NEW HIBERNIA REVIEW
Geimhreadh/Winter 1998




Eamonn Wall
The Black Hills, the Gorey Road
Jack Morgan
The Dust of Maynooth:  Fenian Funeral
as Political Theater-St. Louis, 1865
Celia de Fréine
Filíocht Nua: New Poetry
Nelson ó Ceallaigh Ritschel
James Connolly's Under Which Flag, 1916
Dele Layiwola
"That Ancient Sect": W. B. Yeats
and the Idea of a National Theater
Margaret Rose Jaster
Staging a Stereotype in Gaelic Garb:
Ben Jonson's Irish Masque, 1613
Michael Patrick Gillespie
The Papers of James Joyce: Ethical Questions
for Textually Ambivalent Critics
James E. Guilfoyle
The Religious Development of Daniel
O'Connell, II: The Making of a Devotional Catholic
Patrick Maume
The Margins of Subsistence:
The Novels of Shan Bullock
James J. Blake
The Irish Language Today: An Teanga
Inniu Language Planning and Policy in Ireland, 1960-1998
Reviews: Léirmheasanna

Editors' Notes: Nótaí na nEagarthóirí
Whether in English or in Gaeilge, Irish writing has long claimed as one of its most powerful resources the particulars of sense of place, placelore, dinnseanchas. But what confronts the Irish writer who leaves birthplace and native place for another? In Eamonn Wall's instance, it is the looming buffalo claiming his family's passage through a piney detour. Essayist and poet, Wall ruminates here upon that wide American landscape lying just northwest of his Omaha-on the road to Valentine, into the Black Hills, into the Pine Ridge Reservation. The American-Irish writer may not be native to this place, but traveling out the Gorey Road from Enniscorthy to Manhattan reveals the omphalos, the primary place in the person, and by example in every person. This memoir answers Wall's 1996 essay "Exile, Attitude, and the Sin É Café: Notes on the 'New Irish'." Eamonn Wall is the author of Dyckman-200th Street (1994) and Iron Mountain Road (1997).

If North America had retained its oral cultures, then it would have retained its own dinnseanchas tradition, and the stories that graveyards, cemeteries, and gardens of remembrance tell might still be told. Indeed, nineteenth-century cemeteries would often tell an Irish story, such as that Jack Morgan has researched here about the grave of the Fenian Henry O'Clarence McCarthy lost in St. Louis's Calvary Cemetery. American Fenians, following the model of the 1861 Dublin funeral of Terence Bellew McManus, turned the burial of McCarthy into a Irish nationalist statement just at the end of the American Civil War. The circumstances of McCarthy's nationalist obsequies in September, 1865, engaged issues pertinent both to Irish history and American history-church and state, hierarchy and democracy, the influence of the Old World-"the dust of Maynooth"-over the New. Ever interested in the American Fenians, Prof. Morgan has just finished a collection of essays on Irish-American writing to be titled The Exiled Imagination: Ireland in the American Grain.

Celia de Fréine's latest poems let ordinary plots of perception surrender to fable or, abbreviated, to the parable of the moment, and not just because her lines begin in the sounds and concreteness of Irish. Into those stanzas and riddles come the discords of the contemporary-whether the "Celtic Tiger" or the burnt-out homes of the "the former Yugoslavia." And most of these poems have stunning closures that, with well-planned oxymora, waylay the reader's expectations, just as a poem ought. The same reader may take de Fréine's ventriloquism in the role of the painter Mainie Jellett as a leading poetic. De Fréine's poetry has received the 1994 Patrick Kavanagh Award and the Comórtas Filíochta Dhún Laoghaire. Currently a writer for the Teilifís na Gaeilge serial Ros na Rún, Celia de Fréine received a 1997 Arts Council bursary and, in 1998, was shortlisted for the 1998 Pan Celtic Film Festival.

The Easter Rising of 1916 was made by literary men-poets, dramatists, and scholars like Patrick Pearse and Thomas MacDonagh. Figures with a more ideological bent also tried out their ideals on the literary page and theatrical stage. Among these was the labor agitator and unionizer James Connolly. Connolly's "lost" play Under Which Flag was performed three weeks before the Rising in Liberty Hall. Rediscovered by Prof. Nelson Ó Ceallaigh Ritschel, Connolly's short play displays a drama of Connolly's own choice of a renewed nationalism over the long agitations of his socialism-of the Rising over the Lock-Out of 1913. Interestingly, an actor in the original play, Seán Connolly, was the first rebel to die in the Rising-shot as he was raising the prop tricolor from Under Which Flag on the roof of Dublin's City Hall. Dr. Ritschel has just completed a critical history of the Irish Theater Movement, 1899-1916.

Writing from Nigeria, Dele Layiwola here counters a critical bent that fashionably projects a skepticism about Yeats-a skepticism dating from Conor Cruise O'Brien's 1967 essay on Yeats's politics. These astringent notes, as in R. F. Foster's biography for example, are not everywhere pertinent, as is suggested by Prof. Layiwola's review of Yeats's idea of an Irish national theatre-a many-valenced concept richly connected with Yeats's biography, his mysticism, and his political ideals. Practical political theatre, as in the instance of James Connolly's Under Which Flag, and ideal political theatre, as in Yeats's cycle of Cuchulain plays, both display the possibility of an individual heroism, that some postcolonial cultures still require. Editor of the journal African Notes, Prof. Dele Layiwola edited African Theatre in Performance (1998). Among his articles is "The Philosophy of Wole Soyinka's Art," Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism (1996).

