David Lloyd is one of the most interesting critics working in what might very loosely be termed Irish cultural studies. He began, as many such writers do, as a literary critic, with a study of James Clarence Mangan; but even then, his strong historical and social orientation was apparent: the book was really about the growth of Irish cultural nationalism. This tendency was confirmed by his next work, Anomalous States, a collection of essays, which, while focusing on canonical writers such as Joyce and Beckett, showed an even more pronounced concentration on their historical conditions of possibility.
With the present volume, the transition is complete, and literature has to all intents and purposes been abandoned in favour of undiluted historical and cultural theory. Lloyd at least has had the courage of his convictions: rather than dabbling with a social underlay to his literary thinking, he has reversed the priorities. Literature is now a backdrop, at best, to social thinking.
The most striking aspect of Lloyd's work, to me, is the sustained hostility to the nation-state, any nation-state, that animates it. This certainly complicates any single-minded account of Irish history which would see it as moving to one great goal, a united Irish nation-state. For Lloyd, even a regime which is the product of an anti-colonial struggle is at great risk of replicating the homogenising and monolithic tendencies of the regime which preceded it.
There is, it seems, a good nationalism and a bad nationalism. Bad nationalism is the kind that leads to the monolithic nation-state; good nationalism is less easily defined, but it is dispersed, local, and very close to other marginal forces in Irish history, such as socialism and feminism. Importantly, this nationalism operates in a different time-scale from that of linear, progressive, narrative history. It does not follow that it is anachronistic; indeed, in some ways it is more modern than the progressive forces of state-formation which it resists.
Some of the essays in this rather slim volume go very deeply, and very stimulatingly, into these issues, which I am barely able to summarise here. Lloyd is not afraid to confront the most vexed issue of all: historiography, the writing of history, how we tell the past to ourselves. He values such narratives as accounts of agrarian protest, stories of women's working lives, etc, and is as equally unimpressed by old-fashioned nationalist history-writing as by current revisionism, which he sees as the professional institutions merely confirming their own legitimacy.
Around this central concern with history and culture, Lloyd weaves a number of elegant variations: a rehabilitation of kitsch, a meditation on the meaning of exile now for an Irish emigrant like himself (he teaches in Berkeley, California), a thorough deconstruction of The Crying Game (though this last, it must be said, is a rather easy target).
Northern Ireland, naturally enough, figures quite prominently, but its treatment is disappointing. One might have thought that Northern Ireland would be especially valuable to Lloyd as a contested site, resistant in different ways to the control of two powerful neighbouring states, and as a place where chronology and history are very far from being abolished in any putative new world order. Instead, as so often, we hear a lot about massive state security and surveillance and a harassed and resistant population. The idea that there might be any other party involved is, again, completely elided.
In general, Lloyd is open to the charge of wanting to have his cake and eat it. He wants to arrest nationalism at a particular point, its pre-revolutionary radical phase, and to keep it there in spite of what actually happened. It seems impossible, in reality, to imagine a nationalism that would not find its goal in a fully realised, totally sovereign nation-state. (And, needless to say, Lloyd has even less time for supra-national institutions like the EU.) This may be the reaction of a thoroughly mystified bourgeois subject, but it does seem to be the way things are - in Ireland, if not in the Philippines. Nonetheless, there is much to be said for a critic whose work at least points beyond the sterile revisionist/anti-revisionist dichotomy, as Lloyd's so creatively does.
Terence Killeen is a critic, and an Irish Times journalist.