Mansouri, Shahriyar (2014) The modern Irish Bildungsroman: a narrative of resistance and deformation. PhD thesis. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/5495/ Copyright and moral rights for this thesis are retained by the author A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Glasgow Theses Service http://theses.gla.ac.uk/ [email protected] The Modern Irish Bildungsroman: A Narrative of Resistance and Deformation Shahriyar Mansouri M.A. English Lit Submitted in Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of Critical Studies College of Arts University of Glasgow August 2014 Abstract: My thesis examines the ways in which the critical structure of modern Irish Bildungsroman deconstructs and re-examines ‘residues of past trauma’ in the form of socio-cultural, psychological, personal and notably political artefacts present in the nation’s unfortunate engagement with the State’s politics of formation. The result is a resistant and radical form which challenges the classical and modern specificity of the genre by introducing a non-conformist, post-Joycean protagonist, whose antithetical perception of history and socio-cultural norms contradicts the conservative efforts of the post-independence Irish State. To examine such a resistant critical structure, this thesis focuses on Roddy Doyle’s A Star Called Henry (1999), Dermot Bolger’s The Woman’s Daughter (1987), William Trevor’s The Story of Lucy Gault (2002), Seamus Deane’s Reading In The Dark (1996), Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy (1992), Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes (1996), Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls (1960) and A Pagan Place (1970), Nuala O’Faolain’s Are You Somebody? (1996), Francis Stuart’s Black List, Section H (1971), Flann O’Brien’s The Hard Life (1961), and John McGahern’s The Dark (1965). The selected novels provide an invaluable insight into the nation’s perception of sensitive concepts such as modernism and modern Irish identity, and how the confluence of these two produced a critical dialectical discourse which chronicles the formation of a non-conformist, ahistorical modern protagonist. To achieve a historical relevance, this thesis starts by examining Doyle’s fictionalization of 1916 Easter Rising and the chaotic 1920s; Bolger’s exploration of a repressive, inward-looking post-independence Irish society in the 1930s and the 1940s; Trevor’s engagement with a socio-political divide that further split the nation; Deane’s autogenous reading of an internal neocolonial ‘Othering’ during the ‘emergency’; McCabe’s illustration of the State’s architecture of oppression, and societal introversion from the early 1940s to the 1960s; Edna O’Brien’s and Nuala O’Faolain’s exemplary illustration of women’s blighted sexual Bildung in the 1940s, 50s and 60s; and finally examining a radical, ‘chronocentric’ depiction of a socio-political divide fictionalized by Stuart and McGahern, which emerged during the early days of the State and continued to dominate the nation well into the 1960s and the early 1970s. By examining psycho-social, sexual and political traumata reflected in the modern Irish Bildungsroman, this thesis provides a dialectical reading of the gap that appeared between the revolutionary ethos of 2 independent Irish identity formation, rooted in the principles of 1916 Rising and the 1920s, and that which appeared in the form of a tolerant republicanism in the 1980s. To study this socio-historical gap, I examine the nation’s criticism of the State’s politics and structure of formation, manifested in narratives of individual and national formation. The modern Irish Bildungsroman, I argue, appropriates the traditional features of the genre, for instance, chronicling the individual’s psychosocial formation and the potential to re-engage with their society, and produces a critical matrix for a dialectical discourse which enables the nation to voice their concerns vis-à-vis a politically dichotomous post-independence Irish society, a repressed history, and at the same time to externalize their perception of modern Irish formation, being founded on an anti-colonial, non-conservative and politically aware consciousness. The result, which I call the ‘Meta-National Narrative of Formation,’ is a historically resistant and socio-politically conscious narrative which finds independence in rejection, imposition, and deformation, namely, by defying the State’s architecture of formation as well as their nativist, retrograde visions of Irish identity. 