The problem with a great deal of academic writing comes down to one word: hedging. I don’t know why the mark of intellection should have become the refusal boldly to advance a claim. The following is a parody, but it gets at what I mean: “Certain discourses of embodiedness can, even if we take into account the various persuasive critiques of the very word ‘embodiedness’ advanced by Theorist, Thinker and Frenchman, be understood as suggesting the possible formulation of spaces in which the body might be thought anew.”
Possible. Might. Take into account. The eyes of the non-academic reader glaze over. Why not just say what you think?
I don’t mean to mock. I’m an academic myself. I’ve had my own tussles with Theorist, Thinker and Frenchman. But it seems to me that we are now at a point in history when academic critics of culture need to start saying what they mean as clearly as they can.
Social media hourly pours its effluent into the river of truth. Most of our rulers no longer bother to pretend they’re not lying. “The zone,” in Steve Bannon’s sinister formulation, is being “flooded” – flooded, that is, with bulls**t intended to distract. Academics, particularly liberal and left-wing academics, can no longer afford to hedge. They need to stop talking to each other and start talking to the world – if it will listen.
These thoughts are provoked, somewhat indirectly, by a reading of The Routledge Companion to 21st-century Irish Writing, a huge, various and stimulating anthology of academic essays on contemporary Irish culture assembled by Anne Fogarty (who teaches at UCD) and Eugene O’Brien (who teaches at Mary Immaculate College, Limerick).
Editing such a book is a heroic endeavour. There are 35 essays here, each one fearsomely accoutred with endnotes, references, in-line citations. (A parenthetical suggestion to academics: if you want to hedge, hedge in the endnotes. That’s what they’re for.) Getting that many academics to pull together is, proverbially, like herding cats. But Fogarty and O’Brien are expert cat-herders. They have produced an important book. It is not, alas, priced for civilian readers: £215 for the hardback. Academic publishing is badly in need of reform. But that’s another story.
The Routledge Companion is important because what has characterised 21st-century Ireland is change and because we need all the help we can muster if we want to think about this change and what it means. I was born in 1981, which means I have lived through radical social transformations that show no sign of stopping: the end of Catholic theocracy, the erosion of Civil War politics, the neoliberalisation of the economy, the growth of the middle class, the ambiguous aftermath of the Troubles, net immigration, housing crisis, climate change, racial diversity, the first ugly shoots of a far-right politics. To live in 21st-century Ireland is to live in uncertainty. What country, friends, is this?
Then again, it is hard to think about the present. In their introduction, Fogarty and O’Brien observe that “to read the contemporary is a vexed matter and not as smooth as presupposed”. Well, quite. Kierkegaard is often quoted to the effect that life must be lived forwards, but can only be understood backwards, though he didn’t quite say this. What he did say was that, time-bound as we are, there can be no static point from which to understand your life at all. (Tough break.)
The editors know that this applies to history and culture too. Their response is to construe the present as a historical moment like any other – as knowable as the past, and (crucially) as unknowable. “The present may seem to be the area of cultural production that we should know best,” they write, “but, in fact, it is one that faces us with as many questions, problems and conundrums as the study of any other historical eras.”
To study the contemporary, they note, is to experience a “sense of estrangement”. But such a sense of estrangement is enormously useful. The estranged mind – that is, the critic’s mind – is like the cow in the Gary Larson Far Side cartoon who looks up suddenly and says, “Hey, wait a minute! This is grass! We’ve been eating grass!” We need that cow. Otherwise, we’re just chewing the cud.
So, what kind of grass have we been eating? Note carefully the title: not “21st-century Irish Literature” but “21st-century Irish Writing”.
There are four big sections. The first looks at prose, and includes, among other pieces, Liam Lanigan’s essay Counterfactual Geographies on Paul Murray’s The Mark and the Void (2015); Eamon Maher on Representations of Catholicism in Contemporary Irish Fiction; María Amor Barros-del Rio on The Ethics of Care in Sally Rooney’s Novels; and Anne Fogarty on Animals in Short Stories by Contemporary Irish Women Writers.
Part Two looks at poetry – it’s called A Poetics of the Unfinished and the Transformative, suggesting two perspectives through which not just contemporary Irish poetry, but contemporary Ireland itself, can be understood. This section includes an illuminating and passionate survey of contemporary Irish queer poetry by Kit Fryatt, and an essay by the always-interesting Eoin Flannery on Contemporary Irish Ecopoetics, which stresses the ethical subversions made possible by an ecopoetic approach.
