poet and
art critic Tom McGreevy, who also acted as confidant to Yeats’s wife
George in the 1920s. But while George Yeats sometimes betrayed her
feelings of frustration about her husband to McGreevy, Beckett is
reporting on his plight as a person and an aspiring author to
someone who shared much of his worldview. (There is a photograph of
McGreevy and Beckett in London in the early 1930s in my James
Joyce’s Ireland, page 203).
I would find
it difficult to believe Beckett would ever allow a sentence such as
“I have no pride in my Irishness” to be his final word on the
subject. He hated grand statements, but he also had things inside
him which couldn’t — no could not — be
articulated in such a way, and to some extent Irishness was one of
those things. McGreevy would have understood this and allowed his
friend to sound off. Let me put this another way. If Beckett took no
pride in his Irishness, why did he spend so much time in
correspondence with someone like McGreevy and mixing with an Irish
writer like Joyce or talking up the work of an Irish painter like
Jack B.Yeats? And there is enough in these letters which speaks of
his pride in what the country has to offer the visitor, such as
Galway (“a grand little magic grey town full of sensitive stone and
bridges and water” 127), or seeing Clonmacnoise for the first time
(“indescribably beautiful” 324), or walking in the Dublin mountains
and discovering “a lovely small Celtic cross” (489).
I felt
somewhat unsure reading the first volume of Beckett’s correspondence
as to how many relevant letters were missing, and I cannot say I was
fully reassured by the editors in their introduction. Tipping the
balance towards a more comprehensive coverage leads to a different
problem as exemplified by the publication this past year of the
second volume of T.S. Eliot’s letters. Many of the letters, written
between 1925 and 1927, are business letters written by Eliot in his
capacity as editor of The Criterion and director at Faber and
Gwyer (later Faber and Faber). Fortunately, there are glimpses of
humour in the midst of all this, and in one of the letters we learn
something more about his relationship with Joyce. In the summer of
1923 Joyce was on holiday in the seaside resort of Bognor in Sussex.
The previous year the two writers had published their most famous
books The Waste Land and Ulysses. How would the
leading American modernist living in London address the leading
Irish modernist living in Paris? The answer: light-heartedly, with a
dig at his own text. “I want to get a car one day when I am at
Fishbourne and fetch you over and show you some of the waste lands
round about Chichester” (29 June 1923). As it happened, Joyce did
his own exploring round Chichester, but this was largely undertaken
through reading what was to hand in a book such as the Ward Lock
guide to the area. It was there that he came across in the
churchyard in Sidlesham the name of Earwicker, the name he lifts for
the main protagonist of Finnegans Wake. If the Roman remains
at Fishbourne had then been known, I’m sure both Joyce and Eliot
would have found room for them in their writing, but Joyce would
have been happy just reading about them in the newspaper.
The title of
Love’s Civil War: Elizabeth Bowen and Charles Ritchie Letters and
Diaries from the Love Affair of a Lifetime 1941-1973 (2009),
edited by Victoria Gendinning with Judith Robertson, is slightly at
odds with the tender love story on display inside its pages. Not
entirely, however, for the title does mirror a lengthy
correspondence over three decades between the Anglo-Irish novelist
and the Canadian diplomat, who conducted their relationship in
secret. Interestingly, Bowen and Ritchie spent very little actual
time together, but there is a sense that they made up for this by
writing, at least in Bowen’s case. Her letters are full of the world
around her and full of her love for him, while his diary entries are
inward-looking and fairly terse, coming alive for this reader only
after her death.
E is a third
person initial for Ritchie, while in her letters he is always you.
Forms of address can betray so much in love letters. “The fact is
that happiness and tenderness and love don’t evaporate from the
place where they’ve been strongly; one’s left with something
stronger than memory, a feeling of something still going on —
don’t you think?” (131-2) In the Index there are no separate entries
for ‘reality’ or ‘presence’ or ‘absence’, yet perhaps there should
be, for these are Bowen’s overriding themes, here in these letters
as in her novels. As for the physical side of love itself, we learn
she had “a love of touching the nape of the beloved’s neck or of
having the nape of my neck touched” (347), which is followed by a
series of elliptical points. I couldn’t determine, here and
elsewhere in the book, if these points are cuts by the editors or
suspension marks by Ritchie.
Because Bowen
is such a sharp observer of the social scene, there is little or no
sense when reading these letters of prying into things that don’t
concern us. Certain attitudes, such as those toward social class, we
are familiar with or we could guess what she thought. She was
against the Labour Party landslide victory in 1945, which gave her a
“psychic shock” (53), agreed with the Swiss, in the lead-up to the
subsequent general election in 1950, that the British being
socialists bored everybody, and, from her patrician background, she
was in favour of the Conservative Party taking on Big Business. At
the same time, because of her Anglo-Irish identity she was able to
recognise her own position, which she could subject to humour. “I’m
that awful paradox, a dowdy snob” (153), she admits at one point.
Coming away from a morning shopping at Harvey Nichols, she imagines
the clothes she has bought might look like “a plate of dessert”
(226). London is her abiding passion. Of all the many cities she
writes about, Madrid, where she stayed in October 1954, comes off
the worst in this book, a city that assaults the senses, where
church bells smash the silence to smithereens and “all the people
look most fearfully common” (193), which she puts down to the
Franco-Fascist atmosphere. It is a rare lapse for in general “doing
the rounds” in the manner of the Anglo-Irish normally allows her to
see something of value on which to report.
Throughout
these letters there are nice moments, sometimes quite unexpected.
She is struck, dining with the Duke of Leinster in London in 1946,
how Ireland’s premier duke is ending his days in a “baroqued-over St
John’s Wood kitchen” (98). Visiting Edinburgh in 1950, Bowen wonders
about “the whole ‘British’ concept”, given the need for Scots to
have their own Home Rule (167-8). As for writing and other authors,
she particularly admired Flaubert’s letters and his ability to
capture the sensation of writing (see 361), and she read with
interest David Copperfield, a novel that gave her “an almost
terrifying illumination about her own writing” (440). There are in
addition valuable portraits here of other Irish writers including
Molly Keane and Iris Murdoch. What surprised me were the occasional
comments about the leading psychological novelist of her generation
not being interested in people or in her own “interesting
personality” (181). The letters betray something else, and that too
is intriguing, such as when she claims in a letter written in 1950:
“I might ‘live for others’, but I could never live for my work”
(176).
Those with an
interest in Irish Studies shouldn’t overlook the Letters of Ted
Hughes, which appeared in paperback in 2009. Hughes’s friendship
with Seamus Heaney is well-known, but the ten letters here to the
Irish poet Richard Murphy are worth noticing for their varied
insights into Hughes’s verse, into the work of other writers and
also into the Irish landscape. The period he spent in Ireland in
1965 provided Hughes with a way out of the impasse in his writing,
which was to lead to the poems in his celebrated volume Crow
(1970). The influence of Yeats on Hughes is also to the fore here in
the letters, not least in Yeats’s stress on reading aloud. When he
was young, we learn that Hughes encountered Yeats’s first volume of
verse The Wanderings of Oisin, and in a letter in 1992 he
recalls what it meant to him: “I was swallowed alive by Yeats”
(625). In passing, we can see that the rhythms in Hughes’s early
verse also betray a debt to the Irish poet. What particularly
attracted him to Yeats was the use of myths and legends, as well as
his passionate devotion to the occult and to the esoteric tradition
in Western culture.
The only
occasion I had an opportunity of talking with Hughes was in
Waterstones bookshop in York in the early 1990s. We spent about
twenty minutes chatting, and most of that time was taken up with the
occult. I must have been at work on Yeats’s Worlds (1995),
which includes a chapter on the occult. For me the topic was simply
of academic interest, but I could tell from his line of questioning
that Hughes was a believer, someone who swallowed things alive. Each
to his own, I came away thinking, conscious at the same time of a
presence I had no wish to get too close to. Not surprisingly, here
in the letters he defends Yeats against those critics such as Auden
who would dismiss the occult as “embarrassing nonsense” (426).
As someone
who lives in York, the correspondence that has given me the most
pleasure this last year, published in two volumes and edited by
Melvyn New and Peter de Voogd, has been that of Laurence Sterne.
Sterne is essentially a York or a Yorkshire writer, but he does have
links with Ireland. He was born in Clonmel in County Tipperary, and
spent his early years in Ireland when his father was stationed there
with a British regiment. In the village of Annamoe in County
Wicklow, where Synge was later to spend his summers, can be seen the
remains of a mill-race that once swept up the young Sterne and
nearly killed him. In 1765, as an adult, when taken to task for
ridiculing his Irish friends at Bath, Sterne, now the famous author
of Tristram Shandy, resorts to the clincher: “Besides, I am
myself of their own country: — My father was a
considerable time on duty with his regiment in Ireland, and my
mother gave me to the world when she was there, on duty with him”
(430-1). The tongue-in-cheek attitude suggests he wouldn’t go to the
stake over his identity, but Ireland is nonetheless real for him.
This can be seen in little things in Tristram Shandy by his
use of names, for example, such as Corporal Trim, or in the choice
of tunes such as the Williamite ‘Lillibulero’, which is whistled by
Uncle Toby whenever difficulties arise or he has to express an
opinion. And it’s not surprising to learn in these letters that
Sterne was offered clerical appointments in Ireland by his friend
the Bishop of Cork and Ross (638).
But what
intrigues me most reading these letters and their accompanying
intelligent notes is the real-life incident that seems to lie behind
Yorick’s encounter with the Monk in A Sentimental Journey,
and how the abbé who came to the aid of Richard Oswald, a young
Englishman dying of consumption in Toulouse, was of Irish descent
and called not O’Leary but O’Leari (306ff). The incident clearly
moved Sterne, especially “the great fellow feeling he shew’d to our
friend” (307). So Sterne’s changing attitudes and altered
disposition toward Catholicism seem to belong in part to his sojourn
among European Catholicism, a Catholicism which was itself shaped by
the Irish driven into exile in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries on account of their religion. The local curé initially
refused to allow the young man a church funeral because he was not a
Catholic but, as the editors suggest, he seems to have relented when
Sterne offered him money. The curé confirms Sterne in his prejudice
against Catholics but it is the abbé with the French-Irish name who
finds his way into fiction. Always with Sterne it is through contact
that feeling comes, and it is feeling that changes the world, in
this case, of anti-Catholic prejudice, to which he himself was
subject. One suspects he could have made more of the Irish
connection in A Sentimental Journey, but Sterne gives the
impression that Irishness is behind him, part of the past, an
already discovered or known country, ripe for humour, while European
emancipation, in the clean shape and presumably intended symbol of
the caged bird, is ahead of him, somewhere in the future.
The present
Troubles continue to provide material for creative writers to ponder.
Five Minutes of Heaven, a television drama shown on BBC2 in
April 2009 and now released as a film, was a particular highlight
for me. The play/film, which was written by Guy Hibbert and directed
by Oliver Hirschbiegel, starred James Nesbitt as Joe, the younger
brother of a Catholic murdered in 1975 by Alistair, a member of the
Ulster Volunteer Force, who is played by Liam Neeson. Years later
Joe and Alistair come face to face in a television show (an imagined
scene at the Truth and Reconciliation process), and this encounter
is the subject of the film. Sensibly, the emphasis is on encounter,
not resolution, and this is given a further twist by the fact that
Nesbitt, who comes from Ballymena and who as a boy took part in
Protestant marches on 12 July, plays a Catholic, while Neeson, who
played Michael Collins in the film of that name, took the part of
the Protestant killer. Everything contributes, then, to the tension
in the drama. As if the murder was still fresh in his memory, Joe
fumes, while Alistair, who has changed as a person,
characteristically expresses the best line in the play: “The years
just get heavier.”
Renewed
interest in the North, especially from a Protestant perspective,
shows little sign of abating. Irish Protestant Identities
(2008) is a useful collection of essays, three of which can be noted
here. In “Assessing an Absence: Ulster Protestant Women Authors
1900-60”, Naomi Doak argues for a revision to the conventional view
that Protestant women writers came only from the Ascendancy. In an
essay listing her chosen authors, she also shows how Ulster literary
biographies will need to attend more closely to the issue of gender
(and by implication social class). A second essay that caught my eye
was Peter Day’s “Pride Before a Fall? Orangeism in Liverpool Since
1945”. In his conclusion, Day notices how numbers marching in
support of the annual Boyne parade in Liverpool have fallen from
20,000 in 1980 to around 5,000 today, but the question he seeks an
answer to is how we should interpret this, as a sign of a changing
world or as a sign that people now believe but don’t belong. Stephen
Hopkins’s essay “A weapon in the struggle? Loyalist paramilitarism
and the politics of auto/biography in contemporary Northern Ireland”
contrasts the personalisation of the Irish republican tradition with
the absence of such a tradition among Protestants. However, as
Hopkins points out, the list of autobiographical texts included at
the end of the essay suggests a different story in the making.
Fintan
Vallely’s Tuned Out: Traditional Music and Identity in Northern
Ireland (2008) continues this reassessment of the Protestant
contribution to modern Irish culture. He writes well about Jackie
Boyce, a Protestant singer from Comber in County Down, and quotes
the singer saying “I must be the only person ever to have been
called a Fenian bastard and a Protestant bastard in the one night
— in the same pub, all for playin’ Traditional music” (34).
Only since the advent of the Troubles has there been an aggression
about the music, and we are reminded of the way sectarianism once
threatened to overshadow every aspect of the culture in Northern
Ireland.
Frank
Ferguson’s Ulster-Scots Writing: An Anthology (2008) deserves
to be better known. In a short but generally persuasive introduction,
Ferguson provides a justification for his anthology, motivated as it
is by two questions: what is meant by the term ‘Ulster-Scots’ and
what texts would constitute an anthology of Ulster-Scots writing?
Ferguson is aware of the contentious field he is seeking to map, but
in some respects that makes for this book’s appeal. I particularly
enjoyed seeing again W.R. Rodgers’s “Epilogue to ‘The Character of
Ireland’” surrounded by other Ulster-Scots writing:
I am Ulster, my people an abrupt
people
Who like the spiky consonants in speech
And think the soft ones cissy; who dig
The k and t in orchestra, detect sin
In sinfonia, get a kick out of
Tin cans, fricatives, fornication, staccato talk,
Anything that gives or takes attack,
Like Micks, Tagues, tinkers gets, Vatican.
This is the kind of verse you want to read out loud or hear someone
from Belfast reading, for what we have here is English as a spoken
language on display. The glossary at the end of the anthology
contains more spiky consonants, and I cannot resist quoting some for
the letter k. Keckle for cackle, ketched for caught, kilt for
clothes well tucked up, kimmer for male companion, kipple for couple,
kittle for tickle or irritate, krisnin for christening, kythe for
show or display. We might not agree how we define this language, but
there’s nothing “cissy” about this anthology.
Other pieces I’ve enjoyed this past year include Anthony Cronin’s
essay on Beckett’s Trilogy in Christopher’s Murray’s collection
Samuel Beckett Playwright and Poet, published by Pegasus Books
in 2009 but first issued in 2006. In the same volume there is a
well-judged essay by Terence Brown on Beckett’s middle-class
Protestant background. As for Cronin’s poetry, this receives
particular acclaim by Paul Durcan in The Poet’s Chair: The First
Nine Years of the Ireland Chair of Poetry (2008): “It’s the
prose basis of his poetry that makes Cronin’s poetry such pure
poetry” (179). But I would have liked Durcan to have proved this in
the passages he quotes from Cronin’s verse. A review of The
Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney (2009) is included in this
issue below, but let me add something of my own. As Dennis
O’Driscoll’s essay serves to confirm, Heaney’s politics continues to
provide critics with several options, none of which can be at this
stage definitive. Justin Quinn finds Heaney’s engagement with
Eastern European poetry “profound on the level of theme and
superficial on the level of language” (102). In an intelligent and
generally supportive essay, David Wheatley takes issue with Heaney’s
view in The Redress of Poetry of Larkin’s ‘Aubade’. And Neil
Corcoran’s essay on Heaney and Yeats threatens to provide the final
word on the subject.
The burden of
Calvin Bedient’s The Yeats Brothers and Modernism’s Love of
Motion (2009) is that “each artist shines the more by
comparison” (21). Bedient is attracted to the Nietzschean feel for
sensation and sees this in the poet, while on the other side there
stands his brother Jack B. Yeats with his pursuit of the multiple.
