Abstract
Benedict Anderson claims In Imagined Communities that nationalism and national identity are but fruits of a politicised imagination, and that the nation only acts what the State imagines. A decade later, in Tom Inglis re-examines such an imagination in a postcolonial Irish context, and traces the significance of the land in the process of identity formation. Anderson’s and Inglis’s understanding of personal identity formation resonate with the Deleuzian reading of a Rhizome-based local identity set against a monolithic backdrop of root-tree system. Where the former variety promises an animate, multifaceted identity, the latter conditions the development of Irishness to a closed system in which values are yet to be pronounced by the governing root, namely, the State. This is where one can draw the very red thin line between personal and national perception of reality (of being). The multilayered and dialectical nature of the modern Irish novel and its critical caliber has created an accurate touchstone that enables the Irish to identify the very two sides of reality. For the Irish, on the one hand, reality emerges as a monolithic, obdurate construct, fabricated and observed by the State; and on the other, it materialises as the nation’s memory of economic hardships, political marginalisation, ideological bifurcations, and psychological exiles. By exploring James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman (1974), this paper shall answer the question that Anderson and Inglis failed to address: what made the contemporary Irish literature a difficult reflection of postcolonial identity, which neither accepts the State’s atavistic nativism nor identifies with neocolonial political mindset? Keywords: Modern Irish Novel; Memory Studies; James Joyce; Flann O’Brien; Postcolonial Literature
Highlights
The greatest triumph of human thought was the calculation of Neptune from the observed vagaries of the orbit of Uranus
Reality emerges as a monolithic, obdurate construct, fabricated and observed by the root-tree State; yet on the other, reality manifests itself as the nation’s branched memories of economic hardships, political marginalisation, ideological bifurcations, and psychological exiles
This is when the individual can compare the State’s definition of reality with the nation’s memories of socio-political plights and marginalisation. For critics such as Joyce, reality is a mere reflection of their individual conscious memories, collected and curated through years of civil and national wars, and internal colonisation after the rise of the State: “side by side with his memory of the deeds of prowess of his uncle Mat Davin, the athlete, the young peasant worshipped the sorrowful legend of Ireland” (Joyce 1916, p. 205). In his discussion of Irish history as a selectively forgetful national Irish memory, James Smith claims that the modern Irish novel bears a level of reality that the State has emphatically labeled as pure fiction and negligible
Summary
In his discussion of Irish history as a selectively forgetful national Irish memory, James Smith claims that the modern Irish novel bears a level of reality that the State has emphatically labeled as pure fiction and negligible.7 I suggest that these stark illustrations of Irish society and Irishness in the modern Irish novel seek one objective: to defy the State’s politics of confinement by highlighting the unforgettables.8 As Paul Ricoeur notes, “fiction gives eyes to the horrified narrator.
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