The third section looks at theatre and it reminds us that the stage is generally where we go, in Ireland, when we want to think about class (otherwise our great unspoken subject). There are long reflections on the work of THISISPOPBABY (by Martin Kenny and Miriam Haughton), on ethnotheatre in Northern Ireland (by Lisa Fitzpatrick), and on post-2008 working-class theatre (this is a contribution from an early-career scholar, Clara Mallon, who is to be commended: we need more, we always need more, honest and perceptive writing about class in Ireland).
Part four is New Voices, New Forms, New Modes of Material Production. It includes Irish Fantasy Fiction in the 21st-century by that one-man crusade for Irish genre studies, Jack Fennell; Molly Slavin on Global Irish Crime Fiction in the 21st-century; and Claire Lynch on The Personal Essay and life-writing more broadly.
The final section also moves beyond the textual to look at how and where texts are published (this is a big trend right now, in literary studies). Thus, a pair of essays on literary journals: Elke D’hoker on The Stinging Fly and its preferred modes of short fiction, and Liam Harrison on the journal scene as such. The last piece in the book is Languages and Publishing in Contemporary Irish Writing by Tim Groenland and Margaret Kelleher, which thinks carefully about the conditions at present influencing translation, publishing initiatives and arts funding in Ireland.
To say it’s a mixed bag is to miss the point: it’s supposed to be a mixed bag. The editors are clear about this. What they sought to assemble, they say, was a collection of “critical readings at the coalface of 21st-century writing that reflect on, theorise and tease out current cultural momentums, energies and blockages”. The book was “conceived of as initial soundings in our current moment rather than a sweeping or definitive set of overviews”.
One of criticism’s jobs is to do aesthetic triage on the busy waiting room of contemporary art – to attempt to distinguish, in other words, the good from the bad, and the good from the great. The Routledge Companion doesn’t really do this. What I mean is it lets in a lot of bad art and leaves out a lot of good. Its contributors now and then expend their intellects on works that really aren’t worth it.
But this is to be expected from a book that is essentially an interim report – a collective dispatch from, as the editors say, “the coalface”. (Putting it this way makes art and culture sound like not much fun, actually. But we’ve all done our bit at the fringe plays and the poetry readings. We get it.)
The great value of such a book, produced by diverse hands, is that it allows you to gain precisely what none of its individual contributors pretend to offer: a synoptic, or near-synoptic, overview of Ireland in the 21st century.
What’s the “TL;DR”? Catholicism: creeping in again through the back door. (They haven’t gone away, you know.) We need to fund more translators. The exciting emergence of non-white Irish artists. There is a general and rather bewildered sense of destabilisation, of shifting ground. Several contributors cite Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of “liquid modernity”: the idea that a computer-based, financialised global economy has severed us from the old “heavy” ties of community; now we float free, and lost. We are living through a time of (as the title of one essay has it) “epochal change”.
Interestingly, the editors note that “older paradigms and theoretical lenses like postcolonialism seem no longer to have purchase”. They mean in universities, but the insight holds good more generally. It must be 10 years or more since I last heard anyone blame our colonial past for some quirk of the Irish psyche. Are we post-postcolonial, at last? Huge, if true.
Ah, but what about that other empire, now messily expiring on the other side of the Atlantic? A reckoning with Ireland in the age of US cultural hegemony is conspicuously absent from this book. But it might be too soon to expect any such thing. Also strangely missing from the volume as a whole: the internet. What it’s done to us. What we’ve done with it.
Even so, the assembled essays bear out the truth of the editors’ opening assertion: that “Irish writing in the 21st century appears significantly different from that of the 20th century” and “there are distinct areas where these differences can be pinpointed and explored”. A tiny bit of hedging: that “appears”. But we’ll let that slide.
Ireland in the 21st century is different. So is its art. Once we were certain, of certain things, at least. Now we are uncertain about almost everything. Art is the great stable vessel in which we can hold that uncertainty for long uncertain moments. Here is a book to help us think about our art, and ourselves, now that we most urgently need to.
Kevin Power lectures in creative writing at Trinity College Dublin and is the author of White City and of Bad Day in Blackrock.