It would be difficult to disagree with the claim that the Yeats
brothers disturb the living stream and that they don’t fit easily
into liberal views of tragedy, but I must confess I don’t respond
terribly well to the Nietzschean view of Yeats. There are, however,
insights here which can only come from long periods of exposure to
this line of thinking, as when he claims that Jack’s work “thrives
dangerously close to nothingness but stops short of rage, ill-will”
(280), or that removed from social constraints, the poet’s
loneliness “discovered a desire to destroy its enabling conditions”
(280).
For a contrasting view of Yeats and Modernism, published in 2004, I
am reminded of Sinéad Garrigan Mattar’s Primitivism, Science and
the Irish Revival, a study which had its inception in the phrase
about “our proper dark” from Yeats’s poem “The Statues”. With Lady
Gregory, Synge, and Yeats in mind, Garrigan Mattar’s interest lies
in squaring “their instinctively romantic primitivism with the
findings of comparative science” (19). Where Bedient uses the Yeats
brothers as a platform for something else, Garrigan Mattar’s inquiry
is essentially about a return to history and its
late-nineteenth-century contexts. This is also the place to mention
two other recent contextual studies. Nicholas Allen’s
Modernism,
Ireland and Civil War
(2008) focuses on the decades after Independence and what he calls
the “post-imperial landscape” (143) for an understanding of the
Yeats brothers, “Irregular Joyce” and early Beckett. Mary Burke’s
‘Tinkers’: Synge and the Cultural History of the Irish Traveller
(2009), which includes a detailed discussion of the representation
of the Irish traveller in the work of Synge, Bryan MacMahon, Juanita
Casey, Rosaleen McDonagh, Tom Murphy, and Perry Ogden, is at the
same time a timely shot across the bows of the scholarly community
for its neglect of “the country’s most marginalized minority” (274).
Heinz Kosok’s
Explorations in Irish Literature (2008) gathers together a
range of essays written over a period of some thirty years and more.
Inevitably, some are more distinguished than others. In an essay on
the Great War in Irish drama he provides a valuable inventory of
plays and where those plays were first staged. In another essay he
argues for a reassessment of Thomas Crofton Croker’s Fairy
Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland (1825), while at
the same he has some (unnecessarily) harsh things to say about
Thomas Moore. In a final essay on the oldest of the New Literatures
in English, Kosok underscores the exemplary role of Irish Literature
for other emerging literatures round the world. He supports his
argument by suggesting that colonial literature in Ireland and
elsewhere begins in the subjective vision of lyrical poetry and in
the more objective view of travel writing.
The reference
to Croker’s work calls to mind the continuing use of folklore in
modern Irish writing. Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s comments in The
Poet’s Chair focus in part of her origins as a poet: “I have
always been fascinated by folklore, though I wouldn’t have always
called it by such a lofty name. What were they but little stories
stitched into the everyday narratives around me, a five-year-old
exile, back in my aunty Máire’s house in Cathair an Treanntaigh in
the parish of Ventry in the mid-fifties” (146). In this regard I
should also mention Davide Benini’s thoughtful essay “A Voice from
the West: Rediscovering the Irish Oral Tradition in “The Dead’”,
which can be found in Anáil an Bhéil Bheo: Orality and Modern
Irish Culture (2009), a book of essays reviewed below.
2009 has also been a year for celebrations. The Samuel Beckett
Bridge, connecting Sir John Rogerson’s Quay on the south side of the
river Liffey with Guild Street and North Wall Quay on the north
side, was opened by the Lord Mayor of Dublin in December. Brian
Friel’s eightieth birthday was celebrated in style by both the Gate
Theatre and the Abbey Theatre with tributes, new performances of his
plays, and a bronze plaque of his handprints to join those of
Luciano Pavarotti, John B. Keane, Milo O’Shea, and Niall Tobin. The
revival of Waiting for Godot at the Haymarket Theatre in
London in May 2009,
with an
all-star cast of Ian McKellen as Estragon, Patrick Stewart as
Vladimir, Simon Callow as Pozzo, and Ronald Pickup as Lucky, was
also something of a celebration. On display throughout was
McKellen’s Lancashire accent, a reminder that the Irish writer’s
play can incorporate so many different accents and yet still be
itself. This production, directed by Sean Mathias, also brought out
the way Lucky’s speech draws attention to words and phrases already
introduced earlier in the play. In that respect, it’s a play full of
connections like beads on a chain.
This is an appropriate moment to thank all the reviewers for their
contributions to this issue and all the previous issues. It has been
a pleasure and a privilege to work with so many different people
from around the world who have given so generously of their time.
This is also the place to thank Rosa Gonzalez for allowing me the
space to carry out the reviews section for this journal over the
last five years. That estudiosirlandeses.org is now a flourishing
journal is down to
Rosa.
This is her achievement and her legacy, to have got something off
the ground on behalf of the Spanish Association for Irish Studies (AEDEI)
and to make the journal available without subscription to students
and scholars across the globe.
Indeed,
wherever Irish Studies is taught, the name of this journal will be
known. I told Rosa some time ago when I retired that I would be
relinquishing my editorship. This is largely because I am no longer
in sufficient contact with people in the field. I see new books in
Irish Studies appearing almost every week, and I think to myself, “I
cannot do justice to the field now opening up. It’s time to hand
over the reins to someone who can.” So this is what I am now doing.
As a footnote, you always know it’s time to go when you start
writing memoirs, and this is what I’ve been doing since October
2009.
Works Cited
Allen, Nicholas. 2008. Modernism,
Ireland and Civil War,
Cambridge University Press.
Bedient, Calvin. 2009. The Yeats Brothers and Modernism’s Love of
Motion, University of Notre Dame Press.
Burke, Mary. 2009. ‘Tinkers’: Synge and the Cultural History of
the Irish Traveller, Oxford University Press.
Busteed, Mervyn, Frank Neal, and Jonathan Tonge (eds). 2008.
Irish Protestant Identities, Manchester University Press.
Cronin, Nesssa, Seán Crosson and John Eastlake (eds). 2009. Anáil
an Bhéil Bheo: Orality and Modern Irish Culture, Cambridge
Scholars Press.
Eliot, Valerie and Hugh Haughton (eds). 2009. The Letters of T.S.
Eliot Vol 2 1925-1927, Faber and Faber.
Fehsenfeld, Martha Dow and Lois More Overbeck (eds). 2009. The
Letters of Samuel Beckett 1929-1940, Cambridge University Press.
Ferguson, Frank (ed). 2008. Ulster-Scots Writing: An Anthology,
Four Courts.
Garrigan Mattar, Sinéad. 2004. Primitivism, Science and the Irish
Revival, Oxford University Press.
Glendinning, Victoria with Judith Robertson (eds). 2009. Love’s
Civil War: Elizabeth Bowen and Charles Ritchie Letters and Diaries
from the Love Affair of a Lifetime 1941-1973, London:
Simon and Schuster.
Kosok, Heinz. 2008. Explorations in Irish Literature, WVT
Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier.
Montague, John, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, and Paul Durcan. 2008. The
Poet’s Chair: The First Nine Years of the
Ireland Chair of Poetry,
Lilliput.
Murray, Christopher (ed). 2009. Samuel Beckett Playwright and
Poet, Pegasus Books.
New, Melvyn and Peter de Voogd (eds). 2009. The Florida Edition
of the Works of Laurence Sterne Volume VII The Letters Part I
1739-1764 and Volume VIII The Letters 1765-1768,
University Press of Florida.
O’Donoghue, Bernard (ed). 2009. The
Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney,
Cambridge University Press.
Pierce, David. 1992. James Joyce’s Ireland, Yale University
Press.
_______. 1995. Yeats’s Worlds:
Ireland,
England and the Poetic Imagination,
Yale University Press.
Reid, Christopher (ed). 2009. Letters of Ted Hughes,
Faber and Faber.
Vallely, Fintan. 2008. Tuned Out: Traditional Music and Identity
in
Northern Ireland,
Cork University Press.
Watt, Stephen. 2009. Beckett and Contemporary Irish
Writing, Cambridge University Press.
David Pierce,
now retired, lives in
York.
He has written books on Yeats and Joyce and on fiction and social
class. He has also edited a four-volume edition of Yeats criticism
for Helm Information as well as a Reader in modern Irish writing for
Cork University Press. His most recent books are Light, Freedom
and Song: A Cultural History of Modern Irish Writing (Yale
University Press, 2005), Joyce and Company (Continuum, 2006;
Paperback 2008) and Reading Joyce (Pearson Longman, 2008).
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Brooklyn
by Colm Tóibín (New York: Scribner, 2009)
262 pp.
$25
ISBN:
978-1-4391-3831-1
Reviewer:
Claire Bracken
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Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn
tells the story of Eilis Lacey, a young Irish girl who
emigrates from Enniscorthy, Wexford to Brooklyn, New York in
the 1950s. The narrative begins in Ireland, as we are
introduced to the very shy and retiring Eilis, who lives with
her older sister Rose and elderly mother. Eilis’s family is
one marked by death and emigration; her father died a few
years previously and her three brothers have all left for work
in Birmingham. Jobs are scarce in the depressed economy of
1950s Ireland and Eilis, finishing a bookkeeping course, is
struggling to find work. Her only option is a Sunday job in
the shop of autocratic Miss Kelly, whose lashing tongue
softens only for customers perceived to be of the “right”
social standing. Rose’s pride in her sister, her desire for
her to succeed and be treated with the respect she deserves,
brings about a change in the narrative direction, as she sets
in motion the wheels for Eilis’s emigration. The passivity of
Eilis’s character in responding to this momentous and life-changing
event generates real pathos in the story, as the reader is
brought into contact with her unarticulated fears and
repressed anxieties: “Even when she woke in the night and
thought about it, she did not allow herself to conclude that
she did not want to go” (30). However, go she must; Eilis
embarks on a week-long, sea-sick journey across the Atlantic,
arriving to her new home in Brooklyn, New York. Father Flood,
an acquaintance of her sister Rose, has set Eilis up in
employment as a shop assistant in the department store
Bartocci’s, and has her housed in an Irish boarding house.
After an initial period of cultural climatisation, Eilis
begins to settle in and get used to her new surroundings and
the narrative poignantly portrays her subjective development,
as she navigates the different social and cultural terrains of
1950s post-war US society. Spanning just under two years,
Eilis’s time in Brooklyn facilitates her engagement in various
sorts of friendship making (and breaking), church dancehall
events, bookkeeping classes at Brooklyn College, and beach
trips to Coney Island. She also falls in love. However, family
events in Ireland require Eilis to return and the concluding
sections of the narrative raise questions regarding what
constitutes “home” in the emigrant imaginary.
Like Tóibín’s Henry James in his 2004 novel The Master, Eilis
is constructed as a restrained character, guardedly watching
life around her as it unfolds. The third person narrative is
restricted to her viewpoint. Through this narrative device the
reader gets insight into the dynamic relations between
observation and act, thought and material reality. From the
outset, Eilis is configured as a spectator in her own life,
reflecting on herself, others and external situations. The
opening line, holding resonances of the beginning of Joyce’s
short story “Eveline”, reads: “Eilis Lacey, sitting at the
window of the upstairs living room in the house on Friary
Street, noticed her sister walking briskly from work” (3). The
narrative establishes a specific philosophical relation
between action and reflection, as Eilis responds to the
happenings of her life, particularly her new life in Brooklyn,
in terms of the need for contemplative space: “She could not
wait to be alone, away from him, so she could contemplate what
he had just said” (148). Letters function in the narrative as
the means through which the immediacy of material reality is
re-packaged via thought, as Eilis reflects on her new world to
her family at home: “She began to take note of all the details,
thinking … how she could include an account of them in a
letter to her mother and Rose” (79). However, the directional
relationship of happening leading to reflective thought is not
only one-way. Rather, thought is also constructed as preceding
the actions of material reality. As Eilis notes on her return
to Enniscorthy and her family home: “she knew that her mother
had been planning this moment when they would both stand in
this doorway” (211). The novel repeatedly and insistently
constructs this two-way relationship, thus demonstrating the
way thought is embedded in the material reality it apprehends,
innovatively configuring the materiality of thought itself.
However, it is not just the materiality of thought that the
novel seeks to articulate, but also the materiality of society
and social life. One of the extraordinary features of this
novel is its skill in historical recreation. The textures of
1950s culture, in Ireland and the US, are made vitally present
throughout, facilitated through detailed representations of
material culture, particularly consumer objects. These objects
are presented as active forces in the production of cultural
meaning. This is particularly evident in a scene where
Bartocci’s, the Brooklyn shop where Eilis works, introduces
“Red Fox stockings”: “Coloured people are moving into
Brooklyn, more and more of them … We’re going to welcome
coloured women into our store as shoppers. And we’re starting
with nylon stockings. This is going to be the first store on
this street to sell Red Fox stockings” (114). The material
object of the nylon stocking functions here to reflect “the
change going on outside the store” (114), while also actively
participating in that change, by enabling shifts in the power
and class structures of race relations. The material object is
shown to have force in the actual enactment of social change.
On one level the insistence on materiality works to make this
beautifully wrought novel of the 1950s immediately vital and
alive for the reader. However, it also functions to rework
dominant conceptualizations of the material as passive object.
The danger of such a conceptualization is poignantly drawn
through the character of Eilis. After asking Father Flood why
he helped her in the emigration process, she is told that “we
need Irish girls in Brooklyn” (81), thus positioning her as an
object of exchange between cultures. Just like her letters,
she crosses and re-crosses the Atlantic. The tragedy of her
story lies in her positioning by others as an object with no
power. Brooklyn works to caution against such pacification of
what is constituted as material, functioning as a critique of
the objectification of bodies, particularly women’s bodies, in
a consumerist culture, something which speaks not just to the
past but also to the present day. Furthermore, by intersecting
consumerism with an emigrant narrative, the novel interrogates
the construction of emigrant bodies as passive material objects that provide sustenance to the nation in which they
arrive. Brooklyn reworks such cultural constructions through a
powerful first-person narrative, which renders the material
vital, energised and alive.
Claire Bracken
is Assistant Professor of Irish Literature and Culture in the
English Department at Union College, New York, where she
teaches courses on Irish literature and film.
She is currently co-editing a collection of essays on the
contemporary fiction writer Anne Enright (Irish Academic
Press, forthcoming 2010) and a book on Irish film and visual
culture (forthcoming 2010). She is also working on a monograph
entitled Irish Feminist Futures?
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Race in Modern
Irish Literature and Culture by John Brannigan
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009
246 pp. £65.00
ISBN: 978 0 7486 3883 3 (hardback)
Reviewer:
Patricia Coughlan
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Complex processes have constructed white Irishness, and we are only
beginning to understand these.
This excellent book is a welcome addition to the slowly-growing
literature on this subject. Brannigan’s premise is that race is and
has been a category actively at work in Ireland, at least since the
foundation of the State. Specifically, he argues that Irish national
identity, as a social formation, always was founded on what are, in
effect, recognizable as racial assumptions: this has its roots well
before 1922, in Herderian, more or less essentialist, positions
about organic identity. From the outset he distinguishes his own
project from some influential post-colonialist criticism, noting the
partial blindness of the latter to the active workings of racism and
racialised perspectives in Irish culture and society from even
before the achievement of independent statehood. The racialisation
of the Irish has been well elucidated, but scarcely at all
that by the Irish: Brannigan adds his enterprise to those
already fostering this uncomfortable realization. He questions the
idea that “a people secure in their national philosophy”, in Declan
Kiberd’s phrase, will thereby be all the more capable of solidarity
with ethnic others, but rightly
acknowledges a 1990s counter-current within post-colonialist
criticism (e.g. Deane, Innes, Lloyd) towards making common cause
with other formerly colonized peoples.
The book does not attempt a full,
chronological history of Irish representations
of race, but rather analyses specific nodes of cultural production
and of race-sensitive events and transactions, over eighty years or
so, with a short prefatory look at the earlier twentieth century. It
draws on the important social-science scholarship on race in
Ireland (by Lentin, Garner and others), and internationally by David
Theo Goldberg, as well as historians’ elucidation specifically of
the numbers, circumstances and experiences of Jews in Ireland and of
Irish anti-Semitism. Brannigan’s work is contiguous with that of
other recent investigators (e.g. on Travellers, Hayes and Lanters)
in the gradual constitution of an anatomy of Irish racisms.
But his own focus, as a literature
scholar, is cultural: he reads
race as a cultural construct and argues eloquently, and hopefully,
that it depends upon the aesthetic sphere for its authority and
affective power, and therefore can be resisted by the cultural
intervention of alternative and dissident voices. In literature, he discerns and implicitly endorses a
moment of
critique of the predominant vision of community as “repressively
homogeneous and stiflingly insular”.
