IRISH STUDIES: Modernism, Ireland and Civil War,by Nicholas Allen, Cambridge University Press, 225pp, £50
THE TREATY split, pro and anti, Irregulars and Freestaters: the legacy of 1922 is most easily understood as violent division and cleavage. Nicholas Allen begins his study of the 1920s with snapshots of a more varied political landscape. He sketches the activities of working- class movements, strikes and pan-colonial discussions, setting them alongside the production of works of literature and painting determined to resist their interpreters – an Irish avant-garde.
Allen's portrait of the cultural life of post-civil war Ireland is of a state in "productive disarray". It would be easy enough to cavil at the term "productive" here, considering the violent waste of the civil war, but that would be to miss his point. Allen is good at locating the multiple and often contradictory traces of modernist and avant-garde artistic practice in Free State Ireland. The focus of the book is firstly on the great Irish Europeans: Joyce, the brothers Yeats and Beckett (though in each case Allen concentrates on their more arcane work: Finnegans Wake, A Vision, Beckett's early novels, Jack Yeats's notebooks). But he looks beyond the modernist masters for evidence of a broader international avant-garde community in independent Ireland. Allen explores a varied array of cultural spaces where the "dissident imagination" prospered "in the margins of political society" – from cabaret to theatre riots, to ephemeral magazines of the 1920s and 1930s such as the Klaxon, and Motleyto Ireland Today. The heroes of the Irish avant-garde thus turn out to be minor writers and activists such as Liam O'Flaherty, Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington and Denis Johnston; editors such as Con Leventhal, Mary Manning, Peadar O'Donnell and Jim O'Donovan.
This is an ambitious book, full of inventive readings, but it is at its best when it speaks in a more subdued tone, the argument most persuasive when most detailed. Reading Joyce's 1922 notebook Allen finds the "shrapnel" presence of the civil war surviving in passages of Finnegans Wake, for example, or he explores the creative affinities between Jack Yeats's Punchcartoons and his Dublin sketchbooks of the 1920s.
True to his sense of the cultural ferment in Free State Ireland, Allen resists weaving these different artistic strands into a single movement. Nonetheless, his emphasis throughout is on dissidence, and in particular on parody and mimicry (the parodic experimentalism associated with the Gate Theatre, for example) as forms of resistance to the cultural status quo. Rather than an analysis of the artistic legacy of civil war then, what emerges here is, loosely, a history of republican modernism. Indeed what Allen calls “guerrilla modernism” often seems to take its shape from the practices of revolution. He discovers the “spectral life of the avant-garde” in the shadows of more established artistic institutions, as though radical writing was an underground activity comparable to being on the run. Indeed the considerable attention devoted to the work of Ernie O’Malley suggests this connection is more than metaphorical. The avant-garde of the 1920s displays qualities of fluidity, irresolution, fragmentation, and a concern with the buried history of the revolution – all signs of its quarrel with the new political dispensation.
Allen traces the shifting meanings of the term "republican" through the 1920s and 1930s, as dissidents adjusted first to de Valera's acceptance of the political system, and then to his control of it. This chronology usefully charts the ways in which political change impacted on Irish modernists – from the concern with the Spanish civil war in the journal Ireland Today, which ran from 1936-1938, to more subtle changes, such as a new focus on the Dublin suburbs in 1930s writing.
Allen is at his best when analysing the varied details of a new state in cultural and political transition, yet despite his wish to get away from simple civil-war divisions, their presence haunts this study. In his portrait of newly independent Ireland the formal, political structures of independence are undermined by the ghostly structures of subversion and dissent, the forward march of nationalist history (its high-point 1916) is undone by fragments of buried revolutionary memory, the new institutions of the state are destabilised by the diversions of the avant-garde.
Clair Wills is Professor of Irish Literature at Queen Mary University of London. Her most recent book,Dublin 1916: The Siege of the GPO , was published by Profile in April
