Do Irish writers engage with contemporary life or are they stuck in the past? As the debate around this question continues on our letters page and elsewhere, EILEEN BATTERSBYargues that while some writers catch the frenzy of the moment, others who deal with the past are not looking back, but investigating today
ONCE UPON a time, a character created by an Irish writer who has since earned an international reputation, made the following observation: "Dubliners are the niggers of Ireland. The culchies have fuckin' everything. An' northside Dubliners are the niggers of Dublin." It doesn't date from that distant a past; it was written just 20 years ago. The speaker is Jimmy, the central character in Roddy Doyle's The Commitments.
It seemed to mark the beginning of a revolution, the new, increasingly urban Ireland making its entry into Irish writing. But if the language was real, milking the explosive four-letter comic realism of Dublin vernacular, it was not really all that new. Brendan Behan had already been there, as had years earlier Seán O'Casey, though admittedly, his use of vernacular speech had a heightened lyricism, while James Stephens had harnessed realism in The Charwoman's Daughter(1912).
Irish writing, whether for the page or the stage, is celebrated internationally. As are the songwriters. Would U2 have emerged independently of Ireland's literary culture? No. Look at the literary culture that informs playwright Mark O'Rowe's screenplay, Intermission(2003), as well as the theatre of Marina Carr and Billy Roche.
Is it fair to accuse Irish writers of failing to engage with the Ireland of today? No. Is it even accurate? No. But it is easy, particularly should one overlook the emerging writers and short story writers currently overwhelming publishers and magazines, appearing in journals such as the Stinging Flyand in competitions, and point only to major voices such as William Trevor, Sebastian Barry, Colm Tóibín, Eoin McNamee and Joseph O'Connor, who have all had work which draws on the past achieve international success. And now John Banville, possibly the most European of Irish writers, is through his Benjamin Black series looking to the Ireland of the 1950s.
Playwright Thomas Kilroy's Christ Deliver Us! currently at the Abbey, is also set in the 1950's but is actually investigating the horrors of today – a communal attempt to cleanse a battered society by confronting an inherited legacy of shame, by locating the point at which that abuse began. John B Keane also exposed his society. He was not looking back, though, he was writing about it as it was happening; but it took Irish critics 30 years to grasp what he was doing and belatedly recognise its art.
It is easy to accuse the Irish literary novelists of failing to deal with the Ireland of today, particularly if one has just read a novel as riveting as Jon McGregor’s Even the Dogs, which looks at the collective lives of drug addicts living on the margins in today’s Britain. McGregor’s novel is horrifying, graphic and so beautiful. It combines polemic and art. David Peace’s strongly politicised fiction is written to an agenda, that of chronicling contemporary Britain.
Perhaps Irish writers tend to come from the personal rather than the public? Peter Murphy's John the Revelator(2009) is a personal story, as personal, if less complex, as Ross Raisin's In God's Own Country(2008) but should we demand the public instead of the personal?
We are also missing the fact that the large numbers of Irish writers working in the area of popular fiction, such as Sheila O’Flanagan and Cecelia Ahern, are keeping up with the pace at which Ireland is changing because they produce their books at a far faster rate than literary authors. Perhaps the more commercial publishers are set up to produce quickly as they are printing huge numbers of books. Some of these titles are published in paperback, a quicker process than cloth bound.
Should we dictate an artist’s response? Are we confusing documenting and chronicling with creating? Why order the US National Book Award winner Colum McCann to engage only with contemporary Ireland? Why are novelists and short story writers being told what to write, or how to write? We should stop and listen, read the words, feel the images. Boomtown Ireland provided the backdrop of Anne Enright’s Booker winning The Gathering. And please don’t forget Keith Ridgeway’s wonderful study of contemporary Dublin in free fall, The Parts (2003), which caught the frenzy of that bogus tiger moment – thank you Fianna Fáil.
Scottish writer James Kelman has consistently reflected his society through his powerful narratives. His thesis is society and class; his mastery of authentic vernacular without equal. Many British critics have missed the very important point he is making. Yet in the seminal TV drama series, The Boys From the Blackstuff writer Alan Bleasdale explored much the same themes, while also looking at forced migration for work, a subject Irish people understand only too well. Interestingly, Bleasdale was celebrated for looking at the society of his day.
