Many
collections of essays by literary critics tend to
be an assortment of talks, reviews, articles, and
anecdotes strung together, closely or loosely as
the arranger deems. For David Pierce, of the University
of York, he in his new book places within frameworks
that stretch over the past century many topics perhaps
temporarily orphaned, perhaps, after being presented
at 'Joyce symposia and Irish conferences' across
the world. But, here James Joyce's treatment of
cricket finds probably its first analysis, along
more familiar subjects as Yeats and the Rising,
the Celtic Revival and cultural nationalism, and
the Troubles or the famine from over the past 150
years in literature.
These
chapters, then, play off extended riffs. What need
do we have, still, for another professor's compendium?
Pierce pursues the game of the harp vs. the crown.
Caught up in the paper chase, he charges past British
and Irish fences. Pierce asks how authors stalk
a quicksilver Irish colonial-postcolonial phantom.
In Beckett, appropriately, Pierce finds a master
of evasion and redeployment. Beckett jolts his words,
however sparingly arrayed, to transmit precision
and defiance. The latter quality, Pierce judges,
energises tired clichés and rudimentary utterances.
'Beckett's language is always more than simple texture
or local colouring, and not infrequently it seems
to belong to a form of slippage, an Irish sense
of defiance that can be seen as underlying all his
work'. (113) Nothing human is foreign to me, mused
a Roman a couple millennia back, and this universality,
which we often associate with Joyce in his verbal
largesse, also applies to Beckett, who pared down
what his predecessor had heaped high.
Beckett's
ambiguity as Parisian-Irish, foreign member of the
Resistance, Anglo-Irish, non Irish-Irelander, Dubliner
schooled in the North at Portara, satirist in English
prose who chose the discipline of French: this marks
a hybrid character who--as with Yeats, Wilde, and
Swift elsewhere scrutinised-- becomes an emblem
for Pierce. In his highly recommended anthology,
Irish Writing in the Twentieth Century (Cork
UP, 2000), Pierce edited a massive tome that crams
in fiction, fact, oratory, travelogue, diatribe,
song, and verse and combinations thereof. This stirabout,
this mulligan stew, satisfies its compiler, who
explains movingly in a preface that in its personal
revelations exemplifies the value for a scholar
to show the hand he's played rather than hold his
cards close to his vest, posing with an objective
sang-froid none of us can sustain. Pierce, he explains
about himself, was born in post-war England but
son of an Irish mother, and drawn to the summers
spent in his maternal homeland and then back to
his own native but not quite home turf. This attraction
and retreat, comparatively, marks a writer only
beginning to be taken seriously now after years
of silence. A decade ago, his first three plays,
the Leenane trilogy, teased mid-90s London audiences
with their disturbing mix of Synge and Tarentino,
Beckett and British television satire (at least
that's where I place him early on in his career).
Surely the nemesis of the remorseless INLA and tender
cat-lovers both (a combination rare indeed?), Martin
McDonagh's other early play, The Lieutenant of
Inishmore, has been revived recently. He wrote
seven plays, or most of them, around 1994. Suddenly,
he succeeded. And, with his recent stage success
after nearly a decade of lying low, The Pillowman
(which is not addressed by Pierce), McDonagh again
confounds-- with a non-Oirish setting of a grim
taleteller collared in a police state-- jaded hipsters
expecting another send-up of Man of Aran
meets Father Ted.
Why
bother with McDonagh? Pierce considers him only
momentarily, but McDonagh for me plumbs Irish doldrums:
folks mired but happy as a pig in slop. This is
our greedy, ironic, twitchy mentality. Pierce seeks
hybridity. Well, ghosts of Gaelic haunt the syntax
of McDonagh's eagerly anglicised Gaeltacht folk.
Even as they revel in cartoonish violence in his
1990s plays, they-- and I would align McDonagh's
The Lonesome West cautiously with moments
in Tarentino's 1994 Pulp Fiction -- trip
upon a threshold beyond which beckon meanings hidden
within but inimical to a tawdry existential wasteland.
