Much ‘revisionism’ in contemporary Irish and Scottish studies has concerned itself with challenging the ‘essentialist’ formulations of cultural nationalism. Looking on the face of this challenge, the modern Marxist at one extreme and the cultural éltist at the other can together beam approval. For both, vulgar bourgeois distinctions of ‘nationality’ or ‘region’, at least in the context of the British Isles, are ultimately to be taken out of the cultural and literary equation. Both the Marxist and the pure Aesthete might also approve of the conservative revisionist interpretation of many Irish and Scottish cultural and literary activists as key players in the construction of a British literary canon. Inferiorism or cosmopolitanism is the key: all cultural expression is seen to be ultimately sucked to the power centre of a super state.
The Marxist and the Aesthete (at least as these are at work in the United Kingdom), each in their own way, have a dislike of (‘minor’) ‘nationalism’ – but is ‘nation’ always to be consigned to a spuriously mythic category? Or, if it is, is not the ‘British nation’ perhaps even more of a ‘mythical’ beast than that of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales? Examining national aggregation or disaggregation: which is the proper method for scrutinising the power lines in the literary culture of the British Isles? The answer, one would think, is a bit of both. Mongrel ‘English Literature’ with its Swift, Scott, Conrad, T.S. Eliot, Naipaul and Walcott is mirrored by mongrel Irish and Scottish literatures with their John Gray, Douglas Hyde, Arthur Conan Doyle, Patrick MacGill, Sydney Goodsir Smith, Iris Murdoch or Muriel Spark. It is diffi cult to argue for any very coherent ‘national literature’, and Irish and Scottish literary criticism in attempting to grasp their object too tightly become much more problematic than Irish or Scottish history, where the latter at least have much more assurance, seemingly, in physical place. Irish or Scottish writing being defi ned simply by an ‘open door’ policy to place brings about a situation that concedes almost totally the accidental, allowing no really meaningful underlying shape or connectedness. What is to be done with, say, a Bernard MacLaverty or a J.K. Rowling? Willy Maley’s recent list of the ‘100 Best Scottish Books Of All Time’ includes Conrad, because of the Blackwoods publishing connection, Woolf because of a Scottish location in her To the Lighthouse, and Orwell’s 1984 because the novel was written on Jura. (1) Are these the provocative gestures of a rightful cultural agnostic, or a response akin to the proudly patriotic character in the Asian TV comedy series, Goodness Gracious Me who reacts always to the mention of any of the canon of great talents and inventors, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Newton and Einstein etc. with the emphatic identifi cation, ‘Indian! Indian! Indian! Indian!’?
Place is arguably even more diffi cult than in Scotland in the case of literary Ireland. What are we to do with expatriate or second and third generation writers whose work powerfully charts the experiences of the diaspora? Is Rhode Island’s Edwin O’Connor (who features, for instance, in David Pierce’s infl uential reader, Irish Writing in the Twentieth Century) part of Irish or American literature? What of the Field Day anthologies’ collecting together of writers of the Republic and of Ulster? Is this a nationalist fait accompli – generosity or a failure in cultural discrimination? Politically correct revisionism often seems to mean that there are no longer to be any exclusions, there is to be no more exceptionalism.
Irish and Scottish literature specialists perhaps now divide into two camps. The fi rst, the older veterans of the struggle to establish Irish and Scottish studies in the 1960s, is zealous in promoting the ‘national’ context as the crucial focus; the second group, very often hip younger Oxbridge types, practises a ‘four nations’ approach in the face of undoubted long historical amnesia about the importance of cultural borders and difference within the canon of ‘Eng Lit’. The fi rst group insist on a more or less self-contained vertical cultural axis of reading, the latter look for the day when a horizontal ‘four nations’ approach is part of the basic tool-kit of the teacher of any of the bits of ‘British Literature’.
