Cinema, Empire and Transition

Abstract

Literature and history have been the dominant modes of cultural expression in Ireland for a century and more. Their persistence has informed a critical sense of their centrality. It is hard to imagine Ireland now without thinking of an image that derives in some form from a Yeats, Joyce or Heaney. In this sense, the national territory has been mapped as a possible, and not an actual, landscape. This gives the image of Ireland an unfinished quality that can be traced directly to the legacies of political history, as much as to aesthetics. Civil war, partition and the troubles that attended the island’s postimperial divisions have meant that frequently the idea of Ireland has been disconnected from the reality. Perhaps this fact is nowhere better illustrated than in our own bitter moment, the financial crisis a result, and not the cause, of a civic failure that has its own basis in the social malformations of empire and after. This civic failure is expressed in literature in narratives of exile and disappointment, at which we excel. These stories of diminishment are often taken to represent an actual poverty of wealth and opportunity. They may do. But they are symptoms also of a structural malaise that is more often accepted than resisted. This pattern has informed in turn a historiography that is founded in a narrative of boredom, punctured by the repetitive surprise of revolution (and one unfortunate account is called The Long Gestation). Accordingly, the past is understood as a set of key dates arranged around loose narratives of high political change. One outcome of this orchestration has been a historical industry that is committed to the rediscovery of apparently lost individuals and works (and here literary scholars, myself included, are just as guilty). Another has been the near complete critical silence, until recently, concerning forms of cultural expression that are not textual, and so not translatable into the master codes of nation and narration. Art, music and cinema in Ireland have all been marginally understood activities,