He shows convincingly that the operations of Irish nation- and
identity-construction are clearly
—
and most often oppositionally
—
revealed in writing (and painting). He analyses literary and theatre
texts of varying stature, ranging from Ulysses (a
particularly rich and compelling discussion), O’Flaherty, and
(briefly) Beckett, through Edna O’Brien, Aidan Higgins and
Behan to more minor work including MacDonagh’s 1921 comedy The
Irish Jew, fiction by MacManus and Plunkett, and Clarke’s satire
“Flight to Africa”; a case-study of Dublin black rock musician Phil
Lynott ends the final chapter.
The argument is also sustained by
other kinds of documents. Archives include the Harvard physical
anthropologists’ mid-'30s phenotypical study of Irish faces, with
their disturbing eugenics-inflected implications; there are also
fascinating records from the 1922 Paris Congress on the Irish Race,
with its speeches by both Yeats brothers, 1925 reports on the
State’s first deportation (of a self-styled
“Prince of Abyssinia”), and the 1960s
government’s dismissive responses to persistent discrimination
against African students.
Chapter 2, the longest, is entitled
“Face Value”. At its centre is the Harvard study, which curiously
combines empirical measurement and positivistic classification of
racial types with value-laden assumptions concerning ethnic purity
and other social-symbolic meanings. Brannigan appropriately prefaces
his discussion of this archival material by recalling that
disturbing equation of Irish identity with Western racial hegemony,
Yeats’s “The Statues” (“measurement began our
might…”). The
anthropologists’ findings are placed in the context of facial
representations in O’Flaherty, Jack Yeats and Beckett: the latter
two robustly reject the notion that the human face can legitimately
be read as a racial sign. Particularly good is the tracing of
Yeats’s development away from illustrative art (shown at its
strongest, and most directly nation-oriented, in the Synge
collaborations) towards his mature modernist-expressionist style.
This transformed his rendering of the face and perhaps also stripped
his Irish faces of ethno-national representativity.
This strategy of contrasting these
radical aesthetic and ideological visions with 1930s phenotypical
assumptions is highly effective. Brannigan’s reflection on the face
in Levinas and Wittgenstein is a little too elliptical and its
implications for the overall argument obscure. A more concrete issue
this chapter explores well is the warm welcome given the Harvard
study by both Free State and Northern governments; Catholic
suspicion of eugenics discourses seemed overcome by the flattering
attention (in both jurisdictions) of these distinguished scientists
and the prospect (congenial, as Brannigan shows, to Free State
ideology) of a vindication of Irish ethnic purity.
Derrida argues:
“there is no home without the foreigner”:
Brannigan’s third chapter analyses the nation-state as
constituted by the exclusion of others even while
guaranteeing rights to its own citizens,
a troubling paradox widely explored in
the theoretical literature on racism.
A “racialising” State is identified in the developing 1930s-‘40s
struggle between ethnos and demos, where a “civic,
modernising nationalism” meets a “recalcitrant” ethnic one with
intensifying anxieties about the infiltration by “strangers” of a
national character often defined in terms of organic
authenticity. In the Free State imaginary, “the foreigner” played a
role grotesquely out of proportion to the minuscule numbers of
actual foreigners; we see how in these decades, fears of a notional
cosmopolitan rootlessness merged with pre-existing hostility to the
former colonising power, shadowing the notional ideal of Irish
hospitality.
The “alien” is a significant trope in Johnston’s 1932 Moon on the
Yellow River; there are effective readings of the
challenges posed by female foreigners’ transgressions against bodily
containment and regulation, in later fictions (by Kate and Edna
O’Brien and John Montague). Higgins, by contrast, rejects the
“exotic fantasy of the foreigner as agent of social change” with his
sexually predatory, parasitic Otto Beck in Langrishe Go Down.
A 1956 Plunkett story about the social marginalisation of a Polish
refugee character completes this suite of texts which are said to
expose “the figural limits of the nationalist project”. While
Brannigan sees an “exhaustion of imaginative and ethical resources”
in the mid-century Ireland these fictions represent, he
argues that they can themselves be read as contesting such
limits and such exhaustion.
Chapter 4 argues that 1960s-‘70s Ireland evinces continuing
“prescribed” racial figurations which hinder the recognition of
heterogeneity. While Behan’s Richard’s Cork Leg stages a
black character who might be meant to “dislodge fixed
identifications”, his blackness is an unstable trope, skirting
stereotype, and 1972 reviewers were underwhelmed, as also by Desmond
Forristal’s 1974 debate-play about missionaries and Nigeria, which
revealed the ambivalence of Irish gestures towards cross-racial
solidarity. The discussion here is more sketchy and is unavoidably
foreshortened by the as-yet-unfolding impact of multi-cultural
in-migration. Clare Boylan’s Black Baby (1988) and Donal
O’Kelly’s Asylum! Asylum! (1994) broke new ground in
examining Irish welcomes from the perspective of racialised
“others”, but before the concrete reality of such others’ presence.
Brannigan ends by reiterating the key role of race within the
“social glue of the nation-state”. He also restates his governing
imperative: that Ireland must find ways to imagine community and
integration “beyond the terms of national or racial affiliation”. On
the other hand he reads, in Irish culture’s recurring expressions of
radical doubt — from Joyce onwards — about the “ideological legacies
of nationalism” and “the validity and efficacy of racial
ideologies”, signs of hope.
Prof
Patricia Coughlan
teaches at University College, Cork and has published
widely on Irish literature. She is currently completing a monograph
on subjectivity, gender and social change in Irish literature
1960-2005.
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Making
Ireland Irish: Tourism and National Identity since the Irish Civil
War by
Eric G. E. Zuelow (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2009)
ISBN: 978-0-8156-3225-2
(hardback)
328 pp. $39.95
Reviewer:
Joan FitzPatrick Dean
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Making Ireland Irish
uses tourism as a cultural and political measure of how Ireland
imagined itself and how it wanted to be seen by others. To survey
eighty-five years since Irish Independence, Eric G. E. Zuelow draws
on archival work in Dublin,
Cork,
Belfast,
and elsewhere, including the National Archives, the Bord Fáilte
Photographic Archive, and the Public Records Office, Northern
Ireland. His extensive research is indispensable because tourism,
an especially sensitive barometer of Irish culture and self-image,
sought consensus between the private and public sectors, between a
cosmopolitan centre and the storied provinces, between centralized
authority and regional initiative.
Zuelow’s first three chapters provide a chronological overview of
tourism between 1922 and 1994; his last chapter, “Tourism and the
Tiger”, considers the historic changes in not only tourism but also
Ireland between 1994 and 2007. Intervening are three thematic
chapters devoted to culture and language, to the construction of the
Irish history, and to the treatment of landscape.
Tourism is an especially engaging subject because it brings together
the least likely of bedfellows: politicians and artists, hoteliers
and newspaper editors, civil servants as well as the brewers of
Guinness. Zuelow begins with key questions: was tourism in the
national interest and, if so, what image should Ireland project to
the world? Both questions proved central after Irish Independence,
not only to tourism, but also to theatre, literature, music, and the
visual arts.
Competing and sometimes mutually exclusive notions of to whom and
toward what Irish tourism should direct its energies vied for state
funding, corporate partnership, and popular support. Should
resources focus on attracting those interested in the Irish
language? How could state agencies negotiate between tourist’s
expectations for a quaint, “authentic” experience and yet avoid
kitsch-laden, theme-park “Paddywhackery”, especially at events such
as the Puck Fair in Kerry? What images best represented Ireland’s
past, present, and future?
In the tumultuous early years of the Irish Free State, the Irish Tourism
Association superseded regional tourism boards. Despite the Cumann
na hGaelheal government, the early years of the Irish Tourism
Association was dominated by what one of their number C. S. Andrews
described as “'a coven of ex-IRA men’” (16). By 1929, no fewer
than thirty-six separate publications hoped to attract domestic as
well as foreign tourists. In fact, until the economic impact of
tourism was undeniable, some, including E. T. Keane, editor of the
Kilkenny People, aggressively opposed encouraging foreign
visitors and any tourist scheme that might drain government
resources.
A crucial moment came in the 1960s when “Irish poverty was
reformatted to symbolize Irish purity” (117; original
italics). Zuelow effectively synthesizes regional and national
initiatives, the workings of a host of government agencies (as
various as the Office of Public Works, the National Graves
Association, the Department of Finance, and the Department of
Foreign/External Affairs). Beginning in 1962, Bord Fáilte promoted
Ireland as a “land of festivals” (133) and awarded grants to
regional sponsors in support of events like the Yeats Summer School,
the Dublin Theatre Festival, and the Cork Film Festival.
Twentieth-century Irish tourism was shaped by legislation, not only
by governmental fiscal appropriations but also by such as the 1929
and 1952 Tourism Traffic Acts, the National Monuments Act, and a
host of other thoroughly-debated legislation. A persistent
challenge to tourism was the construction of a version of Irish
history “that would not offend outsiders while also assuring
equanimity within Ireland itself” (153). That political opponents
in Fianna Fail and Fine Gael might disagree on any account of Irish
history, especially events from the early twentieth century, seems
self-evident. No matter. In many instances, “little attention was
paid, either by tourists or the Tourist Association, to the actual
history of the sites/sights in question” (138).
One of the most interesting case studies in Making Ireland Irish
is the restoration of Kilmainham Jail and its eventual development
as a tourist destination. For nearly two decades the work of a
private voluntary group, the Kilmainham Jail Restoration Society,
kept alive the vision that Kilmainham could be restored. More than
just restored, Kilmainham Jail was transformed: what was once a site
of oppression and suffering was recast as one of heroism and
triumph. Zuelow’s coverage ends in 2007, but the Pearse
Museum
and St. Enda’s Park in Rathfarnham, which the Office of Public Works
opened in late 2008, offers yet another instance of the striking
transformation of an historical site.
Zuelow’s contribution can also be read as an overview of the
development of one of Ireland’s most important industries. Although
some efforts to attract foreign visitors, such as the Aonach
Tailteann in 1924, 1928, and 1932 might have been more fully
documented, a singular strength of Zuelow’s study is the remarkable
spectrum of media covered. Print publications, such as Ireland of
the Welcomes, festival programmes, guidebooks, postcards,
advertisements, as well as pageants, films, radio broadcasts, and
even postmarks (that urged “See Ireland First”) all figure in
Zuelow’s highly readable analysis. Making Ireland Irish
joins several recent publications — including Ireland’s Heritages:
Critical Perspectives on Memory and Identity (2005), edited by
Mark McCarthy (to which Zuelow contributed) and Guy Beiner’s
Remembering the Year of the French: Irish Folk History and Social
Memory (2007) — in an ambitious project to map Irish heritage.
Joan
FitzPatrick Dean
teaches at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. In spring 2010,
her book Riot and Great Anger: Stage Censorship in Twentieth
Century Ireland will be available in paperback.
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Love and Summer by
William Trevor (London: Viking, 2009)
212 pp. £ 12.99
ISBN: 978-0-670-91824-9 (hardback)
978-0-670-91825-6 (paperback)
Reviewer:
Constanza del Río
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Faithful to his practice of alternating short stories and novels,
after his collection Cheating at Canasta (2007) William
Trevor has recently published a new novel, Love and Summer
(2009). In it Trevor chooses provincial Ireland — the
Ireland
of his short fiction and life experience, the Ireland of the small
town and scattered farms on the hills — to stage a
moving drama that develops during a hot summer in Rathmoye,
Co.Tipperary, in the 1950s. The world of the Big House, so central
in many of Trevor’s previous novels about Ireland, has become in
Love and Summer just a ruined and ghostly presence, but one that
will nevertheless play a crucial role in this novel’s unexpected
denouement. Most of the narrative, though, is infused with the feel
of the small town and the farm; a world of tractors, cows and
Rayburns, of pubs, lodging houses, Bovril and Bisto.
Rathmoye seems to be a place where nothing happens, or so its people
say. Yet, a knowing narrative voice soon ironically alerts the
reader: “That nothing happened was an exaggeration too” (3). After
an initial section of omniscient narration and bird’s eye view to
present the town and some of its inhabitants, the focus starts to
fall alternately on the main characters, all of them introduced with
economy of means coupled with psychological depth, this being an art
in which Trevor excels. Thus we learn that in Rathmoye there is
indeed a lot going on, if only emotionally, under a calm surface.
Some characters are haunted by their pasts and corroded by guilt,
resentment or a sense of failure. Others, it is true, are content
with what they have since there is so very little they have been
taught to expect from life. For ones and the others, things will
change with the arrival in town of a stranger, Florian Kilderry, a
young man who will inadvertently set in motion the characters’
desires and feelings, including his own.
There is Ellie, a young, beautiful, childish and innocent foundling,
the heroine of the novel. Raised in an orphanage where furniture,
clothes and schoolbooks had all been passed on, and educated by
nuns, she has learnt to accept and be grateful, and considers that
she is fortunate to have been hired as a maid and then proposed
marriage by Dillahan, a widowed farmer older than Ellie whom she
does not love. Ellie’s discovery of love with Florian plunges her
into an emotional turmoil from which she will emerge, if not
unscathed, at least more experienced.
There is Dillahan, Ellie’s husband, a silent man always kind and
gentle with Ellie. Permanently worried about his farming and the new
field he wants to buy, Dillahan is secretively haunted by a sense of
shame and guilt for the tragic accident in which he ran over and
killed his first wife and child. His only solace is his young new
wife who, as he confesses, has made it easier for him by helping him
to confront his irrational fears.
Florian Kilderry is the stranger, a young Protestant man in search
of his own destiny and a place he can call home. When he cycles for
the first time into town to photograph Mrs Connulty’s funeral, he
immediately attracts Ellie’s and Miss Connulty’s attention. Only son
of bohemian and gifted parents — lapsed Catholic Italian
mother and Anglo-Irish father — he nostalgically
idealises his dead parents, their lifestyle and their mutual love
and devotion. He feels he failed them in their artistic expectations
for him and he moves though life letting things happen, only
realising the consequences of his thoughtless acts when it is
frequently too late. Now he has made the decision to sell the family
country house and immigrate to
Scandinavia.
Burning and disposing of the contents of the house convey Florian’s
symbolic goodbye to his parents and memories of the past, and his
intention to start from scratch and find his way in life. Yet, while
getting ready for his final departure and chosen exile, during the
hot season he gets involved in an adulterous love affair with Ellie.
For him, this relationship is just a summer friendship; a casual
relationship similar to previous ones and pursued for the same
reasons, that is, to help him forget his unrequited love for his
Italian cousin Isabella: “This beginning was as previous beginnings
had been, its distraction potent enough already. Isabella would
never be just a shadow, but this morning an artless country girl had
stirred a tenderness in him and already his cousin’s voice echoed
less confidently, her smile was perhaps a little blurred, her touch
less than yesterday’s memory of it” (84).
The novel starts with Mrs Eileen Connulty’s funeral and the reader
is soon offered an insight into her daughter’s consciousness. Miss
Connulty is a middle-aged single woman, whose hatred and resentment
at her unsympathetic and domineering mother and secret joy in her
death are superbly expressed in how she fondles her mother’s
jewellery, now finally hers. Miss Connulty keeps her past secrets
too: in her youth she had a love affair with a married English man
who disappeared leaving her pregnant. Against the mother’s will,
Miss Connulty’s father took her to a Dublin chemist’s shop to
terminate the affair. Fond as she is of watching people from her
window, Miss Connulty soon realises that something is going on
between Florian, “a plunderer” (88), and innocent Ellie. Influenced
by her own experience, Miss Connulty will try to protect Ellie from
a destructive liaison, as if Ellie were the child she could never
have.
There are in Love and Summer other secondary characters, such
as Joseph Paul Connulty and his devoted secretary, Bernadette
O’Keeffe, excellently realised, but one deserves special mention for
the role he will unwittingly play in the novel’s conclusion. This is
Orpen Wren, the fool, the madman who tells the truth even when he is
fantasising or confusing the present with the past. Orpen was
librarian of the St Johns, the Anglo-Irish family
who left the county many years before. Only the gate-lodge remains
now of Lisquin, the St Johns Big House, but, loyal to the
Anglo-Irish family, Orpen still awaits their return and lives “in
both the present and the past” (42). So potent is his desire that it
is materialised when he mistakes Florian for George Anthony St John,
old George Freddie’s grandson.
