Irish Classicsby Declan Kiberd

Irish Classics by Declan KiberdReview by: Philip O'LearyIrish University Review, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Autumn - Winter, 2001), pp. 482-487Published by: Edinburgh University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25504889 .

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Philip O'Leary

Review Article: Kiberd's Classics1

Behind the old-fashioned title of Declan Kiberd's latest magnum opus lies a radical, challenging, and obvious fact, one generally ignored

?

blithely, aggressively, or guiltily ?

by most scholars of Irish literature. Like it or not, for anything approaching a coherent understanding of even the kind of 'classics7 with which a serious undergraduate must be

familiar, critics of Irish literature must have a wide-ranging command of two linguistic traditions stretching back centuries. Indeed, as will be

argued below, one could and perhaps should push still further into the

past than Kiberd does, but for now two languages and four centuries are

enough to be getting on with. With his own mastery of writing in both Irish and English, Kiberd is

superbly qualified to remedy the longstanding and often wilful

shortsightedness that has allowed scholars of the nation's two languages to avoid, for quite different reasons, any meaningful engagement with each other. For Kiberd, the Gaelic tradition is not a distant precursor of or mere source of decorative exotica for the dominant English-language culture of contemporary Ireland; nor does the English-language tradition

represent a treacherous and final rejection of a putative Gaelic national essence. Rather, in the words of the Belfast Agreement with a discussion of which he concludes the book, Kiberd calls for a 'parity of esteem',

seeing the two languages giving voice to a symbiotic cultural hybridity that represents, and has done for centuries, the true and complex nature

of the lived Irish experience. Kiberd's ability to bridge this linguistic divide and achieve synthesis is all the more crucial given the post-colonial perspective on Irish literature that inspires some of his most provocative

readings of individual texts and broader developments in the two

languages. The overwhelming majority of post-colonial theorists

analyzing Irish culture make a perfunctory and often not well-informed nod in the direction of Gaelic Ireland as the suppressed, possibly lost and irretrievable realm of the colonized. The actual colonized can then be ignored in the headlong rush to get to those comfortable and

impeccably colonial sources their entire theoretical project is supposedly designed to challenge and problematize. Instead, Kiberd explores the

interaction of the native and the colonial cultures in all its dynamic

contemporary complexity. By no means, however, does Kiberd posit any simplistic or essentialist

1. Declan Kiberd, Irish Classics (London: Granta, 2000), ?25 (UK).

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REVIEW ARTICLE: KIBERD'S CLASSICS

controlling narrative of Irish literary and cultural history. Rather, he

proposes that Ireland represents 'a case of modernity avant la lettre'

(p. 249) and argues that the continuously fruitful triangular clash of

Gaelic, English, and Anglo-Irish cultural values and worldviews has

made it impossible for a tradition rooted in any single discourse to

achieve unequivocal and final 'official' status. As a result, he writes, 'the

only persistent tradition in Irish culture was the largely successful attempt to subvert all claims to make any tradition official' (p. 631). Moreover,

the use of that adverb 'largely' underscores Kiberd's awareness that this

process of merging hybridity has not been without its problems and

reversals in various periods. Obviously, this reading entirely subverts

the cliched notion of Ireland as a society obsessed with its past. Rather, as Kiberd insists throughout, even cultural conservatives like (3 Bruadair,

Swift, Burke and Yeats were 'dynamic traditionalists', 'Tory anarchists',

creatively reshaping the past even as they are 'hurtled into modernity'

(p. 475). Here still more than in Inventing Ireland, Kiberd argues that

Ireland has long evinced 'a manic race for modernity' (p. 249) which

has meant that Irish writers in both languages have for centuries been

compelled by their circumstances to experience, assess, and come to terms

with cultural crises that call into question the very ideas of tradition,

stability, and identity, in the process giving rise to what we call

modernism.

In practical terms, Kiberd's bilingual approach makes possible inno

vative, often startling readings of individual texts in unexpected contexts,

as writers of Irish and English are shown to be soulmates in ways never

clear within the conventional confines construed by the academy. More

conventionally, Kiberd traces links between various Irish writers within

their own linguistic traditions. Thus Goldsmith's inner conflict between

'private genius and public humiliation seems to prefigure not just the

Marlow of She Stoops to Conquer but also the Gar of Brian Friel's

Philadelphia, Here I Come' (p. 107). Edmund Burke's aesthetic is seen as 'a

dominant code of the Irish Revival' (p. 219). Wolfe Tone becomes 'in a

sense the first Professor of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama' (p. 229) ?

