Public Works: Infrastructure, Irish Modernism, and the Postcolonial (review)

Public Works: Infrastructure, Irish Modernism, and the Postcolonial offers an innovative take on the multiple functions of public utilities in literary discourses, with an emphasis on those that consider the effects of modernization in Ireland. Michael Rubenstein's approach brings to the fore the previously understudied subjects of water, gas, and electricity as agents in the development of the Irish Free State between 1922 and 1940. Rubenstein argues that these public utilities are constructed as characters in literature as a means to highlight the relationship between Irish modernism and Irish modernity in the creation of the postcolonial state.

Other scholars have often overlooked utilities as inconsequential "basic necessities"; Rubenstein seeks to address a gap in literary and historical research by calling attention to the ways in which water and power were deeply controversial, political divisive, and inextricably linked to identity. The focus on infrastructure is pioneering in and of itself, but the analysis is also sophisticated in its comparative approach to postcolonial studies, which places the critical process of Irish state building in a global perspective. Public works link the nation in an imagined community, not only as taxpayers with a responsibility toward one another, but also as citizens who rely on the state to ensure and protect access to utilities. Limiting his study to representations of water, gas, and electricity, Rubenstein makes a convincing argument for choosing these models of modernization, which penetrated the home in ways other modern technologies—like railroads—did not.

Each chapter traces the relevance of water or power to storylines in literature, including the thoughtful processes by which authors apply utilities to determine scene selection, act as narrating voices, or to portray symbolically the role of modernity in the new nation. In many ways, Ulysses acts as the framework for Rubenstein's. He characterizes Ulysses as a model of the postcolonial comedy of development, and distinguishes this generic form from tragedies based on the "ambiguous but always hopeful distance from purely capitalist development and from the repressive aspects of the state." However, Rubenstein posits this outlook as the culmination of Joyce's thoughts on public utilities. The progression of his thinking on the matter can be mapped out in a close reading of earlier works, including A Portrait and "The Dead." Narrowing his focus to "Ithaca" and "Wandering Rocks," Rubenstein ponders the relationship between taxpayers and the waterworks, suggesting that the latter actually speaks as a narrative voice with a panoptic perspective on Dublin. Rubenstein complicates his reading of Joyce's utopian view of public utilities by providing the counterexample Flann O'Brien, who sought to prove that public works were an inappropriate literary trope and had no place in the modern novel. However, Rubenstein interprets this quest as a disappointment for the author, largely because O'Brien's over-reliance on utilities in his own writing reinforced the trope presented by others. The Third Policeman can thus be read as a critique not only of Joyce's employment of public utilities as a literary theme, but also as a perceived failure on the part of the Free State.

Transitioning from water to electricity, Rubenstein indicates the political and cultural consequences resulting from an ambiguous association between the power of the state and the power provided by the state in the form of utilities. In a fascinating chapter on Denis Johnston's 1931 play The Moon in the Yellow River, Rubenstein positions the colossal undertaking of the Shannon Hydroelectric Scheme as the literary motivation for the play's critique of unprecedented positive change expected to come in the wake of national electrification. Calling the relationship between electricity and the state in modernist literature "electrifiction," Rubenstein goes on to articulate the spectrum of anxieties ranging from the government's anticipation that the scheme would foster a more progressive Irish mentality to fears that electrification would sweep away the romantic notions of an idyllic Ireland. Situating his work in the wider field of postcolonial studies, Rubenstein concludes with a...