Is There Anything 'Post' about Postnationalist Ireland?

Is There Anything 'Post' about Postnationalist Ireland?Author(s): Matthew BrownSource: The Irish Review (1986-), No. 34 (Spring, 2006), pp. 91-107Published by: Cork University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29736299 .

Accessed: 16/06/2014 01:40

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Cork University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Irish Review(1986-).

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 62.122.76.45 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 01:40:28 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=corkup

http://www.jstor.org/stable/29736299?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Is There ̂ ?ytt?rig 'Post' About Postnationalist

Ireland?

MATTHEW BROWN

Since

the Republic of Ireland joined the European Community in 1973,

'postnationalism', an

expedient catch-all for Europe's emergent federal?

ism, has gradually established itself as a curious and nervy proposition. Critical questions elicited about its potentially vertiginous effects include:

does postnationalism bode the end of single-state nationalism and, in so

doing, offer new strategies to topple established, albeit worn, paradigms

deployed to imagine the nation? Or, rather, is postnationalism nationalism's

hypothesized and critically idealized endpoint, where the positive commu?

nity affiliations lauded by nationalism are transposed to the international

level through entities such as the European Union? Beyond these choices, does the 'post' in postnationalism suggest that the theory might embody

something more than a

quarrelsome progeny, a theoretical curative or a

political cul-de-sac?

Postnationalism is all the more vexing for the Republic of Ireland, a

nation already laden with many 'posts'. It has been labelled the first post colonial country of the twentieth century, a country responsible for

fostering a postmodern literature and for anticipating poststructural theories

of language (in the writings of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett). To worsen

matters, Richard Kearney agglutinates 'post' to 'nation' in order to surpass, as

he writes, Ireland's 'modern nation-state model in the direction of a federal

Europe of regions ?

postmodern, postnationalist and postsovereign'.1 So, a

nation bearing the weight of these many 'posts' is encumbered by the ques? tion of what common theoretical ground they share, a question that has

been asked before by Kwame Anthony Appiah, and that I return to here for

somewhat different reasons: is the 'post' in postnationalism the same 'post' as

the 'post' in postmodernism? Or the 'post' in postcolonialism? Or is this an

BROWN, '"Posf'-nationalist Ireland', Irish Review 34 (2006) 91



ersatz 'post' posted to 'nationalism' in order to rehearse theories of national

identity in the wake of globalization?2

Despite the obvious and potentially disabling tensions between these two

posts ? what Appiah characterizes as postcolonialism's desire to assert posi?

tive forms of communal identity that postmodernism always already

anticipates ? both stake an equal claim to the 'post' in postnationalism. As a

postmodern phenomenon, the postnational condition arrives after or

indeed might signal the end of single-state nationalism. In this temporal

usage, there is the implied sense that postnationalism follows from national?

ism as an event of historical closure.3 There are several other meanings

implied here, many of which Kearney identifies. The 'post' in post?

modernism, so he argues, 'refers then not just

to what comes after

modernity. It signals rather another way of seeing things, which transmutes

linear history into a multiplicity of time-spans'; the net effect of postmod ernism's 'post' as modifier for postnationalism is that 'the modern idea of a

millenarian state in which cultural and political differences might be sub?

sumed into consensus is challenged by the postmodern preference for

dissensus ? diversity without synthesis'.4 As we will shortly see, Kearney's

'Postnationalist Ireland' recommends dissensus by weaving regional episteme

together with inter- or transnational forms of identity. Elsewhere in the extant criticism, 'postnationalism' appears as 'post

nationalism', an emphatic hyphenate that ostensibly conjures another

etymological track: 'post-' as position or location (deriving from positum, the

neutral post participle of poner?: to place). The spatial iteration of'post' in

'post-nationalism' considers itself an alternative discourse to theories of com?

munal identity and is situated in relation to nationalism without necessarily

signalling the nation's end. This 'post-' cringes at any familial resemblance to

its temporal kin and is often affiliated with the 'post' in postcolonial criticism.

From a postcolonial perspective (but not from a 'post-nationalist' one), David

Lloyd skewers postmodern postnationalism:'[Postnationalism] has the absurd

goal of preserving cultural difference within the broader plan for rationaliz?

ing and homogenizing the European political economy. It is, in other words, a merely aesthetic response to the contradictions of modernization and cul?

tural difference.'5 For Lloyd, the 'post' in postcolonialism refers 'not to the

passing of colonialism but to the vantage point of critiques which are aimed

at freeing up the processes of decolonization from the inhibiting effects of a

nationalism invested in the state form. Such critiques make way for the

reconstitution of alternative narratives which emerge in the history of our

present, with its multiple contemporaneous rhythms and intersections.'6 Even

though Lloyd misses postnationalism's viability as an aesthetic problem that

might, in turn, precipitate a more profound understanding of 'alternative

92 BROWN, "'Posf'-nationalist Ireland', Irish Review 34 (2006)



narratives', he nevertheless shares critical ground with Kearney. In their

mutual conjuring of dissensus, Kearney and Lloyd agree that both modifying

'posts' offer a 'new way of seeing things', a 'different vantage' from which to

consider Irish nationalism ? but how to locate or to manufacture this new

perspective through a 'post' within the alleged 'Postnational Constellation'

(an analytic set in motion by J?rgen Habermas) is the subject of significant critical debate.