As an aside, Pierce's anthology includes all of
Lonesome, less prominent than Beauty Queen
of Leenane or Cripple of Inishmaan, but
in my judgment his best Irish play to date. Speaking
to Fintan O'Toole in the 6 March 2006 New Yorker,
McDonagh recalled the 'lunar' landscape near his
father's birthplace around Lettermore. 'Skulls in
Connemara'. And, so we return to Godot. Beckett's
anguish finds itself prolonged rather than terminated
or abandoned, through the career of a Londoner who
went back during his summers to Connemara found
himself taking in much more as a teen in the 80s
than he probably expected. John Lydon in Rotten
tells of his early disappointment, a couple of decades
earlier, when he was ridiculed on his holidays by
his Galway relatives -- Lydon being a fine Connemara
name, by the way, not far from Leenane in many clan
manifestations. McDonagh credits listening to the
Clash around 1982 (at twelve) with inspiring his
distrust for regimes, whether paramilitary, clerical,
or familial. For McDonagh, propelled straight after
his own media blitz manipulated by/for Johnny Rotten
into the notoriety enjoyed by Tarantino a dozen
years ago, the self-taught playwright produced drama
in a Hiberno-English that seemed to emerge without
his intention, as he heard the voices of his relatives
in the characters he created. He credits the Pogues
for their example: the trash could be separated
from the treasure that Irish tradition still offers
us. With the anarchy that punks mimicked and terrorists
perverted, McDonagh taunts us further. He shoves
his characters within this garish spectacle. He
forces them and so us to witness a neglected, fragile,
all-too-human soul.
Think
of Johnny Rotten onstage in the spotlight, before
the mike, eyes unfocused, dazed in a too-large wooly
sweater, weary, hands wrapped around his skinny
frame: a well-known circa '77 snapshot. Shane McGowan
hushing the mosh pit to make them listen to Eric
Bogle's lyrics as 'The Band Played "Waltzing
Matilida". Tarantino's protagonists wondering
what light emanates from the suitcase, and why one
says it's the most beautiful sight he's ever seen.
Or, Pierce invites, ponder The Lieutenant of
Inishmore. 'Very few characters or situations
in modern Irish literature lie outside the known
or familiar. Padraic tells his distended victim:
"If it hadn't been such a nice fella I would've
taken one toenail off of separate feet, but I didn't,
I took two toenails off the one foot, so that it's
only the one foot you'll have to be limping on and
not the two".' (qtd. 42) Pierce observes what
could be said of Beckett or Tarantino (where to
place Lydon: 'we're the flowers in your dustbin,
your future'?): McDonagh knows his stereotypes,
of the nutting squad, of republican comrades who
find themselves victims of yet another INLA split
to find themselves hung inverted about to be split.
Recent reviews often contained warnings to the potential
audience -- likely more to weep for the fate of
a cat than of the torture of three men. So weary
are he, we, and they of such Jacobean revenge. McDonagh
parades violence but subverts power's futility.
Irish
tendencies towards gallows humour, mordant moralism,
superlatives, the speed of craic at 90: this element
rears with McDonagh but then fades in Pierce's study.
Pages whir by with asides to authors and their texts,
many barely mentioned. Still, as with an itinerary
that must speed us past minor points-of-interest
to better spend our tour at our destination, the
journey's worthwhile. No matter how familiar you
are with Irish literature, you will discover in
this book writers you never knew. Much more could
be said. Areas of merit: he opens up fresh perspectives
on Northern feminism against and within the republicanism
of the 80s. He places John Banville, John McGahern
Glenn Patterson, Denis Johnston, Francis Stuart,
Robert Ballagh's art, Julia O'Faolain, Kathleen
Coyle, Derek Mahon, Jamie O'Neill, Medbh McGuckian,
and Aidan Mathews alongside much acclaimed Irish
scribes. From Padraic Fiacc, an unjustly overlooked
Belfast poet, Pierce cites his horrifying Missa
Terribilis [1986] from 'Crucifixus' and 'Introit'.
