The Unappeasable Host: Studies in Irish Identity by Robert Tracy UCD Press 280pp, £30/£15.95.
Robert Tracy wears several intellectual hats. Translator of Mandelstam, scholar of 19th-century novelists, he has also been tracking the implications of his own cultural background as an Irish-American over several decades by teaching, lecturing and writing about the literatures of Ireland. As outsider/insider, he sets out in this important and welcome study to explore the rich cultural dilemma of the Anglo-Irish writers, offering readings of Maria Edgeworth and Lady Morgan's concern with intermarriage, Sheridan LeFanu's Gothic anxieties, Yeats's assertions as against Elizabeth Bowen's hesitancies. The metaphor employed by many of these writers for their relation with what Tracy terms "the unhyphenated Irish" is a theatrical one, with the natives represented as audience to the performances of Anglo-Ireland.
But Irish audiences have often proved volatile and, although the power relations in such a cultural exchange would appear to favour the Anglo-Irish, appearances may be deceptive. Role reversals can occur, notably in Maria Edgeworth's inaugurating novel of 1800, Castle Rackrent, in which the servant Thady Quirk's approval of his masters eggs them on to their destruction. The key scene for Tracy is of Maria Edgeworth taking dictation from Thady's original, a rebellious Miranda in ambiguous cultural exchange with the island's Caliban. In Elizabeth Bowen's The Last September (1929), the most charged encounter between the two Irelands passes in silence: when the Big House heroine spies a young IRA man:
"It's a fine night," she would have liked to observe, or, to engage his sympathies: "Up Dublin!" or even - since it was in her uncle's demesne - boldly - "What do you want?"
Tracy's exploration of Yeats focuses not on the poet's self-enclosed elegising of Lady Gregory's Coole estate but on key moments of encounter between the "sixty-year-old smiling public man" and the emergent Free State. The poet-Senator during these years was asserting a claim for his own class as "no petty people". As Tracy shows, Yeats's vision was at its most generous when it sought mutual recognition of Anglo-Ireland and Gaelic Ireland, unacceptably arrogant when its voice mutated into triumphalism.
If the book's concern is with "members of the Protestant minority who wrote about Ireland", what, then, is James Joyce doing in it? It could be claimed that Joyce never ceased to protest against political and cultural conditions in Ireland; but it is well to remember what Stephen Dedalus said when a friend suggested he become a Protestant: "I said that I had lost the faith . . . but not that I had lost self-respect."
Arguably, Tracy's study would be incomplete without the supreme literary exemplar of the risen people. Joyce's inclusion is justified as someone who deliberately concentrated on "those separated or excluded from the Irish life around them". I am less persuaded by this argument than I am by how impressively the three chapters on Joyce reveal a range of parallel obsessions with those very different Anglo-Irish writers. Joyce is drawn to restless ghosts who return to haunt the living (Michael Furey in "The Dead", obviously, but the theme is pervasive throughout Dubliners); has an interest in folklore as great as that of Yeats and Lady Gregory's, but trained on its urban equivalent, gossip; and, in Finnegans Wake, juxtaposes the founding of the Free State in 1922 with - not an ancient Irish burial mound - but the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb, of the Book of Kells ("our book of kills") with the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
In asserting a continuity between the Gaelic tradition and more recent Irish writers in English, Robert Tracy is showing why he values the work of the late Vivian Mercier, to whom this book is in part dedicated. But the chapters on Joyce make explicit what underpins The Unappeasable Host's critical endeavour: that Tracy is making the even more urgent contemporary claim for shared imaginative possessions between the hyphenated and the unhyphenated Irish, the hybrid and the so-called native. For, while concentrating on the writers of the Protestant minority, Tracy's analysis takes its direction from those crisis points where the two cultures draw near and confront one another. This book studies that process, with imaginative sympathy and scholarly detachment; it is a work to challenge prejudice and enlarge understanding.
Anthony Roche lectures in Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama at University College Dublin and edits the Irish University Review