With these characters and these raw materials Trevor weaves a drama
where chance, loneliness, bitterness, nostalgia, guilt, shame,
acceptance and generosity play a fundamental part. While the reader
follows the protagonists in their daily chores, tasks or activities,
magnificently and realistically detailed and narrated, s/he glimpses
their innermost desires and feelings as well. There is irony in the
narrator’s approach, but sympathy too. At the end of the novel, one
gets the feeling, and this differentiates Love and Summer
from previous novels by Trevor, that the characters are finally
spared a tragic fate. The events of that hot summer bring about a
sense of catharsis in some characters or the ability to learn and
mature in others that redeem them and help them accept and confront
life. This is a novel to be relished, read and reread. Only William
Trevor can write a passage such as the following one: “The events of
that day had not receded for Miss Connulty. Her cruelty to the dead
was their ceremonial preservation: the time for pain was over, yet
her wish was that it should not be, that there should always be
something left — a wince, a tremor, some part of her anger that was
not satisfied” (76).
Constanza del Río
is Senior Lecturer in British Literature at the University of
Zaragoza. Her research centres on contemporary Irish fiction,
narrative and critical theory and popular narrative genres. She has
published on these subjects and on writers Flann O'Brien, Seamus
Deane, Eoin McNamee, William Trevor, Jennifer Johnston and Kate
O'Riordan. She is co-editor of Memory, Imagination and Desire in
Contemporary Anglo-American Literature and Film (Heidelberg:
Universitätsverlag Winter. 2004).
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Painting Rain by Paula Meehan ( Manchester: Carcanet,
2009)
Reviewer: Luz Mar González Arias.
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The (Un)Reliability of Poetry
Paula Meehan’s sixth full-length collection to date, Painting
Rain, opens with two quotes, the first of which is taken from
the Buddhist text The Diamond Sutra: “Words cannot express
Truth. That which words express is not Truth”. These two sentences
function as a useful piece of advice on how to approach poetry in
general and the poems in this collection in particular. Reading
poetry has conventionally involved an exercise in bio-criticism that
inevitably links the “real” life of the poet to what the poetic
persona is experiencing in the texts. Unlike novels and plays, poems
—
that are supposed to stem from the guts, from the deepest regions of
the poet’s inner landscapes
—
hardly ever offer the practitioners of the genre an artistic shield
to protect their privacy. The biographical reading of poetry is at
odds with postmodern conceptions of language as a constructed,
mediated means of apprehending the world and has often deprived
poets of a feeling of safety within their own creations. The quote
above, however, problematizes any aspirations of poetry to convey
“the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”, and fosters
instead a reading practice that moves between the private and the
public, the real and the imaginary, the historical and the
fictional. This blurring of boundaries becomes particularly relevant
when approaching Meehan’s collection, concerned as it is with youth,
trauma, death and the possibilities of healing through language and
memory, in other words, the very stuff that has traditionally
nourished bio-criticism.
The second quote that opens the book
—
“[t]he mysteries of the forest disappear with the forest”
—
is provided by Irish poet Theo Dorgan and addresses the issue of
environmental damage that is going to underpin a good number of the
texts. The aggressive proliferation of building sites during the
years of the Tiger together with international debates on global
warming have turned the so-called eco-critical perspective into a
very relevant artistic and academic discourse, and Paula Meehan has
arguably become the poetic voice most frequently associated with
that agenda in Ireland. Her poetry resists the mere invocation of
landscape as a bucolic site for nature’s equilibrium. The
eco-political poetics of Painting Rain is presided over by
that crossing of boundaries previously referred to, so that the
preservation of landscapes is intimately linked to the preservation
of the history of the community and/or the individual. In “Death of
a Field” (13-14), for example, the world of nature and economic
interests form a binary opposite that leaves no space for
reconciliation. A litany of nature’s losses
—
dandelion, dock, teasel, primrose, thistle, sloe, herb robert,
eyebright — lies in poignant contrast with the artifacts of
consumerism
—
Flash, Pledge, Ariel, Brillo, Bounce, Oxyaction, Brasso, Persil
—
and results in an apocalyptic mantra: “The memory of the field is
lost with the loss of its herbs”; “And the memory of the field
disappears with its flora”. In a similar vein, in “The Mushroom
Field” (87) a “ten storey apartment block / and a shopping centre”
are built at the expense of the eponymous field the poetic persona
and her father used to walk. Poetry here becomes the archive of
memory that nature itself should be if preserved and respected: “our
footsteps, // the vestiges I lay down on this page / side by side,
in the same rhythm, now; / making a path through autumn rain”.
But what makes the collection quite unique for its ecological
potential is that this agenda is brought to the heart of the city.
In her previous work Meehan had found creative impulse in the urban
landscapes of her native Dublin’s North Inner City. Painting Rain
is no exception in this respect and the poems go back to Dublin
—
Seán McDermott Street, Bargy Road, the areas around Parnell and
Gardiner streets
—
as it looked before the redistribution of urban spaces brought about
by the boom and the massive arrival of economic migrants. The city
is at times the site of gender and class oppression, as in “When I
Was a Girl” (52) and the “Troika” sequence (74-80), but it is also a
space whose natural elements become palimpsests of memory that
record the different stories they witness. And so, in the sequence
“Six Sycamores” (28-33) the trees acquire the same archival
potential as the flora of the fields usurped by the building sites.
In Meehan’s urban contexts nature is that “spring blossom falling
like snow” (33) that, in Joycean reminiscence, functions as a
pervasive presence embracing the wealthy and the underclass, the
male and the female and, once more, the nationally public and the
personally private alike. Meehan’s Dublin clears a space for the
representation of previously invisible collectives. If the statue of
Molly Malone in Dharmakaya (2000: 25) became a symbol for
“the cast off, the abandoned, / the lost, the useless, the relicts”,
in Painting Rain the Christmas tree in Buckingham Street
preserves the memory of the children who died from drug addiction
“[h]ere at the heart of winter / Here at the heart of the city”
(47-48). The same streets
“that defeated them / That brought them to their knees” (47) are
utterly transformed by nature to become a monument to societal
problems associated with the north side.
Painting Rain
is also remarkable for its inscription of physical pain in a good
number of its pages. Meehan has always shown a special interest in
the elegy as a means to come to terms with loss and grief. However,
the articulation of emotional pain is here complemented by the
representation of physical distress, pain and suffering. Elaine
Scarry’s seminal work on the body in pain pointed at the poignant
silencing of these experiences in art and literature as, she
contends, the body in a state of decay shatters linguistic
articulation, that is, it has the capacity to resist language.
Dealing with illness has often confronted artists with the
validation of this subject matter as poetic material, not to mention
the ethical dilemmas such a thematic choice might involve. Meehan,
however, bravely introduces uneasy physical experiences into her
lines and creates a space for previously silenced forms of
embodiment. The poetic persona of “From Source to Sea” (70) caresses
the scars of a tortured body whose pain is “beyond comfort of song
or poem” and enlarges the meaning of beauty to encompass its
distortions and deviations: “I trace its course from neck to hip,
its silken touch, / its pearly loveliness”. Similarly, the effects
of chemotherapy or the physical descriptions of sexual abuse and
trauma find a space in poems such as “Cora, Auntie” (38-48), “Peter,
Uncle” (41-44) and “A Reliable Narrative” (76-78).
Meehan can be described as a very formal poet for whom rhythm and
the breaking of the line are at the centre of creation. However, her
poetry does not exclusively come out of verbal fluency. As she
herself has acknowledged, she is not “attached to either received
forms or free forms. I will use whatever the poem demands” (González-Arias
195). For anyone attending one of Meehan’s readings the texts read
will never be the same, impregnated as they become by the rhythms of
the poet’s breathing, by her intuitive
—
although often very formally accomplished
—
breaking of the lines. In this respect, Painting Rain is an
eclectic collection that reflects Meehan’s interest in the symbiotic
relationship between form and content, and where the line at times
resists the constrictions that the poetic persona is finding in
class consciousness, in trauma and in grief. And so, the suggestive
“How I Discovered Rhyme” (74-75) makes use of images with a high
evocative potential
—
the shape of Ireland, Christmas dolls, grass, “feathers like some
angelic benison”
—
but turns them into signifiers for a new rhyme, a new poetic form
that brings the marginal into the centre of representation.
As it was only to be expected from any new poems by one of Ireland’s
most acclaimed voices, Painting Rain has already attracted a
lot of critical attention and the special issue An Sionnach
devoted to Paula Meehan (edited by Jody Allen-Randolph, 2009)
includes many essays that look at the poems here reviewed. After
reading this substantial collection we cannot but reflect once more
on the choice of quotes that precede the poems. All the seemingly
autobiographical material the poet may be drawing on is presented
without the protective aid of mythical shields. Even a sequence such
as “Troika”, that explicitly uses the Greek pantheon as a starting
point for what is to follow, does not deploy this background as a
means of escaping historical commitment through a comfortable
distance. The narratives represented in this collection are
“reliable” (76) but “not confessional” (78), leaving the reader in
that limbo between the real and the imagined, the truth and the
fiction or, in other words, the reliable and the unreliable. This
liminal space is part and parcel of the limitations of good poetry.
It is also its main source of strength and pleasure.
1. The author of this review
wants to acknowledge her participation in the Research Projects
FFI2009-08475/FILO and INCITE09 204127PR for the study of
contemporary Irish and Galician women poets.
Luz Mar González Arias is a Senior Lecturer in the English
Department, University of Oviedo. Her main field of research is
contemporary Irish women poets. She has recently contributed to
The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial Studies (ed. John
McLeod), to the volume Opening the Field: Irish Women, Texts and
Contexts (eds. Christine St Peter and Patricia Haberstroh) and
to the special issue on Paula Meehan in An Sionnach: A Journal of
Literature, Culture, and the Arts (ed. Jody Allen-Randolph). She
is currently working on a book-length monograph on the life and
poetry of Dorothy Molloy.
Anáil an Bhéil Bheo: Orality
and Modern Irish Culture
(Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne, 2009)
edited by Nessa Cronin, Seán Crosson and John Eastlake
ISBN: 9781443801522
274 pp. €43
Reviewer:
Irena Grubica
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Exploring the multifaceted ways in which, as the editors of the
book point out, “modern Irish culture has navigated its way
through the ‘surrounding seas of orality’” (4) this outstanding
collection of essays embraces interdisciplinary approaches
ranging from ethnography, literature, visual art, history,
music, film, theatre and women’s studies and sets out to animate
one of the most debated topics in the history of Irish society
and culture, the interrelation between the oral and the textual
and their role in the formation of modernity. The most
challenging vehicle for this brave voyage through the impressive
array of heterogeneous material is the application of the
concept of orality informed by Walter Ong’s theoretical work to
different intersecting cultural discourses. This invites various
methodological approaches and paves the way for rejecting the
oversimplified dichotomy between orality and textuality by which
orality has traditionally been aligned with “the Irish language,
the traditional and rurality, and print literacy with the
English language, modernity and urbanity” (4), in order to point
out at their co-existence in various forms of cultural
production.
The nineteen essays included in the collection are the fruitful
product of the conference organized by the Centre for Irish
Studies, National University of Ireland, Galway in 2006, which
gathered both emerging and established scholars in the field.
The distinctiveness of this event, which is also reflected in
the collection, is a choice given to speakers to present in one
of the Ireland’s main languages, Irish and English, according to
their own preferences and enabled by the simultaneous
translation facilities, so that English speaking scholars could
engage with the works of their Irish speaking colleagues.
However, we can note with regret that only one essay in the
collection is printed in Irish accompanied with its English
translation. A personalized authorial voice resonates throughout
the opening essay by Gearóid Ó Crualaoich and the closing essay
by Henry Glassie, referred to in the contents as the ‘prologue’
and the ‘coda’ of the collection, which give a vivid account of
their living and work in Cork and Ballymenone respectively and
how various people and events informed their methodology and
understanding of storytelling. Featuring also as authentic
narratives about the rich fieldwork experience of these two
leading figures in folklore research, their essays appropriately
provide a compositional frame into which other essays are
embedded and dynamically interrelated.
A diverse yet coherent nature of this collection is achieved by
the division of essays into three sections. The first section
Ballad, Song and Visual Culture, energizes the whole
collection not only by exploring interesting relations between
tradition, authenticity, orality and the visual but also by
providing reassessment of some contentions long taken for
granted and by inviting the possibility of new approaches. Thus,
in the opening essay Lochlainn Ó Tuairisg proposes to re-examine
the possibilities the folk tradition can offer for the study of
the agrarian oath-bound secret societies of pre-Famine Ireland
such as Whiteboys and other less known illegal, clandestine
groupings arguing that “vernacular source materials, the great
bulk of them oral and in the Irish language, have been more or
less ignored” (27), although “they offer exceptional insight
into the mindset of people and communities involved in agrarian
protest” (27). He undertakes a microhistorical examination of
one incident of agrarian protest showing how history, seanchas
and memory work in the representation of “the battle of Cèim an
Fhia» in County Cork and makes the point that «the worm’s eye
view of popular protest has still to be written” (27). In
similar vein Julie Henigan emphasizes the need to diverge from
the most common use of the terms oral and orality among Irish
folklorists and folksong scholars. Instead of restricting their
reference only to the means of transmission and performance she
proposes to consider them as a “phase of cultural and cognitive
development” (41) providing interesting analysis of “folk” vs.
“literary” in some eighteenth-century Irish songs.
The relevance of the widespread genre of ballad for Irish
folklore tradition is undisputable, but the influence of the
printed ballads, according to a ballad singer and collector John
Moulder, seems to be overestimated. In his essay he discusses
the functioning of printed ballads in nineteenth-century Ireland
and suggests that from the early eighteenth to the
mid-nineteenth century there were two strains of printed
balladry, popular and elite. As his research reveals, backed up
with some excerpts from the editorials of The Nation, The
United Irishman and Young Ireland Ballads were mostly elite
products, and had less powerful influence than previously noted
in the works by scholars such as Kevin Whealen and Seamus Deane
because they mostly failed to move into a vernacular milieu
among people whose verbal functioning was predominantly oral. As
Moulder argues, “they were written for the eye rather than the
ear, and consequently unintelligible and unsingable” (61). Their
popularity went hand in hand with increasing literacy among the
general public and reached its peak toward the end of the
nineteenth century.
Equally revealing is Deirdre Ní Chonghaile’s essay dealing with
traditional music of the Aran Islands, which shows how the
collectors’ opinions of orality, their motivation, and
inclination to the myth of Aran shaped the canon of Irish
traditional music and our understanding of it. She makes
interesting point that the unpublished elements in their
collections reveal “some changes that were then occurring in the
Aran musical milieu” (71) while the published elements are more
“representations of an ideal than of actuality” (71). Shifting
the thematic focus from music to the representation of orality
in visual images, Jenny McCarthy’s essay on Jack B. Yeats’s A
Broadside discusses the important role this periodical had
in the preservation of the dying tradition of broadsheet ballads
in Ireland and examines Yeats’s first and last illustrations of
ballad singers contained therein. The relation between the oral
and the visual is further explored in the essay by Sheila
Dickinson. Although she does not fully answer the intriguing
question mentioned at the beginning of her essay “why have there
been no great Irish artists?” (99), referring in particular to
the absence of leading women artists, her remarkable analysis of
four performances and new media video and projection artworks by
women artists convincingly shows how this form of artistic
expression articulates the expressive needs of contemporary
artists in a country that “continues to function with a
residually oral culture” (100).
The essays in the second section Testimony, Identity, and
Performance: Speaking the Self mostly deal with oral
testimony and memoir. These genres encapsulate the complex role
of orality in the representation of identity, illustrate
tensions between individual and collective identity formation
and also enact the issue of gender identity. Ray Cashman's
essay, therefore, appropriately focuses on the construction of
local identities through traditional, vernacular speech genres
in Northern Ireland, in particular storytelling at wakes, the
rare occasions for mixed Catholic-Protestant gatherings. Cashman
argues that genres of folklore could serve to dismantle the
conventional contentions about the construction of sectarian
identities such as opposing Catholic and Protestant identities,
the two predominant compound ethnic, political and religious
identities, proving that they are not the only possible
collective identities in Northern Ireland.
The ensuing two essays by Catherine O’Connor and Yvonne McKenna,
perhaps less appealing to the general reading public than the
previous one, but extremely well documented and without doubt of
relevance to women’s studies, draw on the oral testimonies of
two different social groups of Irish women in order to examine
the interrelationships between gender, religious and social
identity. The first essay deals extensively with the oral
testimonies of Church of Ireland Women in Ferns in the time span
between 1945 and 1965 arguing that “while women were essential
to the preservation and survival of the religious identity of
the Church of Ireland during these years, they also acted
significantly in the reproduction of gender identity” (135). On
the other hand, the second essay explores the construction of
Ireland in the oral history narratives of Irish women religious
by highlighting the pivotal images of Ireland in the stories of
this particularly neglected group of Irish migrants.
