Critical Survey

In this issue of Critical Survey we present a selection of essays which demonstrate a range of critical approaches to a variety of material within Anglo-Irish writing. The recalcitrant traditionalism that previously marked this arena has long gone, replaced now by a broadly analytical approach. Likewise, the traditionally established and highly selective, mostly male canon of Anglo-Irish writing has been replaced by a more inclusive arena and these articles represent the diversity of scholarship and research across this expanded area. One of the most significant changes within Anglo-Irish criticism in the last decade has been in the volume of attention given to women writers. Several essays here focus on women’s writing, recognising Irish women writers’ legitimate inclusion across a range of genres. Kathy Cremin examines the disparity between Irish women’s increased opportunities in terms of determining their own lives and the elisions and ambivalences regarding these at the heart of Patricia Scanlan’s best-selling fiction. Helen Kidd explores the particular poetic strategies of three of Ireland’s leading women poets, Naula Ní Dhomhnaill, Eileán Ní Chuilleanain and Eavan Boland. Mary King couples the plays of J. M. Synge and one of Ireland’s leading contemporary playwrights, Marina Carr, in a timely exploration of the treatment of ‘the other’ in Irish drama.

For some time a consensus has existed in critical circles concerning developments in poetry and publishing in Ireland in the 1960s. This decade has been seen as a period of expansion in the volume of new writing, in the range of subject matter and in the formal properties of poetic writing, activities which represented an unprecedented change in poetic expression. This has been frequently claimed but seldom analysed. While history testifies to the beginning of a modernising process in Ireland in the 1960s in terms of industry, economics and social policy changes, contrary to the glib pronouncements that to date neatly package the poetic activities of this period, it was, in fact, a complex period of cultural adjustment involving many players whose thinking and whose written pronouncements often harboured antithetical perspectives. This is most obvious in the editorial policies and pronouncements within Irish poetry journals, which, contrary to the above impression, harboured traditionalist and often nationalist and or essentialist affinities.

‘No ideas but in things.’ One impact of this Emersonian clarion-call by William Carlos Williams early in the twentieth century was the demand for a more local version of modernism in poetry, one which resisted the presumed universalising vagaries of more classicallyinformed strivers after the ‘new’ like Eliot and Pound. In the more intimately identifiable context of such ‘ideas’, ‘so much’was notoriously taken to ‘depend’ upon practical and found objects in the everyday world, without an irritable reaching after cultural, historical or mythic correlatives which would serve to describe, in Eliot’s phrase, ‘the mind of Europe’.

In Irish writing the house is a familiar metaphor for nation, psyche, and community. Haunted with unquiet ghosts, it is frequently depicted as symptom of colonial repression and control, invoking the Famine, dispossession, dislocation, partition; the list, as with all colonial abuses, goes on and on. Freud usefully makes the connection between the uncanny (unheimlich) and the homely (heimlich)2 indicating the secondary meaning of heimlich as covered, concealed. Once the silences and (long) sufferings of colonisation are out in the open, gender issues, and the institution of home supported by these, which also rests on naturalised cover-ups – these continue to unsettle the discourses of home, nation and history.

‘Thinking about how we might work with, and speak to, others, or how we may inhabit the world with others, involves imagining a different form of political community, one that moves beyond the opposition between friends and strangers, or between sameness and difference’.

This is the opening of Patricia Scanlan’s first best-seller, City Girl, and it also marks the beginning of a compelling chapter in Irish publishing. In 1990, City Girl made the publishers, Poolbeg, a household name in Ireland, finally establishing them in the commercial market they had been chasing since Meave Binchy defected to English publishers with her break through novel Light a Penny Candle (1982). Within twelve months of City Girl’s first run, Scanlan and her editor were media celebrities and other publishers were finding suitable candidates for the packaging process – resulting in best-sellers Deirdre Purcell and Liz Ryan. By best-selling fiction I am referring to high-selling, widely read, popular fiction. The genre is identifiable by packaging, location and theme: fat books about love and relationships, four hundred pages at the least; two or three word titles often eclipsed in size and prominence by the author’s name. These books are widely available outside conventional bookshops, on sale in airports, train stations, supermarkets, large newsagents and corner shops. This thriving best-seller genre has gone largely unremarked in Irish cultural criticism. Yet there has been a remarkable coincidence between its appearance and an upsurge of feminist writing questioning the literary, historical and political heritage of ‘mother Ireland’ for Irish women.

