One Introduction: the Poor Mouth

Notes One Introduction: The Poor Mouth 1. While all the authors I discuss have continued to publish after 1997, all of them move in different directions in subsequent work (discussed in my afterword). 1983–1997 brackets a period of extreme economic hardship for the working classes in the UK and Ireland, a time that acts as a back- drop for most novels in chapters two–four. Eoin McNamee’s novels depart from my schematic somewhat, in that, not only is he generationally behind the other writers here, but chooses to set his work in prior periods, a deci- sion (as I will discuss) that I attribute in part to the vastly different political context in Northern Ireland. 2. Later in “Discourse in the Novel,” Bakhtin distinguishes hybridization from internally dialogized interillumination, saying that “In the former case there is no direct mixing of two languages within the boundaries of a singular utterance—rather, only one language is actually present in the utterance, but it is rendered in the light of another language. This second language, however, is not actualized and remains outside the utterance” (362). While he seems to be referring to national languages (the role of Gaelic and Irish is one that has been productively explored), here I suggest the excluded status of the second language resembles the case for working- class voices in literature of the British Isles. 3. David Harvey, David Lloyd, and Seamus Deane, among others, have also expressed skepticism about the potential of the local to effect change. Harvey: “Regional resistances, the struggle for local autonomy, place- bound organisation, may be excellent bases for political organization, but they cannot bear the burden of historical change alone” (303, qtd. in Ryan n91). Contrast this tangentially linked idea of Joe Cleary’s: “ . peripher- ies cease to be regarded essentially as passive consumers of ideas of the modern; at certain pivotal moments . they can function as sites of ‘alternative enlightenment’ where ideas of the modern are intellectually tested, creatively extended, radicalised and transformed, and indeed transferred eventually into the metropolitan centre” (“Introduction” 6). See also Trumpener and Crawford. 4. This is a combination proposed by Derek Attridge in Peculiar Language in reference to Joyce’s onomatopoeia. Tom Leonard, a Glasgow poet whom Kelman credits as an inspiration, has interrogated the “realism” of standard spelling by rendering accents in the Standard Received Pronunciation on the page via transliteration; for instance, literature becomes “littricha.” 198 Notes 5. These historical factors are important background for the sorts of novels and films being produced by and about the Scots and the Irish. Ireland, in particular, can be a troubled term; when I use it here, I refer by and large to the Republic of Ireland. When discussing the island of Ireland, or talk- ing about a unified Ireland as envisioned by those who reject the legiti- macy of British presence on the island of Ireland, I will take pains to make my distinctions clear. For more on Scots nationalism, see Keith Webb, Tom Nairn, and Michael Gardiner. For diverse views on Irish nationalism, see Roy Foster, Modern Ireland, Frederic Jameson, Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature: Modernism and Imperialism, and Terry Eagleton, Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature: Nationalism: Irony and Commitment. 6. Indeed, Scott comes to be seen as the source of “fake romantic ‘tushery’ (Craig, “National” 59), while Barrie, living in London and writing stories of Never Land, often does not seem Scottish at all. When he does write of Scotland, he tells stories of a disconnected past with no bearing on contemporary situations or politics: “Barrie’s Kailyard stories are the fulfill- ment of the historyless world that Scott bequeathed” (Craig, OH 39). His use of the working-class dialect presumes a middle-class English as the common language norm. 7. In a poll throughout Scotland in the summer of 1998, A Scots Quair, not a commercial success at publication but now a fixture on the school cur- riculum, did win as the best Scottish novel. Given that the top five also included the notoriously difficult Lanark and James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner, it seems likely that the list represents less what people actually read than their internalization of current constructions of a national literature. 8. Such a pronouncement immediately begs some clarification. Flann O’Brien, Brendan Behan, Edna O’Brien—definitely some of the most sig- nificant figures of the 1940s and 1950s—do write positively about Dublin. Flann O’Brien I treat briefly, with attention to his linguistic formal depar- tures from his domestic contemporaries, momentarily. Behan, based in Dublin, resembles Flann O’Brien in his reference to the Irish language. Kiberd writes that “Whenever he espoused Gaelic ideas, Behan was at pains to fuse them with socialist principles” (II 517). Edna O’Brien’s Country Girls, with its eponymous locus, treats Dublin as a site that con- firms one’s inner character instead of offering escape, as well as represent- ing an alternative space in which the constrictions of a Catholic, national identity are relaxed. Grace Eckley’s analysis of O’Brien’s career excises Dublin altogether: “The two kinds of fiction—the Irish and the urbane— are produced from two life styles in Ireland and in England” (77). 