Exile, Emigration and Irish Writing (review)

The synonymous association of Irish writers with exile and emigration is such a donné in literary criticism that the title of this study might, at first glance, suggest redundancy. George O'Brien has recently claimed that, "It seems only a slight exaggeration to say that without exile there would be no contemporary Irish fiction." O'Brien's sensitive exploration of the aesthetics of exile in fiction by John McGahern, Brian Moore, Edna O'Brien, Joseph O'Connor, Dermot Hogan, and others might be adduced as evidence that this trope has deep roots in the Irish literary tradition. The self-imposed exiles of Joyce and Beckett, along with Seamus Deane's labeling of exile as a stereotyping "fetish" for Irish writers would seem to make the case watertight.

Not quite so, according to this carefully researched and persuasive study by Patrick Ward. His essential premise is the striking degree to which the Irish literary tradition before the twentieth century is marked by silence on the subject of exile; therefore, Ward argues, one must move beyond the canonical tradition to find its recurring and most persistent forms of expression. In Ward's view, the myth of the Irish literary figure in exile needs to be dismantled for several crucial reasons: it overdetermines our reading even of those few writers who actually engage with the subject; the term "exile" needs to be broadened to accommodate such iterations as emigration, migration, displacement, banishment, and expatriation; and it is a thematic that needs to be explored in the Gaelic tradition and in English-language forms of popular cultural expression, at least from the seventeenth century onwards.

Ward sets out to establish an historically informed theoretical framework. This imperative is rooted in his belief that those few critics who address this subject operate within a generalized conception of the term—for example, interchanging exile with emigrant, expatriate or émigré—and fail to conceptualize it as an issue deeply connected with such phenomena as colonization, banishment, mass emigration, and nationalism. He believes that "an overwhelming and uncritical obeisance to the image of the artist as an exile" is the product of a critical perspective that effaces variety; it is "a kind of epistemological and interpretative fusion which aims to transcendentally harmonize diversity."

Ward first turns to Edward Said's injunction that to appreciate fully the complexity of the experience of exile the critic must "map territories of experience beyond those mapped by literature. It is necessary to set aside Joyce and Nabokov and even Conrad" and to understand that "Exile is life lived outside habitual order. It is nomadic, decentred, contrapuntal, but no sooner does one get accustomed to it than its unsettling force erupts anew." Ward argues that the multidimensional nature of Said's comments make them "equally applicable to a consideration of emigration as they are to a study of exile and just as relevant to the consciousness of those who left in droves as well as to those whose self-appointed artistic mission led them to leave."

Because Irish literary history has tended to ignore popular culture, and because the passing references to exile in Irish literature reveal it to be a subtheme usually associated with minor characters, Ward next turns to Irish historiography "for serious and sustained exploration of the connectedness of emigration, exile and literature within Irish thought and tradition." Ward finds particularly pertinent Kerby Miller's debunking, in Emigrants and Exiles, of the Catholic view of migration to North America as an "involuntary expatriation" attributable to colonial oppression, the tyranny of landlords and the Protestant Ascendancy. In Miller's view, such a perception was "integral to Catholic's Irishmen's sense of individual and collective identity and, most important, was crucial for maintaining 'social stability' and bourgeois hegemony in a Catholic society whose capitalist institutions and social relations made lower-class emigration imperative." For Ward, stripping away these ideological processes "provides a valuable contextual framework within which literary texts may be situated and scrutinized...