Theorizing Glengormley, Reconfiguring Nationhood

Diaspora 3:2 1994 Theorizing Glengormley, Reconfiguring Nationhood Enda Duffy University of California, Santa Barbara Anomalous States: Irish Writing and The Post-Colonial Moment. David Lloyd. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. In his poem "Glengormley," the Northern Irish poet Derek Mahon contrasts bourgeois anomie with a vividly surreal version of the plight of the heroic intellectual: The unreconciled, in their metaphysical pain, Dangle from lamp-posts in the dawn rain. (Qtd. in Paulin 56) In bulletins from Britain and Ireland since 1969, Glengormley, like dozens of other place-names in Northern Ireland, has come to signify a site where more violence has occurred: another shooting, bombing, riot. In the context ofa politics so grim that it never allows cultural productions the luxury of mere introspection, Mahon's surreal figure ofearnest and extravagantly self-tormented intellectuals becomes a vivid image of victims of Irish political violence. Given that the "Troubles" (as the violence is known) in the North of Ireland have lasted for a quarter of a century, and that they are the current manifestation of a history of violent opposition to colonial oppression in Ireland, Irish writing, more than any other from Western Europe, seems to support Fredric Jameson's controversial opinion that postcolonial literatures, whatever else their effect, also function in the final instance as national allegories. In his brilliant and deeply committed discussions of a series of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers and genres, David Lloyd implicitly accepts the notion that Irish literature works as national allegory, but he does not leave unquestioned the terms upon which this relation between text and nation is negotiated. In readings of texts ranging from Irish nineteenth-century street ballads to Samuel Beckett's first work in French, he meticulously delineates the overlapping of the political and the poetic in Irish writing. He wants his readers to be clear about whose interests are being served and whose are being ignored when the political realities underlying Irish literary produc- 222 Diaspora 3:2 1994 tion are obscured. For Lloyd, Irish political reality is the result of the island's, or at least the Republic of Ireland's, postcoloniality; one claim implicit in the title ofthe collection is that while this postcoloniality , given the particular divisions marking Irish politics and culture, is anomalous, from the viewpoint of the diasporan intellectual this very anomaly can be a useful challenge to accepted models of postcolonial history. Lloyd's essays contribute to, and critique , debates in Ireland on viable versions of postcolonial identity; they do so by raising issues that reach beyond the matter ofIreland. In particular they encourage diasporan intellectuals to examine more rigorously the nation-state's function as clearinghouse ofideologies of community. As one of the first to explicitly refer to Ireland's current political milieu as postcolonial, Lloyd's collection is ground-breaking. At least from the time of Swift and Burke, commentators on Ireland have more or less explicitly considered Ireland's predicament as the effect of its colonial relation with England; hence, Lloyd's perspective might not on the face ofit seem surprising. His innovation, however , is to reread Ireland's colonial and, since 1921, postcolonial history through the interpretive lens of theories of postcoloniality that have been developed in the last decade by the Subaltern group of Indian historians, by diasporan postcolonial critics, and by theorists of minority discourses in the United States. The book's strength is that it observes Ireland from without, from a relatively detached diasporan viewpoint. It scrutinizes contemporary theorizations of the postcolonial in the light of the trickier particularities of England 's closest ex-colony; at the same time, it brings to ongoing discussions among Irish intellectuals the broader comparative and even geopolitical perspectives oftheories generated in transnational contexts (see also Cairns and Richards). Lloyd greatly enlarges the range of interpretive apparatuses in use in Irish discussions by bringing to bear on what might appear to be the "anomalous" situation of Ireland Bakhtin's concept of the dialogic possibilities of discourses in novelistic space, the work of Benedict Anderson (see Imagined Communities) and Homi Bhabha (see Nation and Narration 1-7; 291-322) on the construction and contradictions of the nation -state, and theories...