Robert Tracy, The Unappeasable Host: Studies in Irish Identity (Dublin: UCD Press 1998), 288pp.
Gerry Smyth, Decolonisation and Criticism: The Construction of Irish Literature [Contemp. Irish Studies, gen. ed., Peter Shirlow] (London: Pluto 1998), 262pp. [with index.]
Robert Tracy, The Unappeasable Host: Studies in Irish Identity (Dublin: UCD Press 1998), 288pp.
Robert Tracy's collection, The Unappeasable Host (UCD Press 1998), gathers together essays that have appeared elsewhere at dates mostly during the 1980s, which date ought really be read as a testimony to the author's keenness and daring in pursuit of the postcolonial fox before others had joined the hunt. To Professor Tracy, indeed, must go the credit for sounding the crucial distinction between 'Legality and Legitimacy' in Irish criticism - to quote the key phrase from subtitle of his essay on Edgeworth and Lady Morgan which made its first striking appearance in Nineteenth Century Fiction (June 1985). Both the literary strengths and some of the philosophical weaknesses of his critique of Irish literature are fully apparent in that writing, especially where he strains to establish the proposition that, behind the conscious author in Maria Edgeworth there was a unconscious mind which knew very well that the Anglo-Irish ascendancy-class to which she belonged were wholly without legitimacy in Ireland and that their reign was both iniquitous and doomed.
In such a reading it is obviously tempting to put a proto-nationalist spin on the oddity of Thady Quirk's character and situation in Castle Rackrent, making him seem like an anti-colonial thinker avant le mot: 'Thady is not naive. He is well aware that the more foolishly the Rackrents behave, the more he and his family will prosper', Tracy writes in one place, and in another: 'In inventing him, Edgeworth examined the process by which the colonised subject simultaneously feigns loyalty, manipulates his rulers, and subverts their control.' (Unappeasable Host, p.17.) Now, this is a general interpretation of Thady shared by Tom Dunne and others,and which has come to supercede the more modestly postcolonial version aired by Patrick Murray (Studies, Autumn 1970) - in turn an antidote to the 'loyal-retainer' vision of Marilyn Butler, which stands in direct line of descent from the Rt. Hon. Emily Lawless. Yet what it says about Maria Edgeworth's form of colonial anxiety - even perhaps her prescience about the distant political future - constitutes a critical problem not easily resolved with reference to the rights and wrongs of Irish history, or psychoanalytical theories about the return of the repressed - to cite the dominant tendency in literary criticism of the nineteenth-century Irish novelists, gothic or otherwise, at this moment.
Professor Tracy is the original of this tendency. There is in his way of reading Anglo-Irish fiction a constant sense of the compelling - even perhaps compulsive - logic of social and political justice as seen in an Irish nationalist perspective, even when that perspective was obscured in a contemporary view by the facts of nineteenth-century life in Ireland. Juxtaposing two apparently unrelated contexts is the key procedure, as when he writes of J. S. Le Fanu that his 'chief interests were Ireland and the supernatural, interests which often coalesced.' ('Introduction', In a Glass Darkly, OUP, 1993; here p.57). For an Anglo-Irishman of Le Fanu's lineage, that interest in Ireland turns out - predictably enough - to involve the risk of implication in his forefathers' crimes against the native Irish, many of whom 'chose exile' (in Tracy's phrase) rather than endure the rapaciousness of the colonial caste that created Dracula and pari passu created the Irish Famine through absenteeism and rackrent. But Tracy is not a heavy-handed writer and muc of this is done by suggestion. When he remarks of Justice Harbottle, for instance, that he has 'a terrifying vision of his own cruelty', he abstains from pressing the historical analogy too strongly. Yet that analogy may be more rhetorical than real since Harbottle is no more typical Protestant (albeit Huguenot) settlers in Ireland than Thady is typical of Provo godfathers. What is enacted in so many of these essays is a dynamic of colonial reprise that seems more native to the constitution of a certain kind of critic's mind than to the minds from which the chief texts of Anglo-Irish literature emanated.