In what follows, I want to suggest that contemporary Irish literature has

much to offer postnationalism. Like the postmodern Kearney and the post colonial Lloyd, many contemporary writers explore new ways to imagine the nation and do so by experimenting with, as Ray Ryan notes, depictions

of space, those many 'borders, margins, parishes, provinces, cities, counties,

places, and regions through which Irish culture is regularly comprehended'.7

Through the work of John Banville and John McGahern, I want to suggest that postnationalism

? if it is to have any traction in Irish Studies, if it is to

avoid posing as a dilute strain of previous 'posts', if it is to invigorate new

theoretical paradigms on the nation ? needs to critically investigate rather

than serve as a neutral term of accommodation for the interactions between

regional and cosmopolitan forms of identity. To be more specific: by setting

up postnationalism as form of analysis useful for investigating the political, cultural and economic collisions between the Irish state and the European

Union, I seek to offer a reversal (of sorts) of Kearney's model and read 'post nationalism' not as a solution to Irish nationalism but as a clearer statement

on the problems facing regional, national and international forms of repre? sentation. Postnationalism needs to be at once more dynamic and more

self-reflective about the spaces it hopes to represent ? an understanding that

Banville and McGahern lend to postnationalism's current momentum. In

this discussion, I cannot aim to solve all the theoretical and lexical problems elicited by postnationalism. But by offering a few theories on what this

curious 'post' activates in contemporary Irish literature, I do want to argue that in striking out on its own, out of the heavy shadows of previous 'posts',

postnationalism faces the difficult task of avoiding either an uncritical cos?

mopolitanism or an insular regionalism that absorb qualities of the nation

and national life without transcending 'traditional' substitutions (for exam?

ple, between the local environ and a universal ideology) often required by Irish nationalism.

The Irish region, the European Union

Theories of'Postnationalist Ireland', the title of Kearney's book on the sub?

ject, walk hand in hand with the internationalist paradigm proposed by John

BROWN, "'Posf'-nationalist Ireland; Irish Review 34 (2006) 93



Hume's 'Europe of the Regions'. To suggest why postnationalism fails to

articulate what Kearney calls a 'postmodern theory of power', I want to sur?

vey briefly a few answers to that motivating question - what is

postnationalism and to what etymological and political 'post' has post nationalist Ireland has been hitched? ?

by explicating the correlation

between Irish regionalism and European cosmopolitanism, a relationship that Kearney and Hume idealize.

The term 'postnationalism' developed in Ireland mainly as a response to

the continued hegemony of nationalism in Irish Studies. Attempting to

move beyond or sidestep inherited nation-state models of national identity,

Kearney defines postnationalist Ireland as 'the idea of a Council of the

Islands of Britain and Ireland, eventually evolving towards a federal British

Irish archipelago in the larger context of a Europe of Regions'.8 Published

in 1997, Kearney's Postnationalist Ireland expands upon Across the Frontiers:

Ireland in the 1990s, his edited collection containing Hume's formative essay

'Europe of the Regions', in which Hume's conceptual support for Irish

regionalism gains relative strength from his comparison of it with Irish

nationalism under a 'Europe of the Nation States'. In cataloguing post nationalism's benefits for 'smaller countries like Ireland', Hume asserts that

its future implementation 'depends on our political vision and will whether

we want to make of the single Europe simply a dilution of national sover?

eignty or a dilation of democracy'.9 Following Hume's manoeuvre to pit

democracy in Europe against single-nation sovereignty for the postnational? ist cause, Kearney asserts that the postnational condition is imminent:

contemporary Ireland is in historic transition and calls for new modes

of self-definition in keeping with an overall move towards a more

federal and regional Europe. In the new European dispensation, nation

states will, arguably, become increasingly anachronistic. Power will be

disseminated upwards from the state to the transnational government

and downwards to subnational government. In this context, future iden?

tities may, conceivably, be less nation-statist and more local and

cosmopolitan.10

Notwithstanding his mid-1990s optimism, nurtured perhaps by Celtic Tiger

enthusiasm, Kearney endorses republicanism through the greater integration of Ireland with Europe while striving also for a simultaneous reappreciation for regional culture and politics. His argument is analogous to Hume's inso?

far as they both argue that Irish regionalism linked to European federalism

should ideologically superannuate traditional expressions of nationalism. In

this substitution of a federal-regional model for the nation-state model,

postnationalism wants to appeal to an abstract identity of affiliation - an




idea of Europe - that overrides nationalist sympathy by appealing directly to

the material circumstances particular to each region. As Kearney maintains, it is a model that, equipped with the good sense to skirt around 'traditional'

nationalism, presents an innately 'postmodern theory of power' because it

puts 'the "modern" concept of the nation-state into question. It points towards a decentralizing and disseminating of sovereignty which, in the

