Abstract
This important and timely volume is one of three new Cambridge Histories of working-class writing – the other two examine Britain and the United States. Published in 2017, the companion volumes proclaim themselves histories of ‘literature’, rather than writing; however, the change in tone here seems to speak of an ambition to democratise Irish studies, which is entirely welcome. In this respect, A History of Irish Working-Class Writing builds on Pierse’s own Writing Ireland’s Working Class: Dublin After O’Casey (2010), which recovered texts from a corrosive ‘legacy of neglect and snobbery’ (p. 1).
Eight years on, Pierse’s thoughtful and sophisticated introduction opens with the contention that ‘Irish working-class history is shrouded in silences’ (p. 1). The central ambitions of this project are outlined here: correcting omissions, widening canons and hearing from those as yet unheard. These ambitions are emphatically fulfilled in what follows and this book brings to light many texts and figures hitherto excluded from the dominant frames of scholarship and pedagogy. Beyond such necessary archival excavations, however, Pierse and several of his contributors articulate a welcome and energising commitment to the transformative possibilities expressed by working-class writing in Ireland. Rejecting the notion that ‘apparently inert literary forms’ reflect historical truths, Pierse also resists any collapse into ultra-relativist orthodoxy – what Christopher Norris has termed the ‘quasi-universal “postmodern condition”’ – and insists instead on asking ‘the perennial historical-materialist questions of whose “truth” and why?’ (pp. 6–7). Pierse proposes a bold synthesis of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of cultural capital and Jacques Rancière’s philosophy of cultural reappropriation, a ‘complicated business’, as he acknowledges, but a helpful place from which to begin to understand ‘the radical contestation of legitimacy posed by the working-class writer’ (p. 9).
These manoeuvres are crucial to overcoming the difficulties that may arise when conceptions of class derived from studies of industrial Britain are applied to the Irish situation. Pierse forthrightly dismisses any lingering claims for Ireland as a classless society, stating that ‘Class is at the heart of Irish society, its apparatuses, privileges and anxieties, whatever the failures of academic scrutiny in this regard’ (pp. 20–1). But, as David Convery observes in the opening chapter, ‘Writing and Theorising the Irish Working Class’, ‘Part of the problem in understanding class in Ireland is the inheritance of a British model of interpretation, wherein commonly understood ideas about status are clearly linked to economic categories of class. The Irish case is more fluid’ (pp. 49–50). Likewise, in his survey of Irish working-class writing in Australasia, Peter Kuch argues that the material under study ‘defines itself in terms of a politics of lived experience rather than an ideological struggle between inherited class structures’ and cites E. P. Thompson’s ‘canonical statement’ in The Making of the English Working Class (1965) that class, instead of being seen as a structure or a category, should be approached ‘as something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships… Class is defined by men as they live their own history, and, in the end, this is its only definition’ (p. 228). Christopher J. V. Loughlin, meanwhile, successfully adopts an expansive Gramscian category of the ‘subaltern classes’ (p. 58) to address the ways in which labour has been represented in urban and rural forms over the past four centuries.
Questions of representation recur across the chapters. In his sensitive reappraisal of the significance of Ulster’s rhyming weaver poets, Frank Ferguson draws an important distinction ‘between texts which purport to inscribe the practices of the labouring class and those which have been in actuality created by writers from a labouring-class background and embody its culture within their texts’ (p. 90). Niall Carson’s chapter on poetry from 1900 to 1960 uncovers a ‘vibrant tradition of resistance’ both in the production of directly political poems and in attempts ‘to capture the working-class experience in art’ (p. 251). Mindful of class and gender inequalities, Heather Laird’s survey of representations of working-class women in Irish urban writing challenges ‘the oft-rehearsed equation of Ireland’s working class with the country’s capital city’ (p. 122), addressing works set in Cork, Limerick, Galway, Kilkenny and Donegal. Investigating the means by which the lives of working-class women are contextualised in fictional texts within existing power structures, Laird’s chapter illuminates continuities and contrasts between texts from very different epochs.
As is too often the case, the gender balance of the collection is disappointing (of twenty-five contributors, five are women) but, otherwise, this is an admirably polyvocal collection – Pierse has not enforced a common structure and the theoretical intensity of the chapters varies considerably. The chapters taking a biopolitical approach are particularly innovative. James Moran’s outstanding ‘Class during the Irish Revolution: British Soldiers, 1916 and the Abject Body’ marshals Georges Bataille’s argument that sovereignty is dependent on the exclusion of certain members of society by means of their representation in a mode of disgust, and draws powerful parallels between the ways in which the British state treated its own soldiers on the Western Front and ‘its treatment of Irish bodies in revolutionary Dublin: as objects that could be commandeered, displayed for instruction and reduced to bloody debasement’ (p. 155). Pierse’s own chapter on theatrical and fictional representations of death in pre- and post-partition Ireland also takes a biopolitical approach, examining the ‘production of death’ and concluding that the necropolitical is a ‘key terrain’ from which to question ‘who is included within the nation and who merits life’ (p. 194).
The collection provides some welcome revaluations of familiar figures. Adam Hanna finds ways of complicating binary ethnosectarian distinctions in his examination of class in the poetry of Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley and Derek Mahon. In a forceful rereading of Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (1914), Paul Delaney successfully makes the case that this English-set novel nevertheless speaks ‘to abuses and injustices which were – and which still are – systemic in Irish society’ (p. 269). As might be expected, Seán O’Casey and Brendan Behan make appearances in several chapters. Arguing that both writers are preoccupied with the relationship between aesthetics and democracy and with the interrelated question of how change happens, John Brannigan finds that both writers understood the cultural markers of a failing Republic and observes that ‘in their exceptionalism as working-class intellectuals […] they found both the symptoms of democratic failure and the hopes of democratic change’ (p. 302).
Where next? John Moulden’s exploration of ‘the fluid, cooperative, multi-authored, democratic nature’ of eighteenth and nineteenth-century vernacular songs concludes with a suggestion that precisely these qualities may also be found in writing online, and looks with some optimism on the prospect of the end of the so-called ‘Gutenberg parenthesis’ as the dominance of the ‘individual, authoritative voice of the book’ begins to dissolve (p. 121). This transformation presents intriguing opportunities for creative and scholarly work. In his afterword, H. Gustav Klaus voices hope for the foundation of academic networks beyond ‘the given national literary and disciplinary boundaries’ (p. 404). Most of the chapters here could certainly be opened out, unfolded and developed into longer projects, and it is to be hoped that this can happen. As universities in Ireland as elsewhere continue to be assaulted and deformed by the reactionary agents of neoliberal destruction, however, the material conditions for future research of this kind are inevitably threatened. Future scholarship in this field, therefore, should take into account the power structures which determine and hinder interactions between working-class culture and the academy.