Daniel Campbell’s memoir, one of the most fascinating narratives
of pre-famine Ireland and also one of the few available accounts
from a poor layman’s perspective, is the focus of Eugene Hynes’s
essay which argues against straightforward reading of this and
similar narratives embodying conventions commonly found in
orally transmitted material. It shows that the underlying
meaning of the stories is more important than their factual
claims and that making sense of “mistakes” in them can give
valuable insights since, according to Hynes, “‘mistakes’ in
factual claims provide powerful evidence of what was most
meaningful among storytellers and their audience” (156). The
section concludes with Sarah O’Brien’s essay on narrative
encounters with the Irish in Birmingham which demonstrates how
oral narrative can “help us understand the events that
reconfigured Irish immigrants identity in Britain” (169).
The third section Origins, Revivals, and Myths: Orality and
Literary Production is in some respects complementary to the
first one because it sets out to critically re-evaluate subjects
that have already been extensively researched and written about,
such as the works of Irish canonical writers Edmund Burke and
James Joyce, and could perhaps be considered as the touchstone
of the whole collection. By highlighting the interrelations
between Irish literature and the realm of Irish oral tradition
and by deepening our understanding of how some genres of oral
tradition were mediated in literary production it provides
remarkable new insights. Katherine O’Donnell convincingly traces
the influence of the oral culture of eighteenth century Munster
on Burke’s later philosophical and political work giving
interesting insights how literary and debating clubs Burke
founded while a student in Dublin and a politician in London
share some patterns he encountered at poetic and social
gatherings in his formative childhood years.
Various relations between music and the works on James Joyce
have already been extensively explored in the works by e.g.
Matthew J.C. Hodgart, Mabel Worthington, Ruth Bauerle, Zack
Bowen and Timothy Martin but the two essays by Lillis Ó Laoire
and Davide Benini dealing with Joyce’s “The Dead” provide
interesting fresh readings of Joyce's short story drawing
primarily on the context of Irish oral tradition. Ó Laoire
examines “the liminal context of festive performance through
dominant symbols of dance, song and general entertainment” (199)
in Joyce’s “The Dead” and Tomás Ó Criomhthain's An tOileánach
in a comparative analysis of the “rich, sonically keyed
textures of their writing” (199). Bennini’s essay also seeks to
rediscover the Irish oral tradition in “The Dead” attempting to
read the story as the “allegory of Joyce’s discovery of a model
of Irishness compatible with his own artistic self” (205) and
convincingly explores the interpretative potentials of poetic
genre of aisling linked to the medieval tradition of
vision poets, as he argues, encoded in the symbolic
layers of the story as well as Joyce’s possible reference to
“the old Irish tonality” (209) in the story as a manner of
sean-nós singing tradition in Ireland which, as his essay
interestingly reveals, might have been of more relevance to
Joyce than it has previously been acknowledged in criticism.
The tension between orality and textuality is further explored
in Mary O ‘Donoghue’s essay on Conor McPherson's play The
Weir and Ronan Noone’s play The Lepers of Baile Baiste
both “propelled by male volubility and its discontents in the
theatrical setting of the bar” (217) in which listeners “may be
said to perform the most destabilising work” (226). Márín Nic
Eoin’s essay, the only one in Irish, gives a comprehensive
survey of the influence of oral genres on modern literature in
Irish and the section concludes with John Eastlake’s remarkable
and meticulously elaborated view of the origin of the Blasket
Island autobiographies, one of the most unique and distinctive
group of texts originally written in Irish. Eastlake is
particularly focused on the intricacies of production in which
the role of the native, the editor and the translator contribute
to the formation and transmission of the text, and his essay is
the only one in the collection that overtly addresses the issue
of translation, which perhaps could have deserved more attention
and could have opened new horizons to the vast sea of orality
these essays graciously glide through.
Anáil an Bhéil Bheo
provides an enlightening encounter with some of the defining
genres and authors of modern Irish culture. It guides the reader
through the discursive space between orality and textuality,
present and past, at the junction of many disciplines in a
time-span of the last two formative centuries underlying the
interconnections and prevailing concerns in the ongoing process
of modern Irish cultural production. It serves as a rich,
well-documented source and a valuable reference for all the
students and scholars of Irish studies.
Irena Grubica
lectures in
English at the University of Rijeka in Croatia.
Her doctoral thesis is on
“Cultural
Memory in the
Novels of James Joyce:
Stephen Hero, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man, Ulysses”.
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978-0571239658
221pp. £12.99
Reviewer:
Pauline Hall
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| “It’s only life”
In this compact, intriguing novel, Deirdre Madden revisits themes
that she addressed in an earlier one, Authenticity. Molly
Fox’s Birthday also brings to life the artistic sensibility,
artistic success, and artistic careers. The anonymous narrator, a
playwright, here practises her craft as she “summons up people by
thinking about them.” Drama stems from conflict, and amongst these
exceptionally cultured characters, conflict is muted, but not
absent. By withholding the narrator’s name, Madden is playing with
the idea that her identity is bleached out by the two friends she
summons, the two friends who fascinate her. Her fascination is shot
through with the urge to choreograph how the protean Molly Fox,
actor extraordinaire, and Andrew Forde, polished TV art historian,
relate to her and to each other. The novel celebrates the magic of
the theatre, where artifice is the means to achieve truth. In a
lovely phrase, Madden describes how Molly, by enacting the emotion
of an imaginary woman, the Duchess of Malfi, calls forth from the
audience a real emotion: how, from her lonely stance on the stage,
she achieves for the audience “a breaching of loneliness.”
“Things are not quite on the level,” Madden writes. Here,
authenticity may be essential, but it is also elusive. The
narrator’s is the voice that filters the world of the novel, makes
us complicit with her version of events. Unreliable narrators first
appeared in mystery tales, like The Moonstone and The Turn
of the Screw. Madden’s book is set on a perfect Irish summer
day, yet she deploys some of the same devices as Collins and James
did, qualifying the narrator’s reliability by deft planting of tiny
details, and holding the quality of surprise right to the end of the
book. The narrator’s own artifice in construction of a self, of a
history, cannot prevent the leakage of significant facts. These make
her progressively more, not less, interesting and (giving the lie to
her self-critical commentary) ultimately more interesting than
either Molly or Andrew. Each of them has also constructed the self
they present to the world.
In contrast, members of the large cheerful Northern Irish family
from which the narrator springs have, apparently, little need of
artifice. As a consequence, they seem less evolved. Yet
authenticity can be found, even where there is little common ground,
as the narrator shrewdly observes, “How important formulaic
conversations are to the sustaining of affection.” One example of
artifice, Andrew’s dropping of his Northern Irish accent, has
significance for the relationship of Ireland with England, where
accent is a proxy for class. The narrator does not say if she has
done the same: it seems unlikely.
Madden makes skilful use of devices from classical drama, by keeping
the action to the time frame of a single day (albeit the longest day
of the year), by shifting into flashbacks, by interposing moments of
discovery into her chronicle of time past. Scenes from time past are
smoothly embedded in the main narrative, the present time of
midsummer in Dublin. As she house-sits for Molly, the narrator
struggles with writer’s block, traces key moments in the
interlinking stories of herself, Molly and Andrew, from their
jeunesse dore days at Trinity to their current celebrity.
The two characters, born (like Madden herself) in Northern Ireland,
illustrate and reflect on two versions of Northern Ireland families:
a multi-generational bustling Catholic family, and a truncated, more
reserved Protestant one. For the narrator, the ethic and the
aesthetic don’t line up neatly in the difference between the two
kinds of church.
At one point, the narrator wonders: “Who is Molly when she’s
alone?” The closer she approaches to Molly, the more Molly seems to
recede. The house, the garden, and her elegant possessions promise
to unlock her essence. But these clues both reassure and unsettle.
When the narrator breaks a jug, it heralds other disturbances.
Each of the three main characters has a deep relationship with a
brother, relationships summed up in objects given as gifts. Madden
excels in describing the gesture of someone holding a small
intricate object, and underlining what it communicates. The
narrator’s brother Father Tom (by far the most sophisticated of her
siblings, not cramped by his round of mundane parish duties) gave
Molly a small olivewood bowl from Jerusalem. Molly’s troubled
brother Fergus gave her a miniature chess set. Andrew’s ambivalence
about his loyalist paramilitary brother Billy and his Northern
Ireland heritage shifts when the clumsy signet ring that came to him
from Billy is transformed from something he dismissed as ugly and
loaded with unhappy meaning, into a treasured moment.
It would spoil the enjoyment of the last third of the novel to say
more than that, as in fairy-tales, the narrator receives three
visitors, none of them expected. Each opening of the front door in
its way disrupts the mood of the day, and counterpoints the memories
she has wound and unwound. Each encounter functions as a
discovery, forcing the narrator to revise her assumptions, and
forcing readers to revise their assumptions about her story.
Fergus, for instance, introduced as someone with serious psychiatric
problems, is the character that most exemplifies authenticity, and
paradoxically, has, against the odds, retained the most mature sense
of self.
As the longest day draws to a close, the narrator moves away from
the hall. This, of all rooms of the house, most strongly evokes
Molly’s public life and success. The narrator achieves a wrap on the
emotion that has surged up there. She attends to a simple end of
evening ritual: the winding up of the long case clock, whose dark
narrow wooden compartment seems to her ”to hold time itself”, the
time of their past experience, as well as the time of the day that
unfolded in the novel. Andrew’s comment “It’s only life” reaches to
reconcile past and present. The final passage of the novel pulls the
narrator back from her personal dilemmas by a deft opening to the
strangeness, the randomness of the natural world.
Pauline
Hall is a
graduate of University College Dublin and Yale University. Her novel
Grounds was published by Brandon Books. She has just
completed another novel and is preparing a volume of poems for
publication. She has published poems in Cyphers and on RTE’s
Rattlebag, and articles in the Dubliner magazine and the
Irish Times. She is a member of Airfield writers’ group.
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Last Train from Liguria
by Christine
Dwyer Hickey (London: Atlantic Books, 2009)
Pb ISBN: 9781843549871
392 pp. £12.99
Reviewer:
James McGrath
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The identities
of people, periods and nations are compellingly mercurial throughout
Christine Dwyer Hickey’s fifth book. Though packaged like a standard
historical novel, it defies predictability throughout. Atlantic
Books’ teacherly blurb is justified in emphasising the sustained
confrontation of “how identity and history are both mutable and
inextricably linked”. Last Train from Liguria starts in
Dublin in 1924 and concludes in the Italian town of Bordighera in
1995. In the ambitiously wide-ranging cast of characters, only the
most incidental are confined to any one nation. Aptly, the main
protagonists’ names, Edward King and Bella Stuart, connote royal
figureheads of mixed national identity.
Fleeing Dublin
for Italy after murdering his sister, Edward adopts his name (plus
an English accent) after noticing an advertisement for King Edward
cigars. In Liguria, blackmailing his former music tutor into giving
him an immaculate reference, Edward secures work teaching piano to
Alec Lami, the lonely child of an eminent Jewish Italian family.
Meanwhile, the Stuarts leave Dublin for London after Bella’s
adolescent passion for her surgeon father’s colleague incurs what
remains, for most of the novel, an unspeakable incident. As a
thirty-two-year-old spinster in 1933, Bella arrives in Italy to work
as a tutor to Alec. Sailing from England, the shy Bella (born
Annabelle) contemplates renaming herself Anne (“an indefinite
article”, p. 19). Edward and Bella, exiled Dubliners, are thus
united in Italy while acting as surrogate parents to a melancholy,
eccentric child against the backdrop of Fascism.
Throughout the
novel, overt parallels emerge between key characters across
generations, enhancing their depths via both symmetries and
contrasts. In the later settings, Bella (“Nonna”) is shown from her
granddaughter’s viewpoint. As if inheriting the repressed half of
Bella’s character, the contrastingly unreserved granddaughter is
named Anna. However, most pivotal to the novel, albeit less
foregrounded, is Alec, “the outsider looking in” (p. 159).
Continuing a
pattern well-established in popular fiction of the past decade (Hornby;
Haddon) Alec’s appearances repeatedly suggest autism — or more
specifically, Asperger’s Syndrome. However, it is significant that
these terms are unused here, and not only because Alec’s appearances
(confined to the 1930s) predate Hans Asperger’s seminal 1944 outline
of this condition’s manifestations. Dwyer Hickey’s novel also
appears at the end of a decade in which three books by Dublin-based
psychiatrist and autism specialist Professor Michael Fitzgerald have
pushed Irish writers including Swift, Yeats, Joyce and Beckett into
what seems to be emerging as an autistic canon. Fitzgerald
contributes boldly to autism studies in such works (2004, 2005 and
with Antoinette Walker, 2006). Yet for me at least, Dwyer Hickey
offers more to this field through fiction than Fitzgerald does
through speculative biographical reconstructions. Dwyer Hickey
indirectly prompts questions concerning Asperger’s Syndrome as a
condition which — as the term may suggest — exists significantly in
the view of the beholder. Here, the novel’s quiet emphases on the
fluctuating nature of identity are most poignant and perhaps most
important. For the most part, Alec appears “extremely awkward” (p.
163) to those unready to understand him, particularly at school.
Conversely, when he is shown with Bella and Edward, Dwyer Hickey’s
unsubtle yet judiciously controlled post-Haddon invitations to
autism-spotting largely cease. Thus, through one of this historical
novel’s most notably “contemporary” facets emerges a valuable feat
in character construction. Unlike Fitzgerald’s James Joyce (et al),
Dwyer Hickey’s Alec is not “autistic”; Alec is Alec.
Inextricably
melded to the complex identities of its characters, the novel’s main
settings — within and between Ireland, England and Italy — reinforce
themes of transience and transition. Trains, hotels, pubs and (in
the Lamis’ villa) an atmospheric library-come-apartment feature
prominently. The later counterpart for Bella is a darker place of
transition: a home for the elderly.
Last
Train from Liguria
could be superbly stimulating in both universities
and books groups. The vast array of minor characters make close
reading essential in order to keep up with the constantly-moving
plot; but through the almost self-referentially multiple layers of
implication, there is much to speculate and indeed debate. Most
pertinently, this novel prompts us to consider national identity as
both an essential and an existential notion. The dialogue favours
the former, with frequent generalisations concerning the English,
Americans, Italians and Germans (continuing the “outsider looking
in” motif, there are few such comments on the Irish). However, these
crude observations are continually revealed as ironic by the broader
narrative.
Nations and
indeed continents are themselves effectively characters in this
novel, and like the people who represent them here, these concepts
are shown in continual change. “Europe”, an American character
observes in 1933, is “in foul mood” (p. 100). Anna’s 1995 confession
of knowing little regarding Italian anti-Semitism during World War
II could have summarised my own viewpoint prior to reading this
book. However, Last Train from Liguria is both informed and
informative, as alarmingly rapid amendments to Mussolini’s racial
policies are narrated via the dialogue. These events culminate in
Bella’s attempt to bring the half-Jewish Alec to safety in London.
The characters’ differing but changing attitudes to racism in
Mussolini’s Italy make for unsettling reading on the British
mainland in 2009. The evocations of England as, in part, a refuge
from the rhetorical poisons of fascism now seem eerily nostalgic.
As the
remaining pages of this mysterious novel become fewer with much
remaining unrevealed, we are led to expect a spectacular conclusion.
This we receive, but not in any predictable novelistic manner. Scope
for a sequel is readily apparent — but this does not mean that the
plot is unresolved. Equally evident — through the lively dialogue,
the charming descriptions of music, and the captivating evocations
of time, space and mood — is the potential for this novel to provide
the basis for an internationally-themed Irish film for the coming
decade (Dwyer Hickey, it is unsurprising to learn, has previously
worked as a screenwriter).
Much as
national identity is never confined to one land in this novel, the
reading experience is not confined to the pages. By turns uplifting
and disturbing, Last Train from Liguria lingers in the mind
like a haunting song.
Works Cited
Asperger, Hans. 1991 (1944). “Autistic Psychopathy in Childhood”.
In Uta Frith ed. Autism and Asperger Syndrome. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Fitzgerald, Michael. 2004. Autism and Creativity: Is there a Link
Between Autism in Men and Exceptional Ability? New York:
Routledge.
