Here we pay our dues to Pluto Press which for some time has been bombarding IASIL Newsletter with specimens of its productions-including them a reprint of the classic account of War in an Irish Town by Eamonn McCann, an indispensable source for anyone who wants to understand the Troubles and their context in the town of Derry. In a new series entitled Contemporary Irish Studies, Pluto have now brought forward Who Are 'The People'?: Unionism, Protestantism and Loyalism in Northern Ireland (1997), a collection of essays edited by Peter Shirlow of QUB - also series editor-and Mark McGovern, along with Black and Green: Civil Rights Struggles in Northern Ireland and Black America (1998), a comparative study by Brian Dooley. Both works are informed by the left-wing convictions held in common with Peter Berresford Ellis, whose History of the Working Class (first published by Constable in 1985), has now been now reprinted in the Pluto's Classic Series, which seems to include Aindrias Ó Cathasaigh's edition of Connolly's Lost Writings (1997) and a selection from Connolly by Ellis himself.
Ellis's book offers a synopsis of a brand of Irish historiography that sees all our troubles, past and present, as arising from exploitation in a world where class and nation map onto one another more or less exactly.
This idea may be Chartist in origin-very much inspired and captained by the cadres whom Daniel O'Connell trained in his Catholic and Repeal Associations. (Chartism was a very much inspired and captained by the cadres whom Daniel O'Connell trained in his Catholic and Repeal Associations.) It is certainly traceable to Engel's letters on Ireland, finding its most romantic expression in James Connolly's Labour in Irish History. Ellis shares Connolly's interest in the colonialist-feminist thesis, but his main concern is (regrettably enough) to identify each successive physical force movement in Ireland with the cause of justice for the Irish people. This leads to some nauseating passages. Here we are in the year of 1935:
Dare one suggest that 'assassinate' and 'defend' are no less appropriate than 'execute' and 'attack'?
Pluto have extended their list in our direction with the publication of Gerry Smyth's The Novel and the Nation: Studies in New Irish Fiction (1997), which offers a frankly pedagogical overview of a platterful of contemporary writing hardly less hot from the press than the book itself. The first third of this survey takes the form of a high-speed tour of postcolonial theories associated with Benedict Anderson, Edward Said, Frederic Jameson, Ashis Nandy, and Homi Bhabha. Smyth maps the ways they might apply to Irish fiction. He is not however boundlessly enamoured with them and in the end the critical perspective he endorses is Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of 'heteroglossia', seen here as an antidote to the monologic tendencies of colonial discourse but also of its nationalist mirror-image.
The novels are treated in sections functionally labelled 'author', 'text', and 'reader', or thematically labelled 'madness', 'Irish gothic', and 'family', &c. Roddy Doyle gets the champion's portion while nine others are rammed into a single chapter on the Northern crisis. Eight more fall under the rubric 'Borderlands'-a state of mind rather than a location-with further sub-divisions such as 'emigration', 'gay writing', and 'returned emigrants'. (It's probably just a matter of time before Irish fiction throws up the figure of a dyke with a black pig.) Smyth frankly acknowledges that writers such as John Banville, or Maeve Binchy are unamenable to his chosen emphasis on 'subversive' modes of writing, and for that reason he omits them (though he includes John McGahern without subjecting him to such treatment). Women writers are represented by Kathleen Ferguson, Mary Morrissey, Lia Mills, Deirdre Madden, Mary Beckett, Kate O'Riordan, Emma Donoghue, and Eilís Ní Dhuibhne. Of non-women, those found here include Patrick McCabe, Colum McCann, Joseph O'Connor … and so on. Some of the omissions are highly surprising: Colm Toibín, Dermot Bolger and Neil Jordan-are passed over as though the Writers' Co-op and the Raven Arts Press never happened. Perhaps, in the end, this is a young man's book intended for the like readers grooving along with their own self-delighting generation. [Envy will get you nowhere! -Ed.]
At the end, Smyth roll-calls a tribe collectively engaged in a second Irish Renaissance including many of the writers named but also the membership of U2 and the stage-film director Jim Sheridan. What these have in common, apparently, is an end-of-the-century openness to change and an indifference to the call of Irish nationalism. What they have in common with Pluto Press is another matter. For orders and information, contact Lisa Jolliffe, Pluto Press, Freepost, ND 6781, London. N6 5BR. [An' keep sending the bukes, Pluto! -Ed.]