Special Issue: Literature, Criticism, Theory || Introduction: Stirring the Pot Withershins

Introduction: Stirring the Pot WithershinsAuthor(s): Christopher MurraySource: Irish University Review, Vol. 27, No. 1, Special Issue: Literature, Criticism, Theory(Spring - Summer, 1997), pp. 1-6Published by: Edinburgh University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25484698 .

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Christopher Murray

Introduction: Stirring the Pot Withershins

For some time I have been coming to the realisation that criticism in the

field of Irish literature in English ?

unwieldy phrase ? is radically

changing. It is not easy either to date or to specify this change. But anyone who has been attending conferences in this field will be able to testify to

the change. For example, there was discernible at the IASAIL conference

held at Leyden in 1992 a preponderant difference in critical style and

methodology from what obtained, say, some fifteen years earlier in

Galway. At that time, in the seventies, there was a general critical

conformity. What we did was literary criticism as minted by the New

Critics, 'new' even fifty years after LA. Richards's Practical Criticism. That

era is now well gone. But is it possible to say what has come in its place? In the USA there has been a considerable debate on the general shift

from criticism to theory in the universities. The editor of a recent

anthology of essays on the topic makes clear the deeply felt hostility to

theory released by this debate and still raging in American conservative

circles. He introduces his defence under the title, "The Academy Writes

Back":

The best answer lies in the essays at hand, but it will be worthwhile to introduce some of the contributors' concerns

by way of practical criticism. I say criticism, not theory, and it will do now to make

slightly firmer a distinction between a pair of terms I have been

using loosely. Criticism, one might say, involves the questioning,

description, evaluation, celebration, derogation of cultural works;

theory intensifies that activity, providing a stylistic and conceptual challenge to extant forms of cultural authority. The borders between criticism and theory are infinitely permeable, but the distinction is not without its practical uses.1

Of course, part of the "challenge" of theory is the "authority" of criticism:

this is one horn of the dilemma on which university departments of

English on this side of the Atlantic have been impaled for some years now.

It is hard to maintain both clarity and patience in the face of develop ments arising from this dilemma. At the first ESSE conference, at the

University of East Anglia at Norwich, Frank Kermode proposed a two

tier solution: theory for those students not primarily interested in

1. Mark Edmundson, ed., Wild Orchids and Trotsky (New York: Penguin, 1993), p. 21.

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IRISH UNIVERSITY REVIEW

literature and "poetry" for those genuinely committed to exclusively literary considerations. As I recall the occasion in 1992, many people

were incensed at what they regarded as Kermode's elitism; the published form of the lecture seems less de haut en has? But in any case partition is

hardly a commendable solution to what are, at bottom, political differences. Then there are the unaccommodated conservatists who in

their daily struggle in the cold war against theorists long for another iron curtain to descend which would forever ensconce them in the

nineteen sixties, the early sixties for preference. I suppose I am parodying a debate I dimly recall in the TLS around 1984, in which Rene Wellek, at

least, fought a rearguard action with dignity: and yet it was even then

transparently a rearguard action. By the early nineteen nineties Harold

Bloom, one of the main spokesmen (were they all men?) for the

preservation of old-style American criticism, his trusty canon by his side, could let rip more in anger than in sorrow:

When I was a young man, back in the fifties, starting out on what

was to be my career, I used to proclaim that my chosen profession seemed to consist of a secular clergy

or clerisy. I was

thinking, of

course, of the highly Anglo-Catholic New Criticism under the

sponsorship or demi-godness [sic] of T. S. Eliot. But I realized in latish middle age that, no better or worse, I was surrounded by

a pride of

displaced social workers, a rabblement of lemmings, all rushing down to the sea carrying their subject down to destruction with them. The School of Resentment is an extraordinary sort of melange of latest-model feminists, Lacanians, that whole semiotic cackle, latest

model pseudo-Marxists, so called New Historicists, who are neither

new nor historicist, and third-generation deconstructors, who I

believe have no relationship whatever to literary values. It's really

a

very paltry kind of phenomenon. But it is pervasive... .3

I just thought I'd like to share that pious piece with you, be you of the

clerisy or just a displaced social worker. Bloom's impatience is probably

representative of a certain reader-response to theory. Is it just a matter of

the generation gap, as I overheard someone say in the lift descending from a particularly acrimonious debate at the IASAIL conference in

Ley den? I refuse to believe it is necessarily so. As I see it, the aggression of the elect is but a fear of loss of privilege, but a preference for an older

mode or even model can be both positive and productive. It is all about

dialogue. The Blooms of this critical world are not interested in dialogue:

they will dialogue (interestingly) with a text but not with a threatening theorist.

2. Frank Kermode, "The Future of the English Literary Canon", in English Studies in

Transition: Papers from the ESSE Inaugural Conference, ed. Robert Clark and Piero

Boitani (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 9-21.