and thus Kiberd's true predecessor in his own chair ? as well as a pioneer in the creation of the Irish 'jail journal' later practiced by writers as diverse

as John Mitchell, Oscar Wilde and Brendan Behan in English, and Mairtin

(3 Cadhain in Irish. Maria Edgeworth "anticipated the epiphanic methods

of James Joyce' (p. 244). Bram Stoker may have suggested to Yeats and

Lady Gregory their vision of Cathleen Ni Houlihan as 'a very Irish sort

of vampire' (p. 398). The fact that Joyce's Ulysses is able to masquerade as an experimental novel, 'while really being a collection of short stories',

begets similar sleights of pen by Beckett, Flann O'Brien, and Mairtin

0 Cadhain (p. 471). The 'ferocious parody of Myles na gCopaleen in An

Beal Bocht is rooted in the author's awed "obsession" with Tomas

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IRISH UNIVERSITY REVIEW

6 Criomhthain's An t-Oilednach' (p. 516). Moreover, Kiberd clearly enjoys himself, teasing out ideas and prodding the reader to share the fun with

deceptively quirky dicta like '[i]f Leopold Bloom had ever become a poet, his name might have been Louis McNeice' (p. 554).

More fruitful are the strikingly original insights Kiberd offers into

what he sees as ongoing dialogues between Irish writers of Irish and

English. Thus we find Sheridan and Merriman both trying to come to

terms with 'the problem of women's autonomy in a system that reduces

each to a Smithfield bargain or else a leftover like Mrs. Malaprop'

(p. 150). The 'polymorphous perversity' of Douglas Hyde's translations

is among the inspirations for Yeats's Crazy Jane poems, Molly Bloom's

soliloquy, and the speeches of Winnie in Beckett's Happy Days (p. 323). Yeats shares 'the plight of the fill [professional poets] after the collapse of the bardic order compelled them to seek a popular audience' (p. 440). Tomas 0 Criomhthain helps provide 'a wholly new set of impulses' which may lead, inter alia, to 'the austere lyricism of Amongst Women'

p. 521). And, in two extended and richly perceptive explorations of

influences across linguistic and cultural frontiers, Beckett is seen as the

spiritual sidekick of Mairtin 6 Cadhain, while Sean 6 Riordain, who never published a poem in English in his lifetime, is discussed in positive terms and with a very fresh twist on an old perforative in Gaelic circles, as Anglo-Irish to the core.

It must again be emphasized that Kiberd does not pull these insights out of a carefully crafted ideological hat. Rather, in discussing the 'classics'

in both languages, he focuses on what could be seen as common energies

running through the work of writers in both languages responding to

their shared condition of Irishness. At times such energies move along

parallel courses, at other times they augment or damp each other, but

they are never entirely absent. For this reason it is possible, legitimate,

perhaps imperative to attempt to trace them as they move, shift, and

change throughout the entire course of Irish writing in both Irish and

English. In the process, a bridge is thrown over the infamous linguistic gap of Ireland's supposedly 'gapped' literary history Indeed this

deconstruction of the gap may well be the most audacious contribution of this audacious book.

It is, however, a contribution that creates its own problems, making it

impossible for a scholar as honest as Kiberd to be fully consistent in his

view of the role of the Irish language in contemporary Irish literary life.

At times he stresses the devastating psychic implications of the

widespread voluntary abandonment of Irish by the majority of Irish

people in the nineteenth century, but elsewhere he seems to accept a bit

too easily the putative compensation so often glibly proffered for that

loss. It is, for example, impossible to imagine Mairtin (3 Cadhain viewing with any distance or equanimity the following conclusion to a chapter

484




on his masterpiece Cre na Cille: 'The Irish language might finally expire, but even that would not be the end. The Hag of Beare, Mad Sweeny,

lamenting Deirdre, Iiibhlin Dubh, Ciichulain, the young lovers of Con

nacht will all continue to speak and sing ? and so will the voice of Stoc

na Cille' (p. 589). Well, maybe. Then again, part of the problem here may be a function of the available evidence. Writing in Irish has not produced

enough 'classics' in the century since the revival to provide a

counterbalance to the works in English discussed here. It has, though,

particularly over the past two decades, produced some first-rate works

which fall outside the scope of this book but which might in time achieve

that status. The vitality of that work ? the poetry of Ni Dhomhnaill and

Jenkinson, the prose of Titley, Mac Annaidh, and (3 Ciobhain?provides a salutary reminder that the Hag of Beare and her comrades may still be

finding voice in Irish in the coming times. One is also tempted to wonder

if, without bending the rules too much, Kiberd could not have included some of the work of Padraic 0 Conaire or the poetry of Mairtin ?) Direain to provide a fuller sense of the contribution of writers in Irish to the

nation's literary discourse in the twentieth century. On the other hand, no one who thinks and cares about the present state of Irish as a living and generative language can avoid such fluctuating attitudes, and

Kiberd's ambivalence here is a further sign of his willingness to see things as they are in all their contingent and contradictory complexity.

