A Provincial Passion: Cleansing Irish Literature of Irishness1

A PROVINCIAL PASSION: CLEANSING IRISH LITERATURE OF IRISHNESS1 DESMOND FENNELL I i got the idea for this essay from an article by a Frenchwoman, Maggie Pernot , in the Tralee literary journal Asylum (Winter 1997). Madame Pernot was writing about the short stories of Neil Jordan in the late 1970s, of which “Night in Tunisia” remains the best known. In particular, she was exploring a programmatic decision of Jordan’s as reflected in these stories. I quote from her second paragraph: From the outset Neil Jordan had chosen to move away from tradition and to write about aspects of everyday life that would not immediately be identified as Irish. The smell of boiled cabbage is conspicuously absent from his stories as are the whitewashed cottages, the rain-drenched winding lanes or the Dublin pubs with their roaring drunkards, to give just a few examples. In the same way, references to the past, or to Irish war, are either non-existent or alluded to briefly and then, only as memories rather than experience. (19) Pernot explains this decision partly by the fact that Jordan was born in 1950 and had no experience of the major historical events in Ireland in the early part of the century. But there was more to it than that. Jordan had told her that in his stories he was consciously “not referring to ideas of national identity” but “expressing another reality, everyday facts, ordinary facts . . . something mundane, contemporary . . .” (19). So recent Irish history and ideas of national identity were out. One of his stories made clear that the “recent Irish history” that was not relevant included even mid-century de Valera and what he stood for. Moreover, MagCLEANSING IRISH LITERATURE OF IRISHNESS 192 1 This essay is based on a paper read at the Kerry International Summer School of Living Irish Authors, Tralee, 8 August 1997, where the theme was “Love and Passion in Irish Literature .” gie Pernot, quoting further—this time from an interview with Jordan by Richard Kearney—shows that the great works of Irish literature written in English (English Irish literature) were also out. Jordan told Kearney: When I started writing I felt very pressured by the question: how do I cope with the notion of Irishness? It meant almost nothing to me. I was, of course, profoundly moved by the Irish literature I encountered as a student —Yeats and Joyce. But how was I to write about the experience I knew, as someone born in Sligo and growing up in the surburban streets of Dublin in the sixties? The great books of Anglo-Irish literature had very little to do with this, they had no real resonance at this level. My most acute dilemma was—how to write stories about contemporary urban life in Ireland without being swamped in the language and mythology of Joyce . . . The only identity, at a cultural level, that I could forge was one that came from the worlds of television, popular music and cinema which I was experiencing daily. (qtd. in Pernot 19) Note, in passing, that these “worlds,” and the East Coast urban teenagers who dwelt in them and who figured centrally in Jordan’s stories, were actually part of contemporary Irishness: a nondistinct, largely British and American part of it. So it could be said that Jordan, as compared with most of his predecessors, was simply shifting the focus within Irish life. He was directing it to a previously neglected class of characters—suburban, middle -class Dublin teenagers—and to aspects of Irishness that were internationally shared rather than distinctive. But that is not what he said or what he conceived himself to be doing; he conceived it in much more dramatic terms, as a turning away from Irishness, whether historical, literary, or lived, towards a contemporary, non-Irish reality that was located in Ireland but not marked by it. Pernot then proceeds to check out the stories in detail to see whether Jordan has indeed fulfilled his intention of writing “un-Irish” literature, which she takes to mean, reasonably enough, literature that is “simply human.” That can mean having human significance of a contemporary kind or, more broadly, of a perennial nature; here it is...