IN 1901, the very first Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded. Its recipient, clearly, was taking his place in the pantheon of literary immortals. No doubt, when they chose the winner, the judges felt certain that they were honouring a body of work that would still be read, discussed and esteemed 100 years hence. Now that their imagined future has arrived, it is somewhat chastening to reflect that their choice, Rene Francois Armand Sully Prudhomme, is hardly regarded as essential reading. His name does not even feature in most of the standard literary encyclopaedias.
Few fields of endeavour are more obsessed with posterity than literary culture. Mike Murphy's new series for RTE, Reading the Future, featuring interviews with the 12 living Irish writers judged by an independent panel to be the ones most likely to be "read, performed and esteemed" in 100 years' time, is a fascinating exercise in literary astrology. The writers, chosen by a panel chaired by Prof Declan Kiberd, are all unarguably distinguished. But the point of this particular exercise is to suggest that they will be equally well-regarded in the year 2100. It thus raises, yet again, the question asked in the old Irish parliament by Sir Boyle Roche when debating a motion to erect a monument to posterity: "Why should we do anything for posterity? What has posterity ever done for us?"
It is interesting to speculate, for example, on what choices a panel of experts, asked a century ago to draw up a similar list of then-living Irish writers, might have imagined we would now be reading. Bernard Shaw might just have squeezed in, though he was not then a particularly successful playwright. W.B. Yeats might just have made it on the basis of his new volume, The Wind Among the Reeds, though a sceptic might have wondered whether all his Celtic Twilight stuff wasn't just another passing fad. George Moore would almost certainly have made it. But Oscar Wilde would probably have been left out as a shameful and best-forgotten figure. Bram Stoker? Too trashy. Augusta Gregory?
On the other hand, Emily Lawless, Edward Dowden, George Egerton, Aubrey De Vere, Sir John Mahaffy, Shan Bullock and G.F. Armstrong might well be just the sort of writers who would seem destined to find an appreciative audience in the year 2000. After all, the basic assumption would have been that Irish literature would still be essentially a branch of British imperial culture. The Ireland we now inhabit would have been literally inconceivable.
As Declan Kiberd acknowledges in his incisive introduction to the book which accompanies the E series, trying to guess which contemporary writers will last best is a shot in the dark. Even before considering the claims of particular individuals, some basic assumptions have to be sifted. Will there still be readers? Will there still be such a thing as "Irish" literature? Will there still be any significant readership for works in the Irish language? Will some of the fundamental concerns of today's writers - personal and collective identity, the politics of gender, the dynamics of exile and homecoming - have become virtually incomprehensible to all but a few specialists in late 20th-century studies? The notion that our great-grandchildren might find many of our most urgent concerns as dull and obscure as we find those of our great-grandparents is so hurtful that we have little choice but to carry on regardless of the unpredictable answers to such questions.
One of the few things we can probably say about the future with some confidence is that it will not be any less subject to the whims of fashion and the effects of technology than the present is. Writers, especially neglected ones, tend to see the future as a literary version of Heaven, in which today's slights will be rewarded with posthumous praise. Time, in the unpopular writer's daydream, is the court of final appeal in which the ignorant judgments of embittered critics and indifferent readers will be struck down and the true worth of unappreciated genius will be upheld.
There is some truth in this notion, but not as much as there ought to be. The effects of hype do wear off over time. Works that seemed strange and obscure do become clearer and more comprehensible. Yet, some of the changes in literary taste are simply changes in fashion. It may seem obvious to us now that King Lear is one of the greatest plays ever written. But in the 18th century, it was considered literally unplayable, and was staged only in a version "improved" by a playwright we now regard as a dull hack.
BOOKS, in any case, sometimes endure, not because they are intrinsically great, but because they have been transformed by new technologies into popular myths. One of the reasons an imaginary panel in 1900 would not have predicted that the most enduring Irish novel of their time would be Bram Stoker's Dracula was that they could not possibly have imagined the possibilities of the new medium of cinema. Who is to say that some Irish novel of our day, now confined to a genre such as children's fiction or science fiction, might not be as universally famous in 2100 as Dracula is now, simply because some new electronic art form has picked it up?
