Representations of the Jew in the Modern Irish Novel since Joyce

Abstract

This study reads the Semitic discourse in five modern Irish novels – Francis Stuart's Black List Section H (1971), Robert MacLiam Wilson's Manfred's Pain (1992), Robert Welch's Groundwork (1997), Jennifer Johnston's This is Not a Novel (2002), and John Banville's Shroud (2002) – for what it tells us about the cultural identity of modern Ireland, and for what it reveals of the psychohistory, and even the psychopathology, of Irishness hidden in these representations. The span of five novels allows some demonstration, first, of the ambivalence, rather than overt hostility or unqualified identification, which characterises this writing; and, second, of the striking variety and heterogeneity in the representation of ‘the Jew’ in contemporary Irish writing. Such unpredictability and contradictoriness in the construction of Jewish racial difference challenges or threatens both the national discourse which seeks to exert control over the unmanageable ‘reality’ of Ireland in terms of fixity, certainty, centredness, homogeneity, and the transcendent discourse of liberal universalism. That is, these novelists, in demonstrating the impossibility of fixing the indeterminate Jew as one thing or the other, reflect a more general crisis of representation, not only for the nation (Welch, Johnston), and the individual (Wilson, Stuart), but for epistemology itself (Banville).