These poems transfix Christ-figures in agony, one
from sectarian murder and another in the immolation
of British soldiers. Even within academia, some
on this list get short shrift by critics infatuated
with Heaney's new verses. The reading public's more
likely to hear of whatever Malachy McCourt's press
agent's promoting. I would have wished more space
given to newer arrivals. Only in passing does Pierce
notice Ursula Rani Sarma (...touched and
Blue), Conor McPherson (a hurried nod to
Shining City), Hugo Hamilton (his enigmatic
memoir The Speckled People), and Rosa González
in her critical essays on 'the cultural greening
of Britain'. With the predictable exception of Cathal
Ó Searcaigh's treatment of homosexual desire,
Irish-language writing receives little notice. Still,
in hundreds of references, Pierce offers plaudits
to both bestselling celebrities and those still
humble (both feted at 'symposia and conferences'
as he attends) for the success of recent Irish writing.
One
failing of this otherwise solid book is that the
illustrations -- often apropos from unexpected sources
-- do not always match what Pierce is on that page
explaining, and what he discusses could have gained
more clarity if he had selected an appropriate postcard
or photo. Few errors remain, but Westland Row station
was not Connolly station pre-independence (136;
Amiens=Connolly, Westland Row=Pearse). Irish-language
lenition as rendered into English "h"
is garbled and in one case misspelled in the captions
translating Seán Ó Sullivan's map
of Corca Dorc[h!]a from Myles na gCopaleen's An
Béal Bocht. (A novel that I find anticipates
McDonagh's charmless squalor praised by tourists
to this Wild West.) However, a superb semi-bird's
eye view map on pg. 138 from The Sphere paper,
6 May 1916 showing locations for the rebellion reveals
graphics surpassing the flat perspective we see
on conventional diagrams of the Rising. The book's
atypical format, halfway between standard and small
'coffee table/art book' size, makes a heavier volume
to hold but worth the price for its wealth of colour
and, as in the Rising map, better rendered pictorial
details previous studies did not know of or could
not afford to reproduce. Pierce's diligence, although
intermittently erratic in its distribution, of the
archival as well as the textual research gathered
(as in his anthology) shows an eagle-eye rivalling
that of The Sphere. He enriches context with
a 1930 AA roadmap or plastic bullet photo or the
infamous shot taken of Countess Markievicz with
pistol ready. He displays the cover of the 2 July
1953 BBC weekly The Listener to indicate
this 'extraordinarily time-warped sentence' to bolster
his point about imperial British fealty: 'Her Majesty
will today receive and reply to addresses of loyalty.'
(30) Pierce's meticulous attention enriches his
effort. This BBC caption is in tiny print under
a large photo of the Houses of Parliament. Only
a sharp-eyed reader would notice this regal reference
on a mundane magazine page.
Pierce
in his enthusiasms to link Clongowes Wood to The
Crying Game to MLR James via West Indian cricket,
for instance, proves unwittingly how even when he
cannot stop interpreting (for then he dashes into
comparing them to Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano),
he manages to keep you reading. Inevitably, we must
give way to the trailblazer. We lag behind Pierce's
furious cogitation as he associates everything he's
ever read to the purported topic. (A fault I sympathise
with generously.) Pierce -- as veteran anthologist--
recalls snippets from hundreds of literary works,
so to deploy the mot juste, check off that
text, and hurry on to another dozen references from
often equally overlooked books to back up his latest
bold assertion. You'll have a hard time keeping
pace if you lack the stamina. The chapters are best
read one by one, with pauses for mental or physical
refreshment. Knowledge of Irish literature, from
Pierce's own anthology or a refresher from Neil
Corcoran's After Yeats and Joyce (OUP), Seamus Deane's
A Short History of Irish Literature (U of
Notre Dame P), would be a wise pre-requisite. Rarely
tainted by jargon or puffed with theory, Light,
Freedom and Song is not for absolute beginners.
But, if you already know your Yeats from your Keats,
it follows one man's trail into the blizzard of
print from an island prolific to the extreme in
its inhabitants' wish to have out on paper what's
been too long stored up inside as potential poem
or persuasive prose.
