Surveying flatlands.

Brown, Terence

DEREK HAND

A HISTORY OF THE IRISH NOVEL.

CAMBRIDGE: CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS.

2011. HARDBACK 55.00 [pounds sterling]/US$ 90.00.

A KEY PROBLEM (cogently discussed in he introduction to this work), for any literary historian embarking on a history of the Irish novel in English is that the territory to be surveyed comprises broad, often dull, flatlands in which a few major peaks dominate the scene. In the eighteenth century, Swift and, arguably Sterne, rise above the many more lesser talents who were exploring fictional worlds as the new literary form took shape. In the nineteenth century, only Edgeworth and Maturin at the beginning of the century and the Somerville and Ross of The Real Charlotte at its end achieve similar prominence when set against the worthy Irish authors whose works now languish in the dusty multi-volume editions that weighed down Victorian bookshelves. It was a time when numerous Irish writers of fiction sought to make Irish reality the substance of the kind of realist fictions that seemed accurately to take the measure of life in England and on the continent. Their failure highlights, in a way that probably exaggerates the quality of works such as Sheridan le Fanu's sensationalist Uncle Silas and Stoker's gothic extravaganza Dracula (a work, which like Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, lives, I have always thought, more powerfully in filmic versions than in the original text), how well-nigh impossible their task probably was. For Irish reality for much of the century did not seem answerable to the realist method which could produce a George Eliot in England and a Balzac in France. In the twentieth century, of course, Joyce and Beckett tower above their contemporaries as they can seem to subsume their predecessors achievements too. Only Elizabeth Bowen and Flann O'Brien, in their very different ways, seem to make their own modernist presence felt in the shadows cast by the looming peaks of literary experimentalism in such works as Joyce's Ulysses and Beckett's postwar trilogy, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnameable.

Derek Hand in this boldly-argued, thoroughly-researched, thoughtfully constructed book seeks to cope with this difficulty by shaping his text as a series of chapters interspersed by a series of interchapters that focus on what turn out to be texts crucial to the book's overall argument. A problem emerges, however, inasmuch as it is the seventeenth-century, anonymously published novel Virtue Rewarded; or, the Irish Princess that is chosen as the subject of the initial "interchapter 1 ," preceding chapter one itself, while the far greater writer Swift must be addressed in a chapter dealing with the period 1665-1800, as if his complex and internationally renowned engagement with fiction as the novel was developing as a distinct literary form were not the major peak to be scaled by the critic in this part of his book.

Later interchapters are dedicated to Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent, Somerville and Ross's The Real Charlotte, James Joyce's Ulysses, Elizabeth Bowen' s The Last September, John Banville's Doctor Copernicus, Seamus Deane's Reading in the Dark, and John McGahern's That They May Face the Rising Sun. The difficulty that arises because of this authorial strategy and the critical choices it involves is that by directing attention to such prominent works as Castle Raekrent, Ulysses, even The Last September, whatever about Swift's Gulluver's Travels, the reader is left wondering why Beckett's Trilogy, one of the masterworks of the age alongside Joyce's comic epic in prose, is not given its interchapter in the twentieth-century section of the book. This remarkable trio of fictions is afforded a mere page-and-a-bit of notice, while, for example, Seamus Deane's, admittedly powerful, Reading in the Dark is allowed six pages of useful analysis in Interchapter 7.

The reason for what I take to be a disproportion of emphasis (Deane's single novel, fine as it is, does not possess the fictional radicalism of Beckett's tragicomic masterwork) may be that the way Hand reads Deane, as compared with his reading of Beckett can be aligned more readily with the overall tendency of his book which is composed within the colonial and post colonial paradigm that is now normative in Irish Studies. Working within this structure of thought, Hand is deeply concerned to show how the Irish experience of colonialism and its aftermath has always involved a struggle with modernity and modernisation (and on this he is often thought-provoking and insightful). For Hand, therefore, Deane's troubling narrative is a necessary text because at a crucial moment in Ireland's political history "it begins to to repossess the reins of narrative power, but to do so in a manner that complicates rather than liberates the individual" (252). Hand continues:

 To do this at the moment in the 1990s
 when it might have been thought that
 Ireland, in the midst of the developing
 peace process, had come into a position
 of objectivity to its past - had come to a
 moment when a reconcilation with its
 diverse pasts was possible - is to indicate
 the ongoing trauma of Irish colonial
 history. (252.)

Hand concludes: "Ireland's history is not fixed, finished or complete [whose is?], there are always more stories to be told and more stories to read" (253). It seems, nonetheless, that these may amount to the same old story, if, despite their being, as he suggests, human stories "among many possible human stories," the "ongoing trauma of Irish colonial history" is a defining, if complex, condition of their telling. By contrast, Hand reckons Beckett's Trilogy a terminus (he is doubtful that the three works in question do actually constitute a trilogy, as if that lessened their cumulative power when they are read in sequence). He does, it is true, see these texts as devastating in their deconstruction of "the certainties of tradition," which creates its own kind of liberation. So they are a paradoxical "end and a beginning" (208). However, Hand insists: "For the Irish novel, particularly, Beckett's fiction consciously did not allow for imitation: it was a dead-end in terms of offering either a stylistic or narrational ground for a continuing tradition" (208). Whatever about a stylistic ground for imitation (and what serious writer engages in simple imitation of another's style?) this is perplexing. Beckett's novels, particularly the Trilogy, have proved inspirational for such exceptional and diverse narrators as Paul Auster, J.M. Coetzee and Salman Rushdie. There is no reason, surely, to conclude that Beckett as novelist could not have the same kind of tonic effect on an Irish writer that he has had on them and others, stimulating him or her to produce work which might redefine or transcend a "tradition" that Deane's book, in Hand's terms, compellingly consolidates.

In laboring the above point I am, it is only fair to say, neglecting this book's considerable merits. It is written with the confidence bred of wide knowledge of the field and the author is prepared to exercise judgement bravely in a way some literary historians will not: Francis Stuart's novels, for example, while deemed "essential reading" are reckoned to "represent a failure because of his unwillingness to truly shine a light on his actions and his consciousness" (206). Hand is prepared, too, to generalize in a way that challenges and stimulates: "The story, or the history, of Irish fiction revolves around the long emergence of an Irish personality that might be able to exist--even for a moment--outside the burden of stereotype" (75). He is capable of brilliant observations (for instance, he notes how the geographic center of gravity shifts over the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuiles) and he is prepared to be wrong in selecting among current writers those he thinks will stand the test of time. Inevitably there are omissions (Forrest Reid and Joyce Cary among the dead, Maurice Leitch among the living, in my book) and it seems curious, one must say, that a writer as productive and skilled as Brian Moore should be represented only by The Lonely Passion o f Judith Hearne. And a few things will need correcting in a new edition: it gives the wrong impression to say the Rackrents in Edgeworth's novel fall over four generations, the point being that the Sir Murtagh lacks an heir so his younger brother Sir Kit inherits. When he too dies without issue the ruinously improvident successor, Sir Condy "heir-at-law to the Castle Rackrent estate." is "a remote branch of the family." George Russell appears twice as A.E. Russell. More oddly on p. 149 the author states "As has been noted throughout this study, the Irish wake and funeral have always been of almost obsessive interest to a wider novelistic audience outside Ireland. In many ways, especially in the nineteenth-century novel, all Irish culture was distilled in this one custom." These are a fascinating claims, but where are they "noted." even if left undeveloped in the book, other than on this page.

--Trinity College Dublin