Breaking the nets
On Seamus Deane – my original, extended version of an essay published in March 2023 by Jacobin.
Writing can be a form of action. Few in recent decades have embodied this maxim better than the Irish critic Seamus Deane (1940-2021). Although he began his career as a poet and will likely be remembered best for his semi-autobiographical novel, Reading in the Dark (1996), one of the finest novels composed in response to the Northern Irish Troubles (1968-1997), Deane was primarily a writer of literary and cultural criticism. By vocation a lecturer and academic, he was by disposition an intellectual; one restive to established boundaries, disciplinary or political, and attuned to the antimonies of prevailing capitalistic conjunctures, which he approached via the study of literature. The primary object of his coruscating intellect was Ireland’s postcolonial dispensation, of which he offers over the course his work an historical genealogy, tracing the development of a set of cultural paradigms as they interweave with the binding forces of global capital and British imperialism over the longue durée of Irish history from the eighteenth century to the present. In the same manner of James Joyce’s ambition to locate the essence of human experience in his evocation of the small world of Edwardian Dublin, however, Deane’s work can be read as an attempt to explicate the universal though an exacting consideration of the particular. Out of the microcosm of Ireland he extrapolated the greatest questions of liberal modernity, and pondered these with acuity and humane sensibility. On the stage of Irish intellectual life, few could rival Deane’s ambition or replicate his effect. Even fewer bear such relevance to our current predicament, or reward so close an exegesis.
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He was born to a Catholic-nationalist, working-class family in the Bogside of Derry, the second city of Northern Ireland, in 1940. His beginnings were inauspicious, as they were for most Catholics born in Northern Ireland after the Government of Ireland Act of 1920, which partitioned the island and established two new self-governing polities north and south of this border. Southern Ireland, or the Irish Free State, though originally created as a dominion within the British Commonwealth, would forge its own path to national sovereignty in the 1930s and proclaim itself a republic in 1949. Northern Ireland was, ostensibly, an equal component of the United Kingdom of Britain and Northern Ireland of which it was a constitutive member, implying that the civil liberties enshrined in the British constitution were extended to this new state and supported by its devolved government. In reality, Northern Ireland bore the mask of a liberal democracy, and never convincingly. Electoral districts were blatantly gerrymandered by unionists to prevent nationalist groups from attaining power; recruits to the police primarily arose from Protestant unionist communities; and the state’s civil and legal institutions were configured to prioritise Protestants over Catholics, as was the economy.
In a piece for The New Yorker in 2000, relating the history of his life-long friendship with Seamus Heaney, Deane testifies that by 1957: ‘the local police were more aggressively sectarian [towards the Catholic inhabitants of the Bogside] than ever before, especially at night; unemployment in our area was running at nearly 50 per cent; housing was appalling; discrimination, with a Sten gun behind it, was all we knew of British democracy.’ There was, however, ‘one glorious exception’ to an otherwise dismal rule, one the unionist establishment tried to delay for it threatened their sectarian system of inequality: the British welfare state, that great socialist experiment of the post-war era, which provided universal health care, secondary education, and opened the possibility of university to a community otherwise bereft of an effective mode of social advancement. This was the source of Deane’s deliverance, and he seized it, as did other members of his generation such as Bernadette Devlin. Learning now had an ‘extra dimension to it, an extra pleasure; it now carried a political implication, a sense of promise.’ Devlin would realise this promise as an active politician, Deane as an engaged public intellectual, but each allied to the same emancipatory cause.
Deane and Heaney arrived at Queens University Belfast in 1957, both taking English and graduating in 1961. Heaney remained in Belfast, establishing himself by the late-1960s as the leading poetic voice of his generation; Deane went to Cambridge to pursue a Ph.D. on the reception of French Enlightenment thinkers in the works of nineteenth-century English republican writers such as Hazlitt, Godwin and Shelley. The fruit of this research, The French Revolution and Enlightenment in England, 1789-1832, although published in 1988 by Harvard University Press, is the foundational text in Deane’s critical enterprise. It lays the theoretical framework within which he would dissect the various aesthetic paradigms of Irish literature and anatomise the inherited discourses through which the Irish predicament has been articulated by Irish and British writers since the eighteenth century. Deane began his teaching career in the United States, first at Reed College, Oregon (1966-67), then at the University of California at Berkeley (1967-68), before returning to Northern Ireland as the Catholic minority’s disaffection with the sectarian state edged into insurrection.
