Irish Literature

BOOK REVIEWS awareness* that always surrounds the "focal awareness* (Michael Polanyi 's terms) we modern Westerners give such great priority to. But at other times Boitani's allusive, quasi-poetic presentation becomes nebulous and difficult to foUow, leaving his reader puzzled as to where he is going and rendering dubious his claim that his audience is the educated non-specialist. This obscurity is not a concomitant of his admittedly ambitious multi-disciplinary aims, nor is it, apparently, the fault of the translation, which is fluent and is warmly praised by Boitani in the preface to the English edition. The occasional vagueness seems rather a function of his methodology, which involves suggestion, allusion, implication and which vacillates between being free-wheeling and brilliant , or self-indulgent and gnomic. This inaccessibility I find regrettable , because this book takes on such deep-running questions about the interrelationships of art and life that it is disappointing for an attentive and sympathetic reader to be left at times wondering exactly what is being claimed. Weldon Thornton University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Irish Literature Vivian Mercier. Modem Irish Literature: Sources and Founders. Eüis Dillon, ed. Introduction, DecÃ-an Kiberd. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. vii + 381pp. $45.00 THE NAME OF VIVIAN MERCIER wiU be remembered by most .ELTreaders, especially those with an interest in Irish literature. As the author of the Irish Comic Tradition (1962), a work which went through five printings, and Beckett/Beckett (1977), he is known as a man with much to say. The appendix to this posthumous volume identifies at least 200 additional items—speeches, articles, and book reviews. WMe one may not always agree with his procedures and conclusions, his work is usually sensible and informative. When he died in November of 1989, says the Irish novelist Eilis Dillon and Mercier's widow, he was working on a two-volume set on Irish Uterature in English. The first, which dealt with ite roots, was practically finished, but the second was only in the note stage. Using her knowledge of Mercier's procedures, Dillon finished that first volume and offers it here. She claims the organization as her own, but credits her husband with the text and notes. Presumably writers who are either absent or receive only slight treatment in this volume (Heaney, Clarke, 423 ELT 38 : 3 1995 MacNeice, Bowen, Kinsella, Montague, Corkery, O'Connor, OTaolain, OPlaherty, and Lavin, to name only a few) would have been worked up for the second volume. Given the depth of commentary on what Mercier does include, we must lament the loss of volume two. Kiberd's introduction reminds us of the range and depth of Mercier's scholarship, as weU as the fact that it is always personal. Mercier believed strongly that criticism could only deal weU with that which one liked and he made no apologies for liking some things and not others. His personal likes are strongly reflected in this volume, too. For him, "modern" Irish literature is Shaw, Yeats, Synge, Joyce, and Beckett. Of course, this is a good group to like and he does connect them to movements in history, as weU as to each other. As usual, one can learn from reading his work. The volume opens with a chapter on the eighteenth-nineteenth century rediscovery of Ireland's past. Beginning, as is fitting, with the charlatans (e.g. James MacPherson) who partly invented and rearranged materials to suit their own ends, Mercier moves on to native Irish recorders of history and literature (OTJonovan, O'Curry, Pétrie, and OTieiUy), followed by foreign scholars (Windish, de JubainviUe, and Kuno Meyer) and the work of such Irish natives as Standish Hayes O'Grady. According to Mercier, O'Graà ys Sylva Gaelica (2 volumes) was later "pUlaged" by Lady Gregory and James Stephens. The early effect of all of this scholarship, though, was to create an enthusiasm for national records. Very likely this enthusiasm helps to account for the existence of Thomas Moore's Irish Melodies and their success. In a more serious vein, it gave impetus to patriotic journals such as the Nation which, in turn, pubUshed young writers who wrote about Ireland's past and glorious...