NEW HIBERNIA REVIEW
Samhradh/Summer 1998




Stephen Watt
The Irish Invade America! Terrorism,
Gender, and Assimilation
Rand Brandes
“Letter by Strange Letter”: Yeats, Heaney,
and the Aura of the Book
Catherine Phil Maccarthy
Filíocht Nua: New Poetry
Emmet Larkin
Myths, Revisionism,
and the Writing of Irish History
Thomas G. Fraser
Orangeism, Parading, and the Northern Ireland Peace Process
Megan Sullivan
Orla Walsh’s The Visit (1992):
Incarceration and Feminist Cinema in Northern Ireland
Eva Jacek
Schemers and Squanderers:
Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal
and Flann O’Brien’s Slattery’s Sago Saga
Nancy Stenson
Beagáinín: The Use of Irish Among
Immigrants to the United States
Taispeántais: Exhibitions
Gary A. Richardson
Leaving the Old Neighborhood Behind:
The Irish in America
Charles Fanning
The Irish in America: Darby
and Fievel Do Not Go West
Reviews: Léirmheasanna

Editors’ Notes: Nótaí na nEagarthóirí
Of the more notable trends in mass-market American popular culture in the 1990s has been the fetishization of things Irish—from the memoir of misfortune to the chorus-line glitter of Celtic spangles to the coopting of the Famine by right-minded middle-school educationists. As Prof. Stephen Watt wittily reveals here, the commercial placement of Irish culture and its themes as a model of what we now call multiculturalism in America is no new phenomenon. It can be traced back to the formulas and conventions of Irish-American melodrama of the later nineteenth century—from Pilgrim through Boucicault. Its late twentieth-century, Hollywood equivalent may be discerned in Patriot Games, Blown Away, and The Devil’s Own—each tellingly analyzed in terms of present constructions of race and gender. Dr. Watt delivered a version of this essay as a plenary lecture at the October, 1997, regional meeting of the American Conference for Irish Studies at St. Norbert’s University in De Pere, Wisconsin. Author of numerous articles on theater and on things Irish, Prof. Watt published Joyce, O’Casey, and the Irish Popular Theatre in 1991.

Among the projects of the Renaissance was the institution of the book as a central artifact of a high national culture. Discovering the pivotal place of the book in Yeats’s Renaissance aspirations and in Seamus Heaney’s is Dr. Rand Brandes’s aim here, and he accomplishes it by way of Frances Yates’s The Art of Memory and Giordorno Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. In this nearly occult context, the cover decorations and typefaces, the frontispieces and printer’s devices, the wraps and covers of Yeats’s and Heaney’s books—as well Heaney’s poem “Alphabets” and Yeats’s “The Stare’s Nest”—fructify with needful significance, especially for readers in the latter months of this century. With the late Michael Durkan, Prof. Brandes compiled Seamus Heaney: A Reference Guide (1996).

Not all of Irish poetry in the twentieth century has Renaissance ambitions, as any reading of Patrick Kavanagh or Paul Durcan will show. The parish or the moment sometimes suffices, and sometimes can be teased into a revelation, as in these lines by Catherine Phil MacCarthy. Their language seems simple, but MacCarthy’s breaking of a line, posing of an allusion, repetition of an unrhymed word winds up complicating the reader’s first intuitions. Many of these poems come from MacCarthy’s second collection The Blue Globe, which Belfast’s Blackstaff Press published in March, 1998. This Hour of the Tide, her first collection, came from Salmon in 1994. Catherine Phil MacCarthy presently serves as editor of Poetry Ireland Review.

One of the latest revisions in historiography has been to redefine the late Renaissance, and especially in the countries of northern Europe, as “early modern.” In the historiography of Ireland, as Prof. Emmet Larkin delineates here, “revisionism” has since the 1970s led to a testing of popular myths that have for decades informed nationalist and Revival histories of Ireland. These had as their subjects the Act of Union, the Great Famine, Irish Catholicism, and the Fall of Parnell, and they had as their unstated raison d’être the continual and frequently substantiated need to perceive—with the saeva indignatio of Swift—England’s presence in Ireland as fundamentally immoral. The exhaustion of that indignation may have been complemented by the Good Friday Accords and, now, by the referenda. Dr. Larkin delivered a version of this essay at the November, 1997, ceremonies marking the opening of Fordham University’s Institute of Irish Studies.

The Orange parading tradition—like the A.O.H. one, now fallen in desuetude, or diluted in St. Patrick’s Day exhibitionism—enshrines unexamined myths both going and coming. And the assertion of that tradition will, of course, trouble postreferendum Northern Ireland in years to come. Here, Thomas G. Fraser, the author of three works on Middle East politics summarizes both the history of Orangeism and of its parading tradition before anatomizing parading’s recently disruptive role—Drumcree being the chief recent example—in the Northern Ireland peace process. Prof. Fraser teaches at the University of Ulster and is presently at work editing “We’ll Follow the Drum”: The Irish Parading Tradition forthcoming in 1999, as is his history Ireland since 1922.

Moving down the Lisburn Road, the banners of an Orange parade can seem to show a story, to be an early form of animation, of “film.” Likewise, the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland may be said to have provoked a renaissance not just of writing in the 1970s but of film-making in the 1980s and 1990s. And, as Megan Sullivan proposes, much of life in the North has been recorded by such feminist film-makers as Pat Murphy, Anne Crilly, Margo Harkin, and Orla Walsh. Walsh’s 1992 short feature The Visit, based on a scenario derived from a short story in The Maze journal An Glór Gafa, details a day in the life of a “wire widow,” Sheila Malloy, and her visit to her incarcerated husband. Dr. Sullivan’s articles appear in the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Éire-Ireland, Feminist Review, and the Irish Review.

