This
massive, handsomely designed, and solidly researched
annual looks like no other academic journal. The
debut issue of Field Day Review (1.2005)
combines the graphic layout of an art magazine,
the scholarship of academic contributors, and the
format of a coffee-table presentation of text matched
to photos and reproductions of historical documents.
Nearly 300 pages, the few advertisements on its
final pages blend with the previous attention to
a cohesive style of sidebars, blocks of text soberly
set off in muted tones, and contemporary but not
too bold a typeface. Such consistent control by
the editors Seamus Deane and Breand�n MacSuibhne,
Red Dog Design Consultants, and the Field Day staff,
has resulted in a bold combination of exactitude
and appeal.
When
I saw the issue at a reception at the 2005 Irish
Studies literary conference in Prague, I wasn�t
surprised that I could not obtain a copy then�they
were all snapped up. A few months later, now that
I have one, I will provide an annotated expansion
of its table of contents, for on the website [http://www.fielddaybooks.com/review.htm]
in-depth information about what can be found in
the issue is not provided. It�s nearly 300 pages,
and my only objection-- although I know it otherwise
would have been priced beyond the budget of all
but well-endowed libraries-- is that its paperbound
format makes it impossible to open without risking
damage to the spine. The weight of the volume necessitates
that you treat it carefully, propped in your lap,
unless you want the spine to crack and the pages
to separate from their backing. At 35 euro, it can
be purchased from the website for shipment to not
only Ireland but the U.S. and Britain. (Shipping
costs overseas not included.) The FDR site lists
no reviews of the first issue, so perhaps this summation
below, lengthy although it is even in my necessarily
cursory evaluation of its abundant contents, will
meet a need so far unmet.
Sylv�re
Lotringer, in January 1961, accompanied by the poet
Derek Mahon, in Dublin interviewed Brendan Behan.
�The Thin Man� explains that while she had meant
to gather details for a review she was preparing
on the Paris staging of The Borstal Boy,
Behan kept skirting around the play. �These digressions
became the main story�. (3) One telling anecdote
from the interview: Behan finds that Mahon has never
heard of Merriman�s �The Midnight Court�: �You should
be ashamed of yourself as an Irishman.� (15) Behan
then recites a bit in Irish before translating,
which he had claimed to have written a rendering
of and later lost, although in Borstal Boy�
a section was published. This example sums up mercurial
Behan: the oral and the written, the vaguely recalled
and the precisely rendered, and the often overlooked
conversation between the Irish he learned in prison
and the English for which he-- too precipitously
by the 1960s-- courted notoriety as well as acclaim.
Lotringer offers in an extensive and annotated article
much more of Behan�s reflections on Communism, the
French left, the then-eroded state of those few
claiming to be the IRA, and how the French and the
Irish mingled in his life and in his oeuvre. When
so many played into Behan�s self-aggrandisation,
Lotringer�s intelligent conducting of this interview
reveals what the later years of Behan�s more publicised
pronouncements too often overwhelmed: the sensitivity
and the political as well as literary instincts
informing what remains the enduring legacy behind
the stereotype of his later years spent in the public
spotlight that he craved and that did him in.
Earlier
republican sentiments, Philip Pettit explores in
�The Tree of Liberty�, often have been treated in
their articulation by Wolfe Tone by relying on their
French influences. This neglects� Tone�s American
antecedents. Adapting a lecture at the University
of Notre Dame, Pettit restores both progenitors
of 1798's uprising. Hobbes, Rousseau, the Whigs,
Grattan�s Parliament, and colonial American theorists
receive an accessible and stimulating overview that
in its generous citations reminds us of its Roman,
Renaissance, and English traditions�a more ancient
lineage than is often traced by those reviving Tone
in Irish contexts. What the Irish republicans added,
Pettit concludes, is its �more ecumenical attitude�
towards religion. (40) Open to Dissenters and even
to Catholicism as well, Tone�s message invited those
who might have otherwise been excluded by those
in America hostile to Catholics and those in France
hating any churchgoers.