He wrote, edited, and lectured in various places during the 1970s, and like Heaney established himself in the south to further his career. It was in the 1980s, however, that Deane became one of the most commanding and controversial voices on the Irish intellectual scene. He was appointed professor of American and English literature at University College Dublin in 1980, and soon came to lead the largest university English department in the country, elevating his stature significantly. In this decade he published pamphlets on the ‘Irish question’: ‘Civilians and Barbarians’ (1983) and ‘Heroic Styles: The Tradition of an Idea’ (1984); and three volumes of criticism: Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature, 1880-1980 (1985), A Short History of Irish Literature (1986), and The French Revolution and Enlightenment in England, 1789-1832 (1988). Each volume proved influential in shaping the preoccupations and interpretations of Irish literary and cultural scholars; but it was in his pamphlets that Deane arguably presaged a new departure in Irish studies that by the 2000s had become orthodoxy, namely the shift towards examining the Irish situation within a Marxian postcolonial framework.
This is not to say that Irish scholars had not previously endeavoured to elucidate the peculiarities of Ireland and Irish historical experience through recourse to a colonial or postcolonial frame of analysis. It is rather to say that much of this previous work was insufficiently self-critical: they fell victim to the mentalities Deane sought to identity and transcend. Taking inspiration from Edward Said, whose Orientalism (1978) marked a new departure in postcolonial studies (rather than inaugurating the field), but also from French post- structuralism and the mode of Marxian cultural criticism espoused by the Frankfurt School theorists, Deane sought to redirect the focus of Irish literary and cultural scholars towards discursive analysis and the critical examination of the cultural paradigms through which the Irish situation had been conceptualised by authors of fiction but also political writers, social commentators, and colonial administrators. A historical-minded critic, Deane rejected the form of ahistorical literary formalism known as New Criticism that was, by the 1980s, the standard mode of literary interpretation in Anglo-American universities. It was from this paradigm that Joyce emerged as an apolitical representative of Western literature: his work spoke to humanity rather than to any narrow communal interest. Joyce was the quintessential liberal cosmopolitan, not a vulgar nationalist. The same was true of W.B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett, and Edmund Burke: divorced from their original historical contexts, their writings could be put to any number of ends; such as in service to Cold War liberals seeking to valorise Western cultural achievement against Eastern communism. The Irishness of these writers was duly effaced; the fact of Joyce’s nationalism, his perception of the Irish as suffering beneath the dual weights of British imperialism and Roman Catholicism, was occluded. Burke’s critique of colonialism in eighteenth-century Ireland, and the horrendous violence wrought by it on an innocent population, was overlooked. Seeking to explicate the Irish situation as clearly and comprehensively as possible, Deane advocated a return to an historical mode of cultural criticism that would render perspicuous the manifold material or intellectual-cultural systems of contemporary Irish life that mutually determine one another. Rendered intelligible, they might then be overcome.
In the 1980s Deane pursued this objective as part of a collective of like-minded critics and artists: the Field Day Theatre Company, established in Derry in 1980 by the actor Stephen Rea and the playwright Brian Friel to produce the latter’s play, Translations, which itself marked a transitional moment in Irish literature. ‘Deane was the driving intellect,’ as Rea noted in an interview with the Financial Times in 2021. Later joined by Heaney, the critic Tom Paulin, the playwright Thomas Kilroy, and the musician David Hammond, Field Day gradually extended its purview from the strictly theatrical to become a platform for the literary and intellectual engagement with the state of the Irish nation, north and south. The overt nature of this criticism, expressed in a series of pamphlets addressing contentious dimensions of the Troubles and provocative questions about Ireland’s postcolonial inheritance, did not endear Field Day to mainstream commentators in Ireland or Britain. Indeed, Field Day was soon dismissed as ‘the literary wing of the IRA’, to employ a judgment of Colm Tóibín’s that was representative of broader liberal opinion in the republic at this time. Field Day was embroiled in yet more controversy on the publication of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (1991), an elaborate undertaking overseen by Deane’s general editorship. The purpose of the anthology was to define a new Irish literary canon, one that was inclusive of all the major cultural formations that had contributed to the making of Irish society from the early Christian period to the late twentieth century, and encompassing the various forms of writing through which these formations have been articulated. Irish unionists and liberal commentators dismissed the enterprise as a totalising nationalist meta-narrative that assimilated Northern Protestant writing into an Irish nationalist canon, a gesture taken by some as tantamount to annexing the unionist community into a nationalist unitary state. More seriously, the anthology’s paucity of female writers solicited justified condemnation from Irish feminists, in a moment that served as a formative catalyst for academic feminism in Ireland on the cusp of the twenty-first century.