3. Harold Bloom, "Authority and Originality: An Interview by Antonio Weiss", in

Edmundson, ed., Wild Orchids and Trotsky, p. 204.

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INTRODUCTION

Developments in Irish universities have been less dramatic than in

the USA. Yet we have had our gentle revolution. People such as Seamus Deane and Thomas Docherty have mounted certain barricades, in one case advisedly, in the other considerably less so. But before commenting further on this point it is necessary to make clear that although the base

of third-level education in Ireland has considerably broadened in recent

years the ethos has remained liberal-conservative. The mistake would

be to construe this ethos as conservative in the same sense as Bloom

(above) is conservative. It is an intellectually open system managed

conservatively. That is no more than to say that the system is both

progressive and responsible. The upgrading of Dublin City University and the University of Limerick may be regarded as symptomatic here.

Already the study of English has been affected; there is no longer the conformity of syllabus and critical ideology which obtained in

university circles up to the nineteen eighties. The newer universities do

not have 'departments' of English as such. They have Schools of Lan

guages, Humanities and Communications. The teachers in these schools

include some of the brightest and most innovative writers and critics in

Ireland today; enviably, they are attracting many of the best students.

These teachers/writers are bringing to bear on criticism discourses new

(in this country) to the study of literature. It is a pattern discernible in

Britain too, of course, but there, it seems to me, the growth of new

universities has led to a major split between cultural studies and English literature. This has not happened in Ireland. Perhaps it is simply because

Ireland is smaller and the population well below ten per cent of that in

Britain. But I think it is less a matter of such statistics than it is of the

historical differences in the "idea of a university". Newman's ideal is

undoubtedly challenged by the wholly different ethos of the University of Limerick, for example. And yet, to date, there are no visible fruits of

any ideological rivalry in the humanities. What is visible is an enriching of critical discourse and a validation of a pluralist approach. Expansion of the system widens the dialogue. Provided, of course, contributors

respect differing values.4

At present, in any case, what is happening is that Irish criticism is

becoming pluralist. One could also call it inter-disciplinary. In Denis

Donoghue's time as professor of Modern English and American

Literature at UCD (to 1979), there was, because of Donoghue's own style and interests, some traffic in critical discourse between literature and

philosophy. But this was never any kind of formally acknowledged fact

(even though, historically, English studies have always had philosophical

longings in Ireland as elsewhere). Politics, especially, were anathema to

4. To what extent, if at all, the new Universities Bill (1997) will affect the ethos here

being described it is impossible to say. If it results in entrenchment of autonomous

universities it could well create an unhealthy kind of competition.

3




dominant lit. crit. Even in the nineteen eighties, a generation after his

having to face the first grapeshot from radical students at UCD,

Donoghue could not see his way towards admitting politics into his critical vocabulary: "We seem to be at the end of the period in which the

theory of literature was construed in philosophical terms. Our setting is now much more overtly political. Issues are named as ideological as soon as they are recognised as issues at all."5 Donoghue's successor to

the chair at UCD was Seamus Deane. Politics and history took up residence with literary criticism. The plural in the title Celtic Revivals

(1985) served notice that Irish literature was not to be mystified but deconstructed and made to answer before the bar of what one may call the Irish historical imagination. Moreover, although Deane was professor

not of Anglo-Irish Literature but of Modern English and American

Literature his praxis ensured a departitioning. Side by side with this

development went an accelerated integration of theory into the English

syllabus. By 1992 Deane could be described as "a professor whose efforts

have been dedicated to ensuring that his own department is fully

engaged with contemporary critical theory".6 At the same time, it is necessary to note that Thomas Docherty moved

from UCD to TCD, where he took the chair of English in 1992. It is

necessary to note this because it was a failed attempt to transfer to Trinity the revolution which Docherty, with Deane's blessing, had initiated at

UCD. At Trinity, where a different administrative system obtains, a

reasoned resistance to radical theory preserved the role of literary criticism as a positive enterprise. Docherty resigned within three years.

Other developments included the impact made on Irish cultural life

by Crane Bag (1977-85). The range and inter-disciplinary nature of this

journal gave currency to a new style of Irish criticism, less text-based

and more theoretical, less Americanised and more Gallic. It is significant that one of Crane Bag's two editors, Richard Kearney, teaches in a

department of Philosophy (at UCD). The alliance formed between

philosophy and criticism of all the arts boded such an expansion of

interests as might have made a Harold Bloom cry Armageddon. Failing Bloom, for he cannot be everywhere, we had to put up with Conor Cruise

O'Brien, who mourned "the doomed intellectual enterprise" on which

Kearney and his contributors to The Irish Mind were "all imprudently embarked".7 O'Brien's prophecy of doom has not, needless to say, been

realised.

5. Denis Donoghue, "Yeats, Ancestral Houses, and Anglo-Ireland", in We Irish: Essays on Irish Literature and Society (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of

California Press, 1986), p. 65.

