The Ends of Ireland: Criticism, History, Subjectivity by Conor Carville (review)

Aiming to understand the implications and limitations of the 1990s’ turn to theory in Irish studies, Conor Carville’s The Ends of Ireland examines critical texts from that period, considering their theoretical frames and then offering alternatives to their approaches. Each of the book’s chapters focuses on the work of a particular critic, addressing how that work frames issues of subjectivity. In each case, Carville chooses an issue central both to the writing of the critic in question and to Irish studies more generally.

The first chapter, for instance, considers the commentaries of Luke Gibbons and the centrality of “traumaculture” (23)—where the experience and configuration of trauma become central to a cultural or even national identity—to considerations of Irish identity.¹ Carville notes the ways in which a focus on trauma both in popular conversation and in critical studies can establish “parallels between personal histories bedevilled by the secrets and violence of childhood and the history of the nation as a whole” (25). In an Irish context, such personal and national experiences as the famine, the troubles, and institutional and clerical child abuse combine with other narratives of the past to make issues of memory and trauma central to Irish culture. This “’wound culture’” psychologizes relationships between past and present (26),² and it figures prominently in both state-sponsored and dissenting approaches to Irish commemoration and identification. Additionally, Carville links the proliferation of “traumaculture” to a temporal disruption rooted in nineteenth-century colonial discourses, whereby particular regions of the contemporary Irish nation are imagined to be stuck in the past or are holdovers from another era. Carville challenges Gibbons’s use of such concepts as this “rhetoric of temporal disruption” (36), which is noted when scanning across his various publications. The following chapters similarly challenge the theoretical paradigms and readings of David Lloyd, Seamus Deane, W. J. McCormack, Emer Nolan, and Gerardine Meaney.³

Carville’s closing chapter offers his own model of subjectivity, drawing on these other critics’ work while challenging it in a reading of James Joyce’s “The Dead,” a story Carville calls “the Ur-text of contemporary Irish cultural criticism” (211). Carville’s own approach to questions of Irish identity combines the idea of subalternity, taken from postcolonial studies, with a psychoanalytic approach to subjectivity, suggesting “that the relationship between subjectivity and identity, or between subalternity and strategic essentialism, is a central, problematic and often disavowed aspect of the most productive and provocative work in contemporary Irish cultural criticism” (11). Specifically, Carville deploys “the Lacanian distinction between the subject of the unconscious and the subject of identification” as a means of analyzing this contemporary criticism of Irish identity (15). Drawing on work by Fredric Jameson, Carville reads the closing story of Dubliners “in terms of a relationship between modernist space and nationalism,” suggesting that “The Dead” can “provide a template for a new understanding of the relations between modernism and nationalism that confirms the utility” of his own proposed model of subjectivity (211, 211-12).⁴ Challenging Jameson’s proposal, in “Modernism and Imperialism,” that the Dublin of Ulysses presents, as Carville puts it, “a space where the dislocations of imperialist mapping will not hold,” he instead proposes an interpretation of Joyce’s Dublin (albeit in “The Dead”) where the sense of that space is more analogous to the “disruptive spatial affects afflict[ing]” E. M. Forster’s Howards End (212).⁵ Comparing, for instance, a description of Gabriel Conroy with a moment in Howards End exemplifying modernist style, Carville notes in Joyce’s story “an oscillation … between the real and the unreal” and an inability of the various descriptive details “to add up to a quantifiable whole” (215). Carville thus asserts that, in this story, as in those works by Forster and Joseph Conrad that Jameson describes, there is “a disruption of the external world [that] has its direct counterpart in the way that consciousness represents space” (216).⁶ Further...