Colin Graham-Deconstructing Ireland

Deconstructing Ireland TENDENCIES: IDENTITIES, TEXTS, CULTURES Series Editor: Peter Brooker Other titles in the series are: Narratives for a New Belonging: Diasporic Cultural Fictions Roger Bromley Cruising Culture: Promiscuity, Desire and American Gay Literature Ben Gove Race and Urban Space in Contemporary American Culture Liam Kennedy Memory, Narrative, Identity: Remembering the Self Nicola King Fundamentalism in America: Millennialism, Identity and Militant Religion Philip Melling Deconstructing Ireland Identity, Theory, Culture Colin Graham Edinburgh University Press © Colin Graham, 2001 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh Typeset in Melior by Pioneer Associates, Perthshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin A CIP Record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 7486 0975 X (hardback) ISBN 0 7486 0976 8 (paperback) The right of Colin Graham to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Disclaimer: Some images in the original version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. Contents Series Editor’s Introduction vii Preface and Acknowledgements ix List of Illustrations xv 1. ‘Ireland, east of Atlantis’ 1 2. ‘Pillars of Cloud and of Fire’: Irish Criticism in the Twentieth Century 32 3. ‘A warmer memory’: Speaking of Ireland 61 4. Liminal Spaces: Postcolonialism and Post-nationalism 81 5. ‘Staged Quaintness’: Subalternity, Gender and Popular Identity 102 6. ‘. maybe that’s just Blarney’: Authenticity in Irish Culture 132 7. Punch Drunk: Irish Ephemera 153 Bibliography 176 Index 187 This page intentionally left blank Series Editor’s Introduction Contemporary history continues to witness a series of momentous changes, altering what was only recently familiar ideological, political and economic terrain. These changes have prompted a new awareness of subjective, sexual, ethnic, racial, religious and cultural identities and of the ways these are constructed in metropolitan centres, regions and nations at a time when these spheres are themselves undergoing a period of critical transition. Recent theory has simultaneously encouraged a scepticism towards the supposed authenticity of personal or common histories, making identity the site of textualised narrative constructions and reconstructions rather than of transparent record. In addition, new developments in communication and information technology appear to be altering our fundamental perceptions of knowledge, of time and space, of relations between the real and the virtual, and of the local and the global. The varied discourses of literature and media culture have sought to explore these changes, presenting life as it is negotiated on the borderlines of new, hybridised, performative, migrant and margin- alised identities, with all the mixed potential and tensions these involve. What emerge are new, sometimes contradictory perceptions of subjectivity or of relations between individuals, social groups, ideologies and nations, as the inner and public life are rewritten in a cultural environment caught up in religious and political conflict and the networks of global consumption, control and communication. The series Tendencies: Identities, Texts, Cultures follows these debates and shows how the formations of identity are being articu- lated in contemporary literary and cultural texts, often as significantly in their hybridised language and modes as in their manifest content. Volumes in the series concentrate upon tendencies in contemporary writing and cultural forms, principally in the work of writers, viii SERIES EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION artists and cultural producers over the last two decades. Throughout, its consistent interest lies in the making and unmaking of individual, social and national identities. Each volume draws on relevant theory and critical debate in its discussion inter alia of questions of gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, class, creed and nation, in the structuring of contemporary subjectivities. The kinds of texts selected for study vary from volume to volume, but most often comprise written or visual texts available in English or widely distributed in English translation. Since identities are most often confirmed or redefined within the structures of story and narrative, the series is especially interested in the use of narrative forms, including fiction, autobiography, travel and historical writing, journalism, film and television. Authors are encouraged to pursue intertextual relations between these forms, to examine the relations between cultural texts and relevant theoretical or political discourse, and to consider cross- generic and intermedia forms where these too bear upon the main concerns of the series. Peter