I
admit in my past efforts to read the post-colonial
theorist David Lloyd that I have been frustrated
by his convoluted prose. �Republics of Difference:
Yeats, MacGreevy, Beckett� with its necessary examples
from Jack Yeats� paintings, does ground Lloyd�s
academic theory in a more accessible examination
of why Beckett praised Jack. Thomas MacGreevy, unlike
Lloyd�s other two titular subjects, may be less
familiar today. A mutual friend of these two subjects,
MacGreevy�s essay gave Yeats the first extended
attention as in his work conveying �the consummate
expression of the spirit of his own nation�. (qtd.
45) Beckett, in turn, quoted MacGreevy. Lloyd, delving
into this artist�s aesthetic representation of the
new Republic, reminds us of how Jack Yeats opened
�a door between the damaged life of a heretofore
hidden Ireland and the secret realm of its spirit�.
(45) Nods to Connolly and Ernie O�Malley, Lloyd
shows, further complicate the radical republican
strains that Jack Yeats threaded into his art, according
to MacGreevy�s nationalistic interpretation: an
analysis that provoked Beckett�s disdain. Civil
War, partition, lawlessness,� the attempted subordination
of the human to the landscape: these are further
elements Lloyd mixes into his reading of Yeats�
paintings and drawings. As with Behan and Tone,
so with Yeats and MacGreevy-- we are reminded how
the �anticipatory trace of a republic emerges as
that thing that defies representation�. (67) ����
�Spaces
of time through times of space: Joyce, Ireland and
Colonial Modernity� continues the trajectory of
the previous three directions: all encounter how
the aesthetic energises the actual republican project.
Luke Gibbons argues how �disjunctive or �allochronic�
time� in Ulysses contrasts with spatial conceptions
then emerging �within modernity within the metropolitan
centre�. (71) Joyce�s employment of narrative simultaneity,
Gibbons explains, has been previously explored.
What such studies have neglected is whether Joyce�s
Dublin�or the Ireland of his formative years�should
be defined �in terms of space as conceived by high
modernism� (72). Any reader of Gibbons on cultural
theory, the cinema, and the connections between
cultural and literary production will find here
another re-orientation. The parallax view, how film
and narrative flashbacks in the �Wandering Rocks�
chapter chart the breakdown of simultaneity, and
Joyce�s conversion of such techniques into �unannounced
flashbacks, or rather �flash-cuts� in which the
pressure of the past forces its way into the present�
support Gibbons� conclusion that historicised space,
�the nightmare of history� encountered by Stephen
Dedalus, comprises the true space within which Ulysses
exists. (85; emphasis in the original.) One study
that may have appeared too late for Gibbons� consideration,
Joyce and Reality: the empirical strikes back
by John Gordon (Syracuse UP, 2004) also confronts
Joycean transgressions within and beyond the naturalism
and historicism asserted by the novel�s previous
scholars.
That
same novel�s Leopold Bloom endures as Dublin�s most
famous if most conflicted (half-) Jewish resident.
Cormac � Grada situates his �Settling In: Dublin�s
Jewish Immigrants of a Century Ago� within historicised
contexts rather than literary departures. Fleeing
pogroms, most of the Jews in Ireland came post-1870,
to urbanised areas. Litvaks (refugees from Lithuania)
generated much of the rise in Jewish Irish numbers;
their predecessors, �English� Jews, resented the
newcomers. North of the Grand Canal, �Little Jerusalem�
thrived for decades as the heart of the community.
� Grada studies the records of this generation between
the 1890s and the 1920s. The Litvak followed the
tendency of Jews back in the Pale of Settlement
in the Russian regions to ghettoise, and � Grada
explains how this led more often not to clusters
in the same streets contiguously, but in small enclaves
dispersed throughout Little Jerusalem. While rarely
having a �whole street to itself� the Litvak descendants
nonetheless left their mark on Dublin that, even
a century after Bloomsday, leaves its faint traces
around Lower Clanbrassil Street today.
