Declan Kiberd

Declan Kiberd is one of the foremost contemporary Irish literary scholars. I have just read The Irish Writer and the World, a collection of essays published in 2005. This is a follow-up to the much larger anthology Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation, which was published in 1996 to wide acclaim. At 699 pages (35 essays), Inventing Ireland is a bit too big of a bite for me right now, although I have a copy and I will get back to Kiberd, maybe on a vacation sometime (my idea of beach reading!). At 320 pages (19 essays) The Irish Writer was itself a bit of an experiment for me; I'm a philosopher by trade and I read novels and keep this blog for pleasure. Once I got into it, though, I found that it was a pleasure to read - I wish I had time to read Inventing Ireland right now, I just don't.

Kiberd is a scholar of the Irish Literary Revival, also known as the Celtic Revival, of the late 19th-early 20th century. This was the literary and cultural vanguard of the renascent Irish nationalism that culminated in the establishment of the Free State in 1922. It was, among other things, a sustained attempt to rescue the Irish language and Celtic traditions in general from oblivion, in which it was to some extent successful (Kiberd informs us that there are about 400 books published annually in Irish today). Its leading lights were the poet W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) and the folklorist Lady Gregory (1852-1932), who together established the Abbey Theatre that still mounts productions in downtown Dublin. Kiberd is perhaps the foremost expert on J. M. Synge (1871-1909), the playwright of The Playboy of the Western World (1907), which famously sparked riots during its premiere, and other plays that critically examined internalized Irish stereotypes and influenced Sean O'Casey (1880-1964) who produced many political plays including Juno and the Paycock (1924) and The Plough and Stars (1926).

Like his subjects, the protagonists of the Gaelic League, Kiberd is fluent in Irish, and the earlier essays here are interesting for their discussions of Irish-language novels and poems. However Kiberd is a dialectician by inclination and training (at one point he describes himself as a "radical") and he has not done his days' work if he does not deconstruct some set of preconceived notions about Irishness or the other. One theme I found refreshing was his work to break down the barrier between "Anglo-Irish" identity and literature and that of the "Catholic" (I suppose) Irish. This is important as many of the historical leading lights of Irish literature, from Swift to Wilde, have been members of the Anglo-Irish minority. Kiberd argues that the writers of the Irish Literary Revival and their successors developed a poetic style of English prose by writing English with Irish grammatical patterns and, more provocatively, that the Irish-language literature of the Revival and subsequently is deeply inflected by English. Irish cultural studies and literary criticism cannot Quixotically ignore the fact of deep Anglicization, in short. This is a striking example of the way Irish literature helps me understand cultural and social issues here in Puerto Rico where a defensive nationalism also sometimes leads to willful obtuseness about popular culture (lots of little jibarito tchotchkes in the tourist shops, lots of hip-hop fans in the classroom). Kiberd will have none of this.

This allows Kiberd to develop a broader compass of Irish literature, one that embraces Anglo-Irish writers like Wilde and Yeats and freely makes use of this resource in examining "native" Irish writers. Kiberd shows that the question of language is crucial for all Irish writers (and he is unafraid to weave an ongoing discussion of Joyce into his work). Kiberd is of the new generation of Irish artists and thinkers who want Irish letters to look forward, not backward, and he resists all attempts to manufacture Irishness. He is as much a political and social critic as a literary one, bringing to mind the contemporary Irish historian Diarmaid Ferriter whose The Transformation of Ireland (2004) documents the transformation of Ireland into a modern European country in the 20th century.

Ferriter understands Kiberd to be framing the cultural identity issue as "posing the choice between nationality and cosmopolitanism," and it is true that Kiberd points up the apparent irony of the rise of Irish cultural nationalism in the form of the Revival at the same time as a generation of great Irish writers (Yeats, Joyce, Synge) writing in English. However, on Kiberd's view (I think) this is not an irony at all, rather we see two facets of one development, which is precisely Irish worldliness: the acceptance of a living presence of the Irish language and high aspirations for English-language Irish literature, rather than a self-defeating rejection of both. (Kiberd doesn't mention Ferriter, probably because Kiberd is the older man. Colm Toibin, inevitably, has blurbs on the jackets of both.)

Kiberd wants to foster a living Irish culture that is not self-conscious about drawing on both the Irish and the English elements when appropriate. He places Irish literature very persuasively in the larger context of modern-day Ireland, excoriating both the "designer Stalinists" (a recurring phrase) who would globalize Irish architecture and style out of existence, and those who would treat native culture as a kind of diorama to be preserved as an exhibit for the delectation of tourists (another problem common to Ireland and Latin America). He sees clearly that Ireland is at an historically defining crossroads, something he shares with contemporary novelists like Anne Enright and Dermot Bolger (Kiberd is disdainful of Bolger in earlier essays, warms up to him later. I agree Bolger is not a great novelist). Kiberd makes much of Ireland's modern prosperity, which he argues is another transforming element that renders past stereotypes worthless; reading essay 17, "The Celtic Tiger: a cultural history" (2003), I wonder what he has to say about Ireland after the economic downturn and real estate bubble that is causing such hardship today.

Enright's Gathering

This 2007 Booker Prize winner is maybe a little over-hyped, but that's the only bad thing I'll say about it. Anne Enright's style is both flowing naturalism and clipped impatience, psychological insight is achieved through a fearless candor and character development set on the frame of a very simple story. Veronica Hegarty is the eighth of twelve children of a lower-middle class Dublin family, born across the upwardly-mobile 50s and 60s from Ada and Charlie, the parents who grew up in another world.

It is a story about the anger of a modern Irish woman who sees a family of twelve children as, if not a crime, a towering negligence. Her mother's lack of self-determination, and therefore of responsibility towards her children, is what the daughter cannot forgive, and the central event of the story, now long past, adds a concrete dimension to Ada's guilt even as it reveals her as a victim of classic injustice. Now Veronica is in her late 30s, the wife of a professional man and a mother of two daughters of her own. The death of her brother Liam, next older than her in birth order and her childhood companion, precipitates her own confrontation with her unhappiness and disappointment as she retrieves his body from England and works through the reunion of her mother and the nine remaining siblings for Liam's wake and funeral.

Veronica is thoroughly modern, at least she certainly seems to be, but one is soon struck by how she epitomizes basic themes of twentieth-century Irish life. She is conflicted about and fixated on sex and particularly the sexual nature of the male, her consciousness of the male body around her brings to mind Molly Bloom's awful hatrack. There are even observations of rich and carefree Americans that could have been made thirty years before (I thought of The Quiet Man). A long-ago relationship with an American during her college years still haunts her as she wonders if he was her true love, but as with all such totems of memory this one has more to do with her present dissatisfaction than with anything else. The legacy of Irish history and the legacy of Catholicism cannot be left behind for her generation; she will leave her marriage but she will not leave Dublin or her family, although she is constantly physically acting out escape (her husband is by now used to her simply driving off after a fight).

This book is part of a discernible trend in recent Irish writing, an insistence that the Irish gaze must be turned now forward, a resistance to the traditional Irish trope of a longing backwards for a lost world and a new determination for reinvention. Another example published this year is Dermot Bolger's The Journey Home, also see Diarmaid Ferriter's The Transformation of Ireland (2004), a thorough history of the emergence of Ireland as a modern nation that also documents a forward evolution.