Theorizing Glengormley, Reconfiguring Nationhood

In: Diaspora: a journal of transnational studies, Band 3, Heft 2, S. 221-234

Abstract

In bulletins from Britain and Ireland since 1969, Glengormley, like dozens of other place-names in Northern Ireland, has come to signify a site where more violence has occurred: another shooting, bombing, riot. In the context of a politics so grim that it never allows cultural productions the luxury of mere introspection, Mahon's surreal figure of earnest and extravagantly self-tormented intellectuals becomes a vivid image of victims of Irish political violence. Given that the "Troubles" (as the violence is known) in the North of Ireland have lasted for a quarter of a century, and that they are the current manifestation of a history of violent opposition to colonial oppression in Ireland, Irish writing, more than any other from Western Europe, seems to support Fredric Jameson's controversial opinion that postcolonial literatures, whatever else their effect, also function in the final instance as national allegories. In his brilliant and deeply committed discussions of a series of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers and genres, David Lloyd implicitly accepts the notion that Irish literature works as national allegory, but he does not leave unquestioned the terms upon which this relation between text and nation is negotiated. In readings of texts ranging from Irish nineteenth-century street ballads to Samuel Beckett's first work in French, he meticulously delineates the overlapping of the political and the poetic in Irish writing. He wants his readers to be clear about whose interests are being served and whose are being ignored when the political realities underlying Irish literary production are obscured. For Lloyd, Irish political reality is the result of the island's, or at least the Republic of Ireland's, postcoloniality; one claim implicit in the title of the collection is that while this postcoloniality, given the particular divisions marking Irish politics and culture, is anomalous, from the viewpoint of the diasporan intellectual this very anomaly can be a useful challenge to accepted models of postcolonial history. Lloyd's essays contribute to, and critique, debates in Ireland on viable versions of postcolonial identity; they do so by raising issues that reach beyond the matter of Ireland. In particular they encourage diasporan intellectuals to examine more rigorously the nation-state's function as clearinghouse of ideologies of community.