Much of Robert Tracy's lore on the subject the hereditary crimes of the Anglo-Irish comes from Elizabeth Bowen's self-analysis of her class in Bowen's Court - making particular use of the Earl of Clare's bald profession that the Anglo-Irish state was founded on what he called an 'act of violence' (as recounted in Lecky's History of Eighteenth-Century Ireland, where Bowen found it). What is striking about Bowen's deposition is that it remains so free of neurosis - as free as David Thompson's Woodbrook, though not ultimately so plangent. Besides that, there is an element of sleight of hand in Professor Tracy's reading of the Earl of Clare and the attempt to turn Elizabeth Bowen into an exorcist of her class history suffers accordingly. That 'act of violence' in his discourse refers less to the parliamentary act of expropriation known as the Cromwellian Settlement than to a physical assault on the Irish people - though perhaps the distinction is spurious in the long run. By such means, he delineates an area of 'coalescence' in which the persistence of crime and guilt on one side and an unslakeable thirst for restitution on the other creates the haunted world of Irish social and literary culture.
Tracy's essays on the Banims, Synge, and the Victorians explore just such a world of colonial hauntings, finding ghosts in Joyce and Yeats as readily as in the 'fetches' of the nineteenth-century writers. Much as he concerns himself with colonial ghost-busting, however, it is far from evident that Professor Tracy has any interest in the supernatural per se; indeed, he expressly commends Elizabeth Bowen for learning from Le Fanu how to suggest that the uncanny might be hallucinatory rather than really supernatural in leaving a 'loophole for a natural explanation'. Very strikingly, at the end of the last essay, Professor Tracy suggests of Bowen's vis-à-vis with Anglo-Ireland that her 'last novel is not a requiem but an exorcism'; and in so doing he rounds out the argument of this book in a way that belies its origins as a collection of lectures and conference papers. What emerges is a keen intelligence with a strong sense of the drama of Anglo-Irish prose and an idée fixe which may, in the end, be the right one. If so, the theoreticians must not be allowed to take all the credit. If not, the intellectual gusto of these essays still make them entrancing commentaries upon the writers. BS
Gerry Smyth, Decolonisation and Criticism: The Construction of Irish Literature [Contemp. Irish Studies, gen. ed., Peter Shirlow] (London: Pluto 1998), 262pp. [with index.]
In 1997 appeared The Novel and the Nation (1997), a survey of recent Irish fiction that also served a useful introduction to postcolonial theory and its possible application to Irish writing. In it Gerry Smyth surveyed the contributions of critics in the field from Franz Fanon to Homi Bhabha, taking in Edward Said, Frederic Jameson and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak but also - nearer home - Declan Kiberd and Richard Kearney. Jacques Derrida was the object of repeated references but it was Mikhail Bakhtin who seemed most capable of addressing the structural peculiarities of Irish writing. The fact that Bakhtin is not in any obvious sense a post-colonialist critic bore certain consequences for the argument; and Smyth bravely admitted a poor match between postcolonial theory and the actual productions of contemporary Irish writers - a mismatch that led to gaps in his table of contents when it came to Maeve Binchy and John Banville, while Francis Stuart and Joe O'Connor are among several authors who explicitly deny the least interest in nationalism as a source of inspiration (however they may be have been affected by it in formative terms).
Irish criticism is naturally more amenable to theoretical discussion than imaginative writing since the topics of identity and nationality rest at the core of almost all of it in so far as it is Irish criticism. It is just such topics that Smyth addresses in Decolonisation and Criticism, and when the Irish critics do not oblige by concentrating upon them he charges them with collusion in the treacheries of belle-lettres humanism - in reality the disguise worn by neo-imperialist Anglo-Americans in their attempt to hegemonise post-war literary discourse and recolonise Ireland. Whether inspired by 'state-affiliated aggrandisement' or driven to espouse 'the codes and practices of professional scholarship', or whether reacting to the 'increasing international critical interest in Irish literature' - as Smyth writes in his concluding sentence - Irish literary critics at the mid-century 'effectively failed to imagine a new agenda, or construct a new language, for [their] debates.' (p.207.)