European context at least, signals the possibility of new configurations of

federal-regional government.'11

As a federal-regional model of governance, postnationalism is met more

equivocally by J?rgen Habermas, who, when theorizing the 'Postnational

Constellation', identifies the many potential instantiations of the term, some

of which are less sanguinary than Kearney's. In his essay 'The Postnational

Constellation', Habermas contends that postnationalism either forecasts the

advent of global democracy or ends democratization altogether when glob alism bears its gnarly fangs: the homogenization and 'Americanization' of

world culture governed by capital interests. As preventative to the latter,

Habermas endorses cosmopolitan solidarity motivated by shared political

responsibility and economic commitment that preserve the democratic

constitutional state, situated amongst other, similarly orchestrated states. His

future vision of the EU is similar to Kearney's ? it thrives off the 'immigra?

tion and pluralization of life forms' that, by merging the local with the

international community, 'poses a real challenge for nation-states in the clas?

sical mold . . . [since] inclusion means that a collective political existence

keeps itself open for the inclusion of citizens of every background, without

enclosing these others into the uniformity of a homogenous community'.12 Habermas attends to the challenges presented to the EU by postnationalism,

including issues of citizenship and economic interdependence, but he is

unwavering in his more general sense that postnationalism is both the logi? cal and desired endpoint for nationalism in Europe, an opinion that, as the

following extract from 'The Postnational Constellation' implies, symboli?

cally pilots Europe's divisive spats in centuries past to the greater glory of a

postnationalist future:

The learning process that can lead toward a European civil solidarity

encompasses a series of specifically European experiences. Since the end

of the Middle Ages, developments in Europe have been more strongly marked by divisions, differences, and tensions than in any other culture

?

by the rivalry between secular and ecclesiastical powers, the regional

fragmentation of political rule, the contradictions between town and

country . . . and above all by ambition and war between nations. In hap?

pier moments, these sharp, often fatal, conflicts have acted as a spur

toward the decentering of perspectives; as an

impulse toward critical




reflection on, and distancing from, prejudices and biases; as a motive for

the overcoming of particularisms, toward tolerance and the institutional

ization of disputes. These experiences of successful forms of social

integration have shaped the normative self-understanding of European

modernity into an egalitarian universalism that can ease the transition to

postnational democracy's demanding contexts of mutual recognition for

all of us.13

One leaves this quote wondering exactly which 'happier moments' the

author has in mind. In this dialectical model of history, regional conflict and

local debate generate an 'egalitarian universalism', eventually reified by the

proliferation of postnational democracies. The writings of Habermas and

Kearney share the conviction that the postnational constellation completes

Europe's evolutionary course, a belief apparent in Habermas 's assertion that

'postnational democracy' may be summarized as the achievement of being

'European' or performing a set of'specifically European experiences'. To the

casual reader, this may not seem all that rhetorically different from being

Irish, French or German except that there is a larger population likewise

identified as 'European' and disseminated across a wider geographical field.

This wouldn't necessarily be a problem if Habermas, Hume and Kearney did not place such high faith in postnationalism as a way out of or around

models that valorize the achievement of a national identity (in Habermas 's

case, a 'European-ness')

as one of the primary goals for nationalism. Because

the postnational symbolically repeats the national, critics ranging from

Jacques Derrida to Edna Longley warn against the postnational condition.14

With the macro-structure of nationalism left relatively intact, is post nationalism really a viable future course for the greater internationalization

of Irish regions?15 Because it harbours what Colin Graham calls a profound

'nostalgia for nation', postnationalism seems vulnerable to critical inquiry at

many of the same contact points as nationalism.16 While writers such as

James Joyce and Patrick Kavanagh expose the fictions of nationalist Ireland, novelists John Banville and John McGahern are equally skilled at revealing the fictions of postnationalist Ireland, which they treat as an aesthetic prob? lem that weighs in on cultural and political debates, and especially Kearney's central conceit that postnationalism summons into being a 'postmodern

theory of power'.17

Cosmopolitan anxieties

John Banville studied postnationalism ? the manifold interactions between

local, national and international spaces ? before postnationalism itself was




theoretically cool. As one commentator suggests, Banville 's work deploys 'a

determinedly cosmopolitan geographical and historical range of reference'

within a local Irish setting; consequently, the collisions between European

cosmopolitanism (or, as with Freddie Montgomery in The Book of Evidence, uncritical cosmopolitanism) and Irish regionalism inform much of his most

recent work.18 Added to his interest in cosmopolitan themes is a deep suspi? cion towards Irish nationalism, either as a literary tradition or as a present concern. About canonical formulations of'Irish Literature', Banville retorts:

'There is no such thing as an Irish national literature, only Irish writers

engaged in the practice of writing.'19 As one might guess from this gnomic

declaration, Banville is notoriously mercurial on the subject of his influ?

ences, showing an obvious regard for those ensconced in the Irish literary

pantheon but acknowledging also the significant pull of Nabokov, Rilke and

Wallace Stevens on his work. Not surprisingly, scholars evaluate his work

through very different national registers: R?diger Imhof and Joseph McMinn emphasize Banville s status as a European writer, as 'one of the

very rare cases where an attempt is made to open up a somewhat parochial

area of literary expression and to link the Irish novel to the European tradi?

tion', while Derek Hand, cognisant of the transnational locutions echoing

through Banville's work, explores the critical contexts of Ireland because, as

he writes, there 'can be no question that Banville's work differs greatly from

the majority of Irish writing of the contemporary moment, but to declare,

then, that it is not "Irish" or that it eschews "Irish" themes and concerns is

too easy and convenient a move on the author's part'.20 Multiplicity, cultur?

al hybridity, contested or vaporous origin: these are the thematic currents

running through Banville's fiction. But his effacement of the Irish nation is

deceptive; returning for a moment to Kearney's definition, Banville appears to be the postnationalist exemplar, insofar as many of his influences are

European while, at the same time, he shades and gives texture to this land?

scape with regional flourish ? a culture and a geography he uses to situate

many of his most recent novels (for example, the jail cell in The Book of Evi?

dence, the Dublin underworld discovered in Athena). What results in Banville's fiction is a fraught relation to place, his charac?

ters torn between the region they inhabit and the larger world they desire.

