Irish Studies: 'Ireland may be a separatist issue", observes David Pierce in his introduction, "but it is almost impossible to handle in a separatist way." He argues for the hybrid nature of Irish literature as an effect of the colonial encounter.
After the Elizabethan confiscations, the Irish became defamiliarised, he says, a people strange even to themselves. Over later centuries, not just people but the very idea of Ireland began to disappear. The revivalists of the last century deceived those who remained into thinking that their losses would be overcome with independence from colonial rule, but the lives of the poor were largely unaltered.
By such analysis, Pierce seeks to reconcile the "archipelago" theory that Irish culture is best understood in the context of "these islands" with the post-colonial commentary of the past decade. The former theory is sometimes accused of being the old imperial line tricked out in pseudo-socialist garb; the latter of being old-style nationalism in trendy Third World gear.
Nothing daunted, Pierce combines both in clever readings of the role of cricket in the imagination of James Joyce. When Stephen Daedalus in A Portrait outwits the Englishman who is his teacher by proving that he knows more about the derivation of the word "tundish", he should, in theory, feel the same surge of triumph which an Indian fast-bowler enjoys on knocking back the middle stump of Andrew Flintoff. But Stephen doesn't feel triumphant at all, for it is he who has had to make the demeaning visit to the nearest dictionary in order to prove that he was right. The Englishman remains invincible in his ignorance of his own tradition - and Joyce's book simply adds one more text to the glories of "English Literature".
Pierce confines the cricket commentary to Joyce, but he wasn't the only batsman among Irish revivalists. The 1916 leader Thomas MacDonagh prevailed upon a captured British soldier to bowl "googlies" at him with a tennis ball during lulls in the fighting of Easter Week. Just a few years earlier, Pearse's students at St Enda's had an impassioned debate before opting for hurling rather than cricket (a difficult choice, since both games rely on hand-eye co-ordination). There is even a vivid description in Irish of a cricket match in Kilkenny of the 1830s in Cinn Lae Amhlaoibh Uí Shúilleabháin. We always were a hybrid people with a mingled tradition - as MacDonagh argued in Literature in Ireland.
Pierce asks: why didn't the Irish rebel more often after Black '47? The literary silence surrounding the Famine he finds all the harder to understand, given that Spenser had already made available a language of horror. This is a strange contention - that those who suffered might look for inspiration to a conqueror's text. It's a bit like airy-fairy assertions to the effect that the Famine was a shared experience.
Yeats's The Countess Cathleen (1892) may have been a delayed response, as was Friel's Translations (1980). Pierce writes brilliantly on the latter work as one which captures the life of a people verging unknowingly on utter catastrophe, but "there is something that can't penetrate the time-frame, the translation, and this seems to be Friel's point". As a materialist, Pierce seems slightly scornful of a people who listened to the prophecies of Pastorini when what they needed was bread: but he may neglect the fact that the Great Hunger was the first major famine faced by a people who had abandoned their own language and cultural codes without as yet fully adopting the protection of any other. Unlike some more finicky revisionists, he is willing to compare the Great Hunger to the Holocaust, but laments that it is much less documented and praises Eavan Boland as one of the few current authors to face that challenge.
Sometimes, that same materialism leads to a gruff and grim approach. Rather than see Yeats, Synge and Augusta Gregory as inventors of modern Ireland, he argues that their identification with the native culture was the rather belated tactic of a Protestant uppercrust which realised that, unless it changed sides, it would lose all status and influence. Surely, there was little status or influence left to the Anglo-Irish by the 1890s; and it might be truer, and kinder, to say these great artists broke free of their own class in order to explore and express their innermost selves.
Earlier in the book, Pierce admitted as much when rejecting the contention of FSL Lyons that all three authors were representatives of the "Anglo-Irish tradition". Really good artists seldom think of expressing anyone other than themselves. By far the most original idea here is Pierce's isolation of the idea of "the dark" as the zone in which first the Gaelic bards, then Yeats and Beckett, and later John McGahern and Seamus Deane, find their deepest element. If there is any national analogy lurking there, it is in the notion of Ireland as hidden, as the Unconscious.
Yet even that reading is finally resisted as a temptation by this shrewd critic. Ireland is not England's Other: "To insist on sameness, therefore, has always been an ideological move in the Irish context". Learning English in Lower Drumcondra until you know it better than its inventors was one way of making sameness subversive; developing "reverse swing bowling" at cricket was another. Pierce is astutely aware of just how ludicrous John Hinde's postcards with their colour enhancements actually were - the real technical problem posed by Irish life for artists has never been how to tone things up to make them vivid but rather to scale them down in order to make them credible.
In later chapters, Pierce offers analyses of the art of two bleak decades, the 1930s and 1980s, exploring the "dark" of such figures as Kathleen Coyle, Robert Ballagh and Brendan Kennelly. But, in the end, no one author's dark can be the same as another's. And this is where Pierce seems less than fully convinced of his own "colonial thesis". Writers, in his ultimate scheme of things, prefer to transgress national ideas rather than embody them: "Virtually no Irish writer from Jonathan Swift to John Banville sings from the same hymn sheet".
If that is true, then why bother to write another book on Irish identity in art? Or why berate Louis MacNeice (as Pierce does) for failing to stake out the ground from which he attacks the Free State of the 1940s? Pierce's volume contains many wise and clever readings of individual writers, film-scripts and paintings: but as it moves to a conclusion, they have the strange effect of throwing its opening theses into question. For all his early warnings to himself and others, he does treat Irish culture as a separate, distinct category - in the process, giving us a lavishly illustrated and interesting book.
Declan Kiberd's The Irish Writer and the World was published recently by Cambridge University Press. He is professor of Anglo-Irish literature at UCD
Light, Freedom and Song: A Cultural History of Modern Irish Writing By David Pierce Yale University Press, 350pp. £25