anthology as history: the field day anthology of irish literature

Anthology as History: The Field Day Anthology of Irish LiteratureAuthor(s): Kevin BarrySource: The Irish Review (1986-), No. 12 (Spring - Summer, 1992), pp. 50-55Published by: Cork University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29735643 .

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Anthology as History: The Field Day Anthology of Irish Literature

KEVIN BARRY

We stopped very little in Ireland', wrote John Keats from near

Belfast in 1818. The expense of the place and the 'misery of the poor common Irish' left him ill at ease. His overnight visit from Stranraer

remained with him as one overwhelming image:

On our return from Belfast we met a sedan - the Duchess of Dunghill. It

is no laughing matter though. Imagine the worst dog-kennel you ever

saw, placed upon two poles from a mouldy fencing. In such a wretched

thing sat a squalid old woman, squat like an ape half-starved from a

scarcity of biscuit in its passage from Madagascar to the Cape, with a

pipe in her mouth, and looking out with a round-eyed, skinny-lidded

inanity, with a sort of horizontal idiotic movement of her head: squat and lean she sat, and puffed out her smoke, while two ragged, tattered

girls carried her along. What a thing would be a history of her life and

sensations ...

It is unlikely that any anthology of Irish writing will answer Keats's

wish for such a record. A daughter of the Bishop of Clonfert, Mary Alcock, who died in 1798, left some aspiring verses under the title

'Written in Ireland' but they do not take us very far:

Around, where now in ruins lie

Thy sacred altars, I espy Fair Order rear each pile,

Whilst o'er thy wilds forlorn and waste,

Lo, Industry with nimble haste

Makes hill and valley smile.

No more thy sons in fell despite, A murderous band arrayed in white, Shall deal destruction round; Each man beneath his vine shall rest, No more by bigotry oppressed, But Truth by Peace be crowned.

Neither of these perceptions of Ireland near the turn of the nineteenth

century are included in the Field Day Anthology. One would have to

force a point, however, to say that either is excluded. The project of an

50



ANTHOLOGY AS HISTORY 51

anthology is not to be representative but indicative. The Field Day

Anthology is short neither on gothic impressions of Irish poverty nor

on polite verse. As a selection from Irish writing it opposes the asser?

tive status of Irish literature, both polite and impolite. It indicates on

many levels of discourse how apparent opposites depend upon each

other: the horror of the tourist, for example, depends upon standards

of domestic politeness at home. One main purpose of such an anthol?

ogy is to provoke a perception of the interdependence of contradic?

tions.

Its effects may be to call in question the relative authority of differ?

ent kinds of writing simply by the promiscuity of what is made available. This calling in question can be found not only in the recur?

rent scepticism and disagreements that animate many of the introduc?

tory essays to the different sections within the anthology. It is also a

structural element in the juxtapositions or mere contiguities within its

thousands of pages: texts of government policy alongside exquisite stanzas, a ragbag of various translators beside immaculate original texts, folk memories beside political economy, modernist repudiators of history beside verbal republicans.

The humorous inclusion of a variety of translation in Volume I best

indicates the radical historicism of the project. In contrast to the prac? tice in, for example, Thomas Kinsella's anthologies of the translated

past, where all the translations are by Kinsella himself, we are offered

here a light-hearted and vulgar variety of translators who include dry scholars, heroic Victorians and ascetic moderns, all pre-emptive of, and pre-empted by, Mangan's ironic parodies of translation itself. The

substantial inclusion of Mangan (far from sniffing into a cabinet of

Irish literature) is exemplary insofar as for the first time the texts are

edited accurately from their original occasional sources. Mangan is

rescued from, not returned to, the clich?s which dominated his repu? tation from Mitchel to Joyce. While meeting such high standards of

editorial practice, it is also the case that an anthology of this kind is, of

necessity, structurally inconsistent. If you wish, on the one hand, to

disagree with its project you will find your precedent for doing so

within it. If you wish, on the other hand, to aspire to that crypto nationalist zone of the imagination, the fifth province, you will find, on the evidence of Fynes Morison (I, 244ff.), that it is not myth: it is

Meath.

