The unfamiliar story [of the novels under discussion] has also enabled me to see a rewarding confusion of the popular and the mainstream, categories that most commentators on Irish fiction have either declined to countenance or have yet to explore. Commentators have preferred, or been preoccupied with, the notion of a ruptured and interrupted tradition in the Irish niovel that perhaps too conveniently reflected the policital and constitutional ruptures of the time. [1]
[...]
The Revival regarded itself as an inauguration, one that returned to the past to achieve a beginning, so its exponents paid little attention to the Irish Victorian novel which continued through the 1890s and into the Edwardian decade and beyond. Literary hsitorians of the Revival in our own day have maintained this inattention. [2]
[...]
The orthodox account explains Irish literature, including fiction, on the Revival’s own ground and cultural nationalism’s own ground. As a result, we have accommodated a counter-Revival (see, for example, three sections so titled in the third volume of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 1991) but have reserved no shelf-space for credible Irish writing that neither promoted nor repudiated the Revival and that reflected the continuities in both Irish ficiton and Irish society that survived Revivalism in literature and separatist nationalism in politics, even if these continuities were driven underground in the decades after the achievement of the Free State. To important fiction writers we associate with the counter-Revival were convinced of the unsuitability of Romantic Revival expression to the astringencies of Free State Ireland. They thought the new Ireland was a broken world, with its sectionalism, puritanism, philistinism, anti-intellectualism, and censorship and that it could not therefore sponsor an artistic realism over the stretch of the novel. […] After O’Connor and O’Faolain the idea took hold among criticis that Ireland ahd at best a ruptured tradition in the novel; indeedn, given the allegedly peculiar nature of the rollicking nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish novels, the romanticism of the Revival, and the novel drought proclaimed by O’Connor and O’Faolain in the 1930s and 1940s, it had hardly a novel tradition at all. I leave for another time and place whether this critical opinion, with its particular conception of Irish literary proclivities, influenced later writers (and potential novelists) as well as later literary critics, but it is the case that in a significant essay of 1965 Augustine Martin contrasted the capacity of contemporary English novelists of the 1950s and 1960s to see life steadily and whole with the incapacity in that respect of contemporary Irish novelistis. Rather than blaming the nature of Irish society, as O’Faolain and O’Connor had done, with some justification he blamed the writers themselves who he thought were avoiding the values and actualities of the [6] society in favour of an assumed dissent inherited chiefly from George Moore and James Joyce. (Martin, ‘Inherited Dissent: The Dilemma of the Irish Novelist’, in Studies , 1965, pp.1-20. The net critical inference has been the same: Ireland has been immensely gifted with poetic, dramatic, and short story traditions but its achievements in the novel are intermittent, disconnected (from society and each other) and even unnovelistic. [7]
[...]
Surprisingly, contemporary [i.e., 2008] interest in cultural “hybridity” does not seem to extend to those hyphenated writers whom we can call, in the most generous sense, Anglo-Irish, nor even to a Catholic writer of the archipelago like Tynan. Yet hybridity can be tracked through the Irish novel form the beginning to the present. [10]
If works that seemed neutral on the question of the Revival do not find a role in the orthodox account, neither do works by Irish writers set outside Ireland (including England), since the Revival demanded on-site engagement, as we might say nowadays; for Irish commentators, Revival literature and Irish literature of the period 1890-1922 became synonymous. […]
This critical squint began with the Revival. […]
The exclusiveness is understandable for the Revival period, since the idea that it was only Ireland that mattered was a strategy by which a necessary native cultural recovery could happen. The problem is that the strategy became over time an exclusive policy and perspective, so that it is now no wonder the student of Irish literature should be drawn to novels set in Ireland even by English writers, more than to novels set in England even by Irish writers. The governing assumption is that a student of Irish literature is primarily a student, not of Irish writers, but of Irish culture, by which is meant a student of Ireland’s cultural nationality either in its most or least generous senses. But it isn’t merely a question of focus and priorities. Critics have neglected numerous Irish novelists who felt qualified, and secure enough in their identity, to depict and illuminate the neighbouring island of Britain. Or to depict life beyond what until recently was called the British Isles. Irish popular fiction is a reminder that many Irish were engaged with matters in the wider world, that there was in Ireland, even during the time of the Irish Revival - a necessarily self-regarding and self-interested movement - a centrifugal energy and enthusiasm. Such energy and enthusiasm were facilitated and impelled by the Empire in which the Irish participated, certainly, but also by an historical Irish interest in the New World and other parts of the globe as well. The cultural as well as political sentiment of Sinn Fein (‘Ourselves’) came to dominate Irish feeling as it was publicly acknowledged inside and outside Ireland, but the larger sentiment remained alive and expressive, though just as neglected by literary critics since, as well as during, the Revival.
Behind the critical practice of neglecting writers who set at least some of their work outside Ireland, is almost certainly a reluctance to countenance certain aspects of Irish literary and social reality, including the geographic [10] mobility of the Irish imagination and the social mobility of the Irish, especially the middle and upper middle classes even after the creation of the Free State. The historic Irish expatriate mobility that comes readily to mind and that has been dealt with so extensively in the critical and historical literature that it is now a sub-field in Irish Studies, is called the Irish Diaspora, which refers chiefly, however, to the emigration of the Catholic lower classes, out of a perceived necessity, to England, America, and Australia. (Even when voluntary, such emigration is normally assumed to be in truth involuntary.) By contrast, the dispersal of upper-class, middle-class, or farming Protestants, be it their eighteenth-century emigration from Ireland to the New World or their military, administrative, or commercial sojourns in India and elsewhere in the British Empire, has not been striking enough to attract a great deal of scholarly attention. Since they tended not to establish ethnic urban enclaves, and their emigration was often a voluntary and individual affair, they have not registered importantly on the radar of economic and social historians. The Protestant and Catholic middle-class or upper-class “diaspora” we can find recorded in the popular novel but it is as neglected by the critics as the reality has been by the historians.
Presumably a literary patriotism and a class bias or even religious bias (in varying ratios) account for the neglect of fictions by certain writers who set most of their work beyond Irish shores. One might hing of the novel of B. M. Croker set in India, save for the fact that all of Croker’s novels hve been forgotten, without the need for geographical discrimination: it was presumably her social class, her unqualified Anglo-Irishness, and her popularity that already counted against her. These would explain, too, the oblivion enjoyed in Irish critical circles by the very readable novels of Henry de Vere Stacpoole from County Dublin, set in the South Seas, the Congo, and other far-flung laces and which we will give a second glance later.