Joseph Th. Leerssen

[ Much of the material in RICORSO derives from a close reading of Leerssen's major works on Ireland, especially in regard to quotations from individual authors and commentary upon them. BS]

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Criticism
Alan Harrison, review of Mere Irish & Fíor-Ghael, in Eigse, Vol. XXII (NUI 1987), pp.155-[59].

Commentary
Andrew Hadfield, ‘Rethinking Early-Modern Colonialism: The Anomalous State of Ireland’, in Irish Studies Review, April 1999), remarks that Joseph Th. Leerssen’s ‘encyclopaedic study of Anglo-Irish representations relies on the assumption that national stereotypes have an intimate binary relationship and can be studied in pairs’ (p.13).

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Quotations

Mere Irish & Fíor-Ghael: Studies in The Idea of Irish Nationality, Its Development and Literary Expression Prior to the Nineteenth Century (Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins 1986): ‘[...] Thus, in the social and economic ruin of Northern Ireland, the enmities of past generations continue even today, as if preserved in amber; their memories help to perpetuate them and to create fresh bitterness, whose memories may in turn, it is to be feared, burden future generations. / It would be illusory to think that what I have written in the preceding pages will change all that: and yet the desire to change all that is what lies behind much of their content. Perhaps the greatest lie that is perpetrated on both sides - in this and other nationally-defined conflicts, iks the contention that the categories, the terms of conflict, the “nations” involved, are timeless, extra-historical entities. If I have spent much laborious argument I in tracing the historical roots of these ideas, it was, ultimately, with a view to disrupting the imperviousness and perpetual self-reenactment through which they have preserved immunity against historical change for so long.’ (p.455; end.)

Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Cork UP/Field Day 1996): [...] That nationalism, unlike its eighteenth-century precursor, Patriotism, relies crucially on an awareness that Ireland is distinct and distinctive, culturally individual and discrete, and therefore deserving of political autonomy. What is more, this cultural individuality is linked specifically, and with increasing emphasis and exclusiveness, to the nation’s Gaelic roots. In other words, a Gaelic-oriented cultural and historical self-image takes shape which is quite literally central to the Irish drive for self-determination.

Further: It is this self-image which I set out to investigate. How was Ireland seen in the nineteenth century? How was Ireland’s cultural and historical profile silhouetted against other nations and, primarily, against the neighbouring isle? What specific individuality was ascribed to it? In tackling such a topic, it became clear that this self-image was something far more important and fundamental than a mere stereotype as to the Irish national character or similar commonplaces and cliches. ‘Imagining Ireland’ involved assessing and indeed constructing the nation’s history, and also involved the development of a historical awareness which situates Ireland, not just synchronically amidst the other nations from which it is distinct, but also diachronically in a historical development out of which it has grown and by which it has been shaped. As 1 argue in the following pages, the quest for a national sense of identity was twofold: it was national in its trans-partisan agenda, attempting to work out a shared sense of identity applicable to all Irishmen and transcending their internal sectarian and social differences; it was also national in that it attempted to distil such an invariant and universally shared awareness out of a contentious and conflict-ridden past, transcending thereby the violent vicissitudes of history and extracting from them an essential and unchanging principle of Irishness. The nineteenth-century history of the Irish imagination is characterized by a long and widespread quest for a Hegelian, authentic, trans- historical answer to the old question, ‘What ish my nation?’ (Leerssen, op. cit., 1996, p.4; this being the retort of MacMorris to Fluellen in Shakespeare’s Henry V, Act III, Scene 2. See Thomas Flanagan [q.v.].

There is always the temptation to speculate whether or not such imaginings of Ireland were ‘true’ or ‘false’, or to pronounce judgement as to whether they were ‘right’ or ‘wrong’; that, I believe, is a misguided and misleading approach. The various imaginings of Ireland were, first and foremost, contentious; they formed part of a contemporary debate, evoked important and diverse reactions, and should therefore first and foremost be studied as part of that debate. Multiple ideas were advanced in many ways by different authors; the first task is to bring a sense of order into this chorus of voices, to see who echoed whom, who was contradicted by whom, and how the various patterns of imagination were distributed and transmitted, disseminated, received and licked into shape along different channels of communication. What we are dealing with is a manifestation of the imagination; to comment upon it in terms of its ‘truth’ or ‘falsity’ places the historian in a spurious position of quasi-superior insight into the nature of things ‘as they really are’. The imagination does not move in channels of truth or falsity. Is Wordsworth speaking the ‘truth’ when he states that there is blessing in this gentle breeze? Is it any use to establish whether or not the newspapers were really right in claiming that snow was general all over Ireland? By the same token, it [5] sees more useful to establish which images and imaginative patterns were most effective, most influential and most formative in later developments, at best, it becomes possible on that basis to spot inner tensions and rhetorical stratagems which to a latter-day reader may be more obvious than to contemporaries - i.e., to analyse the strategies of the discursive verbalization and expression of certain images.]

