Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature

"Seamus Deane, though viewing things from a different angle from McCann, was also deeply hostile to O’Brien. Again, he emerged out of a younger generation. He is also, crucially, from the north rather than the south, a product of Queen’s University Belfast who did graduate work in Cambridge, and then spent time in the United States. His great interest was the English literary tradition, together with its related intellectual traditions, though he was also naturally absorbed by specifically Irish culture and the conditions of its historical formation. Deane returned to Ireland to take up an academic post in Dublin, where for a number of decades he gained prominence as an effortlessly eloquent intellectual. He was very much taken up with the mood of outrage shared by Derry Catholics about developments in the late 60s and early 70s. That outrage was easily converted into periodic bouts of antagonism towards Conor Cruise O’Brien. Celtic Revivals is a luminous work of literary analysis and literary history. What is interesting is the extent to which the forces that shaped the historical profession in Ireland are also evident in this book — that is to say a preoccupation with the relationship between culture, moral outrage and history. “All subsequent Irish writers are, to some extent, living in the shadows of Yeats and Joyce.” I see the book as advancing the argument that a certain Irish literary predicament was shaped by a bruising historical past. The predicament in question can be encapsulated as follows: the burden of history is inescapable for the Irish writer, largely because their present is conditioned by a succession of dramatic, often violent and sometimes traumatic dislocations. Deane sees the Irish writer as unable to withdraw from the obduracy of history. Incarceration by the past ignited tremendous moral passion—rather than structured political insight or a program of action—and, as a result, the Irish writer is invariably driven to develop literary solutions to inescapably practical problems. Thus Stephen Dedalus—to take us back to where we began—is forced to navigate a course through the multiple legacies of Irish history. Yet in order to ‘fly’ by the nets of Catholicism and nationalism he embarks, in exile, upon the project of forging in the ‘smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.’ That is to say, opting to realise in imagination what was not available socially and politically. Joyce offered an essentially aesthetic response to seemingly intractable political difficulties. Yes, he does; Heaney was a close school-friend and one-time collaborator of Deane, though his role in Celtic Revivals is rather tangential to the main argument. The book as a whole is structured around the rise of that more or less absurd abstraction, ‘Irishness.’ The story began, as far as Deane is concerned, with Edmund Burke who provided a singularly compelling diagnosis of the Irish political predicament. Elements of that diagnosis were duly adopted by Victorian men of letters, most creatively perhaps by Mathew Arnold. Arnold added his own mystical brew of dubious ethnic theory. In order to explain why it was that misshapen Irish political arrangements were not amenable to British liberal political solutions, Arnold came up with the idea of the Irish or ‘Celtic’ sensibility or ‘race’ being somehow culturally incompatible with ‘English’ Normanism and Puritanism. It was a benignly intended yet flabby thesis, prone to radical misconceptions. Arnold was thus among the first to develop an elaborate cultural stereotypification of ‘Irishness’, indirectly giving rise to much modern debate about national ‘identity.’ Deane is right that this was basically a misbegotten enterprise. Regrettably it still dominates much historical discussion. Traditions are usually belated constructions. I think Yeats and Joyce strove to escape the mental straitjackets imposed by prevailing attitudes in Ireland. They did so with energy and inventiveness, but also with eccentricity. All subsequent Irish writers are, to some extent, living in the shadows of Yeats and Joyce. They left an incredibly rich terrain for future literary cultivation. It remains to be seen whether their achievement limited the chances of innovation. One thing is certain: Irish history remains the defining horizon of the Irish literary imagination."