9. Judy Simons sees Braine as one of the Angry Young Men in 1950s Britain, a collection of writers who “asserted an ethic of individualism and of rebellious, amoral youth. ... Braine was in the forefront of the wave of populist writers who, with a contempt for avant-garde fictional devices, rejected notions of artistic elitism and of the refined sensibilities and Notes 199 unique moral position of the writer” (47). It is this rejection of formal innovation that sets the Angries apart from the authors I discuss. 10. Writing in 1977, Nairn argued that Scotland was less susceptible to this sort of nationalism, having a sense of “historic nation” that Wales, in his example, lacks, including a separate legal system and Church of Scotland, as well as being more recently developed than England, hence a “restive impatience” with “English ‘backwardness,’ London muddle, economic incompetence, state parasitism, and so forth” (204). Yet, what flour- ished in 1977 has become an industrial wasteland since, a consequence in part of the denationalization of heavy industries under Margaret Thatcher, so that the Glasgow of a the mid-1980s would very much resemble the muddle and backwardness that Nairn cites. 11. Ryan’s list of the “empirical and cultural bases” for the Irish/Scottish comparison is thorough and insightful, including similar linguistic tra- ditions, religious tensions, contested Acts of Union with the British state, and “most importantly, they share an oppressive relation to the English literary tradition” (10). 12. The contemporary demographics in the United States show a similar development, as “Rust Belt” economies decline while profits and popu- lation in the “Sun Belt” explode. The even more recent recuperation of the Northeast, and New York City in particular, parallels the renais- sances in Glasgow, Europe’s “City of Culture” in 1994, and Dublin, now a cultural center in Europe (Belfast’s rebirth is slower but certainly in progress). These reemergent cities have shifted focus away from heavy manufacturing and traditional industries, with a concomitant decrease in the visibility of the working class. 13. Gibbons’s essay seeks to demonstrate that technology and moderniza- tion are neutral forces that can be harnessed by progressive ideologies and reactionary ones alike. 14. See Ryan’s Ireland and Scotland as well as Across the Margins: Cultural Identity and Change in the Atlantic Archipelago, ed. Norquay and Smyth; Ireland and Scotland: Culture and Society, 1700–2000. ed. McIlvaney and Ryan, McGuire, O’Toole, “Imagining Scotland,” and others. Marilyn Reizbaum in particular deserves credit for pioneering this direction of investigation, one now outfitted with its own institute in Aberdeen and its own journal, Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies. 15. In Modernism and Mass Politics, Michael Tratner reads Portrait as leaning toward fascism, while he sees Ulysses as engaging positively with the mass politics of the early twentieth century by allowing for multiple constitutions of the individual subject. Vicki Mahaffey cites the “Evolution” away from Dubliners, while Moretti has called Portrait a mistake that led to Ulysses (“‘A Useless Longing for Myself’”); on a slightly different track, Kevin J.H. Dettmar sees the apotheosis of postmodernism in Ulysses devastatingly supplanted by a more static Finnegans Wake that commits to a single style. The need for a totalizing narrative of right answers and mistakes leads 200 Notes many critics to overemphasize the “flaws” of the texts less suited to their own theses. Colin MacCabe identifies Joyce’s opposition to classic realism as continual, spanning his entire career. 16. While I do want to emphasize that innovation permeates the entire novel, the opening scene of Portrait is in many ways its most experimen- tal. Moretti distinguishes between two “distinct strains of stream of consciousness:” one for “exceptional circumstances: fainting, delirium, suicide . waking, drunkenness” (Epic 174) and a Joycean everyday stream of consciousness. The use of stream of consciousness for the baby Stephen, soon supplanted by more traditional narration, seems to show Joyce experimenting with and rejecting the “exceptional” strain. 17. M. Keith Booker sees Joyce as unable to escape his petit bourgeois groundings and cites “the failure of Joyce’s writing to represent the lower classes of colonial Dublin” as a “genuine shortcoming in Joyce’s work” (UCC 16). Ryan refers to a “narrow band of petit bourgeois characters . inscribed by an almost exclusively Anglo-Irish history” (156) in Dubliners. As I will show, such statements overlook the extreme poverty of the Dedalus women, among others.

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