Irish Writing. Exile and Subversion PAUL HYLAND NEIL SAMMELLS. Palgrave Macmillan. Edited by. Head of History Bath College of Higher Education.

Transcription

1 IRISH WRITING

2 Irish Writing Exile and Subversion Edited by PAUL HYLAND Head of History Bath College of Higher Education and NEIL SAMMELLS Senior Lecturer in English Bath College of Higher Education Palgrave Macmillan

3 ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI / The Editorial Board, Lumiere (Co-operative) Press Ltd 1991 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1991 All rights reserved. For information, write: Scholarly and Reference Division, St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y First published in the United States of America in 1991 ISBN Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Irish writing: exile and subversion I edited by Paul Hyland and Neil Sammells. p. em. Includes index. ISBN English literature-irish authors-history and criticism. 2. Ireland-Intellectuallife. 3. Politics in literature. 4. Ireland in literature. 5. Exiles in literature. I. Hyland, Paul. II. Sammells, Neil. PR8714.I '9415-dc CIP

4 Contents Acknowledgements and Note on References Notes on the Contributors Introduction Neil Sammells vii viii xi 1 The Subversive Philosophy of John Toland 1 Stephen H. Daniel 2 Naming Names: Steele and Swift 13 Paul Hyland 3 The English Swift I the Irish Swift 32 Robert Phiddian 4 'They sate in counterview': Anglo-Irish Verse in the Eighteenth Century 45 Bryan Coleborne 5 Irish Exiles, Revolution and Writing in England in the 1790s 64 Alan Booth 6 William Carleton: the Lough Derg Exile 82 Margaret O'Brien 7 Making History: John Mitchel and the Great Famine 98 Graham Davis 8 Oscar Wilde: Quite Another Thing 116 Neil Sammells 9 Yeats, Childhood and Exile 126 Declan Kiberd 10 'A voice in directing the affairs of Ireland': L'Irlande libre, The Shan Van Vocht and Bean na h-eireann 146 C. L. Innes v

5 vi Contents 11 James Joyce: a Subversive Geography of Gender 159 Bonnie Kime Scott 12 Joyce's 'Chinese alphabet': Ulysses and the Proletarians 173 Keith Williams 13 Fin de Partie/Endgame as Political Drama 188 Charles R. Lyons 14 Parables of Estrangement: the Fiction of J. P. Donleavy 209 David Seed 15 Friel and Shaw: Dreams and Responsibilities 224 R. K. R. Thornton 16 Strange Letters: Reading and Writing in Recent Irish Poetry 234 Neil Corcoran Index 248

6 Acknowledgements and Note on References Ciaran Carson's 'Belfast Confetti' appears by kind permission of Bloodaxe Books. We greatly appreciate the diligence of Tina and Caroline, at Bath College of Higher Education, in helping to prepare the typescript. We are also indebted to Graham Eyre for his help and advice as copy-editor. Above all, we would like to thank the contributors to this book for their enthusiasm and commitment, and for responding with patience and good humour to our queries and cavils. In all references London is the place of publication, unless otherwise stated. Vll

7 Notes on the Contributors Alan Booth is Lecturer in History at the University of Nottingham. He has published widely on Britain in the 1790s, and is currently working on a study of eighteenth-century politics and propaganda. Bryan Colebome is Senior Lecturer at Monash University College, Gippsland, Australia. He has published articles on eighteenthcentury Anglo-Irish writing and has edited the journal Swift Studies (University of Munster). He is also the editor of the section on Anglo-Irish verse ( ) in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (1990). Neil Corcoran teaches English literature at the University of Sheffield. His publications include a study of David Jones, The Song of Deeds (1982), and Seamus Heaney (1986). He is at present completing a study of English poetry since 1940 and editing a collection of essays on the contemporary poetry of Northern Ireland. Stephen H. Daniel is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Texas A&M University. His publications include Myth and Modern Philosophy (1990) and John Toland: His Methods, Manners, and Mind (1984). His current research focuses on contemporary European strategies of historiography. Graham Davis is Principal Lecturer in History at Bath College of Higher Education. He has published on local history and is the author of 'Little Irelands' in R. Swift and S. Gilley (eds), The Irish in Britain in the Nineteenth Century (1989). He is currently at work on a book on the Irish in Britain. Paul Hyland is Head of History at Bath College of Higher Education. He has produced a modern-language edition of Ned Ward's London Spy and is currently completing a study of the life and work of Richard Steele. C. L. Innes is Senior Lecturer at the University of Kent. Her books include The Devil's Own Mirror: The African and the Irishman in viii