As
the Jews had suffered persecution, so had the Fenians:
both suspected as subversives within a Catholic
Ireland whose authorities preached fidelity to the
Church and Crown. Breand�n MacSuibhne and Amy Martin
investigate �Fenians in the Frame: Photographic
Irish Political Prisoners, 1865-68'. The authors
report from the Irish National Archive the files
with photos preserve nearly 250 prisoners; earlier
than the rest of the British realm, working-class
men found their likenesses captured-- the better
to secure their capture. �The state had developed
the mugshot�. (104) Even in 1857, Irish officials
began some use of photographing prisoners. Mountjoy
and Kilmainham�s internees�especially among many
arrested after the end of the American Civil War
sparked a revival of Fenian veterans determined
to put their acquired military skills to further
militancy-- found themselves some of the first prisoners
to have the process of their state scrutiny preserved
permanently, not only in writing but in image. Resistance
in the documentation of their religion, of their
tattoos, their grins: the human side that may have
been only imagined among those incarcerated in 1798
or 1848 now might assume the faces and the expressions
that we recognise from Republicans in the next 130-odd
years�if often in more widely disseminated media:
the poster, the snapshot in the news, the booking
photo on t.v., or the surveillance camera�s grainy
figures. MacSuibhne and Martin compare how Fenian
imagery linked to fears of insurgency links to post
9/11 fears of terrorism, and how the panopticon�s
gaze may change its resolution, but not its persecution
of those summoned before the imperious lens. They
conclude that the �Irish Fenian is the racial and
cultural converse of the ethical citizen subject�.
(117) Any who threaten the stability of the state
must be manacled and made submissive. The Irish
workingman found his distorted representation in
the face of the Fenian. In wars on terror, the authors
remind us, �photography was a foundational element�
in its inception over a century ago. (119) Throughout
this collection of essays, while the chronology
shifts about, the relevance of republican and cultural
nationalism lies embedded within each entry.
The
clash between a national identity based on political
boundaries and that of cultural cohesion arrives
with Mary Burgess� �Mapping the Narrow Ground: Geography,
History and Partition.� Welsh geographer E. Estyn
Evans from 1928 on lectured at QUB; he promoted
a regionalism that gave the North a concentrated
rural agrarian-based mentality rather than the contested
and recently partitioned political polity. �Regionalism
added cultural density to the idea of partition.�
(122) That is, Evans� popularised a separation for
Ulster rooted in its inhabitants� relationship to
the land that strengthened the decisions recently
made to keep the Six Counties under the dictates
of Unionism. Evans� �humane geography� ironically
preferred to distinguish Ulster�s material culture
as �folklife� from the Free State�s Gaelicised,
Peig Sayers� paradigmatic, �folklore.� Burgess also
analyses T.W. Moody and A.T.Q. Stewart�s own revisionist
histories that followed.. I might add, extending
Burgess� own argument, that the reader could mull
over the name given the �Ulster-American�-- rather
than the Irish or even a Northern Irish-- open air
park near Omagh today. Ties via the Mellon family
between its ancestral homestead and its nascent
power in the New World bind the family land to the
family lord; these, however, stretch thousands of
miles to the transplanted former native demesnes
rather than a few miles south to the more Catholic
counties.� As Burgess sums it up: �Evans�s �Ulster�
was ultimately conceived as a sectarian landscape
in which the land itself had somehow shaped the
politics of division.� (125)
A
feature of the layout of the Field Day Review,
due to its large-format design spreads, wider page
space, and marginal notes, is that it can juxtapose
image with print provocatively. Alongside Burgess�
text, photos taken December 1956 by Charles Hewitt
record a Unionist revenge on attacks by the breakaway
Saor Uladh, followed by an IRA-RUC skirmish at the
Lisnaskea barracks in Fermanagh. Without captions
at the end of this array of stark compositions,
one would never know who the police were, who shot
the bullets, and who was pursuing whom.
�Ireland
in the 1940s and 1950s: The Photographs of Bert
Hardy� continues the FDR�s display of iconography
of resistance to the State. Sarah Smith introduces
Hardy�s shots for Picture Post. 1948's general
election of the 12th D�il that brought
Clann na Poblachta into the governing coalition,
the Guinness brewery in 1953, and unemployment in
the North in 1955, in Smith�s opinion, sparked Hardy�s
�compelling visual narrative��one that in its depiction
of poverty and constraints may seem predictable
but not perhaps to some of its viewers the �flashes
of energy and self-confidence� that Smith locates
and Hardy depicts in a variety of by now unexpected
locations. (133) Michael Scott�s design for Dublin�s
Bus�ras terminal, in my opinion, is dwarfed in its
exuberance by other shots of a grim array of Derry�s
dwellers--on the dole or picking among heaps in
scenes that look more like those of wartime deprivation
far beyond the Channel ten years earlier.
