For some the term “Protestant imagination” leads to the same head-scratching as “married bachelor” or “square circle”. The two words make sense in isolation, but when put together one seems to cancel the other out. This is where Gerald Dawe’s essay collection, The Sound of the Shuttle, begins, challenging the often unspoken yet conscious conviction in Ireland and Britain that Ulster Protestants are to the imagination and the arts what rainwater is to the campfire. And the extent to which this view has been received, incubated and amplified is a central concern of Dawe’s analysis. The Sound of the Shuttle has arrived at a time when interest in cultural Protestantism, or “Protestant culture”, has rarely been higher, with a 2019 conference in east Belfast, The Protestant Imagination, implying that there must indeed be such a thing.
These essays do not so much present an economically or efficiently expressed argument, but after a couple of pages Dawe has already trained his reader’s expectations. To read Dawe on Irish literature, the hunger strikers or cultural Protestantism is not to be taken from point A to point B, a linear journey from issue to solution, but is to be invited into a non-dogmatic, remarkably open exploration. And in this way, Dawe’s writing style is, after all, his most potent – if implicit – argument. It has been corridored dogmatism that has led to the entrenched and self-harming notion that northern Protestants lack culture and imagination. Dawe’s collection of essays trouble this characterisation basically by ignoring it – to defend the Protestant imagination is, it would seem, to have already given too much ground.
The Sound of the Shuttle comprises essays from a span of some 36 years, and while one would expect to get something of a bird’s-eye view of the North’s political and cultural development over this time, it does not necessarily materialise here. In fact, had Dawe not dated the individual essays collected here, one might struggle to place some to within a few years of their actual year; such is the lack of a progress narrative. This is not a criticism, just an observation; and one that Dawe makes himself, noting that Blair’s “hand of history … seems distinctly less benign”, such is the “lack of progress in Northern Ireland”. The presence of recurring themes – competing identity markers on the island and Irish literature’s processing of history, for example – across the collection is evidence of an absence, an absence of movement that holds Northern Ireland back in many respects. On the question of identity, and the competing terms of British, Irish, unionist, nationalist, Dawe feels, as “most people in Ireland”, like a “spectator at the game, not even sure of the rules or the players”. This kind of honesty and eschewal of polemic marks Dawe out as, yes, an observer, but an observer worth listening to.
Irish literature
In the essay Telling a Story (1986), Dawe comments on the reluctance of northern Protestants to embrace Irish literature never mind claim it as their own. To point out that some of Ireland’s greatest writers have been Protestant would seem to invite the argument that their literary acumen was in spite of, not because of, their Protestantism. One of the great achievements of this volume is the great care it takes in demonstrating the generative potential Protestantism has had and will continue to have for artists working in both North and South. Dawe makes reference to Wendy Erskine, Jan Carson and Lucy Caldwell in the introduction to his essays, and he is right to. East Belfast, Dawe’s childhood home, is experiencing something of a mini-renaissance at the moment, and Protestant writers working in the east are producing world-class, prize-winning stuff at a remarkable rate.
The subtitle of the book, Essays on Cultural Belonging and Protestantism in Northern Ireland, is loose enough to hold many of the essays included here, but as a collection, there is little to unite these pieces. Dawe moves frequently and rapidly from personal anecdotes to, say, a Czech writer, to the Troubles, to Edna Longley’s criticism. While not necessarily a negative, it can make some of the essays err on the side of sprawling at the expense of tight focus. But really this is a minor flaw in a collection so wonderfully written. Dawe has a fluidity in his prose that moves these pieces along at quite a rate, and a reader will no doubt wonder just how Dawe has taken them from a 1981 poetry reading in Holland to a discussion of regionalism in Ireland without the joins showing. Dawe ends his collection, poignantly, with a plea that a “New-Ireland” be the product of consultation that includes those for whom it holds most dread. And this collection succeeds in demonstrating just how valuable and creative a voice this could be.
Andrew Cunning is a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Limerick. He writes on theology and literature, and his first book, Marilynne Robinson, Theologian of the Ordinary, will be published by Bloomsbury in late 2020