There are obvious advantages to studying closely a particularly Irish or Scottish axis: at the most basic level, knowledge of the Famine or the 1929 Censorship Act or the Clearances or the rise of the National Party of Scotland represent distinctive national moments. Thomas Moore and Walter Scott are ‘mainstream’ writers of the Romantic Age in some aspects, but also have to be understood in their respective Irish and Scottish anxieties (albeit that these are perhaps often more to do with confessional rather than constitutional identity – reaction in Catholic and Calvinist contexts). In Anglocentric descriptions of Romanticism, however, we have the writing out of these two writers, who, along with Wordsworth and Byron, comprise the contemporary ‘Big Four’ of the Romantic period. This is a story worthy of some critical ‘self-refl ection’: refl ection upon the way in which ‘English’ cultural identity was, for a brief period at least – roughly between 1870 and 1914 – re-centring itself, often in rather exclusive fashion. Matthew Arnold’s infl uential invocation of a ‘Celtic’ racial gene in 1866-7 was really about providing for English literature a venerable pedigree that would allow it to stand scrutiny with the complex Greco-Roman convolutions of the ‘Ancient Classics’. Arnold finds ‘Celticism’ in such exemplars as Shakespeare and Keats, and ‘English poets’ are imbued also with ‘Saxon’ and ‘Roman’ qualities, making for an appropriately ancient and complex gene pool. (2) Following Arnold’s lead, the late nineteenth-century ‘Celtic revival’ in Ireland, Scotland and Wales (not to mention ‘regions’ of England such as Cornwall or the Isle of Man), demanded the isolation of the Celtic gene as a cultural birth right and thereby attempted to write out English or British cultural ‘pollution’.
The revivals of Irish Gaelic or Scots Gaelic or even Cornish are neutrally positive by-products of this new ‘Celtic’ awareness, but, on the other hand, we have also a dangerous denial of reality, culminating in 1936, for instance, with Edwin Muir’s dictum that the Scot could not with psychological wholeness write in English (this said, even at the same time as Muir was translating Kafka, who existed in an even more linguistically trammelled location than any Scottish writer ever did, arguing for this novelist’s wholeness of artistic vision and explicitly according to Irish literature a homogenous status). (3) Anxieties about periphery, and, indeed, the vaunting of periphery as representing some kind of primitive virtue can, of course, be read as part of the wider Western Modernist condition, but the periphery advanced in the case of Ireland and Scotland in the period from the late nineteenth century was perhaps too monolithically about nation, rather than being much more expansively peripheral, bearing in mind such factors as class, gender or even dialect. (In the case of the Scots revival of the early twentieth century, at least, language was subsumed all too simplistically within ‘national’ rather than ‘regional’ debates.) Arguably, simplistic nationalism precluded proper attention to literary life beyond the Dublin pale or in Aberdeenshire, and often smothered local strengths under the apprehension of national weakness. Such over-determined cultural and critical attention created somewhat impassable national iconographies, of imperious ‘Britain’, as much as of defeated Ireland, Scotland or Wales.
At the same time, new national ‘conditions’, however wrong-headed, sometimes were created in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and are engaged with by subsequent writers whose work can only properly be understood within the time and space provided by courses in Irish and Scottish literature. Can we really understand the fi ction of national scepticism, the work, say, of Mervyn Wall in Ireland or Robin Jenkins in Scotland, without ample consideration of the reaction against the romantic ‘Celtic’ nationalism of the previous generation in Irish and Scottish writing? Previous essentialist nationalist statements – either by critics or creative writers – have now created ‘objects’ that exist historically and which the revisionist must constantly revisit. Courses in Irish and Scottish literature as much as any in ‘Eng Lit’ are now in a position to revisit the sins of the fathers, and there is more than enough material in this soul-searching to power Irish and Scottish courses for many decades to come.
W.B. Yeats or Hugh MacDiarmid at their most fl orid or lurid speak nothing that stands much empirical scrutiny but represent cultural phenomena that must be explained. We may possibly, or even probably, doubt national Irish or Scottish cultural formulations, but because these ‘national’ formulations have been believed to have existed in the past, they continue to justify close scrutiny within modern courses on ‘national’ literature, even when our modern perspectives on ‘nation’ and ‘literature’ remain constantly sceptical about the basic concepts attaching to such notions. And in any case if a course in Irish or Scottish literature is hopelessly limited it is only more hopelessly limited than any ‘English Literature’ course, if at all, in relatively small terms. Creative, not to say historically credible, identifi cation of material is not really a problem. I know of one case of an academic objecting to the inclusion of Arthur Hugh Clough’s ‘The Bothy of Tober na Voulich’ in a nineteenth century course in ‘Scottish literature’, while seeing nothing wrong with the inclusion of Robert Burns in a course called ‘English Literature 1780-1820’. I see nothing wrong with the former case, and especially welcome the latter; among other things Burns was admired by English dissenting writers, and so helps exemplify a cross-border British dissenting intellect (the ‘canon’ of which remains to be properly defi ned in British literary studies) that crucially came to the fore in the early romantic period.
