Michael Rubenstein

Rubenstein-00FM_Layout 1 6/30/10 5:30 PM Page iii P U B L I C INFRASTRUCTURE, IRISH MODERNISM, AND THE POSTCOLONIAL WORKS MICHAEL RUBENSTEIN University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana © 2010 University of Notre Dame Press Rubenstein-00FM_Layout 1 6/30/10 5:30 PM Page iv Copyright © 2010 by the University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 www.undpress.nd.edu All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rubenstein, Michael, 1971– Public works : infrastructure, Irish modernism, and the postcolonial / Michael Rubenstein. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-268-04030-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-268-04030-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. English literature—Irish authors—History and criticism. 2. English literature—20th century—History and criticism. 3. Public utilities in literature. 4. Infrastructure (Economics) in literature. 5. Modernism (Literature)—Ireland. 6. Postcolonialism in literature. I. Title. PR8755.R83 2010 820.9'3556—dc22 2010024336 This book is printed on recycled paper. © 2010 University of Notre Dame Press Rubenstein-01_Layout 1 6/30/10 5:33 PM Page 1 c h a p t e r THE POSTCOLONIAL COMEDY OF DEVELOPMENT: PUBLIC WORKS AND IRISH MODERNISM o n e Public Works is centrally about a brief span of time—1922 to 1940—in the literary, cultural, political, and technological history of Ireland. This was roughly the eighteen-year period of the Irish Free State, a political body that emerged in 1922 from colonial union with Great Britain and transformed itself, with the ratification of Éamon de Valera’s constitution in 1937, into Ireland or Éire. In that time, James Joyce published Ulys - ses and the Free State planned, funded, and built the world’s first state- controlled national electrical grid.1 Joyce’s monumental achievement in Ulysses is widely acknowledged; Ireland’s technological and political achievement with their electrical grid is far less well known, even in spe- cialized histories of science and technology.2 Public Works seeks to de- scribe the counterintuitive but profound connections between these two seemingly unrelated historical facts, one a milestone of literary modern - ism and the other a milestone of technological modernization. The term public works I use as a kind of synthetic summation of my argument: 1 © 2010 University of Notre Dame Press Rubenstein-01_Layout 1 6/30/10 5:33 PM Page 2 2 that works of art and public works—here limited to water, gas, and electricity—are imaginatively linked in Irish literature of the period for reasons having to do with the birth of the postcolonial Irish state. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 of Public Works make the case for the connection between literary acts and public utilities in the cultural milieu of the Irish Free State. Each of these chapters focuses on a literary text: Joyce’s Ulys - ses in chapter 2, Flann O’Brien’s posthumously published novel The Third Policeman in chapter 3, and Denis Johnston’s play The Moon in the Yellow River in chapter 4. Joyce published Ulysses at the dawn of the Free State era; O’Brien wrote The Third Policeman looking immediately back on it; and Johnston staged The Moon in the Yellow River right in the middle of it, one year after the state’s Shannon Hydroelectric Scheme began pro- ducing electricity for the first time. Taken together as a selection of Irish authors—Joyce the famous high modernist and Catholic exile, Johnston the representative “West Briton,” and O’Brien the state functionary, native Irish speaker, and struggling author—they represent a diachronic slice of Irish cultural production in the new period of state sovereignty immediately following the partially successful Irish revolt against British colonialism. My chapters are organized thematically, however, not chro - nologically. Chapters 2 and 3 form Part I, “Water,” and deal with Joyce and O’Brien: because they both thematized the waterworks and because O’Brien’s novel is in my reading a direct response to Joyce’s Ulysses. Chap- ters 4 and 5 form Part II, “Power,” and deal with literary thematizations of electrification; chapter 4 treats Johnston’s play depicting the construction, and destruction, of a hydroelectric power plant in Dublin. My last chapter departs from Ireland and follows the public utility to Marti nique and to the end of the twentieth century. My central text there, Patrick Chamoi- seau’s 1992 novel Texaco, depicts the struggle of an officially unrecognized shantytown to obtain electrical supply from the municipal authorities of Fort-de-France. By thus moving, via a shared thematic concern for electricity, from early twentieth-century Ireland to the late twentieth-century Caribbean, my book makes two further arguments: first, that Irish modernism ought to be studied in the