LENIN in a rare witticism described theology as a subject without an object and a similar charge might sometimes be made against literary theory, which often turns through widening gyres of the self referential with little resort to either quotation or empirical fact. Seamus Deane's theorisation of Irish writing since 1790 takes Edmund Burke's Reflections On The Revolution in France as what it terms a "foundational text", a text which, like Persse McGarrigle's Small World thesis on the influence of T. S. Eliot on Shakespeare, "allows or has allowed for a reading of a national literature in such a manner that even chronologically prior texts can be annexed by it into a narrative".
Burke's anti theoretical valorisation of tradition and aristocracy in the face of revolution in France led to universal human and family feelings being constructed as synonymous with the British national character. But this British national character did not embrace Ireland, and so Irish Catholics were left open to the revolutionary theories of the French Enlightenment.
Thus Burke's detestation of the Irish Protestant parliament derives, according to Deane, from its denial of full citizenship to Catholics, "thereby treating a traditional society in such a way as to threaten the endurance and validity of the idea of civil society that Britain, more than any other European country, exemplified". Deane argues that Burke's intention was to attach Ireland more closely to Britain, but Burke might more accurately be seen as a political forefather to John Hume, bypassing recalcitrant Irish Protestants to seek amelioration through London.
In a brilliant analysis of the relationship of land to speech, Deane writes that "soil is what land becomes when it is ideologically constructed as a natal source..." Central to the Irish nationalist project is a characterisation of land and language as moving from possession to a dispossession which should be converted into a repossession. Nationalists emphasised a recovery of the land while Unionists spoke of its loss, but neither could find a language which might adequately embody its condition. Notions of national character sought to express these meanings and as these evolved they became racial in character; became, in fact, the Celt, an anachronistic antimodernist adhering to the Burkean nation rather than to modernity and the state. As land faded from the forefront of politics both it and speech came to form an intermesh of obscurities - Celtic and Gothic twilights, folklore and occultism - which bestowed mysteriousness on soil and speech and - emphasised Irish exceptionalism us opposed to British modernity.
Less satisfactory is the book's reductive characterisation of the Irish Literary Revival's "valorisation of the community" as "the literary equivalent of crowd control", a Burkean exaltation of community over modernity which Deane sees as "an integral feature of Catholic ideology in the Free State".
THE most relentless critic of Free State ideologies was Sean O'Faolain, but the direction of his criticisms does not meet here with approval. O'Faolain is represented as a kind of Deane in reverse and the summery given of O'Faolain's 1944 essay The Gaelic Cult is refracted in line with Deane's general argument and away from O'Faolain's stated case. O'Faolain, Deane argues, is at one with those revisionist historians whom he accuses of refusing to countenance the possibility that a community "might actually surrender economic wellbeing for something less boring..."
In this and other elaborations on revisionism" Deane's theories might themselves be theorised as metonymies for the experience of Northern Catholics at the time of the Civil Rights Movement - indeed that was also the time when the historians he attacks were publishing their most influential work. He accuses the "revisionists" of endorsing the state monopoly on violence and of having vindicated the colonialism from which he claims their "rhetoric" derives. A frustration at the Republic's embrace of its own economic interests while Northern Catholics sought something less boring is manifest.