This book bristles with bright ideas. It is a powerful example of how contemporary theoretical models - from deconstruction and feminism to revisionism and postcolonialism - can be used to shed new light on the study of Irish culture. It also provides a persuasive argument for the analysis of popular culture as a legitimate subject of academic inquiry.
But the book is not geared towards a general readership. Perhaps it does not intend to be. More is the pity then, for there are many fascinating insights here that deserve to be communicated to a wider public. While Graham's reflections are intriguing, the language is all too often prone to jargon and in-speak. Anyone who uses phrases like "Andersonian coevality with its marmorealised culture" without the use of a glossary is not overly eager to reach readers uninitiated into the academic elite.
Deconstructing Ireland, according to its author, traces the processes "by which Ireland becomes 'Ireland', a 'cited' version of itself which is both excessive and phantasmal". In simpler terms: it explores a number of key images and fantasies which have been used to construct visions of Ireland over the last two centuries. These range from John Mitchell's exiled imagining of his homeland to Ignatius Donnelly's Atlantean Ireland and Sean Hillen's " Irelantis" - all examples of how Ireland can become a utopian symbol removed from lived reality and projected into some far away future. Graham also offers a critical adjudication of the various debates on the notion of a post-colonial or post-nationalist Ireland. Here the author energetically engages with thinkers like Deane, Llyod, Gibbons, Kiberd and Foster. He examines the critical relation between the intellectual-artist and the "people" as it pertains to Joyce studies and the Field Day movement.
But while frequenting such heady debates, Graham does not shy away from popular culture. In a chapter called 'Staged Quaintness', he explores the relation between nation and gender in stories by Gerry Adams and Frank Delaney. And in subsequent chapters he investigates the curious appeal to "authenticity" in Irish politics and tourist advertising and assesses the role of a specifically Irish kitsch in the configuring of national identity.
Despite his use of arcane idioms, Graham is not at all an exponent of high culture looking down on popular culture. There is nothing snooty about his attitude. On the contrary, this book is in many respects a celebration of the way in which the fictions and phantasms of popular writing, crafts and even postcards, can suggest ways of reinventing our identity. One sometimes wonders, however, if there is any real Ireland for the author outside of these phantasmal images - a country where people actually act and suffer, live and die? One gets the impression that if one tried to grasp "Ireland" at all it would - as in Hubert Butler's wonderful image - fade and shrivel like an anenome dragged from a rock pool. The postmodern tendency to collapse the real and the imaginary can sometimes go too far.
This book is a valuable contribution to the expanding Irish Studies industry. It is written with panache and, at times, with ingenuity. Colin Graham has done his homework and knows what he is about. His argumentation is sure-footed even when his rhetoric is inflated. Overall, he makes a spirited case for his thesis that "Ireland" is more a citation or brandname than a reality. And his application of philosophers like Derrida, Said, Spivak and Baudrillard to the Irish politics of identity is daring and, for the most part, pertinent.
Graham celebrates the fact that Ireland is constantly in the process of deconstructing itself. Which means, in turn, that it invites new efforts at reconstruction. That is the upbeat conclusion to this otherwise downbeat but deserving book.
Richard Kearney is a professor of philosophy at Boston College and University College Dublin. His latest book On Stories has just been published by Routledge