Breaking Enmities: Religion, Literature and Culture in Northern Ireland, 1967–97 by Patrick Grant (review)

564 letters in canada 1999 [being] staffed largely by convinced separatists'; `the hundreds of Quebec students who went over to study in France [who] were, or quickly became, separatists'; `the history of Franco-Quebec relations these past thirty years teaches us what these meetings are for: to conspire once again for the separation of Quebec from Canada'; whether the federal `government [is] paralysed by [the] large membership of politicians and servants, civil and military, from Quebec, of whom an unknown number have ambiguous feelings about the separatist campaign; [and whether it] is half-converted to the cause of Quebec sovereignty.' Does this last contention apply to Jean Chrétien, Stéphane Dion, Lucienne Robillard, Paul Martin, Denis Coderre, and the other Quebec Liberal MPs? Finally, the author acknowledges that his research was limited because many RCMP and CSIS documents are still secret. When these documents are released for research, many passages are censored. Also, members of these two organizations do not reveal a lot when they are interviewed, which limits research on this topic. In his conclusion, the author writes that`Gaullist encouragement for Quebec separatists is hard to assess, but we have neglected it for too long.' This suggests that more critical studies are needed on the relations between Canada, France and Quebec. (MARCEL MARTEL) Patrick Grant. Breaking Enmities: Religion, Literature and Culture in Northern Ireland, 1967B97 St Martin's. xii, 240. US $49.95 The cultural complexities of life in Northern Ireland over the last thirty years and the difficulties of renovating or dismantling old categories in the examination of texts are amply demonstrated by Patrick Grant in Breaking Enmities. Borrowing Frank Wright's identification of Northern Ireland as an `ethnic frontier zone,' Grant employs the common currency of the `two communities' while insisting that the cultural diversity of these `fiercely endogamous' communities is seriously underestimated and that the notion of `two communities' is a sterile mythology: `one can neither accept the necessity of the phrase nor ignore its relevance.' His sense that political, cultural, and religious analyses of Northern Ireland have been disabled by the inadequacy of discursive categories is evident in his own procedures. Grant opposes to the `binary oppositions and stereotypes characteristic of a morality that simplifies or denies the autonomy of persons' an ecumenical application of the ```great simplicities'' of Jesus' perennial philosophy to the turmoil of history.' These simplicities Grant takes to be present in the injunction of the `Great Commandment' to love one another and he advocates a reading of literature as a transfigurative act that helps liberate people from `mimetic rivalries.' He thinks `patient exercises of discernment and imagination ... to be identical with what theologians humanities 565 mean by the spirit disclosing us to one another across the alienating boundaries.' Grant's `hermeneutical realism' is a quasi-liberal reading of the cultural record within an ecumenical Christian context. The test cases for the interconnection of literature, religion, and a critique of the conflicting repertoires of the text in the educative process of dismantling cultural stereotypes are read under identity (John Hewitt and Seamus Heaney), endogamy and education (Brian Friel and Stewart Parker), gender, pluralism, and equality (Edna Longley and Medbh McGuckian ), and imprisonment (Bobby Sands, Brian Keenan, and Salman Rushdie). Few of these writers are proof against the fables of identity, but they enable us to see problems of identity and religion with a `salutary complexity.' However, a belief that nationalist subject positions and deepset prejudices in the non-literary texts he looks at `require extra attention' because they often suppress the link between identity and religion aligns Grant with Edna Longley, who he notes is `especially interested in how nationalists differ from unionists by more effectively masking their own patriarchal authoritarianism.' This they do, she argues, by appropriating images of women. Cultural critics have examined this long and complex literary, political, and iconographic history that also has a history of challenge. Appropriation of images of women, however, has never been confined to nationalists in Ireland or elsewhere. The Jacobean magistrate Luke Gernon depicts `This Nymph of Ireland' as `a yong wenche that hath the greene sicknes for want of occupying,' and Tenniel's illustrations for Punch include a magisterial Britannia...