__________. 2005. The Genesis of Artistic Creativity: Asperger’s
Syndrome and the Arts. London: Jessica Kingsley.
Haddon, Mark. 2003. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the
Night-Time. London: Jonathan Cape.
Hornby, Nick. 1998. About a Boy. Harmondsworth: Penguin,
2000.
Walker, Antoinette and Michael Fitzgerald. 2006. Unstoppable
Brilliance: Irish Geniuses and Asperger’s Syndrome. Dublin:
Liberties Press.
See also McGrath, James. 2007. “Reading Autism”,
Interdisciplinary Literary Studies. Spring 2007. 8:2. 100-113.
James
McGrath has
recently submitted his PhD at Leeds Metropolitan University, where
he lectures in English Literature and Cultural Studies. His thesis
compares representations of home, class, nation and religion in the
songs of John Lennon and Paul McCartney. He is also pursuing a
further research interest, exploring the value of interdisciplinary
Cultural Studies toward understandings of high-functioning autism.
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The
Origami Crow: Journey into Japan, World Cup Summer 2002
by
Éamon Carr
(Dublin: Seven Towers,
2008)
ISBN
978-0-9555346-5-2 (case bound); 978-0-9555346-6-9 (perfect bound). 75 pp.
Leaf, Sunlight, Asphalt
by Ben Howard (Cliffs of Moher, Co Clare: Salmon Poetry, 2009)
ISBN
978-1-907056-13-0 (paper). 69 pp.
Reviewer: John L. Murphy
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Two poets from Irish departures enter Matsuo Basho’s path.
Basho (1644-94) inspires Carr and Howard towards reconciling the mundane
with the profound. Basho, known for what Carr calls
“the most famous lines
in Japanese literature”, wrote in one haiku these three: “Ancient pond
— /
Frog jumps in/ Water-sound”. Drummer, lyricist, and ‘conceptualist’ for the
Irish electric-folk rock band Horslips, after an earlier stint with the
poetry collective Tara Telephone, Carr shares with Iowa-born, upstate New
York-based Professor Howard a long career in verse. For both, the East lures
these Westerners towards a calmer perspective grounded in nature and
forbearance. Although this is Carr’s first collection, compared with
Howard’s sixth, both men bring to their slim new volumes a broad range of
experience travelling through Ireland and abroad. They integrate popular
culture, the toll of aging, sport, and pleasure into their recollections
made largely in tranquility.
Carr, now a sports broadcaster and cultural commentator,
leaves Dublin having planted seeds in his garden. He follows not only
Basho’s footsteps but the kicks of the Irish World Cup team during their
initial matches in Japan. Roy Keane’s dramatic departure from Mick
McCarthy’s national squad before the games begin devastates all who support
the “Boys in Green”. The tension between the team’s predicament as underdogs
and Carr’s own pilgrimage towards a quieter example of fortitude adds
unexpected force to his summer journey.
In a series of prose-poems, Carr describes the sights and
sounds of Japan, mixed with his recollections of the first televised match
he saw, that of the soon-doomed Manchester United team many of whom would
die in a 1958 plane crash in Munich. This in turn blends with the memory of
his mother, dead from cancer then at thirty-one. Against such frailty, Carr
strives to rise to the opportunity provided by his visit.
At the Takasegewa River, he watches the local folks float lit
lanterns downstream “to console the spirits of their ancestors” (27). Where
Basho honoured his own stay there, so does Carr: “I listen to the music the
river makes as it dances over rocks that have been cleverly placed to create
just such a symphony and notice how close the twinkling machinery of the
heavens seems. I find a key to an ocean of calm beyond the nameless gates of
the everyday”.
His life tracks the same direction on “the road under a full
May moon”. As he continues across Japan, the matches go on and Ireland
manages to pull two draws to survive in the competition. The team bus
airbrushes Keane from its exterior image, “his form by now an ominous black
silhouette. A dark star at the heart of the squad’s aspiration’ (53).
Ireland battles on against the odds, and like Carr, perhaps knows that
defeat, whether with his mother, ManU, or himself, may loom. Nevertheless,
he does not stray from his mission.
His fellow countrymen may not share his direction. In
Roppongi, thinking that our narrator heads for a pub, “a man from Sligo”
joins him (55). Carr must correct him. He aims for an obscure shrine “where
many of the samurai families once worshipped”. The next line tells us
simply: “I’m travelling alone when I arrive at the shrine, with its grove of
camphor trees and ginko”.
Frequently on his pilgrimage, Carr seeks the less-travelled
road. He finds on “the wide swift Sumida River” where the old poet “began
his journeys. This is the place to which he returned. This is ground he
walked on. I sit beneath the basho tree and close my eyes” (67). There in
the breeze he hears the same sounds Basho did “every day he sat here”. In
the wind, “it’s a voice I recognise. A voice that calls across the fields,
and the years, from among the branches of the trees in a County Meath
graveyard”. There rests his mother, who died when he was a boy. He seeks for
her poor body and great soul the epiphany that the “wind in the basho tree”
grants.
Reminiscent of Joyce’s “The Dead” not with a general snowfall
so much as a gentler rustle, Carr reaches the moment of insight. “It is
then. It is now. It is beyond and outside time. There’s a growing
luminosity. It surrounds a large bright vessel that’s overflowing with tears
and with light for the world. Compassion and grace. For the dead. For those
still living. For us all. For my young mother. And for that boy”.
Even if the Irish team had not achieved more than two draws
and a win, Carr would have left them on his already charted direction home.
The team went on to Korea, fought on to the last sixteen knockout round, but
lost to Spain on penalty kicks. “The World Cup remains a dream” (73). His
own dream more compact, Carr comes back to his Dublin garden to find “a fine
crop of blooms”. He learns the same lesson from life as taught by Basho:
“While travelling, everything seems temporary. — And of course, everything is
transient. Like clouds in the sky, like flower blossoms, like football
teams, nothing ever remains the same. — In this impermanent world, we should
attempt to hold family, lovers, friends, and heroes in our hearts forever”
(75).
By such clarity, Carr leaves on every page here a single
haiku, surrounded by such reflections. These episodes do not strive for
great drama. In the spirit of their Japanese inspiration, Carr avoids
complexity. He aligns himself with Basho’s perspective; in the sights seen
by Basho, Carr sees his own.
For Ben Howard, Leaf, Sunlight, Asphalt extends this
poet’s own Eastern perspective, sharpened by his own Irish exchanges. A
critic of its literature and a practitioner of Zen, Howard places himself at
the same crossroads that Carr meets. For Howard, however, Dublin represents
not home as it does for Carr with his garden, but a reminder of a past
literary glory and a present but elusive revelation.
“The Glad Creators" opens part one. He wishes he’d been born
a decade earlier, “an able novice setting out,/ Equipped with confidence and
cautious diction/ But all the same a lamb among those lions/ Who frequented McDaid’s and Davy Byrne’s,/ Reciting Yeats or Ferriter by heart/ Or
bellowing invectives to the rafters/ Or sitting meekly with a ball of malt”
(13). He conjures up Behan and O’Faolain, Kavanagh and Flann O’Brien, and
Parsons Bookshop with “May O’Flaherty/ Who made a temple of a common shop”
(16). Howard takes on his forebears but betrays no anxiety for their
influence. He sizes up each lion, and returns each glance steadily.
“Dublin in July” contrasts South Great George’s Street, “this
street that’s no more Irish than its name” filled with panini, tandoori,
noodles, and “The cell phone bleating from a stylish belt” (20). Here, he
asks: “What has become of that revered, imagined/ Dublin of O’Brien and
O’Faolain,/ Its taste as Irish as a ball of malt?” It may be found in
Liverpool or Boston or a pint of Guinness, Howard muses, but not among the
traffic press of Vespas.
Evanescence flows through these linked poems as through
Carr’s; both know their return to a place they sought will weaken their
memories from what they have read, once revealed as real. Howard fondles his
latest poetry volume in 2004, in a place with “bamboo screens suggestive of
repose” (22). Yet, its name warns of a lesson learned by Carr. “The Samsara
Bar and Café” stands in Buddhist teaching for “the never-ending/ cycle of
birth and death, the end result/ of ignorance, aversion, and desire”. He
contemplates his new book of verse, one more poet with one more added to a
long line of Dubliners native and not. He recognizes a truer moral that
tempers his morale, sitting in the café with “its sparse calligraphy replete
with meanings/ well beyond my ken”.
From such moments of comprehension and mystery, Howard
creates his contemplation. His verse moves firmly, as confidently as the
“cautious diction” favoured by McDaid’s lions. Yet, as with Carr, Howard
hesitates. He retreats from hubris. “Leaving Tralee’ finds: “As for the
page/ I’m writing over tea too hot to swallow/ I see it as a sieve, through
which the pungent/ odor of last night’s fish” from the clattering kitchen
reminds him of the passing patrons in his hotel’s lobby, “and all the sights
I have or have not noticed/ are passing to their final destination” (27).
His yellowing journals remind him of an “aging hymn” and seem “no less
formless than a jotted dream”.
Part two surveys his Midwestern childhood. “Original Face”
takes on the Zen koan: “What was your original face/ before your parents
were born?” (31). He concludes, after gazing at a photo of his mother and
father on a canoe earlier in their courtship about “the son who can’t be
seen/ but nonetheless abides/ somewhere in those waters,/ those high
Midwestern clouds” (32). He anticipates, in hindsight, “all the hoarded
thought of forty years together” that his parents shared.
For now, Howard recalls his own dimming childhood memories.
For Carr, these filled with death: ManU and his mother. For Howard, they
remain more innocent tastes and smells and sounds. Part three invites Thomas
Merton’s “lucid silence” to continue such a return to purity. Howard lives
near where Merton summered as a poet-critic himself before he entered the Trappists; Howard finds Merton’s hard-won wisdom elusive today. Like that
English professor turned monk, Howard lingers within nature for solace. “One
Time, One Meeting” (also the name of Howard’s spare meditations collected as
his blog) summons in Zen fashion the entry of the ethereal into the
ordinary. It begins: “Picking up the phone to call my son,/ I entertain the
thought that every act,/ No matter how familiar or banal,/ Might be
construed as unrepeatable/ And all of life as ceremonial” (49). Precisely,
Howard as has Carr moves forward on his determined path, to blaze into the
everyday a trace of the otherworldly, which in its own universality
permeates life.
Life passing, mortality for both poets waits. “What I May
Rely On” reads in full: “Turning into nothing, all those days/ Remain in
memory as though their patterns/ Persisted when their dyes had long since
faded./ Here is the morning sun. And here is dusk/ Consuming every tree on
the horizon”.
It continues: “Turning into forms of which I know/ Only a
little now, my own two hands/ Tell me that the bones beneath that skin/ Are
what I may rely on to continue,/ Whatever may come of mark or wrinkle” (58).
Howard finds in his body’s reduction to not skin but bones his own sign, a
Jolly Roger of sorts to mark his sailing over another ocean towards a port
he cannot imagine. Carr came full circle back to his Dublin garden to find
renewal as the seeds planted on his departure grew into flowers. Howard
circles too, within the persistent patterns of nothingness that endure far
longer than any plant’s dye, lost in the diurnal glow of savage sun and
altering night.
The collection finishes with “Right Livelihood”, on the
occasion of his retirement from teaching. The speaker fumbles as he
struggles to find for his professorial peers the proper tone. He refers to
Philip Larkin, who called in his university appointment his supervisor
“Toad”, but then opts for a more diplomatic, and Zen-like, address. He
chooses ‘Frog’, but “not the frog that brought/ enlightenment to Basho”
(66). He chooses a croaking hungry creature as his avatar. Seeking to ease
aspersions rather than to cast them at his colleagues, he calms himself.
Borrowing “a leaf/ from Basho’s heritage”, he calls his
collegial faculty by invoking the Buddhist injunction to Right Livelihood
and Right Speech in hopes of truth. He seeks in his verse as in his
valedictory speech a signifier “that indicates what’s there/ and never what
is not;/ that waters seeds of joy/ and equanimity”, but one that in truth
also calls out “greed and cruelty” when necessary. As with Carr who admires
in the refusal to capitulate to defeat Basho’s own example of fortitude
under pressure, so does Howard evoke the same haiku master’s heritage to
guide him on a path less directly trod by the Japanese poet and his Irish
follower, but one which whether in the streets of Dublin or the corridors of
a college in upstate New York keeps to the same fidelity.
John L. Murphy
coordinates the Humanities program at DeVry University in Long Beach,
California. His current research includes the invention of the concept of
"Celtic Buddhism".
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In recent years, the Irish have played a prominent role in the
popularisation of autobiography and memoir both in Ireland and further
afield. This, of course, has been largely due to the extraordinary success
of one particular book. In the mid-1990s, Angela’s Ashes, for better
or worse (depending on your opinion) did for Irish literature what
Riverdance did for Irish traditional music. But, perhaps because Frank
McCourt is often accused of being the instigator of the “miserabilist” turn
in autobiography, surprisingly little attention has been recently paid by
Irish critics to this deep and rich seam of literary endeavour. Liam Harte
went some way to redressing this situation by editing a welcome collection
of essays on the subject three years ago. Now he has turned his attention to
a specific corner of this canvas by investigating the autobiography and
memoir of the Irish in Britain.
In light of the recent upturn in Irish migration to Britain (a projected
25,000 per annum will be making the journey in the next five years), the
book has a timely relevance. Beyond the facts and figures about such trends,
which can only tell us so much, accounts like the 63 collected in this
impressive anthology enrich our understanding of the lived experience of
migration in numerous ways.
Phrases in his introduction such as “the first recuperative survey” and
“open up a largely untrodden landscape” indicate the self-consciously
pioneering spirit with which Harte has approached his task.
Every migrant has a unique story to tell but, just as importantly, the way
in which they tell that story reveals clues to the psychological and
emotional impact the experience has had on their personal identity. Harte’s
approach helps to illuminate this by showing how Irish migrants represented
themselves in their own cultural vernacular, as opposed to the often
stereotypical images we are familiar with from both the British and Irish
media.
One of the most valuable services the book provides is to problematize the
common perception of the Irish in Britain as predominantly victims of exile.
The rich heterogeneity of the narratives exemplifies, what Harte refers to
as, the “multiple ways” in which migrants reflected on their experience and,
as a result, their sense of Irishness.
Some of the texts included here will
be familiar to scholars of Irish literature: those by writers such as
Patrick MacGill, Louis MacNiece and Dónall Mac Amhlaigh, for instance. But
others won’t, especially the fascinating extracts from works written in the
18th and 19th centuries by colourful individuals such
as Laetitia Pilkington, for instance, who vividly describes her nine-week
incarceration in Marshelsea Prison in 1742.
Likewise, John O’Neill who
provides an endearing account of his attempt to track down his father in
London’s
West End
in 1808, or the redoubtable Jane Jowitt who recalls her travels around
Yorkshire in the early 19th century attempting to sell her
poetry. It is notable how women writers are more prominently featured the
further back in time the survey delves. Whilst they account for almost fifty
per cent of the pre-20th century inclusions (albeit from a
smaller sample overall) they only constitute about a fifth of the rest of
the anthology. This is surprising given the wealth of female accounts in
more recent times. The inclusion of extracts from memoirs such as Nuala
O’Faolain’s Are You Somebody (1998), Bridget Boland’s At My
Mother’s Knee (1978) or the autobiographical accounts of their
experiences in England by Katherine Tynan, Eavan Boland or Ethel Mannin
would have helped to redress this imbalance.
The experience of migration might itself be conceived of as a form of
narrative. It could be said to have a beginning, a middle and an end. But
there is a dichotomy between how such an experience is lived and how it is
later recorded.
The role of
narrative (and the inherent relationship between the facts and fictions of
which it is the product) is crucial, therefore, for understanding the way
diasporic identities are shaped. In his introduction to The Literature of
the Irish in Britain, Harte rehearses some of the methodological
complexities this presents for researchers. He rightly warns, on the one
hand, against the dangers of overly-literary analyses which might dissolve
the lived experience of such accounts into “the ether of textuality” whilst,
on the other, the danger of reading the testimonies as transparent factual
relics of the past and ignoring their undeniable constructedness and
aesthetic import. He opts, instead, for an interdisciplinary approach. In
the helpful prefaces he provides to each text, he chooses to read his
sources as both social history and cultural artefact. So, for instance,
where Bill Naughton’s autobiography, Saintly Billy (1988), is
constructed around the trauma of uprooting from his native Mayo in the early
20th century and is “a compelling exercise in redemptive
recollection”, Alice Foley’s A Bolton Childhood (1975), a second
generation memoir set in the same Lancashire town a few years earlier,
incorporates both “documentary description” and “quasi-Wordsworthian”
flourishes in its depiction of its subject’s political empowerment.