In reality, then, E's this list of Irish writers for the future tells us much more about 2000 than 2100. The question being addressed is not "what writers will last?" but "what writers have qualities that seem, to intelligent readers now, timeless?" The answer the panel has come up with is as good as any. It tells us, in broad terms, what the current working definition of "timeless" is. As it happens, that definition is a pretty conservative one.
Particularly striking is the predominance of poetry, which fills five of the available places on the putative time machine. This, in part, reflects the extraordinarily high quality of contemporary Irish poetry. It is difficult to imagine that at least some poems by Seamus Heaney, Thomas Kinsella, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill (not to mention, as the panel doesn't, Richard Murphy and John Montague) will not be read in the future with the same kind of pleasure that we now derive from Yeats, or for that matter from William Blake, Andrew Marvell or Geoffrey Chaucer. With its rhythms and intricacies, its play of sounds and forms, poetry survives social change better than other literary genres.
Given that there are so many poets on the list, however, the absences are also striking. That there is no place for the fabulous virtuosity of Paul Muldoon, for Ciaran Carson's brilliant recent forays into the rich terrain that lies between poetry and non-fiction prose, for Medbh McGuckian's hypnotic oddness, or for Paul Durcan's intimate incantations, suggests a rather constrained view of what a timeless poem is. The working definition seems to preclude anything that is deeply, unmistakably characteristic of the knowing, ironic, ruefully unheroic Irish sensibility that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s.
The same, broadly speaking, is true of the choices in drama and fiction. With the obvious exception of the still-emergent Marina Carr (and, in a different sense, of the self-invented John Banville), the judges have chosen writers whose work was driven by the social and cultural transformations of the 1950s and 1960s, rather than the more angular and fragmentary forces of the past two decades. There is a real logic in this. The conflict between tradition and modernity in Ireland, which was both reflected and, to an extraordinary degree, shaped by writers such as Brian Friel, Tom Murphy, John McGahern and Edna O'Brien, did create a "classical" era in which the small stories of individuals could mirror the big stories of a whole society.
But who's to say that future readers or audiences may not be equally fascinated by the mixture of public myth and private family history that writers as different as Sebastian Barry, Frank McGuinness, Roddy Doyle, Eavan Boland, Paula Meehan and Colm Toibin have concocted. It seems somewhat prissy to exclude, as the list does, any writer who is overtly interested in popular culture or whose work has clear connections to movies, rock music or sport - the daily obsessions of huge parts of the present Irish population.
To put it another way, the putative reader in 2100, if she sticks to the twelve12 writers on the list, will find it hard to place their work alongside other images from the archives of the 1980s and 1990s: U2, Italia '90, Temple Bar, queues for visas outside the American embassy, Gay Pride marches, video rental shops, Riverdance, the heroin epidemic. Maybe the judges are right to feel that today's ephemera will be, well, ephemeral. Yet, as Declan Kiberd points out, the most enduring Irish novelist of all is James Joyce, whose greatest book engages with what he calls "quotidian banality".
Which brings us back to Sir Boyle Roche and the pointlessness of doing anything for posterity. Future readers will doubtless be unimpressed by any attempts to pre-judge their tastes and interests. What the RTE list, and its omissions, really tells us is that these are the good old days for Irish writing. There are not twelve12 living Irish writers whose work can be imagined in the hands of readers when we are all dead. There are thirty30 or forty40. If they please, enlighten, move and entertain us now, then that is surely enough. For readers and audiences, after all, there is no past and no future, just the absorption in an enriched present moment that a play, a poem or a novel can and must create. So long as it endures in the minds of the living, it can let the future take care of itself.
Reading the Future begins will be broadcast on RTE Radio 1 on Saturday, November 18th. An accompanying book is published by Lilliput Press (£12).