The thematic tensions emerging from his protagonists' splayed geography do not, however, suggest that Banville's fiction endorses postnationalism

?

or, at least, the model offered by Kearney. In The Book of Evidence, Banville's

raffish Freddie Montgomery seems committed to claims of erasure, of fuzzy national allegiance, of transitioning in between European and Irish locales.

But by organizing the text around Freddie's criminal act, the consequence

(among others) of his inability to reconcile his cosmopolitan world view




with Irish regionalism, Banville punctures Kearney's foremost claim that in a

postnationalist state 'future identities may

... be less nation-statist and more

local and cosmopolitan'. In this novel, violence ascends as the extreme con?

sequence of triumphant postnationalism, Banville all the while suggesting that Irish regionalism and an idea of Europe, clinched through postnational?

ism, are locations that rarely work in concert. Consequently, the

cosmopolitan personality becomes a position of privilege, able to celebrate

the fabled end of nation, while the regional denizen must still abide by a

national ideology. Thus, the regional in coping with the loss of the nation

becomes itself more national and absorbs those duties that the postnational abandons to local authorities.

Jostled between regional and cosmopolitan views on the state, Freddie is

unable to accommodate his peripatetic world view to the geography he

encounters. These spatial anxieties occur within a wider thematic context, one familiar to readers of Banville, who recognize the author's continuing

investigations into epistemology and language. Freddie is the disinherited

son of a middle-class Irish family who, after a botched attempt to steal a

painting from a Big House, kidnaps and, with a hammer, bludgeons to death

a young woman employed at the house. From this murder follows the con?

fessional book of evidence ? Freddie playing the role of self-conscious

inventor who draws frequent attention to his elaborate fictions, but not

without the profound caveat that his staged series of dramatic monologues, creative asides and biographical flourish smuggle into the text a 'truth' moti?

vating his crime.21 His memoir aims for epistemological certainty, a final

'truth' upon which the book equivocates; at novel's end, Freddie exclaims to

a police inspector about whether his narrative confession is true or not: 'All

of it. None of it. Only the shame.'22 By offering a portrait of the artist as a

young murderer who seeks to 'make restitution', Banville explores post?

modern theories of language that run up against the material conditions

language constitutes through iteration, so in bringing The Book of Evidence

to bear upon questions of postnationalism, we are concerned with the mod?

ifying activities of postmodernism's 'post'. Given Freddie's dull acceptance of moral relativism, it comes as no sur?

prise that his world view is consummately post-Nietzschean. Literary critic

Tony Jackson perceptively argues that Banville's novels are concerned with

'the situation of living everyday life in the context of postmodern under?

standings of knowledge and truth', and by 'postmodern'Jackson references

Banville's dramatization of Nietzsche's theories of nihilism, moral relativity and the well-known theorem that 'truth' is always 'an arbitrary set of

metaphors'.23 Jackson's turn to Nietzsche is especially instructive for The

Book of Evidence. On a draft version of the novel housed in Trinity College

98 BROWN, '"Posf'-nationalist Ireland', Irish Review 34 (2006)



Library, Dublin, the author inscribed one of Nietzsche's more famous apho? risms from Beyond Good and Evil: 'There are no moral phenomena at all;

only a moral interpretation of phenomena' (Aphorism 108). One of Fred?

die's more obvious compulsions is to enhance the relativity of morality

through cosmopolitan living, and he reflects on his previous unboundedness

with both awe and nostalgia in his jailhouse memoir.

The Book of Evidence is not Banville's first novel to explore Nietzsche's

theories on the relativity of truth, grammar and morality. His preceding sci?

ence tetraology methodically upset any claims to empirical truth by

suggesting that epistemology remains inextricably linked to linguistic

uncertainty. From the personas of Copernicus, Newton and Kepler, Banville

details the limitations of science's truth claims about natural phenomena,

implying that contesting interpretations of meaning erupt from the lan?

guage employed to write science, against each scientist's desire to locate

those stolid truths so advertised by scientific discourse. 'A new beginning,

then, a new science, one that would be objective, open-minded, above all

honest, a beam of stark cold light trained unflinchingly upon the world as it

is' is how the eponymous hero of Banville s Doctor Copernicus first character?

izes his theory of planetary motion; this 'new science' fails and pitches

Copernicus into despair.24 Epistemological despair in the science novels lead

Banville to ethical studies in The Book of Evidence, in which the author eval?

uates the victim's body as the site where 'moral interpretation of

phenomena' must be tested. As for Copernicus, Freddie in his youth studied

science 'in order to make the lack of certainty more manageable' and later

comments about his own empirical turn of mind: 'I was going to be one of

those great, cold technicians, the secret masters of the world.'25 Again, sci?