One possible bold manoeuvre that might be employed by the revisionist is to teach a Scottish literature course on how, say, William Collins, Wordsworth, Charles Dibdin and others contributed to the construction of the Scottish literary landscape; or on the way in which the Irish cultural background of Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser and Jonathan Swift make contributions to the construction of ‘civilised’ ‘English’ ‘cosmopolitan’ culture in the light of this ‘other’ background. In Irish and Scottish studies we are some way away from constructing such imaginative courses as yet. I suspect because (as with the taunt of the academic who objected to the inclusion of Clough on a Scottish course), we are afraid that there are those who will retort, ‘Have you run out of enough interesting native writers?’ The ‘four nations’ coin has begun to buy results in terms of the contribution of Irish, Scottish and Welsh writers to ‘British’ culture and literature. Rather less ventured, as yet, is the way in which ‘English’ writers have contributed to the modern formations of Irish, Scottish and Welsh cultures and literature; and this is a terrain those of us in Irish, Scottish and Welsh areas should increasingly be occupying.
The key point is that these ‘national’ areas are all sites of negotiation, and the intellectual rigour, the critical analysis required to traverse such terra infirma are exactly the same as for any such culturally centred, or self-scrutinising course in English Literature. Anyone still hankering for good old fashioned skills in practical criticism will find that Irish, Scottish and Welsh literature provide enough high quality texts to do enough practical criticism to last a life-time.
I’m conscious that, in a sense, I’m edging close to ‘the question ‘Are there things’ that the study of ‘English Literature’ can do that Irish or Scottish literature cannot?’ Or, ‘Should a cultured British person necessarily have read Shakespeare?’ My answer, is ‘No, not really.’ I would be potentially worried about a course in Irish or Scottish drama where the student knew nothing about Shakespeare simply because of his pervasive presence in the drama of the British Isles (in the work of an ‘Anglo-Irishman’ like William Congreve, say, or an ‘Anglo-Scot’ such as John Home). But this is not a problem that a little priming and even a little ‘peripheral’ reading of Shakespeare won’t fix. I’m hinting, I suppose, that the cultural cringe remains: we are to be ashamed, according to some people, of huge knowledge of a writer like Robert Burns (and funnily enough I can’t think of an Irish writer who works exactly like this – where Burns is just too Scottish), and relatively minor knowledge of Shakespeare. Much more permissible is to have huge knowledge of Shakespeare and no knowledge whatsoever of Burns. We have to start resisting such overarching attitudes: ‘British’/’English’ prejudice (as often wielded by the denizens of Ireland, Scotland and Wales as by those of England) still abounds and we should not be scared to say this.
In this day of skills based learning, of transferable skills, let’s seize the ‘centre’ ground for Irish and Scottish literature; let’s actually believe that these are as valuable (not more valuable) than any other ‘canon’ of literature in terms of skills to be practised upon them, and of cultural and historical knowledge to be derived from them. The only resistance to such propositions actually lies in residual ‘British’ or ‘English’ assumptions about ‘wholeness’ or ‘bigness’ of culture, which revisionists in Irish and Scottish studies, as much as anywhere else, can no longer accept. Revisionism in Irish and Scottish Literature : How far can we go?
Notes
1. Willy Maley (ed.), 100 Best Scottish Books Of All Time (Edinburgh, 2005).
2. Matthew Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature, in R.H. Super (ed.), The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold vol. 3 (Ann Arbor and Toronto, 1962).
3. Edwin Muir, Scott and Scotland (London, 1936), a book that is hopelessly Anglocentric both in desiring/idealising a completely separate national culture and in lamenting the fact that this is wholly unattainable as evidenced, in part, by the fully mature and organic culture of England.