3 Contents Abstract p. 2 Acknowledgments p. 5 Introduction p. 7 Bildungsroman as the narrative of growth and integration p. 7 Dialectics of Bildung: Pedagogy and Apprenticeship p. 11 De-structured Ireland and the ‘Meta-National’ Dialectics of Formation p. 21 The Modern Irish Novel and the Narrative of Resistance p. 35 Chapter I: The Nationalist Mirage and the Modern Irish Identity p. 40 Meta-Nationalist Formations in Roddy Doyle’s A Star Called Henry p.42 Radical Meta-national Formations and Apologist Anti-Nationalism in Trevor’s The Story of Lucy Gault p.66 Meta-National Irishness in Bolger’s The Woman’s Daughter: Against the State’s Politics of Oblivion and Formation p.74 The Nationalist Isolation and the Phantasm of Modern Ireland in Deane’s Reading in the Dark p.83 Chapter II: Isolationism, Containment, and Defiance: Decolonizing p. 90 Anti-authoritarian Irish Identity and the Nationalist Politics of Containment The Telos of Modern Man: Non serviam p.92 Decolonizing Anarchism in Post-Colonial Ireland p.96 Francie as The Madman: Madness and Bildung p.115 Chapter III: Marginal Formations and the Modern Irish Woman p.135 Against the Oedipal Politics of Formation in Edna O’Brien’s A Pagan Place and The Country Girls and Nuala O’Faolain’s Are You Somebody?: “Women do not Count, Neither Shall they be Counted” p.138 Chapter IV: Individualism, Modernism and Beyond: Towards a Modern Irish Dialectics of Formation in Francis Stuarts’s Black List, Section H p.191 Afterword p.230 Bibliography p.238 4 Acknowledgements I would like to express my sincere thankfulness to Vassiliki Kolocotroni, my first supervisor, for the immeasurable amount of support and guidance, her perspicacious feedback over the years, and for helping me steer my research in the right direction. My second supervisor, Matthew Creasy, has also been generous with his comments and in-depth readings of my drafts, for which I sincerely thank him. I also thank Professors Paddy Lyons and Willy Maley for their invaluable feedback on the earlier drafts of this thesis. I would like to thank my love and muse, my wife, Raheleh Milani Mansouri, whose presence and selflessness made the impossible possible while I was typing away. I am also indebted to my mother, Victoria, for her heartfelt prayers and blessings. I dedicate this thesis to them. 5 The conception of the symbolic novel is polymorphous: now a single character moves through spheres deformed by his own hallucinations, by his temperament, and the only reality lies in these deformations. … Thus, scorning the puerile methods of naturalism … the Symbolic- Impressionist novel will build its work of subject deformation, strong in this axiom: that art can only seek in the objective a simple and extremely succinct starting point. Jean Moréas, “A Literary Manifesto” 206 But our particular friends were the rats, that dwelt by the stream. They were long and black. We brought them such tidbits from our ordinary as rinds of cheese, and morsels of gristle, and we brought them also birds’ eggs, and frogs, and fledgelings. Sensible of these attentions, they would come flocking round us at our approach, with every sign of confidence and affection, and glide up our trouserlegs, and hang upon our breasts. And then we would sit down in the midst of them, and give them to eat, out of our hands, of a nice fat frog, or a baby thrush. Or seizing suddenly a plump young rat, resting in our bosom after its repast, we would feed it to its mother, or its father, or its brother, or its sister, or to some less fortunate relative. It was on these occasions, we agreed, after an exchange of views, that we came nearest to God. Samuel Beckett, Watt 153 6 Introduction Bildungsroman as the narrative of growth and integration The Bildungsroman or under its various headings, namely, the novel of formation, of youth, of initiation, of apprenticeship, of education and recently even the life-novel, has been regarded by scholars such as Franco Moretti at one and the same time as a debatable yet “pivotal point of our history”, narrating the link between national and individual formation (The Way 16). A socio-historically conscious narrative, the Bildungsroman emerged in the late eighteenth-century Germany as an objective portrayal of the harmonious interplay between individual and national formation. It was this perception of the Bildungsroman that provided a metonymic insight into the European ethos of Bildung,1 resulting in a narrative that as Georg Lukács notes identified individual formation as a historically conditioned, “uninterrupted process of changes” (The Historical Novel 23), chronicling the development of the “man along with the world” (Bakhtin, Speech Genres 23);2 and as Moretti claims, it becomes a means that reflects the individual’s struggles to keep not just the history but also society “at a safe distance” while striving towards psychosocial perfection (The Way vii).3 Such various “headings,” according to Jerome Buckley, are debatable for they are sporadically yet spuriously used when critics and readers refer to novels that are neither about self-cultivation nor self-determination, resulting in a failed conceptualization of the term (Season of Youth vii).