context of comparative postcolonial literary studies, and second, that the argument of Public Works is a por - table heuristic that yields new insights into a multiplicity of postcolonial literatures. © 2010 University of Notre Dame Press Rubenstein-01_Layout 1 6/30/10 5:33 PM Page 3 3 In the later sections of the present chapter I sketch a brief history of what made public utilities so prominent in the minds and the works of the Irish writers I treat, tracing public works in Ireland back to a critical moment during the Irish Famine in the mid-nineteenth century; I offer a brief reading of a literary text from the Famine era, John Mitchel’s Jail Journal, that focuses on the Famine works and prefigures later literary concerns with the public utility; I survey a small selection of high modernist reactions to the expansion of public utilities in the early twentieth century; and finally I deal with Irish literary modernism’s representa- tions of the public utility, bringing my argument to the historical period of the Irish Free State and to the next chapter on James Joyce. There are several theoretical arguments to set out, however, before I return to the Irish question. In the first parts of this chapter I will be defining the ter- minology that I use throughout Public Works; making a general case for public utilities as a critical problem for modernist and postcolonial literary studies; and mapping some of the literary-critical terrain upon which I situate my work. DEFINITIONS What do I mean by public works? I take a fundamental aspect of my definition from Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, where he identifies what he calls the “publick works” as “the third and last duty of the sover- eign or commonwealth,” coming after “defence and justice.” That duty consists in “erecting and maintaining those publick institutions and those publick works, which, though they may be in the highest degree advan- tageous to a great society, are, however, of such a nature, that the profit could never repay the expence to any individual or small number of indi - viduals, and which it, therefore, cannot be expected that any individual or small number of individuals should erect or maintain.”3 In Smith’s description the public works are loosely defined as a kind of social imperative, a set of necessary institutions for any “great society.” He assumes a domain within the system of capitalism that is at once outside of capitalism (public works are in his conception beyond the profit mo- tive because they cannot, strictly speaking, realize a profit, except perhaps © 2010 University of Notre Dame Press Rubenstein-01_Layout 1 6/30/10 5:33 PM Page 4 4 a profit on so grand a social scale, and in so unquantifiable a way, that it could no longer be called a profit in any capitalist sense) and one of the most basic enabling institutions of capitalism (the facilitation of civil society by way of works that no single or corporate actor in civil society would, under the assumed constraints of self-interested capitalist motiva- tion, undertake).4 Public works are for Smith a part of, yet apart from, the capitalist system: a supplement, to borrow a term from Jacques Derrida.5 Proposing public works as a supplement to civil society, Smith differen- tiates his thinking from the many latter-day distortions—whether neo - liberal or neoconservative—of his understanding of the freedom of the free market. As Amartya Sen argues, while Smith “rejects interventions that exclude the market,” he does not reject “interventions that include the market while aiming to do those important things that the market may leave undone.”6 “Important things that the market may leave undone”: that is the domain, or the part of the domain, of Smith’s public works that most interests me in this book. I will be emphasizing throughout that Smith’s definition of the public works opens up a productive— and, in the literary texts I deal with, much contested—ambiguity for thinking broadly about public works: on the one hand those “things” that are prerequisite for the existence of the “great society,” and on the other those “things” that result from the existence of the “great society.” Within this ambiguity, Ulysses and the Irish national electrical grid both fall under Smith’s definition of public works. That Smith defines the public works as beyond private enterprise does not mean that they should ring synonymously with the state either. By separating public works out from defense and justice, and by rejecting interventions that exclude the market, Smith is already intimating some- thing like the distinction that would emerge between certain kinds of public works and the state. And few kinds of public works better outline this ambiguous space than what I am calling “public utilities”: water, gas, and electricity.

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