As both of these texts demonstrate, some of the best autobiography on the
Irish in
Britain
in recent years has been motivated by second generation experiences. It is
unfortunate, therefore, that some the most absorbing and
critically-acclaimed examples of this from the last decade are disqualified
from inclusion by the cut-off date of 2001. John Bird’s Some Luck
(2002) springs to mind, as do Blake Morrison’s Things My Mother Never
Told Me (2002) and John Lanchester’s Family Romance (2007), both
by writers who, whilst often regarded as quintessentially English,
nevertheless reveal how their Irish mothers left a profound impact on their
lives and identities. It is the sorry lot of anthologists, of course, to
never be quite as comprehensive as they or their readers might wish. But,
given the inevitable constraints on such enterprises, Liam Harte has clearly
taken great pains to be as representative as possible. He should be
congratulated for producing such a meticulously researched volume and
bringing a fascinating and unduly marginalised genre of Irish literature
firmly to our attention.
Tony Murray
is Deputy Director of the Irish Studies Centre at London Metropolitan
University and co-producer of the film, I Only Came Over for a Couple of
Years…: Interviews with London Irish Elders (2005).
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Disguise
by Hugo Hamilton (London: Fourth Estate, 2008)
ISBN 978-0-00-719216-8
272 pp. £12.99.
Reviewer: Paul O’Hanrahan |
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In the two decades since his first Berlin novel, Surrogate City
(1990), Irish-German author Hugo Hamilton has been much concerned
with surrogacy and the need to compensate for life’s failings by
creating alternatives. Published in 2008, Hamilton’s most recent
novel, Disguise, also set in Berlin, is a meditation on
personal and post-war German history, which begins with an act of
surrogacy. In the chaos and panic of a wartime air-raid on Berlin, a
mother loses her child; later, in Nuremberg, her father finds a
three year-old in the midst of refugees drifting from the east and
offers it to his daughter as a replacement. There follows a shift in
the action to 2008 and a scene of apple-picking in an orchard in
Jüterbog, Brandenburg, on the southern perimeter of Berlin. The
forwarding of the action by six decades allows for a retrospective
view of how the foundling child, now identified as Gregor, has fared
in his life. In his early development, suppression within the family
of questions about his adoption becomes a source of contention.
Following a conversation with an uncle, Gregor’s discovery that he
might be of Jewish origin leads him finally to leave the family home
after an unresolved argument with his parents. Gregor’s frustrations
with a repressive family environment are epitomised by a scene in
which he lets off a hunting rifle in the family kitchen, causing
minor damage, but illustrating the anarchic violence bred by the
suffocating domestic atmosphere. In Disguise, Gregor’s
struggle with an authoritarian father is emblematic of the family
conflict which characterised the 1968 generation in Germany; it is
also a theme which courses through Hamilton’s work, reflecting the
author’s own difficulties in his upbringing in Ireland when he was
forced to conform to the strict nationalist regime of his Irish
father.
Gregor’s name echoes that of the protagonist of Kafka’s
Metamorphosis. Like his namesake in the Kafka story, Hamilton’s
Gregor inspires familial consternation and paternal antagonism
through an identity which he has inherited and over which he has
little control. In both cases, a family constructed on conformist
expectations is unable to accommodate individual singularity.
Disguise describes Gregor’s unsettled peripatetic life as he
seeks to find an environment in which he feels at home. A musician,
he becomes accustomed to a travelling lifestyle and, although he has
a wife and son, spends long periods away from his own family. The
likelihood of another generation being disfigured by the disruption
caused by a problematic father is only countered by the successful
nurturing of Gregor’s son, Daniel. The latter is coaxed through some
dysfunctional episodes by his wife, Mara, with the support of
Martin, a sympathetic friend of the couple who becomes a surrogate
father to Daniel.
The dual Irish-German cultural context of Hamilton’s work is
apparent when Gregor teams up with an Irish musician. Later he
travels to Ireland and looks up his erstwhile musical partner but
the indifferent reception he receives is far from the hospitality
stereotypically associated with the “Green Island” beloved of many
Germans in the decades after the war. Gregor stays in Ireland and
finds work but he is largely anonymous within Irish society and
makes no friends, apart from the conversational bond he develops
with a Jewish dentist from Poland. The period is significantly
defined by Gregor’s absence from traumatic moments in his son’s
development such as his admission to hospital after an overdose. On
receiving the news of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Gregor returns to
Nuremburg to visit his mother, who is dying. Here an allegorical
reading of the narrative is clearly signalled when Gregor’s reunion
with his mother, at which he is also joined by his own family,
coincides with the dawning of German reunification. Reviewing the
story, Gregor’s wanderings and separation from his own family can be
read as a representation of the rootlessness of divided Germany in
the post-war period.
Resourceful women, notably including his own mother as featured in
his memoir The Speckled People (2003), are a recurrent
element in Hamilton’s work. Research carried out by Mara, Gregor’s
wife, into her husband’s possible Jewish origins reveals her to have
a determined, investigative nature comparable to Christa Süsskind in
Hamilton’s novel The Love Test (1995), who pursues enquiries
into abuses perpetrated on her and her dissident husband by the
Stasi, the notorious East German secret police. Mara’s research is
inconclusive but is another important act of surrogacy in sustaining
the relationship between Gregor’s family and his mother in the
absence of Gregor himself.
The relaxed and supportive environment of a contemporary orchard
around Gregor’s narrative has the effect of encompassing the
alienation and trauma of Gregor’s turbulent past and the wartime
stories associated with his relatives. By joining family and friends
in a pastoral setting, ultimately Gregor is shown as willing to
accept that he is at home and that the people who surround him
embody what he has become. Hamilton in this novel is particularly
forthright on identity as a construct rather than a birthright and,
by presenting his friends as an alternative family who come to
constitute Gregor’s identity, the narrative asserts how the
embedding of personal history in supportive relationships can be as
formative as environment and family of origin. As Gregor’s friend,
Martin, observes: “His identity is the people he’s been living
with’(259).
Although Jewishness itself is not probed in depth in the novel,
Disguise displays the uneasiness of post-war German attitudes to
Jewishness, an issue which has come to the fore with unification and
the need for Germany as a whole to recognise the country’s Nazi
past. One of the novel’s strengths is the trenchancy of its
narrative voice, one example of which is the confidence of its
pronouncements on contemporary Berlin, in which the city is credited
for its ability to absorb and learn from its tragic experience:
The city is vivid with history. Layers of it in every suburb,
coming up through the streets, in people’s eyes. A chamber of
horrors, but also a place of monuments and devotion to memory. A
place that has no time for greatness any more and celebrates instead
the ordinary genius of survival. A wounded place at the heart of
Europe, eager to heal and laugh (96).
Praised by critics such as Hermione Lee for the strength and
originality of its wartime scenes (The Guardian, 28 June
2008), Hamilton’s portrayal in Disguise of the German
civilian experience of war aligns him with writers such as W.G.
Sebald and Günter Grass, both of whom have in recent years expressed
the need to redress the neglect in recording the suffering of the
Germans in the Second World War. As described in The Speckled
People, Hamilton’s sensitivity to German suffering had its
reflection in his own youth, when, as a child of mixed Irish and
German parentage, he was regularly taunted as a Nazi by some of his
peers. The accusation was particularly hurtful as his German mother
was herself a refugee from the Nazi regime.
Disguise
is a novel which reflects on action and behaviour rather than
presenting it directly. This may distance some readers who enjoyed
the immediacy of The Speckled People, but the strong
narrative presence enables the text to function as a novel of ideas,
at once showing and telling how identity is constructed and
can be created. Beginning with wartime destruction and ending in the
contemporary discovery of a pastoral place, this is a novel informed
by an optimistic vision of our times.
In the second volume of his memoirs, The Sailor in the Wardrobe
(2006), Hamilton describes how Berlin became a haven for him
when he discovered the city as a young man. Similarly, in
Disguise, Berlin in the sixties is seen as a site of renewal,
the place “for everyone to begin afresh” (43). Further recognition
of the city’s emancipatory influence is embodied in the use of a
rural Brandenburg setting which reconnects Berlin with the
hinterland from which it was severed by the Cold War division of the
city. Reflecting the trajectory of post-war German history and of
the generation which has endured and shaped it, Disguise
shows how friends become more than surrogate in nurturing new forms
of family and identity:
Gregor Liedmann has been brought to life by Mara, by his family, by
the external story created around him, existing only inside those
experiences he has shared with others (254).
Once again assuming the mask of fiction, Hamilton reveals how close
the novelist’s trade is to the everyday business of constructing our
own characters and narratives, and, by advocacy of an ethic of
mutual support, would seem to imply that in understanding how our
relationships make us what we are, the better we together have the
potential to become.
Paul
O’Hanrahan is
currently studying at the University of Liverpool for a PhD
on the representation of Berlin in English language texts
published in the twenty years since the fall of the Wall and
entitled Discovering
Berlin: Genre, Space and the
Individual, 1989-2009.
He is also a performer who specialises in interpreting the works of
James Joyce through site-specific readings and theatrical
presentations in Dublin.
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The Twelve by Stuart Neville (London: Harvill Secker, 2009)
326pp. £12.99
ISBN: 9781846552793
Reviewer: Laura Pelaschiar
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Stuart Neville’s The Twelve sits comfortably within
the well-known tradition of the Northern Irish Troubles Thriller, a
highly popular subgenre which has been thriving in Belfast and
surroundings since the early seventies when it first saw the light
of day. As Neville’s debut novel seems to demonstrate literary
genres can only with difficultly survive the end of those very
particular and specific political, historical, and social
circumstances, which engendered them in the first place.
One would have thought that, after the Good Friday Agreement,
decommissioning, and the setting up of the Northern Ireland
power-sharing executive, after all the painstaking work that went
into the political and cultural steps that make up the Peace
Process, that a novel like The Twelve might have become
obsolete, out of date, out of place, out of literature. Instead
literature is an unpredictable organism and what should have been
dead and buried has the power to survive against the odds. Given
that the advent of the Post-Troubles era which should have buried
the Northern Ireland Troubles thriller, Neville’s novel comes across
as a sort of ghostly apparition. It is therefore most appropriate
that the Twelve to whom the title refers are the twelve ghosts of
the victims of Troubles violence , each of whom is looking for
revenge, having been killed by the protagonist Gerry Fegan — a
ruthless IRA killer, who is both feared and admired (“He looked like
a killer, the purest kind, the kind who killed more out of want than
need” (p. 144). Fegan did twelve years in the Maze and since the
last week of his imprisonment has been haunted day and night by each
of these twelve victims.
The Twelve
could certainly be defined as a gothic Troubles thriller (not the
first one in the family: Maurice Power’s Children of the North
trilogy comes, among many others, to mind) both in terms of its
belonging to a literary genre which should be defunct, and in terms
of its content — the twelve gentle shadows that kindly but
relentlessly haunt Gerry, their material killer, in order to force
him to kill those they believe are morally responsible for their own
deaths (among them, terrorists, priests, politicians).
The Twelve
can also be read as a Northern Irish Revenge tragedy with Gerry
Fegan playing the double role of ex-killer and current avenger. He
certainly fits perfectly into this tradition, as an isolated,
alienated, brooding individual who is engaged throughout the novel
in pursuing his avenger’s task. He is an unusual avenger in that he
is also purging his own sins and his sense of guilt. “Memory”, we
are told, “cursed him”, and there is no doubt that the death of his
unforgiving mother who, after not having spoken to him for sixteen
years, died telling him that she was ashamed of him, has a powerful
Joycean echo in this sense. The ruthless killer without a conscience
is gothically transformed in post-Troubles Belfast into an epic hero
with a conscience. After all, the gothic is that literary mode in
which the past never goes away but comes back to haunt the present,
demanding that old wrongs be put right. But Fegan’s revenge plot
—
with its trail of violence, politics, and inexplicable death —
threatens to put Northern Ireland’s frail post-conflict peace
process in danger and to destabilize the government — before
thickening and becoming, like any other respectable thriller, both
convoluted and multilayered. But the Revenge will be carried out,
those responsible for the twelve original deaths will meet their
unavoidable destiny (including a priest) and the twelve shadows
(four civilians — including the inevitable mother and child
— five soldiers, one policeman, and two loyalists), will dissolve, one by one, at
the end of the novel.
Neville’s first novel parades without shame all the most practised
clichés and stereotypes of the genre — the psychopathic killer,
crooked British politicians, double-dealers, freedom-fighters,
secret agents, innocent women, in a mix that has not kept up with
the times but seems a rehash of films already seen, books already
shelved. Just as Fegan thinks, at a certain moment in the novel that
“the cause he once killed for was long gone”, and reflects at the
close that “all he knew was this place had no more thirst for war.
That had been quenched long ago. Men like him no longer belonged
here. Exhaustion washed over him in a heavy grey wave”, we too might
conclude that given that the conditions that provided the context
and justification for the Northern Ireland Troubles thriller, with
all their political permutations, have now changed so radically, so
too should the genre itself. But then again literature is an
unpredictable organism and the future of the troubles thriller in
the North is still to be decided.
Laura
Pelaschiar is a
lecturer in English Literature at the University of Trieste, Italy.
She is the author of Writing the North, The
Contemporary Novel in
Northern Ireland
(Trieste: Edizione Parnaso, 1998), and of essays on Northern Irish
Literature, James Joyce and Shakespeare. Her most recent book is
Ulisse Gotico (Firenze: Pacini, 2009).
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Cambridge
Companion to Seamus Heaney, Edited by Bernard O’Donoghue (Cambridge
U.P. 2009)
ISBN-13: 9780521547550
260 pp.
£17.99
Reviewer: Meg Tyler
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The strength of the Cambridge Companions lies in the
comprehensiveness of the introduction to an author’s work they
provide to students; in this, Bernard O’Donoghue’s Cambridge
Companion to Seamus Heaney is no different. The fourteen essays
comply, more or less, with the intent of the series, as stated on
their website, which is to place each writer “in literary and
historical context; their major works are analysed [….], and their
influence on later writers assessed.” However, because Heaney is
still living, and writing, his influence on the next generation of
poets can only be estimated. More on this later.
The editor, Bernard O’Donoghue, writes lucidly and convincingly
about both poet and poems. O’Donoghue rightly observes, for example,
the political undercurrents that shape Heaney’s work; he writes that
Seeing Things (1991) “must be seen in the context of an
improvement in the political situation in Northern Ireland,
culminating in the 1994 IRA Ceasefire.” O’Donoghue reads best when
he reads closely. For instance, quoting lines from a section in
“Squarings” (the car “gave when we got in / Like Charon’s boat under
the faring poets”), he observes that “the recurrent image in
Seeing Things is of a false sense of security, or a false sense
of insecurity.”
I wonder, to take the metaphor a little further, if we critics do
not have a kind of “false sense of security” with our readings of
Heaney. The Companion offers, with few exceptions, pages of
approving wonder; what is conveyed to readers is Heaney’s
pre-eminence. Patrick Crotty, in an essay on Heaney’s reception,
points out that this “is manifested by the very existence of the
volume for which this essay is written; no other living poet has
been the subject of a Cambridge Companion.” I think such a
decision to collect these essays might have been premature. We (and
I include myself) are unable to see Heaney from the necessary
critical remove time would provide. The group of writers assembled
here
—
Neil Corcoran, John Wilson Foster, Dennis O’Driscoll, to mention but
a few — are for the most part well-established Heaney scholars and
friends, and each one has very positive things to say about Heaney.
However, there is no singular, no dissenting voice, and no writer
whose way of seeing Heaney is remarkably different from the others.
