Greaney, John. The Distance of Irish Modernism: Memory, Narrative, Representation

Abstract

Influenced by new modernist studies, John Greaney diligently interrogates the simultaneous proximity and distance that Irish modernism has to a national narrative of social and political history, particularly as enabled through form, aesthetics and questions of language and translation. The Distance of Irish Modernism adopts what Greaney calls a ‘flexible formalism’ (p. 26) in order to emphasize the importance of aesthetic features when approaching Irish modernism’s relationship to Irish history. In Chapter 1, Greaney complicates historicist readings of Beckett’s work, specifically Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951) and The Unnameable (1953). He convincingly illustrates the ways in which Beckett deflects ‘the capacities of even basic representation’ (p. 58), as apparent in his engagement with the Holocaust and Irish colonial history, and thereby enables his works to ‘operate at a remove from history to negotiate its trauma and ineffability’ (p. 58). Chapter 2 interrogates the questions of authorship and voice raised by the various pseudonyms of Brian O’Nolan, as well as the subsequent destabilizing forces of fragmentation and trivia located within texts such as At-Swim-Three-Birds (1939). Greaney argues that O’Nolan/O’Brien/na gCopaleen’s texts actively refute being conflated with their cultural and historical contexts. Chapter 3 perhaps best captures the spirit of Greaney’s endeavours. His metacommentary on Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September (1929) highlights that the variability in academic definitions and readings of Bowen’s novels acts to destabilize the text’s relationship with Irish history. In his textual analysis, Greaney argues that Bowen’s representation of Ireland during the War of Independence through the perspective of female Anglo-Irish characters, whose worlds are limited by their class and gender, serves to put distance between the novel and the wider revolutionary context. In Chapter 4, Greaney argues that Kate O’Brien’s application of omniscience is a formal modernist device which functions to distance the narratives of Mary Lavelle (1936), Pray for the Wanderer (1938) and The Land of Spices (1941) from her contemporary social history. Greaney clearly demonstrates how in O’Brien’s work, the setting of postcolonial Ireland is rendered ‘spectral’ (p. 139) by her omniscient narrator, who thus serves to detach O’Brien’s texts from their historical contexts. In his final chapter, Greaney considers the work of John McGahern, a writer usually associated with naturalism and social realism (p. 141), and tests the presumed distinctions between these attributes and modernism. Focusing on a wide range of McGahern’s texts, Greaney argues that McGahern’s critique of mid-century Ireland is informed by a modernist fragmentation of various narrative operations that render reality a ‘hermeneutic enigma’ (p. 165).