Small World ranges from a close reading of Joyce’s endings to an evocative memoir of Seamus Heaney. It gives you fragments of the intellectual world Deane made his own. The reception of Burke in America provides a coda to Foreign Affections (2004), his fine study of Burke and Catholic thought. ‘Imperialism and Nationalism’ (1995) distils decades of reading into an encyclopedia entry and extricates postcolonialism from the postmodern. Most remarkable is ‘The End of the World’ (2012) which deals with everything from the sinking of the Lusitania to Synge to Christian neo-medievalism and the study of ancient Greece. The English scholar George Thomson reading Aeschylus on the Blasket Islands might seem an outlier in Irish Studies, but late Deane was as quick as young Deane to sense possibilities.
The previously unpublished essay ‘Emergency Aesthetics’ argues that the distortions of legality and state power identified in ‘Civilians and Barbarians’ have come to permeate America and its hegemony. Like other Irish republicans, Deane was drawn to the United States, teaching in Oregon and at Berkeley before settling in Dublin. He knew that some of the biggest keys to partition are hanging up in Washington, but he also came to think of Ireland as belonging to a ‘world system’ centred on Wall Street and the Pentagon. This transatlantic outlook was a product of the Cold War but it still has explanatory power. Joe Cleary has updated this paradigm in an excellent pair of books – Modernism, Empire, World Literature and The Irish Expatriate Novel in Late Capitalist Globalisation – which track the translation of cultural capital from London to Dublin and New York, and the emergence of a globalised fiction in which America is a base.
‘Flann O’Brien was right,’ Deane says at the start of ‘Emergency Aesthetics’. ‘Joyce was invented by Americans. He was part of their foreign policy, of the drive to make the USA a cultural presence and to recruit “high” culture to its mission of world domination.’ Humour was never Deane’s strong suit (scorn was more his style), but this flat extrapolation of O’Brien provides a thought-provoking frame for the author-centred studies of Yeats, Joyce and Beckett that characterised the postwar period. The colonial model of Irish Studies that Deane advocated as an alternative was historically more inclusive and almost irresistibly topical given the British troops garrisoned in the North. Part of its persuasiveness came, however, not from its newness but from its reviving of an old analysis. As Declan Kiberd pointed out with such flair in Inventing Ireland (1995), nationalists preparing for independence more than a century ago thought about the country in relation to British India, the Congo, the Boer War and the position of Hungary within the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
For Deane, the ‘revisionist’ historians who picked holes in the Sinn Féin worldview were the enemies of his people in the North and agents of the elite liberalism of Dublin 4. His 1991 critique of Roy Foster on the Easter Rising, reprinted in Small World, is blisteringly effective, yet its foundations now seem shaky. ‘Foster’s own writing is itself a reading dependent on the congealed stereotype of the partitionist mentality that is subsequent to the process he affects to describe,’ Deane writes. This is a way of saying that, were it not for the thwarting of the Irish Revolution in the partition of 1921, Foster’s outlook would be different. It is one responsibility of historians to give us the past as it was when the future was uncertain, but it is another to be alert to what made history turn out as it did.
As in ‘Civilians and Barbarians’, Deane is being more dichotomous than dialectical: ‘Revisionists are nationalists despite themselves,’ he goes on. ‘By refusing to be Irish nationalists, they simply become defenders of Ulster or British nationalism, thereby switching sides in the dispute while believing themselves to be switching the terms of it.’ It is a small world in which there is no alternative to nationalism. Deane would reply that the best alternative is republicanism, but it is harder to split Irish republicanism from nationalism than it is to believe (as only an Irishman would) in the existence of ‘British nationalism’. The constitutional and cultural muddle of English, Welsh, Scottish and Cornish Britishness lies behind the assertive front of unionism. It is as though Deane wants to deny the evolved legitimacy of the 26-county state and the varieties of Irishness within it. Many land borders in Europe have moved and will move again (witness Ukraine). To say that the existing Irish Republic has its own history, as all good revisionists would, is not even to defend partition. The extent of any republic can be determined by political accommodation rather than by geography, ethnicity and its constructs, or the descent of royal titles.