8 Notes on the Contributors ix Literature and Chinua Achebe (both 1990). She is currently completing a book on women and Irish literature, Declan Kiberd teaches at University College, Dublin, and is a former Director of the Yeats International Summer School. Among his many publications are Anglo-Irish Attitudes (1984) and Men and Feminism in Modern Literature (1985). He is currently editing a new edition of Ulysses and preparing a study of Irish writers as forerunners of the current post-colonial school of 'magic realism'. Charles R. Lyons is Margery Bailey Professor of English and Dramatic Literature at the University of Stanford, California. Among his many publications are books on Beckett, Brecht and Ibsen. Margaret O'Brien teaches in the Five Colleges in Western Massachusetts, having previously been a member of the English Department at Trinity College, Dublin. She is currently writing a book on the Lough Derg theme in Irish writing. Robert Phiddian is a postgraduate student at Monash University, Australia. He is currently working on a PhD thesis on Swift and parody. Neil Sammells is Senior Lecturer in English at Bath College of Higher Education. He has published widely on modern drama and is the author of Tom Stoppard: The Artist as Critic (Macmillan, 1988). He is currently completing a book on Oscar Wilde and editing, with Paul Hyland, a collection of essays, Writing and Censorship in Britain. Bonnie Kime Scott is Professor of English at the University of Delaware. She is the author of Joyce and Feminism and James Joyce in the Harvester Feminist Readings series. She is the general editor of the forthcoming critical anthology The Gender of Modernism. David Seed is Senior Lecturer in English and American Literature at the University of Liverpool. He is the author of books on Thomas Pynchon (1988) and Joseph Heller (1989), both published by Macmillan.

9 X Notes on the Contributors R. K. R. Thornton is Professor and Head of the School of English at the University of Birmingham. Among his many publications are books on the 1890s and on Gerard Manley Hopkins. He has also edited work by John Clare, Nicholas Hilliard and lvor Gurney, and is preparing an edition of Gurney's letters. Keith Williams is Temporary Lecturer in English at the University of Exeter. He is currently writing a book on 1930s writers and the impact of the mass media.

10 Introduction NEIL SAMMELLS Oscar Wilde said in the 1880s that what captivity had been to the Jews, exile had become to the Irish: it had made them what they were. Wilde also noted, in 'Pen, Pencil and Poison' (1891), that a fondness for green - the national colour - denoted both an artistic temperament and a laxity of morals. Green, in other words, was the colour of the artist, the decadent, the subversive, the Irish. Irish Writing: Exile and Subversion focuses on the connections suggested by Wilde. These essays explore the recurrence of exile as a motif in Irish writing from the eighteenth century to the present, and emphasise its subversive potential in political, cultural and literary terms. A number of these essays have been written by historians, and one, on John Toland, by a philosopher. This reflects our desire to avoid a narrow concern with the 'literary' to the exclusion of other kinds of writing, and with 'literary criticism' to the exclusion of other kinds of analysis. For instance, Bryan Coleborne' s survey of eighteenth-century verse (Ch. 4) stresses the significance of popular ballads and songs; Alan Booth (Ch. 5) writes on the political pamphleteering of the United Irishmen in the years of the French Revolution; Graham Davis (Ch. 7) discusses the journalisthistorian John Mitchel's part in the rhetorical construction of the Great Famine (and balances nationalist versions of nineteenthcentury Irish history with recent 'revisionist' scholarship); C. L. Innes (Ch. 10) surveys the variety and importance of journalism by women nationalists, such as Maud Gonne and Hannah Sheehy Skeffington, during the Revival. Other essays deal with individual writers and specific texts. Some- such as Stephen H. Daniel's on Toland (Ch. 1) or Margaret O'Brien's on William Carleton (Ch. 6) discuss less familiar or neglected writers; others explore 'major figures' such as Yeats, Joyce, Beckett and Swift. We are looking not just at the monuments, but also at the landscape, and at its historical contours. A concern with actual landscape and location is one of the themes linking several of the essays. Declan Kiberd (Ch. 9) notes the importance to Yeats of the Sligo of his childhood, a landscape xi

