Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790 (review)

It is sometimes quipped that ‘the first item on every Irish agenda is the split.’ This adage originates, of course, in the hoary old stereotype of the Irish as intrinsically quarrelsome and factional. Given the current anti-essentialist climate, one might expect Irish critics and historians to debunk the stereotype of the fighting Irish, to expose it as the patrician imagining of a colonial mindset. Alas, with splits and schisms high on the Irish studies agenda itself, any such attempt is in danger of being embarrassed from the off. The debates that strenuously divide and enliven professional Irish studies, between soi-disant revisionists and nationalists, are often regarded as having a political and ideological basis, largely concerning Ireland’s historical relationship with Britain. Crudely put, the battle is seen as one between Anglophobes and Anglophiles: nationalists emphasize colonial exploitation by Britain in understanding the traumas of Ireland’s past; revisionists query the colonial model altogether and seek to break down what they regard as the old nationalist metanarrative into a factual series of local contingencies and discrete circumstances. However, the dispute is really as much methodological as ideological. That is why much of the sniping occurs between literary critics and historians. Revisionists tend to suspect nationalist critics of obscuring an essentially old-school way of reading the past—the mythic liberation of Holy Ireland from the nefarious clutches of Perfidious Albion—in a smokescreen of trendy ‘theory’. Nationalist critics as sophisticated and philosophically schooled as Seamus Deane tend to be impatient with revisionist historians for epistemological naivety, for an uncritical espousal of a positivist and empiricist approach which underestimates the textual nature of historical writing: its inextricability from interpretative and evaluative discourses. More ominously, for Deane, revisionist claims to objective perspective and scientific method all too often veneer readings every bit as tendentious and rhetorical as the most fervid nationalist diatribes.

Based on the Clarendon lectures in English literature delivered at the University of Oxford in 1995, Strange Country is all about methods of reading and representing Ireland. Like Adorno and Horkheimer, Deane is mindful of mythic strains in the project of ‘enlightenment’. The final section of his book explicitly indicts the anti-myth mythology that the godfathers of Irish revisionism—the late T.W. Moody and F.S.L. Lyons—have valorized. Deane concludes that ‘revisionism remains happily ensconced not only in ignorance of its own theory but the more happily so because it regards such ignorance as the badge of its peculiar notion of professionalism.’ Whatever faults they may have had, Deane might have paid more tribute to the tremendous scholarly achievement of this generation of historians, who infused Irish historical studies with uncompromising standards of academic rigour and erudition. Especially since, as his ample endnotes testify, Deane is no scholarly slouch himself. However, he seeks to evaluate method and interpretation more than archival research. In particular, he strives to rehabilitate the shoddy reputation of ‘myth’ within Irish historiography. Against the common pejorative conception of myth as a synonym for falsity, a poisonous distortion to be weeded out of the flat field of historical facts, Deane regards mythology as a paradigm or structure which coheres and controls historical narrative. Myth is inescapable, even desirable. It is the frame within which the past is interpreted: no less for the revisionist project, with its foundational opposition of ‘rationality and nationality,’ than for nationalist commentators of various hues. However, if he is emphatic in insisting on the textual nature of history, he never mistakes it for mere fiction. Deane plays no ludic (or ludicrous) post-modernist games with ephemeral truth and meaning, but knows full well that history was experienced and suffered by real men and women. But factual as much as fictional narratives must be textually interpreted, and this brings them into the discursive web of ideology, evaluation, and myth. As one might expect from a literary critic, it is with the process of interpretation that Deane is most concerned. That said, his survey is...