R.F. Foster
(Penguin, £22.50)
While Paddy and Mr Punch is a collection of essays, not a general history, it nonetheless maps out the central preoccupations of a highly influential historian and sets out to analyse the past and current state of relations between ‘History and the Irish Question’. Foster welcomes the possibilities offered by an interdisciplinary study of history and literature, but these essays offer too narrow a base for truly interdisciplinary work. Those which are primarily literary criticism rather than history utilise a very old fashioned form of literary criticism indeed. He might find more recent work in the broad area of cultural studies far more hospitable to historical concerns than his exclusive focus on literary ‘personalities’, which limits so many of the essays in this collection.
There is an even more important omission in this volume, however. While it is not unusual, it is no longer excusable for an Irish historian to proceed to analyse broad issues in Irish culture and politics as if feminist historiography had never happened. Foster’s preface briefly refers to women’s history in Ireland as amongst ‘the most fundamental revisionism’ now in progress, though he modestly attributes this insight to Tom Dunne. Thereafter there is no explicit reference to women’s history (though considerable use is made of Dana Hearne’s edition of The Tale of a Great Sham in the essays on Parnell). The discussion of current debates in Irish history excludes reference to the ‘agenda’ for a history for Irish women outlined in Irish Historical Studies in 1992 by Mary O’Dowd, Maria Luddy and Margaret McCurtain. Foster’s Modern Ireland 1600-1972 referred to feminist historians only in footnotes; it is hardly an improvement not to refer to them at all. For example, Foster notes that there has been renewed interest by historians in the period between the fall of Parnell and 1916 as a ‘period when new options were tried, new alliances cautiously tested out and traditional identities debated and examined’. The long footnote outlining this research ignores The Women’s Suffrage Movement and Irish Society in the Early Twentieth Century. Katherine Cecil Thurston’s immensely successful John Chilcote MP is left out of the account of parliamentary fiction. There are less serious and presumably intentionally provocative moments, such as listing Maud Gonne as a ‘marginal man’.
Foster’s assumption that ‘gender-consciousness’ does not have to be taken seriously has consequences for the book’s central and much repeated thesis. He cites as evidence that ‘anti-Irish prejudice owed more to class than to race’ the fact that Hibernia was portrayed as a ‘classic Greek beauty’ in Punch. This interpretation is completely blind to gender, particularly in relation to race. Most of the negative, bestial stereotypes Foster cites are linked to masculinity — and to a very specific ‘type’ of Irish man. The depiction of Ireland as a beautiful virgin needing to be saved from the ravages of wild Irish men was already being satirised in the opening of Emily Lawless’s With Essex in Ireland (Lawless’s politics were broadly constructive unionist) and has been more recently analysed in Cairns and Richards’s Writing Ireland and C.L. Innes’s Women and Nation. Engagement with the complex relation between class, race and gender in nineteenth-century popular discourse might have alerted Foster to the significance in this case of the crucial difference between a symbol of territory and a caricature of its inhabitants.
All of these essays are circumscribed by fear of contamination by modes of reading which have been employed by critics of revisionism. The borderline form of identity available to the Irish, colonised yet white (‘the Irish occupied administrative and legislative roles in the imperial hierarchy which would never be allowed to Africans or Indians; intermarriage was never tabooed’) is often ignored by those over-eager to generate facile analogies with other colonial histories: Foster seems equally unwilling to entertain the complexities of this position, precisely because his goal is to dismiss such analogies. An important avenue of analysis is closed down by the need to assert that interpretations recruited by ‘the other side’ are indisputably wrong.
The intellectual price which the study of Irish history pays for this revisionist/anti-revisionist monomania is clear in Foster’s curt dismissal of the interaction which has occurred elsewhere between historiography and narrative theory. ‘The useful position that all history is suspect and all readings questionable’ is a gross simplification of the views of Hayden White and Paul Ricoeur. Foster argues that it is too easy to use their views to sanction ‘a turning back to the old verities and the old, atavistic antipathies’ without giving any example to support this crude reductionism.
Foster argues forcefully against equating revisionism with anti-nationalism, but throughout assumes anti-revisionist opinion must be nationalist. He stridently insists that revisionism is pluralist (and the terms on which pluralism accommodates diversity are unquestioned) and that anti-revisionists are all the same and rabidly monoculturalist. ‘The notion that people can reconcile more than one cultural identity with their individual selves’ is a much more pronounced feature of post-colonial theory than of Irish revisionism. If, for example, Foster had engaged with Edward Said or Homi Bhabha, two leading post-colonial critics, it might have forced him to think about the power differentials between cultures, the difference between toleration and equality, and to admit the value of thinkers quoted by opponents in the ideological battleground of Irish historical and cultural studies.
Inevitably in such a context old certainties recur. There is something deeply reductionist about the way in which life and art are subsumed to something more accurately described as heritage than culture in his readings of Yeats and Bowen. The banal hypothesis that ‘Yeats’s personality and his work is inseparable from the historical tradition and social subculture which produced him’ disturbingly expands into an uncritical celebration of Yeats’s ‘reconciliation with a tribal tradition’ (Irish Protestantism). It is difficult to know whether this is more unfair to the poet or to the tradition.
Foster’s essays on individual writers might have taken heed of a comment by Elizabeth Bowen (not quoted here) that the task of art is to ‘gainsay the demand for stability’, above all to betray tribal tradition, a task which is particularly difficult for the artist who is ‘the product of an intensive environment — racial, local or social’. There was much in the intensive environment of Irish writers to encourage the elevation of not belonging into an aesthetic. The complex negotiation between negation and affirmation of ‘tradition’ is one area which calls for a truly interdisciplinary approach to the study of Irish culture. Paddy and Mr Punch does not undertake such a project.
Gerardine Meaney