ence fails to provide an underlying truth about the universe's essential

constitution, setting Freddie adrift ? he becomes 'something without

weight, without moorings, a floating phantom'.26 Freddie's spatial crisis within the postnational constellation, in combina?

tion with his morally relativist world view, precipitate the crime. Before the

Irish state intervenes in his free play, the pre-crime Freddie is the post? modern last man adrift in what he supposes to be a postnational world. The

opening movements of The Book of Evidence confess to an unremitting rela?

tivism that lasts as long as his body remains unhooked from legal definitions

of violence. After a casual study of mathematics in Ireland and America, Freddie travels across islands in the Mediterranean with his wife, Daphne, and son, Van, in tow. He runs into trouble when he meets 'Randolph the

American' and in jest uses him as the go-between to borrow money from a

local mobster. From this wager, we learn that Freddie assumes that everyone

performs as he does, that his enjoyment of'playing at being a blackmailer' is




shared by the faux American lackey, a not uncharacteristically egotistical

premonition on Freddie's part that the body of the other is always already subsumed into his subjective rendering of events. He spends the money lav?

ishly, is insulted when the American asks him to repay the debt, remarking that the American seems 'distressingly literal-minded in his interpretation of

words such as lend and repay', and only recognizes his true indebtedness

when a severed ear arrives in the mail.27 Bodily harm provides lexical clari?

ty, and the ear temporarily cures Freddie's misrecognition of the debt,

although it does not compel empathy. He describes the ear's former land?

lord, the sullen American, as swathed up like 'poor, mad Vincent in that

self-portrait made after he had disfigured himself for love'.28 Freddie's

delightful elisions between metaphor and materiality tend not to be morally

instructive, and he continues to operate as an aesthetic, rather than an ethi?

cal, agent. Reading the severed ear as a sign of future harm to his own body, Freddie returns to Ireland to procure money by selling an inherited collec?

tion of paintings. In the effort to regain a painting his mother sold to a

wealthy estate, he bludgeons the young woman to death. Moments after the

crime, he remarks: 'I got out of the car and stood a moment ... to my

astonishment the road in both directions was empty, and I had no idea

where I was. On one side a hill rose steeply, and on the other I could see

over the tops of pine trees to far-off rolling downs. It all looked distinctly

improbable.'29 Freddie kills the young woman and is dislocated to such a

degree that he lands in a regional space he does not recognize and an ethical

space we do not recognize.

Once in prison, Freddie's moral relativity, always pitched at a gleeful excess, is fixed by the regional authorities in its most punitive form, a jail cell. Emblematic of the regional capture of the cosmopolitan citizen, the

incarceration surprises Freddie, but it does not surprise the reader. Through? out the novel, Banville characterizes the interactions between regional and

international episteme as a contest. Consider Freddie's homecoming to Ire?

land when, upon seeing his mother for the first time in seven years, she

yelps, 'Freddie, you've got fat.' To which Freddie responds, 'I was thirty

eight, a man of parts, with a wife and a son and an impressive Mediterranean

tan, I carried myself with gravitas and a certain faint air of menace, and she,

what did she do? ? she pinched my belly and laughed her phlegmy laugh. Is

it any wonder I have ended up in jail?'30 Freddie's ideal self, formulated by his lambent internationalism, crumbles against this desultory regional exam?

ination. From the posture of an uncritical cosmopolitan who becomes a

penitent raconteur, Freddie suggests that the regional ? within the post

national constellation ? is used to pay for the excesses of the cosmopolitan citizen. The region's perceived hostility to Freddie's world view is made




explicit when, on being lead from the courthouse, Freddie catches the

attention of a small crowd:'They shook their fists, they howled. One or two

of them seemed about to break from the rest and fly at me. A woman spat,

calling me a dirty bastard . . . That was when I realized, for the first time, it

was one of theirs I had killed.'31 Freddie murders the young girl and jump starts regional prejudice, a circumstance emphasized in this fierce moment

when Freddie's patrician performance is roundly deflated by the emotive

force from the victim's family. More than either a Levinasian imperative to

recognize 'the other as other' or a neohumanist injunction to determine

moral structures within postmodern theories of language, Banville's text

notches the many aesthetic and ethical problems elicited by postnationalist Ireland that are often elided by political accounts. Languishing in jail under

the 'shame' of his confession, Freddie represents a world view that political accounts of postnationalism fail to acknowledge but nevertheless license.

The regional sceptic

Reading John McGahern in light of Banville recommends that we might

approach the ideological machinations of Kearney's postnationalist Ireland

from a different vantage altogether: the regional novel. Just as there is nostalgia for nation in Kearney's theories of postnational life ? that postnationalism

wants to perform under different pretexts what the nation has attempted to

do all along ? so too is there a wistfulness for regional space, as if region as

representation can solve on a local level the problems of difference that

stymied the more salubrious effects of Irish nationalism.32

Taking the 'regional' as a literary genre that seeks to offer a 'more realistic

portrayal of regional topographical, economic and cultural traits', K.D.M.