Assuming this indictment to be true, Smyth's book attempts to diagnose that failure in the context of a full-scale interpretation of the role of literary criticism at large and, more narrowly, its role in Anglo-Ireland and Irish-Ireland. After an adroit reconnoitre of postcolonial theory no less impressive than the last, his first chapter deals with the eighteenth-century Celtic Revival, concentrating on the cases of J. C. Walker and Thomas Preston (with some obvious indebtedness to Joep Leerssen), before moving on to treat of Davis, Ferguson, Yeats and Douglas Hyde. All of these are seen, in one degree or another, as seeking to insinuate their 'section' of society - Anglo-Ireland - into the 'radical decolonising narrative' represented by men of the future such as Patrick Pease and D. P. Moran (but not, oddly enough, Daniel Corkery, who is portrayed as the victim of the contradiction between his advocacy of Irish as the "real" language of Ireland and his own medium of expression). In so doing they have strayed from the liberal decolonising narrative which is their proper element as cadets of the ascendancy class; and naturally enough they will stray back again when the radicals start take over the national narrative. There is a good deal in this, but there are problems also - notably the idea that Yeats or Hyde were attracted to Irish culture for the reason given rather than by reason of its intrinsic interest. In discussing such matters, Smyth employs a technical and generally hostile vocabulary that conveys nothing of their temperaments, their talents, or their attainments, and as such the discussion is consistently - and tinnily-reductive. But this is often the way with theoretical writing, particularly when written by a hand other than that of its originator in whom the warm touch of primary imagination is still apparent.
In the second half of the book Smyth subjects Seán O'Faolain and Ben Kiely, along with a host of Celtic scholars such as James Carney and Brian Ó Cuiv, and even some cultural politicos such as Sean MacBride, to equally remorseless treatment. The effect of these assaults is difficult to convey: one recognises the general truth of the charges but also their irrelevance to the subjectivity of the accused. To live in such and such a time is necessarily to fail at tests constructed in another and for different reasons. Smyth writes of Seán MacBride (who founded the Cultural Relations Committee) that he was involved in a 'belated effort' on the part of the new Irish state 'to remove [the] potentially dangerous capacity' of Irish literary texts - to do what, is not quite clear, though one can guess with reference to the "Midnight Court" - and treats all of that as a 'typical strategy of the nationalist [sic] bourgeoisie'. This is thumping good stuff but makes nonsense of any informed insight into MacBride's state of mind and renders it difficult to understand, for example, why Máire mac an tSaoi should have been content to serve as first secretary of the new Committee.
Only Patrick Kavanagh is exempt from this sort of blanket condemnation; and to a lesser extent, Vivian Mercier; and finally - in an outlandishly eccentric peroration - Arland Ussher, whose 'continually shifting viewpoint' is here seen as an anticipation of the 'the system that will become known as "deconstruction"' (p.206). It is my sense that this judgement does not stand the test of close examination, yet one does understands how Ussher gets elected to this honour; after all, it would hardly do to show no light at the end of the tunnel other than the dark luminance of Joyce - whom the author dubs his 'silent hero' at one point, with unuttered promise of a book to come giving Michael Bakhtin is due. Ussher may have played with shifting viewpoints in his essentially revisionist description of the 'Irish mind' as exemplified by the Earl of Cork, Swift, and Joyce; but he was positively nutty about Tarot cards, and offered a neo-Platonic view of gender in a late book that renders words like chauvinism lamely inadequate to the occasion. And yet ... Arland Ussher was a resourceful and industrious opponent of the clerically-driven cultural orthodoxy of the period and deserves some honour.
As does Gerry Smyth; and though the doctrinaire tone of his putatively anti-ideological book is tiresome in many places, there are many moments of illumination - notably, I think, the account of the mid-century dilemma of critical writers who were still intent on privileging Irish national literature precisely because it was Irish and national, and at the same time sought to translate their advocacy and approbation into international terms. That was the period of the 'New Criticism' when the leading organ to which an Irish man of letters might wish to contribute was CIA-funded, as we now know. It is interesting to examine issues of Partisan Review such as that to which Bryan MacMahon contributed two stories in August 1949 - one a wry celebration of the soggarth aroon, the other a shrewd appraisal of a Fianna Fail politico, both keeping company with pieces such as Richard Ellmann's translation of cantos from Henri Michaux's "The March into the Tunnel", Brewster Ghiselin on Hart Crane, and Frederick Kiesler on "Pseudo-Functionalism in Modern Architecture". 'Tis far from pseudo-functionalism that Bryan MacMahon was reared.