6. George J. Watson, review of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing in Irish University Review 22 (1992), p. 404.

7. Conor Cruise O'Brien, Passion & Cunning: Essays on Nationalism, Terrorism and

Revolution (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), p. 197.

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INTRODUCTION

What we are faced with, then, in the Irish republic at present is a

significant mutation in the whole discipline of English studies. (The North, in recent times, has left its own problems of cultural identity, focus and literary canon conspicuously unexamined, at least in print.)

No doubt it would be folly to imagine, much less hope for, resolution of

all differences dividing conservatives and radicals in this general area.

The real advances must be that criticism in Ireland is now far less an

elitist affair than it used to be, and that the questions being asked in

journals and at literary conferences relate more to cultural life, gender issues, history and politics than to arcane textual and/or meta-linguistic

problems. The really daunting prospect is how the creative chaos now

happily distinguishing Irish criticism, where orthodoxy has received the

last rites of Bloom's beloved clerisy, will be used to transform the teaching of English at second level. A trickle-down effect (now where does that

phrase point?) seems inevitable, and plans would need to be devised to

ensure that such permeation is educationally constructive. But that is an

issue for a different forum.

The idea behind this special issue of Irish University Review, conse

quently, is two-fold. First, to illustrate the diversity of critical approaches

currently available in Anglo-Irish studies (the term, while undoubtedly troublesome, must be endured). From Luke Gibbons to Brian John there

is a certain distance in interests, approach and discourse. In between

there is a plurality of voices sometimes addressing the same topic or

even the same author in entirely different terms. And we include new

poems among the voices articulating Irish experience in new ways. This

inclusiveness has neither to do with postmodernist dissonance nor

pretentious indifference to point of view. Part of our purpose is to exhibit a variety of viewpoints. This collection claims coherence from a deliberate

refusal to unify. Secondly, there is an intention to offer, by a kind of

double-jobbing, some sort of progress report on Irish studies today and on the approaches found useful, from stylistics to feminist theory, from new historicism to post-colonial theory. Embedded in this plenty is Ciaran

Benson's review article on Krino. The importance of this short piece lies

in the issues Benson identifies as urgent in Irish letters today. Looming

large among these is 'memory'. The primary or ur-occasion of Benson's

remarks was the election by the Arts Council of Francis Stuart as saoi of

Aosddna, the highest literary honour available in Ireland.

Much controversy followed the decision so to honour Stuart. In the

Irish Times Kevin Myers articulated the main objection being voiced in

the press, namely Stuart's war-time broadcasts in Berlin:

To have volunteered to serve that enemy of civilization and of art is not just a mistake on a par with life's other little blunders. It is a cosmic error from which no full escape is possible. That is the inevitable consequence of aligning oneself with the greatest enemies

5




humanity, and humanity's arts, have ever known, though the result

ing experiences provided wonderful material for a writer as

indisputably fine as Francis Stuart is. He has told us that he went to Germany because he sought life

on the fringe, on the very margins, in a land inhabited by martyrs and mystics. Fine. And untrue. He went to Germany not in the hour of Germany's defeat, but at the moment of victory, as Poland lay in ruins. More conquest, more subjugation followed, all of it com

manded from Berlin, where he had made his home and from where he broadcast.

He was at the centre of things... .8

Touche. Fintan O'Toole, on the other hand, shifted the question from the

moral to the aesthetic plane. "Nazism was, in Walter Benjamin's famous

formulation, the irruption of aesthetics in politics. After the war, Stuart's

work reverses the process, bringing life ? ordinary, honest, complex

humanity?into the domain of art."9 (Here the Barthean "myth-reader"10 is referred to the picture on our cover, and is informed that it is, in a

sense, a re-take. President Robinson was absent from the original occasion

when the Arts Council was to have made its award.) As chairperson of the Arts Council, the body responsible for honouring

Stuart, Ciaran Benson spoke out at the launch of Krino in defence of

artistic freedom. What he said provides a significant intervention in the

debate on Stuart, although it should be noted that his address was

delivered on 29 October, some time before the comments quoted above were published. The invoking of Ezra Pound was, in my view, unfor

tunate in the circumstances. Benson was attempting to depoliticise Pound, and by the same token depoliticise Stuart. That is to return to the

mode of New Criticism. History, memory, may not now be so readily

suppressed. Benson's address thus, by its appearance here among two

articles on Stuart's work, challenges anew not only our ideas on artistic

freedom but our residual notions of the autonomy of literature.

8. Kevin Myers, "An Irishman's Diary", Irish Times, 24 November 1996, p. 17.

9. Fintan OToole, "Second Opinion: Forcing art to confront the reality of experience", Irish Times, 5 November 19%, p. 10.

10. Roland Barthes, "Myth Today", in Barthes: Selected Writings, ed. Susan Sontag

(Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1983), p. 117.

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Special Issue: Literature, Criticism, Theory || Introduction: Stirring the Pot Withershins