Snell highlights what might be so appealing about regionalism ? that region

as representation implies a kind of ethnographic realism, a symbiosis between person and place that can then be taken as a 'true' expression of

political or economic need.33 This is certainly one way Kearney reads

'regionalism'. There are other factors germane to literary regionalism that

here deserve mention. Since Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent, Irish liter?

ary regionalism has been intimately affiliated with the construction of

nation. About this correlation, Snell writes: '[Regional] fiction cannot be

interpreted without reference to the problems or even failures arising in

different periods of formulating and imposing national programs or ideolo?

gies.'34 As one of the generative roots for national consciousness, the folk

idiom in literature problematizes Kearney's postnationalism precisely because

the regional mirrors back to the EU qualities that, by their cumulative

BROWN, '"Post"-nationalist Ireland', Irish Review 34 (2006) 101



effects, are national and narrate the nation. Again we see that postnational?

ism constituted by regional representation in parlance with Europe is

effectively a national (and nostalgic) design.35 The international risks facing the same thorny politics as the national, and the EU seems no better

equipped to address what Snell calls 'the problems of regional consensus, of

incorporating diverse regional cultural traditions and political sensibilities

within enveloping policies of the state'.36

Acknowledging this literary-historical traverse between region and

nation, Kearney deploys the writings of John Hewitt and Seamus Heaney to

infuse the regional space with international possibility. For Kearney, both

Hewitt and Heaney link 'a local identity with a cosmopolitan identity' to

point 'in the direction of a cultural pluaralism which, in the evolving frame?

work of a postnationalist Europe of Regions, may lead to the affirmation

and acceptance of differences'.37 This is a process by which regional fidelity remains receptive to cultural internationalism ? an idyllic, perhaps because

so uncomplicated, praxis. David Lloyd's well-known critique of Heaney and

Richard Kirkland's view of Hewitt, though both critical extremes of their

kind, dissect Kearney's view that 'regionalism' might serve as a fundamental

particular to a

European universal.38 Thus, to uncover the increasingly tan?

gled exchanges between the local and universal, and to avoid the

essentialism that Irish regionalism is often assigned, I want to turn to the

novels of John McGahern, for whom questions of citizenship and the rem?

nants of nationalism are thematically formative.

McGahern s dramatization of Irish regionalists such as Michael Moran in

Amongst Women or Mahoney in The Dark ? lives characterized by domestic

violence, unrewarding labour and a just-barely-there domestic economy ?

suggests that rural Ireland is not suddenly rejuvenated by the ideological

designs promised by the postnational. McGahern's scepticism towards post nationalism's revivifying claims has remained ever steady, even though his

books have attended to political, economic and cultural transformations in

the Republic for the past thirty years. The author's representations of the

region in Amongst Women, for example, highlight problems indigenous to

regional life that nationalism itself never cured and that postnationalism continues to exacerbate, such as

emigration to

England, a

deeper entrench?

ment of the psychology of impoverishment and inter-regional tensions.

McGahern is most of all critical of the postnational for its postcolonial con?

ceits through Moran, a disillusioned Irish Republican who offers a stern

judgment on Independence: 'What did we get for it? A country, if you'd believe them. Some of our own johnnies in the top jobs instead of a few

Englishmen. More than half of my own family work in England. What was

it all for? The whole thing was a cod.'39




Despite his innate cynicism, Moran adores the region, and during his daily rounds he visits the post office to post letters. Here, the morose Republican chats with his neighbours and eventually meets his wife. In these short visits, one post ennobles another. The post office confirms the ideal of the post national ? a positive regionalism positioned at the way station of

internationalism. This is a brief moment when McGahern grants the 'post' in

'postcolonial' a positive value, as a space that might encourage enabling over?

laps between local and global cultures. The moment, however, is stunningly

brief, and the author quickly derails this traverse between Ireland and

Europe. Moran s alienated son Luke, who moved to England and, in effect, severed ties with his family, neither responds to his father's letters nor does he

honour his sisters' request to return home for Moran 's funeral: 'A telegram was sent but he neither replied nor came.'40 For McGahern, the post office's

modest success in fostering regional identification is more than overwhelmed

by its cumulative failure to connect the Irish region to locations beyond the

nation's borders.41 Moran 's younger son, Michael, does return to visit his

family, but in the face of his father's play for family solidarity against global ism's allure he matter-of-factly claims, 'We all left Ireland ... I'm afraid we

might all die in Ireland if we don't get out fast.'42 Despite Moran s many let?

ters, however half-hearted, cynical or insular his writings ultimately prove

(his domestic tyranny allegorically recalls Ireland's isolationism), the regional? ist never affects the international, and citizens of the two ideologies

? the

father and his sons ? stand in a constant and final fit of alienation.43

While Banville and McGahern do imagine more profitable interactions

between local and global communities, theirs is a much more tempered ver?

sion of what these postnationalist formations bode. This is not to suggest that they promote a return to Irish isolationism. What these authors suggest is that postnationalism

? as a tepid admixture of postmodern and post colonial theory

? fails to deliver or accommodate forms of representation suitable to either regional or cosmopolitan world views, a failure that leads

their respective protagonists into moral equivocation and despair. Given

these authors' view on postnational life, what's to be done if postnationalism can neither manoeuvre around problems plaguing regional life nor amelio?

rate the local to a wider, ostensibly global, ideology as corrective to the

more delimiting turns in Irish nationalism? Given these shortcomings, does

Irish Studies need postnationalism?