The Field Day Anthology is old-fashioned: something akin to an

anatomie of the world of letters. Its diversity is monstrous and wonder?

ful. It does not behave like the other anthologies on my shelves: the

Norton anthology, the Oxford anthology, the brand new MacMillan



52 BARRY

anthology. It is obvious that such anthologies, with their monologic

concept of literature and of the linguistic nation, express assumptions of traditional scholarship since their editors include such established

figures as M. H. Abrams, Barbara Lowalski and A. N. Jeffares. These

assumptions are that the history of writing is best summarised in

canonical authors of 'literature' and that a common language sub?

sumes all circumstantial differences. Although they contain Jonathan

Swift, James Macpherson, Edna O'Brien and Derek Walcott, all go under the same title of anthologies of English literature. They do make

certain distinctions: the frontispiece of the Norton features a 'Map of

England' which includes Wales, Scotland as far as Edinburgh, and

Carlingford Lough; the Oxford gives a map of the 'British Isles' and

also distinguishes 'Modern British Literature' (Shaw, Yeats, Joyce, MacNeice, Beckett) from 'English Literary History in Process' (Larkin,

Da vie, Gunn, Hughes). The Field Day Anthology, by contrast, ranges far beyond canonical

authors and the category of literature. It does not limit itself to a

common language, including as it does Latin, Norman French, Gaelic

and several Englishes. (Even these may not be enough if we credit the

anthology's evidence of Laurence Whyte, a teacher of mathematics

from Meath, who extravagantly asserts in 1740 that 'Tis well the

Vulgar now of late, / Can relish sounds articulate, / There's scarce a

Forthman or Fingallion, / But sings or whistes in Italian , I, 413). The

effects of this diversity have not yet been well estimated by reviewers

of the anthology. Its volumes make available a reliable and accurate

resource for students of diverse disciplines. Volume by volume we are

offered here a work of detailed, reliable and extensive scholarship:

biographical dictionary, up-to-date bibliographic record, cross-refer?

ential texts and indices. It is probable that only in learned journals of

Renaissance, Enlightenment and nineteenth century studies, will an

exact estimate of the value and omissions of Volumes I and II, be

decided.

The Field Day Anthology looks backwards to a world of letters before the foundational anthologies in the early 19th century. The foundation

of a national canon of poetry, for example, can be located in Alexander

Chalmer's Works of the English Poets (1810) and has been maintained with remarkable consistency, not only into contemporary anthologies, but also as the stuff of university courses and the lofty objects of post structuralist criticism. Chalmers included no women, no anonymous texts and no translators. By contrast, the inclusion of popular anony?

mous texts and of the ironically impossible business of translation are

fundamental to the Field Day Anthology 's definition of a national past.




Insofar as the Field Day Anthology is the largest collection of Irish women's writing available, its ratio of women to men compares well, even in the third volume, with such recent collections as Thomas

Kinsella's New Oxford Book of Irish Verse or Paul Muldoon's anthology of contemporary Irish poets.

The anthology remains, however, on a level with the lamentable

dearth of scholarship about women's writing in Ireland. Almost no

work at all has been done. The anthology relies quite heavily on Janet Todd's Dictionary of British and American Women Writers . However, it

falls far behind, for example, Roger Lonsdale's recent Oxford compila? tion of women poets, which includes more than half a dozen Irish

women who published verse during the 18th century but remain

unknown to this anthology. The only available historical anthology of

Irish women poets, Pillars of this House: Verse by Irish Women 1690 to the Present (1987), also omits that same half dozen. By editorial decision it

also excludes translators, such as Charlotte Brooke, Augusta Gregory and Helen Waddell, and the poets,

Fanny Parnell, Lady Wilde (Speranza), Margaret T. Pender, the Lamont

sisters from Belfast who wrote songs set to music, some of The Nation

poets, the many women who wrote poetry for Shan Van Vocht...

The Field Day Anthology does at least includes some of these poets and

translators. Should a fourth volume make good the omissions and

serve, with the three already published, as a basis for a condensed one

volume paperback, it is likely to be the first substantial work of

reference published on Irish women's writing of the modern period.

Anthologies make history, but all histories are also anthologies. The

categories in the Field Day Anthology are not unfamiliar to us from

chapter headings in the volumes of A New History of Ireland, of the

Helicon History of Ireland or of Foster's Modern Ireland 1600-1972 .