11 xii Introduction that attains a powerful symbolic resonance. Bonnie Kime Scott (Ch. 11) discusses a similarly symbolic transformation of place in Joyce's Dubliners as she describes his 'subversive geography of gender'. Margaret O'Brien's essay on William Carleton (Ch. 6) locates a nineteenth-century precedent for Seamus Heaney's fascination with Lough Derg. Neil Corcoran (Ch. 16) analyses Tom Paulin's idiosyncratic meditation on the political configuration of landscape and place-names in his poem 'Mount Stewart'. The naming of places is also the central political metaphor of Brian Friel's Translations (1981), discussed here by R. K. R. Thornton (Ch. 15). In more general terms, Robert Phiddian (Ch. 3) describes Swift's enduring sense of exile in both colonial Dublin and metropolitan London, while David Seed (Ch. 14) explores the sense of estrangement from place in the novels of J.P. Donleavy. Awareness of the significance of place and names is, perhaps, an inevitable element of writing in a culture so pervaded by the possibility and the pain of exile - a connection brilliantly explored in Maria Edgeworth's novel of exile and homecoming, The Absentee (1812). 'Absence' echoes through contemporary literary theory. In his essay on contemporary Northern Irish poetry, Neil Corcoran (Ch. 16) traces its importance to Derrida and its knowing and surprising use by Heaney. Furthermore, it sometimes seems as if such theory has been specifically developed to cope with the challenges and difficulties presented by Irish writing. The Russian Formalists, and Viktor Shklovsky in particular, regarded Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1760) as a seminal text, noting the way it freed itself from novelistic conventions by parodying them. Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds (1939) is a similarly exuberant anti-novel: a work of self-delighting formal complexity, a kaleidoscopic array of stories within stories sealed in the envelope of the nearest narrator's biographical reminiscences. O'Brien's student narrator (a parody of Joyce's Stephen Dedalus) calls for the novel to be a self-evident sham that allows the reader to regulate at will the degree of his or her credulity. This is a humorous anticipation of Roland Barthes, whose 'writerly' text is a self-evident sham which seeks to exercise no despotism over readers but which gives them an active role to play in the production of meaning. Joyce, of course, has been the subject of some of the most challenging and influential post-structuralist criticism, the work of Colin MacCabe being a case in point. In this collection Keith Williams (Ch. 12) stresses the

12 Introduction xiii political nature of Joyce's experiment and innovation, and his unlikely influence on British proletarian novels of the 1930s. Paul Hyland's essay (Ch. 2) compares Steele's 'presence' as an author with Swift's calculated 'absence' and notes the latter's deliberate complication of the seemingly simple relationship between reader and text, and text and author: a concern which gives Swift a distinctly modern look. My essay on Oscar Wilde (Ch. 8) points out the similarities between his aesthetic theories, outlined in the 1880s and 1890s, and contemporary cultural theory. What such writers have in common is a conscious desire to subvert literary norms and conventions. Theirs is the response, conscious or otherwise, of colonial subjects to discourses fashioned for the purposes of their imperial masters. In a sense, their writing is struggle - a struggle shared with the more directly political forms of writing also discussed in these essays. Awareness of this context produces surprising changes in the way we approach particular writers: Charles R. Lyons argues here, for instance (Ch. 13), that the time has come to see the political dimension to that most apparently apolitical of Irish writers- Samuel Beckett. In Four Dubliners (1987) Richard EHmann says of his celebrated quadrumvirate- Wilde, Yeats, Joyce and Beckett- that their work shares with their island (from which they chose to exile themselves for so much of their lives) a struggle for autonomy and a disdain for occupation by outside authorities. His remark neatly draws together the personal, the aesthetic, the historical and the political. Irish Writing: Exile and Subversion is similarly dedicated to exploring this series of interconnections, and signals our belief that this can only be adequately achieved by ignoring the traditional distinctions between academic 'disciplines'. To do otherwise is to risk seeing history as simply a backdrop to literature, or literature as just a mirror to history. Instead, the relationship between the two is dynamic: writing creates, deploys and destroys the myths and images by which a people both sustain and imprison themselves. The title of Brian Friel's 1989 play about Hugh O'Neill and the Battle of Kinsale says it most succinctly: writing is not just a way of reflecting or describing, but a way of Making History.