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  • Notes on a “Classic”
  • Stephen Watt (bio)
Review of Declan Kiberd, Irish Classics (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2001). 704 pp.

Like his 1995 book Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation, Declan Kiberd’s Irish Classics is, well, “classic.” This cliché, much like the disarmingly simple title of this fine study, would seem not to require a protracted unpacking, but given the broad spectrum of texts potentially qualifying as Irish classics it probably does. A kind of double complexity inheres in Kiberd’s simple title. Not surprisingly for a study that endeavors to address some four centuries of Irish writing, entire chapters are dedicated to such canonical texts as Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Oliver Goldsmith’s “The Deserted Village,” James Joyce’s Ulysses, and Patrick Kavanagh’s “The Great Hunger.” Specialists in the field will be pleased, but perhaps not surprised, that such nineteenth-century “classics” as Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent and William Carleton’s Tales and Stories of the Irish Peasantry also receive substantial treatment, as do Flann O’Brien’s riotous novel At Swim-Two-Birds and Kate O’Brien’s The Ante-Room. And this barely scratches the surface of what Kiberd defines in his introduction as a “classic”: “like a great poem,” a classic is “‘news that stays news’” (ix). That is to say, a classic “displays a capacity to remain forever young and fresh, offering challenges to every succeeding generation which must learn anew how to be its contemporary” (x). Such a definition, in part, explains the necessarily backward and forward movement of Kiberd’s readings, des-cribing the historical and political milieu of a wide array of scrivened texts, but also remaining attentive to their relevance for contemporary readers. Because of this strategy, one occasionally finds Samuel Beckett lurking in a seventeenth-century poem, or a weary filí or bard residing indecorously in Oscar Wilde’s denunciation of a “pusillanimous aristo-cracy no longer committed to a defence [sic] of artistic standards” (327). [End Page 265]

These writers, of course, are Irish-born, but the classics they produced were all written in English (or, in Beckett’s case, French), the inevitable consequence of its colonial history. Importantly, however, Irish Classics also considers a number of Irish-language texts: Brian Merriman’s Cúirt an Mheán-Oíche (Midnight Court, 1780), Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Cré na Cille (Graveyard Clay, 1949), and several others, one of the most beautiful of which is a song published in Douglas Hyde’s 1893 anthology Love Songs of Connacht. In Kiberd’s expansive sense of an “Irish classic,” this seldom-discussed lyric attributed to a woman named Biddy Crummy receives the attention typically claimed by a Joyce, a Bernard Shaw, or a Lady Gregory. In the most successful instances, Kiberd’s readings of Irish language texts not only provide insight into a literature and Western Ireland too little known by non-Gaelic speaking readers, but also create a rich context for re-reading English-language texts contemporaneous with them.

Such is the case with Kiberd’s treatment of Cré na Cille, which he refers to as the “logical consummation” of a “movement” initiated by Beckett, Kavanagh, and Flann O’Brien. Ó Cadhain gives a voice to a French airman who crashed his plane and died in Connemara, an analogue to several of Beckett’s protagonists through its ineffable sense that “a person may die and yet go on talking” (574). Further, Beckett’s “Trilogy,” especially Malone Dies, is informed by a kind of circular structure akin to that of Cré na Cille: “The characters cannot step out of time, but they are also incapable of growth. There can be no beginning, middle or end in the ensuing narration, only the perpetual repetition of the same range of sentences, petering out into a dot-dot-dot” (580). Like its better-known English-language counterparts, this “anti-novel in the Beckettian mode” originates from what Kiberd terms a “sumptuous underdevelopment,” a thoroughly Irish aesthetic with which readers of Beckett are very familiar.

Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion that a writer of a “minor literature” tends to feed “himself [sic] on abstinence,” Kiberd...