Deane’s most formidable interrogator was the Dublin-bred, Belfast-based Edna Longley, who adds to brainpower a willingness to do her homework and an insinuating way with modal auxiliaries: ‘Although the term “colonial” may fit some aspects of Irish experience,’ she writes, ‘most historians would qualify or specify its uses, and dispute the one-size-fits-all zeal of most theorists.’ She must have had the attack on Foster in mind as well as Deane’s antipathy to Yeats, when she noted ‘the tendency for revisionism and the Irish Literary Revival to serve, in nationalist intellectual quarters, as proxies or scapegoats for unionism.’
Her
LRB diary of 9 January 1992, written in response to the publication of the three-volume Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, is a vintage rebuttal of Deane. Clear-eyed about the derivation of what he, as general editor, calls the anthology’s ‘metanarrative’, Longley objects that ‘reading back from a present moment perpetually frozen at independence/partition in 1921 is precisely what Irish historiography has discredited.’ She is just as brisk with his half-hearted Derridean willingness to turn history into story. She quotes what his introduction says about the Troubles, namely that ‘Field Day’s analysis of the situation derives from the conviction that it is, above all, a colonial crisis,’ and adds: ‘Note that the conviction does not derive from the analysis.’
Longley also remarked on the limited representation of women’s writing in The Field Day Anthology and the neglect of female scholars. It was a common objection. What wasn’t included by Deane became more important than what was. It didn’t help that publication came at the end of a low decade in the Republic. After the passing of an anti-abortion referendum in 1983 and a vote against the legalisation of divorce three years later, the last thing feminists needed was a discriminatory blockbuster from supposed progressives. One of the best things in Fintan O’Toole’s We Don’t Know Ourselves is his conjuring up of the 1980s, when the Troubles seemed endless in the North and patriarchal Catholicism gave a final lash of its tail. Now that the feminist campaigns of this period are receding into history, it is the more worthwhile and necessary to have Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s compilation of memoirs, Look! It’s a Woman Writer! ‘Thirty years ago,’ Catherine Dunne remembers, ‘we had the infamous Field Day Anthology, which arrogantly excluded the writings of most women: but that was then.’
So what is now? Repeated, high-profile exclusions, such as the almost complete absence of women dramatists and directors from the plans for the celebration of the centenary of the Easter Rising at the Abbey Theatre, have given the scandal around the anthology a zombie-like ability to lurch back to life. On the basis of what has been published since the start of the pandemic, however, a tipping point has been reached in Irish Studies itself. The general editors of the six-volume Irish Literature in Transition, and many of its contributors, are women. Its publisher, Cambridge University Press, has since brought out a substantial and authoritative History of Irish Women’s Poetry, edited by Ailbhe Darcy and David Wheatley. A new genealogy of Irish poetry that doesn’t foreground Yeats or Kavanagh but Katharine Tynan and Máire Mhac an tSaoi has come into view.
Deane reacted promptly to protests about The Field Day Anthology by commissioning two volumes of women’s writing edited by women. Small World includes two perceptive pieces on Elizabeth Bowen, a writer from a Big House, Ascendancy background not obviously congenial to his sensibility. ‘Emergency Aesthetics’ has a section on Anna Burns’s Milkman, set in the Provo stronghold of Ardoyne. More surprisingly, there is an essay about the out-of-fashion novelist and short story writer Mary Lavin. ‘About’ has to be the word because the piece is heavily contextual, using Lavin to illustrate the stranglehold of Catholicism on Irish lives. Celibacy and small-town respectability are laid at the feet of the Vatican and linked to the cult of the Virgin that was harnessed by reactionary forces across peasant Europe. The essay could be more attentive to the emotional subtleties in Lavin, but as a denunciation of the clergy it would do credit to any Dublin 4 liberal.
In fact, it’s a tangled web. I remember talking to Deane about the plot of Brian Moore’s Lies of Silence (1990). At one point in this thriller, a priest tries to persuade a hotel manager to say that he can’t identify a young IRA volunteer (a nephew of the priest’s) who was responsible for a kidnapping and car bombing. ‘It wouldn’t happen,’ Deane declared, whether blinded by anti-clericalism or not. The dogs in the street knew about the complicity of a small number of renegade priests and ex-priests, as allegedly in the Claudy bombings of 1972 – an operation so inane and bloody (nine civilians were killed) that it stands out even in the grisly catalogue of IRA atrocities in We Don’t Know Ourselves.
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