Theater in Ireland-whether in the auditorium of Liberty Hall or on the small stage of the old Abbey-provocatively portrayed the Irish for themselves or, at least, for Dubliners. Theater in Jacobean England-whether at Blackfriars or at court-depicted the Irish as Other for the English or, at least, for Londoners. Taking up the example of Ben Jonson's An Irish Masque at Court (1613), Dr. Margaret Rose Jaster reveals how props and costuming-the forelock or "glybb" and the Gaelic mantle-were used to establish and enforce visual stereotypes of Irish barbarity. A specialist in the cultural significances of Renaissance costume, Prof. Jaster has delivered numerous conference papers and has received seven grants from the Folger Institute.

Historians, biographers, and literary researchers require access to archives of public and private papers, but what considerations enter into decisions to make avalilable some papers and not others? Prof. Michael Patrick Gillespie here takes up that question in reference to Richard Ellmann, perhaps the Joycean, and his edition of Joyce's Selected Letters (1975) so as to pose questions about access to the James Joyce-Paul Léon Papers in the National Library of Ireland. Pressed by the demands of ever more outré schools of critical enquiry, researchers demand access to intimate and extraliterary evidences whose publication may discomfort an author's heirs and, perhaps, damage the reputation of the author's character. Prof. Gillespie recently published Oscar Wilde and the Poetics of Ambiguity (1996).

Daniel O'Connell, the Liberator, died in Genoa on May 15, 1847. His last words were "Jesus, Jesus." Here James Guilfoyle continues his exemplary portrayal of the evolution of O'Connell's religious life by beginning with a second crisis of faith: O'Connell's killing of John D'Esterre in duel on February 1, 1815. After this, O'Connell's devotional practices became ever more severe and, late in the 1830s, his tendencies to dark anxieties about his faith were deepened by the death of his wife. Yet, O'Connell never abandoned his faith in the civic expression of liberty of conscience, a tenet founded in his deism. A coordinator of the Social Theory Workshop at the University of Chicago, James Guilfoyle is presently researching Irish mercantilism of the Ascendancy period.

Writing for London, and sometimes from London as did Shan Bullock, Irish authors of the Victorian and Edwardian eras used the fictional conventions of the novel to record the passing ways of Irish life. As did William Carleton earlier, Bullock wrote of his Ulster homeland-of the bordering fields and townlands of Counties Fermanagh and Cavan. Writing from Belfast, and drawing on Bullock's letters to Sir Horace Plunkett, Dr. Patrick Maume here parses Bullock's output of almost forgotten stories and novels, analyzes his mix of liberal and convservative themes, and most particularly stresses Bullock's dependence upon his father and the remembered resources of life on his father's farm. Maume's views of By Thrasna River (1895), Robert Thorne (1907), or in The Loughsiders (1924) raise issues more Lawrencian than Wordsworthian. Dr. Maume recently published "Life that is Exile": Daniel Corkery and the Search for Irish Ireland (1993).

The fate of Modern Irish as a minority tongue nurtured by some European Union funding seems as unaffected by planning and policy now as it did three decades ago, when the twelve-year-old Republic was just beginning to wake from the thrall of isolationism. The actual modernization of the language, as Prof. James Blake shows, has proceeded apace according to "corpus planning." But the continuing everyday use of the language within discrete geographical or occupational communities has continued to wane, the only sign of vitality being the flowering of Gaelscoileanna in the South and the North. And the same arguments made for the innovations of Teilifís na Gaeilge-the insertion by electronic media of Irish into the pop culture of déagóirí-were made as long ago as 1950 in respect to Irish cinema. Readers with an appetite for detail will appreciate the bibliography supplied by Prof. Blake at the end of his survey of the condition of Irish. 

Cover
The last issue of the 1998 volume of New Hibernia Review closes our presentation of popular, political lithography commemorating the centenary of the Rising of '98. Published by Dublin's United Ireland for its St. Patrick's Day issue, 1894, this mournful lithograph by J. D. Reigh employs theatrical gesture, traditional Fenian iconography, and spectral allusion so as to establish at a glance the necessity for remembering the first republican rising of the United Irishmen. In the farthest, greyest background loom the columns of the parliament of Grattan and Flood. Framing the foreground figure of Erin or Hibernia, are the pitying specters of Henry Grattan (on the left) and the recently deceased Charles Stewart Parnell (on the right)-the two united in pity for their motherland. In the foreground is Erin or Hibernia in Celtic Revival dress. Her voluminous, deep-green and orange-red lined cloak is clasped above her heart by a pennanular brooch. Her left hand holds upright, as if it were the arm of a chair, an antique harp-its strings clearly broken, its voice silent. The full page, though, is not silent. The legend at the bottom of the lithograph almost poses a statement as if it were a question: "U's truagh gan oidhir n-a bh-farradh, : 'It is a pity there is no heir to such men.'" In Erin's hair are twined specters of shamrocks; growing over the face of the broken High Cross are spectral leaves of ivy. If, glancing at this, our readers  recall Joyce's "Ivy Day in the Committee Room," then perhaps they will also recall a line or two from Yeats at the sight of the embroidered hem of Hibernia's gown of white samite sashed with an orange cord.

We thank Prof. Lawrence McBride and Nancy Romero, of the Library of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, for providing this and the past three covers for New Hibernia Review.
                                                                       Back to New Hibernia Review