[...] The challenge, as it appears to me, is to study the movement of ideas and attitudes, images and perceptions within the culture sphere, from journalistic to historiographical to literary and critical discourse, and to assess the specificity of the traffic around the the specific and somehow special genre of imaginative literature. Literary texts can be studied in the extent that to which they engage with ideas that are doing the rounds at the time, expressed in other non-fictional genres, and in the extent to which they disseminate and transform such ideas and feed them back, in a specific form and rhetoric, into the cutlural-political system.

Bibliography: In a footnotes to the section of the Introduction on “Method”, Leerssen cites Hugo Dyserinck, ‘Kompartistische Imagologie: Zur politischen Trageite einer europäischen Wissenschaft von der Literatur’, in Europa und das nationale Selbsverständnis: Imagologische Probleme in Literatur, Kunst und Kultur, des 18. und 19 Jahrhunderts, ed. Dyserinck & K. U. Syndram, Bonn: Bouvier 1988), pp.13-37, and sources therein; his own ‘Echoes and Images: Reflections upon Foreign Space’, in Alterity, Identity, Image: Selves and Others in Scholarship and Society ed. R. Corby & Leerssen (Amsterdam: Rodopi 1991), pp.123-38 and also acknowledges indebtedness to Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) and Culture and Imperialism (1993) [Ftn. 5, in Notes, p.233]. Ensuing remarks embrace Paul Ricoeur (mêmeté and ipséité), Lessing (Nacheinander and Nebeneinander), Ferdinand Tönnes (imaginaire), Gérard Genette (paratext), Mikhail Bakhtin (chronotope) - all pp.6-7; 233, n.5 - while Raymond Williams, Edward Said, Seamus Deane and Luke Gibbons are among many others cited and/or quoted in the text as a whole.

[ For longer extracts from Remembrance and Imagination [...; &c.] (Cork UP 1996), see separate file - as attached; see also Leerssen’s account and extensive use of Lessing’s Nacheinander/Nebeneinander distinction in Joyce > Notes > “Proteus” (Ulysses) - as supra.]

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‘Ireland and the Orient’, in Oriental Prospects: Western Literature and the Lure of the East, ed. C. C. Barfoot, Theo d’Haen (Amsterdam & Atlanta: Rodopi B.V. 1988), pp.161-74: ‘It was not until the late 1960s that the growing intellectual bankruptcy world-wide of nationalism began to hit Ireland. Even so, nationalism finds stalwarth defenders amongst the Irish intelligentsia. In the historical profession, especially, a debate has been raging over the past years in which scholars have crossed swords over the degree in which the Irish past ought or ought not to be read in a predominantly national context, that is in the light of the Irish struggle against English oppression. / Irish Studies, then, had only since a comparatively recent date been apprehended of the intellectual and moral defects of a nationalist parti-pris in scholarly research; and I am sometimes led to suspect that many critics have adopted the post-colonial, anti-hegemonistic critical discourse a la Said merely to be able to take the moral high ground, as it were, and to point the old-fashioned accusing anti-British finger in more acceptable phraseology.’ (p.163.)

‘Ireland and the Orient’ (1988) - further: ‘Even Mangan himself subscribes to this Irish-Orientalism parallelism - though he does so, as [David] Lloyd demonstrates [in Nationalism and Minor Literature: James Clarence Mangan and the Emergence of Irish Cultural Nationalism, 1987), not from a superciliously Anglocentric point of view, but from the standpoint of the marginalized. In some rare instances the sens eof shared hegemonistic oppression linking Ireland to the oriental colonies becomes explicit, for example, in Mangan’s invective against John Bull who is apostrophized through an oriental persona as the Khafir Dzjaun Bool Djenkinson. In most other cases a parallel remains implicit. Mangan’s Siberia is a poem of icy death-in-life, comparable to the icy hallucinations of Coleridge in the “Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner” or “Kubla Khan”; but Mangan’s “Siberia” is more, it is a place of political exile and oppression, and and in that respect Mangan’s orientalism differs from Coleridge’s reveries. Again, it is a telling fact that Mangan, who translated much poetry from the Gaelic, chose to phrase an Irish-Oriental parallelism: the Gaelic word for “head” is ceann; Mangan uses this (solecism though it be) in the sense “head of a family or tribe” and [168] thus can come to spell the Gaelic ceann as Khan. What is more, Mangan, a century and a half before [Edward] Said, already denounced the fashionable sort of British couleur locale [in Orientalism, 1978], and argued the irreducibility of oriental culture to European exoticism. Thus, in his review of Edward William Lane’s translation of Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, he calls that version:

the most quackish jackassicality of latter days. Mr Lane is a good writer and a shrewd observer, but he cannot - no man can - Europeanize Orientalism. One might as well think of introducing Harlequin’s costume into the Court of Chancery.