Silvio
Berlusconi�s continuing saga of ineptitude and corruption,
then, may be a fitting transition away from pinched
Irish scenes to expansive Italian vistas. Their
beleaguered prime minister, Conor Deane warns, should
be regarded by us not as a failure but �perhaps
as our future� within an EU where Berlusconi and
Putin herald anarcho-capitalism, where Silvio has
�made the nexus between business and government
explicit.� (174) Deane�s �Letter from Rome: A State
of Embarrassment� reports on the latest of many
Italian scandals; what catches my eye are the strikingly
dignified selections from 20c Italian art-- and
one by Robert Ballagh about an Italian!--that slyly
stalk along the pages of this article. Another graphic
contrasts notably with the rest. The first photo
alongside Deane�s first page is a strikingly pedestrian
snap of Berlusconi in some turban-like headgear
alongside Cherie Blair, caught mid-denture in a
rictus, and Tony looking down so his eyes cannot
be seen, only their downcast lids. This 2001 shot
from Sardinia, red-eye glare in the cheap camera
and all, says as many words as Deane�s few thousand,
suffice to say.
These
predictors of restless capital logically prepare
for Benedict Anderson�s �Globalization and its Discontents.�
You are reading this review via the Net. Anderson
shows how �long-distance nationalism� and e-mail
loosen tribal loyalties; this is no surprise. Tom
Friedman of the New York Times, I add, promotes
in bestsellers such as The Earth is Flat
a �new system� run by �super-empowered individuals�
alongside the multinationals and nation-states,
a third entity whose manifestoes may aspire to annihilation,
jihad, or the Second Coming or--he hopes but does
not guarantee-- free-trade, capitalism, and relentless
competition. So, how does Anderson differ? His books
may sell fewer copies, but the author of Imagined
Communities can boast of his own influence if
on a more specialised shortlist. Anderson explains
that in a diasporic world, citizenship divorces
from nationality. One may live in the adopted country,
but need never separate from the politics and the
identity of the land one left behind physically.
The Net only expands these �self-enclosed niches.�
(185) Audiences such as that for The Blanket
would do well to compare the necessity for free
speech and openness to all opinions with the dangers
of sectarian fanaticism and chauvinism that have
darkened so many purportedly nationalist visions.
Seamus
Deane�s �Edward Said (1935-2003): A Late Style of
Humanism� confronts Said�s difficult determination
to remain faithful to �his vexed, yet loyal adherence
to the humanist tradition in which he had been educated
and by the limitations of he so often was dismayed.�
(189) This nimble formulation expands into Deane�s
survey of how Said expounded postcolonialism and
the Palestinian cause into a cohesive intellectual
and politicised blend of influences ranging from
the predictable Derrida, Foucault, Bhabha, and Luk�cs
to the unexpected: Cardinal Newman, Erich Auerbach,�
E.R. Curtius to name a few. Deane reminds us of
Said�s interrogation of Joseph Conrad, and how this
was not as one-sided a conversation as we might
assume. Beethoven attracted not only Adorno but
Said. Deane locates Said more akin to Nostromo
than Marx. Deane tracks the later career of Said
alongside his reading of Adorno, and Deane after
a long and winding intellectual path alongside Said
winds up at Freud�s Moses and Monotheism,
bringing it all back home to Palestine again. It�s
a challenging journey for both his subject and himself,
and readers should be impressed by Deane�s own determination
to better Said himself in expressing complicated
ideas succinctly. Deane follows Said�s itinerary
directly. He reminds us of Said�s own awareness
that prose expounded far above the reach of all
but the most educated of us unable to attend or
afford Oxbridge or the Ivies only diminished the
intellectuals who crept behind such tangled jargon.
Deane models clarity for his readers.
