The Irish Review, No. 25 (1999/2000): Reading Notes

Claims that Liam Kennedy’s rebuttal of post-colonialism overlooks the special conditions of emigration as a motor of a colonised economy. (‘Modern Ireland: Post-colonial Society or Post-Colonial Pretensions?’, Irish Review, No. 13, Winter 1992/95, pp.107-21.

‘In Strange Country (1997), for example, Deane equates “British colonialism in Ireland and in India” (p.2.), and rebukes Maria Edgeworth for believing that “Ireland was backward, unenlightened, poor, ill-led, even Romantic, not because it was a colonial culture, but because it was Ireland.” He terms her fiction “not an analysis but a symptom of the colonial problme the country represented.’ (pp.32-33). (Longley, p.77.)

Calls Gerry Smyth’s The Novel and the Nation a ‘work of vulgar postcolonial theory’ [78]

Ferguson and his text steer between metropolitan, colonial and colonised attitudes and sctances. Ferguson’s wish for Ireland to be imperial is the other side of a fear that the Anglo-Irish will be considered “colonial” and, once drawn into the colonial analog, regarded as “colonised” … [This] lead[s] to the general question of how Ireland should be viewed in (post-)colonial ters. While it may be attractive to thhink of Ireland as some “partially” colonised, or … “between First and Third Worlds”, such a “graded” configuration of colonial experince can tend either to the ridigification of Irleand’s position or the kinds of over-compensating cultural claims to colonial uniqueness found in, for example, Declan Kiberd’s Inventing Ireland. (Ideologies of Epic, p.175; here p.79.)

‘The obsession with representation, especially of Catholics by Protestants, of Irish people by English people, of “Ireland” by writers (like Edgeworth) whose former licence to speak the critic may seek to revoke; the stress on trauma, deformation, dependency, the colonised mind: is all this - up to a post-structuralist point - the obsession of intellectual élites keen to jusify or advance their status? Spivak’s question. “Can the subaltern speak?” becomes more difficult in a context where literary-critical speakers themselves both assert and mask their authority.’ (p.80.)

Paradoxically, conditions under the Union in some ways facilitated the growth of Irish national consciousness. Comparative research suggests that political repression was more pervasive in nineteenth-century Russia, Spain, France, the Hapsburg empire and other European black spots [than in Ireland]. [81]

For Deane, “the Ossian controversy highlight[s] the relation between the devastated Gaelic order and the British state’ (Strange Country, p.37); while the Celticism initiated by Macpherson he ssees as mainly serving to denigrate the Irish national character.

The truth is that that mid-century, in its southern Irish literary mode, causes difficulties for the kind of “postcolonial” critifism that is effectively “nationalist” criticism. After all, if any era might be strictly “postcolonial” it is this. But most serious writers, although usually sympathetic to the nationalist enterprise, were neither harping on the British legacy nor bemoaning their colonised minds, but reappraising relations between politics and literature, and measuring the state in practice against what it had promised in theory. (p.83.)

Although there are obvious times when it is the artist’s métier to act … as a can-opener of the public heart, of public attention, of public [84] opinion, as he had constantly done here in political matters, it is deplorable if a country’s writers should be persistently and unrelievedly in a state of dissatisfaction. And … it is certainly a most strange and disturbing symptom of the national spirit that so many, indeed practically all the wriers of Ireland have been thrown into that condition since we won our political freedom. Any future historian of our ties who ignores this fact will be suppressing a vital truth about Irish life since 1922; we may boast as muc as we will about the freedoms wh have put on paper, but we cannot explain away this thing. (Bell, 9, 5, Feb. 1945, pp.372-73; here pp.84-85.)

‘a plangently isolationist tendency emerges in Clarke’s critical writing in the 1930s. Hence his dismissive reaction to MacNeice’s Autumn Journal: “Mr MacNeice is prepared, apparently, to plunge Europe into a catastrophic war to save the Czechs and other small nations, but becomes the complete moralist when it comes down to his own country and adopts the manner which we usually associate with the typical West Briton.” Even Clarke’s slanted precis decloses that MacNeice does not perceive Ireland’s failings (which include those of the North) as unique but as implicated in the wider questionss that the Munich crisis raises about Europe, Britain and western civilisation. There is a naïve idea that, by not entering the war, mainly for complex internal reasons, the Free state left Europe, only to rejoin it in 1945 (here we go again!).’ [85; quoting Clarke, Dublin Mag., 14, 3, Jul Sept. 1939, pp.82-84.]

On Cathleen Ni Houlihan: ‘Yeats’s drama according to Richard Allen Cave [Selected Plays, 1997], was a reaction against the sentimental and ultimately defeatist and quietist tendencies of the nineteenth century political melodrama. But what Lady Gregory’s coment [‘a hag with a voice’] reveals in a remarkably unillusioned way is something that the presence of Gonne with her fabled beauty in the role has blinded us to . Nothing happens in the play. It is furthermore a history play and therefore when Yeats and Lady Gregory wrote it they know that nothing happened: 1798 had not transformed Cathleen. The play’s iconic status its relationship to 1916, and the conservatism of Irish theatrical practice have all conspired to make us overlook the fact [14] that nothing happens in it. … The transformation from a present aged decrepitude obsessed with the past into regal beauty is not in this play a memory, but rather a gesture towards the future.’