Few aspects of Northern Irish political culture are as denuded as those that attempt to locate and understand the terrorist act. From the exasperation of Margaret Thatcher’s outburst at the time of the Hunger Strikes that ‘it is not political, it is a crime’, to the exhausted freedom fighter/terrorist binary opposition recently pressed back into service by Peter Mandelson, terrorism has consistently been perceived as an act that defies the realm of civic discourse. Indeed, it has been the traditional role of language in the immediate aftermath of a terrorist atrocity to present itself as unable to capture the overwhelming materiality of the event itself. What, so the argument runs, can words offer in the face of such violence? Understood as such, every terrorist outrage becomes unspeakable.

The publication of Declan Kiberd’s Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (1995) was widely praised and embraced enthusiastically by critics, teachers and students and its impact has already been recognised as influencing recent criticism where scholars have been quick to apply Kiberd’s approach to often fruitful ends. This essay is one of many indebted to his pioneering work, employing Kiberd’s thesis on the centrality of issues of identity in Irish writing. Kiberd claims that the enterprise of inventing Ireland’s and Irish identity has historically been varied, depending on the source of the project and the proclivities of the proponents. Inventing or inverting established, colonial or romanticised ideas of Ireland and the Irish are central concerns of many Irish writers whose work has not hitherto been considered in relation to this engagement nor recognised to contain this agenda. Acknowledging that Irish writing is not confined to this preoccupation alone, Kiberd claims that much of Ireland’s classic modern literature can be read as being engaged in this endeavour, an approach which leads to innovative and sometimes revelatory interpretations. In this essay I will apply Kiberd’s contemporary analysis to a long established classic of Irish writing, Flann O’Brien’s At Swim Two Birds, in a reading which outlines O’Brien’s insightful engagement with issues of identity and which also accounts for the book’s hitherto puzzling aspects.

Painting the Town HUGH UNDERHILL

‘Twelfth Night’ Rehearsal of a String Quartet: St. Gregory’s, once a Church JEREMY ROWE

The Fox and The Crow MICHAEL MURPHY

The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making it up in Ireland by R. F. Foster (London: Allen Lane, 2001) ISBN 0713994975 £20

Travelling West by Rita Kelly (Arlen House, 2000) ISBN 1903631025 £7.99

The Water Horse: Poems in Irish by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, with translations by Medbh McGuckian and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin (Gallery Books, 1999) ISBN 1852352329 £8.95

Ad Infinitum: Gedichte und Epigramme; Poems and Epigrams; Dántaagus Burdúin by Michael Augustin; translated by Hans- Christian Oeser,Gabriel Rosenstock a thiontaigh go Gaeilge (Dublin: Coiscéim, 2001) £5

Life as It Comes by Anthony Edkins (Bradford: Redbeck Press, 2002) ISBN 0946980969 £6.95

The Soldier on the Pier by Brian Waltham (Calstock: Peterloo Poets, 2002) ISBN 1871471990 £7.95

Craeft: Poems from the Anglo-Saxon by Graham Holderness (Nottingham: Shoestring Press, 2002) ISBN 1899549676 £7.50

The Great Friend and Other Translated Poems by Peter Robinson (Tonbridge: Worple Press, 2002) ISBN 095394774 £8

The Complete Poems of William Empson edited by John Haffenden (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000) ISBN 0713992875 £30.00

Norman Cameron: His Life, Work and Letters by Warren Hope (London: Greenwich Exchange, 2000) ISBN 187155105 6 £20.00

Just as Blue by Andy Croft (Hexham: Flambard Poetry, 2001) ISBN 1873226446 £7.00

Notes on contributors