Granted, the Irish mid-century men of letters had to straddle a literary abyss between the demands of cosmopolitanism on the one hand and Irish nationalism on the other with its problematic valuation of the local on grounds that Kavanagh was to characterise as 'parochial' in contradistinction from 'provincial' (and which Seamus Heaney later called the 'sense of place'). This was pretty wilful since, of course, 'parochial' and 'provincial' are virtually synonymous in the cosmopolitan perspective. It is not certain, however, that national and cosmopolitan perspectives are as mutually inimical as Gerry Smyth believes - though the tension between them is unmistakable and acutely described in several places.
What is less well done - though inessential to the argument - is the persistent and illogical use of the feminine pronoun in contexts where no woman has been mentioned. This is taken to painful lengths in discussing curricular arrangements at TCD and UCD - about both of which Smyth makes false assumptions especially as regards the origins of 'Anglo-Irish literature' as a course-component. Much of this section of the book consists in a finger-pointing exercise. Unfortunately, the finger points in the wrong direction when TCD is accused of hugging that term to its bosom in the spirit of amour propre. In reality the epithet was bestowed upon the chair at UCD in 1967 at the behest of Daniel Corkery - no Anglo-Irish grandee he (or she). A further irritating tic is the resort to stabbing accusations about 'certain individuals' deemed to have committed cultural crimes against the people in a Maoist humour that informs the writing most especially where the intellectual amenities on Burlington Road are concerned.
Underlying the plaintiff mood of much in this book is less a definite theory of colonialism and decolonialism than a morbid touchiness about any system that distinguishes better and worse in the sphere of literary production. Where Smyth suggests that the cultural value-system of the 1950s was intentionally organised to exclude those who (as he puts it) 'have not been sufficiently educated or intellectually endowed to raise themselves above their local experience to engage in issues of non-Irish, universal import' (p.136), then the chip-on-shoulder school of cultural value has reached its full development. Yet in Irish Studies Review, Smyth has warded off the simplicity of nationalist teleology while refusing to participate in the final deconstruction of national experience suggested by more advanced post-colonial critics such as Colin Graham. In other words, he strikes a balance between what can be said in support of the 'decolonising subject' (ordinary Irish people) and what cannot: an act of intellectual judgement.
Decolonisation and Criticism is a book without an obvious hero but it is not a book without a villain. That role is played not so much by a single individual as by a class - 'the nationalist [sic] bourgeoisie' whom Smyth holds responsible for the reified version of cultural identity that played the part of official ideology for decades after the revolutionary period. Putting the middle-class in the dock is a classic anti-colonial trick, and doubtless a necessary one if discrediting them is among the objectives of the revolutionaries who wish to take their place as the leadership cadre of the nation. It is nevertheless profoundly questionable if the Irish middle class was a categorical force for evil in any period, though it might be wrong to identify them - as Thackeray did - as the only check upon the tyranny of landlords and the dictatorship of priests in Ireland. Gerry Smyth is not alone in his impatience at the uwarrantable persistence of the Irish nineteenth-century or the mixture of conservatism and nationalist self-assertion that led to the narrowing of intellectual horizons at the mid-twentieth century. (Brian Fallon's An Age of Innocence makes an interesting case for a higher estimate of this period, however.) Change, when it came, was rapid; and people born after the advent of television fail to understand the sheer gradualism of cultural life before that moment. Smyth would like the Irish intelligentsia to have proceeded directly from romantic nationalism to poststructuralism: that is apparently what he means by a 'new agenda and a new language'. As applied to the present moment, this might be an understandable complaint; as applied to the pre-television age in Ireland, it represents a falsification of some magnitude. It took international levelling forces - including notably the conquest of the airwaves by American popular culture and the emergence of an anti-authoritarian culture in Britain - to effect the changes in mentality that set Bryan MacMahon and his generation apart from ours. At any rate, the majority in Irish society today belong to an increasingly-cosmopolitan society which is giving this country the only thing approximating to economic and psychological well-being that it has known in modern times. It is far from clear why theoreticians are complaining. BS