Small World: Ireland, 1798-2018 by Seamus Deane (review)

In one of the earliest set pieces of the sublime, De Rerum Natura, Lucretius imagines the powerful impact of a scene in which a shipwreck at sea is watched by an awestruck spectator on the shore. Famously, Lucretius remarks that the "delight" on such an occasion comes not from the desire "to watch another's labouring anguish far" and "that a man should thus be smitten," but rather because "'tis sweet to mark what evils we ourselves be spared." Distance lends self-preservation to the view, and danger and terror exert endless fascination so long as our own lives are not at stake.

In the tour de force of critical writing that marks the final essay in Small World, "The End of the World," Seamus Deane re-enacts a real-life equivalent of Lucretius's scene in which Blasket Islanders gathered on the coast of their remote island to pick up the debris of the Lusitania that washed up on their shores in 1915. "'By God,' one man would say, 'war is good.' 'Arra man,' said another, 'if it continues, this island will be the Land of The Young'" (297).² But as Deane points out, time was not on the side of the islanders, and soon they were in the position of the Lusitania, washed up on the shores of history. The last inhabitants left the islands in 1953, leaving not only their homes but centuries of tradition behind them. Even the remotest outpost of European culture no longer provides a refuge from the modernity that engulfed societies across the globe in two world wars.

Discussing Hans Blumenberg's book-length reflection on Lucretius's scene, Shipwreck with Spectator, Enzo Traverso notes that the fate of the modern is such that

we are no longer spectators, we are "embarked," and can neither escape nor contemplate from a distant secure observatory the calamities that surround us: we belong to and participate in them. The relief of those who escaped catastrophe and watched it from afar is a privilege unknown to us: we are shipwrecked ourselves: we have to avoid drowning and rebuild our sunken ship.³

This could stand as a summary of Deane's own life as a writer and critic, the most brilliant, imaginative thinker in Irish culture in the last half-century, who died, sadly, on the eve of this book's publication. Born and raised in Derry, Deane was part of the generation that brought civil rights and the dismantling of the sectarian Northern Irish state to the streets, and, in his role as a Co-Director of the Field Day Theatre and publishing company, he provided creative and cultural interventions that challenged the partition of the mind. The current collection, with a magisterial foreword by Joe Cleary that stands as the best available introduction to Deane's thought, has a wide sweep both chronologically and thematically. The sixteen essays here range in subject from Jonathan Swift, Edmund Burke, and Wolfe Tone to postcolonial reflections on imperialism and nationalism, civilians and barbarians, the Irish national character, heroic styles, including his famous riposte to historical revisionism in Ireland, two essays on James Joyce, two on Elizabeth Bowen, and studies of Mary Lavin and the Booker-award-winning Anna Burns, and it concludes with essays on his life-long friend Seamus Heaney and a valedictory masterpiece, "The End of the World."

According to Deane, if Ulysses "implied the possibility of structure in history" and Finnegans Wake "a history of structures," both can be seen as closing off an escape route in the transcendence of form. In his caustic take on the Irish Literary Revival, Deane sees the Celt of the twilight as staying quaint to stay put, whereas in Joyce, and subsequent Irish modernism, there is a search for forms that break out of the colonial exotic, whether in its homespun or imported variants. Style is not an affectation of self, still less of inner life, but the "production of an individual style which...