Field Day wound down in the wake of these controversies; and Deane, to whom much of the resulting vitriol was directed, began a new position as Keough Professor of Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. He nevertheless remained active in Irish cultural and intellectual affairs, becoming editor of the Field Day Critical Conditions series in 1996 and publishing his central work, Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790, the following year. It was during this period that he achieved international renown, as a leading postcolonial scholar, a gifted lecturer, and an accomplished novelist with Reading in the Dark (1996). In addition to publishing Foreign Affections: Essays on Edmund Burke in 2005, he established and edited (with Brendan Mac Suibhne) what was until its final issue in 2015 a leading outlet of cultural and political criticism in Ireland, The Field Day Review. Here, until his final years, he devoted himself in a rich series of essays to navigating the strange landscape of Ireland’s postcolonial modernity.
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As the Troubles convulsed Irish society in the 1970s and 1980s, it inspired in its artists and intellectuals a pervasive disillusionment; for not only did the crisis reveal the inadequacy of prevailing political orthodoxies to cope, or the inability of standard aesthetic paradigms to capture its tragedy, it also represented a profound historical failing to the Irish republic and its nascent political liberalism. From 1958, out of economic desperation and a desire to lessen Ireland’s dependence on the declining British economy, Seán Lemass’s Fianna Fáil government introduced a series of reforms that began a protracted process of economic and social liberalisation. This was ultimately to qualify Ireland for E.E.C. (later E.U.) membership and to make it amenable to American corporate investment. Ireland had capitulated to the implacable forces of global capital, confining ‘De Valera’s Ireland’ (1923-58) to history and inaugurating a delayed Irish modernity.
The benefits of modernisation for Ireland were undeniable. It gradually released women from the shackles of a misogynistic patriarchy re-enforced by the Catholic Church, for instance; but only to deposit them beneath the weight of a new patriarchy, also misogynistic, and supported by the institutions of the liberal state. ‘Modernization’ served as a euphemism for the process whereby most aspects of Irish life (including artistic, academic, and intellectual work) were brought into conformity with the logic of free market capitalism. All those customs and modes of association that did not conform to the imposed strictures of market efficiency were vanquished in the name of progress. What had been a sovereign community was supplanted by the sovereign individual, for whose prosperity the existing political-economic system was reconfigured and sanctified of all demonic ‘ideologies’, religious and political. Out of the old republican trinity of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, values enshrined in the ‘Proclamation of the Irish Republic’ of 1916, only the first was now recognised as a social value. But this notion of liberty bore an etiolated resemblance to the concept of ‘Liberty’ advanced in classical republican theory, as articulated in writings of Wolfe Tone, the intellectual father of Irish republicanism, and revived in the work of Philip Pettit and Quentin Skinner. It represented the preservation of individual consumer sovereignty rather than the collective emancipation of a people.
‘Nothing disorientates a culture more than the loss of its self-awareness’, Deane wrote in 1973. In one sense, he regarded the Irish in a way analogous to Joyce in the short stories comprising Dubliners (1914): as driven into a sordid state of inertia by the impositions of global capital and a constellation of inherited colonial mentalities from which they had yet to awaken. The characters of these stories, Deane wrote, ‘are shades who have never lived, vicarious inhabitants of a universe ruled by others’. The triumph of liberal modernity marked the end of history, supposedly. ‘Ireland now treats the past as a kind of supermarket for tourists’, Deane wrote in his most excoriating critique of Irish liberalism, ‘Wherever Green is Read’ (1991). He was responding here to those who would apply the moral precepts of liberalism retrospectively to the study of Irish nationalism and to the Irish revolution (1916-1923), commonly referred to as revisionists. Represented by figures such as Conor Cruise O’Brien, revisionists, in Deane’s view, ‘downplay the oppression the Easter Rising sought to overthrow [in 1916] and upgrade the oppression the Rising inaugurated in the name of freedom’. The Troubles were inevitable, in their understanding, for nationalism is antithetical to ‘reason’ in all its forms, as perpetuated by emotive impulse. Irish nationalism was essentially romantic in orientation; an archaic remnant of the nineteenth century that had no place in the twentieth let alone the twenty first. Its grievances were baseless, and its appeals to a lingering British imperialism fatuous. The Rising was an exercise in irrationalism, perpetrated by poets instead of revolutionaries. The fact that many of them were Catholic probably had something to do with it – notwithstanding how most of the architects of the Irish nationalist and republican traditions were Protestant. The direct legacy of this was the Troubles, thereby vindicating liberal commentators in their vituperations against the ‘senseless’ violence perpetrated by the