Brooker University College, Northampton Preface and Acknowledgements Bart Simpson gets drunk for the first time on St Patrick’s Day. Surrounded by the glorious trappings of Irish America and in the middle of a parade which memorably includes a James Joyce lookalike on the ‘Drunken Irish Novelists of Springfield’ float, Bart’s plastic horn is accidentally the conduit for a spray of free stout. The parade turns from raucous carnival to silent outrage; ‘Stop the cele- brations, that small boy’s drunk,’ says an onlooker. During the writing of this book I’ve worried at times that either my reader or I will have an experience parallel to Bart’s. Caught up in the cacophony of Irish culture, it’s easy to lose a sense of perspective. This book attempts to examine how that note of celebration gets attached to ‘Ireland’ and then perpetuates itself. It addresses the tele- ology which becomes superimposed on the structures of Irish culture through the concept of the nation, through the processes of moderni- sation and through the progressive ideal inherent in colonisation. Whether manifested in a desire to be synchronically and completely a nation, or in a need to ‘authenticate’ the past, or in a continual turn to the pledge of future time, the signs of Ireland find themselves imbricated again and again in what Declan Kiberd calls ‘the foreglow of a golden future’. Deconstructing Ireland suggests that ‘Ireland’ is a future which is always posited and never attained. The book does not seek to find a final paradigmatic or historical cause for the state of ‘play’ in which Ireland exists. Rather it tracks the processes by which Ireland becomes ‘Ireland’, a ‘cited’, quoted version of itself which is both excessive and phantasmal. Despite its title, Deconstructing Ireland is not a strict application of Jacques Derrida’s philosophy to Irish studies. Derrida and his ideas appear at various times in the text, and their influence will be apparent to readers who are familiar with deconstructive thought. x PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Where Deconstructing Ireland follows Derrida at all, it is in the interest it has in examining the logic by which ‘Ireland’ and the ‘Ireland’ of Irish studies constitute themselves, looking for underlying forms of thought and conception, and reading through their faultlines. The conclusion which the book edges towards is that ‘Ireland’ stages its own deconstruction and that at every turn the idea unravels and reforms itself, always in anticipation of the next act of definition and criticism which, like this one, will be inadequately applied to it. The spirit of this book is one which analyses, celebrates and enjoys the fact that ‘Ireland’ is a deconstructing Ireland. This book is organised around topics which describe points at which Irish studies currently places its own limits. The book begins with a chapter introducing the notion of a free-floating ‘Ireland’ intent on escaping the archival and defining intentions of its pursuers; from John Mitchel’s vision of an Ireland which can be met in the exile’s imagination to Ignatius Donnelly’s Atlantean Ireland and Seán Hillen’s ‘Irelantis’, this chapter attempts to argue that ‘Ireland’ is underwritten by a utopian trope which propels its completion always into the future. The result of this is, on the one hand, an emptiness of signification, as if Ireland has been drained of meaning until that future comes, and on the other hand, a repletion of meaning which allows a perpetual movement towards that future as a time when the plethora of signifiers will have settled back onto their proper objects of signification. The suggestion that this promise of future harmony and wholeness is a persistent state of affairs is examined as a formative aspect of the history of Irish literary criticism in the twentieth century in Chapter 2. Discussing a series of moments in critical thinking in Ireland over the past century, this chapter suggests that the undelivered future of the nation induces a continual sense of ‘crisis’ in Irish criticism. Chapter 3 finds a particular cause of that crisis in the unresolved relationship between the Irish critical voice and ‘the people’ of which, and for whom, it implicitly wishes to speak. The chapter examines this dilemma of articulation using Roland Barthes’ writing on Michelet as a starting point for a discussion of Irish criticism of James Joyce, and more particularly Joyce’s own analysis of the same crisis of the intellectual voice in the ‘Ithaca’ episode of Ulysses. Chapters 4 and 5 attempt the same kind of archaeology of the critical for postcolonial critiques of Ireland. Chapter 4 examines how postcolonial theory has begun to interact with Irish criticism, focusing on the moments at which

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