Peer Gynt, Or the Difficulty of Becoming a Poet in Norway
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www.fieldday.ie Field d ay Review ay 4. 2008 Front cover: A brass strip marks zero longitude at Greenwich, England. Photo: Bruce Dale/National Geographic/Getty Images. Inside front cover: Thomas Allen, Topple. Inside back cover: Thomas Allen, Knockout. 4. 2008 www.fieldday.ie www.fieldday.ie www.fieldday.ie Editors Seamus Deane Breandán Mac Suibhne Consultant to the Editors Ciarán Deane Assistant to the Editors Joan Arbery Copy Hilary Bell Design Red Dog Design Consultants www.reddog.ie Fonts Headlines — Gill Sans 21/23 Body Copy Essays/Review Essays — Sabon 9/12 Body Copy Reviews — Gills Sans 9/12 Paper Stock McNaughton’s Challenger Offset Copyright © 2008 by the contributors and Field Day Publications Field Day Review is published annually by Field Day Publications in association with the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame. ISSN 1649-6507 ISBN 978-0-946755-38-7 Field Day Review Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies 86 St. Stephen’s Green Dublin 2 Ireland [email protected] FIELD DAY REVIEW 2008 www.fieldday.ie ESSAYS Pascale Casanova 7 The Literary Greenwich Meridian Thoughts on the Temporal Forms of Literary Belief Toril Moi 25 Ibsen in Exile Peer Gynt, or the Difficulty of Becoming a Poet In Norway John Barrell 40 Radicalism, Visual Culture, and Spectacle in the 1790s Breandán Mac Suibhne 63 Afterworld The Gothic Travels of John Gamble (1770–1831) Claire Connolly 115 Ugly Criticism Union and Division in Irish Literature Denis Condon 133 Politics and the Cinematograph The Boer War and the Funeral of Thomas Ashe David Fitzpatrick 147 ‘I will acquire an attitude not yours’ Was Frederick MacNeice a Home Ruler, and Why does this Matter? Seamus Deane 163 Snapped Thomas Allen’s Pulp Fictions Michael Cronin 175 Minding Ourselves A New Face for Irish Studies Fintan Cullen 187 The Lane Bequest Giving Art to Dublin Robert Tracy 203 ‘A statue’s there to mark the place’ Cú Chulainn in the GPO Máirín Nic Eoin 217 Idir Dhá Chomhairle/Between Two Minds Interculturality in Literary Criticism in Irish REVIEWS Luke Gibbons 235 ‘Mourn — and then Onward!’ Patrick Griffin 247 Reckoning with the English Bruce Nelson 261 ‘My countrymen are all mankind’ Deirdre McMahon 275 Plato’s Cave? Sean Ryder 289 Ireland’s Difficulty, the Novelist’s Opportunity? Peter McQuillan 297 Bardic Realities Terry Eagleton 305 The Lack of the Liberal Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh 315 Once upon a Time in the West www.fieldday.ie www.fieldday.ie Essays FIELD DAY REVIEW www.fieldday.ie The Greenwich or Prime Meridian in south-east London. Photo: Fred Mayer/Getty Images. 6 The Literary Greenwich www.fieldday.ieMeridian Thoughts on the Temporal Forms of Literary Belief Pascale Casanova For Pierre Bergounioux A sine qua non of the existence of a world literary space is a measure of time shared by all international players. That is why I suggest the idea of a literary Greenwich meridian. The fact that the ordinary world was unified in part by the British invention and that there then followed the worldwide acceptance of the Greenwich meridian — the imaginary arbitrary line enabling the whole world to measure and thereby to share time — is, it seems to me, objective proof that: 1 an imaginary line can have objective measurable effects on the real order of the world; 2 the prerequisite to the political and economic unification FIELD DAY REVIEW 4 2008 7 FIELD DAY REVIEW of the world rests to a great extent on pause to reflect, in terms of ‘literary space’, 1 I would like to thank an organization of time that enables as I try to do, using Pierre Bourdieu’s notion Bruce Robbins and Gayatri Spivak for having all of the countries that recognize the of ‘field of artistic production’,3 we begin reminded me that some Greenwich meridian to measure their to think that it is not enough to describe countries have modified position with respect to this line and thus and define these two kinds of time, that their relative position in www.fieldday.ieto determine their own time. many other kinds of time exist side by side the world system of time zones. Hugo Chavez, (both in our heads and in the world), and for instance, recently In other words, this unification rests on that these relatively separate worlds, these created a new time zone universal recognition of a common clock artistic or scientific worlds that operate set 30 minutes ahead that allows everyone, not to have the same relatively independently of political and of the old one (cf. bbc. news.co.uk, 9 December clock-time, but to situate themselves with social constraints generate their own tempo, 2007, ‘Venezuela creates respect to the prime meridian. It also enables their own temporality. Which means that own time zone’); India us to calculate the longitudes, designated in these worlds have another way of counting is 30 minutes ahead of minutes and