Irish Studies:'At last, the truth!" is the feeling the reader has after reading Joe Cleary's monumental new book. Outrageous Fortune is a comparative, materialist account of the emergence of modern Irish culture, mainly writing, mainly in the 20th century.
Telling us what our century was really like, it paints a startlingly unfamiliar picture of a familiar corpus of writers and titles. Instead of looking at Irish letters from the inside, as it were, Cleary mobilises a breadth of reading in world literature, literary theory and economic history, to give an objective, bird's-eye literary view of the Irish 20th century.
The result is an unsentimental account which knocks down most of the master narratives of Irish literary history. Most literary histories of Ireland have taken it as a given that the national narrative - the struggle for independence, the foundation of the State, social and economic liberalisation - is also the context of the national cultural narrative; that the story of national cultural production is a subset of the national story as a whole.
For Cleary, culture has a far more complex relationship with nationhood, overlapping and intersecting with it, but also plugged into a vast, international intellectual economy. This book thus resembles a literary version of the Whitaker report, dragging Irish letters out of a protectionist scholarship and into the full rigour of comparison with the rest of world culture and cultural theory.
Outrageous Fortune identifies and then strips away the cherished national myths which have shaped our conception of modern Irish writing: that it is always vibrant, innovative and the envy of the world; that the Irish rejoice in a unique kind of postcolonial poetic sensibility; that culture in Ireland has developed in parallel with the State and the economy, out of the dark ages and into a "modern", "European" era of modernity and sophistication; and so on.
IT IS NOT a question of fresh readings of individual texts (though there are these in abundance: for instance the counter-intuitive but utterly convincing interpretations of The Field, Dancing at Lughnasa, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne or Into the West); rather, the familiar story of our national literature and its evolution is thoroughly defamiliarised. Cleary suggests, for example, that freer markets and freer social mores are no guarantee of cultural innovation, and goes on to baldly spell out a fact which most accounts of Irish culture prefer to omit: that a bleak, formally conservative naturalism totally dominated Irish writing throughout the 20th century.
He begins by pointing out the singularly European context of the early Irish forays into the mode, showing how Irish writers (Moore, Shaw, Joyce) played a key role in introducing French naturalism to English literature. But after the brief and bright flame of Irish modernism (the genius of Ulysses, Cleary argues, came out of a "curious confection" of European naturalism and the strategies of the Revival), naturalism takes over the Irish stage and page. This history of Irish literature, from Seán O'Casey to Martin McDonagh, is perhaps this book's most original achievement, for it tells a story that we feel we know but which had never quite been articulated before.
Along with vivid analyses of the comparative contexts of writers such as Edna O'Brien, Brian Moore or John McGahern, Cleary gives us a crystal clear overview of mid to late 20th-century Irish culture (". . . for most of the 20th century Ireland was mainly a rural society whose leading writers came from Dublin, but after the 1960s it became largely an urban island, dominated by Dublin, most of the leading writers of which have come from rural Ireland. There is some reason to think, therefore, that post-1960s Irish naturalism is really an aesthetic that expresses the moment when the old rural Ireland dies and disappears but when the new urban Ireland . . . has not yet found any other identity except the negative one of repudiating the rural world it has displaced").
Cleary is one of the first to give sustained theoretical attention to mid and late 20th-century Irish naturalism as a genre, examining the paradox of why a period that produced individual writers of exceptional abilities remained so formally and thematically constrained.
In Cleary's view, Irish naturalism ("the unacknowledged stepchild of Irish fiction"), through its political pessimism and formal conservatism, was in some ways in cahoots with the very world it criticised; a symptom, not a diagnosis of a national condition. In the later part of the century, Cleary wonders why the "dark ages" of de Valera's Ireland, the dismal world of a Catholic, conservative, impoverished island, has continued to provide the imaginative material for almost all of the country's major writers since the 1960s. Even recent post-Tiger writers, less formally austere, and even postmodern, such as Patrick McCabe, Marina Carr or Martin McDonagh, remain mesmerised by a vision of the country as bleak, rural, penniless and repressive.
HE OFFERS A series of possible explanations for the phenomenon, but concludes that, whatever the reasons behind it, one of the serious and certain effects is that by fetishising a dismal, repressive past, these Irish writers have the tacit effect of supporting, and even of eulogising the current, liberal-capitalist status quo. Although the commonplace critical rhetoric surrounding contemporary Irish writing is that we are in a time of great vibrancy and innovation, Cleary wonders why our writers still devote their energies to "slaying the shrivelled dragons of de Valera's Ireland" instead of engaging critically and imaginatively with the realities of the present.
Luckily for Irish studies, however, in Cleary we have one writer who happens to do just that. He is ready to acknowledge and analyse works of talent and importance, but he himself has no investment in any idea or ideal of Ireland, in national identity or in national pride or shame; he is interested in the realities, not the myths, of society and culture. His book, which contains extraordinary essays on Irish film, the Marian apparitions and the Pogues, is erudite, forceful and fearless. Quite simply, it now feels impossible to understand modern Irish culture without it.
Barry McCrea is the author of the novel The First Verse. He is assistant professor of comparative literature at Yale University
Outrageous Fortune: Capital and Culture in Modern Ireland By Joe Cleary. Field Day Publications (Series: Field Day Files 1 ), 320pp. €25