Observing empire

Despite these many critical imbalances, postnationalism continues to adver?

tise Utopian possibility. In an admittedly Utopian moment, Berthold




Schoene enumerates the conditions by which postnationalism would 'incor?

porate rather than merely accommodate the nation's vast repertoire of

different narratives of national belonging': first, the concept of'otherness'

would have to be unlearned and, second, the 'people would have to say a

collective "no" to power'.44 Utopianism aside, Schoene's latter point locates

a third term that has crept into debates about postnationalism ? whether as a

Utopian future or regressive fantasy - a term suggesting that postmodern

and postcolonial critics have been sucker-punched by globalism. That term

is 'Empire', and it is upon a discussion of this term that I want to conclude.

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri define 'Empire' (the era in which they believe the globalized world is currently passing) as a condition character?

ized by fluid national boundaries that redraft, under aggressive terms set by

power alone, defunct nation-state ideologies. Postcolonial and postmodern

theorists, so they claim, 'who advocated the politics of difference, fluidity,

hybridity in order to challenge the binaries of modern sovereignty have

been outflanked by the strategies of power'.45 Their theory of Empire sug?

gests that under the palliative rubric of global democracy, power acts, and

empires are created while the sovereign state is prone to invasion by eco?

nomic or military force. Empire might also be characterized as the

increasing tensions between a nation's call for borders and the posts' dissolu?

tion of these frontiers.46 If Negri and Hardt are to be believed, then power seems the subterranean life of celebratory 'post-ing'

? closing the door on

nationalism allows Empire to creep in through the window.

The concept of Empire, I think, prescriptively contributes to this study by

suggesting that postnationalism might supplement postmodern and post colonial theories of nation. If we hear its tone as contrapuntal to Empire, as

interested in studying the complex interplay between Ireland and Europe

(and, indeed, Ireland and the rest of the world), and as an aesthetic problem that leads into political and cultural debates, postnationalism will better illu?

minate the conditions by which the individual must approach the overlaps between regional and cosmopolitan world views. In this formulation, post nationalism would not pose as a solution to nationalism but as a clearer

statement of the future national and international crises facing Ireland. It

might also serve as a term of accommodation ?

with postmodernism, post

nationalism would question the foundational categories upon which the

nation has and will continue to constitute itself; with postcolonialism, it

would share the ability to make available positive assertions of identity while

maintaining socio-cultural particulars within the EU. Obviously, this is an

ideal manifestation, but as I have been suggesting through Banville's study of

cosmopolitanism gone awry and McGahern's regional enclosures, post nationalism should articulate the difficult substitutions required by the




simultaneous contraction of the national space into the region and the citi?

zen's ideological expansion into the world community. If'Empire' denotes

the channels through which power acts, postnationalism might be the

means for the individual to articulate the collisions between the ostensibly

sovereign nation and the borderless expanse of globalism that other 'posts'

might herald under cover of global democracy.

Notes and References

1 Richard Kearney, Postnationalist Ireland: Politics, Culture, Philosophy (London: Routledge,

1997), p. 20.

2 Kwame Anthony Appiah, 'Is the "Post-" in "Postcolonial" the "Post-" in "Postmod?

ern"?', in Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti and Ella Shohat (eds.), Danger Liasons:

Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives (Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press,

1997), pp. 420-45.

3 Such a view also hinges on the fallacy of 'presentism', that is, overplaying the 'radical

discontinuity between contemporary social existence and that of the recent past': (Neil

Lazarus, 'Transnationalism and the Alleged Death of the Nation State', in Keith Ansell

Pearson, Benita Parry and Judith Squires (eds.), Cultural Readings of Imperialism (New

York: St Martin's, 1997), p. 32.

4 Kearney, Postnationalist Ireland, p. 65, emphasis in the original. 5 David Lloyd, Ireland After History (Cork: Cork University Press, 1999), p. 81.

6 Ibid., p. 41.

7 Ray Ryan, Ireland and Scotland, Literature and Culture, State and Nation, 1966?2000

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 16.

8 Kearney, Postnationalist Ireland, p. 11.

9 John Hume, 'Europe of the Regions', in Richard Kearney (ed.), Across the Frontiers: Ire?

land in the 1990s (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1988), p. 57.

10 Kearney, Postnationalist Ireland, p. 15, emphasis in the original. 11 Ibid., p. 61.

12 J?rgen Habermas, The Postnational Constellation, trans. Max Pensky (Cambridge, Mass.:

MIT Press, 2001), p. 73.

13 Ibid., p. 103.

14 See Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today's Europe, trans. Pascale

Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992); Edna

Longley, 'Irish Poetry and "Internationalism": Variations on a Critical Theme', Irish

Review 30 (2003), 48-61.

15 One immediate response is that postnationalist Ireland is nothing more than a contem?

porary iteration of Revivalist fantasia, postnationalism striving to reconcile the regional

particular to a European universal in much the same way that many Revivalists wanted

to summon the Irish region and an imagined national community into something

resembling a liveable relationship in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

16 Colin Graham, Deconstructing Ireland: Identity, Theory, Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh

University Press, 2001), pp. 94-8.