Such
control of the word brings Clare Carroll through
�Early Modern Ireland,� a review article reappraising
scholarship following D.B. Quinn�s pioneering 1966
study, The Elizabethans and the Irish. She
singles out Breand�n � Buachalla�s Aisling Gh�ar:
Na St�obhartaigh agus an tAos L�inn and Marc
Caball�s Poets and Politics: Reaction
and Continuity in Irish Poetry, 1558-1625. These
�two most important books of the last decade on
early modern Ireland� examine respectively the aisling
(vision poem) as articulating political thought
and encouraging political action and how traditional
codes of bardic verse transformed under the pressure
of the �New English� incursion. (205) Three new
biographies deepen understanding of poetry�s political
dimensions in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Colm Lennon�s Archbishop Richard Creagh of Armagh,
1523-86 triangulates Creagh where not only the
Gaelic tradition and the Tudor English meet, but
where papal diplomacy also sharpens the encounter.
Vincent P. Carey�s Surviving the Tudors: The
�Wizard� Lord of Kildare and English Rule in Ireland,
1537-1586 takes this tumultuous shift in power
as the Church of England fought against the Church
of Rome-- and places the �Wizard� in its vortex,
surviving amidst the dangers of both the bardic
and the royal courts. The World of Geoffrey Keating
by Bernadette Cunningham focuses upon a representative
figure: the historian of the Gaelic past with a
Norman-English first name-- to show how his humanism
informed his history. With John McCavitt�s The
Flight of the Earls, Nicholas Canny�s Making
Ireland British, 1580-1650, and David Edwards�
The Ormond Lordship in County Kilkenny, 1515-1642
the aftermath of the Crown�s victory is investigated
in its micro and macro-cosmic domains. The 17th
century emerges in monographs by P�draig Lenihan�s
Confederate Catholics at War, 1641-49 �and
Tadhg � hAnnrach�in�s Catholic Reformation in
Ireland: the Mission of Rinuccini, 1645-49 as
well as a festschrift for Donal Cregan, Kingdoms
in Crisis, ed. Mich�el � Siochr�. This editor
in his earlier work and Cregan in his both inspired
these later studies: while such titles may seem
arcane to the uninitiated, in listing them here
perhaps their appeal may be broadened. Too often
academics find their efforts languishing while a
curious �general reader� eager to know more about
this period may have no idea about new scholarship
in early modern Irish history.
Is
Ireland part of Britain or the Northern Atlantic
archipelago? Jane H. Ohlmeyer edits a collection
that argues the latter in Political Thought in
Seventeenth-Century Ireland: Kingdom or Colony.
How the Irish framed their own sovereignty within
not only British and Irish but continental theory
is one of many topics that new scholarship in the
wake of postcolonialism addresses in Hiram Morgan,
ed. Political Ideology in Ireland: 1541-1641.
Negotiating between Irish and English languages
itself provides much still contended: see Patricia
Palmer�s Language and Conquest in Early Modern
Ireland: English Renaissance Literature and Elizabethan
Imperial Expansion. Too often only glanced towards
rather than faced, the connection of power and rhetoric
goes much deeper than a cursory citation from Spenser.
David J. Baker and Willy Maley edit British Identities
and English Renaissance Literature; historiography,
Shakespeare, and the �brave new world� he envisioned
all enrich and expand new English and Irish literary
criticism. The Irish emigrated beyond that New World,
and not only Earls and wild geese. Thomas O�Connor�s
The Irish in Europe, 1580-1815 and a collection
co-edited with Mary Ann Lyons, Irish Migrants
in Europe after Kinsale, 1602-1820 compile studies
on an topic deserving investigation.
A
very specific study on the Irish College at Rome
1628-78 covers the Ludovisian College there;
this edits a ms. by James Reilly, S.J.,� from 1678
that was an early version of an alumni souvenir
or an �official history� of an alma mater for many
clerics trained abroad. Carroll confesses herself
let down by Clodagh Tait�s dismissal of Irish-language
poetry as �conventional�-- presumably in its elegiac
mode, given Tait�s Death, Burial and Commemoration
in Ireland, 1550-1650. I share Carroll�s disappointment,
but given my own research into earlier literature
on purgatory in Middle English along with its Irish
backgrounds, even an uneven expansion of this period�s
customs and records regarding Irish departed and
departure would be welcome. Socioeconomic and cultural
history also provides two decades� worth of essays
by Toby Bernard, in another erratic volume, Irish
Protestant Ascents and Descents, 1641-1770. Finally,
to end a long list, �amonn � Ciardha�s Ireland
and the Jacobite Cause, 1685-1766 takes us closer
to the end of not the seventeenth but the eighteenth
century. Even if modern Ireland still awaits, its
early stages have ended, and these twenty-two books
gather up the most recent explorations of that older
era.