The essays gesture at bigger pictures and contexts, but in fairly
predictable ways, and do not bring us closer than previous
scholarship to Heaney’s poems or to his creative process. As
Wordsworth wrote in an 1831 letter to William Rowan Hamilton, “Again
and again I must repeat, that the composition of verse is infinitely
more of an art than men are prepared to believe; and absolute
success in it depends upon innumerable minutiae.” And so one flaw in
this gathering is that it is not specific enough. Only by focusing
wholeheartedly on a particular poem, argues Christopher Ricks in
Poems and Critics, “can one distinguish between a poem’s good
qualities and those bad qualities which so tantalizingly resemble
them.” No essay provides a reading of an individual Heaney poem with
the same depth as breadth as, for example, John Crowe Ransom
provides in his unsurpassed reading of “Lycidas” (in the essay “A
Poem Nearly Anonymous”). Ransom attends to the details of the poem,
what intricacies make it work, and by doing so is able to widens the
lens, as it were, so we can better see the place of “Lycidas” in not
only literary but also in cultural history. He poses a simple
question, but one that reveals the chief concern of poetry, form:
“What was the historic metrical pattern already before him, and what
are the liberties he takes with it?” Ransom reminds us that “meter
is fundamental in the problem posed to the artist as poet.” By
asking this question, and answering it profitably, Ransom enables
the reader of poetry to understand both the significance of
“Lycidas” as a verbal artifice and also to understand more
completely the larger question that any poem or poet worth his or
her salt must perforce struggle with: how to use the sometimes
combustible combination of form and content in both a novel and a
natural manner.
As for the individual essays in the collection, Rand Brandes’
“Seamus Heaney’s Working Titles: From “Advancement of Learning” to
‘Midnight Anvil’” advances thought because Brandes uncovers much
that is unknown about Heaney’s title choices. For example, the
volume Electric Light had provisionally been titled “The Real
Names”, “Known World” and “Duncan’s Horses”. Brandes is expert at
collecting and gathering about Heaney (he has authored Seamus
Heaney: A Reference Guide (1996) and Seamus Heaney: A
Bibliography 1959-2003 (2008). Fran Brearton’s “Heaney and the
Feminine” is surprisingly engaging — a feminist critique of Heaney’s
work is not a new stance, but it provides a starkly different angle
from the ones offered by other essays collected here. Justin Quinn’s
contribution, “Heaney and Eastern Europe” piques interest but some
of his claims are suspect. Of Robert Pinsky and Robert Hass
(translators of Milosz), he says they can be numbered with W. S.
Merwin as “three of the most important American poets of the last
half century.”
Some caveats. A glossary (one as well-positioned as Susan Wolfson’s
in her Cambridge Companion to Keats) would have been an
immense help (if not imperative) to any student of Heaney’s poetry,
as the poet draws upon words of varying etymological origin, words
from Ulster dialect, and a broad range of rhyme schemes and formal
patterns. And if “lyrical beauty” is the vehicle for “ethical
depth,” as O’Donoghue attests at both the beginning and the end of
his Introduction, then why not include work that amplifies — by
close reading — this quality in Heaney’s work? Finally, an important
qualifier — how writing about a living writer differs from writing
about a dead one — is overlooked in this volume.
What makes Heaney great has yet to make for much great criticism.
(Young scholars would do well to look to Christopher Ricks’
marvelous essay on Andrew Marvell in The Force of Poetry, in
which he offers a view of the Ulster Poets’ lasting significance.)
The volume wants to celebrate the miraculous, as we know it, in
Heaney, but here there are no departures from the expected.
Meg
Tyler is
Assistant Professor of Humanities at Boston University. Her book,
A Singing Contest: Conventions of Sound in the Poetry of Seamus
Heaney, was published by Routledge in August 2005 in their
series ‘Studies in Major Literary Authors.’ She recently won a BU
Humanities Foundation fellowship to complete her current book
project, entitled Broken Sonnets, a study of sonnets by
contemporary American, British and Irish poets.
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Irish
Times:Temporalities of Modernity
by
David Lloyd (Dublin: Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies,
University of Notre Dame/Field Day, 2008)
181 pp. £25.00.
ISBN:
978-0-946755-40-0 (paperback)
Reviewer: Wolfgang Wicht
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Midway through his new book, Lloyd quotes from Adorno and
Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York, 1972), as
follows: "Only the conscious horror of destruction creates the right
relationship with the dead: unity with them because we, like them,
are the victims of the same condition and the same disappointed
hope" (71-72). This comment on the casualties of history can be read
as a summary of Lloyd's own persuasive discussion of the Irish
Famine and the wider scope of colonial Irish indigence, misery and
terror in the economic and political contexts of enclosure,
dispossession and eviction. Historical investigation continually
turns into present-day political deliberation. As Lloyd has it, "the
work of history is not merely to contemplate destruction, but to
track through the ruins of progress the defiles that connect the
openings of the past to those of the present. For the dead are the
contemporaries of every unfinished struggle against domination"
(71). In other words, in order to "ground a different mode of
historicization" (29), he resolutely contends that the historian
must splice together the scholarly study of past oppression and
the notion of present-day political and social intervention.
David Lloyd, Professor of English at the University of Southern
California, has written a number of books that examine the
interrelations between history, culture, politics and the state.
Irish Times collects six essays, which were, with the exception
of the paper on Joyce, previously published elsewhere in 2003 and
2005. The initial three chapters, "Overture: Ruins/Runes," "Colonial
Trauma/Postcolonial Recovery? Mourning the Irish Famine" and "The
Indigent Sublime: Spectres of Irish Hunger," re-examine agrarian
production and life in Irish history, focussing on the extreme
impoverishment and repression of the rural population in general and
the outstanding case of the Great Famine in particular. Lloyd’s
representation of this traumatic event in Irish memory goes against
the grain of "revisionist histories" (30), which have tended to see
the Famine as a natural disaster or to make it the object of
commemorative mourning. He convincingly shows how "that catastrophe"
(30) was the effect of a distinctly colonial matrix of
administrative, economic and circumstantial forces which were
"suddenly deflected and disequilibrated" (30) by the blight.
Referring to a number of eye-witness documents, he detects the
traces of economic survival and subjective resistance in the midst
of the brutality and humiliation of hunger and eviction. However,
from these oral accounts of the Famine and the hopes associated with
emigration Lloyd purports to find traces of a Messianic vision. This
vision of creating "new communities of survival" (37) unfortunately
gives rise to an essentialist notion that would have us believe that
"the future emerges, changed, out of such catastrophes" (37).
Despite this methodological short cut, Lloyd's account of history as
a continual process of transformation (one of his key terms)
is perfectly adaptable to our own age of European and global
capitalist modernity (another key term). Lloyd nurtures a
Yeatsian indignation at the "monstrous violence" (7) of modern
technologies and financial accumulation. For this reason, he is also
extremely sceptical about the recent negative transformation of
Irish capitalist modernization in the form of the Celtic Tiger.
In subsequent chapters, "The Medieval Sill: Postcolonial
Temporalities in Joyce," "Rethinking National Marxism: James
Connolly and 'Celtic Communism'" and "Ruination: Partition and the
Expectation of Violence (On Allan deSouza's Irish Photography),"
Lloyd combines historiographic investigation with the discussion of
particular literary, political and artistic appropriations of the
Irish situation. In the Joyce essay, drawing on aspects of
post-colonial theory, Lloyd establishes a conception of the
medieval as a historical place of recalcitrance and antithesis
which, as circumstances dictate, contains the seeds of the modern.
The way he discusses the problematic relationships inherent in "the
simultaneous coevality and incommensurability of the modern and the
medieval" (74) and the acute paradoxes in the modern apprehension of
the medieval is a perceptive contribution to post-colonial and
cultural theory. But the commentary on Joyce has little to add to
the wealth of critical reviews of the 'political Joyce’, which have
been published over the past 20 years or so. Notwithstanding the
fresh light he sheds on a number of relevant details, his discussion
of 'medieval Joyce' curiously ignores the erudition amassed in the
collection Medieval Joyce, edited by Lucia Boldrini
(Amsterdam-New York, 2002). At various points, Lloyd surprises us
with eccentric novelties. One of his more spectacular conjectures
is, for instance, "that the formal structure of Ulysses is
one in which the medieval system of correspondences that regulate
the relations among things becomes the most acute interpreter of
modern colonial capitalism" (92).
Lloyd is at his best, perhaps, when he vigorously counters the
postcolonial neglect of the political ideas and practical activities
of James Connolly. Emphasizing the Irish Marxist's notion to
integrate the socialist with the nationalist struggle, Lloyd
cogently examines Connolly's concept of Celtic communism in the
contexts of colonial rule, the ideology of Irish nationalism and the
international working-class movement. Lloyd's essay might be seen as
a pioneering attempt to reconsider Irish labour history, and Irish
radicalism in particular. As the author himself implies, it makes
desirable further studies in this field, both analytical and
theoretical. This need is, in fact, affirmed by Lloyd's exciting
discussion, and reproduction, of the apocalyptic photographs taken
by Allan deSouza of the northwest of Ireland.
Lloyd's book is a remarkable instance of counter-hegemonic
argumentation. It persuasively argues that the singularity of the
Irish is not least determined by "an uncanny persistence of a
medieval formation in the midst of modernity" (100). But
concomitantly, the argument is curbed by its mechanistic ideological
design. The author's helpless rage at the "most extreme ever
concentration of wealth in the hands of the global élites" (101)
leads him to accentuate the traces of historical disobedience and
obstinacy, from which we are summoned in turn to learn our own
lessons. Lloyd asserts (incorrectly) that the awareness of the
"unfinished struggle against domination" (71), which is also
inherent in Irish nationalism, must inspire people "to deploy a
selected and canonized version of the past in the service of the
political and social projects" (64) of anti-capitalist alternatives.
It is, however, deceptive to believe that past desire persists "into
the present with some differential significance" (3). Any conception
that extrapolates promises of alternatives in the present from
social aspirations from the past enters the realm of abstraction,
detached from social practice itself.
Wolfgang Wicht
is a retired Professor of English Literature at the University of
Potsdam, Germany. His recent publications include Utopianism in
James Joyce’s “Ulysses” (2000); articles on the reception of
Joyce and Virginia Woolf in East Germany, Joyce’s ‘Hibernian
Metropolis,’ the problem of representation and the decentering of
the narrator in Ulysses; and two essays on Denis Riley.
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The Infinities
by John Banville (London:
Picador, 2009)
ISBN: 9780330450249
304 pp. £14.99
Reviewer: Joakim Wrethed
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| Picture this: A rather spacious house. A dying
scientist trying to hold on to melancholy-tinged memories of the
life that slowly seems to be slipping through his fingers. A couple
of outlandish characters. A handful of not so outlandish characters.
A bizarre sense of dark humour, lurking as a ghost in the text.
Erudite allusions scattered here and there. All of the above is
conveyed to us in a brilliantly crafted prose, with an occasionally
almost more than poetic intensity. If we picture this, we know for
certain that we are in Banville-land. With The Infinities,
John Banville publishes his first novel since the successful Man
Booker Prize winning The Sea (2005). In the time between the
novels, the author has entered the realm of crime fiction,
half-heartedly hidden behind the pen-name/persona Benjamin Black.
According to Banville’s own comment on the distinction between these
two author-selves, Black writes swiftly and Banville slowly. This
may perhaps be applied to us readers as well. The construction
“swift Banville reader” is in itself a conceptual violation, which I
shall comment on below.
But if we initially stick to the contrast between the
last two novels of Banville’s long and triumphant career as a
writer, an interesting aspect of his maturation may be revealed. In
The Sea, the narration is centred on the experiences of the
protagonist Max Morden (male first person narrators, or third person
narrators with the point of view of male characters, dominate the
oeuvre). In The Infinities, the manner of narration is
slightly different. Here, the point of view emanates from the Gods
(the voice of Hermes) and is therefore more mobile, not restricted
to the mind of old Adam, the dying scientist. We are allowed to
float from young Adam (the son) to his wife Helen, to the sad,
self-harming daughter
Petra, to old Adam’s wife Ursula, and even into the mysterious
structures of canine cognition through the family dog Rex. The
overall effect of this mobility is partly comical, zooming in on
human predicaments from the outside, as it were, which of course
raises the ancient question: What is the meaning of it all? The
human tragedy presented almost as a practical joke. By introducing
this type of narration, Banville achieves two things. Firstly,
novelty in terms of possibilities, which, among other things,
entails that a great deal of textual space is given to the female
characters. Secondly, he maintains faithfulness to his central
obsessions as a writer: science, language, reason, the oddity of the
ordinary, the intricacies of memory processes, the complexity of
perceptual patterns, the mystery of otherness, etc. From a scholarly
perspective, this is no mere happenstance. The Banvillean authorship
is more than a collection of narratives labelled with that author’s
name. There is obviously a master plan (speaking of Gods) behind the
differences and samenesses of all his writing. The recycling of
names and characters is beginning to reveal a more or less coherent
picture.
Already in his début collection of short stories,
Long Lankin (1970), there is a story called “Sanctuary” in which
we have two female characters, one named Julie and the other Helen
(eponymous to young Adam’s wife in The Infinities, which
certainly is not a haphazard fact in Banville-land). Furthermore,
the two characters are alone in a house when a young man arrives,
who obviously is Helen’s lover. The relation between the two female
characters is never clearly articulated, more than that they seem to
live together and that Helen used to be Julie’s teacher. The short
story’s suspense-energy is derived from all that is not said. In
The Infinities, we also encounter strange arrivals to the house,
particularly that of the Pan-like Benny Grace (one of the more
outlandish characters), old Adam’s former colleague, who turns up
and stirs the same kind of curiosity-mingled fear in Petra as the
young, red-haired man did in Julie in “Sanctuary”. What I am getting
at here is some kind of repetitive scheme, which (in typical
Banville fashion) is a holding-on and letting-go at the same time.
In the early short story we read about Julie:
In the bedroom she lay with her hands folded on her
breast and listened to their voices. Once they laughed, and in a
while all was silence. She watched the reflections of the water
above her on the ceiling. They seemed to have but one pattern
which constantly formed, dissolved, and reformed again. A small
wind came in from the sea and murmured against the window, and the
curtains moved with a small scraping sound. (my emphasis)
The names of characters are both important and
irrelevant. Sometimes a name is recycled in a new possible world,
sometimes there is a new name, but very similar characteristics and
experiences prevail. In Julie’s perception above there is sameness,
“one pattern”, but also difference within this sameness, since it
“formed, dissolved, and reformed”. In The Infinities, Helen
and Roddy Wagstaff are engrossed in a conversation at the faintly
lugubrious dinner:
They are conscious of the summer day outside, its soft
air and vapoury light . . . . A breeze comes in from the garden and
the curtain of white gauze before the open half of the french doors
bellies into the room like a soundless exclamation and listlessly
falls back.
Humans (characters) come and go in the oeuvre, but the
sameness in difference of air, light, rain and weather, billows,
dissolves, forms and reforms in intricate perceptual patterns. In
the new novel, this kaleidoscopical Banvillean concern is explored
from a slightly different perspective. The personification of the
Gods, i.e. the fleshing out of the spirit, is a novel way of
stretching a dominant and persistent Banvillean preoccupation, which
has been there from the start. It is here we may witness the
strength of Banville’s writing. How he repeatedly finds new
variations of this primary textual matter. It also sheds light on
the impossibility of reading his novels swiftly. If the reader does
not let herself be pulled into the beauty of the seemingly
irrelevant, then most of the reading experience is lost. To
actually read Banville is a laborious task.
Even though The Infinities must be regarded as
a tour de force — especially considering the fact that it is
probably not a trivial business for a writer to know exactly how to
proceed after having won the Man Booker — I would still hesitate to
shower the novel with praise, and dub it the crown of Banville’s
production. I know how to read it and appreciate it as a scholar,
but I wonder how Black-readers would read it. I am still waiting for
something similar to The Book of Evidence, since I think that
Banville in that work brilliantly combined his poetic intensity and
philosophic ruminations with a plot-driven energy, which makes it a
true literary masterpiece.
The most prominent strengths of The Infinities
are the beautiful wordings, which repeatedly astonish even the most
fastidious reader, and Banville’s ability to find a viable literary
form for the possible world concept. The real–unreal dichotomy is
traversed seemingly with ease time and time again. There are other
worlds, but they appear in this one. There is sameness in
difference. The novel pays homage to the beauty of misery and
perhaps we never get closer to life itself than in the form of that
oxymoron-like word formation. Banville successfully utilises a
chiasmatic rendering of the statement: “For what is spirit in this
world may be flesh in another”. Like great thinkers and artists, who
have managed to make human life less boring and predictable,
Banville knows, and (hopefully) persuades his readers into knowing,
that the “real” world is always already metaphysical and vice versa.
This may be shocking to some and consoling to others. To be sure, in
the intellectual atmosphere of our times it almost comes out as a
provocative political statement.
Joakim Wrethed
is currently a visiting assistant Professor in English Literature at
the University of Stockholm. His PhD dissertation on John Banville’s
science tetralogy was published with VDM Verlag Dr. Mueller in 2008.
His main fields of research are the contemporary Irish novel, John
Banville, and the intersections between phenomenology, theology and
cognitive science.
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