Lloyd rightly places Mangan’s orientalism in a context that is party German - for example, Goethe’s West-ostlicher Divan - and partly peculiar to Ireland. In both of these aspects, then, Mangan does not quite fit the type of colonial “hegemonistic” orientalism as analysed by Said. Mangan’s odd “oversettings”, not translations proper, but paraphrases and adaptations from various exotic languages, range from Gaelic to optic, German to Arabic, and clearly cannot be subsumed within an English-language tradition from Beckford’s Vathek to Edward FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát.
  Yet at the same time there is a danger of overstating the uniqueness of Anglo-Irish orientalism, or of explaining it from Ireland’s political subjugation. There is no reliable basis on which to say that Mangan’s topos of “the fall of Oriental empires” (in poems like “The Time of the Barmecides” or “Gone in the Wind”) is distinct from similar musings in English romantic poetry - for instance, Shelley’s “Ozymandias” or The Revolt of Islam.
 There is a tendency in nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish literature which I have called auto-exoticist: by that I mean a habit, in Anglo-Irish authors, of looking at their own country in terms of its strangeness, its foreignness. I have explained the habit from an ingrained tendency to write about Ireland for an English readership, to whom the country had to be mediated, explained, introduced. [Ftn. ref. to Remembrance & Imagination, pp.33-38.] What makes Ireland exotic is its being different from England; and under that heading its non-English uncouthness can be described with vocabulary borrowed from the opposite end of the Empire, where equally strange and unknown lands lay. That is part of the self-orientalization of Ireland as we see it in Magnan, who with equal [169] exoticist gusto can turn to thirteenth-century Gaelic Ireland or to Siberia or to the Middle East. The curious result is that Mangan’s nationalism (for it is as a nationalist that he delved into his country’s antiquity and evoked it in his poems and “oversettings”) becomes almost indistinguishable from his exoticism. [Goes on to cite Samuel Ferguson’s ‘cycle of prose fiction .. set a the time of the Elizabethan wars [...] entitled, interestingly, The Hibernian Nights’ Entertainment, thus evoking for a scrupulously historical Irish story the aura of fantastic adventure and exoticism implied in the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments as they had shortly earlier been translated by Lane.’ (pp.168-70; available at Google Books - online; accessed 16.02.2015.) ]

[Ftn.: Leerssen adds: ‘The stratagem of using the nomenclature of “exotic tales” for an Irish collection was prefigured a century before in Mrs Butler’s Irish Tales, and in a venture contemplated briefly by Charles O’Conor and Robert Digby.’ Cf. Mere Irish and Fíor-Ghael, 2nd. edn., Cork, 1996, pp.324-25.)

‘Ireland and the Orient’ (1988) - conclusion: ‘The ambiguous case of Ireland, both part of Europe and part of a denigrated colonial periphery, hugely complicates this straightforward binariness [of Brecht’s concluding lines in Threepenny Opera - Denn die einen sind im Dunkeln, und die anderen sind im Licht / Und man siehet die im Lichte - die im Dunkeln seiht man nicht [Brecht: Because some are in the dark, and the others are in the light / And the one who sees it is in the light - while the one in the dark sees it not]. Ireland is subjected to hegemonistic representation, but also has access to it. English exoticism did not silence the Irish voice as it silenced the native voices from the colonies; conversely, when Ireland uses the language of exoticism, it does so in less ethnocentric ways than in England. With Irish authors, it is not just a matter of watching or being watched, seeing or being seen: Ireland is in the Twilight between First and Third World, between the ones in the dark and the ones in the light. Ireland watches now it is watched by England; Ireland watches itself watching the Orient.’ (p.173; end.)

Irish fiction: Foreword to Guide to Irish Fiction 1650-1900, by Rolf & Magda Loeber (Four Courts Pres 2006): ‘[...] The two underlying assumptions on which literary history rests have lost credit: the self-justified importance and separate status of something like a canon based on artistic merit/importance, as well as the author as the premier organizing focus of literary praxis and of the analysis of literary praxis. This shift has affected literary criticism more than literary history, however. True, counter-canonical revisionism has made its voice heard: for example, in the rise of feminist-inspired historiography or postcolonial studies (preceded by the earlier attention for “Commonwealth Literature”); and there has been an increasing awareness that “literature” is not easily cordoned off from other media genres, or from orality and manuscript cultures. Still, when it comes to the writing of literary history, all these critical innovations present themselves as revisions rather than revolutions, as additions and correctives to the established historiography rather than as fundamental overhauls. But there is also a truly revolutionary, fundamental change in perspective emerging, one which will present the most thorough overhaul of how we deal with the diachronicity of literature. That challenge comes from the field of book history; and although Rolf and Magda Loeber are not card-carrying book historians, their magnus opus presents one of the most impressive examples to date of what literary history must reckon with in the future.’ (p.xvi.)

Hidden Ireland, Public Sphere (2006): ‘How did the political climate of “ancien régime” Ireland, with its colonial-style landlord system, its Penal Laws, and its total cultural segregation, give way to the mounting nationalist groundswell of the nineteenth century? This pioneering study attempts to sidestep ingrained and outworn debates and argues that Irish developments around 1800 can be fruitfully studied in the light of historical models elaborated for Continental Europe.’ (See Syracuse Univ. Press website, online; accessed 23.03.2010.)

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Notes
Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill - writing in Ireland of the Welcomes [Aer Lingus in-flight magazine], ed. Derek Mahon, Sept. 1996) quotes Leerssen: ‘The past is something that the poetic subject looks back upon and mines for the ore that he or she can appropriate and assimilate and turn into some sort of creative impulse.’ (p.27; no ref.)

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