Jonathan Swift, in early Ascendancy Ireland, and Flann O’Brien, in late de Valéran Ireland, both satirically observed societies bound by the mechanics of stunting economies and commercial appetities. As Eva Jacek so painstakingly reveals, tropes of consumption and appetite undergird the wicked reasonableness of Swift’s Modest Proposal (1729) and the fantastical poor-mouthery of O’Brien’s Slattery’s Sago Saga (1973). In their prose satires, both O’Brien and Swift save most of their severity for the monomania of schemers, or “Proposers” in Swift’s parlance, or of experts and planners in our own. Eva Jacek’s reading of both satires in the context of historical detail makes plain a surprising consonance both of madness and method between O’Brien and Swift. That consonance registers less the human flaws of schemers than the ever-present temptations of market-driven culture.

According to anecdotage and some enthusiastic reporting, the teaching and use of Gaeilge in America has experiences a renaissance since the mid-1980s, as Thomas W. Ihde’s The Irish Language in the United States (1994) suggests. At the same time and since the same decade, the character of Irish immigration to the United States has changed significantly, as such memoirs as Eamon Wall’s have lately suggested. In this context, and in the overdetermining context of trendy “Irishness” in American popular culture, how does the language fare in the lives of Irish-speakers newly settled here? This is Prof. Nancy Stenson’s basic question, and it occasions a host of others. Many of these she asked of nearly thirty Irish-speakers resident in New York, Boston, or Chicago—many from County Galway. Dr. Stenson is the author of numerous papers on linguistics and on the fortunes of the Irish language in such journals as Teanga and the Journal of Celtic Languages. Her most recent book is Studies in Irish Syntax (1981).

Late in January, 1998, public television broadcast over three nights a six-hour documentary—The Irish in America: Long Journey Home. Certainly many readers of New Hibernia Review made it a point to take in the four programs in the series and to consider just how and to what effect the immigrant experience of Irish America has been broadly exhibited to other Americans, whether still in their old neighborhoods or transplanted to postwar suburbs. Here, Prof. Gary A. Richardson summarizes and parses each program. Along the way, Dr. Richardson details the vivid visual and dramatic narrative line of each program, while noting that, in terms of scholarship, the series slights the complexities of the immigrant experience, noting that the first program, “The Great Hunger,” proves susceptible to both historical and cinematic criticism. Later programs may be praised more for their attention to Al Smith and Eugene O’Neill than for their focus on the Kennedys, despite the Kennedys status as an ameliorist artifact of American mass culture. Prof. Richards is the author of American Drama from the Colonial Period through World War I (1993) and, with Stephen Watt, of American Drama: Colonial to Contemporary (1995). He is currently at work on a study of the dramatic representations of Ireland and the Irish from Shakespeare to O’Casey.

Yet, whatever its virtues, The Irish in America winds up being a Disney production aimed at the television audience rather than at seminars of historians or clusters of neighborhood storytellers. The result of the design of the four programs, as Prof. Charles Fanning notes with some severity here, is to confuse representation with stereotyping, as when the series returns time and again to the commentaries of a Boston bartender. And sometimes the stereotyping is enhanced by the series’ choice of exemplars: Eugene O’Neill is offered as the only representative of Irish America’s aspirations to high culture. The Irish in America leaves out much recent scholarship—The New York Irish (1996), for example—but also so much of American social and popular culture: the vibrant urban life of Chicago or San Francisco, the real politics of unionizing and nationalism in America’s Irish parishes, the Irish presence in the now-dominant entertainment media. Selection must entail omission, of course; yet, would any other immigrant community but the Irish in the United States countenance the verifiable absence of so many notables? Charles Fanning directs the Irish and Immigration Studies program at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale and is the author of The Irish Voice in America: Irish-American Fiction from the 1760s to the 1980s (1990).

Cover
The British Empire celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of Queen Victoria’s accession in 1897, a year before the centenary of the Rising of ’98 and six years after the Fall of Parnell. Of course, Ireland or Erin did not welcome to the celebrations, as this political lithograph shows, for she felt a higher duty. Working for the Weekly Freeman, Dublin lithographer Thomas FitzPatrick titled this cartoon “Who Fears to Speak of ’98” after Kells Ingram’s famous ballad of 1843. Michael Dwyer (1771–1815), lies under the farthest tombstone to the right of the central Celtic cross and opposite William Orr (1766–1797). The background is the graves of the ’98 heroes, all neglected, until now: Father Murphy (1753–1798), John Sheares (1766–1798), Robert Emmet (1778–1803), and most famously and to the fore, Lord Edward FitzGerald (1763–1798). 

Against that background, facing Britannia and the Irish reader at home and abroad is Erin, somberly garbed and standing just behind Emmet’s tombstone, about to lay a wreath of roses carrying the legend “In Loving Memory” on Emmet’s grave. Tending those graves after they have been forgotten so long is the duty that now keeps Erin from Victoria’s festivities. Erin’s refusal of Britannia’s invitation—“My place is here”—renders morally superfluous Victoria’s festivities—with their toasts, addresses, and grand huzzas. Indeed, though brightly garbed and carrying a golden trident and wearing a Roman helmet, Britannia stands so far to the fore of the lithograph that she seems hardly in the moral compass of FitzPatrick’s picture at all, though her shadow does extend to the gravestone.

We thank Prof. Lawrence McBride and Nancy Romero of the library of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, for providing these examples of political lithography from Dublin.
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