The Disappointed Bridge: Ireland and the Post-Colonial World by Richard Pine (review)

Richard Pine has previously published full-length studies of Oscar Wilde, Brian Friel, Lawrence Durrell, and the Irish music critic Charles Acton, as well as a standard history of the Royal Irish Academy of Music and Raidió, Teilefís Éireann, along with critical collections on Brendan Kennelly and Theodore Stephanides.¹ For some years past, he has been a mainstay at the Guardian’s obituary column where his notices on Irish figures ranging from Joan Trimble and John McGahern to Gerry Ryan and R. B. McDowell prove him a master of that difficult genre. Although Pine has given lecture-series and directed academic conferences, he is essentially a man of letters, and his new book betrays that fact in sundry ways. In it, he undertakes the daunting task of comparing modern Irish literature with the postcolonial literatures of newly emergent African countries and others in Latin America with a radically different experience of colonialism in that their modern populations are, quite bluntly, the colonists themselves.

All of this is spun out of a famous interview with Jorge Luis Borges in The Crane Bag during the Joyce Centenary Year of 1982, in which Richard Kearney insisted on the parallel between Irish and South-American writing based on similar colonial traumas (chiefly apparent in Joyce’s Ireland and Gabriel García Marquez’s Colombia), while the doyen of Argentinian letters blithely affected ignorance of such outré connections, focusing instead on the influence of Joyce’s originality as a European modernist and his own character as a “European writer in exile” and an “expatriate European.”² Pine cites this interview often, although it conspicuously fails to sustain the postcolonial thesis of his book—notwithstanding which, postcolonialism, folklore revivalism, and magical realism all tend to merge here into a single web of political and aesthetic premises so that what is true of one appears to be equally true of all the others. The result is that the reader is continually on the qui vive for false analogies and over-stretched similitudes stemming from the notion that Ireland, India, Africa, and Latin America were all subjected to the cultural hegemony of the European powers in the Age of Empire, with their “logocentric” philosophy, and its counter-image in the “linear” narratives of the conventional English novel. This is so in spite of the care with which Pine sets out his stall in saying, “it is the purpose of my study to indicate some of the parallels between Irish writings and writings of other post-colonial societies,” while acknowledging that “there is no ubiquitous ‘model’ of a standard post-colonial society” (21).

The present book presents some challenges to the reader both as to the idiosyncratic nature and confused organization of its chapters, which feature miasmal orders of repetition to complement the vertiginous feeling of the argument. In writing of Irish literature from an Irish nationalist standpoint while promoting a strenuously anticolonial reading of other literatures, Pine speaks as personally as possible, conferring a testimonial tone to his book not often seen (and still less cultivated) in academic writing. With this, there is a note of joyous participation in the liberation of peoples who freed themselves from colonial forebears—“sympathetic alien[s],” as Joyce might say (SH 73)—and therein lies the fundamental irony of The Disappointed Bridge. Contrary to the usual supposition about the authorship of such narratives, the history of Ireland is now being written by a reformed colonist as distinct from a former colonist—which might apply to a Robert Erskine Childers or a Robert Barton in the Anglo-Irish context. For, as Pine tells the reader in his preface, he is the son of an English historian who unfortunately died before he could complete an elegiac tome on the many virtues of British Colonial Office in its mission to civilize the lesser breeds.

James Joyce, W. B. Yeats, Brian Friel, Denis Johnston, Liam O’Flaherty, Elizabeth Bowen, Barbara...