Throughout a series of uneasy, impassioned novels and plays written during the 1990s, Dublin writer Dermot Bolger examined a world created by country people who had moved to the city. He was writing about a drug culture before it became the stuff of the daily news pages. It was Bolger who best attempted to articulate the cultural phenomenon of a hastily suburbanised society at war with its history, and, increasingly, at war with itself. Filmmaker and writer Neil Jordan articulated the malaise of contemporary Irish life with The Dream of the Beast(1983). A novel of the moment when it was written, it remains, quite eerily, a novel of the now.
Many Irish writers, most specifically the gifted contingent from Northern Ireland, chose to reflect their society more through the theme of political tension than social issues. If the writers, specifically the novelists from the Republic did not pursue the politics of Northern Ireland, the prose writers, and most emphatically the poets, of Northern Ireland, have, creating a magnificent literary canon. Bernard MacLaverty in novels such as Lamb(1980) and Cal(1983), as through his short stories, never lost sight of the politics, nor did poets such as Heaney and Longley, Mahon, Montague and Muldoon.
This engagement has continued with novelists such as McNamee and most impressively Seán O'Reilly in Love and Sleep(2002) and The Swing of Things(2004) who not only looked to the political tensions – they identified the Ireland that was emerging on both sides of the border. Dublin-born, Derry-based Jennifer Johnston continues to work within a middle class register, yet she too reflects the changing face of Irish middle-class society.
David Park has chronicled the story of his society with a deliberate intensity culminating in his most ambitious novel, The Truth Commissioner(2008), dealing with post Good Friday Ulster. If Ireland has a novelist as witness, it is he.
Claire Keegan was right when she replied to a question asking why her work reflected an earlier Ireland, not quite the one she is living in. Her response was that an awareness of the past led to an understanding of the present. When Ronan Bennett decided to set his Havoc, In Its Third Year(2004) in 17th century Puritan England, he was just as effectively writing about today's society.
Time and again some commentators have short-sightedly decided that William Trevor, long domiciled in England, doesn’t know Ireland. How wrong they are. It is tantamount to accusing Seamus Heaney of failing to address the Northern conflict – which he has through pathos, anger and regret. Edna O’Brien has devoted her career to explaining modern Ireland to itself and to the world. Twenty years ago we all became excited – or should that be exercised? – by Doyle’s use of the vernacular. He has since, through his Henry novels, gone on to explore that most eloquent of places, the past. Claire Keegan is quite right: you do find the present in the past.
Kevin Barry is locating the now in stories that have a surrealist tinge.
Are Irish writers failing to engage with the society of today? No, and if writers continue to draw on the past and on memory, in the creation of art, it should not be seen as a flaw. Our writers are not Government-appointed poet laureates employed to celebrate a specific moment. They have their artistic freedom and although they do inform commentators and journalists, novelists are primarily creating art, not opinion pieces. It is true that fiction can serve as both art and social history – look at John McGahern’s work. At what point does responsibility become an imposed obligation?
Speaking at a writers' conference in Dublin in 1990, Andrei Bitov, author of The Pushkin House(1978), pondered on what writers might be writing about after the fall of communism. The answer was obvious; they would continue writing about their societies. They have.
IRISH WRITERS ARE LOOKING at Ireland and at the world, at a radically evolving Ireland within that changing world. Irish writers, particularly poets, have always looked to their society – as did Yeats and Austin Clarke. The past is time-honoured territory, to deny an artist memory or to deny, question or diminish that artist his or her feel for a specific time or place, amounts to a form of censorship – and Irish writers know all about that.
Considering how Ireland was so long held ransom by a sexual and religious guilt, and the oppressive power of a dominant church that betrayed the nation’s trust bequeathing a squalid legacy of ugly secrets, the diversity of Irish writing is remarkable. Read the new Irish fiction – much of it is about the now – and don’t assume a time warp that doesn’t exist.
The present asks the questions, the past holds the answers. The comedy is bold and confident and blunt with an exasperation honed by the current generation of stand-up comics whose collective voice is influencing younger writers. The more pressing question that should be asked is, when will multi-cultural Ireland assert itself? It will. Watch this space.