17 Despite their differences in style, influence and tone, Banville and McGahern are often

compared, typically on the grounds of their shared interest in spatial depictions of Ire?

land. See Terence Brown, 'Redeeming the Time: The Novels of John McGahern and




John Banville', in James Acheson (ed.), The British and Irish Novel Since i960 (London:

Macmillan, 1991), pp. 159-73.

18 Conor McCarthy, Modernisation, Crisis and Culture in Ireland, ?969?1992 (Dublin: Four

Courts Press, 2000), p. 81.

19 Banville, quoted in Edna Longley, The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland

(Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1994), p. 179.

20 R?diger Imhof, 'John Banville', in James P. Myers, Jr. (ed.), Writing Irish (Syracuse:

Syracuse University Press, 1999), p. 66; Derek Hand, John Banville: Exploring Fictions

(Dublin: Liffey, 2002), p. 5.

21 For a discussion of Freddie's manufacture of truth, see Kim Worthington, Self as Narra?

tive: Subjectivity and Community in Contemporary Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1996). 22 John Banville, The Book of Evidence (New York: Warner Books, 1989), p. 220.

23 Tony Jackson, 'Science, Art, and the Shipwreck of Knowledge: The Novels of John

Banville', Contemporary Literature 38 (1997), 510.

24 John Banville, The Revolutions Trilogy: Doctor Copernicus (London: Picador, 2001), p. 100.

25 Banville, Evidence, pp. 18, 65.

26 Ibid., p. 16.

27 Ibid., p. 14, emphasis in the original. 28 Ibid., p. 15.

29 Ibid., pp. 113?14, emphasis in the original. 30 Ibid., p. 42.

31 Ibid., p. 211, emphasis in the original. 32 Without question, 'Irish regionalism' in the shadow of the EU is itself a murky prove?

nance that is more often synonymous with local partition. When studying Ireland's

economy during the 1990s, Ullrich Kockel remarks that any burgeoning regional ethos

since Ireland joined the EU 'has been constrained by a national developmental policy that effectively treats the Republic as a single city region, Dublin, with its vast hinter?

land'. This absorption of Ireland's geography into the Dublin metropolis seems a less

than ideal particular upon which to base future implementations of a postnational uni?

versal, especially if a 'Europe of the Regions' is to have any political traction. And as

Kockel suggests, this policy in its effects treats the nation as a single and vast region,

which again returns us to the problem of the postnational as a national paradigm.

('Regionalism in the Republic of Ireland', in Peter Wagstaff (ed.), Regionalism in the

European Union (Exeter: Intellect Press, 1998), p. 48).

33 K.D.M. Snell, 'The Regional Novel: Themes for Interdisciplinary Research', in

K.D.M. Snell (ed.), The Regional Novel in Britain and Ireland, 1800-1990 (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 49.

34 Ibid., p. 8.

35 See also Kevin Whelan, 'The Intellectual and the Region', in Liam O'Dowd (ed.), On

Intellectuals and Intellectual life in Ireland (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1996) .

36 Snell, 'The Regional Novel', p. 47.

37 Kearney, Postnationalist Ireland, p. 107.

38 At the critical extreme occupied by Lloyd and others, Heaney and Hewitt have been read

as apologists for regional vitality and unity against the cross-hatchings of modernization,

economic vicissitude and cultural change, their restoration of regionalism seen as 'a funda?

mentally pacific gesture'; Ryan, op. cit., p. 17. See also David Lloyd, Anomalous States

(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993); Richard Kirkland, Literature and Culture in

Northern Ireland since 1965: Moments of Danger (London: Longman, 1996), pp. 28?33.




39 John McGahern, Amongst Women (New York: Penguin, 1990), p. 5.

40 Ibid., p. 181.

41 The only favour errant Luke provides his family is helping his younger brother,

Michael, escape the dead ends manifest in Ireland by finding work for him in London, a

service that confirms Moran's worst fears about the 'new' European economy.

42 McGahern, op. cit., p. 155.

43 As Gerry Smyth notes when discussing McGahern's critique of nationalism, Amongst Women offers 'an astute portrayal of a post-colonial life in which disappointment and

frustration are the typical informing emotions, at the level of both individual and state'

(Gerry Smyth, The Novel and the Nation: Studies in the New Irish Fiction (London: Pluto

Press, 1997), p. 173).

44 Berthold Schoene, 'The Union and Jack: British Masculinities, Pomophobia, and the

Post-nation', in Glenda Norquay and Gerry Smyth (eds.), Across the Margins: Cultural

Identity and Change in the Atlantic Archipelago (Manchester: Manchester University Press,

2002), p. 97.

45 Philip Roth well, A Postmodern Nationalist (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2004),

p. 16.

46 Forged from the activities of multinational expansion and local contraction, Empire

rhymes with Kearney's emphasis on dissensus in that it is 'a decentered and deterritorializing

apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open,

expanding frontiers. Empire manages hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, and plural

exchanges through modulating networks of command. The distinct national colours of

the imperialist map of the world have merged and blended in the imperial global rain?

bow' (Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press, 2000), pp. xii?xiii, emphasis in the original).




Date post:	21-Jan-2017
Category:	Documents
Upload:	matthew-brown
View:	216 times
Download:	2 times

Is There Anything 'Post' about Postnationalist Ireland?

Documents