IRA; all while underplaying the violence perpetrated by the Northern Irish state and Protestant paramilitaries. ‘Only those who wish to defend an established political position ever say it is. Even then, they are highly selective,’ as Deane put it. Such a perspective, for Deane, in substituting what he saw to be the ‘metanarrative’ of Irish history – a colonial-centric narrative lending an underlaying coherence to the frequently catastrophic incoherence of Irish history – for a series of empirical monographs founded on convictions of scholarly objectivity, revisionists were operating complacently within the intellectual and cultural frameworks Deane sought to delineate and break. Their critique of nationalism as a form of outmoded romanticism, a telling manifestation of the ‘Celtic fecklessness’ ascribed to the Irish by nineteenth-century British writers trying to elucidate Ireland’s foreign (oriental) strangeness, is a case in point. ‘One of the reasons we have a crisis on our hands is that we have not made the attempt to understand the relationships between its elements,’ as he wrote in 1973. ‘We have mutilated our reality by our incomprehension; what we should do is to change that by the effort to comprehend what he have and what we have not done.’ He recognised that for the Catholics to gain equal rights within the UK, or a United Ireland, would not appease their plight: the framework of inequalities that blighted the Northern Irish landscape would remain. ‘Such desires belong inside the framework of the society as it at present exists. They merely involve a new shifting of power inside that frame.’ Something new was called for.
Out of the convulsions of this period arose ‘a new awareness of the need for radical change,’ as Deane declared in the editorial for the first issue of Atlantis in 1970. Progressive Irish literature in the 1970s and 1980s, to quote Nicholas Allen, was ‘an art of persistence and of innovation, a disconcerting murmur on the margins that spoke all the time to the centrality of the imagination.’ To this sphere Deane brought an assemblage of radical philosophies in an effort to expand the horizons of Irish cultural and political possibility; to break the stasis into which Irish intellectual life had fallen and ossified since the early twentieth century, as the radical potential of the Irish revolution was mollified by a succession of conservative nationalist governments in the decades following independence. This form of Irish nationalism was, for Deane, more of a ‘political passion than ... a political ideology. It was ... so imbued with the sense of the past as a support for action in the present that it never looked beyond that.’ Divorced from the intellectual stimulus of socialism, provided in 1916 by James Connolly, Irish republicanism could not proceed into the future; it could only regress into the past, into the suffocating mentalities of Ireland’s postcolonial inheritance, as evidenced in Eamon de Valera’s autarkic nationalism. The language of Irish nationalism merely appropriated and re- deployed the identifying discourses by which a colonised people had been subjected in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For Deane, ‘nationalism, cultural or political, is no more than an inverted image of the colonialism it seeks to replace.’
Deane was not an Irish nationalist in a conventional sense. The complexity of his alternative nationalism, and of his critique of the staid form of ahistorical liberalism that pervaded (and still pervades) political and cultural discourse in the republic, was such that opponents found it easier to label him an IRA sympathiser than to engage faithfully with his critical enterprise. This provides some indication of why he was never embraced by the Irish intellectual establishment, which could neither ignore nor assimilate him: he set himself to exposing their guiding assumptions and to investigating their historical genealogies. He finds accommodation very neatly within a tradition of philosophical critics encompassing such figures as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Adorno, and Raymond Geuss in our own time. Like them, Deane was concerned with undercutting ideological complacencies by exposing their contradictions in a style of ironic indeterminacy, an agenda that was necessarily confrontational. In this, however, he was engaged neither in formulating concrete alternatives nor with adopting dogmatic standpoints, to the chagrin of critics, but with foregrounding the imaginative possibility of devising alternatives. Deane sought to inspire us to thought, and to reveal the impediments that encumber our thinking, not dictate its course. His guiding injunction was ‘[t]o remain critical, to develop a methodology, to sustain a philosophy, to retain contact with actuality and to recognise official fantasy when one sees it – these are difficult, almost impossible ventures, but they are honourable, not parasitic.’ He devoted his career to the difficult yet venerable task of trying to shed light on the darkness of Ireland’s history and contemporary reality. Stephen Dedalus remarks in Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) that ‘history ... is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake’. It is only by understanding the historical structures that bind us, expressed in the cultural and political spheres, that we may come to think beyond them. In our time of protracted crisis, felt as strongly in Ireland as across the Western world, there is a pressing need for change as we face an encroaching darkness. Much light awaits discovery in Deane’s oeuvre.