Narratives of Class in New Irish and Scottish Literature: From Joyce to Kelman, Doyle, Galloway, and McNamee (review)

Mary M. McGlynn's book is determinedly positioned beyond postcolonialism. Although she draws on Homi Bhabha's work to show how hybridity and heteroglossia give voice to the dispossessed of empire, McGlynn makes it clear that she shares David Lloyd's critique of Bhabha's faith in hybridity as a universally positive force and more generally highlights dissonances between what she sees as the postmodern condition and certain kinds of postcolonial teleology.¹ From this perspective, McGlynn constructs a critical agenda for such contemporary writers as James Kelman, Roddy Doyle, Janice Galloway, and Eoin McNamee outside of "the homogenizing tendencies of an overarching cultural nationalism" (9).² For all the suggestions of the Celtic fringes in her title, she seeks to identify narratives of class on the urban periphery that reveal "the richness of local identities evolved beyond constructions of nation, engaging in international discussions and maintaining their own distinctive sound" (32).

Distinguishing this new literature from romanticized bourgeois traditions that normalize class relations and attempt to assimilate working-class experience, McGlynn identifies a much more radically engaged body of writing. It establishes itself in relation to what Raymond Williams calls "dominant cultural forms" through narrative innovations that move beyond "authenticity/representation" to disrupt long-standing binaries—between narrator and character, for example, and, equally importantly for McGlynn, between the urban and the rural (16).³ The edge of the city thus becomes the location, or "space," that defines a new modernism, or postmodernism.

Such ideas are not entirely new—McGlynn follows, for example, Ferdia MacAnna, to whom she refers.⁴ Her sense of Joyce as the great forerunner and enabler of these class narratives, however, does constitute an original position, one that counters the commonplace view of Joyce the elitist with an entirely different Joyce. Here he registers not least as the poet of phenomenology who, at the same time as he rewrites flux, apparently uses what Franco Moretti calls "cacophonic polyphony" to "enfranchise those silenced" (30).⁵ The amount of space devoted specifically to Joyce in McGlynn's book is relatively small—some twelve pages—but throughout Narratives of Class, there are numerous passing references to his work. At a range of levels, from narrative styles to perceived similarities in characters and in the political articulations of writers, it is clear that the crucial linkage joining these "new" narratives—elsewhere criticized for being limited, parochial, and even reactionary—and the highly prestigious culture of high modernism is Joyce. Much of this theoretical positioning is striking and refreshing. It also has the virtue of being rooted in the realities of Thatcherism and New Labour that produced the urban fringes and the writing with which McGlynn's study is engaged. The difficulty comes with the claim McGlynn makes for Joyce as the progenitor of the so-called "dirty realism" of the 1980s and 1990s. In order to sustain this claim, McGlynn argues that class is central to Joyce's work, and she has a point. But she also makes highly overstated claims concerning what she sees as Joyce's commitment towards voicing the experiences of a dispossessed Dublin working-class, notably in Ulysses. In order to make such a claim, minor characters like Dilly Dedalus and the whores of Nighttown are forced to stand as representatives of working-class life, with "Wandering Rocks" and "Circe" illustrating technical innovation in Ulysses more widely. From this position, McGlynn writes of an "interdependency of the female and working-class voices and the formal innovations of the text," a formulation that, if not "the most often-noted of Joyce's varied legacies" (28), is clearly important to McGlynn's thesis.

There are serious problems in argumentation at this stage of Narratives of Class. Dilly Dedalus, whatever her material situation, is not working-class, nor, as Joyce constructs them in "Circe," are the Nighttown whores. "[F]ormal innovation" in Ulysses...