seconds, that is, to determine time, another chronology, have important Pakistan (UTC [Universal Time Coordinated] + very precisely the location of every point on events other than those of the political or the 5h30, and Nepal marks 1 the face of the earth. historical world. its own difference by The world of literature can be seen In other studies I showed that the adding another 15 in the same way (at least to a certain progressive and relative process of unifying minutes (UTC + 5h45); Iran is another time extent and differentially according to the the international literary space has been dissident (UTC + 3h30). zones, territories or spaces). It can even be first of all the history of the unification Opposition to the time considered that it is precisely this specific of (literary) time, through gradual and system is clearly a way of measure of a particular time that enabled transnational agreement of all protagonists challenging the dominant world order while the world of literature to constitute itself, in this collective enterprise, on the specific recognizing its power: to unify itself gradually around this highly way of measuring it. This unification temporal dissidents distinctive ‘clock’. As the literary planet gradually came about over the four centuries merely want to mark an expanded, as new claims to literature’s during which the Republic of Letters took internal distinction while remaining within the right of existence appeared, as new national shape, but it was probably in the first half of world time system. literary spaces emerged over the nineteenth the nineteenth century that the unification 2 Henri Bergson, Essai sur and twentieth centuries, protagonists was actually completed and that we can les Données Immédiates gradually came to agree on a shared measure begin to glimpse its objective effects. de la Conscience (Paris, 1888); Time and Free of (literary) time. Little by little, they agreed Such international unification of time Will: An Essay on the on the localization of a present (which is possible only if each party agrees to Immediate Data of I therefore suggest we call by homology recognize one or several places as reference Consciousness (London, the literary Greenwich meridian), which points that make it possible to measure time 1910; New York, 2001). 3 Pierre Bourdieu, The made it possible not only to situate oneself and to evaluate practices using universally Field of Cultural (and to be situated) with respect to other recognized standards. In the world of Production: Essays on literatures, but also to implement strategies literature, this unification is first effected in Art and Literature, ed. for drawing closer to this line, for rejecting certain major literary capitals, which, at a and introd. by Randall it, laying claim to it, distancing oneself from given moment in the history of the structure Johnson (Oxford, 1993); see also The Rules of Art: it, discussing it, proposing other definitions, and distribution of resources, embody Genesis and Structure of and so on. specific power or even represent literary the Literary Field, trans. Western philosophical tradition, as we prestige (‘prestige’ being one of the major Susan Emanuel (Stanford, know, makes a classic distinction between forms of power in the literary space). As 1995). 4 See among others, two aspects of time: collective or social time a consequence, the places endowed with Gilles Deleuze and Felix (also known as historical time), on the one the most prestige ‘territorialize’ (to use an Guattari, A Thousand hand, and inner time or psychological or expression coined by Gilles Deleuze4) the Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, existential time, on the other hand. Henri literary present. Simply, unlike the ordinary trans. Brian Massumi Bergson thus opposes scientific time to what social world, no one in the literary world (Minneapolis, 1988). he calls ‘duration’.2 However, when we clearly explains its structure; there is tacit 8 THE LITERARY GREENWICH MERIDIAN Kathy Prendergast, City Drawings Series (Paris), 1997–, pencil on paper. Courtesy Kerlin Gallery, www.fieldday.ieDublin. agreement on the one or two places where agencies of consecration and the investment modernity is decreed, since it is more or less of many members of literary circles in the obvious to all protagonists of this world; discussions about the present of literary but it is never explicitly stated for fear of legitimacy that create or designate the literary disenchanting the reputedly quasi-magical capitals as places where literary time is mechanisms of literary consecration. continually engendered and reproduced. The literary meridian is not located in It can be said that the two places, the a single place. In fact, there are struggles two capitals that have been vying for this between several centres vying for the monopoly for nearly two hundred years are monopoly to inscribe and impose the London and Paris, to which must of course present.