One of the many pleasures of a book like this is that it tempts the

reader to offer additional or alternative 'classics' for the honour roll. Few

will be able to resist that temptation; this writer certainly could not. And so ? in addition to 6 Conaire and 6 Direain noted above ? I wonder

whether a book like Daniel Corkery's The Hidden Ireland should not have

found a place here, especially since Kiberd treats Corkery's ground

breaking if often wrong-headed critical work with welcome respect. The

Hidden Ireland was a book that influenced Irish writers in both languages and that continues to have resonance. Also, were none of the works of

Frank O'Connor or Sean O Faolain worthy of 'classic' status? Judging from this book and from Inventing Ireland, it would seem that Kiberd sees little of lasting value in most of the works of the post-independence realists. He may well be right there, but the subject seems worth at least a comment. (And why choose The Informer as O'Flaherty's 'classic', rather

than, say, the more accomplished Skerrett or Famine?) More important, Beckett is a major presence throughout Irish Classics, but he never gets a

chapter to himself. Is Kiberd suggesting that Beckett never wrote a single work of classic stature, or does he think that in some sense Beckett's

entire oeuvre functions almost as an integrated unitary whole? These are

just personal reactions, tossed out more for fun than anything else, and

every reader will be inspired to conduct his/her own debate with

Kiberd's list.

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IRISH UNIVERSITY REVIEW

On a more significant level, however, one could argue that some

inclusions would further enrich this already magnificent study. Kiberd's

focus on the two major linguistic strands in the literature of the modern

Ireland that emerged after the Flight of the Earls (1607) is both well

thought out and well-founded in its own terms. It does, however, mean

that short shrift is given to the so-called bardic poets, whose work recent

scholars like Marc Caball have shown to be of greater interest and

relevance to contemporary theoretical concerns than was previously

thought to be the case. While Kiberd himself quite obviously finds their

work stale and unsympathetic, he also on occasion gives hints that some

of them at least had something to say about topics at the heart of his

analysis.

More important, some consideration of early Irish literature would

have given even greater scope and authority to Kiberd's discussion. Many of the issues of cultural conflict, interpenetration and assimilation, of

the kind of intellectual and artistic hybridity that has always been a

central theme of Kiberd's work, are present in the earlier texts in a

fascinatingly different way. Kiberd himself teases with intriguing references to 'the persistent popularity of the pagan-Christian debate in

the poems and songs of the people' and to texts like Tain Bo Cuailnge and Aisling Mheic Coinglinne, but he could do much more. These early

anonymous authors wrestled with identical themes rooted in ethnic,

linguistic and cultural clashes between the Irish and first the Vikings and then the Normans. Like their successors discussed in Irish Classics,

they also reshaped traditional and imported genres to their own needs

and regularly resorted to the kind of anticlimactic conclusion that Kiberd

rightly sees as a recurrent distinguishing feature of Irish narrative and

drama. Early tales like Scela Mucce Meic Datho, Togail Bruidne Da Derga and indeed Tain Bo Cuailnge itself, show that the kind of 'wry fade out'

found in Joyce, Synge, O'Casey, Beckett, Behan, et al. may well be 'a sign of a religious consciousness which refuses to take anything, even

suffering and unhappiness, with more seriousness than God would

assign to it' (p. 490) but if so, it is a 'religious consciousness' with very

deep roots in the Irish past. One could argue that these early writers

encountered again and again, and in very relevant ways, that shock of

the modern that Kiberd finds at the heart of Irish literary expression, and that they were, far from avant la lettre, the kind of literary

anthropologists that he sees the circumstances of Irish literary history

evoking again and again across the centuries. Moreover, discussion of

these earlier texts would help provide a corrective to the view that an

Irish culture, however conceived, can to some extent only exist in creative

tension with some form of English culture, however constructed.

Irish Classics is obviously a big book, but its arguments are complex, interwoven, and cumulative, and so require space for development and

486




exploration. There are repetitions ? or rather reformulations ? in the

book, but these usually help the reader to follow key concepts as they evolve through time. One could, however, wish that the author had

provided fuller notes and textual references. A book like this will send

readers not only back to the primary texts, but also in search of key

secondary works. It is, therefore, unfortunate that Kiberd does not

mention more of the latter, like Breandan 6 Buachalla's Aisling Ghear

(on seventeenth and eighteenth-century writers), Breandan 6 Conaire's

Myles na Gaeilge (on Flann O'Brien), Gearoid Denvir's Cadhan Aonraic

(on ?) Cadhain), Louis de Paor's Faoin mBlaoisc Bheag Sin (on 6 Cadhain), or liibhlin Nic Ghearailt's An Striapach Allurach (on 6 Riordain), to name

just a few from the Gaelic side. For the same reason, the book would

benefit from a bibliography or suggested reading list of some kind. None of the reservations mentioned above in any way detract from

Kiberd's enormous accomplishment in Irish Classics. Reading the book

evoked the same kind of excitement I felt when reading the criticism of someone like Harry Levin as an undergraduate, the excitement of

encountering a brilliant mind profoundly committed to the exploration of ideas and engaged in that exploration with verve, wit, and zest. It

should inspire a whole new generation to join in that adventure, and

will re-energize those of us who have been at it for a while or more. As a

seminal document for its own time and beyond, Irish Classics is itself an

Irish classic.

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Documents

Irish Classicsby Declan Kiberd