These include much the same kind of periodisation ('Ireland under

the Union', The Famine, Before and After'), the same highlighting or

downgrading of certain crises (plantation, 1798) or of personalities (Swift, O'Connell, Parnell), the same aspiration to some meta-narra?

tive, a complex but unifying story that will encompass these micro

narratives. Yet anthologies can be at odds with the meta-narrative of

history. Histories of a nation tend to be rigorously monologic. An?

thologies may take the opportunity to flourish a heteroglossia: an

alarming habit of allowing the past to write in its own irritating or

bizarre idioms.

The English cultural historian, John Barrell, has distinguished be?

tween the attempt 'to write a summary of a period as it can be



54 BARRY

reconstructed in the late 20th century' and the attempt to ask 'how

some writers of the period themselves attempted to construct an

understanding of contemporary social changes'. The tension between

these two attempts is complex because neither can be innocent and the

one is always to some extent a version of the other. Nevertheless, their

tendencies remain opposed. The growth of economic history, the

history of mentalities, the diverse growth of regional and local histo?

ries, the history of gender and social inequality may indicate the

inadequacy of a summary meta-narrative, even when that is a story of

successive national disappointments. The Field Day Anthology also

presents us with a diversity which puts any such summary at risk, no

matter whether an editorial introduction to (or a reviewer's selection

from) a category appears to detect a connective national thread.

The very looseness of the editorial practice allows any one section to

be tangential or contradictory to any other, just as it allows the diver?

sionary tactic of a single author reappearing under many quite sepa? rate categories. The analytic authority of individual introductory essays

provides a useful resource for students. Examples of such analysis would include the deconstructive introductory note to Robert Emmet's

'Speech from the Dock', the exacting introductions to 'Edmund Burke', to 'The London Exiles: Wilde and Shaw', to 'The Counter-Revival

1930-65' and to 'Samuel Beckett'. There are lapses in this exactitude

(for example, the annotation to Heaney's verse), but the decisive

originality of Luke Gibbons on 'Versions of National Identity' and of

W. J. McCormack on Trish Gothic' open up new initiatives in modern

Irish cultural history, initiatives which derive from critical juxtaposi? tions: Charles Maturin with William Carleton; Bram Stoker with W. B.

Yeats; John Eglinton's Dana with Arthur Griffith's Sinn F?in. A casual

glance at recent histories of Ireland will show that the first item in each

of these pairs (Maturin, Stoker, Eglinton) had been given little or no

mention in the narrative, however important their placing in the Field

Day Anthology is now agreed to be.

None of these considerations is likely to make the Field Day Anthol?

ogy any more popular than the historian's versions of history which it

wishes to call in question. There is evidence that, in Ireland as much as

in France and in the United States, there is a popular demand for a

more acute refusal of meta-narratives. The transatlantic success of

Dancing at Lughnasa, the appearance of its filmic American counter?

part Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Caf?, the post Manon des

Sources vogue which gives us the cinema of Thaddeus O'Sullivan's

December Bride and the theatre of Sebastian Barry's Prayer for Sherkin, indicate a nostalgia which resists the juggernauts of history and public




policy. In each case we are given those who have lived beside history.

They are not written out of history. They chose not to write themselves

into it. In each of these tiny narratives the characters make this choice

for the same two reasons: first, they did not participate in the main?

stream attitude of their community; second, this non-participation involved some crime or eccentric betrayal.

Both are motives for concealment. Such nostalgia (often with a

quietist patina) is for their fragility and for their violence. Elegies in a

country churchyard, but with a vengeance! These are, for the most

part, imagined women's histories, although this form extends also to

county, local and domestic histories as much as to such an historical

documentary as that about 'The Varian Girls' (RTE, 1989) which at a

stroke showed the limitations of the dreary 'literary' orthodoxy about

Dublin in the 1940s and 1950s, an orthodoxy which has claimed

extraordinary cultural dominion. These popular requirements of the

past's imagined diversity defy both the meta-narrative, to which a

history of Ireland aspires, and also the aspirations of anthologists, who can find little written evidence for what is imagined to have been

concealed. For this new hidden Ireland both Keats's squalid old woman

and the polite subjectivity of Mary Alcock remain unreliable as evi?

dence.



anthology as history: the field day anthology of irish literature

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