Few critics dare to partition Irish writing. Similarly, Sebastian Barry was brave to publish an anthology called The Inherited Boundaries: Poets from the Republic of Ireland. So why does Ray Ryan stick his neck out and edit a book which explores "how the Republic has been represented in a variety of literary and political discourses"? Beyond the justifications that Ryan significantly feels bound to press, to describe something is not to prescribe. Description is a good deed amid the current volatility of Irish cultural politics, and it can help to expose covert "partitionism". This, for example, distances some intellectuals in the Republic from their Northern Catholic counterparts - and vice versa - and restricts the terms on which writers identified as Northern Protestants are admitted into the "Irish" canon. Indeed, the book's remit includes casting "a cold, sceptical eye on the Republic's self-representation, on the forms of meaning and writing the state has facilitated . . . in order to naturalise its own sovereignty and territory".
Nonetheless, Ryan's social-science contributors (such as Tom Garvin on "The Remaking of Irish Political Culture", Cormac O Grada on economic history and John Horgan on "The Media and the State") seem more comfortable with the Republic as their ground of inquiry than do his literary team. This reflects the lingering belief that a "national literature" is yoked to the nation. (Declan Kiberd's In- venting Ireland exemplifies the remarkable persistence of this idea.) In his introduction, neatly headed "The Republic and Ireland", Ryan ponders the mismatch between nation and state: "For compared to a nation the qualities in a state's existence are peculiarly difficult to describe and commemorate. Once established, it undoubtedly exists, but where and how is it made manifest?"
Patrick Hanafin's fine essay, "Interpreting the Irish Constitution ", provides the best answer by reformulating the problem: "The framers of the Constitution attempted to reconcile their theocratic aspirations with their Republican ideals. This was an impossible task, as the divine and the secular are twin faiths which cannot live in harmony." As a result, says Hanafin, the Constitution paradoxically dramatises "the reality of difference" and "the impossibility of identity" in "a highly fragmented society". So the "Republic" is a secular entity amenable to social science; the "nation" a mystical entity that still bemuses literary critics.
Two essays focus very directly on literature and the Republic. Chris Morash shows how the post-1949 Abbey Theatre operated as a pillar of the state, and Catriona Clutterbuck discusses the Republic as a framework for "Irish Women's Poetry". Clutterbuck may go too far, however, when she contends that "the gap between aspiration and reality in the constitutional identity of the existing Republic mirrors that within which Irish women's poetry works . . . to fully represent female identity." Her argument is weakest at the points where she invokes women poets' theory rather than their practice, or quantity rather than the fine print of quality: "about 120 Irish women poets . . . have published at least one major poetry collection in the last 50 years."
Jonathan Allison, writing more broadly about poetry and the Republic, finds it harder to disentangle state and nation in a critically productive way. He begs several questions by terming Paul Durcan's poetry (as contrasted with Seamus Heaney's) "an antithetical gesture in Irish poetry" and "a highly personal reading of paternal authority as a mode of anti-democratic conservatism". Joe Cleary and Ryan himself combine literary analysis with a touch of polemic. They highlight what they see as modes of detachment or denial promoted by the Republic's evasion of past and future. Thus Ryan faults Colm Toibin's non-judgmental style in Walking the Border for "chronicling the inalienable separateness of both states", for "naturalising religious, cultural and ethnic divisions".
CLEARY argues that some works by John McGahern and Brian Friel employ "conventional naturalistic representations" which condescend to de Valera's Ireland: "The fact that contemporary Irish society continues to rely so heavily on invocations of the darkness of the past to validate its sense of its own enlightenment is not very reassuring". But naturalism does not sing only one song. Nor do these writers exactly speak for feelgood Ireland. They bear witness to various borderlands, and obliquely illuminate the future's struggle to be born. Radical critics - as much as complacent modernisers - may go too fast.
The North figures directly in Colin Coulter's savage essay on "Unionist intellectuals and the Republic". Coulter is right to criticise unionists for ignoring the economic shifts which confound old jeers at the Republic's misty backwardness. Another twist is that (some) unionists now denigrate the Celtic Tiger as they once denigrated the Celtic Twilight. But while Coulter accurately diagnoses an irrationalism which masquerades as reason, his own approach is not free from the same failings. Further, the Republic now seems to be having its spiritual cake and eating it - a point well made by Michael Cronin and Barbara O'Connor in their historical survey of tourist advertising.
A generational as well as disciplinary gap opens up in this collection. Older contributors accept that independent Ireland experienced darker times. The ethos was, in part, comparable to that of other newish European polities; in part, driven by a specific form of nationalist absolutism and the hegemonic appetite of the Catholic Church. Garvin sums up the change: "Rather like the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe, the Catholic Church in 1950s Ireland had begun to educate itself out of power; her own secondary schools were hatcheries of sceptics and anticlericals."
But one generation's revolt is another's status quo: I have heard a young Irish academic use the term "post-scepticism". It is this context that permits Tony Canavan, in a tendentious article on historical revisionism, to conclude: "Revisionism. . . has failed to shift the Irish public's perception of the past". So that's all right then. Such populist thinking is at odds with how most of Writing in the Irish Republic advances various debates. One perspective need not supersede or erase another. And we should be careful about how we apply reductive categories like revisionist/counter-revisionist in history, revivalist/ counter-revivalist in literature. Not only on the surface of this book, but also between its lines, the problematic "Republic" comes into view.
Edna Longley is the author of Poetry & Posterity and editor of The Bloodaxe Book of Twentieth Century Poetry from Britain and Ireland, both published last year