Reviews
end the volume, and I while I would like to list
all the books considered by title, these would stretch
an already packed load to breaking point, at least
for most readers� patience. With apologies to the
sixteen reviewers and the thirty-three reviewed,
I will skip ahead and skim their contents to note
recent books on: the tradition of the cailleach
(wise-woman healer); folklore of Tory Island and
of Oriel-- the Armagh-Monaghan-Louth ancient region;
cutting and necessary pamphlets by An Aimsir
�g in Irish on its culture and its identity
now; biographies of mid 20c writers Elizabeth Bowen
and Maeve Brennan; John McGarry and Brendan O�Leary�s
collected articles and Richard Bourke�s political-philosophical
work-- both on the North; eight recent books on
Irish drama; Charles Trevelyan on the Famine; TB
in 19th and 20th c. Ireland;
four books on semi-colonial and postcolonial literary
theory in Irish contexts; Joseph Lennon�s ambitious
study, �Irish Orientalism; Francis Higgins�
1795-1801 letters to Dublin Castle; Irish political
prisoners 1848-1922 �by Se�n McConville; Tudor
and Stuart verse from Ireland by the expert on the
subject, Andrew Carpenter; books on Irish portraiture
and Irish televised drama; Philip O�Leary�s long-awaited
follow-up to his poetry study, as Gaelic Prose
in the Irish Free State, 1922-1939.
Brendan
O�Leary�s 1995 study Explaining Northern Ireland,
co-authored with John McGarry, sits on the shelf
behind me as I type. Not only its subject but its
detailed, even acerbic, judgments must be familiar
to some readers of The Blanket. Like the
latter publication, the former arouses controversy
more than contentment. O�Leary, who the credits
in FDR note as a recent advisor to the parliament
of Kurdistan, circles back to Ireland for another
contentious subject. The volume before the book
reviews ends with its longest article, thirty pages.
Fittingly, it opens with a photo of a Long Kesh
cell, titled �H-Block 5, B-Wing, 9/25, 2003� with
its bed neatly made, walls daubed pale green and
frosted windows intact.� �Mission Accomplished?
Looking Back at the IRA� filters the long campaign
through the mirror image of its campaigners. �Group-honour�,
O� Leary proposes, �often provokes more violence
than considerations of material self-interest, or
material group-interest.� (217) Pledges of its volunteers
having been fulfilled, its constitutional mission
completed, the IRA �may, should, and likely will
disband.�� He supports this contention by reviewing
its history, objectives, constitutional rationales,
and its structure. He devotes careful review to
its finances, its recruits, its goals, and its killings.
Space prevents me from detailing his findings. Suffice
it to say that this study extends exhaustively and
intelligently this often-raised objection: if the
IRA recognises the Dublin government, why does the
IRA still insist in its own laws that it remains
the legitimate government-in-internal-exile of the
Irish Republic? For instance, he-- perhaps wryly--
notes that the current Irish p.m. �has declared
himself a socialist,� so the IRA�s goal of a socialist
32-county republic could thereby be seen to be capable
of�if not already having been�being fulfilled. The
arcane logic that granted the IRA the continuity
with the Second Dail�s 1921 mandate from the last
all-Ireland election has, O�Leary explains, shifts
now back to the First Dail, which assumed that when
it took power it would then bring about �an autonomous
Ireland that would exercise its rights to self-determination.�
(244) I conclude with this citation to show one
of many examples of how closely O�Leary takes on
the IRA on its own terms, and unlike many commentators
he actually cites the Green Book when taking the
Movement to task for holding itself accountable
by-- to borrow Liam Lynch's phrase-- 'no other law'.
