Fionnt�n de Br�n, Revivalism and Modern Irish Literature: The Anxiety of Transmission and the Dynamics of Renewal (review)

Abstract

Fionntán de Brún, Revivalism and Modern Irish Literature: The Anxiety of Transmission and the Dynamics of Renewal (Cork: Cork University Press, 2019), 262 pages. The back-page blurb on this highly significant monograph by Fionntán de Brún, Professor of Modern Irish in Maynooth University, makes the point that ‘revivalism is writ clear in the history of modern Ireland’, a statement with which few would disagree. But the originality of this study is that it evaluates revivalism as a ‘critical cultural practice’, a position that sets out to underline the extent to which all revivals contain within them ‘a set of fundamental concerns which arise from our experience of time, cultural memory and the quest for continuity’. De Brún’s concern in this instance is with literature written in the Irish language, unfortunately not a specialism of this reviewer. Apologies in advance for any lacunae, omissions or inaccuracies that may be found in the lines that follow. The Introduction lays out the author’s ambition very clearly, arguing that the displacement or decline of a language such as Irish makes us aware of the fragility of the medium itself: ‘… initial realisation that culture is a medium, a construct that is negotiable rather than fixed, brings with it an appreciation of the role of agency in human affairs, in particular that if a language can be lost it might also be recovered’. This clever formulation explains de Brún’s decision to follow the fortunes of the Irish language over the centuries and to illustrate how its very precariousness has given birth to renewed interest and vigour at various junctures. There is nothing like the threat of extinction to make people consider the value of what it is they may be losing. Hence de Brún’s study is not confined to the years most often associated with the Irish revival, namely from the early 1890s to the early 1920s. He argues, in fact, that the attempt to revise and revitalise the past is not confined to those years. For example, he cites the Counter-Reformation movement as having been a particularly significant one for the Irish language, in that it produced the first sustained publishing of Irishlanguage books, as well as a marked renewal of language and literary production in Irish. Similarly, Protestant bible societies at the beginning of the nineteenth century, sensing that they had little chance of evangelising the indigenous and mainly rural population in Ireland without making religious texts available in Irish and having people fluent in the language to preach the Good News, set about addressing this void, with positive results for the national language. Studies • volume 109 • number 435 340 Autumn 2020: Book Reviews De Brún’s approach to revivalism draws on the theory of Henri Bergson, whose understanding of time is one where the past and present coexist. Gilles Deleuze brings this further, saying: ‘Not only does the past coexist with the present that has been, but … it is the whole, integral past; it is all our past, which coexists with each present’. Finally, drawing on Nietzsche’s notion of ‘eternal recurrence’, Deleuze highlights the importance of ‘becoming’ over ‘being’. Linking all this to the emphasis one encounters today on ‘new speakers’ of Irish, de Brún argues that his approach ‘reflects the sense in which “becoming” is seen increasingly as essential to language revival and revitalisation rather than an unbroken continuity’. These ideas are undoubtedly complex, in what is an academic study and as such unlikely to appeal to the general reader. But the game is worth the candle for those who persist with it. Chapter One asserts that the type of revival being considered by de Brún ‘is predominantly cultural and linguistic, and is characterised by a common set of fundamental concerns centred on the will to reform the present by recourse to values associated with the past’. The Gaelic League tended to favour the everyday speech of the people over Gaeilge Chéitinn (Keating’s Irish, a concept to which we will return) in its attempts to encourage a new literary language during the 1880–1920 Revival movement. In some ways Máirtín Ó Cadhain...