Standish O'Grady, AE and Yeats: History, Politics, Culture (review)

While it is standard practice for works devoted to previously marginalized or critically neglected authors to make large claims for their subjects, few are as ambitious in this regard as Michael McAteer's new study of Standish O'Grady (1846-1928). O'Grady, the son of a Church of Ireland rector in County Cork, was a life-long upholder of aristocracy in general, and of the British monarchy and Ascendancy landlordism in Ireland in particular. Nonetheless, his early discovery of translations of ancient Irish myths and legends inspired him to produce a number of books, including The History of Ireland: The Heroic Period and The History of Ireland: Critical and Philosophical, which had a huge influence on an entire generation of young Anglo-Irish writers, some of whose politics evolved in entirely different directions to O'Grady's. These works, together with the Carlylean tract of 1886, Toryism and the Tory Democracy, have won for O'Grady the title of the "Father of the Irish Revival."

O'Grady is thus usually regarded in Irish literary studies as an important precursor to later treatments of myth, oral culture and the heroic (especially in relation to the key mythical figure of Cuculain) in Yeatsian modernism. (The young James Joyce, of course, reacted fiercely against all of this in his early satiric and naturalistic work.) So O'Grady is generally remembered for his evangelical enthusiasm for stories of Ireland's misty, enchanted pre-history, and for his apparently contradictory political conservatism and pro-imperialist sympathies. But many so-called "minor" writers of the Irish revival are currently being reassessed by such critics as Nicholas Allen and Adrian Frazier. In one sense, McAteer's book belongs with such revisionary scholarship, and represents the fruits of an extraordinary engagement with O'Grady's entire oeuvre, surely never before subjected to such close critical scrutiny. However, the grand scale of McAteer's own theoretical ambitions may in fact militate against the book's success as an intervention into this current rereading of the Revival.

According to McAteer, a proper understanding of O'Grady will not merely illuminate the history of the Revival or of Irish modernism, but will help us to overcome "antinomies" which he sees as structuring the entire field of cultural and historical debate in Ireland, particularly in relation to the conflict between "nationalism" and "revisionism" (itself perhaps, by now, a somewhat outdated construction of the key disputes). He drastically reduces such disagreements to what he describes as anxieties about "the concept of necessity in cultural and political analysis of Ireland's history and contemporary condition" (7). This serves the purpose of allowing MacAteer to recast such earlier analysis in terms borrowed from Marxist and post-Marxist debates about history, specifically in relation to empirical, materialist and idealist conceptions of the past. Thus his account of O'Grady is prefaced by a rather lengthy exposition of the first chapter of Fredric Jameson's The Political Unconscious (1981), including detailed analysis of much later commentary on Jameson's text. The idea of Jameson and O'Grady having a shared project is certainly counter-intuitive, and McAteer never explains to us what enabled this solitary late-Victorian figure to write more "dialectically" about history and modernity in Ireland than anyone else before or since. According to McAteer, critical constructions of O'Grady's conservatism are largely based on misreadings. Against these misreadings, as he sees them, McAteer subjects Tory and the Tory Democracy to a "post-Marxist" reading which acknowledges that "radical politics is not exclusive to a discourse of working-class liberation" (102). O'Grady's depictions of women are here regarded as extremely significant contributions to the understanding and representation of patriarchy. His warrior-heroine Maeve, for example, apparently also "represents the possibility of conceiving history in accordance with my reformulation of Jameson's definition of history as necessity, namely...